I'd be curious to hear which law school you attended that taught you that, considering how wrong it is.
You're no better qualified to discuss the issue than anyone else here; And your condescending attitude certainly doesn't inspire confidence in your opinion.
You neglect that your examples are the exception rather than the rule.
Building catches fire because owner doesn't maintain fire suppression system. Owner held liable for damage. Oil platform explodes, pollutes the entire southern US coastline. Owner of platform held liable for negligence and violation of safety procedures. Cashier walks away from counter to go to bathroom; Kids run behind register, make off with a bunch of cigarettes. Cashier goes to jail for contributing to the deliquency of a minor. Man leaves loaded gun laying on street corner, kid comes by, picks it up. It's later used to rob a convenience store; Man goes to jail for criminal negligence. Farmer doesn't keep fence in repair, cows escape late at night, someone crashes into car, dies. Farmer held responsible for not keeping fence mended. Man leaves unsecured wifi connection open; Unknown person sends bomb threat to local school, speeds off into the night. "WAIT! He's not liable!" The exception here is that the guy who owns the wifi router isn't being held liable -- an exception that many lawmakers are looking very closely at in this country, and in others like the UK or Germany, have already been settled: Guilty.
Negligence is a crime in many cases, and there's a solid legal argument to be made that leaving your wifi unsecured and not keeping track of who's using your network is negligent. If you pulled that crap in a business environment, you'd be fired -- and you wouldn't get unemployment either because by industry standards, that is negligent behavior. The argument that an unsecured wifi router today is criminally negligent has legal merit, and I would not be surprised to see it become law soon.
No, you loan your car to someone. Therefore you are responsible. If someone steals your car and crashes into a bus full of nuns, you aren't.
If they crash into a bus full of nuns because you neglegently failed to have the brakes regularly inspected and they catastrophically failed, you are liable then. The argument can be made that failing to secure your networks is an act of gross negligence, especially considering Windows warns you before connecting to such a network (as do most operating systems) that it is not secure, that it says in the owner's manual of every wifi router words to the effect of "We strongly recommend you put a password on this", along with a long list of articles in just about every local and national newspaper and news website out there indicating the same thing.
Its an analogy fail. Get over yourself.
Tell that to this guy. It's not just some armchair lawyer talk here, this is real: It's in the courts right now, and you shouldn't be so dismissive.
Actually, it is flawed, because automobiles are just about the only things for which the courts have upheld this idea...
Oil tanker owner held liable for captain being negligent and crashing. Owner of a building complex that caught fire held liable, even though he wasn't the one who started the fire. Hotel owner held liable for meth lab being setup in room. Owners of male cattle not held responsible for bull killing someone. By the way, that's a biblical reference; I just wanted to demonstrate it's not a new concept. I can provide many, many more examples. It's not just cars. If you own something, you can be held responsible if you're neglegent in the maintenance of it.
Your failure to secure your wifi connection and then having it used in the commission of a crime makes you liable for damages. This has already happened in the UK and Germany. It's currently being looked into in several jurisdictions in the United States. Bottom line here, there is plenty of legal precident here and globally to create, enforce, and have upheld, a law that makes the owners of an unsecured network legally liable for illegal activity which occurs on it.
No, there isn't. I know for an absolute fact that my state laws contradict every single thing you have stated here, the sole exception being the part about automobile liability. And I am pretty sure that most other states are similar.
I have provided several links indicating that at the state and national level, this is something that is being considered, has legal merit, and may be enforceable. Your turn.
...they were just warning him that his subscription was about to run out.
It's ironic that a man who works for an organization that uses the same business model: paying protection money so nothing bad happens to himself or his property, just had something bad happen to him for not paying a different organization protection money. Antivirus software is based mostly on scare tactics and it is an attempt at fixing the problem of poor digital hygiene. If people were just more careful with their data, and didn't use web browsers or other network software that allowed the execution of arbitrary code (Javascript, for example: 90% of the websites out there that use it could be redesigned to work without it) would find their risk of a virus or malware infection to be slightly above nothing. Of course, you can't eliminate the risk entirely, but there's no need to be dropping $50 plus a year on subscriptions either.
