Encryption software needs to be inspectable and verifiable in order to be trusted with anything worth protecting. Closed-source software burned into the firmware of a USB drive does not meet that requirement.
That said, somebody make a programmable USB drive with open source encryption that can be flashed to it (probably with a fused write protect) and *that* would be a compelling product.
Hardware encryption offers superior security to software encryption. That said it's not easy to generate entropy so if you do use software encryption you better have a source of entropy.
How is this different then all the simular systems on the market right now? I use Apricorn drives myself, but there are others using keypads, fingerprint scanners, RFID tokens, etc.
Let me guess, you have the padlock pro? The cool feature of the Padlock pro is it self destructs if the bad guys get access to it and give 30 wrong password attempts.
Seems more likely they'll have machines sitting around on popular trackers grepping for IP addresses from blocks they own. At least if they want it to be even sort-of effective.
That depends on the quality of the certificate authority and the implementation of SSL. It also depends on what the ISP does. SSL doesn't protect anything port 443. What good is that going to be for other ports? The only way users can protect themselves is by using a VPN.
And it's up to the ISP to decide who to intimidate. There will be millions upon millions of people who break the 6 strikes rule. There will be certain people singled out and targeted.
And once that happens anything you do or say while on that ISP will be monitored.It may be under the guise of copyright infringement but the result is you're being monitored at the deep packet level. So when you tweet about how much you love Julian Assange and how much you support Wikileaks and the EFF, and when you hit the donate button, not only can they cut off funding to these organizations but they can cut off your internet as well.
Six strikes? No clue if they will look at some people with more scrutiny than others.
And they know who has been naughty and nice. You get six strikes. Six chances. Deep packet inspection, and they know what sites you like to visit and probably what you say too.
Worse is how they get people to testify against others by offering them time off their sentence. They can't offer you 100,000 dollars to testify against someone but they can say "testify that you saw him shoot the victim and we'll drop your sentence from life to 10 years." Hell I'd rather have the 10 versus life than a million dollars. It is buying testimony no matter what they say. If I'm on a jury all a bought testimony is good for is corroboration of viewable facts at best.
It's worse than that even. Sometimes they get no years. Sometimes they are immune from prosecution. Sometimes the police don't just threaten them with years in prison but threaten to put them in really heinous prisons or in sections of the prison where they are likely to be abused.
Ok, Mr. internet tough guy. Whatever. This Hector guy is obviously just a pussy and has a dick a fraction the size of yours. We get it.
Lots of people are going to prison because of what he did. What he did originally was wrong and criminal and then what he did after the fact was even more wrong than what he originally did, just wrong to a different group of people.
I'm not comparing the actions of Sabu with Swartz and I know far less about the details of the Sabu case than I do about Swartz. I was only pointing out that the heavy handed treatment from the prosecution was pretty much the same in both cases.
Who knows, had Sabu and Swartz not been intimidated by the prosecution telling them they were going to throw them away for the rest of their lives they might have chosen different courses of action than becoming a snitch and suicide. The system sucks and until that is fixed it's hard to blame people for their actions when they are being mentally tortured by draconian prosecution tactics without any real recourse to defend themselves. This sort of thing never happens to people who have millions to defend themselves with and that simply is not equal justice under the law.
I agree with you on Swartz because Swartz did the sort of stuff that any of us could have done and been charged with. He wasn't some sort of malicious black hat. Also Swartz ultimately killed himself but you're right they probably were trying to get him to turn into an informant which explains why they charged him with everything they could. So on that token I agree the system is corrupt but it's been corrupt for a long time now so why are we acting surprised it's corrupt? The war on drugs has put hundreds of thousands of people in prison. During the 60s there were informants just like Sabu getting people put in prison sometimes for stuff they didn't even do. This is just how it is and informants are used to destroy the organizations they were part of through use of entrapment.
