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3 of 4 Charges Against Terry Childs Dropped
phantomfive writes "Terry Childs, who was arrested nearly a year ago for refusing to turn over the passwords to San Francisco's FiberWAN network, has been cleared of three of the four charges against him. The dropped charges referred to the attachment of modems to the network; the remaining charge is for refusing to turn over the password. The prosecutor has vowed to appeal, to have the charges reinstated. We have the original story, and the story where Childs tells his side, for those who want a refresher."
Always seemed to me this was not much more than a witch hunt. Why else would them set a bail higher than for killers and rapists?
Onda Technology Institute
Ignorant people are afraid of the technologically savvy the same way they are afraid of science. They don't understand it, so rather than bettering their knowledge and informing themselves, they'd rather fear the worst and attack those who represent a threat (that is, those who know something they don't).
Also, why didn't the guy just say "dude, it was a complex random password and I've completely forgotten it"? They can't force you to give them a password that you've forgotten, surely? Also, is a partial "moral victory" really worth an entire year of your short life span?
I don't have to read the article to know that. If the charges were dropped, the prosecutor would not be vowing to appeal. When a judge gets rid of charges, they're dismissed. When a prosecutor voluntarily gets rid of charges, then they're dropped.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
From http://www.linkedin.com/pub/chris-vein/7/110/71b you can see that Chris Vein was a senior advisor at the White House after only three years in the workforce! I do not think such a rise is possible by merit or desirable in an honest government.
I hope this case looks deeply at the motivations behind getting the police involved. I'm also extremely curious as to what the $1million that has to be spent to repair the "damage" is required for and hope the defence and judge push hard for an explanation of this unusual claim
The defense made a motion challenging the evidence and the judge agreed that there was not sufficient evidence to support 3 of the 4 charges. There was no plea here. The court threw out the state's allegations for lack of evidence. There was no evidence because what he did was probably not sufficient as a matter of law (a matter of fact would probably have been decided by a jury). The charges were merely trumped up. Fabricated. Lies.
And yet they still kept this man in jail for a year awaiting trial for a ridiculous amount of bail money for a non-violent crime.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
He didn't say he'd forgotten it because he was simply doing what his job description told him to do. He was called into a room with a dozen people he didn't know, he refused to hand over the password to these people. When a single person (the mayor) who was authorized to know the password asked for it, he handed it over without hesitation.
If you can read this you've gone too far.
With respect, none of this is as complex as DNA and other forensic evidence which is handled quite well in criminal trials every day.
With equal respect, have you ever been through jury selection? I have (a number of times unfortunately: every time I move they waste a day of my time not selecting me) and the GP is correct. The system selects for the most ignorant of any issues relevant to the proceedings, and anyone who could be presumed to have knowledge of mathematics or statistics suffer the first peremptory challenges issued. Don't want someone who can see through the numbers the trial lawyers and their expert witnesses pull out of their nether regions. I'm just a software engineer, and every god damn time I was asked what I do for a living I was promptly removed from the jury. The people that were left were often very nice people (you get to know some of your potential fellow jurors in the jury pool beforehand) but not people that I would want on my jury, if I were accused of a computer crime ... especially if I were innocent. The naked fear so many individuals have of computers, and especially those who are accused of computer crimes is unnerving. Fear of the unknown is not intrinsically irrational: but fear of gaining understanding is.
All the juries I've (almost) been on are filled with people to whom a trial about computer systems is, in fact, just as unfamiliar and frightening as a trial involving DNA or other complex evidence, and might just as well be about DNA so far as their level of understanding is concerned. The idea of a technical court is not a bad one at all, particularly given the importance of sophisticated science and technology to all of us, not just those with technical backgrounds. Imagine judges with engineering or science degrees running the show in such trials. Honestly, if we had such courts the patent system probably wouldn't be broken and the RIAA would have been laughed out of court from day one. I can just see a judge who just incidentally happened to have a degree in computer science asking an RIAA attorney: "So, you're claiming that a logged IP address infallibly identifies an individual copyright infringer? Hm. Not on this planet, bucko."
Truly, in these times ignorance is not bliss, and we as a society are paying the price for allowing our adversarial system to dumb down those who judge us. Remember, our justice system was developed in much simpler times. The pace of change being what it is, it's too much to expect the law itself to always be on top of things, but it shouldn't be too much to expect our juries to really be composed of our peers.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.