1) What's to stop me from simply mailing/couriering the test item ahead and then lying to the TSA-IG office at the other end?
The second TSA-IG office is inside the security area at the airport. If you can figure out how to mail stuff into there, that appears to be a fairly serious security flaw!
2) Your plan requires anonymity but the TSA-IG would pretty much have to record the pen-testers name, address and so on would they not?
Inspector General offices are operated, staffed, and funded separately from the agency itself, and do not get rewarded when 'their agency' does well...they get rewarded when they actually find problems.
3) What's to stop someone from duly registering (under a false/stolen identity if need be) and then actually using the razor blade or what-have-you once on board?
I dunno, what's to stop them now?
I don't really understand what you're saying? Yes, if people can bring razor blades past security, they can take them on the plane. That seems pretty obvious.
I'm not seeing why, if they wanted to take them on the plan, they would register at all. Someone who registers and then doesn't turn their stuff in for the reward would not be let on the airplane. (This would require some sort of notification of the airline, not TSA.)
Or they can just use fake tickets, see below.
4) Since the list of registered pen-testers is a secret, what's going to happen to the guy who gets caught?
I thought it was pretty obvious that an IG person would actually be standing at the security checkpoint.
The TSA security staff are not in charge of the no-fly list, and it would be pretty hard for them to manage to add someone's name to it. It would be entirely word of mouth, but there is functionally no way of stopping that once a tester gets caught. It's just 'secret' so that someone in the testing office isn't calling the TSA people and giving their names and what they're hiding.
In the best case scenario the guy who gets caught is almost certain to miss his flight while the TSA agents contact the IG and confirm if this guy is a registered tester.
It would actually be ideal if you could do this without having an actual ticket, but I'm sure the TSA would pretend that was a 'security issue'. But, um, thanks to the stupidity of the system you don't need an actual ticket anyway, you can just make a fake one with a computer.
So all of this expense and inconvenience is for stopping the isolated crazy people with no backers.
...which explosives testing catches just as well.
It's hilarious that we're having to limit the amount of liquids we take on planes, because of undetectable 'binary explosives'. (Which wouldn't work anyway, because, um, duh, multiple people can carry them in.)
Meanwhile, in actual fact we've decided to stop swabbing for actual nitrogen-based explosives. You know, the only explosives that are easy to make or buy, and safe to carry around?
Yup, experts have been warning about this all year. Meanwhile, explosives detectors (you know, the ones removed from airports last year because they were too much trouble to maintain) seems to be a banned topic in the news.
Meanwhile, we're letting utterly unchecked luggage onto the plane.
Don't worry, we've solved that by banning wifi. Luckily, there's no other way besides wifi and by hand to detonate explosives.
Unfortunately the TSA now has too much invested to suddenly admit it probably wasn't a good idea to stop using the more effective machines that are less invasive (they were the round swabs on luggage) replaced with the less effective machines that are more invasive.
The TSA doesn't have to 'admit' things regardless.
As I've suggested, the TSA should be required to operate something like this:
There is an independent office outside the whole TSA, operated by non-TSA people. Let us all it the TSA Inspector General office.
You show up there and present some object to wish to smuggle past TSA, or take one from them. It doesn't have to be the actual banned object, but it has to be one that would 'serve the function' of the object.
They write down your name and what you're doing. You give them a $100 bond.
If you manage to get that item past TSA, you then got to the IG office on the other side, and explain how you did it, and they pay you $1000 out of TSA's budget. The TSA is not allowed to know your name or any other identifying information so they can't start searching you extra. (The IG's office, OTOH, will know your name and the plane you're going to, and you won't be let on the plane, and be in rather a lot of trouble if you don't show up at their office with the stuff.)
If you don't get it past TSA, you forfeit the bond.
REPEAT.
The very first thing people will do is smuggle 'razor blades'. By the thousands. Easy easy money-making scheme. There's all sorts of ways to hide very sharp things.
At some point, the TSA will stop banning stuff they can't possibly stop. Or go broke. Or actually get to the point where only naked people get through.
This is a strangely common myth, but yes, kinda, but not really.
Both MasterCard and Visa are publicly traded companies. (Which, incidentally, should have some stockholders asking questions about all this.) They both coincidentally went public in 2006.
Before that, they were owned by the financial institutes that issued the respective cards, which basically meant they were owned by big banks.