An informant can legally entrap a person while an undercover police officer or FBI agent might not be able to get away with that. This is why guys like Sabu are useful but they are also considered throwaways. Once they have entrapped as many people as they can, they are thrown away. The FBI does not care about their quality of life or what happens to them and these people lose all their friends, can't trust anyone, and have to worry about retaliation for their entire life. In Sabu's case who could care? But in some instances the people involved who get caught up in this are just innocent kids who didn't know better. Here is an example http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_stillman
Rational civil disobedience only works in the presence of a rational criminal justice system. If you stand on a picket line, you expect to be charged with creating a public nuisance or disturbing the peace and to spend a week in jail. You do not expect to be charged with making terroristic threats and 25 years in prison. If you post credit card numbers on the internet, you expect fines and 10 years, not two consecutive life sentences. The criminal justice system allows such insanely disproportionate charges in the name of cost-effectively pressuring people into admitting their "actual offense," but it's an extremely effective form of coercion that can easily compel people into lying and betraying. And the public knows that Law&Order-like prosecutors wouldn't even bring charges against someone who wasn't guilty of something.
When politics are involved you shouldn't expect to be charged with anything. You should expect to have the book thrown at you. You should expect that police and prosecutors will go through the list of obscure esoteric laws to find something on you and charge you with it and if nothing can be found you can expect to be entrapped by a snitch like Sabu.
He did it because he fucking grew up and realized the adventurism was about to start having consequences.
Only a very, very few get to graduate up into being a Stalin or a Lenin. All the other 'revolutionaries' get killed, or imprisoned, or plowed under, or they fucking grow up.
Exactly my point. So why did he take so long to grew up when the rest of us grew up already and don't have to face 124 years in prison and turn snitch in order to grow up?
Last time, I said as long as he helps he won't go down....
A lot of us predicted this since the moment we heard about Lulzsec. I went so far as to warn people not to get involved with Lulzsec and of course it fell on deaf ears.
'Activism' isn't a profession. It's something kids do in their 20's.
Mostly upper-middle-class kids who can afford to be adventurists for a few years.
It's a profession to serious activists sitting in prison because they didn't snitch. Those people will never have any other career. It's a profession for people who get killed fighting for these causes. Telling me that makes me dislike Sabu even more. He entrapped kids in their 20's into ruining their lives over causes they probably never even had the time to fully think about. And those who actually did believe in that cause are going to be sitting in prison for years, have their lives ruined, be blacklisted, etc all because of the snitch Sabu.
If you believe in the causes then Sabu has damaged those causes by damaging or destroying people who believed in those causes. He ran a honeypot which acted as a black hole to suck in anyone who believed in these causes. I would have been fine with this if the police did it, or the FBI agent did it, but for someone who wasn't an FBI agent, who was encouraging people to break the law, who was talking and acting like a revolutionary until he gets caught? He's scum.
Police who are on the side they are on are still loyal to their cause. I respect them. Activists who are on the side they are on who are loyal to their causes, I respect them too. The snitches and dirty cops who aren't loyal to their causes are the scum with no friends. If you're a cop who doesn't actually believe in protecting and serving then you're scum. If you're an activist or hacktivist who doesn't actually believe in certain principles anymore because you got caught? Scum.
Everyone eventually gets caught. Everyone loses eventually. If you truly believe in say Freespeech and you decide to protest by breaking the law, when you get arrested (and you will), if you go and then become a confidential informant to get other people who believe in free speech arrested for ridiculously long sentences, lives destroyed, then you're scum. How is that any different from the dirty police officer taking bribes from the mafia who slowly corrupts the other police into serving the mafia by offering them bribes? It's contagious.
Even worse that slime sought and groomed minors to commit crimes for him and also to be the fall guys for the crimes he committed. The FBI also went on to seek and groom more minors into criminal activity with all the profound stupidity of those who see their promotions before any principles of justice.
Right now the FBI and Hector Xavier Monsegur are stuck with each other. The FBI trying to excuse their joint criminal activity to the judges and now the FBI are stuck pushing a hugely reduced sentence for nothing, for all the joint criminal activity they finished with the same number of lulzsec members they started with and found 'Anonymous' not to be some giant hacking organisation with tens of thousands of members but just an idea. Yet the FBI are stuck with Hector Xavier Monsegur else they will not be able to recruit quislings and back stabbers in future.
