"The Hackers Are the New Communists"

"Outcry Over Computer Crime Indictment," reads the tekkie's URL name for an article posted with the CSM at the New York Times.

The actual headline is a bit more sedate: Hacker Case Leads to Calls for Better Law.

But it's not just about that Better World with that Better Law and the narrative framed by the hackers and their enablers in Google and such -- it's about how casually criminal journalists can become when allying with hackers.

Charlie Savage, who also covered Mannings' trial, does a far better job than any tech media or bicoastal liberal tech media sympathizers in covering the story. He pushes past the scare headlines from the TechThings (TechCrunch, TechCrunch, TechMeme, The Verge, the Next Web, CNET, etc.) and actually, you know, makes phone calls. Talks to prosecutors and experts. And explains that the hypothetical maximum sentence is only that in the indictment, and not the actual sentence.

The perspective of the lawyers is framed as partisan, and indeed it is -- just like the perspective of former prosecutors and security consultants, and indeed they are. At least we hear from all sides. We never do in the tech media. Writes Savage:

Mark Eckenwiler, a former deputy chief of the Justice Department’s computer crime section, said that statutory maximums cited in department news releases are “purely theoretical” in most cases, and that it would be inappropriate for the department to speculate at the start of the case about what an eventual sentence would be.

“The truth is that a lot of first-time offenders may well come in the very bottom band” of the sentencing guidelines, he said.

Nevertheless, Mr. Keys’s defense team stoked the furor. “I think hackers are the new Communists for the D.O.J.,” Tor Ekeland, a Brooklyn-based lawyer representing Mr. Keys, said in an interview. He maintained his client’s innocence and said that he intended to “vigorously litigate” the charges.

Stoked is exactly right. Well, I'm here to tell you that the hackers are the new Communists -- period. Not merely for the DOJ. Not in a "witch-hunt". Not in "McCarthyism," but in their actual beliefs about "expropriating from the expropriators" and "the end justifies the means".

Few want to contemplate the realities of technocommunism -- how their views have played out and how they have been allowed to take over -- as in fact we can now see since they were all given a pass in the 1990s, with Mitch Kapor's fine help.

 Jaron Lanier said very matter-of-factly that nothing good had come from web 2.0 as a result, although he retained hope for the Internet as a whole.

 

Comments

[c3]

web 1.0 wasnt much better.... but at least its "suckers" were the elite business class/corporations..with stupid 26 year old VP or coolz.....

not the entire middle class of the world.

then again, all lessons learned came from pre web days.... as did jarons first fame.... in the early 90s.

[c3]

weev got whacked.