... which was apparently detected and corrected. And so what if they knock out a small part of the grid for a few hours or days -- What damage does that actually cause? Unless it's part of a coordinated strike, it doesn't do much.
Everybody's talking about cyberwarfare, but nobody's ever come up with an example of it. Identity theft? Viruses? malware? That's not war. War involves people being hurt -- and I mean really hurt. Not skimming a few extra bucks off the till or organized crime, which is the closest any of this has come so far.
Has anyone managed to shut off the internet? Disable emergency services (911) across the country (or even a state)? Have planes fallen out of the sky, power gone out, hospital computers taken down, or any other act that can be directly attributed to a malignant entity (as opposed to mere human error)? No. And it's not likely to happen anytime soon either.
It's just not cost effective to spend tens of thousands of dollars finding and exploiting security weaknesses in those systems when a 5 gallon tank of diesel, fertilizer, and a match can take out those same systems for a lot less cost. Cyberwarfare between countries isn't likely to happen until other, cheaper methods of warfare somehow become ineffective. At best, cyberwarfare would consist of espionage efforts and manipulating data to advance certain political goals -- and countering that threat is currently handled by the intelligence community.
The patent system was originally designed to protect the small inventor from a large business entity that could simply absorb the product into their existing product line and mass-produce it at a lower cost than the inventor ever could. This was done by creating a time-limited exclusive right and granting it to the small inventor specifically to prevent this -- thereby forcing the larger business to pay them for their invention (licensing) instead of simply copying the product and leaving the inventor with no return on his/her investment.
That need still exists today, and the principle behind it is still solid -- so solid in fact, that it's written into our Constitution as a specific right granted to the government. And you might recall, our founding fathers were quite stingy about giving the federal government much power at all even after the failure known as the Articles of Confederation. That speaks clearly to the need for patents and copyright.
The problem is that it's been mutated and corrupted into something businesses use to fight one another in endless litigation, and the patent office has been so poorly funded that there's no way for them to vet the process correctly. The only people who even know how to file a patent are lawyers and large corporations dedicated to the task. The patent office is so pathetic that they'll reject a patent if it's faxed in upside down. Imagine if Thomas Edison had the light bulb rejected because he put it in a brown envelope instead of a white one -- it's that kind of idiocy that needs fixing.
We don't need to eliminate patents and copyright; We need to restore them to their proper place and purpose, which is to protect individuals from corporations, not the other way around. And we need reasonable time limits -- and if you want to eliminate anything, start with that mother fucker Mickey Mouse and the corporation that owns it, because that's what started this whole trend towards a billion years plus the life of the author bullshit.
They spend millions upon millions fighting in a broken system that for each side amounts to a crap shoot, endless appeals, and slowing down the entire production cycle with needless approvals and cross-checking to attempt to deflect or marginalize the risks, raising the cost of entry into the market, and do you know who pays for all of this?
You.
This isn't bad news for Optronics, or LG -- it's bad news for us. The consumers. Because regardless of who wins, there'll still be LCD displays being produced, and they'll be just that much more expensive now to cover the costs of the elephant mating going on between these two massive corporations. That's why the system needs reform -- not because arguments that are pro- or anti-intellectual property have any validity, but because the way it's setup now costs too damn much.
Everytime they shoot themselves in the foot like this, public awareness and knowledge of DRM goes up. Even though the consumers are being hurt by this, it will make them realize that it's not always as easy as "buy, own, use however I want" anymore -- word of mouth is a powerful force in this industry.
This is one reason (of many) why it's unwise to date single mothers...
Right. Romance is dead... it was bought out by an aggressive takeover by hallmark and then sold off piece by piece. In other news, you're a jaded asshat who's trying to reduce the enormous complexity and diversity of human relationships into some neat little rule of "all single mothers are SATAN." Baka...
You can't go to some third world pesthole, print up a bunch of books and then import them into the US. The rights holder of course can outsource the printing
200 years ago, you could. copyright only applied to tangible property produced by a US citizen domestically.
wrong, copyright 200 years ago applied to the information, the data, in a book. You could in 1790 copy a book by hand, sell the copy you made,and be in violation of copyright law.
Citation needed! And I'll provide. You want the Copyright Act of 1790, which was created to "securing authors the 'sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending' the copies of their 'maps, charts, and books' for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14 year term should the copyright holder still be alive."
