Better to focus our energies on the similarities which are overtly real: the extreme sentencing mismatching the level of harm done. It's an issue of the state seeking vengeful punishment for political purposes and not seeking to maximizing public safety or victim compensation. In addition to computer hacking/unauthorized access laws having unusually high maximum sentences vs other more more harmful offences.

Hammond has a history of taking political protest over the line to breaking into things, destroying property, etc.

Also important to remember is the fact that Anonymous didn't just leak the e-mails, but stole a bunch of credit card numbers and made $700k worth of charges.

To be fair, I think the sentence is too long, but more because I have a philosophical problem with the sentencing guidelines and how it punishes repeat offenders and not because I think Hammond was particularly singled out.

You know full well what "Anonymous" is, and attempting to attribute everything bad that's ever happened on the internet to every defendant that ever gets grouped in with "Anonymous" is ridiculous.

I honestly don't appreciate Anonymous. If you want to be an activist, show your face and your identity. The world doesn't need an incubator of batman.

> "The actual group of Anonymous [...]"

There is no such thing. Not in any traditional sense. Talking about "Anonymous, the group" is like talking about "Kilroy, the GI."

I wonder how many people here are even going to get that reference...

I thought it was a good comparison because of the "graffiti/website defacement" angle.

How is that different than working for the Gambinos? Anonymous members were part of an "ongoing criminal enterprise", and anybody who didn't realize what that means is too stupid to be out roaming the streets.

The Gambino crime family is actually an organization or group in the traditional sense. "Anonymous" is more analogous to "The Mafia". A useful term if you are okay with being imprecise, but the reality of "The Mafia" is encompasses a very broad set of groups that more often than not have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Of course there are a few differences between the concept of "Anonymous" and the concept of "The Mafia". Groups that identify as "The Mafia" have more in common with each other than groups who identify as "Anonymous" (the former are all organized crime groups, the later can be any group from organized crime groups, to people who wear silly masks and protest fringe religions, to people who call the parents of kids who abuse cats and post pictures to facebook.) Furthermore, if I burn down a local business and then claim to be The Mafia, mainstream media would mock me for delusionally thinking I had any claim to the term. If I defaced a local businesses website and then claimed to be "Anonymous", the media would lap that bullshit up.

Can you expand on that?

I believe in judicial discretion in sentencing, but it should be used to account for extenuating circumstances of the offense, not the character of the offender. E.g. someone who stole food to feed their hungry child should get a reduced sentence, whether he or she is a hardened drug dealer or a sympathetic single mother.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restorative_justice

> Restorative justice is an approach to justice that focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. It is based on a theory of justice that considers crime and wrongdoing to be an offence against an individual or community, rather than the state. [..] it shows the highest rates of victim satisfaction and offender accountability.

So the question is would 2, 5 or 10 years in prison make any difference in making Hammond (and others in the community) stop conducting political property destruction? I doubt it.

Focusing so heavily on the punishment side of it is an incomplete solution and often creates a negative reactionary effect in the community.

The basic purpose of criminal law is to establish norms for behavior. Punishing any given offender or satisfying any given victim is secondary to establishing a norm so 10 other people won't do the same thing. This is a distinct concept from "deterrence." The idea of deterrence is to force people to include the probability-weighted cost of a jail sentence into their cost-benefit analysis. A jail sentence twice as long means a twice as strong deterrent effect. However, given the practical probabilities of getting caught for many crimes, deterrence doesn't really exist. Say 2 years for stealing a bike times a 0.1% chance of getting caught = deterrent effect of 0.73 days in jail per bike. The punishment isn't deterring anyone. What's keeping people from stealing bikes is the social norm created by making bike stealing illegal and punishing offenders.

This rationale for criminal punishment supports having crimes be punished in proportion to how egregious a violation of the social norm has occurred. That's why punishing someone less for stealing food to feed a hungry child is justifiable. Within a restorative justice theory less punishment is appropriate because a small breach of social norms requires less healing, but that only focuses on the singular event. The additional justification is that a small breach of the social norm requires less punishment in order to maintain the norm for everyone else.