With Powershell its different and you can't even setup Exchange 2012 without good knowledge in it on purpose. In NT 4 land Windows Server was first introduced as a server even an idiot can setup. ActiveDirectory and infrastructure is difficult to setup for a large organization.
Specific examples do not compromise general design principles.
Thousands of design choices needed to be made in order to make Windows. While some of them may have been suboptimal or even contrary to the goals, overall, the product achieves its aims. I can provide many examples where Linux' performance is lower than competing products, where it doesn't work well as a server, or where comparable solutions are better at embedding and realtime performance... but again, overall, it achieves the goals of having a low overhead, high configurability, and high reliability.
Your analogy about the car is flawed. The owner is responsible for the use of their vehicle and know they lent it to someone. That is not always the case with an IP address
It's not flawed at all, it's just a position you disagree with. You're an accomplice in any illegal activity if you fail to take any steps to prevent it. My previous example demonstrates additional legal situations where the owner can be charged for a crime that's committed by the user, absent proof that the user did it instead of the owner. There's plenty of legal precident to support my position, and only moral indignation to support yours.
If Windows Server isn't secure enough or powerful enough to do the job, maybe Microsoft should revisit their design choices.
So if you're a bicycle manufacturer, you should give up and start designing cars? Microsoft's design choices have been about making a server that's easy to configure, does not require specific knowledge of the OS' inner-workings, and is intended as a "one size fits all" solution. It's like comparing a semitruck to a freight train -- yes, they both often haul the same materials but they are hardly interchangeable.
Lesson 1, page 2. That bit I wrote on page 1 has proven false. Some how, the NSA clicked a mouse, the lights dimmed, and a computer spit out my passphrase. I go now. Bye.
Umm, how is what I said false? Your comment has nothing to do with the price of tea in China. Anonymity is better than the best security techniques because if an attacker can't find you, they can't do anything to you. For a small opponent (J. Random Terrorist, budget: $20 and a dozen friends) facing a superior opponent (US government, $40+ billion counter-intelligence, standing army of 4 million)... anonymity is also your only defense.
I've never understood why people get all shocked when someone uses a competitor's product when theirs can do the job too. Well, Linux is a better platform for embedded applications, single-purpose servers, etc. It is much more efficient because there's no GUI to drive and only the bare minimum needs to be loaded in memory. Even the kernel can be stripped down to only essential modules, and it can be tweaked for realtime applications.
Windows servers aren't designed for that. They're designed to be low maintenance multi-purpose servers which are easily configurable. Most businesses who setup windows servers aren't using them in areas where high performance is needed. They are for satellite offices, small workgroups, etc., where the server has a variety of roles. The only high performance servers I routinely see windows deployed on routinely are domain controllers and mail servers (specifically Exchange servers).
Encryption prevents viewing the data only for the amount of time it takes to torture the passphrase out of you. Since you need the key to view your encrypted data, it's almost assured that the key will be near the data in some form, minimally protected. Encryption therefore provides little (if any) security in that scenario. In fact, it could cause more harm than good; It may lull you into a sense of false security.
The standard for probable cause in the case of a search warrant is significantly lower than the standard for conviction.
Yes, but everyone is hungup on the idea that the plaintiff has to prove an individual is responsible. At the moment, this may be true, but it's not much of an obstacle. Whenever you park your car illegally, they write a ticket out to the vehicle owner; And there have been many cases where the vehicle's owner was later arrested for not paying a fine they didn't know about because they had loaned their vehicle out to someone else. And unless the vehicle owner can prove they weren't the ones operating the vehicle, the courts have held they are responsible; They can't simply say "It was Ghost Man that parked my car downtown, not me!"
So for now, in that jurisdiction, they may be able to stop people from being sued for copyright infringement based on the IP address alone; But laws can and will be passed within a few years there where the ip address "owner" is responsible (and by owner, I mean ISP subscriber).
At best, this is an empty victory: It may stall copyright enforcement in that juridsdiction temporarily, but it will resume, and the cat and mouse game will move forward. They'll just start using things like timing, traffic analysis, client version identification, etc., to form digital fingerprints that (after they've seized your computer) will be used to individually identify you even from behind your standard NAT router.
If I suddenly experience crushing chest pain, I want an EMT, not a helpful bystander. I also want one called as soon as possible, not as soon as someone can find a pay phone.