As banks changed hands and merged, often they'd end up holding both part of Visa and MasterCard, and, yes, inevitable duopoly behavior emerged, resulting in a lawsuit which was settled recently.
A bunch of banks still hold stock in both, and a bunch of investors probably do also, but they really are independent companies, and the Justice Department keeps policing them to make sure they don't go around abusing their market position.
...that is, when the State Department isn't making phone calls threatening them.
That's not necessarily true. It's possible that MC's internal legal dept said "We believe Wikileaks is operating in an illegal manner" and advised discontinuation of service.
And yet, they still provide service to The New York Times, which has published the same documents.
As I pointed out, Paypal already said they were pressured by the government. I have no idea why people are resistant to the government doing it to two people when we know they did it to one.
You mean other than the fact Paypal said they were pressured by the US government to cut off Wikileaks 'because Wikileaks is illegal', and now Mastercard apparently thinks 'Wikileaks is illegal'?
Well, no, but it's a pretty obvious conclusion.
Now, I have heard the alternate theory that the banks pressured Mastercard, but this is a bit silly...the banks can't plausibly threaten Mastercard.
I missed this, paypal says specifically the US government never asked.
Um, huh?
Please google the bajillion stories saying just that.
Now, Mastercard hasn't said it explicitly...but they have said they think Wikileaks is 'illegal', and considering that's exactly what the US government told Paypal, draw your own conclusions.
How 'credible' the threat is has nothing to do with the severity of the crime.
Either it would be credible to a hypothetical ordinary person, and hence is illegal assault, or it wouldn't be credibly to a hypothetical ordinary person, and hence isn't assault. There's not some fractional credibility where the offense scales. Either normal people would find it a threat, or they wouldn't.
Interstate threats are more serious to because to be credible, the threatener must put more planning into it generally. Or, at least, used to be...now you can look up all that info on the internet and pretend to be local, which makes you credible, without actually being local. (I'm not sure 'the internet makes it easier to threaten people' is a very good reason for making threatening people less punishable.)
Of course, interstate threats aren't punished 'more severely' than local threats. Different states have different punishments, and I suspect the Federal crime is in the middle somewhere.
As for the commerce clause's applicability...more interstate threats have something to do with money. This crime was actually about interstate commerce, so pretending it's some overreach of Federal jurisdiction is stupid...this is exactly the sort of thing the Federal government is supposed to be dealing with.
You can argue non-monetary threats should be dealt with locally. Technically, if you commit a crime in one state on a victim in another, both states can punish you for it. (Strangely, it's not double jeopardy. That's per-jurisdiction.) However, the problem is it's difficult to investigate such a crime....one state cannot issue a search warrant for a location in another state, or arrest someone in another state.
Even if the two states were working together, that doesn't solve the problem. You could easily end up in circumstances where evidence at the victim's end of the crime would easily justify a search warrant in the victim's state to search the criminal's house, but can't be used as evidence in the criminal's state (Because it's not actually part of that case, but of a case in another state.), so the criminal's house can't get searched, thus ending the investigation.
At some point, nearby states would start changing the law and making permanent joint task forces (Which essentially have dual-jurisdiction) to deal with this crap, which means that everyone would simply start doing crimes from states farther away. It gets really complicated, really quickly.
In the end, you'd end up with all the states operating some joint investigative force that looked near identical to the FBI, but had to deal with the minimal intersection of 50 state laws instead of Federal law. It is hard to see how this benefits anything or is somehow magically more 'democratic'.
I mean, if someone is trying to sell me something, and starts acting like and ass...they've lost a sale.
Did you read the linked article?
She purchased something. He then had her credit card number. He made at least one additional charge on it.
He also repeatedly contacted her and threatened her. Hell, at one point he called her credit card company pretending to be her and got her chargeback canceled.
I don't know what sort of goofy naive world you're in, but there are crazies out there...and this was a crazy, who revealed themselves to be crazy after a customer had made a purchase on their totally normal-looking web site at the top of the Google search.
Of course, if this happened because of gov pressure is another discussion entirely, and then I'm not sure it's protected by the constitution.
What the FUCK is wrong with you?
Please do not present actual facts as hypothetical.
Paypal already said the US government did that, that it closed the account because of government pressure.