At some point in the 1960's, people (mostly liberals) decided that criminal law should be about rehabilitating the offender. This led to a focus on the offender, rather than the offense. Hence three strikes laws, ridiculous sentencing enhancements or reductions for whether an offender seems contrite at sentencing, etc. Ironically, this thought process also led to an inflation of sentences, because people more easily rationalized increasing maximum sentences when those maximums would only be applied to "bad people."

Of course restorative justice isn't coextensive with the 1960's idea of rehabilitative justice, so I'm not saying it suffers from the same problems.

Once you start making assertions like this, you're already into a particular kind of theory of justice. There are a few. It's not really possible to say that there is one true purpose of criminal law.

Now, if you qualified it with our current legal system, it absolutely subscribes to a particular notion of what justice is. And maybe you mean to, without explicitly noting it. But given we're in a discussion about different forms of justice, it would make sense that not everyone agrees with this assertion, and therefore, your others.

  deterrence force[s] people to include the probability-weighted 
  cost of a jail sentence into their cost-benefit analysis.
  ... given the practical probabilities of getting caught 
  for many crimes, deterrence doesn't really exist.

Even if the punishment were immediate execution a-la Judge Dredd, we would still have people committing crimes, because they irrationally believe that they'll never get caught, or that what they are doing isn't a crime. Or, in some cases, are acting through emotion rather than rationality.

For effective rehabilitation program you need a few things - low sentences for non violent crimes , social norms that not reject the ex felons and allow the reintegration.

Also you need robust job market and social safety network.

And i think that sentencing should be done on scientific grounds and not moral ones.

I'm not saying the current system is rehabilitative, but rather that it's a perverse consequence of attempts in the 1960's at making the penal system rehabilitative. The rehabilitative approach shifted the focus from the offense to the offender. This is logical: in a penal system the punishment fits the crime. In a rehabilitative system, the punishment is tailored to the offender (ideally with an eye towards reducing recidivism).

That backfired, because it turns out criminal offenders aren't particularly sympathetic. Once the focus was on the offender, it became much easier for people to justify long sentences and harsh punishment than when the focus was on the crime in the abstract.

The deep irony of the focus on the offender is that it allows us to punish Jamal from the hood much more harshly than Johnny from the suburbs for the same exact crime, all because Johnny doesn't have a rap sheet of minor offenses and is socialized to look contrite and afraid at sentencing.

So I wouldn't call today's policies rehabilitative, they are very much neoliberalist, much like American economic policy.

Why shouldn't they? The purpose of imprisonment is not only restorative or rehabilitative, but also to keep the offender from doing further harm to society. If, by reoffending, someone shows beyond doubt that they can't learn from their mistakes, why should they receive the same punishment for their nth crime that someone else receives for their first? Failure to punish repeat offenders more harshly amounts to sanctioning sociopathy.

Anyone who has been injured by a four-time DUI offender would probably have a strong opinion on this. At some point, it is indeed necessary and appropriate to write offenders off as hopeless.

Fundamentally, in the US, the issue is that prison is not for rehabilitation, it is for containment and retribution. We don't provide for their mental health. We don't provide for their safety. We force non-violent criminals into association with violent criminals. There are people who can't be rehabilitated, but we never really try so we have no way of distinguishing the repeat offenders who learned but had a moment of stupidity from those who simply didn't learn.

[1] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/cruel-and-unusual-...

Sentencing laws in general are a really terrible idea IMHO.

Because punishment has many goals, and one of them is removal of negative agents from society.

If someone seems sorry, or it's his first crime, there's a likelihood it will be his last crime, and releasing him earlier makes sense.

If someone is not sorry, or keeps committing crimes when released, then perhaps a higher penalty will at least somewhat deter them, and if not - they'll have less opportunity to repeat the crime.

Attacking civilian targets is wrong regardless of which side is doing it. Having previously engaged in the same behavior does not make the act any less wrong, or the vilification any less deserved.

What about a single civilian in a civilian building filled with a company of soldiers? In the law of armed conflict this kind of thing is called "perfidy" and brings no protection.

...while in Norway, you typically only get the maximum 21 years of imprisonment for multiple murders. And even that is apparently with the possibility of an early release after 14 years and unsupervised weekend parole after 7 years. And even with murder on your hands, they just might send you off to Bastøy to rehabilitate yourself properly. And somehow, the crime rate in Norway is still much lower, as are the reoffending rates.