They can always push the big red button installed in every car labelled "Press in emergency".
Yeesh, whadda think people did before cell phones in an emergency? I believe they used to think, and act (and in that order) -- not just dial 911 and then stand there with a cell phone camera watching the poor bastard suffer. I, for one, wish they'd make the change permanent: Imagine riding public transportation without some obnoxious mouth breather yelling at his girlfriend the entire trip, while you're packed in like sardines with other passengers. It'd be better than Chuck Norris descending from heaven and cock punching every douchebag on the train.
At the end of the day if the law doesn't protect people and/or property, and if there isn't victim, it should not be a crime. That's pure logic, accept.
The child who is asked to engage in sexual acts for the camera would disagree about it being victimless. The distribution of child porn doesn't harm anyone, fair enough, but the demand for it is the cause of the crime, and the crime harms people, so if you make possession and distribution illegal, it will ostensibly reduce the number of children exploited. That said, criminalizing cartoon or written depictions of underage sex is a true victimless crime; and if you made that argument against those abstractions, I'd agree with you. But 'real' child porn is not a victimless crime.
I know that hormesis sounds like a crackpot theory along with holistic super-diluted medicinal honey therapy, but some of the greatest minds in Medical Physics believe it exists.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Wikipedia is not evidence of any variety. It is commonly held, and backed by numerous studies, that ionizing radiation is harmful. non-ionizing radiation may be harmful, in cases where it causes heating of the tissue (especially eyes), or electrical discharge. Hearing that the "greatest minds" in medicine believe something is disappointing; In their field, I would hope they don't practice medicine based on belief... I would hope they do it based on facts, evidence, working theories, etc.
Anyway, it seems like they brute forced the password and found a cache of REALLY suspicious documents. That's harder to explain away.
Well, it's not necessary for him to explain it at all. It's the job of the prosecutor to prove that the documents were put there intentionally, and/or that he knew they were there. The whole point of steganography is plausible deniability. If they were able to detect it, let alone 'brute force' decrypt it, then at the very least the techniques used were flawed. But that still doesn't prove anything by itself -- they need a way of linking him to the hidden data. They probably have it, and the article doesn't go into sufficient detail to identify how they linked him to it; But it is a required element to gain a conviction... otherwise, if they find him guilty, it's not based on any sound judicial principle, it's just a witch hunt.
we tried to conquer your worthless country twice before, but you finally gave us an excuse for a third time
Yeah, the previous two times were so successful, we figure we'll try it a third time, and in doing so trigger an international military response that'll result in the deaths of tens of millions... because Hollywood tells us to? Not. Likely.
He wasn't in Pakistan, nor coming from there, when he was found with the porn. Read the fine article before spouting off like you know what you're talking about.
"He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany." That's the second sentence in the fine article.
As for your dismissals of his travel to Pakistan and his traveling companion, I suggest you look up Bayesian inference. Some coincidences happen.
Umm, okay. So thank you for agreeing with me, I think.
. But as evidence piles up, it becomes less and less likely to all be one big coincidence.
So if you have a muslim friend, know how to make basic electronic circuits, own a cell phone, and got at least a 'B' in chemistry, I should arrest and convict you of being a suicide bomber? Circumstantial evidence by itself is not strong enough for a conviction because a long string of coincidences, however unlikely, are still just a long string of coincidences.
The odds of this guy having two video files, both containing hidden terrorist documents, hidden in his underwear, shortly after a trip to Pakistan, while rebelling with a suspected terrorist are remote to say the least.
True, but remote or not, there needs to be something else for it to rise to the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, not just "wrong place, wrong time".
And BTW, of course my "90%" of security is theater stat was made up on the spot. I never tried to pass it off as a real number.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought someone who was throwing out big phrases like "Bayesian inference" would bother to spend five seconds googling before making a self-righteous post on an internet forum.
. Pro tip: if you need to invent straw men to argue against, don't even bother posting.
Pro Tip: If you can't make an argument without resorting to ad hominim attacks, don't bother posting. Also, you're a pompous asshole.
Sure it is. Why would anyone go to the trouble and potential penalties....and not just wait till he got back into Austria to download all the pr0n he wanted? Seems kinda bass-ackwards to me...doesn't make sense.