That is the problem I have with him and his ilk. He went and groomed young people into doing stuff for him so he could build a case on them to protect himself. He's complete scum and no one can deny that. All this comparing him to Aaron Swartz and trying to make it seem like the prosecutor was scum in this case? The prosecutor was doing their job as a prosecutor, but Sabu was not doing his job as a vigiilante. I respect the prosecutor more than I respect the vigilante snitch Sabu.
From what I understand LulzSec never stole anything. The government simply heard they were hacking, which is apparently worse than terrorism, murder, rape, or forced slavery. So they broke this man by threatening to put him in jail for the rest of his life (124 years is a life sentence).
If he was smarter, he would have gotten a job as a banker and actually stole shit and destroyed people's lives. In that case he would be immune from prosecution.
If he were smart he wouldn't be involved with Lulzsec at all. Truly smart people don't get involved with shit like that for a reason.
If you're willing to break the law as an activist then be prepared to go to prison for as long as necessary. That is something that hacktivists and activists need to start thinking about and planning for.
Part of what is being protested here is the legal system itself and the (often) ridiculous sentences it doles out. Yes, activists should be prepared to face the consequences of their actions, but should not be expected to be quiet about them.
If you're a political hacktivist or political vigilante you can expect the government to treat you like a terrorist and throw the book at you. That is what they have always done no matter what the laws said at the time. They got Al Capone on tax evasion. They'll look for anything they can to get certain people off the street.
The problem is many or most of these hacker types are wannabe revolutionaries who think they can be vigilantes from their mothers basement and not face any consequences. They should instead expect that the moment they get involved with certain social networks and people such as Lulzsec, Wikileaks, etc, their entire life will never again be the same from that moment on.
If they cannot recognize that they are in too deep then they shouldn't get involved in the first place. Sabu is partially responsible for baiting impressionable youth into getting involved with stuff they may not have got involved with on their own. Sabu is therefore a traitor and snitch for that. It is no different from the war on drugs, there is always that one person who snitches on everyone and we probably all know someone who has gone to jail on a drug charge because they were snitched on. How is it people who are supposed to be smart computer hackers can not expect to be snitched on when breaking the law and how is it that smart people would get involved with a stupid group like Lulzsec?
Sabu baited people into getting involved with the Lulzsec honeypot. These are people he called brother. For that reason I will never like him, no he has no excuse. And yes what he did is far worse than what Adrian did because Sabu didn't have any moral pretense or pretext about it. Sabu was among the worst who was entrapping people who were barely involved.
It's easy to talk a tough game about how "I'll take those motherfuckers down with me if they try to bust in" or how you'll never bow to the "sonuvabitch fascist corporate bootlicker prosecutors" in Internet chat rooms. Turns out the rate of following through when the motherfuckers show up with body armor, stun grenades and heavy rifles, or the sonuvabitch is actually in your face threatening to destroy your life, is rather a bit lower.
See also: Enthusiasm for war from actual veterans who've served vs from chickenhawks in the Bush administration.
And that is exactly what Sabu was doing. Talking like the toughest guy in the room to win a leadership position in a community he was snitching on. Stop making excuses for him. He is the definition of a chickenhawk and there is no excuse for what he did, none. If he wasn't prepared to go to prison he shouldn't have been trying to act like a leader in an online vigilante culture. If you're in a culture of vigilantism or political activism then you should expect your life to be destroyed eventually because that is what happens. To not expect it is to be misinformed and to expect it but to then turn against your own side is to be a snitch. There is no real excuse for it, and no he wasn't tortured. This wasn't a case where the government waterboarded Sabu and so he told them what they wanted to hear. He took it way further than just being a mouthpiece or revealing what he knew, he was actively trying to entrap people who believed in a philosophy he spent years preaching and he was the leader telling them to do stuff and was the snitch. This was not a situation where a low level script kiddie was the snitch but Sabu was the so called leader of Lulzsec.