So you could make a handwritten copy for personal use and not be in violation of copyright law. You could also re-sell anything protected by copyright law that you lawfully purchased without any strings. Neither is true today, which is what this case is all about.
Well, this was pretty clear 200 years ago: Property was real and tangible. Copyright existed to protect the authors of works from publishers and printing presses using their work without paying for it. Fast forward 200 years and now we have copyright being applied to something that's intangible, can be copied for effectively zero cost, and has been hob-cobbled together to encompass intangible things like phrases, lines of code, even the "likeness" or "appearance" of something is not copyrightable. Given this vast expansion of the definition of copyright (for better or for worse, depending on who you ask), of course there's going to come a day when the tangible thing -- a legitimate CD purchased through legitimate channels could be declared illegal because it's being used incorrectly.
Copyright no longer covers just possession of a thing -- it's now been expanded to include the use of a thing as well, and that latter definition is what's causing most of the problems.
more regulation, which leads to less innovation, more draconian laws (see DMCA) and losses of freedom.
Yeah, I'm gonna miss the freedom to expose my personal information to thousands of for-profit businesses who will try to sell me crap I don't want or need. That loss of innovation will mean smaller budgets for desperate and single marketing people, who will be sadly forced into slavery and their children sent to public schools. And you're absolutely right about the draconian laws -- I mean, look at HIPAA and how it's horribly screwed over the medical field with it's demands for privacy of information. And then there's the inherent loss of freedom that comes from demanding that a corporation not sell it's customer information to the highest bidder -- oh, wait. That's not a freedom you have -- that's one they have and like to club you over the head with!
Think of it this way, you go to Wal-Mart, buy a new blender thinking it had the feature to, say, crush ice. So for the first week it does it just fine then the next week it won't crush ice because that feature had been removed.
I could counter with, "you should have read the EULA" and give a long dissertation on the wonders of open source in embedded systems, but instead I'll just say "dude... weak."
...and you should have the -right- to be notified when things change.
Yeah! Because Sony didn't put it on their homepage, at the top in CAPITAL BOLD LETTERING of the terms of use, and required the user read the terms before installing the firmware update, where in no uncertain terms it laid out that the feature would be removed, what was being added, and what the consequences of not upgrading were. Yup... none of that happened. If you want to use an example that's relevant, try Microsoft's WGA module being force-updated and then nuking from orbit both legit and illegit installs of its own software.
Any license that states that they can change the conditions must be made illegal.
Licenses are living documents. They need to be changed in order to adapt to the environment. Perhaps it would be better to say people should be free to continue using the product under the old license without losing any features, benefits, or similar by choosing to do so. That is more legally defensible and sound.
It's a lot easier to prosecute someone who has a joint on their person than to find forensic evidence of a rape. Most rapists wear condoms, the drugs used quickly metabolize, and unlike pot smokers, victims of sexual assault are often blamed for "provoking" the defendant into it. So dollar for dollar, drug charges are a lot easier to get convictions on. That's why there's so many pot smokers in jail, and so few rapists, even though more women claim to have been sexually assaulted during their lives than smoke pot.
Just because it's not lawful doesn't mean it's unethical. When the law itself (or those enforcing it) is unethical, the only ethical action may be to break the law.
I don't believe the police were acting in an unethical fashion, I simply think they have limited resources.
Why? You explained your circumstances, but I don't understand your reasoning. If anything, it's the police who ignore you who are unethical. It's not unethical to do their job when they won't.
I can't (nor should I be allowed to) assume police powers because the person or group that has them doesn't want to excercise them. That's lunacy. If I want to track this guy down privately, using lawful channels, and the police are willing and able to prosecute -- it's a win for everyone. But if they don't, my only lawful recourse is to go to the media (weren't interested), protest (one person with a sign didn't exactly make an impact), write letters (got form letter replies and courteous brush-offs), and try to help the other victims to find him and build a case against him (only found one of the three I knew about, and that person didn't want to rehash an old wound).
Don't kid yourself -- I tried. I did more than this website did, and with less fanfare. But I never crossed the line of going public. The risk of someone being misidentified and harmed by that isn't one I am willing to take, then, now, or ever. I want him as bad as anyone else who's ever been raped. That doesn't give me the right to endanger innocent lives to correct that injustice.
Yes. The information is all in the public sphere. All this site is doing is collecting it and providing a centralized place to distribute it. I presume you've heard of the first amendment?
