Trouble at the Koolaid Point

http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point

by mpweiher • 12 years ago

723 241 12 years ago

jmduke2• 12 years ago

This is an excellent, brave thing to write and I originally had a long comment highlighting a bunch of particularly poignant paragraphs that I deleted because really you should just read the entire thing. Neither I nor the vast majority of the people I know have ever been subject to online harassment and it makes me thankful that there are incredible people like Kathy out there. Lord knows I wouldn't have the courage for something like this.

In interest of actually fostering a discussion: I think there's a lot of merit in bringing back moderation, as suggested in the article, as sort of an internet cultural norm. Maybe it's confirmation bias: the highest-quality communities I've ever spent time in, MetaFilter and Something Awful [^1], both use incredibly stringent moderation -- but I feel HN has had a huge uptick in overall quality since the comments and content moderation has stepped up over the past months.

I think that Twitter and Reddit have sort of made their bones on the idea that as long as you aren't doing anything that threatens the company in any way then you're given carte blanche. Twitter's ineffectiveness with dealing with harassment et al requests is notorious; and Reddit, as much as I love it at times, is a cesspool by default. [^2]

At what point does the value proposition flip the other way?

[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.

[^2]: I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff .

verroq5• 12 years ago

willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff

Serious question: why does this even bother you?

jmduke2• 12 years ago

That's a completely valid question, and the answer isn't something concrete. I think on one hand it's just overall indicative of the site's priorities (and again, I completely acknowledge that it's those same priorities which also helped foster the subreddits that I love) -- on the other hand, I think it's just the sense of heebie-jeebies, like being a pro bono lawyer for the mob or something -- as though my presence there is somehow contributing to something that I desparately don't want to exist.

More broadly speaking, I would be very willing to bet that an internet community that places harsher standards on acceptable content would result in a better environment for those involved -- but Reddit's stance during the celebrity photo stuff reinforced their position of 'Reddit as a platform', and I don't see that going away.

iherbig3• 12 years ago

I am not who you asked, but if I may step in?

It bothers me for the same reason it bothers me that those things exist. They are terrible, and should not be given a platform. I don't feel that we, as a society, should tolerate terrible things in general, much less let them prosper.

adrianhoward• 12 years ago

Serious question: why does this even bother you?

Not the person you aimed the question at, but…

I worked as a volunteer counsellor for a few years in my twenties. Some of the stuff I encountered during those years was folk who were going through horrific, long-term abuse.

One of the patterns that you notice is that abusers go to a lot of effort at times to show that their behaviour as normal. Both as a tool to justify it to themselves (this is normal — everybody does it — I'm not a bad person or doing anything bad), and as a tool to further control the abused (this is normal — this is what you should expect — you won't get any better elsewhere).

Anecdotally the ones who can find or create an active "community" of abusers — where two best friends both hit their partners and acknowledge it to each other, where everybody in an extended family beats on their kids, etc. — the abuse is worse because there is little or no sense of shame in what's done.

It's normal.

Now this was the 90s. Before subreddits were around. But this is why it bothers me. Yes, it's just words. But those words are probably making the lives of other people worse.

calibraxis• 12 years ago

Such questions are favored by Reddit trolls, because they take virtually no time to formulate, require no effort in self-education, and eat up other people's time.

Without rehashing the obvious problems of giving a platform to harassment, child porn, spam, etc, just read about how Reddit supported and profited off bros like Violentacrez. Just a little research shows these corporations intervene heavily — but in peculiar ways. http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the...

fenomas• 12 years ago

Reddit isn't the government; they're not under any obligation to permit all-speech-no-matter-how-odious. The site chooses who to provide with a platform - why shouldn't the poster you quoted judge them based on that choice?

McDoku13• 12 years ago

Freedom of speech. The one jerk of a teacher I had, made me realize this.

It is better they are out in the open, that they are confronted publicly. Those standing to be counted are not the dangerous ones.... it is the 10 more who agree silently.

If it is driven to silence it does not disappear but is spoken in whispers. It is better that they are challenged in the open.

waterlesscloud4• 12 years ago

And I think that's at the heart of why there isn't a technical or legal solution to these issues.

Whatever solution will be found will be a social one, that's the only way to actually change what people feel and think and believe. And if they feel and think and believe it, they'll act on it in one way or another, no matter how you try to prevent it.

deciplex3• 12 years ago

What if I told you that around 35% of the population is just terrible, and another 50% is too busy to do anything about it? Would that change your mind?

I'm not claiming these are the numbers, just pointing out that there are numbers, and I'm wondering where you would draw the line, if you would draw it at all. That is, giving these people a forum where they can freely associate, normalize their behavior, and find sympathetic friends, might make them a greater threat that if we just did everything we could to marginalize these assholes and atomize their communities/roach dens wherever and whenever we found them.

I really do emphasize the might here - I don't have an answer. But, I do think it's something that needs to be given serious thought, rather than reverting the default 'freedom of speech must be preserved' position so tempting to the typical liberal.

deciplex3• 12 years ago

[^1]: I know, I peaked in like 2004.

You joke (I think) but it's more like it went through a years-long period where it was really, really terrible. It's gotten better lately as far as I can tell. I'm posting there again after giving up on it years ago.

But, they don't really have stringent moderation, I don't think. It's more that when they do moderate, it means something, because you can't just register another account and back to business as usual. Being an asshole costs money there, and most assholes are apparently not willing to pay the price.

I don't know how to duplicate it without getting the critical mass first. It would be interesting if reddit suddenly switched to a paid model, but I really doubt that will ever happen.

makomk3• 12 years ago

Also, complaining about how they moderate - including the lack of moderation - is against the rules over there, and they do enforce that rule. "If you do not like the mods or the moderation, feel free to not post here." So if anyone is unhappy about how Something Awful is moderated they can't really complain about it or tell if anyone else feels the same way. It seems to be a very effective tactic for them.

CanSpice• 12 years ago

Yeah, I was surprised to see Something Awful listed as an example of a place that does well. Back in the day (early 2000s) it was, like you said, really really terrible. When I think of "for the lulz" I think of SA. Reddit seems to be at the same stage now that SA was back then. There's a lot of good, but there's also a lot of bad and the admins don't seem to care to get rid of the bad.