I just wonder, what comes next in the US, two years for littering, perhaps?

Since we're being honest here, if someone murdered someone close to me and then got unsupervised weekend parole after 7 years, they'd be dead in an alley their first weekend out. Maybe Norweigans are very different, culturally. Maybe I'm just a vengeful asshole who should just deal with it - but I doubt I'm alone over here. But this could also just be a reaction to violent crime - I don't feel as though most non-violent crime deserves harsh sentences. Hell, I'd settle for large fines in most cases.

This is why the federated approach to governing was a big part of the American founding fathers literature (focusing on state-level power), which they viewed as a counter-point to the negative side-effects of centralized Monarchy systems in Europe.

The American government has been reversing it's course - centralizing law (and law enforcement) to a national level - over the last century. Making experimentation with new systems and adaptation to better systems much more difficult.

The length of this sentence is absolutely a cultural thing - perhaps some would feel that 7 years before unsupervised weekends is a fitting punishment. I can guarantee you that most Americans do not - if you want to see a rapid increase in vigilantism in the U.S., try reduced sentences for things like murder.

Oh, and I would fully expect to have the court system hit me the harshest penalty they could - they hate vigilantism. But that's irrelevant to the decision that got me there.

well, theoretically you can get up to 1 year in many states, though i suspect usually it is much-much less harsh than that.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural-resourc...

Quote from wiki about previous 2006 cause:

Charges of 2.5 million dollars in damages was assessed based on $500 per credit card, for each of the 5,000 credit card numbers in Hammond's possession, despite the fact that no money had been spent

As opposed to the billions lost in 2008, and the people rewarded with bailouts for their fraud?

Pshyeah, hokay. Justice is truly being served here.

TH;DR: I said it to highlight the commonality of mass hysteria fueled hyper-punishment for socially distasteful actions.

>"Swartz may have had a "legitimate political cause" but he sullied it (in my opinion) with illegal activities."

In this case, the law was part of the problem. Aaron broke the law, but that doesn't necessarily mean his actions weren't for a legitimate cause, nor does it mean that they weren't justified.

> "It is wrong to act as if you somehow should be looked at differently by the law because you had a "legitimate political cause."

And what if you think the law is wrong? What about civil disobedience? Sometimes it's right to break the law, and sometimes it's worth the risk of punishment to break the law. Whether it was wise is another question entirely.

In my personal view, what Aaron did was unwise, but not wrong; and what Hammond and his associates did were both unwise and wrong.

That said, I realize that many of the issues discussed on HN of late have been cases where the state also considers itself above the rule of law - and I think that's far worse. So I don't mean to argue with you - just saying that breaking the law needs to be a very conscious decision you do for a good reason. And you should be prepared to accept some consequences.

I find that sentiment deeply troubling. I think there is value to disobeying rules you disagree with, and even going out of your way to do so, assuming you're aware of the obvious risks.

> There is value in just obeying the law unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise.

Well, sure, but the reason is self-interest, not morality.

> cases where the state also considers itself above the rule of law

To me, that's a nonsensical phrase. The state creates, interprets, and enforces laws, so it is by definition above the rule of law (or perhaps one could say that the state is the rule of law).

Of course this can sometimes take about 2 seconds and you conclude that the rule is utter crap in your situation's context.

There are laws of people ("no decapitating moron drivers"), laws of society ("no imploding buildings just to see what will happen", "no dumping your waste in the river"), and laws of multinational corporations ("no copying data, no tampering when we say no tampering, everybody must buy private health insurance, ...").

It's easier, and more valid, to ignore laws at the high end of the abstract-o-sphere.

This is an interesting proposition... I hadn't really considered the relationship between validity and abstraction in the context of law. What's your reasoning behind it? Has this been written about?

Most law is pretty obviously mostly just there because of special interests at one time or another--remember, "law" refers to both "thou shalt not kill" as well "all sidewalks with thus and such distance of a school must have thus and such..." as well as "thou shall not commit sodomy".

These are all laws with different purposes, different origins, and different moral backing--to pretend that we ought to follow them, just because they are laws, is rules fetishism.