A lot of things in life don't make sense. It doesn't mean they are any less true. One possible explanation is that he had an addiction to pornographic materials. It's quite common.
This isn't some random dude who got nabbed because something incriminating got planted on his laptop, "in plain sight" to be found by random no-thought-required screening.
Challenge accepted.
He was concealing it because he knew it would get him in trouble with security agents if found,
Pornography is illegal in Pakistan, the country he just arrived from. It makes sense he couldn't want it to be found while going through security there.
and it was found because he and his companion "...were on a watch list, and when they handed over documents at a European border crossing, their names registered with counterterrorism agencies...
Everyone on a terrorist watch list is a convicted terrorist, having been tried in an open court, given a chance to provide evidence proving his innocence, etc. My previous sentence is a lie.
Ocak is also charged with helping to form a group called the German Taliban Mujahedeen,
Charged is not convicted anymore than suspicion equivocates to guilt.
Prosecutors believe the pair met at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan's tribal territories and were sent back to Europe to recruit a network of suicide bombers." (from TFA)
I believe I was touched by a flying spaghetti monster while sleeping last night. Normally, this wouldn't be significant, but had I been a Prosecutor, you'd be in trouble right now.
While your clever strategy is certainly possible, and can be effective at disrupting the kind of security theater that the TSA performs, that's not what's happening here
I don't consider deductive reasoning skills to be particularly clever, just rare.
This is an example of good old-fashioned investigative, targeted counter-espionage working.
The evidence presented does not exceed the standard of reasonable doubt. It is reasonable suspicion only.
If you or I were caught with the video, then claiming that we knew nothing about any hidden content is plausible.
Justice is supposed to be blind. Whether I'm a 10 time convicted felon, or a school teacher who's never even gotten a parking ticket, the facts are the facts. That is what guilt or innocence is determined on.
But neither of us are suspected terrorists, had ties to suspected terrorist organizations, have traveled to regions of Pakistan known for terrorist training camps, or were found with multiple memory cards hidden in our underwear...that just happened to have a porn video with a lot of hidden content very pertinent to terrorist organizations.
All of those things are known as 'circumstantial evidence' and carry no weight whatsoever on their own. Standing in a garage doesn't make you a car. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian. Being in Pakistan doesn't make you a terrorist. Holding a flash drive doesn't make you a computer expert. Get it?
I believe in innocent before proven guilty and all that...but
Like hell you do. You've already judged this man, based on circumstantial evidence provided second hand.
And he was smuggling them in his underpants because... he thinks porn is illegal?
Porn is illegal in Pakistan.
And it's just a coincidence that he was recently in Pakistan?
Well, you don't travel to another continent just to say hi. Obviously there's a reason for his travelling there, but you don't know what it is.
And another coincidence that he was traveling with a man suspected of setting up the German branch of the Taliban?
I use public transit all the time. I'm sure I've ridden around downtown amongst 'persons of interest'. Your point?
Come on, I know that 90% of anti-terrorism security is just theatre, and so we're conditioned to dismiss any successes it claims, but be rational.
86% of statistics are made up on the spot. And how does this process of conditioning work? I don't dismiss claims of success -- I dismiss only claims that lack evidence.
And anyway, there's an easy way to check -- go on the various torrent sites and
... And how can you be sure you're getting all the torrents of "Kick Ass" and "Sexy Tanja", as well as the IPs of all the people who downloaded it? Please, do tell -- there's a multibillion dollar industry trying to do exactly that right now, and they haven't had much luck so far.
If no, he's guilty. If yes, we gain valuable information on how Al Qaeda is communicating, and some lucky federal agent gets the job to download porn all day.
Either/or propositions should be looked at very critically; There are very often more than two outcomes, or the possible answers are a spectrum between two (or more) possibilities. He could be not guilty, yet have valuable information on how AQ is communicating. He could be guilty, and the information is worthless; disinformation planted by an operative who knew he was on a watchlist and would be searched. There are many other possibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Included in a reply to another poster in this thread.
I'd be curious to hear which law school you attended that taught you that, considering how wrong it is.
You're no better qualified to discuss the issue than anyone else here; And your condescending attitude certainly doesn't inspire confidence in your opinion.
