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> All sorts of things are force multipliers for violently disturbed people: guns, cars, explosives, and yes fraud and deception. We should treat people who empl

by pwaai 9y ago

> All sorts of things are force multipliers for violently disturbed people: guns, cars, explosives, and yes fraud and deception. We should treat people who employ fraud to harm others the same way we treat people who use pipe bombs. You've conflated employing fraud with direct use of force. Fortunately, the law draws a fine line between the two. You must prove that swatting somebody presents the same probability of death as detonating a pipe bomb. The truth is there is far more successful SWAT operations that doesn't result in death of innocent lives. Out of the SWAT pranks, only a few results in death. Therefore, it does not pose the same direct harm and high probability of death that a pipe bomb would.

tptacek 9y ago
I'm pretty comfortable with the company of expertise my argument keeps on this subject.
anigbrowl 9y ago
I'm not sold on that analogy. After all, fireworks are recreational explosives and we could count up a lot of destructive but non-malicious explosions as well as malicious but ineffective explosions (pipe bombs defused by robots or blown up in controlled fashion by bomb squads). In the case of SWATting, the fraud is obviously meant to jeopardize the liberty of the targeted subject, and the jeopardy of their life at the same time is highly predictable, even that doesn't let the police officers off the hook.
kbenson 9y ago
> You've conflated employing fraud with direct use of force. He's conflating employing fraud to harm others with direct use of force. Put another way, should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it? I think perhaps you interpreted the harm from fraud he was referring to as financial harm, but this specific issue is all about fraud that caused bodily harm.
- smallnamespace 9y ago
  > should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it? I think it does matter, for the simple reason that people who are willing to commit violence, up close, with their own hands, have a very different psychology than people who are willing to do harm but still (presumably) have the normal human instincts that make them not want to do it personally. It's one thing to kill; it's quite another thing to be willing to (or take pleasure in) literally get your hands bloody. The latter is the mark of an dangerous psychopath.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    It does not in fact matter at law: arranging to have somebody killed will net you the same murder 1 charge as the person who pulls the trigger.
    - smallnamespace 9y ago
      That doesn't seem obviously true to me? The manner in which a crime is committed affects all stages of the legal process, including sentencing, jury deliberation, and those considerations will certainly also affect how a prosecutor decides to charge someone. If you're saying that someone hiring a hitman has the exact same probability distribution of getting charged (let's say, given airtight evidence in both cases) compared to someone who pulls the trigger, that seems like a very strong and surprising claim. If you're saying that 'in theory' both crimes would rate a certain type of murder charge, that sounds reasonable. Even then though, the prosecutor would certainly be able to tack on other charges (e.g. assault with a deadly weapon) that tangibly affect the outcome, from plea bargaining onwards. And that seems correct? One of the goals of the criminal justice system is to prevent future crime, so to the extent that the manner a crime is committed reveals information about the future threat level of a criminal, society (and by extension, the legal system) should take that into account.
      - somebadguy 9y ago

by pwaai 9y ago

tptacek 9y ago

I'm pretty comfortable with the company of expertise my argument keeps on this subject.

anigbrowl 9y ago

I'm not sold on that analogy. After all, fireworks are recreational explosives and we could count up a lot of destructive but non-malicious explosions as well as malicious but ineffective explosions (pipe bombs defused by robots or blown up in controlled fashion by bomb squads). In the case of SWATting, the fraud is obviously meant to jeopardize the liberty of the targeted subject, and the jeopardy of their life at the same time is highly predictable, even that doesn't let the police officers off the hook.

kbenson 9y ago

> You've conflated employing fraud with direct use of force. He's conflating employing fraud to harm others with direct use of force. Put another way, should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it? I think perhaps you interpreted the harm from fraud he was referring to as financial harm, but this specific issue is all about fraud that caused bodily harm.

smallnamespace 9y ago
> should it matter whether you caused harm (and I'm assuming that means physical harm for this argument) using fraud or whether you paid someone to inflict it? I think it does matter, for the simple reason that people who are willing to commit violence, up close, with their own hands, have a very different psychology than people who are willing to do harm but still (presumably) have the normal human instincts that make them not want to do it personally. It's one thing to kill; it's quite another thing to be willing to (or take pleasure in) literally get your hands bloody. The latter is the mark of an dangerous psychopath.
- tptacek 9y ago
  It does not in fact matter at law: arranging to have somebody killed will net you the same murder 1 charge as the person who pulls the trigger.
  - smallnamespace 9y ago
    That doesn't seem obviously true to me? The manner in which a crime is committed affects all stages of the legal process, including sentencing, jury deliberation, and those considerations will certainly also affect how a prosecutor decides to charge someone. If you're saying that someone hiring a hitman has the exact same probability distribution of getting charged (let's say, given airtight evidence in both cases) compared to someone who pulls the trigger, that seems like a very strong and surprising claim. If you're saying that 'in theory' both crimes would rate a certain type of murder charge, that sounds reasonable. Even then though, the prosecutor would certainly be able to tack on other charges (e.g. assault with a deadly weapon) that tangibly affect the outcome, from plea bargaining onwards. And that seems correct? One of the goals of the criminal justice system is to prevent future crime, so to the extent that the manner a crime is committed reveals information about the future threat level of a criminal, society (and by extension, the legal system) should take that into account.
    - somebadguy 9y ago