I think the extortion part is probably a bigger factor in sentencing than identity fraud.
Soliciting compromising photos, and then extorting people to have them removed. He effectively started a criminal organization. A stupid, poorly hidden white collar criminal enterprise, but one nonetheless. Not much different from sending muscle to collect protection money.
And how 18 years will help reform that guy better than 5 or 10? While some short stints in prison may be a good way to cool off some heads, spending the majority of one's productive life behind bars for non violent crime is troubling. Home arrest without internet is better option.
He wastes government money, he will come out without job or ability to be reintegrated into the society ...
Unlike, say, the Federal system, California has near universal parole; IIRC, the norm, barring particularly bad conduct in prison, is serving 1/3 to 1/2 the sentence, so an 18 year sentence is effectively pretty close to 5 or 10 years.
I think that starting from unsympathetic person is better. It was despicable, but still non violent. If he is not physically dangerous for anyone, then the case for keeping him behind bars is weak ...
Most Americans don't see prison as a place we send people to reform them, we see prison as a place we send people to punish them.
Viewed in this light, the 18 year sentence (ensuring that with parole opportunities and overcrowding he will stay in prison at least 4-9 years), sees that he is "appropriately" punished, and others who might try and follow in his footsteps are deterred for fear of getting the same punishment.
The guy definitely deserves jail, no doubt about that. But for 18 years he literally could have killed someone or committed roughly three rapes.
It is also worth considering that the people actually doing the literal posting deserve some of the "credit" for the crime also. He facilitated, and that definitely can be illegal, however they too deserve culpability here.
I'd say this was a 1-3 year crime. With the people doing the literal postings also getting 6 months to 1.5 years a each.
PS - Maybe I lack the full facts of the case.
edit: Appears like some of the victims were under age and he used a "hacker" to steal revealing images somehow(?) from victims which got him 15 charges under CFAA.
Pay attention to the extortion aspect of it. Identity fraud and harassment are one thing, but directly extorting people has never been something you get off with a slap on the wrist.
Well it will be interesting what the actual term is, since in California the prisons are over crowded, the most anyone actually serves seems to be 1/2 their sentence [1], so 9 years. There are also changes all the time to the parole system [2] which try to relieve over crowding by getting non-violent offenders out early.
That said, the guy really did a lot of damage to a lot of people who will never get their life back the way they want too, and this has to weigh on the judge's mind as well.
six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft
so about 8 months each, if you want to think of it that way. He'll be up for parole in 6 or 8 years - I think, but it's late and I don't feel like reading through the rules now.
With reportedly 10,000 pictures posted, that's only 1.5 days per picture.
It's not murder, each incident is a lesser crime, but by replicating it manifold with the tool of the internet he magnified its impact by several orders of magnitude. He's responsible for using that tool and allowing it to grow to an extraordinary level of criminality and grief.
I'm sure if you could murder people en-masse from a website (or offer them "we won't murder you" service for a fee) that they would be getting much longer than 18 years...
I think the extortion played a big role in the sentencing. Hard to claim you didn't know they didn't want their pictures on the internet, if you're actively taking money from them to remove the pictures.
Not really. Being sentenced to incarceration at all is a relatively new phenomenon in human history. Imprisoning people used to just be what we did before the trial, if they were convicted the punishment was almost always something else.
Realistically, despite claims to the contrary, incarceration in the US at least has never actually been about rehabilitation. You had some puritans claiming that rehabilitation was the purpose, but that idea never really informed how incarceration was actually performed.
Think about it, the entire concept of sentencing somebody for "X number of years in prison, then you get released" is at odds with rehabilitation. Doctors don't set up treatment plans ahead of time like that; they don't say "well you have cancer so we are going to do chemotherapy for 6 months and then stop". No, they continuously monitor progress and modify the treatment with the most up to date information that they have on that person. If it takes 5 years, they'll give it 5 years. If at 5 years they still aren't better, they continue treatment.
