This is a decent account of how much has changed, and he conveys the sense of alienation well. But what strikes me is that he talks about the whole thing like something that unaccountably happened to him. He didn't install botnets; he was arrested for installing botnets. Botnets that he somehow sees as part of the "true spirit of hacking", from the long-lost innocent age of 2009, when pure curiosity was the only motive. In reality, the botnets of the time were a) industrial-scale commandeering of other people's gear, and b) widely used for spam, DDOSing, and crime. [1]
I am perfectly willing to believe that his sentence was egregious, as federal prosecution is often more about a prosecutorial win than any real sense of justice. But given that he still seems unable to take responsibility for his choices, I could also be persuaded that having him away from a computer for a decade was perhaps on net the best thing for society.
All of his hacker ethos feels very superficial to me. I.e. get this or that gizmo under control etc. There does not seem to be a deep curiosity for CS or maths as such, rather a childish joy in opening other peoples locks and taking other peoples hardware under control.
That was cool in the 70's when telecoms infrastructure wasn't commoditized. I understand how enticing it is to hack big co telephone networks, for example. Big, big machines with very strict access rights.
2009. Computing and communications infrastructure is commoditized. The world is literally swimming in computers. There is no unusual computing or telecoms capability you can harness by breaking into another system. It just means you want to break into the system instead of actually using your own.
It's pedestrian and rude, like stealing someone's umbrella.
Plus, he breached the implicit trust in him as an employer.
10 years is a lot, though, for bad taste and disappointing social graces.
“There does not seem to be a deep curiosity for CS or maths as such, rather a childish joy in opening other peoples locks and taking other peoples hardware under control.”
Not all technical problems have to be framed in a mathematical context to be seen as rewarding and something if interest
What you're convicted for in a plea deal is usually a step or two down from what you actually did.
So the prosecutor office can claim a large number of successful cases in exchange for lighter punishment.
There's different stories for what you actually did, what they think you did, what they can prove you did, what they think they can convince a non-technical jury of what you did, what the DOJ/FBI traditionally self congratulatory press release claims, what the plea bargain deal was for. Usually those multiple stories are only minimally tangentially related at best.
The somewhat overly self congratulatory DOJ US attorney press release from May 14, 2010 claims the guy got himself hired as a security guard to gain partial physical access, then did all this Hollywood style breaking and entering into secured locations he wasn't authorized to be in, removed the anti-virus from at least 14 machines, downloaded a password cracker from the internet, made an "instructional" video of the process. They couldn't prove he did anything TO the HVAC controller or nurses confidential access station, so the press release is full of "could have" and "would have" but kinda imply he sorta did but nothing bad happened and they can't prove nothing so...
Now in contrast to the above, his plea deal was exactly two counts of transmitting a malicious code. No breaking and entering, the other dozen machines seem to have disappeared, nothing illegal was accessed or modified, nobody seems concerned he cracked the passwords solely what he did afterwards on two of the machines, etc.
I can see how his description of what he did vs what he did time for vs what he actually did seems a bit dissociated.
That struck me too. A guy who installed botnets complaining about how "the true spirit of hacking" was lost. Botnets are a plague. Try cracking Windows 10 to make it play nicer, if you want to feel good about hacking.
For me it was just interesting to read about his views about himself (implicitly) and how he observed everything happening in the last decade. It's quite a unique and informative perspective as a sort of culture piece.
I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before.
I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat prisoners like humans and provide them with something, anything, to help them on the outside. Our system really tries to keep you in the system.
The OP got a harsh sentence but I don't particularly feel much empathy. I could have gone the black hat route too, but I didn't.
One of my coworkers met a guy on the bus the other morning who had been imprisoned in the mid 90s and was just released. (Assault charge plus drugs.) He hadn’t seen a smart phone in person yet and was astounded that you could look up bus schedules on it.
Besides the tech astonishment and the sheer length of the 25 year prison sentence (that’s tangential), it was a bit inhumane how they treated released prisoners. This guy had been released in downtown Austin at 3 in the morning after being bussed from Huntsville, Texas and processed at the courthouse. He had been given a Greyhound ticket to a El Paso Texas, and in order to not violate his probation he had to check in to a halfway house within 48 hours.
What he wasn’t given was any money for taxi, any information about where the greyhound stations were, any money for a cab ride, or any way of actually staying within the bounds of his probation, which involved avoiding being cited for minor misdemeanors like laying on a park bench to catch a nap after being thrown out into a city at 3am.
The guy was lucky he ran into some folks willing to buy him a transit ticket and tell him how to get to the greyhound station half a city away. Imagine how few people are that lucky.
You are released from Texas prison with $100, and any money you may have had on your prison commissary account. The downtown Austin bit sounds a little strange. You typically are released from the Huntsville Unit directly, unless you have additional charges somewhere (they wouldn't wait until you finish a 25 year sentence however to do that; transfers from prison to places for additional trials are common). You also don't typically receive a 25 years sentence for assault+drugs - I know people who only received 15 years for murder. I suspect there's much more to the story, or this was someone who had been to prison, and knew how to sound convincing.
I would think a "criminal beggar" as you call it could come up with an equally convincing sob story which doesn't involve revealing a "criminal" background. In my anecdotal experiences, random strangers asking for money almost always give the excuse that their church bus full of children broke down 10 blocks away in the bad part of town, etc.
Isn't that exactly why claiming you're a recently released criminal would work? Who would use that as a fake story, in our society?
It's people who beg for money that have a story that makes them sounds like they're down on their luck that I think most people are wary of.
(I was bit by the 'thought I had more cash in my wallet, trying to get to a city 40-50 miles away but don't have gas' story. And heard the bus ticket story quite a bit. But if someone told me they had gotten out of jail on a long stint and the world changed on them while they were inside, and the system doesn't care ...)
I’ve seen people reward “honesty” too, like a beggar asking money for alcohol. I would be more inclined to help an ex convict thrown in the streets than a childrens bus or something
FWIW, the rest of the world considers prison sentences in the US to be absurdly long. This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.
Plea bargaining, for better or worse, is a uniquely American invention the rest of the world does not share.
Committing naughtiness level 5 on a scale of 1 to 10 crime in "EU" and in "USA" and you'll get a punishment of X years for a level 5 conviction in EU. In the USA you'll get a plea bargain offer of X years for agreeing to be guilty of a level 3 crime, or you can take your chances at a trial for a level 5 crime (with admittedly draconian punishment). About 90% to 98% of criminals take the plea.
The widely advertised injustice is that on paper, a level 5 crime in EU has the same punishment as a level 3 crime in the USA so the USA is draconian.
The actual real world injustice is if you're innocent and demand your right to trial, we give level 8 punishments for level 5 crimes to encourage guilty pleas and "save money". Because we value saving money over justice and fairness. Or maybe we take a weird statistical approach to injustice; yeah it would suck to do time for a level 5 crime but a level 1 punishment might not be worth the 10% odds of success.
This has a weird and horrible interaction with mandatory minimum sentences. Without mandatory mins, "yeah he probably didn't do it but he's pleading out to a lessor charge" can result in a very fair punishment like mere probation. But with mandatory mins you have to throw the guy in the slammer for decades or let him walk and thats kinda messy. OR being messy, does it encourage higher levels of care and research?
If you commit involuntary manslaughter in Germany, like in a fight in a bar off an army base like a case I know of (I'm not even tangentially involved in other than being in the Army at the same time), yeah, you'll get like 3 years at most. And if you get convicted of manslaughter in the USA you'll get like 8 or so years. That seems terrible.
The difference is you get convicted of manslaughter in the USA by doing actual first degree intentional homicide and its plea'd down to involuntary manslaughter. In Germany the laws are different but vaguely comparable to first degree would get you 15 years minimum, which is actually more draconian than the punishment you'd likely get in the USA due to overcrowding.
> This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.
Both of those things are problematic, IMHO.
As for US sentences being absurdly long, I attribute that to the privatized (profit-incentivized) prison system here. Abolishing that concept would be a good starting point, I think, because it would eliminate a very large chunk of the humanitarian problems in one fell swoop. Then we can work on the rest, starting with the perverse incentives of the legal system itself.
Yes, but even state and federally owned prisons use an army of specialized contractors for much of their staffing and supplies. Since many of those companies were established specifically to service prisons it creates the same incentives to spend large amount of money lobbying for harsher sentences and other policies that grow the prison industry in general. It's not much of a concern for, say, Tyson, which is so big that prisons are a tiny part of their revenue but it's a bigger issue with other services.
The fully privatized prisons are on a whole other level of messed up.
Important correction - the significant political power in the US comes from the prison guards union, not a "private prisons lobby".
The prison guards union is an incredibly powerful lobbying force, which has successfully increased prison sentences for many crimes, blocked efforts to decriminalize marijuana, made more mandatory sentences, etc. Whether those guards work in the 92% of prisons which are government run or the 8% which are privately run makes no difference.
I don't generally consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but I agree with the previous comment. For-profit prisons not only make money by having more prisoners staying for longer, but in many cases have actually been required to maintain a minimum number of prisoners. That creates a huge incentive to the operators of private prisons to make sure that people are sentenced to terms that are as long as possible, and to make sure that as many people as possible are given sentences that get them into those prisons vs. alternatives like house arrest, community service, court-ordered rehabilitation meeting attendance, etc.
I think it would be pretty naive to assume that private actors can have no influence over an unelected/appointed judiciary anyway, but don't forget that many places in the United States have an elected judiciary that needs to campaign every few years to maintain their status, which clearly opens them up to influence by those prisons.
> have actually been required to maintain a minimum number of prisoners.
All prisons are required to maintain a certain minimum population to justify their operating budget.
At any rate the entire debate of public versus private prisons is laughably flawed because even public prisons are reliant upon commercial service vendors that cater specifically to the prison industry at ludicrously inflated rates to both inmates and tax payers. And both prison types are known to make use of inmates as cheap commercial labor which undervalues the inmates and robs the local economy of manual labor jobs.
Not arguing, the US system needs a lot of work. The recent protest have been about what happens on the street but that is only half of the story. Once you are in the system here its very hard to get out. Our recidivism rates are crazy.
Israel is soft on crime if the victims are outside Israel. The "binary options" industry depended on this.[1] At one point, 40% of the Israeli financial sector was binary options scams. Only after heavy foreign pressure and arrests in the US and EU was there a weak crackdown. The Times of Israel ran a long series of articles and finally broke up that racket. Their first story, "The Wolves of Tel Aviv"[2], blew open the scale of the scams. Amazingly, it was legal at the time to scam people outside Israel.
Times of Israel:
"The binary options industry, which is estimated to have employed more than 10,000 people, was outlawed by the Knesset in October 2017 largely as a result of The Times of Israel’s reporting, beginning with a March 2016 article entitled “The Wolves of Tel Aviv.”"