Of course, that was a decade ago. Maybe I should revisit it and see if my account's still there...

freshflowers• 12 years ago

Now that you mention Reddit, I've abandoned it because that cesspool is overflowing. It's no longer just the obscure subs, misogynist thrash from mainstream subs is hitting the front page on a daily basis.

taliesinb2• 12 years ago

Me too. You end up feeling ambushed, because you'll be reading a bunch of witty, smart, and/or playful comments on some Reddit post, thinking "I don't know these people but they're fun", and then you randomly encounter some unchallenged misogyny or racism in the midst of it with plenty of upvotes. Can these people really exist? Do I want to even be reading something that people who repulse me are also reading?

If you stick to subreddits thing are much better. For example, I lurk on r/rust a lot, and like other high-quality subreddits they have a stickied code of conduct to establish the ground rules. And the community there is extremely friendly and encouraging.

sheltgor• 12 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree that strong moderation does a LOT to foster strong communities, and frankly very positive ones.

Both of my favorite subreddits do this very well, as does my favorite forum, and though you get the jokes about 'fascist mods' and the genuine complainers who would rather be able to troll to their hearts content (and who inevitably flame out in a couple months time), they are very enjoyable to be a part of. Rather than having inane comments, stupid back and forths, and, in the case of one more factually based subreddit, misleading comments, you get what the majority of well-intentioned people actually come for.

Niten• 12 years ago

I wouldn't call MetaFilter a particularly high quality community. Discussions there can have just as many trite and trollish comments as your average subreddit.

How MetaFilter differs is in that it features a rigid, hierarchical moderation structure, with gatekeepers who ensure posted content meets the stringent politically-correct tastes of its leadership. As a result I have seen legitimately interesting, good-faith discussion censored there, for no other reason than that it offended the sensibilities of some moderator. (This article was removed by a moderator, for example: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software)

It is a huge mistake to confuse enforced, intellectually sterile homogeneity for quality.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 12 years ago

No-one who uses "politically correct" unironically is going to have opinions worth listening to.

archagon• 12 years ago

FYI, the mods only (99% of the time) remove content if it gets flagged consistently. So it's less censorship and more community policing.

makomk3• 12 years ago

From what I've seen, incredibly stringent moderation creates the illusion of a high-quality community more than anything else. For example, a while ago Something Awful forum member's boyfriend posted something claiming that she'd been raped by another forum member, and the admin at the time decided to handle it by permanently banning everyone involved including the alleged victim. You wouldn't have seen any criticism of this on the forums at the time because doing so was a bannable offence; I'm not sure most people who used the forums even knew it happened. There were rumours that some of the moderators were blackmailing women on the forums for nude pics earlier on, but again they didn't make it onto the forums themselves.

RankingMember• 12 years ago

There was a moderator who turned out to be a convicted child molester (Aatrek), and it seems they knew prior, but didn't actually take action to remove him until it became general knowledge among forum members.

DanBC7• 12 years ago

Moderation is hard toget right and it leaves the door open to destructive trolling.

So, while I agree wth you that moderated spaces are better than unmoderated we need to rememberthat it's not a panacea.

Argorak3• 12 years ago

It's pretty hard to learn moderation. There are almost no good resources and you have to learn through failure and reflection.

(I've been moderating bulletin boards for 15 years)

smoyer3• 12 years ago

I agree completely and yet ... I feel a bit responsible too.

In my mind, Kathy has credibility because she built it the old fashioned way - being worthy of trust. Being a Java developer, I watched JavaRanch grow and I especially loved watching her presentations (the BoS talks are amazing).

And yet I under-appreciated what these attacks were doing to her as well as how severe they'd become. No having celebrity of my own, perhaps I can't understand it fully but what I could have done is at least speak against the growing hatred.

I'm going to start refuting trolls (when I can) and I'm going to try to be that person who's dependable under fire - Kathy, I've got your back ... and I'm sorry for my quiet complicity with your past attackers.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

― Edmund Burke

JoeAltmaier4• 12 years ago

Great attitude. But I wonder if 'refuting trolls' is the same as feeding them. What else is there to try?

golemotron6• 12 years ago

I know this is not a popular opinion, but is growing increasingly painful to visit a site that willingly allows to exist subreddits devoted towards domestic abuse and snuff.

How do you feel about visiting a country that allows freedom of speech and association? I don't like many of the worst of the subreddits either, but allowing them is probably much better than forbidding them for the same reason that we allow such things within the US.

mononcqc• 12 years ago

That something is legal does not force it to be acceptable by any business whatsoever.

mintplant2• 12 years ago

Related: Does anyone know of a good-quality place to go for discussion that doesn't center around news and links? Something akin to MetaFilter or HN in terms of standards, but not focused on aggregation. Are mailing lists/Usenet groups good for this?

ryanpardieck5• 12 years ago

Mailing lists, in my experience, can feature incredible discussion. I participated on one centered around a somewhat obscure literary topic for some years. You almost develop a sense of kinship.

However, mailing lists seem to be going extinct. Even back then it had a quaint, ancient feel to it.

jMyles3• 12 years ago

I don't want to downplay the significance of this writing - thank you for calling it out!

I do want to gently call into question the danger of the attack surfaces that you have (I think accurately) spelled out:

1) "Doxxing with calls to action (that — and trust me on this — people DO act on)."

For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway.

Those that aren't, and who want to stay anonymous, have a big job doing so - not just from trolls, but from the NSA and corporate advertising culture.

2) "Swatting (look it up). That nobody has yet been killed in one of these “pranks” is surprising. It’s just a matter of time."

This is purely a political problem. Clearly there's a flaw in the system when police can enter a home by the say-so of someone they haven't verified to be in that home. A sensible solution here is to work to abolish (or nearly abolish) so-called "SWAT" teams. For those that remain, obviously their standard of probable cause needs to change so that the scope no longer includes phenomena that are so easy to defraud.

3) Physical Assualt

In a general sense, this is already illegal under law that is widely supported. It's worth adding sexual assault as well.

The example that you give, which is disgusting of course, seems solvable by some kind of client-side solution that prevents machines from activating photosensitive epilepsy.

At the end of the day, there's not that much that somebody can do from a world away. To the extent that there is, I assert that the solutions are largely political, social, and cultural.

rjknight2• 12 years ago

For the most part, high-profile "targets" from the troll's perspective are already known to the public anyway.

According to Dunbar's number, the average human can maintain meaningful social relations with around 150 people. If you have more than 150 followers on Twitter, you therefore must have followers who are not known to you personally, viz. "the public". That makes most of us "known to the public" in some way.