Yes. Have you heard of the reasonable restrictions of that amendment? For example, inciting a riot or encouraging criminal activity is not covered.
the only justice that exists in this particular case is vigilante justice. and i agree with you: vigilante justice sucks. however, vigilante justice is better than NO justice
That wasn't vigilante justice -- that was a responsible media figure doing some good old fashioned journalism, finding the guy, and then turning that information over to the police, and once he was captured, published the details in a lawful fashion. I have no idea how that $900k was spent, or if it even exists, and if it's in your state maybe you should look into that. For all we know it could have been to train officers do to exactly what this guy did. But this is entirely hypothetical without a citation, and increasingly off topic...
The only tracking that they're doing is tracking where the crimes took place. Go look at the site, all that's there is a timeline, with a Google map, street view, and text blurb for each attack. It isn't like they've followed the guy on the subway and found out where he lives, they're simply organizing all the data that was doubtlessly available from other sources into a single, easy to follow graphical representation.
Which is still a form of surveillance. Again -- I stand by what I said earlier: If these people want to help, do it with the authorities, not for them. And if they do nothing, call the media. There are ethical channels that can be followed to obtain justice which do not include going public. The moment you put information like this into the hands of the public and tag it "rapist", you're coming dangerously close to inciting people to vigilantism. At the very least, you're enabling it.
The intent is good. The methods of data acquisition is good. The research is good. Publicizing it is not good -- that is the option of last resort, when all other methods have failed. And even then, the risk can be great. This kind of thing is inprecise -- it's entirely possible that a private person with access to this information could misidentify the criminal and harm an innocent person. That is why we leave these things to the authorities.
Putting them out of our collective misery would be an even bigger service to mankind but some people frown on such notions.....
I don't, but I can't defend my own rights by sacrificing somebody else's. He's entitled to the same legal and ethical protections I am, whatever his past or present behaviors. There's a simple and time-honored tradition this society has of dealing with malefactors -- imprisonment. Besides, I know what happens to rapists in jail. I think throwing the predator in with the other predators would sate my thirst for vengance.
I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request. Especially since, historically, the downfall of democracy has started with a well-intentioned attack on a minority perceived as a threat by taking away their personal freedoms and/or citizenship. It's not a right if it can be taken away.
So being tracked electronically for other purposes is ok? It's wrong to track down a serial rapist but it's acceptable for Choicepoint to track my every living move? It's acceptable for my credit card company to build profiles of my purchases and sell them to marketing companies but not acceptable for a citizen to track a convicted criminal?
You're bringing unrelated material into the discussion. This is about answering whether it's okay for a private citizen or group of citizens, to excercise police-like surveillance over another individual, or group of individuals. The examples you outline have different ethical and legal implications, as well as motivations.
If somebody has maliciously assaulted you, tracking them down is not unethical. If somebody has made a habit of maliciously assaulting people at leisure, tracking them down is a service to mankind.
Speaking as someone who was sexually assaulted, yes, tracking the person responsible down is unethical. In my case, they filed it under miscellany and never interviewed him, and less than a month later, three more cases turned up and the guy skipped state. The police never followed up, and so he's very likely still out there. I did the responsible thing and contacted the authorities once I got out of the hospital. Granted, I did it while staring at the floor, stuttering, and being held by a friend, but I did do it.
Can I say I'd do it the same way if it happened again? No, not really. It was a traumatic experience and I won't sit here and say if given half a chance I wouldn't have returned the favor at the time. But I don't think two wrongs make a right, and feeding this guy to a woodchipper because the police wouldn't do their job, while maybe emotionally fulfilling, isn't right. So I have to stand by what I said -- vigilantism is not a public service. A public service would be my day in court, along with the others who that son of a bitch hurt. So I do understand the motivations behind such behavior on a very personal level. I don't agree with it.
If I were on the IRB, I'd gag these guys, put them in a van, drive them out the reservation, and drop them off there as an example to others of why we don't cross those lines. And if they're lucky and aren't fed feet-first to a rez gang, they'll maybe come away with a better appreciation of their craft and their ethical responsibilities when peforming it. In my mind, it's no different than extraditing a criminal to face charges in the country where the crime was committed. Most reservations have treaties granting them autonomy from the government so they really could be tried under these people's justice system, and then imprisoned there or punished accordingly.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities -- this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines. Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
However, if our picturesque little tribe signed up for the research, but is just getting all touchy because they don't like the results, then fuck them.
