Bradley Manning and the 'Hacker Madness' Scare Tactic

New submitter wabrandsma sends this excerpt from New Scientist: "The Bradley Manning case continues a trend of government prosecutions that use familiarity with digital tools and knowledge of computers as a scare tactic and a basis for obtaining grossly disproportionate and unfair punishments, strategies enabled by broad, vague laws like the CFAA and the Espionage Act. Let's call this the 'hacker madness' strategy. Using it, the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge. ... We've seen this trick before. In a case that we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation handled in 2009, Boston College police used the fact that our client worked on a Linux operating system with "a black screen with white font" as part of a basis for a search warrant. Luckily the Massachusetts Supreme Court tossed out the warrant after EFF got involved, but who knows what would have happened had we not been there. And happily, Oracle got a big surprise when it tried a similar trick in Oracle v. Google and discovered that the judge was a programmer who sharply called them on it."

Comments

News: Tool creates possibilities, good and bad.

[DavidClarkeHR]

... the prosecution portrays actions taken by someone using a computer as more dangerous or scary than they actually are by highlighting the digital tools used to a nontechnical or even technophobic judge. ... We've seen this trick before. In a case that we at the Electronic Frontier Foundation handled in 2009 ...

I wonder what Kevin Mitnick would have to say about this revelation as news.

On a broad scale, people have always been scared by what they don't understand. On a more refined level, people are often willing to agree with a strongly-worded argument if they don't understand the premise ... simply to avoid admitting ignorance.

There are lots of new problems due to technology - but very few new avoidance tactics / reactions. Look at the opposition to nearly every major advance (in science) in the last 500 years. No need to go further back - you'll find enough examples in the last 50 that going back 500 will be difficult.

Bad example

[Hentes]

In the Manning case, technology is relevant. There is no way he would've been able to photocopy that amount of information. The case shows the very real danger of switching to digital without considering the security implications. Furthermore, what Manning did had quite a big impact, the volume of the leak more than explains the harsh charges, there's no need to blame it on the 'hacker scare'.

Re:wget

[grcumb]

In the Manning case, the prosecution used Manning's use of a standard, more than 15-year-old Unix program called Wget to collect information, as if it were a dark and nefarious technique.

Maybe it's not quite that, but if it's used to download information that shouldn't be collected by an individual, it certainly bears watching.

Dude, what the fuck?

wget is a web client - you know, like the one you're using to read this comment. It bears watching just like any other web client bears watching.

Now, one could argue it might profit them more to pay attention to what data they make available to web clients.... But that would be all... I dunno, sensible.