"But the industry has not gone away. Many of its operatives have reinvented themselves as “blockchain,” “fintech,” or “cannabis” entrepreneurs, while some of the call centers offering fraudulent investments have moved abroad and now offer fraudulent forex, cryptocurrencies or other investments from such cities as Kyiv, Sofia and Tbilisi."
"The binary options industry operated in Israel with impunity for a decade, stealing billions of dollars from millions of people around the world. While US law enforcement continues to tackle the fraud, and has convicted several Israelis and indicted others, Israel has yet to prosecute any of its orchestrators or operatives."
And they'll probably get some juicy government contracts for their trouble. Six months is just long enough to show them who's in charge here (the Israeli government), but not long enough for their skills to atrophy so much that they are useless.
Colloquially Americans like to call "murder" any time someone kills someone else.
In Germany the translation of murder has VERY specific legal requirements, like detailed planning beforhand, and evil action (cannibalism, sexual intent, terrorism, type stuff). You pretty much have to be a stereotypical serial killer or terrorist in Germany to commit the legal definition of murder.
In the USA, colloquially speaking, not legally speaking, George Floyd was murdered. But in Germany what happened would seem to meet the equivalent of what Americans would call involuntary manslaughter. Clearly, the cops killed that dude while trying to do something vaguely reminiscent of their job, but also clearly, they did not stalk him with evil intent with an intentional plan for a long time and then cannibalize or sexually molest his body as would be required by the legal definition in Germany. Probably.
Historically, in Germany, involuntary manslaughter such as two idiot soldiers who don't know each other getting into a drunken bar fight over nothing while one had an undiagnosed brain anuresm that burst during or shortly after the fight will only get like three year sentence and who knows how early of a release. In America that event would colloquially be called "murder", because one person killed another person, but not so much from a strictly legal perspective in Germany.
As a fellow European, I can confirm. If you don’t take our word for it then feel free to look it up. We follow cases in our home countries and are used to what sort of sentences get passed.
I totally agree. If you want to reduce crime, it is paramount that convicted criminals become honest citizens. Excluding them from society does not accomplish that. Guidance on how to function normally in society might.
Criminal organisations would probably gladly welcome someone with proven criminal experience. If we make it too hard for criminals to rehabilitate, they are very likely to return to crime, because that's always an option for them. Help them out of that world, and help them build a normal life with normal responsibilities, where they can use their skills and talents to make an honest living.
The other way is to just keep criminals in prison until they age enough that their hormones change and they no longer feel the urge to violence.
The good thing about this is that it works very consistently and predictably. If he's in prison, he can't rape, murder, or brutalize anyone else (prison crime notwithstanding).
Human males naturally enter their criminal phase around age 16 and exit it around 30-35. The factors governing this are biological and can literally be measured in the bloodstream. The stuff you're talking about can help some people, but for many... you can't train someone into lower testosterone levels.
I still doubt that's going to help if they don't get opportunities to make an honest living. And it might not be necessary if they can rehabilitate sooner than that.
Exactly but I knew when reading it that your average American would complain. It is an ugly American trait that as soon as somebody commit a crime they become subhuman. All their actions must from then on be viewed as being deceptive or villainous in some way.
I just read the article as an interesting description of the US prison system and technological development.
The thing that stuck me is that this person never seems to admit that his acts were wrong. He gets internet access taken away in prison and then figures out a scheme to work around it, then he blames the work-around for additional punishment. I will say that the punishments did not fit the crime, but this person sort of doubled down by working around the system. Did this person do anything to help or improve himself? That is where I find a lack of empathy. And that isn't a 'complaint', just saying how I feel.
There is a non-profit called Defy Ventures[1], that aims to rehabilitate prisoner personnel who are pre-release and equip them with skills and a technical/tactical overview for entrepreneurial-minded prisoners to help them adjust and better reintegrate back into society.
In my experience you just take out a toilet seat cover (aka, ass gasket), place it on the seat, and as you turn around to sit, it flushes automatically. Voila!
A very long time ago I was working as a network administrator for university dorms. We had a kid get caught multiple times for network violations, and each time part of the punishment was having network access disabled for some amount of time.
What struck me the most was that he was more concerned about losing network access than any impact on his university standing. He was a courier for some warez group and was really angry and distraught that he'd not be able to keep up with his responsibilities there.
The point being, I think that people who need social interaction or a sense of belonging, and get it from the 'wrong' place, are liable to do 'wrong' stuff to stay in the group.
For me, I had a job. For me, it wasn't worth it to risk my income. I made a conscious choice to learn certain tools and techniques but to only use those skills to protect against their use. I could see how I could catch myself and how nothing good could come from that. If I could catch myself then someone else could catch me too.
> "Caging me for a decade is not rehabilitating. I may be making excuses for myself, though there is a lesson that could have been learned with the same amount of value for justice if the sentence was 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, even 6 years." From the article at: https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-severi...
I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. I'm American but I live in Asia so maybe I'm now an outsider. I'm not aware of any other country that punishes this harshly.
Serious questions: Does any other country routinely punish so severely? To what end? At what financial and psychic cost to society? If we're unique (exceptional?) why do we do this to ourselves?
> I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes.
you miss the point. prisons are a massive industry with serious lobbying clout. Putting lots of people in prison for a long time isn't a punishment to the prisoner, it's a gift to the prison system. The "punishment" is just a side effect, and the longer it lasts, the richer the people in power get.
the harm inflicted by a crime has been detached from the relative prison sentence for a long time. Classic example is getting more time in jail (and loosing your house) for having a marajuana joint than if you raped someone. Fortunately this is changing in the case of marajuana but there are many other drugs for which a single personal dose will still get you more time than rape.
10 years of prison time for a single non-violent crime is extremely rare in America.
What can happen in certain states, is that repeat offenders are hit with escalating prison terms each time they are convicted (the classic example are the three-strikes-your-out laws), whereby someone can be sentenced to a life term.
In those cases, sentences don't translate to actual prison terms since non-violent offenders are routinely paroled.
There's still a lot of heavy handedness, and I question the justice of escalating sentencing, but the comments above create a false impression of the US justice system.
I think it is fair to say that whether for violent crimes or non-violent crimes, sentencing in the US is considerably harsher than in many other countries.
I've rarely seen a prison term issued by a US court which I have not found to be excessive relative to my experience with sentences in Germany.
The statistic of the total number of prisoners in the US per capita is well-known and gives us a strong indication that sentencing must be a factor. Still, I'd love to see some official data on this.
He wasn't charged with that, although all reports indicate he did do it. All sorts of conspiracy theories as to why he wasn't charged, most likely boils down to LE or prosecutorial incompetence.
It was, in fact, pay of the allegations of the crimes he was charged with, and it explicitly was a sentencing factor. He wasn't charged with, say, attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder for the alleged murder-for-hire scheme, though.
> Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in murder-for-hire deals targeting at least five people,[29] allegedly because they threatened to reveal Ulbricht's Silk Road enterprise.[37][38] Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred.[29] Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with any murder-for-hire,[29][39] but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations.[29][38] The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life, and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to affirm the life sentence.
I don't have a strong position on this but I am interested in some opinions on whether it makes more sense for the punishment to be commensurate with the actual effects or the potential effects?
eg. If you punch someone in an altercation, they might fall and hit their head and die - and people have been jailed for doing so - but if the same punch happens to not cause a fall, it will likely result in minimal bruising and perhaps a concussion that will heal in a few weeks.
Do these crimes deserve the same sentence or does outcome matter?
I think this usually falls under two considerations - intention and "careless as to consequences"
If you shoot at me with intention to kill, and miss, attempted murder almost always carries the same weight as murder so outcome does not matter.
If you punch me in the face on top of a cliff, and I stumbke and fall to my death, your intention may only have been tissue damage, but you were careless as to (reasonable potential) consequences.
And yes the falling and hitting ones head is iirc seen as a reasonably predictable consequence.
Most computer crimes fall under federal jurisdiction, and the convicted must serve at least 85% of the sentenced time in prison to be eligible for parole. The penalties are very steep for computer crimes compared to their physical crime counterparts that cause similar amounts of damage.
Can those 'three strikes' happen as part of the same crime complex?
Not a perfect example, but let's say an addict robs someone on the street, buys a big score of her favorite drug and then sells some of that to an addict friend. Would that be considered three strikes?
Only 33% of the cases even result in an arrest [1] and 6 in 1000 cases actually result in jail time. That only 384/1000 are even reported to police shows what people think their options are in getting justice. (US is not an exception by any means.)
Well, sure, it's an outlier in such cases because it was prosecuted at all. But that's probably the opposite direction that the claim upthread meant to imply.
I understand there is some truth to that claim, but how real is it?
Sentences are delivered by judges. There have been prominent examples of judges bribed by prison systems to deliver harsh sentences, but that doesn't seem to be the norm.
Am I naive thinking that most judges deliver the sentence they believe is just, and that if something needs to be reformed, it's their perception of justice and not just the prison system?
Sentences are basically tightly constrained within some guidelines. The judge has leeway for leniency, but not much. Otherwise there's a preset range for each crime (i.e. 6-12 months) based on offender's history (i.e. first offender's get less time, etc) and population risk, judge can lower that by up to some maximum amount.
So then it really needs legislative reform to adjust those minimum sentences.
In the US judges tend to be elected. That's not the norm around the world. US judges must to a certain extent be politicans, and "being tough on crime" plays well to the electorate. Many probably do feel their sentences are appropriate, but if they are collectively anchored towards harsh sentences the end result is the same.
The recent episode of the Ezra Klein podcast interviews Paul Butler who argues that prison does more harm than good and that we does replace it with a system that actually improves people.
He compares our current lease enforcement system to a chokehold: "Butler describes a chokehold as “a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because a body does not come into compliance, but a body cannot come into compliance because of the vice grip that is on it.” That, he says, is the black experience in the United States. "
I currently live in Vietnam. Yes, they have very harsh penalties. They also have the least police presence I've experienced anywhere. I feel like when I do see a cop (besides traffic cops) every so often it's quite a surprise.
Also, a friend's weed dealer was busted about a while ago. He got 8 years, not 34 years, from what I heard.
I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture here. Theres huge corruption in the government and a lot of pollution and traffic problems. But it's not the dystopia that it's often portrayed as in the west. On the contrary, it's a beautiful and easy country in which to live, as long as you're above the poverty line. But food and necessities are amazingly cheap here and only about 10% are below the national poverty line here (in the US it's around 12%).
Not defending Singapore which has extremely problematic laws on the books and I can't really speak for Vietnam but the US has far higher incarceration rates than any of those countries. Like 3-4x higher. China's numbers are probably suspect but at least on paper the US is still worse.
Ever wondered what those black spots on city sidewalks are? That's gum. All of it is gum that's been spat out then walked on until it acquires a top embedded coating of city grime.
They are very fixated on clean streets, train etc.