About that punching people over the internet device-- I'd start with your own face. It isn't about cultural sensitivity "getting in the way of" science, nor does it even have anything at all to do with the scientific method, nor are these people challenging it, nor did they expect a "magical wish fulfillment machine" to cure their illness. This was about a very specific rule in medicine, which is do no harm.
Harm is not just physical, it can also be psychological. And in this case, by violating the terms laid out by the informed consent agreement, they did cause psychological harm. It's not for you to decide whether it's justified or not. We know tons about medicine because of WWII experiments done on unwilling subjects, and no -- I don't just mean Germany. And it hasn't just been in wartime -- any time social inequity has existed, there has been a potential (often realized) to hurt a smaller group of people to benefit a larger in the name of progress. Many advances in medicine have been looked back on with shame -- because we hurt people to get the information we have. So we learned from our mistakes and now we are very specific in what we tell patients, howe we tell them, and the specifics of the doctor-patient relationship, and all of this branches from the ethical fundamental of do no harm. That's a line that any self-respecting scientist, doctor, engineer, or decent human being doesn't cross lightly, if ever.
These researchers breached that foundation of trust. Doesn't matter why they did it. Doesn't matter what benefit there was. It's tarnished by the fact that they broke their own rules and harmed another culture doing so. That is indefensible. Let me be clear: This isn't about science or technology. This is about ethics and these people did something unethical because they thought the ends justified the means. And frankly, if science as an instutition is to survive, it needs to recognize that it is not an end unto itself, nor is it a religion, but simply and justly a tool in a box, to be picked up and used when society needs it, and put back in its box when it is no longer needed.
The idea that progress for its own sake is justified has been the source of some of the darkest chapters of human history. Do not drag an institution that has strived to learn from its past mistakes back through the mud purely to justify your own cultural intolerance.
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What is the point of having numerical data types that can't be manipulated?
So they can charge more for the upgrade?
There's one concrete example of cyberwarfare.
... which was apparently detected and corrected. And so what if they knock out a small part of the grid for a few hours or days -- What damage does that actually cause? Unless it's part of a coordinated strike, it doesn't do much.
Everybody's talking about cyberwarfare, but nobody's ever come up with an example of it. Identity theft? Viruses? malware? That's not war. War involves people being hurt -- and I mean really hurt. Not skimming a few extra bucks off the till or organized crime, which is the closest any of this has come so far.
Has anyone managed to shut off the internet? Disable emergency services (911) across the country (or even a state)? Have planes fallen out of the sky, power gone out, hospital computers taken down, or any other act that can be directly attributed to a malignant entity (as opposed to mere human error)? No. And it's not likely to happen anytime soon either.
It's just not cost effective to spend tens of thousands of dollars finding and exploiting security weaknesses in those systems when a 5 gallon tank of diesel, fertilizer, and a match can take out those same systems for a lot less cost. Cyberwarfare between countries isn't likely to happen until other, cheaper methods of warfare somehow become ineffective. At best, cyberwarfare would consist of espionage efforts and manipulating data to advance certain political goals -- and countering that threat is currently handled by the intelligence community.
...or just eliminate it all together.
The patent system was originally designed to protect the small inventor from a large business entity that could simply absorb the product into their existing product line and mass-produce it at a lower cost than the inventor ever could. This was done by creating a time-limited exclusive right and granting it to the small inventor specifically to prevent this -- thereby forcing the larger business to pay them for their invention (licensing) instead of simply copying the product and leaving the inventor with no return on his/her investment.
That need still exists today, and the principle behind it is still solid -- so solid in fact, that it's written into our Constitution as a specific right granted to the government. And you might recall, our founding fathers were quite stingy about giving the federal government much power at all even after the failure known as the Articles of Confederation. That speaks clearly to the need for patents and copyright.
The problem is that it's been mutated and corrupted into something businesses use to fight one another in endless litigation, and the patent office has been so poorly funded that there's no way for them to vet the process correctly. The only people who even know how to file a patent are lawyers and large corporations dedicated to the task. The patent office is so pathetic that they'll reject a patent if it's faxed in upside down. Imagine if Thomas Edison had the light bulb rejected because he put it in a brown envelope instead of a white one -- it's that kind of idiocy that needs fixing.
We don't need to eliminate patents and copyright; We need to restore them to their proper place and purpose, which is to protect individuals from corporations, not the other way around. And we need reasonable time limits -- and if you want to eliminate anything, start with that mother fucker Mickey Mouse and the corporation that owns it, because that's what started this whole trend towards a billion years plus the life of the author bullshit.
