The Bully

Maybe your blog post should be gender neutral…? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2263471/Humiliated-YouTube-Video-North-Lanarkshire-schoolgirl-punching-teenage-BOY-face-6-times.html

I like this. We need more of this.
Ortiz and all other bullies don’t belong.

I like this. Thank you for sharing it.

The Hacktivist

The Hacktivist doesn’t know what’s happening. He’s confused. scared. He doesn’t understand why there are two policemen there talking to him.

His mom is angry too. She always understands. “My son is a good boy. He barely downloaded anything. He had nothing to do with this. Get out of my house and stop harassing my family.”

There was nothing special about JSTOR. Just another organization who grated on the Hacktivist. The Hacktivist didn’t treat JSTOR any worse than the rest of the world treated copyrighted materials – so why was this his fault?

Last week he’d made grand statements against SOPA, and everyone – including the tech press – had applauded him. If everyone had applauded, why was he the bad person? Why was nobody now supporting him?

Really, for the most part, the Hacktivist hadn’t even touched JSTOR. Sure, he stuffed his computer in an unused locker and downloaded millions of documents he wasn’t supposed to, and changed his MAC every now and then to evade filters – but that wasn’t his fault, that was them trying to keep information from being free. And of course MIT kept their network so wide open, they were just asking for it, really.

There had been plenty of other illegal downloads from JSTOR before his. None of them had gone after the downloaders. All of them had been fine. And now just this one big download and suddenly what the Hacktivist has been doing is so incredibly wrong? Suddenly nobody cares about the Hacktivist. It’s not fair.

Sure, he wanted to make a statement and be a self-righteous activist, but he didn’t mean it. Of course he didn’t mean it. He snuck in hiding his face and ran when he saw the cops. Is that why the law was so upset?

There had been hundreds of downloaders before and all of them had been fine. If they were all fine, then obviously it’s not him, it was the copyright industry. His tech celebrity friends had encouraged and justified so much more to so many other downloaders and everyone still loved them. No policemen ever sat them down to ask what happened.

The other businesses lost revenues because they couldn’t adapt their business models, that was their problem, not the Hacktivist’s. Why should the Hacktivist have to change?

The Hacktivist thinks to himself: “They are picking on me. Life’s not fair. Information just wants to be free and I was just doing my job”

The law, it doesn’t agree.

@FlipSide – no disagreement that there’s culpability (but not equivalence) on both sides

@FlipSide, Pascal: Do you understand the difference between property and people? Probably, but you missed it here. Do you understand the difference between law and ethics; or the principle of proportional punishment; or legal excess; or civil disobedience? Unlikely. But try thinking about it.

@Logical-Spear: Civil disobedience is still disobedience.

If you don’t expect the other side to bring their full might to bear against you then you’re fooling yourself. Just ask the kids at UC Davis who got a face-full of pepper spray for daring to question tuition hikes in public.

@FlipSide: Please, read this – http://everything2.com/title/Kevin+Mitnick
If the businesses from your story are somehow “right” (de jure) is because the laws were slowly inclining in time towards the parties that had the bucks required to lobby lawmakers. I don’t see in any degree any valid moral resemblance between the stories.