Gum tends to end up everywhere and is super hard to relive once dried.
But there are other high penalities for dirting the streets/parks/houses related offenses.
But then it's a city where you could (theoretically) walk barefoot in the streets without worrying about dirt it similar. Through it's probably not legal either and you do have to worry about burning you feed on the hot asphalt ;=}
Vietnam is also pretty generous with death penalty for drug trafficking. What makes it worse, it's not transparent about number of executions or even the reasons for capital punishment. See e.g:
While one of the most famous things about Singapore, the law was introduced in the 90s to prevent vandalism of the then new metro system. Since 2004 pharmacists and dentists have been allowed to sell gum, including standard and sugar free gum. I can’t find verification: has anyone actually gone to prison for selling gum in Singapore?
If the Chinese government wants to punish a citizen, they don't need to send you to prison: They can track or tap your phone. They know when you check into a hotel and will send the police over to search your belongings.
There are problably plenty of dictatorships that punish harsher than the US, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find democratic, freedom-loving countries that punish harsher than the US does. Except maybe when it comes to crimes by rich/important people with good connections.
Us has the highest verified incarceration per capita in the world and the largest number of total prisoners. So at least by verified numbers it's not really even close, the US is by far the worst. Are the numbers accurate for China or other oppressive regimes? Who knows and North Korea doesn't release numbers but they're thought to be close to or slightly higher than the US' per capita numbers.
So probably the only country that has very slight worse numbers in the entire world is North Korea, including all the other dictatorships and otherwise failed states. That's crazy.
Looking at US incarceration data over time, the causes are plainly obvious. Mass incarceration began shortly after the civil rights movement was ended, when Nixon launched the War on Drugs in 1971, and then skyrocketed in the 80s as even harsher bipartisan anti drug laws were passed while at the same time the CIA was found to be facilitating the importation of billions of dollars of cocaine into inner cities at the inception point of the crack epidemic.
Well, you could argue that all of North Korea is functionally an open air prison.
If you don’t get to live in a city because you lack the permit, is a rural Chinese citizen jailed in their home town?
If you don’t get to do stuff like drive without your male guardian present, is that Saudi woman watched over by a prison guard?
If you’re a German kid and you’re just tracked into trade school, did society put you to work for it below what you’re worth? Like prisoners being paid below minimum wage to make Victoria’s Secret underwear?
I’m not a hack, I know these things are different than jail. Coercion and incarceration takes many forms around the world though. Expand your mind beyond the formalism of the jail cell and you start to see it everywhere. That’s not necessarily a bad thing - that’s the self awareness this writer is asking for.
And then you have countries that execute much higher amount of people, cut their hands or whip them. Incarceration rates are not the only thing in play.
True but we also execute people in the US, our prisons have despicable living conditions and we routinely use solitary confinement which could be considered a form of torture by some.
> I was arrested in 2009 for installing botnets and commercial remote access programs on a handful of sensitive clinic systems, which included a critical SCADA system
Hacking an online store and a sensitive clinical system should be punished with very different levels of punishment.
That does jive with our sense of justice, yes, but I think the point is what are we achieving. Is it actually disincentivizing the crime? Is it preventing recurrence of the same individual committing future crime? I would argue that US prison statistics point at a massive failure in one, both, or is simply incarcerating people unnecessarily in the first place. This article is touching on the second one specifically.
We don't know what will happen in the future. Prison time at least ensures this won't happen for multiple years, and gives you a chance to think it over.
If medical systems he hacked could have hurt people then this is basically conscious intention to hurt others, and it doesn't matter that he didn't. So in this particular case its really hard to stand on his side. If we were talking about some credit card scam - than I would gladly support you that we better try and change a person, and prison is super overkill for this type of crime. But if we are talking about hurting others - this can't be justified.
I think you're missing the point of the conversation. I'm not excusing or justifying what he did at all. The point of this is, other than our sense of justice and desire to punish someone for doing something bad, what is prison supposed to achieve?
I'd like prison to achieve the kind of justice that yes, does provide some sense of justice to victims, but aims to reform criminals and reduce crime. Now, independent of this case, America is clearly failing, because our recidivism rate is (depending on the study you look at) between 40% and 70% over a matter of months and years, which is pretty terrible [1]. Many other first-world countries are achieving far better rates. And for per-capita imprisonment, America is literally the worst in the world according to Wikipedia [2]. Last I checked, a couple of years ago, it was second.
But back to this specific article. Yes, this person was convicted of a serious crime and went to jail. But while there they were isolated in a way I consider a violation of the 8th amendment without due process. Not only do I consider this a failing of "justice" in its own right, but it's left this person less able to go and rejoin society in a productive way. Poverty is one of the strongest predictors of criminality: how is this helpful to anyone? Just because you want to punish it and doing so seems fair, doesn't mean the way the US justice system will implement that punishment is doing something good in the end. You can reform that system without just excusing serious crimes.
edit: I feel like this is the same kind of misunderstanding everyone's having with the #BlackLivesMatter vs #BackTheBlue stuff right now. People complain about the way some police are doing their jobs, and point out ways some other police departments or police in other countries do it much better, and the alternative we consider is no police. What the actual fuck? Can't we just have police tone down the tactics and approach the problem a different way? Since when is saying that police are killing people too easily and too often saying that they just shouldn't have even arrested the person?
> other than our sense of justice and desire to punish someone for doing something bad, what is prison supposed to achieve?
To keep a person from doing something harmful again when we don't know any other way to make them not do it and we aren't willing to risk more harm.
Sure, if we could magically change the person so they would see what they did before as bad and never do it again, we wouldn't have to keep them in prison. But we don't have any way of doing that. What techniques we do have for "rehabilitating" people are simply not very reliable, so there's a limit to how much we are willing to depend on them as an alternative to incarceration.
Except you're missing the point that other countries have less-horrible prisons and programs to keep inmates somewhat connected with other human beings and better prepare them to resume a normal life after their sentence.
It doesn't matter that we can't see the future when we can look at the present in other locations and see better results. We do know another way - the US prison system is just blind to it.
Just because something can hurt someone doesn't mean it's conscious intent to harm someone. That's a gigantic leap. That's the difference between negligence and pre meditation.
Maybe? I mean, there are a lot of factors that go into sentencing including intent and harm. In this case, the HVAC system was already compromised and the guy seems to have done nothing particularly malicious with it.
It doesn't seem like it was in the state's interest to lock this person up for 10 years. Two years would have been plenty to get the point across, for a fraction of the cost, plus the potential generational damage caused by a kid growing up fatherless in the formative 2-12 years.
He hacked central control systems used by utility companies. This could have caused all sorts of disruptions including to traffic lights and hospitals. This was definitely not a "victimless crime".
That analogy doesn't fit here at all. In your case they intend to cause harm to someone at the start by literally shooting someone. You are presupposing intent and harm of a person and certainly there were neither in the hacker's case.
A better analogy, that maybe is more fitting, is you blow through a stoplight and kill someone.
That's definitely negligence but there was no intent to hurt someone, the intent was to speed to a destination.
The intent here was to use computing resources to launch an attack on another hacker group, nothing that would have intently harmed a person at the clinic. They could have accidentally hurt someone though.
And if they did it would be recklessness, certainly negligent , but their intent was not to kill someone.
And this is why we in the US have different laws for different situations that take into account negligence, intent, premeditation etc.
None of them are alright but the state of mind the person committing the crime was in makes it varying degrees of bad.
Someone who accidentally kills someone and someone who plots a cold blooded murder have both taken a life but, the one who killed on accident isn't as heinous or maybe as morally reprehensible.
Life is mostly varying shades of grey and not strictly good or bad and that's why society has complex laws to dole out different punishments depending on situation.
And finally, the hacker never harmed anyone in this case arguing on what they might have done is an abuse of the system imo. I might get up right now and burn my neighborhood to the ground, but you cant condemn me of it before I actually do it. (I won't)
In the context that people have been talking about is did he physically harm someone, the answer is no, in that sense there was no victim. I don't sympathize with him but he didn't cause physical harm to anyone and besides what it cost to remove the botnet from the clinic's machines he doesn't seem to have done any real economic harm here either. There was no patient information stolen, no damage to the clinic's reputation and no permanent damage to their systems.
10 years is egregious and heavily punitive. The prosecutor that speculated that he "could of caused harm" and that was what the entire punishment was predicated on. Our legal system is entirely draconian when it comes to computer crimes.
This should have been criminally probation or a few months in jail and a civil suit brought by the client for any actual damages.
I'm not saying there was no wrong doing but you're not going to convince me that the minor damages were worth 10 years of this guys life.
I agree that 10 years (any years) in prison is excessive for what he was accused of, but the term being thrown around in this thread was "victimless crime". The mere fact that someone had to pay to clean his botnet from their systems means that this crime had a victim.
A more reasonable sentence would have been 2-3x the cost of the cleanup—and details on the systems that were compromised—plus a certain amount of (extrajudicial) social ostracism along the lines of ISPs not being willing to sell him Internet access based on his past history of abusing such privileges.
Isn't the punishment a way to stop people from trying to commit a crime?
Because you seem to be focusing on the outcome/consequences of someone that committed a crime and got caught.
It's not like the punishment is the result of "bad luck" or "unexpected circumstances", it was a deliberate conscious action, right?
Also some of these actions aren't a burst of irrationality and poor thought process - they are planned and recurrent, done through stretches of time in a consistent manner.
So on one hand, it seems severe punishment, on the other hand, people severely push boundaries while knowing it's wrong and with severe punishment - what would they do if it was less severe?
Edit: just to make it clear, I'M NOT SUPPORTING HEAVY SENTENCES.
> Isn't the punishment a way to stop people from trying to commit a crime?
Harsh punishment fosters resentment.
Isolation is a form of torture.
Cutting off prisoners from society makes reintegration and rehabilitation difficult.
A person who is incapable of participating in society is going to be pushed to the fringes and will more than likely become a drain on society rather than a contributor.
Severity is a huge factor. We don't really have a gradient of consequences, and much of what we do have is limited to privileged individuals. When was the last time you heard of a nonviolent drug offender being given the option to serve his sentence over weekends or in a minimum security facility?
Unless you're a wealthy elite with a very expensive team of lawyers, you're going to "Pound me in the ass Prison". We even make jokes about how extreme the conditions are in our prisons and use those poor conditions as deterrent.
On top of that, we've privatized our prisons so the operators are constantly looking for opportunities to profit. In the post the author talks about per minute charges for email. Some prisons no longer allow face-to-face visitation and instead require the use of video conferencing technology that costs money. Beyond nickle and diming inmates, they're reducing staffing and quality of everything to save as much money as possible. That in itself is punishing torture.
When I've looked into people who commits crimes and why, they rarely are considering the judicial system and the possible consequences of their actions.