You neglect that your examples are the exception rather than the rule.
Building catches fire because owner doesn't maintain fire suppression system. Owner held liable for damage. Oil platform explodes, pollutes the entire southern US coastline. Owner of platform held liable for negligence and violation of safety procedures. Cashier walks away from counter to go to bathroom; Kids run behind register, make off with a bunch of cigarettes. Cashier goes to jail for contributing to the deliquency of a minor. Man leaves loaded gun laying on street corner, kid comes by, picks it up. It's later used to rob a convenience store; Man goes to jail for criminal negligence. Farmer doesn't keep fence in repair, cows escape late at night, someone crashes into car, dies. Farmer held responsible for not keeping fence mended. Man leaves unsecured wifi connection open; Unknown person sends bomb threat to local school, speeds off into the night. "WAIT! He's not liable!" The exception here is that the guy who owns the wifi router isn't being held liable -- an exception that many lawmakers are looking very closely at in this country, and in others like the UK or Germany, have already been settled: Guilty.
Negligence is a crime in many cases, and there's a solid legal argument to be made that leaving your wifi unsecured and not keeping track of who's using your network is negligent. If you pulled that crap in a business environment, you'd be fired -- and you wouldn't get unemployment either because by industry standards, that is negligent behavior. The argument that an unsecured wifi router today is criminally negligent has legal merit, and I would not be surprised to see it become law soon.
No, you loan your car to someone. Therefore you are responsible. If someone steals your car and crashes into a bus full of nuns, you aren't.
If they crash into a bus full of nuns because you neglegently failed to have the brakes regularly inspected and they catastrophically failed, you are liable then. The argument can be made that failing to secure your networks is an act of gross negligence, especially considering Windows warns you before connecting to such a network (as do most operating systems) that it is not secure, that it says in the owner's manual of every wifi router words to the effect of "We strongly recommend you put a password on this", along with a long list of articles in just about every local and national newspaper and news website out there indicating the same thing.
Its an analogy fail. Get over yourself.
Tell that to this guy. It's not just some armchair lawyer talk here, this is real: It's in the courts right now, and you shouldn't be so dismissive.
Actually, it is flawed, because automobiles are just about the only things for which the courts have upheld this idea...
Oil tanker owner held liable for captain being negligent and crashing. Owner of a building complex that caught fire held liable, even though he wasn't the one who started the fire. Hotel owner held liable for meth lab being setup in room. Owners of male cattle not held responsible for bull killing someone. By the way, that's a biblical reference; I just wanted to demonstrate it's not a new concept. I can provide many, many more examples. It's not just cars. If you own something, you can be held responsible if you're neglegent in the maintenance of it.
Your failure to secure your wifi connection and then having it used in the commission of a crime makes you liable for damages. This has already happened in the UK and Germany. It's currently being looked into in several jurisdictions in the United States. Bottom line here, there is plenty of legal precident here and globally to create, enforce, and have upheld, a law that makes the owners of an unsecured network legally liable for illegal activity which occurs on it.
No, there isn't. I know for an absolute fact that my state laws contradict every single thing you have stated here, the sole exception being the part about automobile liability. And I am pretty sure that most other states are similar.
I have provided several links indicating that at the state and national level, this is something that is being considered, has legal merit, and may be enforceable. Your turn.
...they were just warning him that his subscription was about to run out.
It's ironic that a man who works for an organization that uses the same business model: paying protection money so nothing bad happens to himself or his property, just had something bad happen to him for not paying a different organization protection money. Antivirus software is based mostly on scare tactics and it is an attempt at fixing the problem of poor digital hygiene. If people were just more careful with their data, and didn't use web browsers or other network software that allowed the execution of arbitrary code (Javascript, for example: 90% of the websites out there that use it could be redesigned to work without it) would find their risk of a virus or malware infection to be slightly above nothing. Of course, you can't eliminate the risk entirely, but there's no need to be dropping $50 plus a year on subscriptions either.
With Powershell its different and you can't even setup Exchange 2012 without good knowledge in it on purpose. In NT 4 land Windows Server was first introduced as a server even an idiot can setup. ActiveDirectory and infrastructure is difficult to setup for a large organization.
