"punishing a mere guy who turned idea into reality, but who doesn't run the operations himself, won't be a feasible option"

This is dangerously naive. This is exactly what "they" do, if only to brutally discourage anyone else from trying it.

Name one example, please.

Said example must include:

* open source implementation released to the public

* author did not directly do anything obviously illegal, or profit by anyone else doing it

* overwhelming force under colour of law

Isamu Kaneko who wrote Winny [1], a popular Japanese P2P program, while working as a research assistant at University of Tokyo was persecuted and harassed until he died of heart attack this year. He did not profit at all from Winny.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny

There was this guy: http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/programmer-sentenced-to...

* He built some software to upload images to a web site.

* A porn site then used it without his knowledge.

* He was sentenced to death.

* in Iran.

Miss a detail, change the story.

More like change the goalposts. The example meets your criteria.

GP is trying to make decisions, or help others make them. Granted, they should have specified the US or something, but don't act like an incident in Iran should be relevant to their own risk assessment, or to anyone else not living in Iran.

Is your point that all of us live in the United States?

I think his point is that most of us do not live in a religious autocracy.

You shouldn't put it that way or you're going to make people restate the original question...

Protip: Don't live in Iran. /s

Satoshi - creator of bitcoin

Purposely remained anonymous because he knew they would target him. Bitcoin foundation claims that as creator of Bitcoin, he is liable for every transaction under new FinCen laws being considered. https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=163

It would help if the author of this software doesn't call it 'Silk Rd 2.0' or reference online narcotics trade in any way. It should be called 'P2P open marketplace' which makes a huge difference during your trial when they claim you purposely set it up to violate US law instead of being able to argue you are an innocent software developer. Just look at weev's trial how they manipulated everything he said on IRC to make him look as criminal as possible.

Stephen Watt (the_uT) also merely wrote a piece of software he didn't use himself, nor did he profit from and he went to prison after Albert Gonzales used it to steal a ton of money with. It was sort of released to the public, dumped in an IRC room

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And in these cases, when risk is unbounded, it is better to be cautious. Simple antifragility heuristic. [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Gain-Disorder/...

I've heard that there are magic pan-dimensional pixies that will destroy the universe and potentially other universes if you post another link to a book on amazon today.

It might not be true, but remember, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and this is a case where risk really is unbounded, so you better be cautious.

He didn't even include an affiliate link ... what is this world coming to?

Near-complete absence is strong Bayesian evidence against an assertion whose grammar implies universality: «This is exactly what "they" do». You would expect it to be common if the assertion were true.

>Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Man, I really wish people would stop saying this. It's just completely false. It's a basic result of probability theory that if A is evidence of B, ¬A is evidence of ¬B.

That would be true if evidence were a one-to-one relationship but since it's many-to-one, you can't conclusively state !B.

That's the difference between "is evidence of" and "proves". You cannot conclusively state !B, but you can say there is evidence of !B.

Only naively. If there is a clear reason why there is no evidence of absence (e.g. no one has ever looked for evidence), I don't see how this "basic result" is true in any meaningful way.

No, not only naively. Absolutely.

The trick is that the strength of the evidence is not equivalent. It is not correct to say "Evidence of strong evidence is strong evidence of absence". More generally, A is strong evidence of B does not imply that ¬A is strong evidence of ¬B.

Indeed. The alternative would be "we have no evidence that B is happening, therefore we can conclude that it is more likely to be happening than if we had evidence that it was happening."

It is important to consider the chance of us having evidence of B, assuming that B was actually happening.

We have an absence of evidence for æther, but we are pretty certain that if it exists, we would have evidence of it. Our confidence of that is strong enough to state with some confidence that æther does not exist. For practical intents and purposes, we can say that the absence of evidence of æther is evidence that it does not exist.

Not all absences of evidence are made equal, some are more significant than others.

ERM... `a -> b` == `^b -> ^a`. what are you even talking about?

Probability, not logic. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/ih/absence_of_evidence_is_evidence_o...

Please don't drag Taleb into this. His philosophy clearly does not encourage paranoia like this.

Otherwise all crypto projects are off limits, including Tor and Bitcoin

Absense of evidence of " … if only to brutally discourage anyone else from trying it." is a damning enough takedown of at least that part of the argument…

You weren't around for DeCSS, I guess?

Putting your ridiculous stipulations aside, writing legal software can get you in trouble.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/01/coder-charged-for-g...

I think you're on the right track: there's a large gap between releasing a tool and running a service.

The difference between offering BackTrack isos for download and running live, free Backtrack VMs.

A traditional, non-distributed service is often backed by centralized entity (corporation, nonprofit or private person), so many of the consequences are directed at them. Whereas with a diffused individuals running their own, it would be harder to as easily control.

Jacob Appelbaum works on TOR and is routinely harrassed.

The rules that tomorrow's government abides by will surely be much worse (for "us") than those of today. Imagine the future being much, much shittier than it is today.

Cryptocat?

Live free. Don't let "them" scare you into acting out of fear.

I agree with you 100%. I just also think that to claim "oh, I just wrote this software, I can't get in trouble for anything" doesn't take into account either the technological illiteracy of most of the justice system, nor the current environment of what can qualify on the evening news as being a win for the War on Terror.

There is nothing wrong with this, I guess government propaganda is really scaring some people. If it were like this arms manufacturing should be a crime and the billionaires behind those factories should be in jail, you still live under democracy so government should fear you and not the other way round.

> you still live under democracy so government should fear you and not the other way round.

Believe it or not, V for Vendetta is not actually a handbook on how to run a democracy.

One could, however, argue that Thomas Jefferson had some valid points on democracies and the running therof. And it's him that V for Vendetta was riffing off:

“A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!”

On the other hand, a point could be made that it's totalitarian regimes where governments are afraid of their citizens (those in fear of losing their powers, especially illegitimately obtained, start suppressing freedoms and surveilling everyone).

Democracy is "rule by the people." You are not "the people," so you should fear democracy.

Why is it that most HN politicos have nothing useful to say besides, "Be afraid"?

It might be because there really are things that should be feared, and these people are telling the truth.

Why should they be feared?

So the Tor, Bitcoin, libOTR, pidgin/adium, encfs, luks, openssl, openssh, openvpn, truecrypt & recent PGP devs (not counting the crypto-as-muntions early days) fear this too?

The ones that have been harassed in my memory is the Cryptocat dev and Winny. Don't mark your software as having a political purpose and more of a general tool and I think you'll have less harassment in your future.

The TrueCrypt devs certainly appear to.

Can you be less cryptic on this? Unless you are a TrueCrypt dev, in which case you are allowed to.

The TrueCrypt devs are unknown, operating under anonymity.

Wow I didn't know that, thanks.

Yep, it's rather concerning, as nobody knows who they are. They haven't even said why they don't want to be known, as far as I know.

Force them to declare war against crypto then.

You seem to be assuming in point 3) that the government is rational about this kind of crap. History proves they're out of their minds when it comes to drugs and prosecution of any and everything related to them. They'd throw you in prison for as long as they possibly could just to "make a point".

This is exactly the kind of comment that needs to have sources.

I would discourage even titling the submission "Silk Road 2.0". I can't speak to the criminal side of things, but civil court judges have come up with theories that if another piece of software has been deemed 'illegal' and you try to attract users of that software to your software, then your software could be considered illegal.

Again, it's apples to oranges, but you can see how the court's line of reasoning could go the same direction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arista_Records_LLC_v._Lime_Grou...

That's very naive of you.