They spend millions upon millions fighting in a broken system that for each side amounts to a crap shoot, endless appeals, and slowing down the entire production cycle with needless approvals and cross-checking to attempt to deflect or marginalize the risks, raising the cost of entry into the market, and do you know who pays for all of this?
You.
This isn't bad news for Optronics, or LG -- it's bad news for us. The consumers. Because regardless of who wins, there'll still be LCD displays being produced, and they'll be just that much more expensive now to cover the costs of the elephant mating going on between these two massive corporations. That's why the system needs reform -- not because arguments that are pro- or anti-intellectual property have any validity, but because the way it's setup now costs too damn much.
Everytime they shoot themselves in the foot like this, public awareness and knowledge of DRM goes up. Even though the consumers are being hurt by this, it will make them realize that it's not always as easy as "buy, own, use however I want" anymore -- word of mouth is a powerful force in this industry.
And right now, the word is... fail.
This is one reason (of many) why it's unwise to date single mothers...
Right. Romance is dead... it was bought out by an aggressive takeover by hallmark and then sold off piece by piece. In other news, you're a jaded asshat who's trying to reduce the enormous complexity and diversity of human relationships into some neat little rule of "all single mothers are SATAN." Baka...
You can't go to some third world pesthole, print up a bunch of books and then import them into the US. The rights holder of course can outsource the printing
200 years ago, you could. copyright only applied to tangible property produced by a US citizen domestically.
wrong, copyright 200 years ago applied to the information, the data, in a book. You could in 1790 copy a book by hand, sell the copy you made,and be in violation of copyright law.
Citation needed! And I'll provide. You want the Copyright Act of 1790, which was created to "securing authors the 'sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending' the copies of their 'maps, charts, and books' for a term of 14 years, with the right to renew for one additional 14 year term should the copyright holder still be alive."
So you could make a handwritten copy for personal use and not be in violation of copyright law. You could also re-sell anything protected by copyright law that you lawfully purchased without any strings. Neither is true today, which is what this case is all about.
Well, this was pretty clear 200 years ago: Property was real and tangible. Copyright existed to protect the authors of works from publishers and printing presses using their work without paying for it. Fast forward 200 years and now we have copyright being applied to something that's intangible, can be copied for effectively zero cost, and has been hob-cobbled together to encompass intangible things like phrases, lines of code, even the "likeness" or "appearance" of something is not copyrightable. Given this vast expansion of the definition of copyright (for better or for worse, depending on who you ask), of course there's going to come a day when the tangible thing -- a legitimate CD purchased through legitimate channels could be declared illegal because it's being used incorrectly.
Copyright no longer covers just possession of a thing -- it's now been expanded to include the use of a thing as well, and that latter definition is what's causing most of the problems.
more regulation, which leads to less innovation, more draconian laws (see DMCA) and losses of freedom.
Yeah, I'm gonna miss the freedom to expose my personal information to thousands of for-profit businesses who will try to sell me crap I don't want or need. That loss of innovation will mean smaller budgets for desperate and single marketing people, who will be sadly forced into slavery and their children sent to public schools. And you're absolutely right about the draconian laws -- I mean, look at HIPAA and how it's horribly screwed over the medical field with it's demands for privacy of information. And then there's the inherent loss of freedom that comes from demanding that a corporation not sell it's customer information to the highest bidder -- oh, wait. That's not a freedom you have -- that's one they have and like to club you over the head with!
Think of it this way, you go to Wal-Mart, buy a new blender thinking it had the feature to, say, crush ice. So for the first week it does it just fine then the next week it won't crush ice because that feature had been removed.
I could counter with, "you should have read the EULA" and give a long dissertation on the wonders of open source in embedded systems, but instead I'll just say "dude... weak."
...and you should have the -right- to be notified when things change.
Yeah! Because Sony didn't put it on their homepage, at the top in CAPITAL BOLD LETTERING of the terms of use, and required the user read the terms before installing the firmware update, where in no uncertain terms it laid out that the feature would be removed, what was being added, and what the consequences of not upgrading were. Yup... none of that happened. If you want to use an example that's relevant, try Microsoft's WGA module being force-updated and then nuking from orbit both legit and illegit installs of its own software.
Any license that states that they can change the conditions must be made illegal.
Licenses are living documents. They need to be changed in order to adapt to the environment. Perhaps it would be better to say people should be free to continue using the product under the old license without losing any features, benefits, or similar by choosing to do so. That is more legally defensible and sound.