Specific examples do not compromise general design principles.
Thousands of design choices needed to be made in order to make Windows. While some of them may have been suboptimal or even contrary to the goals, overall, the product achieves its aims. I can provide many examples where Linux' performance is lower than competing products, where it doesn't work well as a server, or where comparable solutions are better at embedding and realtime performance... but again, overall, it achieves the goals of having a low overhead, high configurability, and high reliability.
Your analogy about the car is flawed. The owner is responsible for the use of their vehicle and know they lent it to someone. That is not always the case with an IP address
It's not flawed at all, it's just a position you disagree with. You're an accomplice in any illegal activity if you fail to take any steps to prevent it. My previous example demonstrates additional legal situations where the owner can be charged for a crime that's committed by the user, absent proof that the user did it instead of the owner. There's plenty of legal precident to support my position, and only moral indignation to support yours.
If Windows Server isn't secure enough or powerful enough to do the job, maybe Microsoft should revisit their design choices.
So if you're a bicycle manufacturer, you should give up and start designing cars? Microsoft's design choices have been about making a server that's easy to configure, does not require specific knowledge of the OS' inner-workings, and is intended as a "one size fits all" solution. It's like comparing a semitruck to a freight train -- yes, they both often haul the same materials but they are hardly interchangeable.
Lesson 1, page 2. That bit I wrote on page 1 has proven false. Some how, the NSA clicked a mouse, the lights dimmed, and a computer spit out my passphrase. I go now. Bye.
Umm, how is what I said false? Your comment has nothing to do with the price of tea in China. Anonymity is better than the best security techniques because if an attacker can't find you, they can't do anything to you. For a small opponent (J. Random Terrorist, budget: $20 and a dozen friends) facing a superior opponent (US government, $40+ billion counter-intelligence, standing army of 4 million) ... anonymity is also your only defense.
I've never understood why people get all shocked when someone uses a competitor's product when theirs can do the job too. Well, Linux is a better platform for embedded applications, single-purpose servers, etc. It is much more efficient because there's no GUI to drive and only the bare minimum needs to be loaded in memory. Even the kernel can be stripped down to only essential modules, and it can be tweaked for realtime applications.
Windows servers aren't designed for that. They're designed to be low maintenance multi-purpose servers which are easily configurable. Most businesses who setup windows servers aren't using them in areas where high performance is needed. They are for satellite offices, small workgroups, etc., where the server has a variety of roles. The only high performance servers I routinely see windows deployed on routinely are domain controllers and mail servers (specifically Exchange servers).
It's a sound business move.
Lesson 1, Page 1, in covert operations:
Anonymity deflects more bullets than body armor.
Encryption prevents viewing the data only for the amount of time it takes to torture the passphrase out of you. Since you need the key to view your encrypted data, it's almost assured that the key will be near the data in some form, minimally protected. Encryption therefore provides little (if any) security in that scenario. In fact, it could cause more harm than good; It may lull you into a sense of false security.
The standard for probable cause in the case of a search warrant is significantly lower than the standard for conviction.
Yes, but everyone is hungup on the idea that the plaintiff has to prove an individual is responsible. At the moment, this may be true, but it's not much of an obstacle. Whenever you park your car illegally, they write a ticket out to the vehicle owner; And there have been many cases where the vehicle's owner was later arrested for not paying a fine they didn't know about because they had loaned their vehicle out to someone else. And unless the vehicle owner can prove they weren't the ones operating the vehicle, the courts have held they are responsible; They can't simply say "It was Ghost Man that parked my car downtown, not me!"
So for now, in that jurisdiction, they may be able to stop people from being sued for copyright infringement based on the IP address alone; But laws can and will be passed within a few years there where the ip address "owner" is responsible (and by owner, I mean ISP subscriber).
At best, this is an empty victory: It may stall copyright enforcement in that juridsdiction temporarily, but it will resume, and the cat and mouse game will move forward. They'll just start using things like timing, traffic analysis, client version identification, etc., to form digital fingerprints that (after they've seized your computer) will be used to individually identify you even from behind your standard NAT router.
If I suddenly experience crushing chest pain, I want an EMT, not a helpful bystander. I also want one called as soon as possible, not as soon as someone can find a pay phone.
