Teen Suicide Tormentor Outed By Anonymous 550
MightyMartian writes "From the CBC: 'The tragic story of B.C. teen suicide victim Amanda Todd has taken another bizarre twist as the internet hacking and activist group Anonymous has named a man the group says was the girl's primary tormentor. Todd, 15, of Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, died last Wednesday, a month after posting a haunting video on YouTube that cited the sexualized attack that set her down a path of anxiety, depression and drug and alcohol abuse.' This raises a whole nest of issues surrounding the presumption of innocence and vigilantism. Should the police and the courts be given the appropriate amount of time to determine if there is sufficient evidence, or if a crime has in fact been committed, or is Anonymous right in short-circuiting what might in fact be a lengthy process with no guarantee that anyone will face charges?"
Re:It's all tied together (Score:3, Interesting)
Child porn (aka the picture of Amanda's breasts) is a felony. Her death was caused by that felony. Does that make it felony murder? (Yes, I know - she was Canadian and the laws aren't the same in Canada...)
crowdsourced prosecutor != crowdsourced jury (Score:4, Interesting)
I caught a few of the threads where the apparent perp was outed, and I was very encouraged at the volume of comments that basically said 'that's enough data, now let's turn it over to the authorities.' Crowdsourcing of evidence-gathering is terribly powerful, and it's nice to see that even in a large pool of people (in a vigilante mood) the majority still have a sense that there's a line between prosecutor and jury. Sure, there are issues with naming potentially innocent people, but when the crowd refrains from attack and turns to a judicial system, it's the best we can do.
Re:It's all tied together (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure you don't need to believe in God to consider rape and murder unethical, immoral, and just wrong.
Pretty much. If fear of God is all that keep you you from doing bad things then you are not a good person.
Re:Then the irony comes... (Score:5, Interesting)
This "Anonymous" is 4Chan and the crowd. They helped to participate in Todd's suffering. Next, they had a new target and went on to make him suffer. A new jackass pops up to participate in the event by placing a dead-girl picture next to a picture of Todd and he made himself yet another target.
Anonymous is not a bunch of do-gooders. They simply select "worthy targets" and try to make their lives hell. It's never about justice. But what's a worthy target? Anyone they feel is stupid. Todd was stupid for appearing nude on the internet and more stupid for getting angry about it and not learning about the Streissand effect. It goes on and on like that. And this target #2? He's just another of those 4Chanimals. They will turn on each other because they are not really a group or a collective. They don't travel in packs... they just go to the same web site(s) and screw around with each other for fun. And a few of them don't have a reasonable notion of what "too much" or "too far" is.
Of course, people will misunderstand the nature of these Anonymous people and somehow think they are of like mind and in some way organized. That's just not the case.
Re:It's all tied together (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how people would feel if they realized that, agnostic to the possibility of a deity existing, their "god" likely isn't much more than a warped internalization of their parents ... kind of the adult version of an imaginary friend.
Thus making religion a manifestation of something along the lines of the sense of security of the family, the anxieties of growing up, and the fear of encountering dangers outside of the family, etc...
Basically, people like the sense of familiarity and try to maintain some semblance of it into adulthood so they feel more secure and sure of themselves. It gets spooky when you realize that that sense of familiarity is frequently not the positive kind.
This is usually where I get accused of being atheistic...
Re:It's all tied together (Score:2, Interesting)
The whole "Moral" conversation is a primate briar patch. Just whose definition of "Right" and "Wrong" are we going to use? Your Parents? Jesus? The Taliban? Jesus had no problem with slavery, it was a normal thing in the world of his time. Now its considered immoral, we do things today without a moments hesitation that would have earned someone an instant stoning in biblical times.
Mostly what people do with morality is judge themselves as superior and others inferior. Leading to the whole I'm going to shove my gawd/beliefs/political view down your throat for your own good. So rather than trying to hang people in the Fun-House mirror that morality is, seeing as there is no "Morality" outside of human interpretation. It would behoove us to come up with something a little more utilitarian, and a wee bit less subjective.
Personally, I vote for workability. This is something we can easily work on together as a society, and come up with objective measures and pragmatic goals inside of. We create a continuum from spitting on the sidewalk at one end to child rape (or pick you pet atrocity to place here) at the other. We look at workable solutions to the misanthrope who commits that act. For the unruly child we explain why we don't spit, and we help him curb his habit. For the child rapist, molester, abuser, we have a city, on an island. They will work hard there the rest of their lives. Because they have restitution to pay for as well as paying for the infrastructure that now houses them. Whatever is left over, is theirs and they can participate in leading otherwise useful and productive lives. What they give up, is the right to ever see another human being younger than they are and the gender of their sexual preference (so in a very real way, sex is no longer a part of their lives.) These people will be moved through their system like cattle, and be given many ways to lead useful lives. If they instead choose violence or hostility, at some point they'll earn the right to be returned to the carbon cycle. No prison. no hatred. No stigma. No judgement. Just action - reaction. You ever notice, nobody has a problem with gravity. We all have gravity wired by the time we're 2 years old. Workability should aspire to be like that. Simple, quick, compassionate, and resolute. You just remove the source of difficulty and treat people like human beings until they prove otherwise.