Harsh punishments do not seem to actually function as a determent in real life. From my perspective, harsh punishments is more about revenge than anything else. They're a simple way to feel like you're doing the right thing, as long as you don't examine it too closely. And most people don't want to examine it too closely.
> When I've looked into people who commits crimes and why, they rarely are considering the judicial system and the possible consequences of their actions.
Agreed. I'm not saying their approach was exactly unbiased or scientific, but Penn & Teller in their "Bullshit!" show put forward the following considerations:
- If a violent crime is "spur of the moment", by definition it never takes the judicial system into consideration. People who violently murder their loved ones in a fit of rage don't think of the consequences. People who shoot strangers over a car accident don't, either.
- If the crime is planned with anticipation, such as in many white collar crimes but also planned robberies, kidnappings, etc: the perpetrators always think they are smarter than the law and won't get caught. The possible consequences are irrelevant to them, because they simply don't think they'll get caught.
That might be true for first time offenders but what about repeat offenders? They can't be said to not be familiar with the possible judicial consequences of their actions.
That's possibly a third category to add to "spur of the moment crime" and "I don't think I'll get caught": "I don't care what happens to me". A lot of crime done out of desperation, by people with nothing to lose, is precisely that: they are so desperate they don't value their life or the lives of others [1]. In that case, prison and even the death penalty is a poor deterrent; if you expect to live hard and die young, what can they threaten you with anyway?
[1] A journalism/essay book from my country (not the US), depicting the lives of youngsters in shanty towns, interviewed many of them. A surprising number of them claimed they didn't expect to live past 30, and didn't make any plans because plans were meaningless to them. If they died for whatever reason, "so be it". (By the way, in my mind this isn't an indictment of these people, but rather of the society which makes them believe they have no choice and no future).
> Isn't the punishment a way to stop people from trying to commit a crime?
There are different opinions on what the main purpose of incarceration is (punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation, protecting society), but let's for a minute assume it's deterrence, aka "stop people from trying to commit a crime".
How well would you say incarceration as deterrence is working so far? Regarding shootings, muggings, robbery, murder, rape, even "white collar" crimes. Would you say prison (and even the death penalty) as deterrence has significantly helped reduce or stop crime in the US?
The better question is has it abated the act of these crimes to a significant level? If a 10 year sentence crime is commonplace then that’s a dark mark on the police and judges. If it’s a crime not often committed how can we correlate the punishment to the practice? The incarceration is a punishment for the one who commits the crime, but is also there to set an example. If the example isn’t made then the loop continues. Crime without (known) repercussions is a crime that will continue. If that is okay in the eyes of lawmakers then this is now about money. This is just top of mind thinking, not stating as fact.
Imposing a disproportionate punishment "to set an example" makes you more dangerous to society than the person you're punishing. I'm not saying that actions which harm others should not result in repercussions, but the punishment must fit the crime for the law to be legitimate. Even if that occasionally means that some people weigh the risk of getting caught and decide that the odds against being punished are low enough to make the risk worthwhile.
In the UK, crime against property regularly attracts harsh sentencing; crime against the person not so much. Why? I think it perpetuates our historical values. The Government believes we're expendable, although useful enough to pay tax.
Not for hacking though rob a bank of 70k you get much longer sentences than a hacker stealing the same amount by hacking email and redirecting a payment.
Arguably the UK is soft on hacking as there are several News international Hacks that should be doing 5-10
The US is the country with the highest ratio of their population being imprisoned.
The idea behind their long sentences is that if you know you get super long sentences you won't commit crime. Rehabilitation isn't in the agenda. That this is known to not work well is ignored by large part of the government.
The lawmaker in the US panicked when making hacking laws as they didn't understood it and people told them that is viable that expert hackers can literally singlehandedly start amagedon by having nuclear missels. Through unreasonable penalties for hacking are not unreasonable.
If you knew you could hurt others when you intentionally messed up - then probably it is a good idea to lock you up for a few years, because clearly you are very bad at thinking, no matter to what conclusion you will come in 10 minutes.
He didn't just slip and hacked medical systems by accident.
It's important to rehabilitate you in whatever way works best.
The way people get looked up in the US is known to be one of the worst approaches to rehabilitation, it's bad to a degree that it's making it more likely for you to commit crimes when you come out instead of less because you have become totally out of touch with socity and normal life.
Did you know the recidivism rate in the US is around 43%? Maybe it would be better for us a nation to work on making the justice system more about rehabilitation than punishment.
Setting the bar at "North Korea" is simply childish and unhelpful.
Is this how low we've gotten? The only thing you can say is that the US is at least better than the most oppressive and isolated Regime in the world? I don't know what that says about your world view or the US.
Honestly and without sarcasm: from what I understand, it seems like pretty much everybody in North Korea is a prisoner of North Korea. Not having control of your own life, being constantly monitored, and not being allowed to leave are all hallmarks of prison life. Add to that starvation and retributive acts against your family by the state itself.
Let's not get caught up in hyperbole here. North Korea is a harsh dictatorship, but even then, you get to live, breathe the outside air, have a family, raise kids, and you don't risk being raped at every turn (as in physically raped, let's not mince words here and go on a tangent about "mental rape by the state" or whatnot).
It's probably choosing between two kinds of hell, but if given the chance, I'll 100% no-questions-asked go to live in North Korea rather than be incarcerated 10 years in a US prison. (It goes without saying that I'd rather live free in the US, I hope this doesn't need saying. Also it goes without saying that I'd rather live in another country rather than North Korea; this is a thought experiment where these are the only two options).
Of course, prison in North Korea must be hell too, but that's not what we're talking about.
Finally, comparing the US to North Korea -- is that really the bar we want to use?
This bit at the end was the most interesting to me.
"For me, I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it."
Has it really changed that much in 10 years, or is part of it just the sense of alienation everyone experiences getting out of jail after a long time?
I mean, 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before that, and before the before.
I can't prove it of course, but I'd bet you might feel that "human interaction" is not quite what you remember it to be if you had only just spent 10 years behind the bars.
And that's even if the technological progress on the outside had stood perfectly still for some reason.
Yes (although I'd probably put the real dividing line at more like 12 years). Facebook wasn't available outside of certain institutions until 2006, the same year Twitter dates to. The iPhone was first introduced in 2007 and arguably didn't really take off until the 3GS in 2009.
So, yes, the internet was well-established by the 2000s. But today's always connected world of social media and everything else is only about a decade old.
ADDED: Of course, if you turn back the clock about another ten years, for many people it would be the difference between pre-Internet and a mostly broadband-connected very commercialized internet.
I'd argue it hasn't changed much for technology people. I had an iPhone in 10 and used it constantly for the same thing I do today: news, web browsing when away, and chatting with friends. My google history confirms this. I still use the same gmail address, reddit, social media, Steam, bank, etc accounts.
I think the biggest difference for me is that I use spotify now for music, rather than downloading it. And streaming video is now legit, so there's less need for torrents and newsgroups.
What's changed is social media. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram all use machine learning to provide just the right feedback for us to keep cominng back for more. This has hijacked our dopamine feedback loops and changed the way we interact with each other.
I know personally, my attention span is much worse than it was years ago. It's tough to find friends, and if I weren't married, I bet it would be tough and highly competitive to find a mate. I think this has something to do with it.
I think you're partly agreeing with me. I didn't have an iPhone until 2010. Before that I had a Treo, which was much less capable. So prior to 2010, I didn't really have a lot of mobile connectivity other than email and some (slow) web surfing.
I'll disagree with many of the commenters and say, "No, it hasn't changed that much."
15 years ago I was saying the same thing, but about SMS and Internet Messengers. Almost 20 years ago I was complaining about how online chat had killed email, and I rarely got emails that were more than 1-2 sentences, and that instant messaging content was very shallow with nothing of substance. I actually stopped using Instant Messaging around 2002 for this very reason.
14-15 years ago a colleague visited S Korea and Japan, and was struck at how the norm was that couples would be sitting at a table staring at their phones and not talking to each other - before the iPhone was launched.
> 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before that, and before the before.
Is the logic there that if people have complained about something frequently in the past then it's not true? On the scale of human history 100 years is a blip so it's quite possible that for many periods of 10 years things people can observe troubling patterns and in fact a problem can be compounding over time.
People complained about racism and mistreatment of blacks in America 10 years ago, and 10 years before that etc etc. Is your logic that we don't have a problem with racism?
People have complained that destruction of our ecosystem is getting worse, and they did 10 years ago, and 10 years before that etc, etc. Would you really argue that "therefore it's no big deal"?
13 years ago there was no iphone, 13 years before that basically no one used the WWW, 13 years before that virtually no one had personal computers. Now you can disagree about whether the effects of change are good or bad, but communication the fact that communication has changed rapidly in 30+ years is not something that can be argued and is hardly just a fact of human life throughout history.
Ten years ago "looking at a cellphone" was still universal shorthand for "is a dick" in fiction. So was "talking to no-one" (bluetooth headset) which carried a further meaning of "business douche" ("carries a cellphone at all" was shorthand for this for most of the 90s—see the movie Hook for an early example). Both are normal and common now.
Ten years ago much of the population still considered paying any attention whatsoever—any—to a cellphone in the company of others, maybe unless it actually rang (remember phone calls that weren't spam?), to be incredibly rude.
All that changed very fast over the following 5 years or so.
The only reason that 3/4 (conservatively) of the population isn't walking around with their Borg implant Bluetooth earpieces these days is that, in most situations, if something is actually important someone will send you a text. And, yes, I clearly recall when being affixed to a Bluetooth earphone was widely viewed as douchey behavior outside of certain circles because it implied the person was just waiting for a call that was more important than you.
This has pretty much been normalized as more and more people expect immediate response to whatever trivial whine they have.
I agree with that. Yes some persons and young people now live completely connected in a kind of parallel world of social networks, but depending where you live it's a small minority. The physical world and human interactions in it haven't changed, and lot of interesting things still happen offline.
I can't find it now but I saw a before & after picture of Cuban street life. For reasons Cuba got smart phones all at once, recently. The before picture shows a lively scene, in the after picture everyone is alone, staring into a phone.
> We were promised flying cars and got 140 (now more) characters on Twitter.
This is entirely due to tech financiers like Peter Thiel investing in software to the exclusion of other forms of technology. He could be funding flying cars in the way that Elon Musk is funding space travel.
There are plenty of people who generally feel the same way and stay away from social media in general(myself included). Which is incredibly odd when you are building things that are aimed at those exact people. A case of "don't use your own supply" I suppose.
The more involved you are with anything to do with data, the less likely you are to use it.
I don't like social media very much because it's created a culture of bullying people into conformity. It's not so much my opinion that data trends predict individuals, as some may argue, but that people are pressured to conform to trends, rewarded when they do, and punished when they do not. This philosophy is deeply entrenched in the language and behaviors of groups, and it's violently prone to manipulation.
