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."

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Black Man's Bread

[b4upoo]

A starving black man reached through a screen door in Mississippi and took a loaf of bread to keep his family alive. The terror of the state was shown when after 25 years in prison some lawyers got him out. Life for the first tiny offense seems impossible. Yet the people in Mississippi were so frightened of the potential for black uprisings that these types of sentences were not all that rare. The man was set free about 1969.
                  In some towns in Mississippi in that era a black person had to be well thought of just to make it to a jail. A simple issue like getting drunk and loud often resulted in cops taking black folks to some deserted place and killing them instead of booking them in the jails. One needed to be a "good" and well thought of negro to have much chance at all of staying alive back then.