The fact that most hackers are cowards and snitches doesn't mean that everyone in society is a coward and snitch. It's just something common among certain subcultures. It's not my way of doing things, but at the same time I am also smart enough not to get involved with that crowd precisely because I know I would be the one snitched on serving time in prison so that some informant can save their ass. I simply would never involve myself with people like Sabu in the first place and certainly wouldn't break the law for him because I knew he was a rat since before he was arrested and knew Lulzsec was going to go down in flames like this since they started targeting user data.
Look at my post history here on Slashdot and confirm it. I never supported Lulzsec and always saw them as a false flag or as being some sort of snitch run entity. At the same time I also expressed my concern for young people getting involved and cautioned against it.
If you're not prepared to go to jail for 124 years then you shouldn't be involved in crime.
The principle idea behind punishment proportional to the severity of the crime is that it gives criminals an incentive not to escalate:
Pickpocket someone - Have to pay penalty or a short visit to the prison (depending on how often caught)
Threaten someone to rob them - Potentially get into prison for few years
Kill someone to get their money - Go to prison for a very long time
Raising the punishment for 'stealing' or for 'threatening' (depending on how one interprets LulzSec's actions) to the same or even higher level than killing means the next group of crackers will make sure to erase their tracks, even if it means killing a few people here or there. It's not going to make punishment worse for them but increases their chance to get away. And the US will finally have their home-grown terrorists it has always been waiting for.
He didn't just hack for political reasons. Lulzsec was targeting innocent users, gamers, etc and trying to destroy their lives and put their account info out there for really bad hackers to exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
does it have a FBI unlock code?
When offered the chance to unlock your shit or be charged with something producing a life sentence which would you choose?
Encryption software needs to be inspectable and verifiable in order to be trusted with anything worth protecting. Closed-source software burned into the firmware of a USB drive does not meet that requirement.
That said, somebody make a programmable USB drive with open source encryption that can be flashed to it (probably with a fused write protect) and *that* would be a compelling product.
Hardware encryption offers superior security to software encryption. That said it's not easy to generate entropy so if you do use software encryption you better have a source of entropy.
How is this different then all the simular systems on the market right now? I use Apricorn drives myself, but there are others using keypads, fingerprint scanners, RFID tokens, etc.
Let me guess, you have the padlock pro? The cool feature of the Padlock pro is it self destructs if the bad guys get access to it and give 30 wrong password attempts.
The Aegis Padlock Pro works just fine, it supports over 1TB and it has a SSD version. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822161085
so if you know the information the enemy will find out through you.
It's as simple as that. CORP POWER.
And once one group of corporations gains the ability it's only a matter of time before they want other excuses.
Deep packet inspection versus SSL, who wins?
Seems more likely they'll have machines sitting around on popular trackers grepping for IP addresses from blocks they own. At least if they want it to be even sort-of effective.
That depends on the quality of the certificate authority and the implementation of SSL. It also depends on what the ISP does. SSL doesn't protect anything port 443. What good is that going to be for other ports? The only way users can protect themselves is by using a VPN.
And it's up to the ISP to decide who to intimidate. There will be millions upon millions of people who break the 6 strikes rule. There will be certain people singled out and targeted.
And once that happens anything you do or say while on that ISP will be monitored.It may be under the guise of copyright infringement but the result is you're being monitored at the deep packet level. So when you tweet about how much you love Julian Assange and how much you support Wikileaks and the EFF, and when you hit the donate button, not only can they cut off funding to these organizations but they can cut off your internet as well.
Six strikes? No clue if they will look at some people with more scrutiny than others.
And they know who has been naughty and nice. You get six strikes. Six chances. Deep packet inspection, and they know what sites you like to visit and probably what you say too.
I use a lot of tabs. I cannot stand the way Chrome handles tabs. Firefox is better at tab management and history management.
And, just like torture, the torturer gets whatever information the one being tortured thinks they want to hear.
