> "Threats of death have no place in convincing someone."

What I still don't understand is how we got to the point where it's not considered straight up illegal (like it used to be at one time in the not so distant past).

As recently as my own childhood (mere single-digit decades ago) vocalizing a death threat aloud with any sort of seriousness could get you in a mess of trouble with the law, and putting it in print could get you a night in jail to think about it at the very least.

That's just it. It's not in print. Print means that you were in a place at a time, and you can be tracked.

On the Internet, you could be anywhere in the world. It's hard to track you. Not that hard, since most people don't even try to cover their tracks, but it's out of the hands of local police, and it's way, way, way off the radar of the FBI.

Unless you're a politician or perhaps a major celebrity, they don't even bother. They'll just assume that it's some rando in the middle of nowhere who didn't mean it, doesn't know where you are, and are content to just issue the threat. And 99.99% of the time, they're right. Comforting, huh?

It is illegal. And I personally think that if the FBI started taking these seriously, the number would drop substantially. Probably not enough to make the Internet a less bad place, but I'd be curious to see if it helped. I think that the anonymous death and rape threats are the core of all of the rest of the hostility, making it seem reasonable to merely use abusive language.

But I doubt we'll ever find out.

By "print" I meant putting the words down in a more tangible and provable medium than simply saying the words aloud, which if only heard by one person, is easily enough deniable. Your word against theirs. Printed threats were took more seriously by law enforcement when I was young because those words didn't vanish into the ether the moment you were done with them. They stayed where they were placed (on paper usually) and were therefore usable as evidence, same as recorded (video or audio) threats.

As to tracking the perpetrator, in some cases it's exceedingly hard to trace them down online, but in many of these types of cases, the person or persons making these types of threats make little to zero efforts to cover their tracks (of which there are many on the modern Internet), and would be child's play for law enforcement to trace down, especially with even the smallest bit of cooperation from ISPs.

That having been said, I'm actually against wholesale spying on the entire userbase by ISPs, even though many of them are guilty of that already, but when someone reports a crime to them that involves actual risk to the safety of others, turning over user records for the violator (easily determined who by simple time/date matching in the logs) isn't going too far really, I would think?

I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I just need to accept that everything bad in the world is only gonna get worse no matter what anyone does or says about it. It's so hard to tell anymore from day to day…

I agree with you. A tiny bit of effort could potentially have a large knock-on effect. It's certainly worth trying.

I'm not surprised that they don't. But I really think they should.

Did you actually read the article? This individual received hundreds of vile messages and his contacts and family members were harassed.

If you think this represents teenagers in their natural habitat, either that natural habitat is a jail or you’re not aware of how deeply fucked up this is.

Frankly, the little fuckers should all serve time for this. If you wanna act like a gangster from the safety of mommy’s basement, maybe it’s time to meet some real gangsters.

> If you think this represents teenagers in their natural habitat

The internet? Yes? It's not _many_ teenagers, but there's always some who enjoy threatening others for laughs especially when there's no possible retribution. It's why online gaming with strangers always carries a risk of getting random abuse.

It's the adults who run websites that encourage this culture who should know better.

So, perhaps a minority of teenagers demonstrate extreme antisocial traits? I wish courts were advanced enough to start prosecuting their parents. This has to end and frankly, if it’s going to take silver bracelets and jail time, there are a lot worse uses for incarceration.

These pleas to lock up teenagers and their parents over speech are antisocial. Good thing there is the first amendment to protect you from someone using the state to personally seek revenge for any offense you caused.

How is criminal harassment protected speech? Oh wait, it’s not and this is a garbage argument.

Mature response, I see you live in Canada so maybe you don't understand free speech, but harassment has to be a pattern reprated by an individual against another individual or deprive someone of access to some resource and a threat needs to be credible, but thanks for weighing in on how you think another countries laws should be interpreted.

https://www.thefire.org/resources/free-speech-freshman-orien...

Wow, thank you for the law class. However your knowledge seems rather selective. Have you ever come across this law?

https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2011-title47/USCO...

I'm more interested in ethics than the law since I'm not a lawyer. Hopefully someone challenges the constitutionality of that law though because it seems overly broad to me.. "The utilization of telecommunication devices without disclosing (one's) IDENTITY to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number or who receives the communications." Like you're annoying me over the internet right now and I'd like to have you charged and sentenced to 2 years for federal cyber stalking ?? Lol, that seems appropriate to you? I give up, have a good one buddy.

Well, while you were being more interested in whatever the hell you're interested in, your crew of evil trolls accomplished their goal:

https://github.com/tenacityteam/tenacity/issues/99

In good news, the police are involved now. I hope that every single piece of trash involved goes to prison for a very long time.

Yea people that advocate free speech aren't necessarily part of the troll crew, so I don't appreciate that libelous insinuation.

It has to be a credible threat

> This individual received hundreds of vile messages and his contacts and family members were harassed.

Yet there is no proof any of this happened. If le evil 4chan hackers truly did any of this, wouldn't you expect his personal info with telephone number to be posted in the 4chan threads?

Yes the state should inflict real violence on them on your behalf over words they typed. /s

Yeah, the state should. Harassment is a crime. You can’t hide behind a screen and commit crimes with impunity.

No one is harassing you. We're already in a precarious enough situation with all the extreme content auto bans. Maybe we could all filter our own content or create some passive barriers, what you've suggested is an over reaction that would inevitability cause more suffering than it prevented - deescalation is what is needed not escalation.

No shit. I've never claimed to be harassed. However, the engineer involved in this thread was. You and others have come onto this site and continued the harassment via telecommunications devices. But please tell me more about how to deescalate conflict, specifically how continuing to gaslight the engineer on another site is a form of de-escalation.

>You and others have come onto this site and continued the harassment via telecommunications devices.

I use this forum everyday because it is a place for civilized communication with strangers, let's keep it that way, eh? This suggestion that I'm gaslighting or cyberstalking you is why the laws that define those terms are incompatible with a Free and Open society. You're just mad and want the government to make you feel better by getting some revenge for you and don't care if that effects other peoples ability to speak in the future about something actually important.

> This individual received hundreds of vile messages

This individual claims they received hundreds of vile messages. We can't confirm that.

So you’re going to keep gaslighting and harassing this engineer over here in HN?? Wow, you’re a troll. Good for you…

I think there is only one person here gaslighting, and it's not the one you think.

And in that case, you don’t know what gaslighting means. Good for you.

And more trolls are here continuing the gaslighting.

I operate here under my real name. What is your real name? Where do you work? Why are you choosing to continue this harassment?

Real names are not an indicator of trustworthiness or maturity, especially online, where making your real-life personal data too publicly available is just asking for trouble from turds like these (among many other bad actors that make up entirely too much of the modern Internet).

I do totally agree with you about the harassment and gaslighting though. Humanity as a whole has tolerated this sort of behavior far longer than it should have. Something's gotta be done about it. Mebbe we need to start prosecuting public death threats as a crime again?