It's a lot easier to prosecute someone who has a joint on their person than to find forensic evidence of a rape. Most rapists wear condoms, the drugs used quickly metabolize, and unlike pot smokers, victims of sexual assault are often blamed for "provoking" the defendant into it. So dollar for dollar, drug charges are a lot easier to get convictions on. That's why there's so many pot smokers in jail, and so few rapists, even though more women claim to have been sexually assaulted during their lives than smoke pot.
Just because it's not lawful doesn't mean it's unethical. When the law itself (or those enforcing it) is unethical, the only ethical action may be to break the law.
I don't believe the police were acting in an unethical fashion, I simply think they have limited resources.
Why? You explained your circumstances, but I don't understand your reasoning. If anything, it's the police who ignore you who are unethical. It's not unethical to do their job when they won't.
I can't (nor should I be allowed to) assume police powers because the person or group that has them doesn't want to excercise them. That's lunacy. If I want to track this guy down privately, using lawful channels, and the police are willing and able to prosecute -- it's a win for everyone. But if they don't, my only lawful recourse is to go to the media (weren't interested), protest (one person with a sign didn't exactly make an impact), write letters (got form letter replies and courteous brush-offs), and try to help the other victims to find him and build a case against him (only found one of the three I knew about, and that person didn't want to rehash an old wound).
Don't kid yourself -- I tried. I did more than this website did, and with less fanfare. But I never crossed the line of going public. The risk of someone being misidentified and harmed by that isn't one I am willing to take, then, now, or ever. I want him as bad as anyone else who's ever been raped. That doesn't give me the right to endanger innocent lives to correct that injustice.
Yes. The information is all in the public sphere. All this site is doing is collecting it and providing a centralized place to distribute it. I presume you've heard of the first amendment?
Yes. Have you heard of the reasonable restrictions of that amendment? For example, inciting a riot or encouraging criminal activity is not covered.
the only justice that exists in this particular case is vigilante justice. and i agree with you: vigilante justice sucks. however, vigilante justice is better than NO justice
That wasn't vigilante justice -- that was a responsible media figure doing some good old fashioned journalism, finding the guy, and then turning that information over to the police, and once he was captured, published the details in a lawful fashion. I have no idea how that $900k was spent, or if it even exists, and if it's in your state maybe you should look into that. For all we know it could have been to train officers do to exactly what this guy did. But this is entirely hypothetical without a citation, and increasingly off topic...
The only tracking that they're doing is tracking where the crimes took place. Go look at the site, all that's there is a timeline, with a Google map, street view, and text blurb for each attack. It isn't like they've followed the guy on the subway and found out where he lives, they're simply organizing all the data that was doubtlessly available from other sources into a single, easy to follow graphical representation.
Which is still a form of surveillance. Again -- I stand by what I said earlier: If these people want to help, do it with the authorities, not for them. And if they do nothing, call the media. There are ethical channels that can be followed to obtain justice which do not include going public. The moment you put information like this into the hands of the public and tag it "rapist", you're coming dangerously close to inciting people to vigilantism. At the very least, you're enabling it.
The intent is good. The methods of data acquisition is good. The research is good. Publicizing it is not good -- that is the option of last resort, when all other methods have failed. And even then, the risk can be great. This kind of thing is inprecise -- it's entirely possible that a private person with access to this information could misidentify the criminal and harm an innocent person. That is why we leave these things to the authorities.
How is determining a person's location equivalent to vigilantism?
In method, not result.
Putting them out of our collective misery would be an even bigger service to mankind but some people frown on such notions.....
I don't, but I can't defend my own rights by sacrificing somebody else's. He's entitled to the same legal and ethical protections I am, whatever his past or present behaviors. There's a simple and time-honored tradition this society has of dealing with malefactors -- imprisonment. Besides, I know what happens to rapists in jail. I think throwing the predator in with the other predators would sate my thirst for vengance.
Please spare us the slippery slope straw man.
I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request. Especially since, historically, the downfall of democracy has started with a well-intentioned attack on a minority perceived as a threat by taking away their personal freedoms and/or citizenship. It's not a right if it can be taken away.
So being tracked electronically for other purposes is ok? It's wrong to track down a serial rapist but it's acceptable for Choicepoint to track my every living move? It's acceptable for my credit card company to build profiles of my purchases and sell them to marketing companies but not acceptable for a citizen to track a convicted criminal?