Calls to action matter. History has plenty of examples of situations in which somebody manages to provoke a group of people into attacking some individual by selectively or misleadingly disclosing information about that person, even if that information is untrue or nonsensical. My favourite example is the case of a mob attacking the home of a British paediatrician after someone confused the word "paediatrician" with "paedophile"[1] (yes, this actually happened).

This could happen to anyone, and the information being released doesn't even need to be true. Are you sure you've never done anything publicly that couldn't be twisted against you by a sufficiently malevolent person? And if you haven't, what would stop them from just making something up?

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/aug/30/childprotection.so...

thesteamboat• 12 years ago

Furthermore mobs are much easier to rile up than to disperse. I'd suspect the problem is even worse online where the mob is distributed and whose only coordination is around mutually inciting each other.

Literary evidence from Shakespeare, when a mob wishes to avenge Caeser's death, from Julius Caeser, Act 3 Scene 3:

  Third Citizen
    Your name, sir, truly.
  CINNA THE POET
    Truly, my name is Cinna.
  First Citizen
    Tear him to pieces; he's a conspirator.
  CINNA THE POET
    I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.
  Fourth Citizen
    Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.

pmjordan5• 12 years ago

Ugh. At the very least, this kind of victim blaming attitude and lack of empathy is presumably exactly the setup for people jumping on the harassment bandwagon without thinking things through.

1. You're pretty much advocating mob rule. Also, are you seriously comparing the threat that internet hate-mongers vs. the NSA poses to the average Joe or Jane with an internet persona? I dislike corporate and government spying as much as the next person, but what immediate threat does the NSA pose to Kathy?

2. It's not hard to dream up a scenario (any immediate severe danger to one or more members of the public?) which, once the police starts believing the "witnesses", would make it irresponsible for them not to act on it. You just need enough "witnesses". From what I gather, the attitudes of some police forces, particularly in the US, could certainly do with adjusting, but that's an entirely separate problem.

3. Yes, as I'm sure you'll remember from the OP, once someone gets beaten up or worse, the authorities will take an interest. Not before that. You can't run around in real life constantly threatening people with violence, what makes it OK to do so via electronic media?

rjknight2• 12 years ago

I didn't see any victim-blaming in that post - the victim is obviously due our full sympathy in each and every case. The question is what to do about it. The OP suggests that we might be able to form better communities, suggesting that the existence of communities in which this kind of thing does not happen proves that it must be possible. The GP appears to disagree, believing that we need technical and legal solutions to the problem instead. That's something about which reasonable people can disagree.

valas• 12 years ago

Good points, but they don't help much if you're active victim of trolling. E.g. try to sleep at night if they doxxed your children :-(

Technology affects culture (and vice-a-versa). Trolling is/was rampant in blogosphere and Twitter, but I have impression that Facebook and Google+, who both enforce much hated real-names policies, have less of a trolling component.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

I guess it's because Facebook and Google+ are built mostly around reinforcing meatspace relationships. It's harder to be an asshole if your family, friends and cow-orkers read your comments.

pjc507• 12 years ago

The real-names policy is itself a vector of "trolling", especially transphobia and homophobia; when it was instituted on Facebook some people took it upon themselves to report drag queens and transpeople in very large numbers.

Pitarou• 12 years ago

I don't know what the solution to the troll problem is, but I don't think anti-epilepsy filters are a part of it, any more than I think bulletproof vests are a solution to gun violence.

scribu4• 12 years ago

I don't know; I think anti-epilepsy filters can be a _part_ of the solution (at least for the epilepsy trolling sub-problem), among many other things.

Bulletproof vests aren't a solution to gun violence due to practical reasons (uncomfortable, expensive, only protect your torso, not your head etc.), most of which wouldn't necessarily apply to software.

olefoo• 12 years ago

After reading this, I'm battling the urge to suggest technical solutions to social problems. Except that in this case the social problems are caused by the fact the internet is a house built on sand and the underlying protocols don't support authentication or accountability to anything like the degree traditional public conversations did. That said, the choices that were made in the 1980's and early '90s to support pseudonymity and to allow the flexibility that meant that tools like NAT and anonymous forwarding could be developed and deployed may have been the right ones for that time.

I suspect that one outcome of the wave of vicious trolling that has been building the last few years will be stronger laws against online stalking and harassment, possibly even a national quick response network to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security can protect American citizens from these "lawless online thugs".

I don't have an answer for you; but I know that I am saddened that some of the smartest and most technically adept people I know are viciously harassed for their public participation in the technical community. If you think being a woman in public justifies rape threats or death threats; I have no respect for you. If you think that sort of thing is just a game, you need to grow up. And if you think the current situation can go on indefinitely without winding up in one of a number of drastic failure modes; you're fooling yourself.

kansface2• 12 years ago

Would you elaborate on the drastic failure modes you think are inevitable?

mkal_tsr2• 12 years ago

Well, the public internet is global so if someone else can speak your language, it doesn't matter what their societal customs are, there's bound to be differences in word choices, ethics, morals, etc. And do you think that's really going to stop people? People use their real names on Facebook and news websites all the time and they're vicious to each other, anonymity doesn't always matter. People need education on wtf it means to be on a public internet site. If it's too much, move into a private site. Do I think that's a great solution? Not at all. But, I suspect it's more realistic than ensuring everyone around the world treats everyone else with hugs and kisses. It's an asshole problem, not a technical problem. But hey, now there's more reason for people to use privacy-focused means to communicate (sites, apps, networks, etc), even if that reason is the result of assholes.

chipsy• 12 years ago

I don't think it's wrong to discuss protocols, in particular, in the context of a social problem. If we assume the concept of our world as an info-centric one - bodies as libraries, food as signals, etc. - then digital networks act as a boundary of this info-verse which is more manipulable than most, one which we can revise and reorder by changing the systems of communication.

However, even though it's "more manipulable" it's still not _easy_. "Social" in its surface forms - the forum, the comments section, the chat room, etc. - has persisted in a churn cycle where the form changes somewhat between iterations, but the characters, goals, and tactics are age-old. All the stuff about "us" versus "them" manifests itself in every permutation of every medium, whether it's "women" or "those bastards over the next hill" that are deemed the enemy.