However, the USA has long since decided that this is not a problem.
Sabu wasn't just confessing or just giving information. He was actively entrapping people and baiting people into crimes so he could give them heads.
Worse is how they get people to testify against others by offering them time off their sentence. They can't offer you 100,000 dollars to testify against someone but they can say "testify that you saw him shoot the victim and we'll drop your sentence from life to 10 years." Hell I'd rather have the 10 versus life than a million dollars. It is buying testimony no matter what they say. If I'm on a jury all a bought testimony is good for is corroboration of viewable facts at best.
It's worse than that even. Sometimes they get no years. Sometimes they are immune from prosecution. Sometimes the police don't just threaten them with years in prison but threaten to put them in really heinous prisons or in sections of the prison where they are likely to be abused.
Ok, Mr. internet tough guy. Whatever. This Hector guy is obviously just a pussy and has a dick a fraction the size of yours. We get it.
Lots of people are going to prison because of what he did. What he did originally was wrong and criminal and then what he did after the fact was even more wrong than what he originally did, just wrong to a different group of people.
I'm not comparing the actions of Sabu with Swartz and I know far less about the details of the Sabu case than I do about Swartz. I was only pointing out that the heavy handed treatment from the prosecution was pretty much the same in both cases.
Who knows, had Sabu and Swartz not been intimidated by the prosecution telling them they were going to throw them away for the rest of their lives they might have chosen different courses of action than becoming a snitch and suicide. The system sucks and until that is fixed it's hard to blame people for their actions when they are being mentally tortured by draconian prosecution tactics without any real recourse to defend themselves. This sort of thing never happens to people who have millions to defend themselves with and that simply is not equal justice under the law.
I agree with you on Swartz because Swartz did the sort of stuff that any of us could have done and been charged with. He wasn't some sort of malicious black hat. Also Swartz ultimately killed himself but you're right they probably were trying to get him to turn into an informant which explains why they charged him with everything they could. So on that token I agree the system is corrupt but it's been corrupt for a long time now so why are we acting surprised it's corrupt? The war on drugs has put hundreds of thousands of people in prison. During the 60s there were informants just like Sabu getting people put in prison sometimes for stuff they didn't even do. This is just how it is and informants are used to destroy the organizations they were part of through use of entrapment.
An informant can legally entrap a person while an undercover police officer or FBI agent might not be able to get away with that. This is why guys like Sabu are useful but they are also considered throwaways. Once they have entrapped as many people as they can, they are thrown away. The FBI does not care about their quality of life or what happens to them and these people lose all their friends, can't trust anyone, and have to worry about retaliation for their entire life. In Sabu's case who could care? But in some instances the people involved who get caught up in this are just innocent kids who didn't know better. Here is an example http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/03/120903fa_fact_stillman
Rational civil disobedience only works in the presence of a rational criminal justice system. If you stand on a picket line, you expect to be charged with creating a public nuisance or disturbing the peace and to spend a week in jail. You do not expect to be charged with making terroristic threats and 25 years in prison. If you post credit card numbers on the internet, you expect fines and 10 years, not two consecutive life sentences. The criminal justice system allows such insanely disproportionate charges in the name of cost-effectively pressuring people into admitting their "actual offense," but it's an extremely effective form of coercion that can easily compel people into lying and betraying. And the public knows that Law&Order-like prosecutors wouldn't even bring charges against someone who wasn't guilty of something.
When politics are involved you shouldn't expect to be charged with anything. You should expect to have the book thrown at you. You should expect that police and prosecutors will go through the list of obscure esoteric laws to find something on you and charge you with it and if nothing can be found you can expect to be entrapped by a snitch like Sabu.
He did it because he fucking grew up and realized the adventurism was about to start having consequences.
Only a very, very few get to graduate up into being a Stalin or a Lenin. All the other 'revolutionaries' get killed, or imprisoned, or plowed under, or they fucking grow up.
Exactly my point. So why did he take so long to grew up when the rest of us grew up already and don't have to face 124 years in prison and turn snitch in order to grow up?