Incarceration that is designed for rehabilitation is characterized by not having a set finite length. They keep the person until they are fixed, not release them after a predetermined amount of time despite no evidence of being cured. This is done in some cases, at mental health facilities in the US, and in other the criminal systems of other countries.
Breivik for example will be periodically reevaluated, and never released as long as he is not fixed. That is what incarceration for the purpose of rehabilitation looks like. Life imprisonment, with periodic review/parole consideration (preferably done by medical professionals, not random yahoos off the street).
> Incarceration that is designed for rehabilitation is characterized by not having a set finite length. They keep the person until they are fixed, not release them after a predetermined amount of time despite no evidence of being cured. This is done in some cases, at mental health facilities in the US, and in other the criminal systems of other countries.
In England a person who goes to trial but who is found to be insane will be diverted by the court to a forensic mental health unit. Prisoners who develop a severe mental illness during their sentence will be sent to a forensic unit. While there they are patients, not prisoners. When their illness is stabilised they get sent back to prison, unless they are too ill. So, someone operating under a psychosis will probably get stabilised and sent to prison; a person with a personality dosorder will probably stay in hospital. (This is just broad brush stroke generalisations). I have spoken to patients at two different medium secure units in the south-west of England. Most people said they would prefer to be in prison. One reason they gave was that in prison they had a sentence to serve, whereas in hospital it was treatment. (Other reasons given were better food in prison (something that shocked me, and that I raised with commissioners) and better activity programmes). (English people tend not to know that these important NHS facilities are often provided by private companies).
It's probably important to note the difference between people who commit violent crime because of their mental illness, and people who commit violent crime who happen to have a mental illness which played no part in their violence. Breivik appears to be the latter -- he had various diagnoses but was found not to be operating under a psychosis when he committed his murders.
It's an important difference. People with a mental illness, even a severe mental illness, are overwhelmingly not violent. But the constant linking of mental health words -- "crazed killer" -- and acts of violence act as a strongly stigmatising force. A person with a mental illness is far more likely to be the victim, not perpetrator of violent crime; a person with a mental illness is far more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else; mental illness is at best a weak predictor of violence.
The idea of rehabilitation, as I understand it anyway, is that anyone who commits crimes is "broken", "ill", or "maladjusted" in some way that may or may not be reversible (something is wrong with them, and we may be able to rehabilitate them).
If we actually designed a system with that assumption, then all criminals would be treated as England treats "insane" prisoners. They may not all to to a hospital specifically, but they would all go to some sort of treatment program that was designed to rehabilitate them. They would be released when rehabilitated, no sooner and no later.
This is pretty much my point in a nutshell: "One reason they gave was that in prison they had a sentence to serve, whereas in hospital it was treatment." What we do to people in prisons isn't a treatment (and I assert, never has been). If we actually designed our justice systems to first and foremost rehabilitate, all convicts would be on treatment plans.
Personally I think that we should get away from punishment entirely, and move to incapacitation complimented with rehabilitation.
That improves the situation in cases where rehabilitation has been successful, but does not recognize the possibility of rehabilitation not being complete (or successful at all) after the predetermined time limit has run out.
The reason we do not do that is that this would be refused by most people.
Someone steals something, you try to convince him not to do it, but you're 80% sure he'll do it again. Do you keep him in prison forever because he cannot be "rehabilitated"?
If he insists on repeatedly victimizing members of the public, and nothing our scientists and doctors can do will make him stop, then what other option is there? Even in our current system, such a person would just be in-and-out of jail for their whole life. What value does society get out of that, other than the incapacitation provided by his stints in the clink?
I really can't think of any value to retribution, so if we write it off we are left with rehabilitation, incapacitation, and deterrence^:
Rehabilitation: Doesn't work in this hypothetical scenario.
Incapacitation: Works. When he is in prison he is unable to reoffend.
Deterrence: Doesn't work in this hypothetical, because if it did then it could be seen as a form of rehabilitation.
That leaves us with incapacitation. What else could be done?
