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Swartz had something else in mind it seems; just taking the law into his own hands I think this is really one of the core reasons so many hackers disagree w

• rayiner 14y ago
  I think there is a strong grain of truth to what you say. My politics are fairly lawyerly,[1] and I find the anti-democratic sentiment on here disquieting, especially the constant attempts to discredit the democratic process at every turn by unsubstantiated hand waving about how the system is "bought." [1] I think the chicken came before the egg. The profession attracts people who have a strong sense of order and continuity, it doesn't make them that way. Though I think it's incorrect to juxtapose "innovation" so starkly with a love of order. "Cowboy engineering" isn't universal even among technical people. Lots of wonderful things are pyramids--created by armies of order-loving engineers. 787's aren't built by rule breakers.
  • temphn 14y ago
    I am happy we can isolate a point of upstream difference here, as many times people argue about downstream things unproductively. Regarding "cowboy engineering", granted. I would argue that respect for engineering practices/stability comes after that blistering innovation that builds the system in the first place. And in some cases at least, many lawyers seem to endorse anti-democratic measures (e.g. having federal prosecutors immune from election, or having the federal government enforce civil rights measures that were vastly unpopular in the states of enforcement). So it is more complex than pro/anti-democratic on the lawyer side too. But ultimately even more than "democracy", it may just be whether you explicitly believe the ends justify the means. If your bold stratagem ends in failure, then even more scrutiny is placed on your extralegal or envelope-pushing means (see Napster). If it ends in success, you often have much more popularity/influence than you did before and the envelope-pushing is forgotten or romanticized (see Jobs' early phone-phreaking, or Youtube). So whether or not people verbally agree that the ends justify the means, they usually practically agree, in that one or more of their heros was a nonconformist who did change the system. Indeed, often the kind of hero responsible for creating the legal system that they're implementing. The guys on the dollar bills, like Washington and Lincoln, led a revolution and suspended habeas corpus respectively; they did what it took to win, and let history be the judge of whether it was right. So from this vantage point, those who simply execute the law without concern for higher morality are respecting the hackers/revolutionaries of times gone by (because they won) while blocking those of the present day (because they haven't won...yet).
    • rayiner 14y ago
      > I would argue that respect for engineering practices/stability comes after that blistering innovation that builds the system in the first place. I quite disagree. The Internet, for example, wasn't the brainchild of rule breakers. It was a defense project, built by people quite thoroughly entrenched in the establishment. The telephone network, that made the whole country smaller, was built by the AT&T monopoly in a very civilized, orderly manner. A thoroughly beauracratic, top down, government agency working with huge, stodgy defense contractors put a man on the moon. For all it's daring, Space X started with a rocket design that was nearly half a century old. Most of the technology of the 20th century is the product of armies of engineers working orderly in top-down organizations. Pyramids.
      • btilly 14y ago
        I emphatically disagree. If you look within those pyramids you'll find that most of the time the innovations that made the larger pyramid succeed were the result of small, focused teams. For instance consider the famous aircrafts designs for the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk, and the F-22 Raptor. Large pyramids, right? Wrong. All were the result of small teams at Lockheed under Kelly Johnson. (Who had a famous list of rules for successful projects, the third of which was, The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner.) Was this unusual? No! You brought up putting men on the moon and Space X. Both were utterly dependent upon the efforts of a small community of people studying liquid rocket fuels in the 40s-60s. What kind of people were those? According to http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf (that copy didn't load for me right now, but http://web.archive.org/web/20121013085952/http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20121013085952/http://library.sci... did) there were at most 50 men scattered across multiple companies who understood the field, all of whom were "howling individualists". The same is true in computer science. Major projects with huge impact created by a handful of people. Examples include Lisp, Smalltalk, C, Unix, patch, emacs... Companies which, when you tear back the curtain, truly were dependent upon very small numbers of people. Ask anyone who follows tech if Apple would have been Apple without Steve Jobs. Ask anyone who has worked at Google whether Google could have become Google without Jeff Dean. Large groups working together on a known goal are essential to our society. We could not have the world we have today without them. But find me an example of great engineering that requires those pyramids, and when you tear back the curtain you'll find in technology after technology, in component after component, that critical pieces were absolutely dependent upon small groups of people. And those people, far more often than anyone in charge would like to admit, were rule breakers. Those rule breakers who were the ones who got things done are, for technologists both then and now, heros. You may wish that the world of technology was better behaved. But you cannot understand or appreciate it without accepting the fact that it really is that messy.