Troll tactics ultimately come down to the old "signal to noise" problem. Forum admins know pretty well - if you trace the "noise" in a discussion backwards to the source bad actors, and then quietly remove those actors so that innocent people aren't dragged in, the conversation changes dramatically for the better. There is no magic algorithm needed, or even privacy invasion: just sharp eyes that can spot and predict the reactions to a problematic train of thought, and prune it out before there's a flame war. But we persistently end up in spaces where high volume is encouraged, anonymity is encouraged, and moderation is hands off, hands tied, or willfully blind. We are allowing Sybil attacks to take place on our networks all the time, every time.

Security aspects play a role in this, but they would be more of a long-term "how do we rebuild the internet" question; multiplayer games of a certain stripe(usually twitchy FPS games) have had to work around an inherent lack of security and the resulting cheating for a long time, and the best guarantees they've come up with are social in nature - as long as you can create identity persistence, the rest of the social profile can be built up.

Advogato put a ton of thought into technical aspects of identity and trust metrics; I think many of its results remain applicable to a new network. Blockchains also enable distributed persistent identity, but not unique identity. Perhaps we could incorporate market forces and allow identities or their postings to exist as cryptoassets - creating a universe where "valuable comments" translate to wealth. Or perhaps that would be our undoing, allowing trolls to profiteer off their own cultivated following. Perhaps we could force more accountability into the system by explicitly defining top-down fiefdoms and have individuals act to "represent" those fiefdoms, therefore motivating the leaders to moderate them into the best possible light.

As I see it, it's a big open field for protocol designers to come up with the right balance of incentives, privileges, and accessibility.

protonfish• 12 years ago

I think there are technical solutions to this problem (though nothing that has to do with protocols and authentication) that are very similar to the ones encountered when people were moving from small villages to cities. People seem to be able to behave in a civil and constructive manner in a group at or below Dunbar's number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number For cities to form, the technology that needed to be invented were laws and a justice system to enforce them.

The logical requirements for reciprocal altruism are: 1. Others are recognizable 2. You can remember their past behavior 3. There is a reasonable chance of interacting with them again. It is this simple game-theory situation that we have to reckon with and the Internet gives us much more elegant and humane tools than Hammurabi had. Remember when comments were ordered by submission date? The difference between that pointless cesspool of idiocy (FRIST!) and the acceptable level of comments ordered by upvotes is striking. If such a simple change in UI can cause a significant increase in the quality of community discussion, there must be many other techniques to make online communication more civilized yet to be discovered. Unfortunately, they are not easily tested because it requires a large, active community and time.

I am doubtful that more moderation is the answer. If the problem is people behaving poorly, giving some people more power does not sound like a solution - just a different problem.

Millions (or billions?) of racist, sexist, cruel and sadistic people exist. This is not a problem with the Internet. It is a problem with the world. If there are not laws enforced by traditional justice systems against stalking, harassment and threats, there probably should be. It shouldn't matter if it is done verbally, over the phone, through the mail, or online.

tl;dr The Internet did not create jerks, but it may have tools to handle them better.

mrcarlosrendon• 12 years ago

"2. You can remember their past behavior" I think this is a big missing piece. Sure in many communities I can kinda look up their past behavior, but it is not easy.

I would be good to know if this person: 1. Adds to the discussion 2. Has skin in the game

Systems like karma/points/votes kind of address these, but they aren't perfect.

vanelsas• 12 years ago

Wow, this is even worse than I ever imagined. It is unbelievable how far trolling can go and what the costs are in life for the victim. I don't know you personally Kathy but I really feel sorry for you. You deserve respect for having the courage writing up these thoughts despite of everything that has happened to you and your family in the past 10 years. What's even worse how easy it has become for us to judge from the sideline with smug remarks on Twitter. Sad, really sad.

DanielBMarkham2• 12 years ago

I only have one story of harassment, but it might be interesting.

When I first started blogging, about 10 years ago, I would also post on slashdot.

I started getting a lot of traffic. Along with that, I started getting harassed.

It was some of the vilest stuff I've ever read in an online forum -- attacking me, my family, my personality, and so on. I found it quite disturbing, as if one of my friends was secretly insane.

I finally had to institute blocks. After about 100 blocks, I was able to bring the blog back under control.

At that point, I stopped promoting my blog so much. I was happier just to write for myself.

They say there's always 2% of folks that you're not going to get along with. There's also probably 0.2% of folks who actively wish you harm. On the internet with 2B folks? Those percentages add up big time.

My point is that gender is important here, but I'm not sure it's anywhere near being the entire story.

merrua• 12 years ago

http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/news_story.php?id=1788 http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/09/12/146144481245... (if you have login)

DanielBMarkham2• 12 years ago

No doubt there's all kinds of interesting statistics in here. I'd be interested in finding data about the age of the people harassing others. I doubt you'd see many 40-year-olds.

It's really crazy that we give adolescents all this latitude growing up -- they can't be tried as adults, their medical care is the responsibility of others, they are provided free food and medical care if needed, etc. -- and then we expect these same folks to go online and somehow behave like miniature adults. At any one time there's probably a thousand 12-year-olds living in crack houses that are online. And we expect them to behave the same way as a 30-year-old.

By no means am I condoning this kind of trash. But we can explain things without condoning them.

The internet is nice because nobody can tell anything about you, but when talking about things like this, that's not a good thing. There's a vast difference between being harassed by, say, people who are mentally barely able to care for themselves and being harassed by the guy who lives next door.

feldir• 12 years ago

Am I the only one with the feeling like i'm reading the "diary" of Amy Dunne, in Gone Girl? Like i'm in the middle of the movie, and the plot could tip either way.

acorkery• 12 years ago

Possibly, yes

wtracy• 12 years ago

Is it known how doxers are able to get information like social security numbers? I can understand a determined party being able to find, say, your phone number and home address, but certain information just shouldn't be available to the public.

fleitz4• 12 years ago

Social engineering an entity with the number...

Dublum• 12 years ago

Lots of ways. They're actually relatively cheap to buy if you're sufficiently motivated. This might be of interest to you: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/id-theft-service-customer...

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

They may just be buying them:

http://peopleinfofind.com/find-social-security-number/

(and I'm sure others, that's just the first I quickly found)

I have no idea how reasonable their verification of purchasers is.

McDoku13• 12 years ago

My take away from this article is simply raise your standards of people. Esteem should not be so fickle, it should mean something.

Our culture has a very short attention spans and we exalt the wrong people. It creates a weird tension. Being a bad actor is an equal opportunity field and the doubt this creates grows until reasonable people are swallowed.

