iPad Hack Statement Of Responsibility

Pardon my language, but what the fuck happened to this country.

When you hear of horrible stores like that of Aaron Swartz and the author of this insightful article Andrew Auernheimer it really paints a picture of just how afraid the US government is of the Internet. People lament China for their great firewall and control over its people and yet the US is starting to look more and more like China everyday. This is how revolts against governments start, absurd laws and persecution of innocent people which eventually pushes people over the edge and if they don't kill themselves they uprise and society gets thrown into disarray which only results in more oppressive laws and absurd persecution, it's a horrible cycle.

All this guy did was exploit publicly available information. It seems the US is now sending people to jail for pointing out other peoples stupidity. Sure he probably went too far with the whole, "I want to embarrass AT&T thing" but trolling is not hacking and it's not like Andrew had to bypass any form of security to get the info in the first place.

Anyone would swear this guy found a way to steal credit card details...

From Wikipedia:

"On 20 November 2012, Auernheimer was found guilty of one count of identity fraud and one count of conspiracy to access a computer without authorization. Auernheimer tweeted that he would appeal the ruling."

Is the problem that the laws themselves are terrible, or that the laws are being misused by overzealous prosecutors? I mean, if changing a public URL is considered "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization"... Or is this just not the full story, and he really was trying to do some "bad" stuff?

But if not: what can be done to change the law? Is appearing "soft on hacking" such a bad idea that politicians just won't support something better? Or is it really difficult to craft laws that actually do criminalize "bad" activity, without also technically criminalizing innocent activity?

What can be done?

This is one side of the story. I'm not going to form an opinion, and then criticize the US government, weev, or AT&T, without seeing the other side.

China is not naturally terrible, China is just in that kind of shithole phase which any country might get into. It's the wrong direction a civilization evolves into.