  • bcoates 14y ago
    OK, here's some substantiation: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/opinion/how-bankers-help-drug-traffickers-and-terrorists.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/opinion/how-bankers-help-d... HSBC has admitted that it is for all practical purposes a criminal enterprise masquerading as a bank. This is not a paperwork mistake or a lapse of oversight, it's their business model. Nobody will be prosecuted. The people performing these admitted criminal acts will be allowed to keep their paychecks, their bonuses, and in many cases, their jobs. No jail time, no criminal records, not even 40 hours of picking up trash in a park.
    • newman314 14y ago
      I'll leave this here. http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/14/167280430/episode-423-just-cant-get-enough http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/14/167280430/episode-... Planet Money talks about HSBC and well worth a listen. The problem really is why haven't any individuals been indicted from HSBC or any Wall Streeters (from the whole mortgage mess)? On a side note, Planet Money is IMO an outstanding podcast.
      • pdonis 14y ago
        The problem really is why haven't any individuals been indicted from HSBC or any Wall Streeters (from the whole mortgage mess)? Because then you would also end up having to indict all the government officials who were intimately involved in the mess. One of them is the outgoing Secretary of the Treasury (he was the head of the New York Fed then). Not gonna happen.
  • btilly 14y ago
    For the record, I do not consider myself anti-democratic. I consider myself pro-democratic. However I do not see that we have a democratic process. As a concrete example, consider the last election. More than 50% of voters voted for Democrats in Congress (even when you discard seats where there was only one party on the ballot, still over 50% voted that way), and a large majority in polls want Congress to become less partisan. Yet Republicans won Congress by a significant margin, and most members of Congress are in seats where their only realistic political challenges will come from the radical wing of their own political party. In short, the population wanted moderates with a slight preference for Democrats, yet overwhelmingly we got extremists and a significant Republican majority. This does not reflect the desires of the American people, nor will the actions of our elected officials reflect our aspirations. I could multiply with examples of how the governance of our society results in things not desired by the population, or not supported by my understanding of how the Constitution was meant to be read. But my point is simple. If you like sausage, you shouldn't learn how it is made. I want to like our legal system, but I've learned just enough about how it works and came to be that I cannot trust it.
    • newman314 14y ago
      This won't change until we get rid of first past the post and gerrymandering. And with the way things are going, I don't think there is a good chance of that happening.
      • mtgx 14y ago
        And I think that was his point about using "innovation" to bypass a system that is almost immutable.
    • acheron 14y ago
      That's not how it works. The Congress as a whole does not represent the US population as a whole; it's not supposed to, and I'd argue it would be a terrible idea if it did. You have one representative, who represents one district. If the whole Congress represents the whole country, then no individual representative represents any specific area. If a district in Vermont votes 60% R/40% D in favor of a Republican, and a district in West Virginia votes 5% R/95% D in favor of a Democrat, then that argument would say since the total of the two districts is 32.5% R/67.5% D (assuming equal population districts), the "congress" of two districts should have two Democrats, rather than one of each. The Vermont district should have no effect on the representation of the West Virginia district. Frankly, I would consider myself more towards the "anti-democratic" side: I'm much more on the side of "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for dinner". Not that the foundation of government shouldn't be democratic, but there need to be very solid protections in place to prevent a majority trampling on a minority. If anything, our system has become too democratic recently; very few of the rights in place to protect us are still respected. (I guess our 3rd Amendment rights are still pretty safe, but other than that.)
  • noonespecial 14y ago
    787's no. First powered aircraft. Absolutely.
    • rayiner 14y ago
      Big organizations are almost by necessity not rule breakers, but just because you're not a big organization doesn't mean you are a rule breaker.
