Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

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Another interesting point is when the system acts irrationally, this is not lost on psychopaths and those with evil and malicious intents.

Knowing that a snapshot of a Facebook post taken out of context can land that person in jail for months is a goldmine opportunity for some people.

This just adds to the list the other things could include: plant child porn on their machine, call the terrorist hotline with a tip, launch a flood of ssh port scans into a .mil address from their machine, and bam! easy peasy that person's life is ruined.

This is not unlike the witch hunts in repressive regimes where people are encouraged to rat on each other. Quite often that is taken advantage. It used to be report the person to be a "Communist" or "report that person to be an Anti-Communist".

Unless there is public and swift punishment for the prosecutors or the "professionals" in the chain of people this has passed through, this will repeat again and again. There is just very little incentive not to "keep going" with these tips. The potential repercussions for ignoring it could be much harsher. So why not...

A Facebook post out of context, heck... you could doctor the HTML using browser dev tools to make anyone appear to say anything at all on Facebook.

As a person who has sat on a grand jury, I can speak from personal experience, and let me tell you:

Listening to pud-pulling detectives stumble through the technical details of correlating an IP address to a service provider, at the rehearsed prompts provided by power-tripping district attourneys, and then glancing across the 22 other grand jurors, some withed glazed eyes, and others desperately nodding in agreement, as if they had something to prove to the phantom presence of their usually condescending 13-year-old children about their technical savvy, and the relationship that holds with being able to read a cable bill, I was deeply disturbed by the very low bar that was set, in order to prove to the lowest common denomenator that someone committed a computer crime, when I was out-voted on a whether to bring a flimsy case to trial.

Afterward, I casually chatted up each of the people that voted to bring a guy before the judge for allegedly creating fake credit cards and charging thousands of dollars under someone else's name, to gauge whether they understood what they had just voted on.

Most of them had a hard time using their smart phones for anything besides phone calls, couldn't tell me what an IP address actually was, couldn't readily distinguish AOL dial up service and AOL keyword searches from "Googling the internet" or typing in a URL in their browsers address bar, and were mystified by the difference between typing up a Word document and attaching it to an e-mail, versus just typing and sending the e-mail itself.

The difference between how quickly things went to trial, or how long we deliberated on a particular case often hinged on how close to 5PM it was. The DA's seemed to be aware of this, and the complexity and "appeal" of cases and the order of their presentation seemed to be planned accordingly.

Seems exactly like modern day witchcraft/wizardry hunt.

If a Middle Age dude was an expert in chemistry, he'd probably be tried quite similarly. The fact that no one around him could even comprehend what chemistry is, is now completely irrelevant to them ruining his life.

Now replace that with technology, the people with modern day morons and death with impossibly high bail/languishing in prison for years together ruining any chance of an average, let alone decent future and you've got what we have today.

The point is, they don't know the subject yet feel that they know enough. History, it seems never changes.

For those more familiar with legal proceedings :

Was the defense not able to submit the IM context themselves? The conclusion seems to be that it would basically exonerate him, so why could they not disclose it?

The article goes so far as to mention the context "hasn't surfaced". Why on earth not? Is this because Facebook refuses to release the IM history?

IANAL, but maybe they are denying he wrote the comments

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