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Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

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Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#541
post #457
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't deserve any blame if someone broke down my front door to do it. I mean, you could have gotten a more sturdy door... drawing the boundary between someone opening an unlocked door and breaking down the door is hard; so I'd agree with "even less blame", but if we believe you are ever at blame here, there isn't anything magical about the lock that shifts you from having blame to being blameless.

To repeat myself, the opposition to victim blaming is about "not blaming victims for things that are out of their control or that any other reasonable person would do." I acknowledged that a standard lock is generally not going to stop many determined criminals, but it is an acceptable baseline that all reasonable people can be expected to meet in order to help prevent their home from being burgled. You can of course…

Well, I think "the problem with victim blaming" is that it implies that there is something "a reasonable person" has to do in order to not get attacked: a woman should be able to walk around naked, for example, without being raped, and we shouldn't say "well any reasonable person would have at least worn clothes".

In fact, I would then claim pretty forcibly that a lock strong enough that someone has to break your door is absolutely not the thing reasonable people should have to do to prevent theft (assuming one believes in the idea that people own things, of course ;P).

Like maybe a chain lock should be good? I remember a glorious scene of some cartoon which was like "you know what this chain lock says? it means you aren't getting in here... unless you push with your hands". Closing your door is really not good enough? Having an exposed area with a door--even if open--that looks like a door of a household and not a business?

Look: I appreciate and even agree with the idea that Twitter should have blame here in some very real sense, in that someone always could have done better to protect you if they take responsibility for something about you, particularly if they don't really leave you much choice in how they do it: you friend who borrows your car and leaves it unlocked with its windows down is being negligent; and Twitter here looks like they didn't even try hard to protect anything.

But the reality is that we shouldn't think there is some magic level of "responsible" below which there is blame and above which there is no blame... in this kind of tug of war either we are working in the philosophical regime that you are ever to blame--in which case we can talk about matters of degree--or you are never to blame, but drawing some arbitrary line about "well the data storage was technically X3 7066 compliant, so this is on the other party" is actually an extremely dangerous thought process as it sets us up for companies putting in place minimum security theatre provisions that they know don't work but which they know technically absolves them of blame as it is reasonable (which is a thought process that crops up constantly).

(And seriously: is using a large, centralized social networking site and not expecting your data and accounts to be hacked every now and then reasonable? All of them get hacked. Thereby why are we stopping the blame at Twitter? If we are going into the philosophical regime of truly assigning blame, users should "know better by now" and stop using systems with centralized databases, right? I work in the field of decentralized systems and I absolutely am confused as to why people think their data in the "cloud" is secure and absolutely do not consider their usage "reasonable".)

(And like, to explain that context: this is all coming from someone in the field of hacking and security research who is also in progressive politics and thinks throwing the book at this kid with 30 felonies is ridiculous and maybe he should get some community service at best for what he did, and that we should be regulating big tech more to increase their liability as if we don't then it is essentially giving "moral subsidies" to centralized systems and making it harder for distributed, self sovereign, and end-to-end encrypted systems to compete. I actually agreed with your original comment, but in your defense against an accusation of "victim blaming" you actually do seem to have an inconsistency in your mental model and it is the same one we have to push back against in arguments about victim blaming for sexual assault: the lack of any specific protection doesn't mean you have something to blame for someone assaulting you. The argument for regulating against Twitter and holding them accountable has to come from somewhere different.)

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hitting a 17yo with 30 felony charges feels a bit steep to me. Hitting them with 30 felony charges is perfectly reasonable/correct. Those are what the charges are for the crimes. But the punishment for those 30 felonies should/will be adjusted down. I think at most this person will lose 5 years of their life. Not like the 25 year old girl in Seattle that set a bunch of Seattle Police cars on fire during the protest…

The sentences should run concurrently. 4 years for setting a car on fire is not unreasonable, although maybe a little harsh depending on priors. It's a dangerous thing to do. But setting five cars on fire is not particularly worse than setting one car on fire.

Setting five police cars on fire is an act of domestic terrorism. That's not in any way a normal protest action.. That's what the prosecutor will argue.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#543
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People did say things like you could have made a fortune shorting stock by tweeting something insane from Elon Musks account. I don't buy that as necessarily better than a Bitcoin account. Stock transactions are heavily regulated and monitored. You'd leave a pretty large paper trail of any stock manipulation you hoped to profit from. Of course Bitcoin is highly traceable as well, so maybe the lesson is hacking into h…

The stock idea is dumb, in my opinion, because there were safer (no SEC) ways that required less capital and didn't require fancy trade accounts. For example: buy up a load of super cheap shitcoins. Can be done for under $100. Then tweet from an exchange like Binance that they will shortly be listing said shitcoin. Watch the price go up, sell. Or, with a bit more money, short one of the cryptocurrencies, tweet from a…

How exactly do you short a specific cryptocurrency?