Social media didn't create the culture. It just gave more people a chance to be part of it. Before, marginalized voices were almost universally bullied and abused into conformity. Some of those marginalized people handle having a voice now poorly, but it doesn't mean the culture they participate in is new.
I partially disagree. Verbal communication requires people to do at least some degree of thinking if they want to respond to a view that they disagree with. Whereas social media allows people to "participate" in a discussion (in the sense that they produce feedback which influences the course of the discussion) using a mode of thought that can be summarized as "does this make me feel like pressing the upvote or the downvote button?"
I believe that this latter mode of participant-community interaction is especially conducive to echo chambers, because it reduces any kind of content to a one-dimensional axis: does the community like this, or does the community dislike this?
Before social media, the bullying was typically confined to school yards. Now, it follows the bullied everywhere they go. Social Media didn't create the culture, but it poured fuel on the fire and cranked the volume knob up to 11.
>The only solution to making me happy again would seem to download Ubuntu, mount it to a USB thumb drive, and get it installed. Had I known that Windows 10 doesn’t utilize BIOS, but has replaced it with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which is a secure boot option that validates programs before giving them permission to run, I wouldn’t have wasted two more days of my life trying to install my favorite operating system.
I don't understand what he's saying here. I dual boot Ubuntu on my Windows 10 PC all the time (as well as using Virtualbox).
Otherwise, I'd say his accounting of the changes shows although he may be an outsider simply by virtue of time away, he's still more savvy than the majority of the population.
He's probably preparing the thumbdrive the old-fashion way, jusr dd'ing the iso into it.
You need a modern prep tool that's UEFI-compatible for it to boot on new hardware.
Maybe I'm missing something, but (apart from Secure Boot) I used dd to create bootable Linux USBs and booted into UEFI just fine. At least on recent Ubuntu images.
Yes, I've done Linux installations on UEFI hardware using dd'ed iso images. What are these modern prep tools, and what could they possibly be doing that dd can't do?
No, just the secure boot flag. Linux can EFI boot, and most UEFI bioses are perfectly happy to boot 'legacy' BIOS OS images as well. You just have to figure out how to disable windows-only mode.
I think it's something else. One cannot simply shut down a Windows 8+ computer any more in order to access the boot device priority. There is a menu entry for shut down, but it's mislabelled and instead it will hibernate. This is very perplexing if one is used to how it was done before. The real working procedure is orders of magnitude more complicated and documented at https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/5831-boot-uefi-firmware-...
My experience is that there is an 'Advanced BIOS Options' dialog where I select 'Turn off your PC'. Then I can go into the BIOS and change the UEFI/SecureBoot options. One can usually enable 'Legacy Boot' for BIOS boot OSs. Certainly frustrating the first time.
If you install to the HDD and don't use any binary drivers it works fine. If you're trying to boot from USB you usually have to disable SecureBoot in the BIOS.
I usually disable SecureBoot when I install a machine. The extra protections aren't worth losing the ability to run VirtualBox.
Surely I'm not the only one that thinks very little has changed in 10 years?
I hadn't built a PC (nor used windows) between 2005 and 2016. After a few hours of catching up on the newest names (ie, what's the cheapo intel line called? What DDR version do I get? What is the SATA equivalent now?), everything became super familiar. Putting everything together was much easier (mouse cursors in BIOS?!) and looked a bit different, but amusingly familiar.
10 years ago I got a new Android from Google. Apple released a new iPhone with a larger screen. I had an app on whatever Google Play was called back then and this app still works on my phone. I read news online, I coded in Java, Javascript and Python on my MBP. I read Paul Graham essays about startups and posted comments on Hacker News.
The police had descended on my city (Toronto G20 in 2010), putting up massive barriers, kettling protesters, making massive arrests and brutalizing people. I was checking Twitter to see what was happening.
I booked flights on aggregators, booked hostel stays on websites and planned my trips through Google Maps.
Sure, many particulars have changed (AirBnB vs hostelworld, more things on phone vs laptop), but I honestly struggle to see much technological change in my life. Getting a Tesla, which was completely unattainable in 2010, seems like the technological highlight of the past decade.
Ironically, it seems our political situation has changed drastically over the last 10 years while technology has been slowly spreading but remaining fairly stable.
There haven't been many experiential leaps in consumer hardware since 3D graphics on 60Hz 1080p displays and touchscreens, wifi became established in the early 2000s.
VR is still firmly in enthusiast space.
NLP/speech recognition has subtly come amazingly far for consumer products but most people don't use it (or just aren't aware of it) due to the social stigma of talking _to_ your phone in public.
I read one of the linked stories that was an interview of this guy - it strikes me he was more a script kiddie obsessed with 4chan turf wars and not really a technologist.
> That summer the temperature inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit.
I hope people understand common this is in jails and prisons around the US. The prison I worked at was the same way. We were told to lie about the temperatures in the pods because the thermometers were broken but the common areas would reach up to 100 degrees. Hell, even the control rooms would get 115+ because they wouldn't fix our air conditioner. I got heat exhaustion once and had a heat stroke. These places are the worst human rights abuses in the US and should immediately be abolished and replaced with something much less sinister and more helpful.
Prisoners don't vote, politicians don't give a shit about them. 125F cells may even been seen as desirable by people who consider prison as purely for punishment or sequestering undesirables from society.
The carceral state in the US is totally out of control. It is entirely common that people are denied human rights in jail/prison, even prior to trial.
Effectively no one holds prisons or guards or medical staff in the US to account for these incredibly common and widespread human rights abuses. The parallels with US policing are clear (as is the systemic racism: the system is working exactly as designed).
Private prisons are a red herring. The vast majority of prisoners are not in private prisons, and states have been moving to get rid of them. In many big states, like New York and Illinois, private prisons weren’t legal to begin with. Rikers, the NYC jail famous for its abuses, was public.
People make private prisons to face of prison abuse for tactical reasons. In reality, the story of the American prison system is the story of the government: voters who demanded “tough on crime” laws; brutal publicly run police; harsh publicly operated prisons; all tied together and supported by public unions.
This 100%. Private prisons are used to create a contrast statement for corporate suppliers of prisons and lobbyists to "show" how cheaply operations can be done. They are a conference booth to lure states in regarding shredding prisoner QOL for a 6% revenue increase can work without increasing the inmate death rate too much.
The Industrial private prison complex owner group don't want to operate, they want to sell support, training, equipment and materials to public prisons not operate (like a defense contractor), because a prison is very complicated management problem and has little public reward over budget efficiency sadly (things are changing but slowly).
This is a misunderstanding of "human rights". Think of them as the fundamental rights that society declared everyone has as a result of being a human.
Unqualified "freedom" is not generally regarded to be a human right, and nowhere does the existence of those rights include the right to not be imprisoned. They do, in most cases, provide the right to a fair trial, and the right to freedom from unlawful imprisonment.
I know this seems like a pedantic point, but it's really important.
>Think of them as the fundamental rights that society declared everyone has as a result of being a human
Like Freedom?
And what society your talking about? In Europe its clear that everyone has at least the right to life, not so in the US (death-sentence), free-speech? No not in many-many country's.
In prison do you have free-speech, freedom or the right to life (if you have the death-sentence)?
No you don't...so talking about human-right's in prison is completely wrong.
EDIT: Having prisons is just a trade-off of human rights for protecting the life of 'free' citizen's
This adds exactly nothing to the conversation. Please don't do this. I don't like to appeal to authority but the HN guidelines specifically discourage these kinds of comments.
We're on a slippery slope to being disappeared whenever it's convenient for the US government, by the loss of habeas corpus. I first noticed it being undermined in the 2000s under the George W. Bush administration:
Right now habeas corpus is mainly being suspended for non-US citizens, but more authoritarian-leaning elected officials keep trying to undermine it domestically:
Unfortunately we're vulnerable right now because the public is easily distracted by straw man arguments. For example, they might feel that it's ok to deny an antifa demonstrator habeas corpus (since antifa was deemed a terrorist organization by Donald Trump), without realizing that in order for habeas corpus to work, it must apply to everyone regardless of criminal accusation.
I'm seeing this fallacy constantly right now, so if there is a better word for it, please comment because it would be good to have a name for it.
> Most inmates have computer access which uses a specialized access control program that allows them to email approved contacts for .05 cents a minute.
That's actually surprising; Texas has no such access. Hell, they even recently restricted mail such that you can't get greeting cards (I don't know all the details, but I know it involved people putting drugs in/on the cards, probably via ink)
> certainly not the way I left it back when I was arrested in 2009 for installing botnets and commercial remote access programs on a handful of sensitive clinic systems, which included a critical SCADA system.That was how I became the first person in recent United States history to be convicted for corrupting industrial control systems.
> As I probe around the web and observe this new generation of hackers, I see individuals that have lost touch with the true spirit of hacking. A brood that is motivated by greed, revenge, and anger. Harmless curiosity has become a thing of the past.
Your Harmless Curiosity didn't stay so harmless in your case, did it?
Spare me your empty, hypocritical moralism - just like Kevin Mitnick.
Just couple days ago I had to help someone to find up-to-date webbrowser for WinXP https://feodor2.github.io/Mypal/ to use on internal network, they had no option to upgrade. Legacy apps are here with us forever.
> For me, I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful human interaction anymore.
People may think it's because he's been disconnected for so long. But I have the exact same feeling, and think about this problem every day.
I'm a software engineer, and doing everything okay in the modern world. But I mostly use smartphones as a phone like in the last century unless I have to, I don't use most social media stuff, and I don't even take pictures.
I don't feel bad or sad about it because I was not interested in the first place. But I feel disconnected, and cannot empathize with people. Everything seems more and more pointless to me.
I wonder how many people feel the same, or it's just the op and me?
I haven't used really any form of social media (besides HN I suppose) in close to a decade at this point, and I don't feel at all disconnected or left out. Instead I tend to feel real benefits from:
1. Being hard to "reach". If someone wants to talk to me, they have to call, text, email or show up at my house. They can't just broadcast something on their whateverplace and expect me to find it. That makes me appreciate the people in my life who do make the effort to communicate with me personally. It lets me know they value me as a person and that I'm worth their time.
2. I am almost never tempted to think about my image. As a result I'm more "in the moment" and also more certain of my own motives. If the family is doing something fun, we can simply _enjoy it_. No need to document (though there's certainly no rule about this, and plenty of candid pictures are still taken). As someone who at times struggles with anxiety and loneliness, this is one (very large) less thing to worry about.
I feel the same way. I think just a lot of people in the tech industry have a starry-eyed view of technology. Don't get me wrong, technology has done positive things and obviously affords us many conveniences. But there is a negative side as well.
Its funny to me that people don't think technologies like social media and smartphones have changed how people socialize when that's the very purpose of them.
