I disagree. Much as PDR is responding to Kerr's "implicit criticism," Kerr is responding to the implicit focus of the tech world. Much of the response to the situation as focused on three things: 1) firing Ortiz, 2) reforming/repealing the CFAA and 3) open access. Even if the tech community is completely victorious on all three points, the lesson absorbed by authorities will be "don't piss off the tech community when it comes to tech crimes." But when it comes to drug crimes, gang crimes, violent crimes etc (where prosecutors use similar strong-arm tactics on conspiracy, trespassing, etc to force pleas on defendants who may have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time), it will be business as usual.
So sure, HN types can go about their lives. No so much for other folks. The larger picture has to be kept in mind. Since so many posts over the last couple of days have focused on comparisons to MLKjr, I'll leave this quote: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
The drug war is a particularly egregious example that's been going on for decades with a shocking number of people imprisoned and money wasted, to no apparent benefit.
Surely anyone who's aware of the history of prohibition in the 1920s would understand that prohibition itself gave power to violent criminal gangs, that exactly this is happening again on a much broader scale thanks to drug prohibition.
Any reasonably intelligent, informed person should already be aware of these facts. And yet, the only real progress has come very recently, and it's come because of direct democracy, not from politicians. If they can't even manage to fix these terrible, obvious mistakes of the past, what hope for arcane computer laws?
>If they can't even manage to fix these terrible, obvious mistakes of the past, what hope for arcane computer laws?
I don't think the things preventing the fixing of past mistakes actually stand in the way of fixing computer crime laws. The CFAA is bad because it was poorly drafted originally and is now fairly anachronistic. There is no huge lobby for putting a dozen hackers in jail for decades. It doesn't happen at scale. There is no big money in it. Setting the penalties to something less draconian would not cost powerful people anything of significant value.
The drug laws are bad because they were designed to be bad. Their lobbyists are prisons who want more prisoners on a mass scale and law enforcement agencies who want bigger budgets and to seize the assets of rich criminals for themselves. To fix them you have to take on the whole system.
I am not advocating that we should not try to fix the drug laws. We certainly should. But they're not the low hanging fruit. It's worth doing what's easy immediately while we figure out a long-term plan to do what's hard.
If that actually happened, that would be a major improvement on the legislative and legal front for everyone in the world, not just tech people.
Doubtful. Right now the lesson is "don't piss off rich people when it comes to financial crimes" and yet not-rich folk still get the short stick in terms of prosecution. The folks with the loudest voices always get listened too, the folks with no voices are ignored.
So sure, HN types can go about their lives. No so much for other folks. The larger picture has to be kept in mind. Since so many posts over the last couple of days have focused on comparisons to MLKjr, I'll leave this quote: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."