Mastercard said that Wikileaks was 'illegal', and, unless it has decided to start operating their own legal system, certainly were told that by the government.
Visa at least seems to be resisting while their lawyers look it over, but it's pretty obvious that they've been asked by the government.
Really? The government can just threaten companies to get them to stop providing services to people whose speech the government doesn't like? And that's not a free speech issue?
I love how so many people are so unknowledgeable about this issue that they think Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal all suddenly decided to stop provides services for no reason, when both Mastercard and Paypal stated quite bluntly that the government made them do it, and it's probably the same story for Visa.
Remember, folks, the government can't punish you for free speech, but it can threaten everyone who interacts with you so you quickly die homeless and staving in the gutter.
I believe you've mistaken me for someone who agrees with copyright law and needs convincing it needs changing. Nope. My stance would probably be considered 'more extreme' than anyone here, although I don't think it is.
I think that copyright is dead. Not in the sense it doesn't function, but in the sense it is mortally wounded. Not the law, the entire concept of it.
It was killed by the invention of a device that lets you instantly copy stuff with no work at all, and instantly distribute the stuff with no work at all.
It's not a matter of the 'law', it's not a matter of 'fixing' it. You can't legislate that dead people walk around and arrest them when they don't. You can't wire electrodes to them, or attach a robotic exoskeleton to dead people to make them move. Well, strictly speaking, you probably could do those things, but they are not, in any way, useful to actually bring the dead back.
All this discussion over it is some people see the death throes and think we need to give it more medicine and an expensive pacemaker and skin grafts (Not noticing it's missing its head.), and some people see the death throes and think we should restrain it before it hurts more people.
I'm personally in the second camp, I don't like being slapped by it either, but fundamentally think it really doesn't matter.
And notice this isn't some moral judgment on my part. I think copyright was useful, and I'm sorta worried that it's dead, and I don't know how we're going to function without it. But wishing it was still alive does not, in fact, make it still alive. Unless someone uninvents the internet and uninvents PCs, or at least rewinds them a decade, copyright cannot live.
That's an artifact of how Swedish law works. He's not "åtalad", but he's "häktad" in relation to the crimes of one count of rape, one count of sexual assault, and two counts of sexual misconduct.
I.e. he's arrested, but not in the US TV show sense where you have to be charged with a crime before you can get arrested.
No, that's how it works in all countries, or at least in the US also. You can detain people without charging them. (And any forced detention is, by definition, an 'arrest'. All 'arrest' means is that you can't leave. Your movement is 'arrested'.)
You can do that for some amount of time. In the US, it varies form 24-72 hours. They are detained 'on suspicion of X', instead of being charged.
But countries can't extradite people from another country without formally charging them. Sweden cannot get him from the UK without actually filing charges.
Which is, incidentally, why the British didn't go after him. The Interpol thingy is just a way to to get the local police to hold him so that either a) an valid arrest warrant can be filed, with things that are actually illegal in UK, or b) the Swedes fly there and question him there.
The Swedes have shown no inclination to do either, so the UK just ignored him. Now that he's turned himself in, the Swedes have to do one of the other or he's free to go.
If you want to define 'excessive risk of harm' as 'immoral', I'm all for that. In fact, that's how I define 'immoral'.
However, that is not all that 'immoral' means, and some people's definition of 'immoral' doesn't appear to include it at all.
Hence it's not a very good word to use when talking about 'why' laws exist.
Especially WRT copyright law, as some people have apparently ingrained some sort of 'moral right' argument to copyright, and hence argue that it is immoral to copy stuff in and of itself.
Of course, those people probably just then will manage to hallucinate that 'removing the ability to make money from something' is 'harm', so there's probably no helping such people.
Why? It's not up to the suspects to determine when, if and how they should talk to the police.
And it's not the suspect's to wait around forever in the country if the police apparently think he's involved in a crime (At least, the police illegally leaked that to the press, they never told him that), but won't interview him and won't change him with anything, either.
Nor is it the suspect's job to fly back to the country when they do finally want to interview him.
He's still not been charged with anything, just wanted for questioning, which, um, makes this extradition stuff illegal, as Assange is going to point out in British court. You cannot extradite someone for 'questioning'. In the EU, you have the other police hold someone for questioning there, you can only have them extradited if you actually have charges filed against them.