  • strlen 14y ago
    Err, I think you have a very relevant point, but I think it's not fair to characterize this as either "order-loving" or "anti democracy". I'll paraphrase Churchill: I think that democracy is horrible, but it's simply the best means we have of protecting individual rights. Furthermore, democracy doesn't mean "majoritarianism", it means "rule of people". Yet even a simple representative democracy is exceedingly difficult to implement (obvious example is how would one draw district boundaries to ensure fair representation of all groups -- Gerrymandering is a huge problem) as to adequately represent "the will of the people". So a lot of people are contending this specific point. I think where I draw the line is in ends vs. means: I strongly care about protecting basic individual rights. Primitive ancestral tribalism means absolute collectivism and zero individual rights (the right to swing one's fist was not limited by where another's nose began), so we've continuously evolved better and better systems to do so including Anglo-American Common Law (which today still provides some of the strongest guarantees of liberty anywhere on Earth). On the other hand, just looking at the judicial history, I see a lot of clever bending of the rules and hacks that got us there: using 14th amendment to apply first amendment to defend highly unpopular speech was both "anti-democratic" and contrary to the letter of the law (the first amendment clearly said "congress shall pass no law"). Likewise, Roe v. Wade was a great judicial hack (use of 9th and 14th amendment to defend another activity most everyone opposed) that significantly expanded women's reproductive freedom. These kind of "hacks" even made the idea of law entertaining to me (when fresh out of undergrad, I was being prepared for deposition in some IP litigation I got dragged to as a result of an internship I had, the counsel seriously urged me to consider law school instead of MS in CSE). However, I knew that realistically my choices would be either near-starvation or big law (absolutely the wrong place for someone like me, who could never adhere to a strict schedule or a dress code). However, I don't see that "order loving" and "order breaking" are mutually exclusive: a software engineer is free to work at a firm that requires everyone to be in the office at 9:30 (irrespective of how late they stay until) and many choose to do so (practically all engineer working for financial firms). I don't see an issue with companies choosing this culture, with some reasonable exceptions (e.g., I'm not a laissez-faire absolutist, so I would consider it grossly unjust to fire an engineer for coming at 9:45 because their daughter had a doctor's appointment that morning). While I would abhor forced-collectivism as a political system, I've enjoyed working at smaller "collectivist" companies, i.e., where everyone is focused on the same goal (which benefits everyone) rather than on advancing themselves. So where does aaron enter into this? I think to me the part I found morally repugnant that the law that was meant to defend JSTOR (who have dropped the charges and whose rights were not severely transgressed) was aimed disproportionally against Aaron. In other words the state was acting to some concrete end that went far beyond what was reasonable to protect individual rights[1]. If the state wanted Aaron to never do this again, clearly stating to Aaron that if this happens again he will go to jail (something that seemed to absolutely deter him) and get a felony on his record (something that, again, would clearly deter him -- in that it would make his goals of social activism much more difficult in terms of difficulty of finding employment, vote or run for office, etc...). Everything else seems superflous, unneeded and disproportionate (if JSTOR pursued the case they would have had a right to some kind of settlement, but not, e.g., forcing Aaron to pay $2 bn or sending him to jail for a decade). What I think energized me even more personally is that his situation is far from unique -- you were also one of the first to point to this out too. However, rather than forgetting about Aaron, the proper response is to further seize on the momentum: Aaron was certainly influential and this influence could be used to change the laws governing prosecutorial conduct. I think (but correct me if I am wrong), you would also agree with me here. Where we disagree (as far as I understand your comments) is just because 51% of people find personal drug use repugnant (or believe cooky theories about it), than they have a free hand at imposing drug laws. My own take being that "unenumerated" individual liberties (liberty being defined negatively and circularly as something that doesn't infringe on the liberty of othes) should be restricted if and only if doing so is crucial to protecting the rights of others (e.g., to use an artificial example, if a pain killer happens to make 30% of its users instantly and extremely violent it can be restricted, as long as it is still available under supervised conditions to who can't for one reason or another use another pain killer). More fundamental liberties (those crucial to continuation of liberty itself -- free speech, protection against torture, protection against unreasonable search and seizure) should have an even stricter standard (something similar to the "clear and present danger" standard for free speech in the US today). I think it's also close to the fundamental framework most (but not all) HN-ers subscribe to (libertarians and liberals alike), but there is wide disagreement on specifics of how it applies in each individual case (it's clear that an outright ban on marijuana has a zero or negative effect as far protection of fundamental liberties of others goes, but it's a bit more difficult for other drugs). Some might also argue that there is an even more fundamental right to use an entheogen, etc... The libertarian positions tend to be more categorical than the liberal ones (e.g., property is the more right, so taxation is always unjust, even if it's the only way to provide basic healthcare or legal protection for individuals). I am hopefully not caricaturing you, but your argument seems to be that liberties and rights are crucial, but they are granted and limited based on "greater common good" analysis as opposed to more categorical statements. I think it's perfectly valid and (often) seems to lead to similar conclusions as the system I use, but the thought process is very different in that a deeper-level happiness of majority (which is usually greatly bolstered by liberty, but not always so), as opposed to liberty itself is your overriding concern ("if a small minority really wants to do X which poses no harm to the majority, but the majority is deeply upset that X is allowed, then it's fine to bring the legal system down full-force on the minority that chooses to do X"). In the end I think these two systems actually converge more often that not: drug war does not serve the common good, for example. Yet, it's the disagreements that can be particularly vehement (such as issue of laws that infringe on individual rights in one way or another, but yet have a clear societal benefit despite not immediately protecting individual rights -- e.g., seatbelt laws, laws regulating food portions, drugs beyond marijuana, certain police practices, etc...) [1] Reasonable people can disagree whether academic publishers have a right to hold papers behind a paywall. I think that's debatable, with my own views being closer to Aaron's. Another example where this is simply hard and reasonable people coming from the same "first principles" can disagree.
  • AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >I find the anti-democratic sentiment on here disquieting, especially the constant attempts to discredit the democratic process at every turn by unsubstantiated hand waving about how the system is "bought." I think a lot of that comes from the decentralized nature of this industry. The status quo in Washington doesn't mesh with that very well. Normally when two industries have a trade disagreement over legislation, they both send their lobbyists to Congress to advocate their interests and then it gets hashed out and usually something mutually agreeable (or at least balanced) comes about. But decentralized entrepreneurs don't have lobbyists or official spokesmen, as a general rule. So we can't easily participate in that process in the "traditional" way, and then the process repeatedly fails to arrive at results that satisfy us and we rail against it. Which is probably not very productive in the long run. What we need is to find a way to interface with Washington as a decentralized group. Because in many cases we all largely agree and have similar interests, it's just that no one can go there and claim official representation of the entire group and Congress is not currently equipped to negotiate with a million semi-independent individuals.
  • spin 14y ago
    > unsubstantiated hand waving about how the system is "bought." On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration was spying on American citizens without a warrant. Most of the major Telecoms were participants in this massive, warrantless eavesdropping system. So the EFF and the ACLU filed lawsuits against these telecoms. Federal courts began ruling against the telecoms (Yay! Democracy in action!). So the telecoms "bought" some lawmakers. In July, 2008, the senate passed H.R. 6304 which provided retro-active immunity to telephone companies that participated in the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program. ie: This is not unsubstantiated. This is not hand-waving. The system was "bought". Since then, congress doesn't even bother with immunity any more. Both Cheney and Bush have admitted on national television that they authorized torture. (Torture is still illegal in the U.S.: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340 -- that's a specific law passed by a democratic system.) And yet no one was ever investigated or arrested or anything. Ho hum. Obama now has a "kill list" that he personally signs. He can declare someone to die, without a court or a trial. That sounds like "monarchy" to me, not "democracy". ("Off with his head!") Based on these and other events, as far as I can tell, at a federal level, we don't really have a democracy anymore. There's no democracy to uphold or respect. If you're a Washington insider, protecting Washington power, then anything goes -- spying on American citizens, torture, invading countries, killing people. But if you threaten Washington power, then you will be hounded by prosecutors in the name of "justice". It's too bad Aaaron Swartz couldn't buy himself some retroactive immunity.
    • twoodfin 14y ago
      On December 16, 2005, The New York Times reported that the Bush administration was spying on American citizens without a warrant. Unintentionally: Deliberately (albeit perhaps inadequately) avoiding purely domestic intercepts and destroying them when found. Subsequent legislation has attempted to make such intercepts even less likely and more transient. That's a pretty important qualification. Why didn't you mention it? Your phrasing could equally apply to a program targeted at phone calls between California and New York.
