Bradley Manning and the 'Hacker Madness' Scare Tactic 169
New submitter wabrandsma sends this excerpt from New Scientist:
"The Bradley Manning case continues a trend of government prosecutions that use familiarity with digital tools and knowledge of computers as a scare tactic and a basis for obtaining grossly disproportionate and unfair punishments, strategies enabled by broad, vague laws like the CFAA and the Espionage Act. Let's call this the 'hacker madness' strategy. Using it, the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge. ... We've seen this trick before. In a case that we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation handled in 2009, Boston College police used the fact that our client worked on a Linux operating system with "a black screen with white font" as part of a basis for a search warrant. Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there. And happily, Oracle got a big surprise when it tried a similar trick in Oracle v. Google and discovered that the judge was a programmer who sharply called them on it."
News: Tool creates possibilities, good and bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
... the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge. ... We've seen this trick before. In a case that we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation handled in 2009 ...
I wonder what Kevin Mitnick would have to say about this revelation as news.
... simply to avoid admitting ignorance.
On a broad scale, people have always been scared by what they don't understand. On a more refined level, people are often willing to agree with a strongly-worded argument if they don't understand the premise
There are lots of new problems due to technology - but very few new avoidance tactics / reactions. Look at the opposition to nearly every major advance (in science) in the last 500 years. No need to go further back - you'll find enough examples in the last 50 that going back 500 will be difficult.
Re:News: Tool creates possibilities, good and bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News: Tool creates possibilities, good and bad. (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember it as something closer to "People will believe what they wish to be true, or what they fear is true", which is a fair bit more subtle and powerful a statement.
Re:Don't they have to understand the case? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because lawyers view the law as some isolated specialization that needs no connection to any other aspect of the world, real or imagined. It is viewed by most lawyers as an amoral disconnected dance in which both sides usually jargon-heavy language to defeat each other, whilst simultaneously baffling laymen. The Law is a ritual that, unfortunately, has real world consequences but as little actual relation to the real world as its high priests can manage.
Bad example (Score:5, Insightful)
In the Manning case, technology is relevant. There is no way he would've been able to photocopy that amount of information. The case shows the very real danger of switching to digital without considering the security implications. Furthermore, what Manning did had quite a big impact, the volume of the leak more than explains the harsh charges, there's no need to blame it on the 'hacker scare'.
Re:Don't they have to understand the case? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because lawyers view the law as some isolated specialization that needs no connection to any other aspect of the world, real or imagined. It is viewed by most lawyers as an amoral disconnected dance in which both sides usually jargon-heavy language to defeat each other, whilst simultaneously baffling laymen. The Law is a ritual that, unfortunately, has real world consequences but as little actual relation to the real world as its high priests can manage.
Jesus said it better. "And he said, Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne, and ye yourselves touch not the burdens with one of your fingers."
Re:wget (Score:5, Insightful)
In the Manning case, the prosecution used Manning's use of a standard, more than 15-year-old Unix program called Wget to collect information, as if it were a dark and nefarious technique.
Maybe it's not quite that, but if it's used to download information that shouldn't be collected by an individual, it certainly bears watching.
Dude, what the fuck?
wget is a web client - you know, like the one you're using to read this comment. It bears watching just like any other web client bears watching.
Now, one could argue it might profit them more to pay attention to what data they make available to web clients.... But that would be all... I dunno, sensible.
Re:Noobs. (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty sure that he is implying the Nazi regime was able to bring about the Holocaust through the threat narrative used to paint the Jews and others as some sort of menacing threat to their state. The details of the concentration camps weren't discovered until lonnnnggg after the US joined the allies in the war, which obviously would have happened one way or the other once Pearl Harbour occurred heh.
Re:Noobs. (Score:5, Insightful)
Other way around. He was implying the holocaust was justified using a threat narrative. Even the Nazis couldn't just declare time for a bit of genocide. They had to first build up some level of public support by spreading stories about the Jewish 'threat' - they told stories of how Jews sabotaged the first world war leading to Germany's humiliating defeat, accused Jewish bankers of deliberately crippling the economy with hyperinflation for their own profit, and warned that with the high birth rate in the Jewish population their inferior race of lower intelligence would take over all of Germany and hold the country back culturally, intellectually and economically. Thus they invented this threat narrative - one powerful enough that once the government began forcing Jews into ghettos and shipping them off to 'relocation' centers, public objection and protest was limited enough to contain with standard police-state measures.
If you want an American example, there is the Japanese American Internment, in which the US government placed more than a hundred thousand American citizens of Japanese ancestry into camps out of a fear that their ethnicity may cause them to remain loyal to the 'country of their people' and lead them to sabotage the war effort. The conditions in some camps were little better than the German concentration camps.
The incident is regarded as something of a awkward moment in history now - the standard narrative of the mighty US defeating the evil of the Nazis and their Japanese allies is lessened by the idea that the US at the time not only had active eugenics programs but a policy of rounding up citizens of undesireable ethnicity and locking them into poorly-built concentration camps. People really don't like to face a history that isn't made of good-vs-evil.