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Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

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Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#171

Post by CyberDildonics »

FireBeyond wrote: post #169
jstx wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you think that drugs should be legal, convince your fellow citizens to vote to make them legal." The burden of enlightening someone should never fall upon anyone but that someone. To argue that avoiding imprisonment isn't a burden would be the definition of sophism.

To claim that people who are actively hiding their identities, deny, destroy evidence, pass blame, abrogate responsibility - and make sometimes millions of dollars tax-free by doing so are just revolutionaries for the progression and advancement of our society is ... disingenuous at best.

No one has claimed they are 'just' revolutionaries. The founders of the US wanted to stop paying as much in tax. In the process they set up the most decentralized system of their time.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#172

Post by pyre »

ianstallings wrote: post #108
pyre wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general stance that "you broke the law, now you're a criminal" may be technically correct, but most people issuing such statements group "criminals" into a singular group and feel that the serial murderer and the child rapist are no different than the guy that forgot he had an orange in his car when crossing the border. "You've broken the rules of society, you are no better than a vagabond!" In light of this, how…

Well let me clarify what I said above a little more to give you some perspective of where I'm coming from. I'm not making a moral judgement of what you did. I'm making a statement of fact - society will punish you for not following the law. And if you know that up front and you willingly ignore it because you think you're in the right, well don't be surprised when you come into conflict with law enforcement and autho…

> Take that responsibility on your shoulders, because you chose to act a way that would get you locked up.

Would you say this (with a straight face) to Alan Turing in 1952?

"What did you expect having a private homosexual relationship in a society where that is illegal? Just take the chemical castration or the jail sentence. Why are you getting so upset about this?"

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#173

Post by pyre »

rayiner wrote: post #124
pyre wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general stance that "you broke the law, now you're a criminal" may be technically correct, but most people issuing such statements group "criminals" into a singular group and feel that the serial murderer and the child rapist are no different than the guy that forgot he had an orange in his car when crossing the border. "You've broken the rules of society, you are no better than a vagabond!" In light of this, how…

Drug opponents aren't just some religious nuts though. Aside from marijuana, the overwhelming majority of the population supports keeping drugs illegal. Support for legalizing things like cocaine is under 10%. And the homosexuality reference above is a red-herring. Nobody ever broke into someone's house in a state of diminished cognition because of gay sex.

> Drug opponents aren't just some religious nuts though.

You're making a comment in the context of the article. All of the parent comments to mine made much broader statements in response to the root comment that was a more general statement. "If you break the law, then you have no right to complain when you go to jail." This is what I was responding to. It touches more than just drug law.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#174

Post by antihero »

sliverstorm wrote: post #48
hnnewguy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It just always makes me chuckle when criminals won't face the fact that they are criminals. "I know, right? Why don't all those damn sodomites just take their chemical castration and shut up and accept the fact they're criminals?"

My favorite legal defense, moral relativism. "One day, this heinous crime I have committed might not be illegal. Knowing that, how can you possibly convict me!?"

Ah, but we get but one life, and if something you are passionate about is illegal, other than by fighting to change the system, surely given the eternity of death, it makes far more sense to risk prosecution than go forever having never sought ones dreams?

We act as if the government is a legitimate, democratic entity, which of course it is on paper, yet the system is neither pure nor fair, and should we all be prepared to sacrifice everything to gain the simple personal liberty that was taken from us at birth?

Our wrath should be directed not at lawbreakers, but at the lawmakers who cause exceptional and unprecedented amount of harm through their corruption and stubbornness. Almost every problem associated with drugs other than the petty crimes of addicts are due to backwards drug policy which causes deaths due to poor/tainted drugs, alienation and fear for junkies, allows cartels and gangs to control production, and countless collateral damage.

On paper, you may be right, but it takes a callous and short sighted view to presume that any person deemed guilty of a crime are deserving of the punishment landed down to them not by the direct consequences of their actions, but other humans bent on exacting the will of those who's interests are neither rational nor inline with the general population.

It might be a comforting thought to hide in the mentality that if you break no law, you are safe, but life is far to short and precious thing to limit oneself to the life sanctioned for you by the powers that be.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#175

Post by dragonwriter »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #171
FireBeyond wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To claim that people who are actively hiding their identities, deny, destroy evidence, pass blame, abrogate responsibility - and make sometimes millions of dollars tax-free by doing so are just revolutionaries for the progression and advancement of our society is ... disingenuous at best.

No one has claimed they are 'just' revolutionaries. The founders of the US wanted to stop paying as much in tax. In the process they set up the most decentralized system of their time.

The level of taxation was not a central concern of the founders, nor was the US system any more decentralized than, say, the Holy Roman Empire.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#176

Post by jacquesm »

pyre wrote: post #172
ianstallings wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well let me clarify what I said above a little more to give you some perspective of where I'm coming from. I'm not making a moral judgement of what you did. I'm making a statement of fact - society will punish you for not following the law. And if you know that up front and you willingly ignore it because you think you're in the right, well don't be surprised when you come into conflict with law enforcement and autho…

> Take that responsibility on your shoulders, because you chose to act a way that would get you locked up. Would you say this (with a straight face) to Alan Turing in 1952? "What did you expect having a private homosexual relationship in a society where that is illegal? Just take the chemical castration or the jail sentence. Why are you getting so upset about this?"

Leave it to a hacker to be given two options and picking a third.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#177

Post by jmtame »

ianstallings wrote: post #15

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

What is considered legal and ethical are not always the same thing. Please keep that in mind, the law is not the be-all and end-all. Eventually we reverse laws because we catch up and realize they made no sense. So even the concept of what is legal is very fluid.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#178

Post by InclinedPlane »

nickysielicki wrote: post #3

We (speaking as a netizen) need Usenet 2.0; eg: something that can fulfill the role of reddit that is decentralized/distributed. Perhaps reddit can even transition into being a reader (a la google reader) for people that don't want to set up their own node. I'm not saying that drug discussion is the quintessential act that deserves to be protected, but I am worried that the government has such an easy avenue to get t…

I'm not sure that usenet 2.0 is even possible, just merely due to scale, although it would be nice if it did.

I was very active on usenet back in the early to mid 1990s and I would say that it was an enormously valuable experience. I interacted with a lot of smart people, I got to explore a lot of exciting areas of interest, and I spent a lot of time improving my writing abilities. It makes me sad to think that there are lots of people who well never benefit from that experience. At their best HN and parts of reddit can be excellent, but there's still a lot that they're missing.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#179

Post by InclinedPlane »

technofiend wrote: post #69
im2w1l wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web of trust-based spam filtering takes some effort to use, but is a workable solution.

WoT is pointless when people can manufacture identities that trust each other and build a fake trust score for an id used to spam or whatever.

It depends on how things are implemented. WoT isn't implicitly just a vote based system. If it's actually a web then there is a requirement of a trust connection (or route) between you and the content, and that's much harder to game.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#180

Post by FireBeyond »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #101
tedunangst wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welcome to life in a democracy. Stupid people voting for stupid laws. Why can't we just put the smart people in charge?

Because all the smart people are smart enough to see how much of a soul-sucking cluster-fuck politics is. That, and one could argue that if they're put on this earth to live a life of happiness, how could one ever possibly achieve this through a life in politics, knowing what they are getting themselves into?

Ehhh, that's a hand-wringing, self-serving generalization.

"We have the answers. We're just not soulless enough to want to go through (and perhaps change, in the process) the effort to supply them and make them help."

Platitudes rarely change things.

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