There's the problem; we would have to incarcerate him all his life, or kill him, which is unethical from the current life philosophy (for such a crime).
I'll break the mold in this thread by saying this outcome is ideal. At the core, this was a new kind of case. This sets a precedent for people who may try to replicate his business model, and it makes it seem less desirable. Sure, people could just do it internationally, etc, but this is a good outcome for a tenacious and abusive criminal.
edit: it is an injustice that people are jailed for minor crimes, it seems wild that this is longer than some murderers receive, but recognize that what effectively happened here's was the monetization of widespread psychological and social abuse. 18 years is likely less than the sum time his victims have spent trying to deal with the abuse he inflicted, willingly and for profit.
edit 2: removed downvote gripe, in response to feedback, previously the first paragraph ended with "Let the downvotes flow."
Given the tone of the thread when I posted this, it felt necessary. Reactions on HN are truly stochastic and if what I said before the defensive comment wasn't meaningful enough for you to upvote then I'm glad you downvoted it, it only reinforces how reactionary people can be.
Complaining about or goading downvotes turns a comment into a soapboxing whine. It's a juvenile debating tactic where if the author gets modded up they claim victory because of assent, and if the author gets modded down, they also claim victory because "I called it, you all suck!".
>it only reinforces how reactionary people can be
You're calling raldi reactionary even though the downvote was not for your 'meaningful comment', but because you literally asked to be downvoted?
I didn't ask to be downvoted I expressed my expectations. I didn't force anyone. Also, I've since made an edit.
Edit: on inspection of your profile you seem intimately aware of the gratuitous downvotes on HN. Why is pointing it out considered a faux pas? Why should we be goaded into not bringing it up?
Saying thigs like "I expect I'll get downvoted for this" guarantees downvotes - but those votes are for that part of the comment and not for the rest of the comment.
I've seen people say "I expect I'll get downvoted for this" but then say something bland and uncontroversial.
They say resist it, which is materially different from saying not to do it. Goading is another story entirely.
I will add that in practice, adding this defensive layer has had the opposite effect, it has resulted in more compassionate voting, rather than more downvotes, on my comments, which reinforces why I did it here and have done it in the past, so I question why it's such a big deal, to me, the big deal is the fact that there is an expectation of surprise downvotes, that you can't expect a discussion without driveby negative feedback is a sign of a very toxic community.
Since this is a point of contention, though, I'll try to resist in the future, but I still call out to anyone to ask of the community – why do you downvote so readily, rather than upvoting equally as readily? Check out the Wikipedia article for critical positivity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio – there's no reason we can't make HN a positive environment.
why do you downvote so readily, rather than upvoting equally as readily?
They don't. The vast majority of users have positive karma scores, including yourself. You just can't see positive votes for other users, as they're invisible. You're arguing from selection bias here. If you are interested in a higher quality conversation, then try out those guidelines.
You may also want to find better links when you want to support your argument - that wiki page starts out "The critical positivity ratio ... is a largely discredited concept", and most of the article is spent arguing against it.
No, my profile is talking about the braindead combination of "disagree" and "censor this comment" in the downvote button. People are free to disagree in my book, and in droves if they like, but a polite-yet-unpopular comment should not be pushed out of view.
I didn't force anyone.
I didn't say you did. If force is involved, it's not an 'invitation', but a 'summons'. In any case, if you think you can pass off "Let the [X] flow" as being something other than an encouragement for people to do X, perhaps you should consider a career in politics.
There is a strong precedent in the U.S. for aiming for the top end of the sentencing guidelines in cases of psychological cruelty.
That cruelty might not be a crime on its own (sometimes it is) but the logic is that deeply antisocial criminals should be kept away from society for longer. Or they need more time for rehab, or they should just be punished more harshly. Whichever explanation you accept.
Also, extortion has never been a minor crime. A long history of psychologically cruel extortion? It's hard to have sympathy for people who flaunt their own lack of it.
File this under "On personal level I like the outcome, but I am troubled enough by the way we got there and the wider implications". 18 years is just absurdly high.