You're bringing unrelated material into the discussion. This is about answering whether it's okay for a private citizen or group of citizens, to excercise police-like surveillance over another individual, or group of individuals. The examples you outline have different ethical and legal implications, as well as motivations.
If somebody has maliciously assaulted you, tracking them down is not unethical. If somebody has made a habit of maliciously assaulting people at leisure, tracking them down is a service to mankind.
Speaking as someone who was sexually assaulted, yes, tracking the person responsible down is unethical. In my case, they filed it under miscellany and never interviewed him, and less than a month later, three more cases turned up and the guy skipped state. The police never followed up, and so he's very likely still out there. I did the responsible thing and contacted the authorities once I got out of the hospital. Granted, I did it while staring at the floor, stuttering, and being held by a friend, but I did do it.
Can I say I'd do it the same way if it happened again? No, not really. It was a traumatic experience and I won't sit here and say if given half a chance I wouldn't have returned the favor at the time. But I don't think two wrongs make a right, and feeding this guy to a woodchipper because the police wouldn't do their job, while maybe emotionally fulfilling, isn't right. So I have to stand by what I said -- vigilantism is not a public service. A public service would be my day in court, along with the others who that son of a bitch hurt. So I do understand the motivations behind such behavior on a very personal level. I don't agree with it.
If I were on the IRB, I'd gag these guys, put them in a van, drive them out the reservation, and drop them off there as an example to others of why we don't cross those lines. And if they're lucky and aren't fed feet-first to a rez gang, they'll maybe come away with a better appreciation of their craft and their ethical responsibilities when peforming it. In my mind, it's no different than extraditing a criminal to face charges in the country where the crime was committed. Most reservations have treaties granting them autonomy from the government so they really could be tried under these people's justice system, and then imprisoned there or punished accordingly.
Tracking people in this fashion is unethical, even if it is a rapist. Leave it to the authorities -- this is vigilantism, nothing more. And that's not something that we can tolerate in an information-saturated society. Anytime a person is tracked electronically like this by someone with a personal agenda, it's wrong. There should not be exceptions, because the moment we allow that line to be crossed, we damn all of us to the potential to have our privacy invaded under false pretext.
You want to help? Volunteer your services to a responsible authority like the local police. Work with them and follow their ethical guidelines. Believe me, they want citizens to come to them and the system functions best when done under professional and ethical oversight by a disinterested party. This kind of behavior, however well-intentioned, harms those efforts and undermines the entire system of justice.
However, if our picturesque little tribe signed up for the research, but is just getting all touchy because they don't like the results, then fuck them.
About that punching people over the internet device-- I'd start with your own face. It isn't about cultural sensitivity "getting in the way of" science, nor does it even have anything at all to do with the scientific method, nor are these people challenging it, nor did they expect a "magical wish fulfillment machine" to cure their illness. This was about a very specific rule in medicine, which is do no harm.
Harm is not just physical, it can also be psychological. And in this case, by violating the terms laid out by the informed consent agreement, they did cause psychological harm. It's not for you to decide whether it's justified or not. We know tons about medicine because of WWII experiments done on unwilling subjects, and no -- I don't just mean Germany. And it hasn't just been in wartime -- any time social inequity has existed, there has been a potential (often realized) to hurt a smaller group of people to benefit a larger in the name of progress. Many advances in medicine have been looked back on with shame -- because we hurt people to get the information we have. So we learned from our mistakes and now we are very specific in what we tell patients, howe we tell them, and the specifics of the doctor-patient relationship, and all of this branches from the ethical fundamental of do no harm. That's a line that any self-respecting scientist, doctor, engineer, or decent human being doesn't cross lightly, if ever.
These researchers breached that foundation of trust. Doesn't matter why they did it. Doesn't matter what benefit there was. It's tarnished by the fact that they broke their own rules and harmed another culture doing so. That is indefensible. Let me be clear: This isn't about science or technology. This is about ethics and these people did something unethical because they thought the ends justified the means. And frankly, if science as an instutition is to survive, it needs to recognize that it is not an end unto itself, nor is it a religion, but simply and justly a tool in a box, to be picked up and used when society needs it, and put back in its box when it is no longer needed.
The idea that progress for its own sake is justified has been the source of some of the darkest chapters of human history. Do not drag an institution that has strived to learn from its past mistakes back through the mud purely to justify your own cultural intolerance.