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French Man Sentenced To Two Years In Prison For Visiting Pro-ISIS Websites (theverge.com)
According to French media, a court in the department of Ardeche on Tuesday sentenced a 32-year-old man in France to two years in prison for repeatedly visiting pro-ISIS websites -- even though there was no indication he planned to stage a terrorist attack. Police raided his house and found the man's browsing history. They also found pro-ISIS images and execution videos on his phone, personal computer, and a USB stick, an ISIS flag wallpaper on his computer, and a computer password that was "13novembrehaha," referencing the Paris terrorist attacks that left 130 people dead. Slashdot reader future guy shares with us an excerpt from The Verge's report: In court, the man argued that he visited the sites out of curiosity. "I wanted to tell the difference between real Islam and the false Islam, now I understand," he said, according to FranceBleu. But the man reportedly admitted to not reading other news sites or international press, and family members told the court that his behavior had recently changed. He became irritated when discussing religion, they said, and began sporting a long beard with harem pants. A representative from the Ardeche court confirmed to The Verge that there was no indication that the man had any plans to launch an attack. In addition to the two-year prison sentence, he will have to pay a 30,000 euros (roughly $32,000) fine.
Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.
—Part I, Chapter I, Nineteen Eighty-Four
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Well, if he didn't want to blow things up, this will change his mind quick.
For two reasons:
1) no valid crime (in my opinion) was committed
2) it's a two year sentence, besides pissing off a bunch of people, what purpose does this serve?
You can't change a person's ideologies by imprisoning them, not without brainwashing them. This seems like the wrong way to address these problems. Imprisoning and fining people for their thoughts and beliefs is likely to cause more people to think this way, rather than deter it.
moox. for a new generation.
If you see mosquito larvae infesting a pond, do you kill the larvae or do you wait until they grow into mosquitoes and bite you before swatting them?
If you see a smoldering ember in a tinder-dry forest, do you stamp it out before it destroys homes, or do you wait to see which way the wind blows?
If you see someone falling into mental illness, do you treat them early or do you wait until the illness has gripped them and who knows what happens?
It is a very interesting ethical question that this poses. If the guy's family noticed changes, if the guy admits he wasn't consuming any other media other than pro-jihadist propaganda, and if the guy showed outward signals of becoming fundamentalist, wouldn't you act now rather than wait for him to become a major problem?
The smart way of dealing with this is to monitor the suspect.
Now he will have a good time completing his training in prison, where he will be in touch with real specialists
Nerd jailed for reading about person who read about someone who heard that someone read about ISIS.
so what happens in two years? he's rehabilitated?
Well, it's a good thing he was stopped before he could release a low-grade hip-hop album...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The law specifically requires "habitual" viewing, so theoretically you wouldn't be charged unless you visited regularly over a period of time. Also, probably more relevantly, not unless you're living in France.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I think the problem was the harem pants. They offended the French sense of fashion. If he had just gone with the beard and maybe a man-bun, he'd have been on the cover of French Vogue.
I imagine some wannabe jihadi in MC Hammer pants singing "Can't Touch This" in arabic. Don't look at me like that. It's how I deal with the world.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A few years ago I went through TSA with my laptop. Naturally they wanted to search it. No problem. I thought.
I'd forgotten that at the time, my documents directory auto synced whenever I logged into my network at home. At the time, I was writing a fiction story.
All kinds of excitement occurred.
Now I keep all my stuff in the cloud outside of "five eyes" treaty partners and any time I think I might have an "interaction" with LEO, I mercine wipe my drive and install fresh. I still get harassed because obviously I "must be a terrorist" because I don't use windows. Solution; Small windows boot partition by default and some random porn files. (If they don't find anything, they just keep looking. So I give them a little something obvious to keep them off my back.)
When did we start being more afraid of our own government than of terrorist? The world has gone crazy except for you and me, I'm slowly slipping away and I was never too sure about you.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Does he get to pursue the issue in the ECHR? Because it's hard to imagine any public international law body allowing this to stand.
So do you think that if I spend time learning about Nazism, or Communism, or jihadism, or ... christianity perhaps ... including getting input from their proponents and practitioners, that should make me a criminal? I hereby issue a "fuck you" to those trying to make it so.
Once you understand the Islamic Doctrine of Abrogation (later verses replace earlier verses of the Koran) then you will see that Koran 9:29 is the only verse that really matters to non-Muslims. It commands that Islam take over the World until everyone has submitted to the rule of Sharia and the supremacy of Islam.
Islam is NOT founded on what we would call 'ethical good' but instead is based on the supremacy of Allah over all others. So mass rape and murder is considered 'good' because Allah clearly commands Muslims do these to the hated kaffir unbelievers (non-Muslims).
All of the Abrahamic religions are rife with this same bullshit. You can pull up chapter and verses about how swell it is to kill "infidels" in Christian texts all day long.
A core principal of all religion is spreading their seed and wouldn't you know it people are still as gullible today as they were back then.
Islam will only be defeated when the World understands that it is FICTION and is FALSE.
What makes you think anyone cares about reality to begin with?
Oh, I do understand. I understand you're as full of it as someone saying Christians believe in rape victims being forced to marry their rapists, "because the Bible says so".
If he wasn't radicalized before, when he gets out of prison, he surely will be. Mission accomplished, idiots.
The natives won't accept a Nice every couple of months.
So either the security services prevent it from happening by any means possible, or the natives will do so through ethnic cleansing.
I don't really have a position on this debate, but this is patently false:
"For the record, Christianity has an equally terrifying concept: That God punishes the faithful for the sins of the unfaithful, thus making the sinner an existent threat to the Christian (and indeed, him/herself and all mankind). We see this in Sodom & Gomorrah and the Floods."
I'm not a Christian nor a Muslim, but there is no way that God punishing sinners is as terrifying a concept as men believing they are commanded by God to punish sinners.
In the former case, the worst that can happen is that we attribute natural disasters to God's will.
In the latter case, we have people blowing themselves up to kill other people.
There is a real difference there.