It appears the British authorities knew it was illegal and were gravely confused by the request and thus didn't didn't try to arrest Assange, despite knowing where he was...so he turned himself in so this imaginary extradition request could be fought.
And he will win, and it will trumpeted everywhere that he 'managed to avoid extradition for the rape charge'...the rape charge that still does not exist.
I think it probably depends on the person and the circumstances. I doubt various scene groups are as interested in altruism as in competition and credit.
That's because they're in a gift economy, where prestige is gained by how much you give away.
'altruism' is pretty much a meaningless term in a society like that.
And I really mean 'meaningless', I am not attempting to say they aren't 'altruistic', I mean the word literally means nothing. How you show charity in such a society is to pretend the lesser gift they gave was better than the one you gave.
Such societies tend to develop when there's almost no scarcity, but there is a little bit, so someone needs to go out and collect the stuff for people, and they get prestige for doing that and giving it away. But there's not enough scarcity to actually build a 'market' around that.
There are plenty of reasons to outlaw things that are not, per se, immoral.
For example, it is not more moral to drive on the right side of the road. That was basically a random choice.
What we shouldn't do is outlaw things that don't cause harm, or risk causing harm, either to an individual or society, not that 'aren't immoral'.
Or, rather, we shouldn't outlaw things where the harm caused by the law is worse than the harm caused the act, which copyright is rapidly reaching. (And, for comparison, drug law reached in the 1980s.)
Actually, he appears to hate secret decisions in supposedly public institutions.
You'll notice he said 'lying, corrupt and murderous leadership', and you'll notice corruption and murder can only exist when the leadership is free to operate in secret and lie about what it's doing.
We have no indication that he's an 'anarchist'. He's just anti-classified-information, because he believes it inevitably leads to somewhere that he doesn't like.
Slashdot Mirror
1) What's to stop me from simply mailing/couriering the test item ahead and then lying to the TSA-IG office at the other end?
The second TSA-IG office is inside the security area at the airport. If you can figure out how to mail stuff into there, that appears to be a fairly serious security flaw!
2) Your plan requires anonymity but the TSA-IG would pretty much have to record the pen-testers name, address and so on would they not?
Inspector General offices are operated, staffed, and funded separately from the agency itself, and do not get rewarded when 'their agency' does well...they get rewarded when they actually find problems.
3) What's to stop someone from duly registering (under a false/stolen identity if need be) and then actually using the razor blade or what-have-you once on board?
I dunno, what's to stop them now?
I don't really understand what you're saying? Yes, if people can bring razor blades past security, they can take them on the plane. That seems pretty obvious.
I'm not seeing why, if they wanted to take them on the plan, they would register at all. Someone who registers and then doesn't turn their stuff in for the reward would not be let on the airplane. (This would require some sort of notification of the airline, not TSA.)
Or they can just use fake tickets, see below.
4) Since the list of registered pen-testers is a secret, what's going to happen to the guy who gets caught?
I thought it was pretty obvious that an IG person would actually be standing at the security checkpoint.
The TSA security staff are not in charge of the no-fly list, and it would be pretty hard for them to manage to add someone's name to it. It would be entirely word of mouth, but there is functionally no way of stopping that once a tester gets caught. It's just 'secret' so that someone in the testing office isn't calling the TSA people and giving their names and what they're hiding.
In the best case scenario the guy who gets caught is almost certain to miss his flight while the TSA agents contact the IG and confirm if this guy is a registered tester.
It would actually be ideal if you could do this without having an actual ticket, but I'm sure the TSA would pretend that was a 'security issue'. But, um, thanks to the stupidity of the system you don't need an actual ticket anyway, you can just make a fake one with a computer.
Obviously, the real problem happens when an actual terrorist who means to do harm sneaks one of those weapons on board.
Uh...yea, I'm pretty certain that's the entire premise of the TSA.
And you don't really need a 'ceramic dagger'. You just need a CD with one side filed sharp.
Well, yes, but that's the other way of getting rid of laws....by making them so onerous that everyone hates them.
So all of this expense and inconvenience is for stopping the isolated crazy people with no backers.
It's hilarious that we're having to limit the amount of liquids we take on planes, because of undetectable 'binary explosives'. (Which wouldn't work anyway, because, um, duh, multiple people can carry them in.)
Meanwhile, in actual fact we've decided to stop swabbing for actual nitrogen-based explosives. You know, the only explosives that are easy to make or buy, and safe to carry around?