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#544
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this bothers me to my core. Even the 22 year old hasn't developed a fully functional neocortex. I know it seems a little hypocritical of me for getting sad when this happens to a young programmer and not an inner city gang member, but it does. To pull off a hack like this is indicative of these kids being intelligent, risky and bold. Yeah, they went where they shouldn't, but I personally think these are the t…

That attitude is exactly the problem though. These kids getting hit with a 30 year sentence bothers those of us who relate, when the same thing happens to young black inner city kids every day. Plenty of them are just as intelligent, risky, and bold as these kids but we throw them in prison for the best parts of their life without a second thought.

That's violent crime though, which is more obviously bad, even to a teenager. If you're 17 and intentionally kill someone then your brain is broken and you should be kept away from innocent people forever unless you really have some delayed development that comes later.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And enriching the private prisons owners, who then lobby both parties for harsher sentences and this is why the US, a free democracy, has the highest incarceration rate in the World.

Private prisons represent only ~8% of the US state & federal prison population[0]. Private prisons, while bad, are a distraction from the larger issues of policing and incarceration in the US and aren't the reason why we have so many people locked up. Almost half of all federally incarcerated people in the US are there for drug-related offenses[1] thanks to the "War on Drugs", that's where you want to be focusing you…

While that percentage is low, it doesn't tell the whole story. Private prisons are certainly a major symptom of the problem with our prisons. The U.S. has the largest private prison population in the world, and you'll note from your own link that the private prison population from 2000 to 2019 increased by 39%. Also, for federal prisons, the percentage of inmates in private prisons is 19.1%. These are definitely problems and discussing them also helps discuss the big issues such as why in the hell we're incarcerating so many people.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/capitalizing-...

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentences should run concurrently. 4 years for setting a car on fire is not unreasonable, although maybe a little harsh depending on priors. It's a dangerous thing to do. But setting five cars on fire is not particularly worse than setting one car on fire.

Setting five police cars on fire is an act of domestic terrorism. That's not in any way a normal protest action.. That's what the prosecutor will argue.

I agree the crime is serious. But that she did it more than once doesn't make it proportionally more serious, and certainly should not make the sentence proportionally longer.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting five police cars on fire is an act of domestic terrorism. That's not in any way a normal protest action.. That's what the prosecutor will argue.

I agree the crime is serious. But that she did it more than once doesn't make it proportionally more serious, and certainly should not make the sentence proportionally longer.

Why doesn't it make it proportionally more serious?

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sentences should run concurrently. 4 years for setting a car on fire is not unreasonable, although maybe a little harsh depending on priors. It's a dangerous thing to do. But setting five cars on fire is not particularly worse than setting one car on fire.

Setting five police cars on fire is an act of domestic terrorism. That's not in any way a normal protest action.. That's what the prosecutor will argue.

The Boston Tea Party was an act of domestic terrorism. It's hard to determine whether an act is right or wrong without a good duration of hindsight.

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#549
post #431
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in terms of raw skills, but adults are likely to have more experience, better judgement and better opsec.

This works against them in many ways. They're also more likely to say "that wouldn't work", and to be otherwise biased by their prior experience.

Yes, a teenager, especially one stuck at home and not going to school, might just spend weeks and weeks poking around to see what he can hack, and is much less afraid of the consequences

Re: Tampa teen accused of being ‘mastermind’ behind Twitter hack

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not whether it's bad for someone to commit this crime, it's whether Twitter should be held liable for such poor security practices that a 17 year old can hack them. That is exactly my point. There are tons of crimes that basically anyone can do. If you said instead: people whose houses are set on fire by an arsonist should be liable for poor security, at the very least you'd not be taken very seriously. There…

>There is no duty to avoid being the victim of a crime If you entrust a bank with 10 thousand dollars, and the bank puts your money in a paper bag and leaves it in the lobby, they are going to be held liable if someone walks away with it. Twitter letting teenagers steal people's data is approaching that level of negligence for a mutli-billion dollar company.

I don't think the fact that the person is a teenager really bears any significance as to how negligent a company is. Historically teenagers have done massive damage as sole actors in numerous roles.
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