California has crime victim compensation, but only for certain violent crimes; neither extortion nor identity theft qualify. http://vcgcb.ca.gov/victims/
Bollaert earned about $900 a month in website ad revenue and collected about $30,000 from victims.
Ha ha ha. Yelp and the Better Business Bureau laugh at him. This guy was an amateur in the extortion business, that's for sure. And he's paying for it with 18 years! Can you believe it? 18 years! He should have raped a nun while he was at it and got 19 years instead.
The US is a weirdly moralistic society. It is almost as if Americans pride themselves on punishing people as severely and brutally as possible. Perhaps in order to reinforce in our own minds how righteous a group of people we are.
18 years is absolutely insane. Utterly, terrifyingly insane. That's more than murder gets in many countries. That's more than rape gets. That's more than terrorism gets.
How long before someone just automates building these sort of websites on a prepared template. Who'll be punished then?
USA is one country under God, for liberty and justice for all... that includes the asshole who abused these women's privacy - which isn't only illegal, but immoral as well. He deserves to do time.
Having said that, 18 years does seem unusually harsh, as I know countries where the maximum penalty for murder is 25 years, 7 over and above what this guy got. Chances are the sentencing will be appealed and/or he will be able to get out on parole probably within a fraction of his sentence.
I think it's overly cruel as well, but it's worth noting that this is multiple counts of extortion and has done significant damage to quite a few people's lives.
By bad luck he happened to be the same person who also did something legal that they really didn't like and also something illegal. So his legal actions have caused an excessive sentence for the relatively minor crimes he was actually convicted of.
If embarrassing people was a crime, the ex-partners who gave him the photos would be charged too. Those people are even more at fault than him.
> If embarrassing people was a crime, the ex-partners who gave him the photos would be charged too.
It is a crime (disorderly conduct). See California Penal Code 647(j)(4). California Senate Bill No. 1255 made this into law.
> Any person who intentionally distributes the image of the intimate body part ... under circumstances in which the persons agree or understand that the image shall remain private, the person distributing the image knows or should know that distribution of the image will cause serious emotional distress, and the person depicted suffers that distress.
Convictions for the people who gave him the photos probably won't be news.
He did far more than just "embarrass people". He knowingly and willfully extorted people. He caused major psychological damage. How would you like someone to gather sexual images of you, attempt to extort you to keep them hidden, and then, when you didn't pay up, publish those pictures for the world to see. Would you feel as though you just let out a fart in public, or would it be someone worse?
27 counts of extortion is not a "relatively minor crime".
I feel like we've seen so many (genuine) cases of government overstep that we've been sensitized to see any crime involving the internet as "blown out of proportion." What this guy did was no better than a stereotypical Mafia protection racket.
To be fair, rape convictions result in a lifetime sentence in the US, with no chance of parole. The fact that convicted sexual offenders only spend a portion of their sentence in jail (the sad irony being that we send them there to be raped and beaten) does little to commute the effect of these lifetime sentences.
> 18 years is absolutely insane. Utterly, terrifyingly insane.
Why exactly are you terrified?
> That's more than murder gets in many countries. That's more than rape gets. That's more than terrorism gets.
Orange and Apples.
In my understanding Kevin Christopher Bollaert developed a business case where he invited people on a global scale to harm other people. Then in a second step he took advantage of the miserable situation of those victims.
Why do you and other people in this thread fail to see the highly destructive element of this crime? The problem is not just the quality of the crime, where victims experience severe violations of their privacy, it's also the potential quantitity because this business model is only successfull if a lot of people participate.
Because disproportionate punishment on one crime could result in disproportionate punishment on another. In particular with how the US has been fearmongering "cybercrime" recently, before we know it someone gets a 10+ year sentence for an SQL injection.
> That's more than murder gets in many countries.
>> Orange and Apples.
Indeed it is. So why is apples getting a similar punishment to orange? That's the problem, that they are orange and apples, but yet get punished the same. Where is the logic in that?