See my post.
Basically, people should be able to put up a $100 bond to attempt to smuggle banned things past TSA, and get rewarded $1000 if they do so.
Yup, experts have been warning about this all year. Meanwhile, explosives detectors (you know, the ones removed from airports last year because they were too much trouble to maintain) seems to be a banned topic in the news.
Meanwhile, we're letting utterly unchecked luggage onto the plane.
Don't worry, we've solved that by banning wifi. Luckily, there's no other way besides wifi and by hand to detonate explosives.
Unfortunately the TSA now has too much invested to suddenly admit it probably wasn't a good idea to stop using the more effective machines that are less invasive (they were the round swabs on luggage) replaced with the less effective machines that are more invasive.
The TSA doesn't have to 'admit' things regardless.
As I've suggested, the TSA should be required to operate something like this:
There is an independent office outside the whole TSA, operated by non-TSA people. Let us all it the TSA Inspector General office.
You show up there and present some object to wish to smuggle past TSA, or take one from them. It doesn't have to be the actual banned object, but it has to be one that would 'serve the function' of the object.
They write down your name and what you're doing. You give them a $100 bond.
If you manage to get that item past TSA, you then got to the IG office on the other side, and explain how you did it, and they pay you $1000 out of TSA's budget. The TSA is not allowed to know your name or any other identifying information so they can't start searching you extra. (The IG's office, OTOH, will know your name and the plane you're going to, and you won't be let on the plane, and be in rather a lot of trouble if you don't show up at their office with the stuff.)
If you don't get it past TSA, you forfeit the bond.
REPEAT.
The very first thing people will do is smuggle 'razor blades'. By the thousands. Easy easy money-making scheme. There's all sorts of ways to hide very sharp things.
At some point, the TSA will stop banning stuff they can't possibly stop. Or go broke. Or actually get to the point where only naked people get through.
Let's call it 'privatized security testing'.
This is a strangely common myth, but yes, kinda, but not really.
Both MasterCard and Visa are publicly traded companies. (Which, incidentally, should have some stockholders asking questions about all this.) They both coincidentally went public in 2006.
Before that, they were owned by the financial institutes that issued the respective cards, which basically meant they were owned by big banks.
As banks changed hands and merged, often they'd end up holding both part of Visa and MasterCard, and, yes, inevitable duopoly behavior emerged, resulting in a lawsuit which was settled recently.
A bunch of banks still hold stock in both, and a bunch of investors probably do also, but they really are independent companies, and the Justice Department keeps policing them to make sure they don't go around abusing their market position.
Oh, I don't doubt they willingly caved.
That's not necessarily true. It's possible that MC's internal legal dept said "We believe Wikileaks is operating in an illegal manner" and advised discontinuation of service.
And yet, they still provide service to The New York Times, which has published the same documents.
As I pointed out, Paypal already said they were pressured by the government. I have no idea why people are resistant to the government doing it to two people when we know they did it to one.
You mean other than the fact Paypal said they were pressured by the US government to cut off Wikileaks 'because Wikileaks is illegal', and now Mastercard apparently thinks 'Wikileaks is illegal'?
Well, no, but it's a pretty obvious conclusion.
Now, I have heard the alternate theory that the banks pressured Mastercard, but this is a bit silly...the banks can't plausibly threaten Mastercard.
I missed this, paypal says specifically the US government never asked.
Um, huh?
Please google the bajillion stories saying just that.
Now, Mastercard hasn't said it explicitly...but they have said they think Wikileaks is 'illegal', and considering that's exactly what the US government told Paypal, draw your own conclusions.
How 'credible' the threat is has nothing to do with the severity of the crime.
Either it would be credible to a hypothetical ordinary person, and hence is illegal assault, or it wouldn't be credibly to a hypothetical ordinary person, and hence isn't assault. There's not some fractional credibility where the offense scales. Either normal people would find it a threat, or they wouldn't.
Interstate threats are more serious to because to be credible, the threatener must put more planning into it generally. Or, at least, used to be...now you can look up all that info on the internet and pretend to be local, which makes you credible, without actually being local. (I'm not sure 'the internet makes it easier to threaten people' is a very good reason for making threatening people less punishable.)
Of course, interstate threats aren't punished 'more severely' than local threats. Different states have different punishments, and I suspect the Federal crime is in the middle somewhere.