We have no willingness to forgive and this puritanism has in the end soiled us.

pjc507• 12 years ago

What do you mean by "exalt the wrong people"? People like weev?

McDoku13• 12 years ago

A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions. -- Marcus Aurelius

McDoku13• 12 years ago

My dear beautiful downvoters did you disagree or not understand?

McDoku13• 12 years ago

Option three. Irrational emotional rejection :-)

pinaceae• 12 years ago

weev's current webpresence:

http://www.dailystormer.com/what-i-learned-from-my-time-in-p...

clearly a posterboy for neckbeards around the globe.

if you download an mp3 you go to jail, you harass another human being nothing happens.

fleitz4• 12 years ago

This was really eye opening for me, I had no idea weev was involved in such things, I always thought of him as the guy who hacked iPads.

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

Which is really frustrating, because Weev has been openly bragging about ruining Sierra's life for years. But every time it comes up, everyone seems to go "Weev is a hero! LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU SAYING BAD THINGS ABOUT THE HERO." And then everyone goes on talking about whatever he's in the news for now and never ever talks about the trolling. So nobody knows about it.

fleitz4• 12 years ago

Yes, my opinion is definitely not one of a hero, even the iPad thing was unprofessional, I mostly don't think he needed to go to jail for it, however, maybe that's karma, he went to jail for something he shouldn't have because he didn't go to jail for something he perhaps should have.

It's so strange that he did this before the iPad incident, and it's not mentioned at all. Did no one Google him?

zimpenfish3• 12 years ago

Yeah, I thought he was just a daft hacker caught by bad laws until I saw the article about his new swastika tattoo a couple of days ago. Between that and finally catching up on the finer details of 'gamergate', I'm thoroughly depressed about the state of the world.

kartikkumar• 12 years ago

Yikes! What an incredibly brave blog to write. I can't even begin to fathom what life has been like for her over the last 10 years.

I don't know any of the backstory to this, so I'm taking the blog at face value. Even if only 1% of what she say is accurate (and I'm inclined to lean the opposite way), it's absolutely horrendous.

How is it possible that people behave this way? I don't understand what the line of justification can be. It's just cold-hearted, mean and vicious behaviour. I can't understand what benefit is drawn from treating someone like this.

Is there by chance a theory of sociopathy that covers this kind of behaviour?

I hope I never, ever make the terrible mistake of even unknowingly treating someone in this manner.

pjc507• 12 years ago

People maintain their self-image by doing down others. That's all it is.

It happens that this is an extreme example of this common phenomenon. Some men find successful women extremely threatening.

taliesinb2• 12 years ago

I'm grateful that I can read the author's account of her experiences, and her analysis of what is going on sociologically. Her story is utterly shocking to read and I feel terrible for her.

The general phenomenon of misogynist trolling, and in particular the wave of misogyny masquerading as #gamergate has been astonishing to read about. There's something deeply, deeply disturbing and raw going on here and it is hard to see the contours of it.

It's a pity that a 12-hour old HN submission [1] of Anita Sarkeesian's moving talk at XOXO [2] didn't get much traction (indeed a sock-puppet immediately emerged to denounce the submission as 'trash').

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8423719

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah8mhDW6Shs

sqrt172• 12 years ago

The point of the article linked is exactly that: separate out the misogyny from the trolling. Expose how the trolls (or that particular troll) use any kind of story that they can construct, be it misogyny, misandry, censorship, whatever people at large hate or fear, to construct polarizing narratives aimed at damaging individual people.

I response to your implied question why this is perceived as much more interesting than an older submission of a talk by Anita Sarkeesian (which I didn't watch, I'm just extrapolating here), it's because it separates out the ideology part from the description of the trolling phenomenon. You don't need to drink SeriousPony's koolaid to hear her argument about trolling in general and this troll in particular.

You can't expose trolls by preaching to the choir, you have to talk everybody's language to subvert trolls' efforts to create a polarized discussion.

Note how OP's post was met with weird complaints that she "thought prostitution and being a victim of domestic violence were somehow 'shameful.'" - this is again trying to use ideology to polarize a discussion that should be troll-targeted and not ideology-targeted.

Note: I'm not claiming that we shouldn't try to discuss ideologies, just that it's something that trolls will try to exploit. And that the difficulty of moderating such discussions is why Hackernews doesn't even try to be welcoming to discussions that are or look ideological. Let's put it this way: the moderators here have a good track record for creating a pleasant, constructive discussion around technical stuff (including Windows and Linux and upstart and systemd and a host of contentious issues) and around business/startup stuff. As we find out how to have a constructive, non-polarizing, non-troll-prone discussion about other issues (global economy, misogyny/misandry, whatever), these things will be received more positively on Hackernews. (Or maybe: as much as they are somewhat related to YCombinator's business with startups).

pjc507• 12 years ago

I don't think you can separate ideology and morality entirely from this. Even the statement "it's wrong to harass people for entertainment" is ideological.

frontsideair• 12 years ago

I think it's horrible she had to endure all this. Online harassment and is real and until we have laws for this we are mostly on our own.

I'm not sure laws will be able to stop all this single handedly. What we really need is something like shaming. We need to show no tolerance to those who take part in harassment, and even supporters, maybe. We kind of have this for racism and it works more or less. It's amazing we're still going through it when it comes to sexism.

fleitz4• 12 years ago

He went to jail for something he shouldn't have because he didn't go to jail for something he should have.

That's karma for ya.

rwallace• 12 years ago

I'd like to believe that. It would certainly be nice if it were true.

Unfortunately it's not. Weev went to jail for reasons that had nothing to do with the bad things he did. And I think this is worth pointing out, because unjust laws are not selective like karma; if we tolerate them when they target assholes, it's not long before they start targeting innocent people.

Blackthorn• 12 years ago

Putting people in prison for unrelated things is a normal and celebrated aspect of the American legal system. I don't mean celebrated in some metaphorical sense, either. I mean it is actually celebrated in American culture. Think "Al Capone went to jail for tax evasion".