> Why do you and other people in this thread fail to see the highly destructive element of this crime?
That's a strawman. Nobody is arguing that he shouldn't have been jailed, nobody. Therefore there is no way you can claim that people think what he did isn't "highly destructive." They just don't think it is on the same "level" as murder, multiple rapes, or beating two people to within an inch of their lives.
You know what else was highly destructive? Wallstreet fraud. How many people lost their jobs? Lost their homes? Literally committed suicide? And how many of them went to jail for a single year let alone eighteen? None.
The legal system is corrupt and inconsistent. That's a genuine problem and one people are right to complain about.
Then as a third step he profited from this harm, he extorted further payments from victims to stop being harmed, and proved his utterly lack of interest, care, remorse or empathy for anyone involved.
18 years for running such a disgusting website and then blackmailing victims for cash to have the images removed is insane? Do you stop and think about the victims of this asshole? People that have their lives irreversibly ruined because of his profiteering? I think this is a perfectly reasonable punishment for such a coward.
I can kind of understand the extortion charges, but from what evidence did the charges of identity theft stem? Seems like an unusual charge unless he was involved in doing more than just hosting revenge porn.
authorities say he ran afoul of state laws against identity theft, which prevent even simple personal information like names and addresses from being used "for any unlawful purpose, including with the intent to annoy or harass."
Sounds like the legislature mixed in some privacy crimes and gave them a misleading name.
Shouldn't the people who posted the photos be really paying the price? My guess is that the guy's lawyers might have invoked the strong defense that they were just the hosting company, they didn't created or owned the material and that they just wanted to allow their users to express with freedom. I guess the core mistake he made was not allowing "Flag this" button on his website because obviously he wanted to monetize this and that would have made his defense very weak because it simply means he was running a public exhortation service company.
When you do think about legally risky startup ideas, one way to figure out the "badness" is to use the old world analogy: Let's say you ran a company in 1960 that accepts nude photos of your ex by postal mail and makes call to your ex that if they don't pay $300 then the photos would be in newspaper. Would you be punished for running such company? Of course, you will. However 18 yrs is insane. Looking at his income of $30,000 looks like he probably managed to get money from 100 victims. Considering 1 week of pain to get it removed, this still would come out to ~2 years in prison. To compare, people doing Enron billion dollar frauds got less than that.
I think you haven't really been following these cases. To his victims, it was far from "1 week of pain"... his actions cost people their jobs and damaged their relationships. 100 victims only counts the ones who paid, I suspect many wouldn't. You can argue that the posters should pay the price, and they should, but Bollaert is also culpable. Just like I would be culpable if I offered a "bank robbery getaway driver" service.
And let's be honest here, the masterminds behind Enron didn't get the punishment they were due. But they were rich and well-connected. Miscarriage of justice, sure, but a bad comparison.
It's 18 years because US prosecutors want to set an example for a new category of cases, and this guy is neither rich nor well-connected.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadWhat was the nature of the counts for identity fraud?
Soliciting compromising photos, and then extorting people to have them removed. He effectively started a criminal organization. A stupid, poorly hidden white collar criminal enterprise, but one nonetheless. Not much different from sending muscle to collect protection money.
But this isn't that long, in relation to others, if you consider that this amounts to a criminal enterprise with many multiple, provable victims.
He wastes government money, he will come out without job or ability to be reintegrated into the society ...
Viewed in this light, the 18 year sentence (ensuring that with parole opportunities and overcrowding he will stay in prison at least 4-9 years), sees that he is "appropriately" punished, and others who might try and follow in his footsteps are deterred for fear of getting the same punishment.
The guy definitely deserves jail, no doubt about that. But for 18 years he literally could have killed someone or committed roughly three rapes.
It is also worth considering that the people actually doing the literal posting deserve some of the "credit" for the crime also. He facilitated, and that definitely can be illegal, however they too deserve culpability here.
I'd say this was a 1-3 year crime. With the people doing the literal postings also getting 6 months to 1.5 years a each.