As for the commerce clause's applicability...more interstate threats have something to do with money. This crime was actually about interstate commerce, so pretending it's some overreach of Federal jurisdiction is stupid...this is exactly the sort of thing the Federal government is supposed to be dealing with.
You can argue non-monetary threats should be dealt with locally. Technically, if you commit a crime in one state on a victim in another, both states can punish you for it. (Strangely, it's not double jeopardy. That's per-jurisdiction.) However, the problem is it's difficult to investigate such a crime....one state cannot issue a search warrant for a location in another state, or arrest someone in another state.
Even if the two states were working together, that doesn't solve the problem. You could easily end up in circumstances where evidence at the victim's end of the crime would easily justify a search warrant in the victim's state to search the criminal's house, but can't be used as evidence in the criminal's state (Because it's not actually part of that case, but of a case in another state.), so the criminal's house can't get searched, thus ending the investigation.
At some point, nearby states would start changing the law and making permanent joint task forces (Which essentially have dual-jurisdiction) to deal with this crap, which means that everyone would simply start doing crimes from states farther away. It gets really complicated, really quickly.
In the end, you'd end up with all the states operating some joint investigative force that looked near identical to the FBI, but had to deal with the minimal intersection of 50 state laws instead of Federal law. It is hard to see how this benefits anything or is somehow magically more 'democratic'.
I mean, if someone is trying to sell me something, and starts acting like and ass...they've lost a sale.
Did you read the linked article?
She purchased something. He then had her credit card number. He made at least one additional charge on it.
He also repeatedly contacted her and threatened her. Hell, at one point he called her credit card company pretending to be her and got her chargeback canceled.
I don't know what sort of goofy naive world you're in, but there are crazies out there...and this was a crazy, who revealed themselves to be crazy after a customer had made a purchase on their totally normal-looking web site at the top of the Google search.
In America, distributing classified documents is illegal.
No it's not, you fucktard.
Of course, if this happened because of gov pressure is another discussion entirely, and then I'm not sure it's protected by the constitution.
What the FUCK is wrong with you?
Please do not present actual facts as hypothetical.
Paypal already said the US government did that, that it closed the account because of government pressure.
Mastercard said that Wikileaks was 'illegal', and, unless it has decided to start operating their own legal system, certainly were told that by the government.
Visa at least seems to be resisting while their lawyers look it over, but it's pretty obvious that they've been asked by the government.
Really? The government can just threaten companies to get them to stop providing services to people whose speech the government doesn't like? And that's not a free speech issue?
I love how so many people are so unknowledgeable about this issue that they think Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal all suddenly decided to stop provides services for no reason, when both Mastercard and Paypal stated quite bluntly that the government made them do it, and it's probably the same story for Visa.
Remember, folks, the government can't punish you for free speech, but it can threaten everyone who interacts with you so you quickly die homeless and staving in the gutter.
It does bind the government from threatening them with non-existence laws unless they stop providing such a service to certain parties, you idiot.
I believe you've mistaken me for someone who agrees with copyright law and needs convincing it needs changing. Nope. My stance would probably be considered 'more extreme' than anyone here, although I don't think it is.
I think that copyright is dead. Not in the sense it doesn't function, but in the sense it is mortally wounded. Not the law, the entire concept of it.
It was killed by the invention of a device that lets you instantly copy stuff with no work at all, and instantly distribute the stuff with no work at all.
It's not a matter of the 'law', it's not a matter of 'fixing' it. You can't legislate that dead people walk around and arrest them when they don't. You can't wire electrodes to them, or attach a robotic exoskeleton to dead people to make them move. Well, strictly speaking, you probably could do those things, but they are not, in any way, useful to actually bring the dead back.
All this discussion over it is some people see the death throes and think we need to give it more medicine and an expensive pacemaker and skin grafts (Not noticing it's missing its head.), and some people see the death throes and think we should restrain it before it hurts more people.
I'm personally in the second camp, I don't like being slapped by it either, but fundamentally think it really doesn't matter.
And notice this isn't some moral judgment on my part. I think copyright was useful, and I'm sorta worried that it's dead, and I don't know how we're going to function without it. But wishing it was still alive does not, in fact, make it still alive. Unless someone uninvents the internet and uninvents PCs, or at least rewinds them a decade, copyright cannot live.
