Trouble at the Koolaid Point

The US never will because of the 1st Amendment. All I can say is that your understanding of human nature and agency needs some work. You turn people by interacting with them not shaming them. Basic lesson about human nature. We're lucky some people understood that 200+ years ago. It's carried us further than many of us appreciate.

The best way to do something about this kind of trolling is to make the punishment fit the crime. This is exactly what laws were originally created for. Before we had laws and enforcement for actions like rape, murder, theft, assault, etc, I'm sure those actions had a very similar place in society--the majority didn't engage in them, but the minority did destroyed the lives of their victims. This is no different. Internet assault is a recent invention, made possible by the invention of the internet. Therefore, it follows that we need to invent appropriate laws and penalties. And the difference in severity of penalties between internet assault and unauthorized access to a computer needs to be similar to the difference in penalties between physical assault and breaking and entering.

If this was the case, then we can clearly see the problems with Tor Ekeland's statement, "You may think weev is an asshole. But being an asshole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers." Ekeland thinks that the big problem is that weev's AT&T activities were a crime. Regardless of what you think about that, the bigger problem is that weev's asshole activities are not a crime.

Ekeland consolidates a broad spectrum of harassment into one term "being an asshole", and labels it as not a crime. But that is short-sighted. As Kathy points out, there is a point where the spectrum of digital harassment jumps over into the realm of real-life damage. And that should be a crime that carries stiff penalties and is prosecuted aggressively.

Oh, and one other point. Kathy laments how weev has been glorified in the tech community. My guess is that this is caused by nothing other than ignorance. If all you know about weev is that he seems to fall into the group of people that were at least somewhat unjustly targeted by the government for, scare quotes, "hacking" and received a punishment that seemed too harsh, then you'll probably express support for him (read, that cause). Even if you've heard that he says things on the internet that are trollish asshole material, you, like Ekeland, probably won't change your opinion much. What tips the scale here is the knowledge that his troll speech has had the very real consequence of destroying someone's life. That fact is everything. If you don't know someone is bad, you can't correctly adjust your opinion of them. So props to Kathy for speaking out.

> Yeah, creating a safe environment for discourse is super-awesome.

You have a strange definition of discourse if all that's required to create a non-"safe environment" is to present a dissenting opinion. (Did you mean: echo chamber?)

> Filled with dishonesty, zero empathy and zero good faith.

That's a rich complaint coming from someone who called me a misogynist and awful person for the crime of mentioning an article by an actual woman in technology, with her own unconventional opinion on how to ultimately make things better for other women in technology. (Maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong, I sure as hell don't know and that's not the point—the article was censored by a mod just after I and a few other people started discussing it, so that conversation never even got to happen.)

I have every reason to believe that Susan Sons wrote her article in good faith. I sure as heck wanted to discuss it in good faith. So seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for calling me a misogynist for caring about women in technology. People who derail respectful dialogue by going nonlinear with appeals to emotion and unfounded name-calling, like you have here, are the reason important topics like this one rarely see the light of open civil discourse.

Please carefully examine your reaction on this thread and reconsider how you have chosen to conduct yourself.