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3068789&cid=41106927
Last time, I said as long as he helps he won't go down....
A lot of us predicted this since the moment we heard about Lulzsec. I went so far as to warn people not to get involved with Lulzsec and of course it fell on deaf ears.
'Activism' isn't a profession. It's something kids do in their 20's.
Mostly upper-middle-class kids who can afford to be adventurists for a few years.
It's a profession to serious activists sitting in prison because they didn't snitch. Those people will never have any other career. It's a profession for people who get killed fighting for these causes. Telling me that makes me dislike Sabu even more. He entrapped kids in their 20's into ruining their lives over causes they probably never even had the time to fully think about. And those who actually did believe in that cause are going to be sitting in prison for years, have their lives ruined, be blacklisted, etc all because of the snitch Sabu.
If you believe in the causes then Sabu has damaged those causes by damaging or destroying people who believed in those causes. He ran a honeypot which acted as a black hole to suck in anyone who believed in these causes. I would have been fine with this if the police did it, or the FBI agent did it, but for someone who wasn't an FBI agent, who was encouraging people to break the law, who was talking and acting like a revolutionary until he gets caught? He's scum.
Police who are on the side they are on are still loyal to their cause. I respect them. Activists who are on the side they are on who are loyal to their causes, I respect them too. The snitches and dirty cops who aren't loyal to their causes are the scum with no friends. If you're a cop who doesn't actually believe in protecting and serving then you're scum. If you're an activist or hacktivist who doesn't actually believe in certain principles anymore because you got caught? Scum.
Everyone eventually gets caught. Everyone loses eventually. If you truly believe in say Freespeech and you decide to protest by breaking the law, when you get arrested (and you will), if you go and then become a confidential informant to get other people who believe in free speech arrested for ridiculously long sentences, lives destroyed, then you're scum. How is that any different from the dirty police officer taking bribes from the mafia who slowly corrupts the other police into serving the mafia by offering them bribes? It's contagious.
Even worse that slime sought and groomed minors to commit crimes for him and also to be the fall guys for the crimes he committed. The FBI also went on to seek and groom more minors into criminal activity with all the profound stupidity of those who see their promotions before any principles of justice.
Right now the FBI and Hector Xavier Monsegur are stuck with each other. The FBI trying to excuse their joint criminal activity to the judges and now the FBI are stuck pushing a hugely reduced sentence for nothing, for all the joint criminal activity they finished with the same number of lulzsec members they started with and found 'Anonymous' not to be some giant hacking organisation with tens of thousands of members but just an idea. Yet the FBI are stuck with Hector Xavier Monsegur else they will not be able to recruit quislings and back stabbers in future.
That is the problem I have with him and his ilk. He went and groomed young people into doing stuff for him so he could build a case on them to protect himself. He's complete scum and no one can deny that. All this comparing him to Aaron Swartz and trying to make it seem like the prosecutor was scum in this case? The prosecutor was doing their job as a prosecutor, but Sabu was not doing his job as a vigiilante. I respect the prosecutor more than I respect the vigilante snitch Sabu.
From what I understand LulzSec never stole anything. The government simply heard they were hacking, which is apparently worse than terrorism, murder, rape, or forced slavery. So they broke this man by threatening to put him in jail for the rest of his life (124 years is a life sentence).
If he was smarter, he would have gotten a job as a banker and actually stole shit and destroyed people's lives. In that case he would be immune from prosecution.
If he were smart he wouldn't be involved with Lulzsec at all. Truly smart people don't get involved with shit like that for a reason.
If you're willing to break the law as an activist then be prepared to go to prison for as long as necessary. That is something that hacktivists and activists need to start thinking about and planning for.
Part of what is being protested here is the legal system itself and the (often) ridiculous sentences it doles out. Yes, activists should be prepared to face the consequences of their actions, but should not be expected to be quiet about them.