      • spin 14y ago
  • betterunix 14y ago
    "unsubstantiated hand waving about how the system is "bought."" It is not exactly unsubstantiated: the powerful people within the system have basically admitted it. See, for example, Chris Dodd's comments: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywood-lobbyist-threatens-to-cut-off-obama-2012-money-over-anti/ http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywo... How exactly might you interpret a comment like, "Candidly, those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake?" Politicians count on big business for support and the leaders of those businesses make sure those politicians do what benefits them. It's not just Hollywood. Obama needed the support of the pharmaceutical industry to push the healthcare bill through; the deal was that the Obama administration would fight harder against medical marijuana and imported drugs, and despite the fact that Obama's public statements included talk of depriotizing marijuana, his first two years saw more raids on medical marijuana dispensaries than all eight years of his predecessor. There is little doubt that the defense industry has a comfortable relationship with the government either: we spend as much on buying their weapons and systems as we spend on social security, and no president after Eisenhower has failed to involve the US in some military engagement or war (most of which were entirely unnecessary). It is not that democracy is discredited, but that we question whether we even have a real democracy anymore. If your only choices are "far right" and "not so far right," does your vote really count? One has to look to the extreme minorities, third parties and independents, to find anything that could be called "left wing" by any reasonable standard. I place the beginning of valid questions about American democracy in the 1970s. That was when the Democrats began catering to big business just like the Republicans, and it was in that decade that we (probably coincidentally) saw the beginning of paramilitary law enforcement. It was also the decade that saw the beginning of explosive growth in executive branch power (once the dust from the Nixon affair settled, anyway), which at this point has come to mean "when the president has it in for you, you're dead." As an example, it was in the 1970s that the attorney general's office gained the power to declare drugs to be illegal without having to wait for the wheels of democracy, and to arrest and prosecute people for possessing those drugs. So can you really blame us for questioning the democracy of the United States? It seems like the only democratic processes that matter anymore are those that decide which set of big businesses will receive help from the government.
• andylei 14y ago
  aaron's mindset really is different from kerr's, and kerr's thinks his is "better" (i'm not really sure which side to take on this point). but regardless of that point, how should we expect the law to respond to someone like aaron? should we expect that people who intentionally break laws and practice civil disobedience not be punished? if so, why bother even having laws?
  • nitrogen 14y ago
    The purpose of laws is to provide a framework for the easy cases. The hard cases should be judged by their intent and their outcome. The vast majority of the order you see in the world around you isn't because of laws, but because of a mutual interest in cooperation.
    • rayiner 14y ago
      Mutual interest in cooperation happens in the shadow of the law. My parents home country of Bangladesh is a terrible place with no law and order. Are people not mutually interested in cooperation? I don't think that is something people there want less than people here. But at base we are tribes of monkeys. I cooperate with you, but only because I know that if you don't hold up your end of the bargain or act anti-socially, I can call the other monkeys to put you in your place.
      • pdonis 14y ago
        Mutual interest in cooperation happens in the shadow of the law. At the present time, yes, there's a high correlation. But 15,000 years ago, there were no laws, yet humans still engaged in mutual cooperation. Mutual cooperation is prior to law; laws are just the way we currently try to facilitate mutual cooperation. I cooperate with you, but only because I know that if you don't hold up your end of the bargain or act anti-socially, I can call the other monkeys to put you in your place. This is one possible reason, but it's not the only one. If both of us can realize greater gains from mutual cooperation and trade than we can from each being isolated individuals, then we have an incentive to mutually cooperate even without any other enforcement mechanism. The reason the other enforcement mechanisms are there is that, as you say, we evolved from creatures that were not intelligent enough to consciously apprehend the incentives for mutual cooperation, so we evolved unconscious mechanisms for doing so. That's what all those tribal instincts are: calling the other monkeys to put an anti-social monkey in his place happens in the absence of laws too.
• smacktoward 14y ago
  "As for the fetishization of 'democracy' in Kerr's post, sometimes elections produce good outcomes. But often the wisdom of crowds isn't so wise" Well, yes, but that's why we do the whole voting thing again after a period of time, rather than just once. Democracy isn't a means to ensure bad decisions won't get made, it's a means to ensure they can be un-made. "Many times, perhaps most times, the crowd votes after someone bold has already moved and shown the way. That's what Swartz was doing." You missed the point of Kerr's argument, which was that what you describe isn't what Swartz was doing. You're describing a Rosa Parks strategy -- do the minimum necessary to break an unjust law in order to elicit punishment, and therefore draw attention to the law's unjustness. If that's your strategy, the prospect of going to jail isn't a defeat, it's a victory. But Swartz, Kerr argues, wasn't following that strategy; he was doing something different. He did much more than the bare minimum necessary to elicit punishment, and his actions indicate that the prospect of going to jail represented an interruption of his plans, rather than the culmination of them. Swartz was not acting in the grand tradition of civil disobedience in which one willingly draws punishment to bring attention to the unjustness of the law. In his own words, he didn’t want to “just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge.” Rather, he wanted to change the facts on the ground to make his preferred world a fait accompli. That is, he wanted to make the laws unenforceable, winning the debate unilaterally outside of Congress. In this line of thinking, Swartz isn't Rosa Parks; he's Al Capone, if you can think of Capone's flooding the streets of Chicago with bootleg booze as a protest against Prohibition. Effective? Sure; the cops can't bust everyone if there's a speakeasy on every corner, and if the law is being routinely flouted by millions every day its absurdity is obvious. But because it involves doing much more than the minimum required to violate the law, this is something qualitatively different from civil disobedience.