There's something that's definitely changed although I can't quite articulate it. I'm a millennial but I find it easier to talk to people many decades older than me, they seem more attentive. I try to socialize with my colleagues who are my age or younger but they struggle when I ask things like "Hey, how are you?" One of them finally said to me: "I still don't know how to answer that question."
Honestly, front-end development is probably the most forgiving area of all for tech workers returning from an extended hiatus.
Front-end churn is like the apocryphal factoid about the human skin replacing itself completely every few years. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that you're never more than 4 years behind the state of the art in front-end development.
I got out of school in 2013 and then went to a job that was pretty self isolated, working in proprietary format that wasn't really aware of the rest of industry - at best there was some Python and some .Net work. I took another position a couple of years ago where I got throw into the deep end of the modern material - ASP.NET Core, Node, NPM, React, Typescript, modern ES, the whole kit and kaboodle. I can tell you it took me a loooonnng time to get it all figured out. A lot has changed in the latter half of this decade.
.Net? Absolutely. Tools? Oh yeah. JavaScript, HTML, and CSS? Probably. The sheer breadth of things you need to know to stay relevant? Not so much - it's just too much.
Well, that Dell Inspiron ought to have a BIOS/EFI switch to allow you to deactivate the secure boot features, and there are ways to install ubuntu on secure-boot systems using a shim. Failing that, there's now WSL...
But I guess 10 years is a lot of catching up to do!
I don't think technology has progressed, in a meaningful way, since 2007...much less 2009.
It's still all virtualized, cloud providers, instead of servers. It's still digital advertising doing what it was doing in 2002. Myspace and Facebook were around in 2009. Twitter hashtags is a footnote. A lot of what happened is specific events, not technological leaps. I dunno, maybe I'm influenced by how it's all seemed pedestrian since the internet took over mainstream culture in the 90s and now it's just been refined to a sugary powder that's delivered through phone screens.
At least in the DevOps space, we can now develop applications without mastering process managers, log exfiltration, ssh configuration / server hardening, bin packing, configuration management, brittle infrastructure provisioning scripts, etc. This is somewhat revolutionary in that it doesn’t require specialists with decades of experience—devs can operate their own services down to the infrastructure. This affords a lot of impressive organization improvements even while the technology is nascent (lots of room for improvement in the build, infrastructure management, and orchestration spaces as well as in the “appliancification” of infrastructure or “platformization” of the cloud, depending on how you want to look at it).
2009 didn't seem to be that far back to me. Sure, a lot has happened, but a lot of skills are still transferable, especially in SCADA. Basic concepts of OOP or security principles are largely the same as well.
13 months of isolation alone have a devastating effect on the human psyche and general cognitive abilities. Many of the negative effects (e.g. loss of self-worth and cognitive abilities) are irreversible.
One of the videos that got Jesse McGraw on the FBI radar and ultimately arrested. I don't necessarily agree with the severity of his sentence or how he was treated in prison, but his behaviour was pretty reprehensible and juvenile.
It is sad he lost 10 years of his life from some pretty thoughtless actions that I'm sure had he had more life experience would not have considered undertaking.
I'm trying to figure out why he's even being labeled a "hacker". It sounds like he installed a bot onto a system he already had access to as a security guard then used it to packet other kiddies. I don't see anything about remote exploits, or even breaking into a system - this is the epitome of script kiddie.
I get talking yourself up and hustling to make money, but it feels like a stretch to call this guy a hacker.
We’ve often had to relearn or learn. That’s what the author needs to do as well. When faced with a totally new system, they’d have poked about and grokked it.
Come to think of it, they have a massive advantage over many of us - the absence of a distracted mind, the absence of short attention spans.
If they applied themselves to it, they can learn new stuff again.
Per society norms and laws, they did the crime and paid the time. I wish them all the best with a fresh start.
While I sympathize with the OP and try to imagine what it would be like, I have to wonder whether there /really/ is that much of change if we are speaking strictly about linux, the internet and programming in general since the last 10 years.
I know for sure that it isn't hard to get back to it based on the experience of a friend of mine.
She was a sysadmin back in the 90s. A proper one. As geeky as any other linux geek running Red Hat 6.2 with window maker as the desktop environment as her main computing environment. At the turn of the millennium, she quit her job, got married and had a couple of kids. After quitting her job she barely ever kept in touch with computers. Of course, she browsed the web, used email shopped online but I'm willing to bet she didn't ever open up a command prompt. Her personal laptop ran windows and the house had one other computer (a mac, IIRC). Everything in her life revolved around her family and kids. She indulged in her other more satisfying interests of books and music if she ever had any free time -- which was very very rare.
3 months ago, now that the kids are old enough to not fuss and worry about, she decided to install linux and get back into everything with the intention of getting a job.
Last week she gave her first online talk for beginners (kids/teens). It was about container fundamentals. She introduced container concepts, docker and k8s.
By what I described it is perhaps hard to imagine just how disconnected she was from what 'we'[1] call tech but she really was -- she quit tech when Ubuntu was not even a thing !! ...and yet she was able to ramp up fairly quickly.
[1] I'm acutely aware that for non-tech people tech chops could also mean being able to use keyboard shortcuts where most people would use a mouse
Maybe it's not your constitution weakening, but your empathy strengthening? If more people felt injustices like this in their gut, the world would be a much better place.
>> I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it.
For what is worth he's not alone in this. Being "interconnected" the way he thinks he's missing feels actually being less connected than ever. In a way he sees the right picture IMHO but he thinks he misinterprets things. I guess it's his broken ego which puts these kinds of "I-must-be-wrong" filters in front of him but if he ever gets rid of them I think that his vantage point on the current techscape will be unique exactly due to him being absent of it for so long.
Gosh, I felt that way about Windows 3.1. It got so bad around Windows 95 that that was when I switched to Linux. I've never used Windows since, so when people ask if I can help them "sort out their PC" the answer is... :)
... "I'd love to help you, but I don't use Windows so might not be able to. But let's take a look, since you're my friend and all and I want you to be happy"?
The truth is I am now actually incompetent to help my Windows-using family and friends. The answer is that I really can't help, no matter how much goodwill applies.
I recently poked at a friend's Windows10 machine that was having networking issues (probably DNS or proxy settings)... couldn't even find the right sort of settings to paly around with. The whole thing is a mystery wrapped in an enigma to me and causes me to break out in a rash when forced to deal with it.
To come back to the GP's original point: Windows assumes a level of control over the hardware (accompanied by a level of ignorance from the user) that I find intolerable. After all, I paid for that hardware; surely I get to control it? ("Not so!" says Windows.)
What? Really? If you're being placed in front of a different OS than what you use you loose basic troubleshooting capabilities?
Look, I'm not using Windows nor OSX very often, when people ask me for help, I mostly start out as helpless as them. But programmers (or generally computer literate, or whatever you wanna call it) seem to have way better searching skills, even for things they have no idea about.
So yeah, helping people with the windows/osx setup sucks, because I'm completely lost. But if you're a linux user, you're probably used to searching for knowledge in order to gain it. This also works for others OSes.
I'd understand if you don't want to help them out of principle, but please don't call yourself incompetent when so many people have it so much "worse". Mention "DNS" or "proxy" and they'll think you're speaking yiddish.
Windows 10 now being a rolling release is making things even harder. Even if you do learn how to do something, you have no idea how long that method will remain viable or if features will be removed.
I find myself relying more and more on Powershell in Windows and using the Terminal in Mac OS X/OS X/macOS when I have to use these operating systems so I don't feel like a bumbling fool when someone asks for help fixing something. More than once I've had someone wonder out aloud that they thought I knew how to use computers when using the GUI.
Pretty much this. I have family that still uses Windows, even if I haven't used it for many years. So I still have to find my way through it and debug things periodically.
Luckily my mother switched to an iPad when they first came out and she hasn't looked back. So much easier to support an appliance than a general purpose PC.
> That’s three showers a week. 23/5 confinement to an 8X10 cell without air conditioning, a fan, or adequate ventilation. That summer the temperature inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit. With no evidence to support the inmates’ accusation, I was supposed to be released back into the general population. But to make a long story short, that didn’t happen.
One of the reasons I'm really glad we're starting to get serious about prison reform. Right now the conversation is intentionally narrowed to the historical treatment of Black Americans, but I don't see how the conversation doesn't lead to positive changes throughout the criminal justice system. A rising tide raises all boats.
> Some people refer to these facilities as “Black Sites” because they are cut off from the media, visitors, and lawyers so that what happens in there, stays in there. Interestingly enough, the Seagoville Federal Correctional Institution was once a Japanese internment camp.
> That’s three showers a week. 23/5 confinement to an 8X10 cell without air conditioning, a fan, or adequate ventilation. That summer the temperature inside my cell reached 125 degrees Fahrenheit. With no evidence to support the inmates’ accusation, I was supposed to be released back into the general population. But to make a long story short, that didn’t happen.
“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.”
I find it interesting that groups like Anonymous and Lulz Sec, whatever that is, aren't more active right now. Seems like there's lots of opportunity for causing mayhem at the moment. Maybe anti-cyber criminal work has gotten really good?
> Sabu had always been cautious, hiding his Internet protocol address through proxy servers. But then just once he slipped. He logged into an Internet relay chatroom from his own IP address without masking it. All it took was once. The feds had a fix on him. (https://www.foxnews.com/tech/exclusive-unmasking-the-worlds-...)
Fascinating that an auto-login setting on his mIRC client probably led him to be caught.
I'm curious about this too. He also mentioned not being able to access a lawyer at all when he was in max security. I thought access to a lawyer was a constant right - even after incarceration - and available free of charge?
"Big advertisers are using metadata to collect and map any given users’ Internet behaviors for content marketing purposes. I, too, used to steal users’ data. But it was a crime when I did it. Perhaps if I had sent them an ad or two it would have been less illegal?"
I kinda laughed and cringed with fear reading this section and the sections describing life as an inmate.
IMO it worries me thinking about the world he joined full of rights abuse in prison and mass commercial surveillance of our data.
In 2003 I was sentenced to 6 years in a Texas prison. The how and why isn't relevant, other than to say it was a
terrible mistake I made seven years prior. At that point, I was about 5 years into my tech career. I wasn't in there
for a "hacker" crime, so I was in general population, and had more freedom than the author did.
As for prison conditions, not much I can add to the conversation. It was hot, miserable, crowded, things we all know about.
No real opportunity to improve yourself; you mostly have to focus into your own little niche and do what you can to keep
yourself safe and maintain who you are as a person (it's easy to lose yourself in "prison games")
Served a full six year sentence, despite never getting trouble. Parole release for "good behavior" is a cliche.
During my time there, my wife divorced me and my father passed away.
There was some adjustment upon getting out. (2009) However, the first couple of computers I used were actually running XP, so that
was an easy adjustment. I think the biggest adjustment was how much more prominent mobile device use was (in 2003 I think
I only received a text from one person ever, on my fancy monochrome flip phone). From a development standpoint, gettting
used to AJAX was interesting, but to be honest, I did my best to keep up in prison, with a handful of books I had sent to me.