Maybe that's not a good thing, but it sure worked in this case.

antirez• 12 years ago

She really understands social networks trolling and how it works in details, very good article. It is something like inescapable in the internet, and this is very sad. I ran an italian social network site for many years and this was our main problem. If you read Twitter, this is huge. Moreover a few companies are making the problem worse by polarizing and using this in order to attack competitors. The DMCA thing is spot-on: creating facts from nothing, since there are enough people saying it, it must be true. Nobody bothers to actually check. However, doesn't this just reflect a general lack of "information analysis" skills of most people on the internet? The "button" trolls are able to touch to enable certain behaviors in other people, sounds very related to their inability to take apart true information from false information. Logical analysis from faked one. So after all the root cause is that most communities are not the quality they should be.

peterwwillis2• 12 years ago

Couple of comments:

1. I know of weev from hacker circles. He really is this douchetastic. But what's really insane to me is that there's a bunch of women in the hacker scene who adore him. I couldn't quite understand it, until I saw them also adore Adrian Lamo, and so my theory is very close to Kathy's here: hero worship distorts reality. In order to stop people from enabling abusive trolls like this, someone has to debunk the hero status. Which is a lot more difficult than it sounds.

2. Being a troll is about one thing, and one thing only: power. The power to abuse someone and laugh and get away with it. The essential requirement of trolling is that you make someone upset. So there's a very real requirement that you do not respond in the way the troll wants in order for them to put their attention on something else. But trolls are varied, and sometimes they'll just keep plugging away at you. In cases like these you have to change tactics, though there's no guarantee anything will definitely put them off.

3. In general, trolls have goals. Usually it's to harass you until you literally disappear into the ether. Once they can't find any trace of you anymore, they have nothing left to do, and so they find another target. In this sense it's sometimes necessary to literally leave the [online or physical] community you face harassment in, or find a way to force the troll out of it. In either case it's basically a war, and you have to decide to either abandon the area or fight it out to the death.

4. I believe I understand why she was targeted. She has opinions that some people hate. Why, I have no frigging idea; ask a shrink. The point is, when people hate something, they lash out. And the internet is basically a hate delivery mechanism. And here's my opinion that will probably get me downvoted into hell: there is no way to stop this, other than leaving the internet.

Editorial rant (sorry about the length):

Being abused was not Kathy's fault. Unfortunately, you don't have to do anything at all to be abused on the internet. Just your picture, or a handle, or anything can be fodder for trolls. You can do absolutely nothing but exist and people will still try to abuse you.

In my opinion, from what I know of the internet, there is virtually no way to stop someone that hates you from abusing you here. There are no closed systems on the internet. E-mail is public, Twitter is intended to be public, but even if you make it private there's still a picture and a handle to start with (AND you can still direct tweets at private accounts), with Facebook you can avoid non-friends but not on comment sections, and on top of it all these accounts can be hacked. Private information like address, SS#, phone, etc can all be gotten incredibly, stupidly easily, without you ever going online. The internet is the easiest attack platform there is.

If you are visible in any way, you are a potential target for trolls, period. And I don't see any simple solution to any of this. We could re-design our internet services to protect people's privacy and anonymity better from abuse, but this wouldn't protect people who want to publish works like Kathy has. We could try to develop better tools to combat trolling, but that might become an arms race, who knows. Maybe we need to require a ss# and a picture ID for people to make accounts on social media. But regular accounts might just get hacked to be used as sock puppets.

So perhaps there is no technical solution. Perhaps we just need to change the way our entire society treats itself, both online and off. Peacefully boycott sources of abuse, negativity, ridicule and scorn online (i'm looking at you, every-forum-on-the-internet). Combat the causes of insecurity and fear and hate. Provide more social services to support the emotional welfare of all people. Something other than band-aids and coalitions. Maybe it'll never happen in our lifetimes, but at some point we've got to sit down and figure out a way to encourage people to be compassionate, or we're all doomed in the much larger picture of world-wide human affairs.

phkahler2• 12 years ago

> mechanism. And here's my opinion that will probably get me downvoted into hell: there is no way to stop this, other than leaving the internet.

What about ending anonymity? Much as I like the idea of remaining annoymous online (not that I am here), there are legal means to deal with the extreme end of the trolling spectrum so long as you can identify them.

The next issue that pops up of course is privacy. We need to end anonymity while making privacy the default. But that allows criminals to communicate privately - they can now, but it takes effort and many don't know how.

peterwwillis2• 12 years ago

There is no such thing as total security, and so there is no such thing as total privacy, nor anonymity. And at the same time, there's no way to completely track everything done online (or in person), as there's always a way to cover your tracks. But none of that address the human behavior aspect.

If you have a room full of people and someone is saying something bigoted, a couple things happen. One, if others agree with the person, they will clump together and gain strength. Two, if they are shunned, they simply go to a corner of the room where nobody minds them and they're allowed to continue. The bigger the room, the more people there are, thus both of these factors simply amplify the behavior. And the internet is the biggest room in the world.

It's quite easy for this stuff to propagate, anonymous or not. Even if public shaming worked they'd just go underground. Most people who have shitty opinions actually believe in them and will defend them if challenged. So whether you 'expose' someone or not won't typically change their thoughts, and thus not their behavior either.

AnimalMuppet2• 12 years ago

Two comments. First, weev is known, not anonymous. That hasn't seemed to stop him, if Kathy's post can be believed.

Second, do you remember the old Smurf attack? You sent pings to a bunch of networks' broadcast address, with a forged address. So the machines on the networks replied to the pings. For one packet sent out, you could get a hundred aimed at the victim's machine. You can wind up with something like that here: If you end anonymity, then someone can forge something horrible as coming from you, and all the honest, morally upright people online will come down on you in outrage. (In her article, Kathy mentions trolls/harassers already using tactics like this.)

dragontamer3• 12 years ago

Honestly, removing anonymity has made things worse over time.

Facebook and Youtube now have open racists who push their malignant opinion upon everyone now, and are proud enough to sign their name next to it.

cbd19842• 12 years ago

What about ending anonymity?

Congratulations, now you've opened up a lot of trans, gay, and other minority-status people to endless physical harassment every time they use the Internet in their preferred personae.

We need to end anonymity while making privacy the default.

The only way I can understand this is if it's like the postal service without postcards: Senders and recipients are known, but message contents aren't. This... works, I suppose, but it removes nearly all the benefits the Internet provides.

VLM3• 12 years ago

Brand problem and anonymity mismatch.

Plenty of people hate brands. Microsoft, Ford, Chevy, Walmart, Green Bay Packers. You try to turn yourself into a brand, you're going to pick up hate because you're a brand not because you're a person and hating brands is culturally seen as a great idea that should be emulated as much as possible. So trying to fix hatred toward humans is pretty much a waste of time when the root problem is hatred directed at brands. Even if they are "personal" brands. Or rephrased whatever is done to fix this (if anything) the blowback will eliminate brand hatred (umm, good luck with that BTW). No more hating some random female programmer or journalist means no more hating walmart or ISIS or the Jews or Obama (oh wait Obama is a dude not a brand, well, he is both, whatever).