That's an artifact of how Swedish law works. He's not "åtalad", but he's "häktad" in relation to the crimes of one count of rape, one count of sexual assault, and two counts of sexual misconduct.
I.e. he's arrested, but not in the US TV show sense where you have to be charged with a crime before you can get arrested.
No, that's how it works in all countries, or at least in the US also. You can detain people without charging them. (And any forced detention is, by definition, an 'arrest'. All 'arrest' means is that you can't leave. Your movement is 'arrested'.)
You can do that for some amount of time. In the US, it varies form 24-72 hours. They are detained 'on suspicion of X', instead of being charged.
But countries can't extradite people from another country without formally charging them. Sweden cannot get him from the UK without actually filing charges.
Which is, incidentally, why the British didn't go after him. The Interpol thingy is just a way to to get the local police to hold him so that either a) an valid arrest warrant can be filed, with things that are actually illegal in UK, or b) the Swedes fly there and question him there.
The Swedes have shown no inclination to do either, so the UK just ignored him. Now that he's turned himself in, the Swedes have to do one of the other or he's free to go.
If you want to define 'excessive risk of harm' as 'immoral', I'm all for that. In fact, that's how I define 'immoral'.
However, that is not all that 'immoral' means, and some people's definition of 'immoral' doesn't appear to include it at all.
Hence it's not a very good word to use when talking about 'why' laws exist.
Especially WRT copyright law, as some people have apparently ingrained some sort of 'moral right' argument to copyright, and hence argue that it is immoral to copy stuff in and of itself.
Of course, those people probably just then will manage to hallucinate that 'removing the ability to make money from something' is 'harm', so there's probably no helping such people.
Why? It's not up to the suspects to determine when, if and how they should talk to the police.
And it's not the suspect's to wait around forever in the country if the police apparently think he's involved in a crime (At least, the police illegally leaked that to the press, they never told him that), but won't interview him and won't change him with anything, either.
Nor is it the suspect's job to fly back to the country when they do finally want to interview him.
He's still not been charged with anything, just wanted for questioning, which, um, makes this extradition stuff illegal, as Assange is going to point out in British court. You cannot extradite someone for 'questioning'. In the EU, you have the other police hold someone for questioning there, you can only have them extradited if you actually have charges filed against them.
It appears the British authorities knew it was illegal and were gravely confused by the request and thus didn't didn't try to arrest Assange, despite knowing where he was...so he turned himself in so this imaginary extradition request could be fought.
And he will win, and it will trumpeted everywhere that he 'managed to avoid extradition for the rape charge'...the rape charge that still does not exist.
I think it probably depends on the person and the circumstances. I doubt various scene groups are as interested in altruism as in competition and credit.
That's because they're in a gift economy, where prestige is gained by how much you give away.
'altruism' is pretty much a meaningless term in a society like that.
And I really mean 'meaningless', I am not attempting to say they aren't 'altruistic', I mean the word literally means nothing. How you show charity in such a society is to pretend the lesser gift they gave was better than the one you gave.
Such societies tend to develop when there's almost no scarcity, but there is a little bit, so someone needs to go out and collect the stuff for people, and they get prestige for doing that and giving it away. But there's not enough scarcity to actually build a 'market' around that.
You probably don't need that, just requiring people to spend $100 to renew the copyright every 7 years after the first 7 is probably enough.
Probably 99.99% the crap would fall out of copyright at that point. (Remember, every damn thing is copyrighted, with no action required.)
There are plenty of reasons to outlaw things that are not, per se, immoral.
For example, it is not more moral to drive on the right side of the road. That was basically a random choice.
What we shouldn't do is outlaw things that don't cause harm, or risk causing harm, either to an individual or society, not that 'aren't immoral'.
Or, rather, we shouldn't outlaw things where the harm caused by the law is worse than the harm caused the act, which copyright is rapidly reaching. (And, for comparison, drug law reached in the 1980s.)
Actually, he appears to hate secret decisions in supposedly public institutions.
You'll notice he said 'lying, corrupt and murderous leadership', and you'll notice corruption and murder can only exist when the leadership is free to operate in secret and lie about what it's doing.
We have no indication that he's an 'anarchist'. He's just anti-classified-information, because he believes it inevitably leads to somewhere that he doesn't like.