They can always push the big red button installed in every car labelled "Press in emergency".
On the next episode of Mythbusters: Sentient Robots
Yeesh, whadda think people did before cell phones in an emergency? I believe they used to think, and act (and in that order) -- not just dial 911 and then stand there with a cell phone camera watching the poor bastard suffer. I, for one, wish they'd make the change permanent: Imagine riding public transportation without some obnoxious mouth breather yelling at his girlfriend the entire trip, while you're packed in like sardines with other passengers. It'd be better than Chuck Norris descending from heaven and cock punching every douchebag on the train.
No, your world-view is Marxist because you view employees as little more than slaves.
Your red-baiting will not work here, Sith Lord.
At the end of the day if the law doesn't protect people and/or property, and if there isn't victim, it should not be a crime. That's pure logic, accept.
The child who is asked to engage in sexual acts for the camera would disagree about it being victimless. The distribution of child porn doesn't harm anyone, fair enough, but the demand for it is the cause of the crime, and the crime harms people, so if you make possession and distribution illegal, it will ostensibly reduce the number of children exploited. That said, criminalizing cartoon or written depictions of underage sex is a true victimless crime; and if you made that argument against those abstractions, I'd agree with you. But 'real' child porn is not a victimless crime.
I know that hormesis sounds like a crackpot theory along with holistic super-diluted medicinal honey therapy, but some of the greatest minds in Medical Physics believe it exists.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Wikipedia is not evidence of any variety. It is commonly held, and backed by numerous studies, that ionizing radiation is harmful. non-ionizing radiation may be harmful, in cases where it causes heating of the tissue (especially eyes), or electrical discharge. Hearing that the "greatest minds" in medicine believe something is disappointing; In their field, I would hope they don't practice medicine based on belief... I would hope they do it based on facts, evidence, working theories, etc.
Anyway, it seems like they brute forced the password and found a cache of REALLY suspicious documents. That's harder to explain away.
Well, it's not necessary for him to explain it at all. It's the job of the prosecutor to prove that the documents were put there intentionally, and/or that he knew they were there. The whole point of steganography is plausible deniability. If they were able to detect it, let alone 'brute force' decrypt it, then at the very least the techniques used were flawed. But that still doesn't prove anything by itself -- they need a way of linking him to the hidden data. They probably have it, and the article doesn't go into sufficient detail to identify how they linked him to it; But it is a required element to gain a conviction... otherwise, if they find him guilty, it's not based on any sound judicial principle, it's just a witch hunt.
we tried to conquer your worthless country twice before, but you finally gave us an excuse for a third time
Yeah, the previous two times were so successful, we figure we'll try it a third time, and in doing so trigger an international military response that'll result in the deaths of tens of millions... because Hollywood tells us to? Not. Likely.
He wasn't in Pakistan, nor coming from there, when he was found with the porn. Read the fine article before spouting off like you know what you're talking about.
"He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany." That's the second sentence in the fine article.
As for your dismissals of his travel to Pakistan and his traveling companion, I suggest you look up Bayesian inference. Some coincidences happen.
Umm, okay. So thank you for agreeing with me, I think.
. But as evidence piles up, it becomes less and less likely to all be one big coincidence.
So if you have a muslim friend, know how to make basic electronic circuits, own a cell phone, and got at least a 'B' in chemistry, I should arrest and convict you of being a suicide bomber? Circumstantial evidence by itself is not strong enough for a conviction because a long string of coincidences, however unlikely, are still just a long string of coincidences.
The odds of this guy having two video files, both containing hidden terrorist documents, hidden in his underwear, shortly after a trip to Pakistan, while rebelling with a suspected terrorist are remote to say the least.
True, but remote or not, there needs to be something else for it to rise to the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, not just "wrong place, wrong time".
And BTW, of course my "90%" of security is theater stat was made up on the spot. I never tried to pass it off as a real number.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought someone who was throwing out big phrases like "Bayesian inference" would bother to spend five seconds googling before making a self-righteous post on an internet forum.
. Pro tip: if you need to invent straw men to argue against, don't even bother posting.
Pro Tip: If you can't make an argument without resorting to ad hominim attacks, don't bother posting. Also, you're a pompous asshole.