The other aspect is anonymity mismatch where semi-anonymous people are attacking very non-anonymous victims. The solution proposed over and over is less anonymity for attackers. Removal of identity from the victims would work just as well. This merges in with "personal brands" paragraph above. If supposedly you truly want to promote a message and not a brand, that brand being yourself of course, you'd do it for the cause and not the fame. Unless you really are promoting yourself as a brand using a message as a tool to gain fame, and unfortunately gains attacks.

Combine the two concepts and a "famous" non-anonymous brand, which happens to be an individual, will get a heaping dose of trolling for deep seated cultural reasons related to what it means to be a brand and what it means to be famous (and not famous). Good luck fixing that by getting distracted by "brands are people too" and "be nice to people", its the wrong tactic to fix it. You're trying to install deck screws with a hammer.

scribu4• 12 years ago

That's an interesting take on the matter.

An internet where all online identities are decoupled from offline identities seems possible, at least in theory. The idea that using your real name online makes you act more responsibly doesn't seem to work anyway.

But wait. That would only solve part of the problem - trolls targeting women, minorities etc. Even if you have a fictional online identity, once you have visibility and say something a troll doesn't agree with, they'll still come after you.

VLM3• 12 years ago

I think your last paragraph misses the entire point of my post... No matter how many people hate General Motors, the spokesmodel of the latest TV commercial is not likely getting death threats.

Its always the people who insist on making themselves the brands, that self-promote themselves as a brand, that attract the death threats and nut cases, just like any other "brand".

If you can separate the brand and the person in a way even the trolls can understand, let them hate the anonymous brand all they want, what does it matter?

Maybe a sports analogy helps? Everyone in the state of Wisconsin viciously hates the brand of the Chicago Bears and the journalists encourage it as much as possible. But no one sends death threats to Mr. XYZ who is a ticket collector at gate 3. One is a brand and hating brands is seen as a universal good (other than on social media, whoops). The other is just some dude making his way thru life, no problem.

(edited to give you another example. Look how /b/ on 4chan behaves toward women on /b/. Not women in abstract or women in journalism, I'm talking about humans with two x chromosomes talking on /b/ itself which is about 99% male trolls (and lots of lurkers). Frankly, /b/ behaves pretty nicely and civil almost gentlemanly toward women actually on /b/ AS LONG AS she doesn't go all self promotional "gimmie attention look here I am a girlie on /b/ everyone look at me because you're mostly guys and I are a girl so you must worship me its all about me me me me" and then they turn on her like starving wolves beginning with "show us (you can guess) or GTFO" and it generally kinda devolves from there, in fact it gets quite a bit worse, and very quickly. They now hate her because she is now a brand and not a person. Find me a trollier place on the internet than /b/ (good luck) and I bet they behave the same way, people treat people like people, and some people treat some brands like dirt, worse than dirt, worse than you can imagine dirt being treated, and if the brand happens to be an intensely self promotional person instead of an abstract entity or corporation or idea or whatever then things are really going to suck for that brand-which-happens-to-be-a-real-woman. Or TLDR if you want to be treated like a person on 4chan on /b/, its really easy no matter who or what you are, just behave like a person, not a brand or a PR rep or marketdroid. The internet is very nice to people, and occasionally utterly shockingly brutal to brands. Go choose your destiny...)

rturben3• 12 years ago

This was a very well-written article. Though I haven't followed any of this person's journey that she's recounting and can't simply trust her retelling of what happened (based on the fact that I really don't know anything about weev or Kathy or their online presences), she hits on something important. It's shocking how numb a lot of internet culture is toward "trolling" or otherwise hateful statements.

Nobody goes around in public threatening to rape or murder strangers. This might seem naive, but honestly, why is this tolerable by so many people if the words are said on the internet rather than on the streets?

It's not pretend. These are REAL people that are being subjected to threats that at least aren't innocent and at worst are also real. People's intuition of "free speech" seems to be warped here. Should it be okay to type these things to someone? Would it be okay if you called them and said it over the phone? What if you said it to their face? Mailed it to them in a letter? Does the medium change the message?

I'm just tired of the "nut up or shut up" attitude that a lot of the internet seems to overflow with.

zzzeek• 12 years ago

Though I haven't followed any of this person's journey that she's recounting and can't simply trust her retelling of what happened (based on the fact that I really don't know anything about weev or Kathy or their online presences),

saying this is so unnecessary. The harassment Kathy has received is widely documented, for years. Do a little googling up front instead of unnecessarily dishing out assorted seeds of doubt.

rturben3• 12 years ago

The intent of the sentence was to point out that her article is important because it speaks out about something that's outrageous, regardless of if the reader knows who is writing it.

I did google both of them, and read some of her other blog posts. I'm not going to proclaim though that I really understand what's happening after 25 minutes on google. It's irrelevant to her deeper point.

ChiperSoft• 12 years ago

This might seem naive, but honestly, why is this tolerable by so many people if the words are said on the internet rather than on the streets?

It isn't tolerated, but there is no recourse for response. Words said on the streets can be met with physical response, meaning directly removing the offending individual by force, or even physically harming them for their behavior.

Words said online can only be met by moderator response, which is always delayed, easily shrugged off and rarely an actual punishment.

rturben3• 12 years ago

I guess it's just concerning that the people who would say this kind of stuff online don't think about what they're doing. They wouldn't say it to someone's face, isn't it common sense that saying it over a tweet isn't that different?

w0rd-driven• 12 years ago

The immediate "solution" I thought of came from "who watches the watchers?" Why not form a anti-troll trolling group that's sole purpose is to dox the doxers as it were? I then realized all you're doing is changing the victim but at least a tiny bit of karmic justice is served in the process.

There seems to be no real constructive, intellectual or positive way to deal with this problem. Sociopaths aren't technically sane so how do you deal with an insane person? Expose them as having a mental illness and getting them locked away for treatment does seem like one avenue. Like reverse-swatting, you inform mental institutions of would-be patients but everyone is a tad bit insane so there's a lot of room for abuse.