If you're a political hacktivist or political vigilante you can expect the government to treat you like a terrorist and throw the book at you. That is what they have always done no matter what the laws said at the time. They got Al Capone on tax evasion. They'll look for anything they can to get certain people off the street.
The problem is many or most of these hacker types are wannabe revolutionaries who think they can be vigilantes from their mothers basement and not face any consequences. They should instead expect that the moment they get involved with certain social networks and people such as Lulzsec, Wikileaks, etc, their entire life will never again be the same from that moment on.
If they cannot recognize that they are in too deep then they shouldn't get involved in the first place. Sabu is partially responsible for baiting impressionable youth into getting involved with stuff they may not have got involved with on their own. Sabu is therefore a traitor and snitch for that. It is no different from the war on drugs, there is always that one person who snitches on everyone and we probably all know someone who has gone to jail on a drug charge because they were snitched on. How is it people who are supposed to be smart computer hackers can not expect to be snitched on when breaking the law and how is it that smart people would get involved with a stupid group like Lulzsec?
Sabu baited people into getting involved with the Lulzsec honeypot. These are people he called brother. For that reason I will never like him, no he has no excuse. And yes what he did is far worse than what Adrian did because Sabu didn't have any moral pretense or pretext about it. Sabu was among the worst who was entrapping people who were barely involved.
It's easy to talk a tough game about how "I'll take those motherfuckers down with me if they try to bust in" or how you'll never bow to the "sonuvabitch fascist corporate bootlicker prosecutors" in Internet chat rooms. Turns out the rate of following through when the motherfuckers show up with body armor, stun grenades and heavy rifles, or the sonuvabitch is actually in your face threatening to destroy your life, is rather a bit lower.
See also: Enthusiasm for war from actual veterans who've served vs from chickenhawks in the Bush administration.
And that is exactly what Sabu was doing. Talking like the toughest guy in the room to win a leadership position in a community he was snitching on. Stop making excuses for him. He is the definition of a chickenhawk and there is no excuse for what he did, none. If he wasn't prepared to go to prison he shouldn't have been trying to act like a leader in an online vigilante culture. If you're in a culture of vigilantism or political activism then you should expect your life to be destroyed eventually because that is what happens. To not expect it is to be misinformed and to expect it but to then turn against your own side is to be a snitch. There is no real excuse for it, and no he wasn't tortured. This wasn't a case where the government waterboarded Sabu and so he told them what they wanted to hear. He took it way further than just being a mouthpiece or revealing what he knew, he was actively trying to entrap people who believed in a philosophy he spent years preaching and he was the leader telling them to do stuff and was the snitch. This was not a situation where a low level script kiddie was the snitch but Sabu was the so called leader of Lulzsec.
The fact that most hackers are cowards and snitches doesn't mean that everyone in society is a coward and snitch. It's just something common among certain subcultures. It's not my way of doing things, but at the same time I am also smart enough not to get involved with that crowd precisely because I know I would be the one snitched on serving time in prison so that some informant can save their ass. I simply would never involve myself with people like Sabu in the first place and certainly wouldn't break the law for him because I knew he was a rat since before he was arrested and knew Lulzsec was going to go down in flames like this since they started targeting user data.
Look at my post history here on Slashdot and confirm it. I never supported Lulzsec and always saw them as a false flag or as being some sort of snitch run entity. At the same time I also expressed my concern for young people getting involved and cautioned against it.
If you're not prepared to go to jail for 124 years then you shouldn't be involved in crime.
The principle idea behind punishment proportional to the severity of the crime is that it gives criminals an incentive not to escalate:
Raising the punishment for 'stealing' or for 'threatening' (depending on how one interprets LulzSec's actions) to the same or even higher level than killing means the next group of crackers will make sure to erase their tracks, even if it means killing a few people here or there. It's not going to make punishment worse for them but increases their chance to get away.
And the US will finally have their home-grown terrorists it has always been waiting for.
He didn't just hack for political reasons. Lulzsec was targeting innocent users, gamers, etc and trying to destroy their lives and put their account info out there for really bad hackers to exploit.