This sounds like blind obedience. "If patriotism were defined, not as blind obedience to government, not as submissive worship to flags and anthems, but rather as love of one's country, one's fellow citizens (all over the world), as loyalty to the principles of justice and democracy, then patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles." Howard Zinn

The reasoning behind a law is irrelevant. The effect of the law is what matters -- the effect on individual liberty, the effect on society, etc. Unjust laws are laws that are harmful to individuals, particular groups of individuals, or society as a whole -- and it is our civic duty to violate those laws, and to violate them to such an extent that they become impractical to enforce.

Unfortunately the government has learned to keep people in line with fear. We now live in an age of militarized law enforcement; it only takes one widely publicized story about someone having soldiers attack their home to get the rest of the population back in line. You see it with drug prohibition, you see it with hacktivism, and you will see it with every tyrannical law that the government enacts.

This isn't correlated with general intelligence. Most of the intelligent people you know probably have a moral compass largely dictated by the state.

If you find that offensive, maybe you should make an effort to clear your cached thoughts[0], and recompute everything you think about prisons. If you haven't done this at least once in your life, it's probable that you have a thought in your cache that was just inserted there by some authority figure while you were young enough not to know better.

[0] http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/

"It was as if the human brain had a blind spot, and someone had written on it in permanent ink, 'Kings. What a good idea.'"

I believe it's from the Discworld book Guards! Guards!； I always loved that imagery.

You misunderstand, and from there you argue based on your misunderstanding. No one is saying that just because you agree with a certain "law it means [your] morality is dictated by the state.", rather, your morality just happens to overlap with the state, meaning you are past that stage of moral development (at least regarding that particular issue).

Also, your claim of offense and then your sarcastic apology don't do anything to further the conversation, avoid such rhetorical sub-tactics in the future.

Why do you state-defenders feel the need to make up and exaggerate facts.

Obviously nobody explicitly thinks their morality is dictated by the state/church/parents/authority-figure, but in reality most people would agree with virtually everything an authority figure would say, especially if you look at what people actually do rather than just listening to what they profess.

Also, having a sufficiently "legitimate political cause" is a just and legitimate reason for action. For example, revealing criminal activity on the part of the government is a legitimate reason to violate classification laws.

E.g. when MLK Jr. was arrested in Birmingham for marching without a permit, it wasn't because he just up and marched. He tried to get a permit like a good citizen, and it was denied. And even there he could easily argue he was taking advantage of his First Amendment right and not really breaking the law (as the way that law had been applied would be obviously Unconstitutional). But I know of no Constitutional or common law that would allow people to hack into computer systems, copy out other people's private emails, or steal credit card numbers.

On that note, I guess privacy is only important when it's people we like, eh?

Or stated differently, the illegality of act has no bearing on it's ethical or moral status.

Similarly, things with very high risk of long term negative effects to the society or the individual are made illegal due to the risk and not due to the immorality of the event itself, such as our drug laws.

Re: drug laws, people do consider drug use and dealing to be immoral.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/13/us-prisoners-se...

For clarity, I'm for rehabilitation and not retribution -- it gains us nothing. When it comes to drug crimes and youthful offenders, community service and rehab seem like far better things than X days/months/years in jail with a grabbag of offenders running the gamut from arsony to grand theft to smoking a joint. And while I think the purpose of imprisoning them should be to offer rehabilitation, would you not imprison murderers or would you put them in mental health institutions rather than "prisons"?

We have higher incarceration rates than China, and even with their massive population we have more people in prison than China does. [1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat...) We are roughly tied with North Korea for highest % of population in prison by country. [2](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...)

These weren't businesses looking to crush people who voted a certain way, these were businesses who may have had a supplier in Japan and wanted more rational, reasoned coverage of Fukushima than most everyone else was providing. Or, companies that employ Latin American immigrants and wanted a more nuanced view of the future than the standard "instant voting blocs good!/evil brown people bad!" narrative.

If Jeremy Hammond had hacked Stratfor for the express purpose if getting arrested, in order to demonstrate the injustice of computer crime law, your comment would be right on. But that's not what he did, or why he did it.

Next stop, surveillance state. Just because something is illegal often means absolutely nothing to some, depending on whose interests or version of morality were being represented at its' signing in.