This is not an easy problem to solve, verging on unsolvable from an individual perspective. How does one change culture to make this unacceptable? Because in the 10 years since this started, I don't see any positive momentum. Not really. Sure, I do see well more exposure because it's become extremely prolific but it really feels like nothing is being done about it, just talked about ad nauseum. That just really reinforces that it is a tough problem to solve.

facepalm• 12 years ago

The typical mixing up of things that infuriates people. Yes, some people apparently are mean to women. But the conclusion can not be that women can never be criticized.

If she could separate one thing from the other, perhaps she would have an easier time online.

grecy• 12 years ago

Wow, I had no idea anything like this was even happening. How horrible.

You’re probably more likely to win the lottery than to get any law enforcement agency in the United States to take action when you are harassed online, no matter how viscously and explicitly.......There IS no “the authorities” that will help us.

I find this part of the article most disturbing. I can't imagine how law enforcement doesn't take online threats as seriously as "real" threats. Kids are thrown in jail for posting about bombing a school on Facebook, but if I directly say I'm going to rape or kill someone on Twitter or Facebook nothing happens?

How do we get the authorities to start making examples of these people and handing down serious jail time for online threats?

pasbesoin• 12 years ago

My two cents:

Years ago, I found Kathy's posts both very informative and entertaining. She seemed to be very generous with her time and writing. She even took the time to respond to me, personally, once on some question or other.

Something I read at the time about the Weev "data breach" circumstance, that I did not see widely reported. I'm sorry I don't have a reference at hand, so take this as unsupported and from memory: Weev did not immediately reveal the problem. He first took some time (in relative terms; I don't know or recall an absolute quantity) to decide what he was going to do about it and with the data. The reporting implied that perhaps he chose disclosure after realizing there was no other avenue that was personally more advantageous; or perhaps he came to the decision to "do the right thing".

I do NOT support the prosecution of Weev especially under the twisted rationale proffered. The Internet is a public space, and if you are stupid enough, lazy enough, and/or especially simply uncaring and arrogant enough to expose your (and perhaps worse, your customers'/clients') private data there on an unsecured URI/URL, then that is YOUR problem and you DESERVE to be called on it -- all the more so when you do it deliberately as a part of your design.

Nonetheless, I was left with the impression that Weev is not Mr. Goodie-Two-Shoes. (And this was before I knew he was the one who apparently led the bandwagon against Kathy.)

The prosecution shifted attention from the fuck up that is AT&T, onto Weev. Another stupid and probably self-serving prosecution...

And that's the last time I want to use his name. Because, as has become apparent, the loss we are focusing on now has been contributions like those Kathy made to our online world.

So, my two cents. The post implied it is up to us; therefore...

swandriven3• 12 years ago

Why is it the only time I hear about Kathy Sierra is when she's talking about being harassed?

The world is full of all types of people who get their kicks in all types of ways. Unless you propose monitoring everybody so that any offensive speech can be punished, there is always going to be a contingent that will capitalize on any chink in psychological armor just to get someone's ire up. When someone's image primarily consists of being a victim, it's not terribly surprising that they're going to serve as a lightning rod for all sorts of harassment - it's known to work after all!

Frankly, what's sickening is seeing otherwise reasonable people proposing that the solution might be taking away anonymity, perhaps even at the protocol level! If you'd like to be so mollycoddled, then stick to your "web 2.0" VC-gardens. Please leave the Internet alone with your misguided surveillance wet dream "solutions."

And finally, if this article itself is about harassment and speaking truth to power, then why do I feel compelled to use a throwaway account to post this comment?

~8 year HN member.

wpietri8• 12 years ago

And finally, if this article itself is about harassment and speaking truth to power, then why do I feel compelled to use a throwaway account to post this comment?

Because you show all of the sympathy and concern of an albino crocodile? Because you indulge in blatant victim-blaming? Because after (maybe) reading about the horrific campaign of calculated abuse, all you can care about is yourself?

And, of course, because you recognize that other people will (correctly) think less of you. So rather than owning up to your opinions, you are only brave enough to mewl from the shadows.

swandriven3• 12 years ago

That's an awful lot of ad hominem. I made some other points too, you know.

You're right that other people would think less of me, for the same reason I could never hope to refute your attacks - the narrative for this topic has left the domain of logic, and is based solely on hysterical feelings.

Now that nerds have achieved societal glamor through VC money and social acceptance from selling their mothers and friends to Apple and Google, they've eagerly formed the same oppressive mob as everyone else.

At least the jocks ran on a shallow strategy that was easy to understand and avoid. This new set of bullies exerts endless brainpower fooling everyone (most importantly themselves) that they're "making a better world." Alas, we all know how that turns out - same shit, different day.

mightybyte• 12 years ago

The best way to do something about this kind of trolling is to make the punishment fit the crime. This is exactly what laws were originally created for. Before we had laws and enforcement for actions like rape, murder, theft, assault, etc, I'm sure those actions had a very similar place in society--the majority didn't engage in them, but the minority did destroyed the lives of their victims. This is no different. Internet assault is a recent invention, made possible by the invention of the internet. Therefore, it follows that we need to invent appropriate laws and penalties. And the difference in severity of penalties between internet assault and unauthorized access to a computer needs to be similar to the difference in penalties between physical assault and breaking and entering.

If this was the case, then we can clearly see the problems with Tor Ekeland's statement, "You may think weev is an asshole. But being an asshole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers." Ekeland thinks that the big problem is that weev's AT&T activities were a crime. Regardless of what you think about that, the bigger problem is that weev's asshole activities are not a crime.

Ekeland consolidates a broad spectrum of harassment into one term "being an asshole", and labels it as not a crime. But that is short-sighted. As Kathy points out, there is a point where the spectrum of digital harassment jumps over into the realm of real-life damage. And that should be a crime that carries stiff penalties and is prosecuted aggressively.

Oh, and one other point. Kathy laments how weev has been glorified in the tech community. My guess is that this is caused by nothing other than ignorance. If all you know about weev is that he seems to fall into the group of people that were at least somewhat unjustly targeted by the government for, scare quotes, "hacking" and received a punishment that seemed too harsh, then you'll probably express support for him (read, that cause). Even if you've heard that he says things on the internet that are trollish asshole material, you, like Ekeland, probably won't change your opinion much. What tips the scale here is the knowledge that his troll speech has had the very real consequence of destroying someone's life. That fact is everything. If you don't know someone is bad, you can't correctly adjust your opinion of them. So props to Kathy for speaking out.

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