I remember the first line of code I wrote, in a language I considered myself and expert in. It felt familiar, but like I was
pulling memories from a fog. Eventually, the "muscle memory" of working in the language came back, but I can see how it
could be very frustrating for someone who was out of the loop longer than I was.
First job was a remote role, $20 an hour. Some previous writings I still had online sold the employer on my knowledge, and
I actually beat out 4 people in the interview. I was able to leverage some relationship I had before, get some additional
remote gigs, and continue to build my income and my life back up.
I was actually to be quite successful that way, building up my network, finding contracting. Of course, I have constraints:
traditional employers are typically not an option, which includes most w2 contracting roles. I've had to keep learning of
course, and have more flexibility than the usual person who can carve out a niche in one main technology or stack. However,
I could work around the issues of having a felony conviction and maintain a market-level income. I've even had a couple of
situations where I did have to discuss my past and was able to work through it. (Again, sticking to strict 1099 contracting,
and small companies is the key) However, contracting is no longer a need: through my personal connections, I was able to turn
was one of my gigs into a full time significant role with all of the full time income and benefits advantages you'd hope for.
I don't mean to diminish the challenges that many face, but I just wanted to point out that a lot of presumptions aren't
automatically true.
I use that as a general term to encompass all the ways you can lose yourself to institutionalization. Some join gangs. Some get lost in stealing and selling inside of the prison economy. Some "play" religion. Some pimp themselves out. Some play politics and become informants. This isn't all inclusive, nor does anything mean you'll lose your character and personality, but institutionalization is real.
>“That’s the stupidest thing ever!,” I yelled at the TV. “Who’d want to put their greasy fingers all over a screen like that?” Apparently, everybody. Including me.
An aside, but I never understood microphobics and grease-phobics... Perhaps it's part of not having grown in a 100% clinical/artificial urban environment my whole life.
Yeah, you'll get some dirt on you and your things. Big deal...
I assumed that the author was thinking about screens 10 years ago, which didn't have oleophobic coatings yet. So fingerprints and smudges built up in layers really fast and made it hard to read the screen.
Yes, especially the junky plastic screens that would also get all scratched up. And plastic screen protectors that would get scratched, bubbly underneath, and had no effective oleophobic coating.
The modern Gorilla Glass screens and coatings used on iPhones and other devices are so magical in comparison to those early cheaper smartphones.
I was ready to dismiss this as sour grapes, but ultimately he makes the point that maybe we're all out of touch with what's really going. The technology space is no longer transparent in ways it once was.
> I, too, used to steal users’ data. But it was a crime when I did it. Perhaps if I had sent them an ad or two it would have been less illegal?
What I see is also a deep reflection on how the hacking counterculture became the norm but still it sells itself as minority obscure counterculture just to be more popular. The same happens in other areas like social activism which are now the thought of majority and distilling its original thoughts into a fast-food alike consumerism.
What is really striking is the disparity in sentences for various crimes. There is no way that this persons sentence should exceed that of a serious physical assault or manslaughter. That is just outrageous.
"...McGraw installed a botnet to some of the computers to subsequently use it to initiate denial of service attacks (DDoS) on the websites of rival hacker groups..."
Nobody gets even close to 10 years for the 1st DUI - a clear endangering of other people lives - yet potential endangerment by a hacker ... There is something devil about those hackers.
It really sounds like he needs to get away from his 12 year old daughter, whom unfortunately doesn't know him or have an opinion about him but is tolerating his obligatory presence.
Despite the assumptions about tech proficiency thrown onto Millenials and "everyone younger than me while I make excuses about being tech illiterate": Gen Z doesn't know anything about computers, and would have a much more foreign form of "meaningful human interaction" than what really is happening.
Its terrible how the American system thinks about prison's.
Imagine he could do/learn something good in those 10 years, when he was locked away to protect the public (and that really should be the only point for prisons (protect the public))
> and that really should be the only point for prisons (protect the public)
That's not true. Our prisons should protect the public, rehabilitate prisoners in so far as they can, and, to an appropriate extent, punish.
Some people are skittish about the idea of punsihment.
But it's abhorrent to our sense of justice that one suffer no consequences after committing a crime.
Now in general I think our prisons and sentencing guidelines to a pretty terrible job at all three of these things but that is another story altogether.
In my observations of the American public, people generally seem to be fine with the extreme sentences and punishment that the system doles out. We’re completely apathetic towards most criminals (usually unless they happen to be rich & white), without understanding the circumstances that created their situation.
Take the Crystal Mason case. She’s a Texas woman of color who voted illegally in the 2016 election and got a 5 year prison sentence[0]. The problem was that her parole officer never told her she was ineligible to vote, so she went to the polls thinking that she was doing so legally. Now, not knowing what you’re doing is a crime isn’t a legally sound defense argument, but it does raise serious questions about how we view punishment and those we deem should be punished. While I don’t think that crimes shouldn’t be punished, 5 years for voting mistakenly is an abhorrent sentence, and serves to further divide power between the rich and poor.
> Now, not knowing what you’re doing is a crime isn’t a legally sound defense argument, but it does raise serious questions about how we view punishment and those we deem should be punished.
Mens rea is more intention to do the act, not knowledge of criminality. For example intentionally killing someone is murder even if you didn't know murder is a crime (because the act or killing was intended). The mens rea is intention to kill (if you lack the mens rea you end up with manslaughter or something equivalent).
It could be, but in order to sign a provisional ballot you have to sign a form that tells you you can't vote as a convicted felon. So even if she honestly didn't read the form (which wouldn't surprise me!) it severely undercuts her argument.
>What's the idea behind convicted felons not being allowed to vote?
Disenfranchisement, and the 13th amendment. The "justice" system in the United States, especially enabled by laws surrounding drug prohibition (created for the purpose of suppressing Nixon's political opposition, hence why cannabis is schedule 1 federally), is the modern embodiment of the Jim Crow system that was supposedly abolished.
Prisoners are specifically exempted from the slavery protections provided by the 13th amendment. Allowing prisoners, who are being housed at the expense of the tax payer, to be forced to work for pennies as literal slaves, often for private corporations.
Despite marijuana use being equally prevalent among white and black populations, blacks are several times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. Despite cocaine and crack being literally the same drug, the only difference being if it's in its hcl salt or freebase form, crack is prosecuted by a weight ratio of 18:1 compared to cocaine. Before the "fair sentencing act" was passed in 2010, this ratio was 100:1. Low level crack dealers caught with 10g were prosecuted the same as somebody caught with a kilo of coke, triggering mandatory minimums of decades for drug trafficking.
Can you guess why this prosecutional disparity existed (and still exists) between two different forms of the same drug?
Hint: it's the same reason why felons are politically disenfranchised.
I find it crazy (among the other things mentioned too) that taxpayers are subsidizing cheap prison labor for major corporations. Also crazy to me is the cost to house inmates in many states being more than the national average in terms of income[0] considering the poor conditions of these institutions.
Felons are less likely to vote for the system that put them in jail, the system that put them in jail has the power, so the system that put them there stops them from voting so it can stay in power.
> In my observations of the American public, people generally seem to be fine with the extreme sentences and punishment that the system doles out.
Many thousands have been marching across the nation for weeks now, precisely because they are not fine with these extreme sentences, and other abuses of law enforcement.
I've suffered some significant injustice at the hands of another, and for what it's worth their punishment has provided nothing for me.
My experience has completely reversed my thinking about the way criminals are treated. Punishment compounds loss and has provided nothing to me or society. If prison could effectively protect society while providing rehabilitation I don't think any specific punishment would be necessary.
> and for what it's worth their punishment has provided nothing for me.
That is why it is "The people vs. ..." and not "designdesign vs. ..."
> Punishment compounds loss and has provided nothing to me or society.
I think you need to convince society of that, rather than speaking for them.
I look at a guy like Bernie Madoff, who poses no threat to the public now and is probably not likely to be rehabilitated in any traditional sense. But is simply offends for him to live out the rest of his live having hurt so many without some kind of punishment.
I think, in practice, "justice" has always been a mediated form of vengeance. The state maintains its monopoly on violence by extracting enough vengeance from criminals that individuals (i.e. victims or their families) are willing to subcontract revenge to the state. In other words, the "justice" system has to provide enough vengeance to retain the consent of the victims, or those offended on their behalf. The benefits to society are large; total violence is much lower once it's able to break the cycles of private retaliation and avoid endless bloodfeuds. But it is an uncomfortably pragmatic equation.
I don't think there's any other consistent way to look at the issue though. Treating murder as the ultimate crime, as almost all justice systems do, makes sense in terms of the cost to the victim and the desire of societies as a whole to see murderers punished. But most murders are unplanned, and most murderers are no more likely to murder again than any other member of the population. Given the above, long sentences for (unpremeditated) murder just do not make sense; they probably have little value either as deterrence or prevention, and they certainly don't rehabilitate. But would a victim's associates stand idly by if their murderer was free after five years?
This is the crux of it. It's not some fundamental human value to want harsh vengeance doled out for crimes. It's peculiar to the US and a few other countries.
I think the idea of punishment is mostly preventative (because there will be consequences). However, harsher punishments don't necessarily increase this effect.
If this is priority number one then rehabilitation follows from that. Rehabilitating prisoners to minimize the risk of relapse and continued danger upon release to society carries the greatest benefit for protecting the interests of the public as a whole.
You can argue that locking people away forever is better for protecting the public, but that is ludicrously expensive and deprives the public of tax dollars that could go to improving public interests such as a strong economy. Releasing prisoners and letting them work also boosts the economy. Provided that the risk of them relapsing to anti-social criminal behavior is so small that the expected benefit is larger than the detriment.
The feeling of justice being served and retribution is not very productive. For sure there must be consequences, but the consequences should benefit society and serve to prevent criminal behavior in the first place rather than satisfy the victim's insatiable hunger for revenge.
> it's abhorrent to our sense of justice that one suffer no consequences after committing a crime
This is interesting, philosophically speaking. Why do you say this is so? To what end is the suffering, purely for the sake of the suffering itself, valuable? If it's at odds with the rehabilitation, which should take precedence?
Or, from another perspective, what makes one think that forced confinement and ostracisation does not qualify as sufficient "consequences"? In a fundamental sense, this is the greatest punishment that can be given to a human being. We are incredibly social creatures.
I think most would say it does qualify. That was their point- that the goal of incarceration is not only protection, but it (rightfully) serves as punishment.
The appropriate extent of punishment is that you are not allowed your freedom. You are restrained from engaging in society.
However, currently, in the US, prisoners are a) primarily incarcerated for non-violent crime, b) used as indentured servants with their labor sold without freedom to withdraw their labor, c) kept in prison beyond reasonable and appropriate sentences to provide the private and public purse of people's taxes paying the prison complex and their labor for profit.