  • gbhn 14y ago
    That's why the issue is contentious. Was the government of South Africa justified in taking special deterrence measures to deter Nelson Mandela from pursuing his anti-democratic efforts to unlawfully oppose the government? This is absolutely crazy talk. The fetishization of democracy cannot be allowed to undermine principled opposition to bugs found in its operation. I agree with Kerr that civil disobedience merits punishment -- that's kind of the point. But he's completely wrong about prosecutorial discretion. It's completely correct that the prosecutorial indiscretion of treating civil disobedience as if it were traitorous to democracy is a political act, and should be answered by political means. An "Al Capone" approach would be more like some of the actions of Anonymous -- performing security penetrations to collect, say, secret government or corporate data and then publishing it. Accessing publicly-funded research or public-domain documents and making them available is much more Rosa Parks.
• dchichkov 14y ago
  In some cases just fixing things may look like rule-breaking. Imagine, you need to download a file from a server, but your wireless connection keeps dropping. You don't really know why. Maybe some problem on the network, or improperly configured web server. You don't know. What would you do? Would you go, and start soliciting network administrators, or contact web server administrators? Probably no, right? You'll just try to fix things. Solve the problem, so it would work. You will try downloading from another network or another IP address. Tweak your download settings, and so on. I think that's what Swartz was doing. Not breaking in, but just trying to make download script work. He didn't know that network administrators were trying to stop him. And he though that network problems that he was facing were just that - random network problems. Unreliable wireless with some bugs in the traffic management system.
  • btilly 14y ago
    Sorry, there is no reasonable interpretation of the facts of this case under which Swartz did not understand that there were people attempting to block his access to the MIT network and JSTOR.
    • dchichkov 14y ago
      ... really? Has he been communicating with these people? Or was he just observing connections being dropped, which could be automated response?
      • nitrogen 14y ago
        When a computer says "No," a hacker figures out a way to make the computer say "Yes," perhaps unaware that the computer said "No" because a person told it to.
        • dchichkov 14y ago
          When a computer doesn't work, an engineer finds a way to fix it, perhaps unaware of who exactly, when and why broke it down.
• anigbrowl 14y ago
  A hacker or an entrepreneur is someone who breaks rules to create something. That definition really begs the question [1]. A simple counter-example: Google didn't break any rules when it launched a search engine built on pagerank rather than conventional indexing. They broke convention. Talk about 'breaking the rules' sounds great at motivational seminars or in marketing speak, but metaphors don't make for credible legal or policy arguments. We give up a degree of individual autonomy in such matters and do things by consensus instead because historically this has proved preferable to resolving disagreements by force - as the Declaration of independence has it, people institute governments to secure their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as opposed to Hobbes' vision of anarchy as 'a war of all against all.' 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question
  • temphn 14y ago
    I'd very strongly disagree there. Read the history of Google, and you'll see just how many people they pissed off in scraping the web. Launching snippets risked "copyright infringement" on a massive scale. Google Books: ballsy scanning without permission, opt-outs for individual authors. Google Maps Streetview: ditto. Gmail: ballsy advertising based on machine learning with individual messages. Talk to anyone there in the days of Early Google. They were all about breaking rules.
    • fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
      The CFAA, wire fraud statutes could have been applied to Google with the same type of legal-mental gymnastics.
      • anigbrowl 14y ago
        Nonsense.
    • anigbrowl 14y ago
      Thee's a reason that I qualified my remark by saying 'a search engine built on pagerank.' You'll recall that a lot of other things they did resulted in expensive legal wrangles. Your argument is empty.
• Tloewald 14y ago
  Democracy is the worst form of government, except for the alternatives (Churchill — maybe with miswording).
• atas 14y ago
  This too was my main objection to the article. How could a single hacker pose a threat to democracy? And is it really democracy?
  • mpyne 14y ago
    It's not the job of the prosecutors to only prosecute those who could individually threaten democracy all by themselves.
• vph 14y ago
  You are sounding as though in order to be creative one must break the laws.