Sure it is. Why would anyone go to the trouble and potential penalties....and not just wait till he got back into Austria to download all the pr0n he wanted? Seems kinda bass-ackwards to me...doesn't make sense.
A lot of things in life don't make sense. It doesn't mean they are any less true. One possible explanation is that he had an addiction to pornographic materials. It's quite common.
This isn't some random dude who got nabbed because something incriminating got planted on his laptop, "in plain sight" to be found by random no-thought-required screening.
Challenge accepted.
He was concealing it because he knew it would get him in trouble with security agents if found,
Pornography is illegal in Pakistan, the country he just arrived from. It makes sense he couldn't want it to be found while going through security there.
and it was found because he and his companion "...were on a watch list, and when they handed over documents at a European border crossing, their names registered with counterterrorism agencies. ..
Everyone on a terrorist watch list is a convicted terrorist, having been tried in an open court, given a chance to provide evidence proving his innocence, etc. My previous sentence is a lie.
Ocak is also charged with helping to form a group called the German Taliban Mujahedeen,
Charged is not convicted anymore than suspicion equivocates to guilt.
Prosecutors believe the pair met at a terrorist training camp in Pakistan's tribal territories and were sent back to Europe to recruit a network of suicide bombers." (from TFA)
I believe I was touched by a flying spaghetti monster while sleeping last night. Normally, this wouldn't be significant, but had I been a Prosecutor, you'd be in trouble right now.
While your clever strategy is certainly possible, and can be effective at disrupting the kind of security theater that the TSA performs, that's not what's happening here
I don't consider deductive reasoning skills to be particularly clever, just rare.
This is an example of good old-fashioned investigative, targeted counter-espionage working.
The evidence presented does not exceed the standard of reasonable doubt. It is reasonable suspicion only.
If you or I were caught with the video, then claiming that we knew nothing about any hidden content is plausible.
Justice is supposed to be blind. Whether I'm a 10 time convicted felon, or a school teacher who's never even gotten a parking ticket, the facts are the facts. That is what guilt or innocence is determined on.
But neither of us are suspected terrorists, had ties to suspected terrorist organizations, have traveled to regions of Pakistan known for terrorist training camps, or were found with multiple memory cards hidden in our underwear...that just happened to have a porn video with a lot of hidden content very pertinent to terrorist organizations.
All of those things are known as 'circumstantial evidence' and carry no weight whatsoever on their own. Standing in a garage doesn't make you a car. Going to church doesn't make you a Christian. Being in Pakistan doesn't make you a terrorist. Holding a flash drive doesn't make you a computer expert. Get it?
I believe in innocent before proven guilty and all that...but
Like hell you do. You've already judged this man, based on circumstantial evidence provided second hand.
And he was smuggling them in his underpants because... he thinks porn is illegal?
Porn is illegal in Pakistan.
And it's just a coincidence that he was recently in Pakistan?
Well, you don't travel to another continent just to say hi. Obviously there's a reason for his travelling there, but you don't know what it is.
And another coincidence that he was traveling with a man suspected of setting up the German branch of the Taliban?
I use public transit all the time. I'm sure I've ridden around downtown amongst 'persons of interest'. Your point?
Come on, I know that 90% of anti-terrorism security is just theatre, and so we're conditioned to dismiss any successes it claims, but be rational.
86% of statistics are made up on the spot. And how does this process of conditioning work? I don't dismiss claims of success -- I dismiss only claims that lack evidence.
And anyway, there's an easy way to check -- go on the various torrent sites and
... And how can you be sure you're getting all the torrents of "Kick Ass" and "Sexy Tanja", as well as the IPs of all the people who downloaded it? Please, do tell -- there's a multibillion dollar industry trying to do exactly that right now, and they haven't had much luck so far.
If no, he's guilty. If yes, we gain valuable information on how Al Qaeda is communicating, and some lucky federal agent gets the job to download porn all day.
Either/or propositions should be looked at very critically; There are very often more than two outcomes, or the possible answers are a spectrum between two (or more) possibilities. He could be not guilty, yet have valuable information on how AQ is communicating. He could be guilty, and the information is worthless; disinformation planted by an operative who knew he was on a watchlist and would be searched. There are many other possibilities.