> prisoners are a) primarily incarcerated for non-violent crime
You need to be careful about the difference between "of people sentenced to prison, how many were sentenced for a nonviolent crime?" and "of people currently in prison, how many are serving a sentence for a nonviolent crime?".
Only the first question will tell you that prisoners are primarily incarcerated for nonviolent crime. This is a result of sentences for nonviolent crimes being much lighter than sentences for violent crimes.
> Some people are skittish about the idea of punsihment. But it's abhorrent to our sense of justice that one suffer no consequences after committing a crime.
I suspect this is the majority view, but it’s not universal. I’m pointing this out not to argue with you directly so much as to point out that this may be more _your_ sense of justice than a general rule of human nature.
> more _your_ sense of justice than a general rule of human nature.
It's interesting -- I'm a very forgiving person. And I truly believe that hate consumes and destroys the hater not the hated. But something I believe we all should do individually, that is forgive, is not something I believe we should do collectively. Maybe it's irrational, maybe it's that doing it collectively requires some to forgive, quite possibly against their will.
Emotional responses shouldn't trump your sense of justice and fairness to human life. I have someone that was close to me murdered and I don't think that a harsher punishment only for my enjoyment is the answer to "what is justice?".
A desire for punishments generally isn't for 'enjoyment', but motivated by someone's sense of justice. "Being punished for bad deeds" is a very common notion of 'fairness'.
If your notion of justice doesn't include retribution, that's completely legitimate, but to insinuate that your sense of justice is somehow less of a emotional response than someone else's is ridiculous.
It probably starts with corporal punishment of children. That gives society a baseline predisposition towards violence and doled our suffering in order to enforce conduct. Adults who were beaten as children or felt that they suffered for their transgressions may feel that it’s unfair for someone to avoid suffering for transgressions, when they had to suffer in the past for theirs.
hypothetically, if you could see into the future and ascertain that the perpetrator feels regret and would never commit another crime, should they still serve time?
I would think that there should still be some period of incarceration as a putative measure.
Incarceration is a great punishment by itself, depriving someone of their freedom of movement is already quite a lot. What I meant is there is no need for a vengeful justice beyond that.
If an individual is dangerous for society they shouldn't be in it, this doesn't mean forever if there is a possibility of rehabilitation. There are many monsters locked up that probably should never be released, in that sense the justice systems of Norway, Germany, Sweden and others work well: you are locked up to 20 years, after that your case is reviewed and if you are still deemed a danger to society you get it prolonged, a few times this goes on for life.
I doubt that was intended as a threat (though I can see how you might read it that way). Instead, I believe I was an attempt to point out to you that an accusation of bias can go both ways, and that your view of what was typical/normal would change if your circumstances did.
If you were taking some position about money management and the response was "Yeah, just wait until you when the lottery" you wouldn't see this as a threat. Try reading it in that sense.
That wasn't pointing a bias out, that was just an unsubstantiated statement. The rest in your comment is just your perception and projection of your perception.
> Some people are skittish about the idea of punsihment. But it's abhorrent to our sense of justice that one suffer no consequences after committing a crime.
Consequences could be restoration and responsibility instead of mere punishment.
Still, let's say punishment has a place for some severe crimes where restoration/responsibility isn't possible or for people who will not cooperate.
Imprisonment itself is punitive -- there should be no better time that the entire public should understand fully that the loss of freedom and opportunity and association involved in confinement is no small one, because almost all of us have gotten a small taste of what that's like, and some people have found it difficult even when it's their own homes stocked with their own possessions and comforts.
Can we really justify the degree to which we create further suffering beyond the consequences of imprisonment itself?
And if these consequences aren't actually written into the law -- which specifies imprisonment, but not necessarily isolation, or $.05 per email, or informal violence in prison -- can we really said to be a society based on law or justice?
What do you do when someone refuses to be rehabilitated? There is real evil in the world and people who are happy to break the rules of society again and again and again.
Then they have to stay inside prison or closed psychiatry, absolutely. Like i wrote prisons a here to protect the public, closed psychiatry's to protect the public or the prisoner/patient from themselves.
Some guy with pointy ears said once:
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
The mechanism and reasoning behind protection and rehabilitation are simple enough to understand.
With the punishment component in this model I imagine the aim is to dissuade rational people from committing crime in the first place? Is it also to assuage the specific anger of the victims, or the abstract anger of society as a whole, or does vengeance not play a part in the morality of punishment?
It's very interesting people would want prisons to punish people.
It is known that justice systems are fallible.
To demand explicit punishment as part of prison service is equivalent of saying "It's ok if lot of innocent people are punished as long as it is made sure all guilty are punished as well".
What's the overall goal of punishment? We know it's not a deterrent to crime. We know it doesn't help recidivism rates. The only remaining reason I can think of is spite/hate.
From my perspective, I've found that many against promoting rehabilitation (at least for less heinous crimes) tend to see prison as a day at the park.
Essentially, they're trapped in a prison in the form of low income or poverty where significant portions of their time must be spent working. They don't understand how a prisoner could potentially or at least perceptually be better off than them: consistent housing provided, guaranteed food, medical treatment, time for education and growth. When you have such gaps with economic inequality in a society where for those on the lower end of the spectrum combined with some misconception of prison life, prison can actually seem better, you have many who tend to promote punishment over rehabilitation.
"Someone did something society deemed as negative and they're rewarded, I did what society said was positive and seem to be punished relative to those acted negatively. I struggle to survive and work constantly while this person leisures (albeit with limited freedom) and studies."
Who knows how many fewer criminals there might be, if social safety nets, providing for people's basic needs of food, shelter, health care and education?
How do you cure homelessness? You provide homes.
How do you deal with mental and physical illness? You provide health care.
How do you give people are path forwards? You provide education.
All of these things are what our societies are for. To carry on about "law and order" and even the "rule of law" without also quoting the part about "promote the general welfare" is to completely miss the purpose.
We should certainly provide all of those things. But even homeless people, ill people, people with no direction in life can and should avoid committing crimes.
It's pretty easy to figure out 'why we shouldn't focus on revenge', if you try.
edit: I may be guilty of not listening to what you're actually saying. If you're saying there is something in the core of people that is delighted by revenge, therefore the current system, I agree. If you are saying that justifies a focus on punishment, I disagree.
Not necessary to color everything with the worst adjective at hand. A sense of 'justice' is a thing. Calling it 'revenge' devalues it, and implies a personal component that isn't present.
Justice is the sense that good action will be rewarded, and bad actions will come to a bad end. Not "I'm gonna kill anybody that crosses me!" They are very different, and its not useful discussing this if that is not clear.
How do we know punishment is not a deterrent to crime?
If there was no punishment for committing crimes, do you think the amount of crime would remain approximately the same and is there any good evidence for that?
I think it's probably not a deterrent to some crimes, but a deterrent to others. Probably there are lots of people who don't shoplift, e.g., out of fear of the consequences of getting caught. (Obviously there are plenty who would not steal regardless; and plenty who steal anyway). Most studies I've seen on deterrence focus on the most serious crimes like murder and rape.
Giving prisoners the tools they need to flourish in free society (education, vocational training, mental health and wellbeing) after their sentence is over reduces recidivism, so I think you could put it under the umbrella of protecting the public.
For me, the really baffling thing was the fact how restricted access the prisoners have to information.
The fact that prisoners cannot have access to the internet is, to some extent, understandable by me. Filtering an inherently bi-directional communication perfectly, to make sure no information gets out is difficult.
But nonetheless, internet is not the only source of information in the world. The fact that people, who are in prison, are stripped, or seriously limited access to information, and thereby to learn, is really baffling.
If you find your resolution in the fact that you spent your time useful by learning, and when you reemerge and reintegrate yourself into society, you will have a chance to be better before, why restricting it?
>If you find your resolution in the fact that you spent your time useful by learning, and when you reemerge and reintegrate yourself into society, you will have a chance to be better before, why restricting it?
The restriction of information is an intentional cruelty. Another tool which is utilized to punish the evil criminal (especially the nonviolent drug offenders).
The entire american "justice" system is founded upon the premises of punishment (you deserve to suffer for breaking the law), profit (13th amendment allowing prisoners to be used as literal slaves, the billion $ market created for 'prison service providers'), and political disenfranchisement (cant allow people who have been exposed to this utterly abhorrent system to exercise their right to vote, as that could be dangerous to the system).
Rehabilitation? That's simply not what the system is designed to achieve. The goal is profit, suffering, and political disenfranchisement.
First of all, comparing to many many other prisons if the world, US prison system is like a hotel.
Second of all, when you do a crime you already know what the punishment will be. IF you proceed you consciously agree to that.
Sure he could do a lot of good in 10 years, but he also could do a lot of bad.
Sure there are many things that can be improved, like giving access to learning etc. And this probably will be done. But its hard to prioritize them, considering even people who are not imprisoned have a lot of problems, and they haven't done anything wrong. So logically their problems should be prioritized.
That's only because you were there while the chances happened. You also didn't lose a good portion of your cognitive abilities due to spending 13 months in complete isolation.
It's basically impossible to imagine skipping a decade and noticing the changes. Same way you cannot detect yourself or close friends and family ageing from day to day.
That is what I was thinking, too. Hell, we had iPhones well before 2010. There hasn't been any kind of tectonic shift in technology since 2010, just mild evolution. Outside of a few specific areas (web frameworks, anyone?), skills from 2010 should still be very applicable today.
Now, if the author was arguing that it's a mindfuck to be incarcerated for 10 years and it makes him feel out of place, and his mindset is no longer really tuned towards technology, that I could totally believe. Just going to boot camp for a couple months does the same thing, takes a few days to reattach to 'normal' after that. 10 years in jail would take a bit longer to adjust from, no doubt.
From ‘93 to ‘03 Internet tech got industrialized, commoditized, commercialized. After an ‘03 to ‘08 consolidation phase, from ‘08 to ‘13 it got packetized and packaged by CSPs of varying degrees of specialization or verticality. Disruptive startup or OSS changes in last few years often emerge from lessons learned in those CSPs in mid 00s.
Then this last decade has been spent on figuring out how to “declare” that infotech stack of lego bricks and wire it together. We could get to a consensus way to wire bricks and flows by ‘23 — more likely on bricks, less likely on flows.
> Now, if the author was arguing that it's a mindfuck to be incarcerated for 10 years and it makes him feel out of place, and his mindset is no longer really tuned towards technology, that I could totally believe.
You and I can see that forest. To the author, there are only trees. I think that's pretty understandable given the context.
I am perfectly willing to believe that his sentence was egregious, as federal prosecution is often more about a prosecutorial win than any real sense of justice. But given that he still seems unable to take responsibility for his choices, I could also be persuaded that having him away from a computer for a decade was perhaps on net the best thing for society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botn...