That isnt what he is arguing. His argument is that the crime he is being prosecuted for would never have taken place without the involvement of the FBI. And second, he is being over prosecuted for political reasons.

As far as over prosecuted, that's only really possible if they're throwing a book at him that contains charges he didn't really commit (e.g. how Russia initially charged the Arctic Greenpeace protestors with "piracy" even after Putin acknowledged it wasn't piracy). I don't see that in this case.

He ran afoul of an overly severe law, that much is true. But what happened isn't so much that the government ramped up the charges, as that the government didn't tamp them down like they might for other computer hackers who seem more innocent. But I don't know what Hammond expected here either. If you're going to commit a series of crimes specifically to piss off The Man then you shouldn't be surprised when the judge seems to forget how to be lenient.

There is an IRC log somewhere of lulzsec talking about Stratfor, only one person knew who it was. It has to be characterized in very simple terms for the others (about 8 people there) to get what it was. They all wanted to continue scanning .gov and had to be convinced of Stratfor as being value.

I am almost certain the Stratfor idea came from outside of the group. Hammond was the most politically involved and savvy yet he didn't know about them, I really doubt Sabu did.

The other part of this is that the Stratfor hack has been represented as the work of one man who only got a little help along the way, when it was a few individuals involved. What distorts this case is that the only source of information is Sabu. Since Hammond trusted Sabu and spoke to him a lot (although I think Hammond knew that Sabu was more operations/motivation than skill). So naturally there is more evidence against Hammond, than there is evidence against Topiary and the europeans who spoke to Sabu much less and didn't trust him.

The Sabu evidence gave the feds enough information to issue Hammond an entirely separate indictment for Stratfor, something that happen nowhere else in Lulzsec hacking cases.

He has been charged with nothing else. All else that the case established was that he had views sympathetic with parts of Anonymous and he hung out on their IRC channel a lot. Charged with credit card fraud and $1M in theft even though the guy was eating out of a dumpster.

I think it would have been fair to imprison him for 18-24 months like a few of the others, he seems reformed in any case.

It's not about "the law", it's about justice (the concept of what's "good").

Owning slaves was once OK with the "law". But I'd say, I'd very much agree with someone in 1850 illegaly helping slaves break free, because he had a "legitimate political cause".

People should care less about what's legal and more about what's moral. (Admitingly, the second is harder to define. But that's the conversation worth to have, instead of just blindy assuming anyone who did something illegal "deserves" jail).

You've got it backwards. The point of all political protests, whatever form they take, is to get people to look at something in a different way. I know you don't mean it this way, but what you've stated could just as easily have come out of the mouth of a racist during the 1960s.

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h...

I don't see it the same way as you. I see this as a complaint about the law itself, not a claim that the law shouldn't be enforced because of a "legitimate political cause." If slavery were still legal, and a slave complained publicly about the practice, you (hopefully) wouldn't tell the slave "hey, slavery is legal, that's how it works."

Also, I've seen a couple of people claim that Hammond seems surprised, but in the article it is very clear and explicit that he expected this to happen.

The legality you talk about, the rule books were written by the same (type of) people. They get to break it but you get to do nothing about it.

It's absolutely ridiculous to take 10 years off someones life for doing good.

I don't think stealing my CC number was "doing good."

Instead of wasting a human being for 10 years, give them mandatory community service, or worse, customer service heh. Put them to work, make them productive. People have too much skill and creativity to waste away in a jail for 10 years. It would absolutely wreck me.

I would, without hesitation, kill myself as soon as possible after sentencing.

You seem to think that the only possible way to be a menace to society is with actual violence. What a positively uncreative viewpoint! Surely you can think of some way to absolutely ruin a person's life without so much as a hint of violence? Likewise, perhaps punching someone in the shoulder isn't as vicious a crime as, say, cleaning out all of their bank accounts via computer hacking?

His crime is in the internet domain. Monitor his internet traffic or take away his personal computer rights.

It's treating the symptom by eradicating all possible causes by throwing the man in prison for a decade.

It's like the russians, bombing and burning all their land so the enemy stands no chance. I think it's wrong to take that approach in this case, but hey, I guess I have some semblance of empathy.