PS - Maybe I lack the full facts of the case.
edit: Appears like some of the victims were under age and he used a "hacker" to steal revealing images somehow(?) from victims which got him 15 charges under CFAA.
Pay attention to the extortion aspect of it. Identity fraud and harassment are one thing, but directly extorting people has never been something you get off with a slap on the wrist.
That said, the guy really did a lot of damage to a lot of people who will never get their life back the way they want too, and this has to weigh on the judge's mind as well.
[1] http://blog.la-criminal-defense.com/how-credit-for-time-serv... -- note he doesn't have to register as a 'sex offender'
[2] http://www.shouselaw.com/parolehub.html
so about 8 months each, if you want to think of it that way. He'll be up for parole in 6 or 8 years - I think, but it's late and I don't feel like reading through the rules now.
It's not murder, each incident is a lesser crime, but by replicating it manifold with the tool of the internet he magnified its impact by several orders of magnitude. He's responsible for using that tool and allowing it to grow to an extraordinary level of criminality and grief.
Jail once was for this purpose, you know.
Realistically, despite claims to the contrary, incarceration in the US at least has never actually been about rehabilitation. You had some puritans claiming that rehabilitation was the purpose, but that idea never really informed how incarceration was actually performed.
Think about it, the entire concept of sentencing somebody for "X number of years in prison, then you get released" is at odds with rehabilitation. Doctors don't set up treatment plans ahead of time like that; they don't say "well you have cancer so we are going to do chemotherapy for 6 months and then stop". No, they continuously monitor progress and modify the treatment with the most up to date information that they have on that person. If it takes 5 years, they'll give it 5 years. If at 5 years they still aren't better, they continue treatment.
Incarceration that is designed for rehabilitation is characterized by not having a set finite length. They keep the person until they are fixed, not release them after a predetermined amount of time despite no evidence of being cured. This is done in some cases, at mental health facilities in the US, and in other the criminal systems of other countries.
Breivik for example will be periodically reevaluated, and never released as long as he is not fixed. That is what incarceration for the purpose of rehabilitation looks like. Life imprisonment, with periodic review/parole consideration (preferably done by medical professionals, not random yahoos off the street).
In England a person who goes to trial but who is found to be insane will be diverted by the court to a forensic mental health unit. Prisoners who develop a severe mental illness during their sentence will be sent to a forensic unit. While there they are patients, not prisoners. When their illness is stabilised they get sent back to prison, unless they are too ill. So, someone operating under a psychosis will probably get stabilised and sent to prison; a person with a personality dosorder will probably stay in hospital. (This is just broad brush stroke generalisations). I have spoken to patients at two different medium secure units in the south-west of England. Most people said they would prefer to be in prison. One reason they gave was that in prison they had a sentence to serve, whereas in hospital it was treatment. (Other reasons given were better food in prison (something that shocked me, and that I raised with commissioners) and better activity programmes). (English people tend not to know that these important NHS facilities are often provided by private companies).
It's probably important to note the difference between people who commit violent crime because of their mental illness, and people who commit violent crime who happen to have a mental illness which played no part in their violence. Breivik appears to be the latter -- he had various diagnoses but was found not to be operating under a psychosis when he committed his murders.
It's an important difference. People with a mental illness, even a severe mental illness, are overwhelmingly not violent. But the constant linking of mental health words -- "crazed killer" -- and acts of violence act as a strongly stigmatising force. A person with a mental illness is far more likely to be the victim, not perpetrator of violent crime; a person with a mental illness is far more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else; mental illness is at best a weak predictor of violence.
If we actually designed a system with that assumption, then all criminals would be treated as England treats "insane" prisoners. They may not all to to a hospital specifically, but they would all go to some sort of treatment program that was designed to rehabilitate them. They would be released when rehabilitated, no sooner and no later.
This is pretty much my point in a nutshell: "One reason they gave was that in prison they had a sentence to serve, whereas in hospital it was treatment." What we do to people in prisons isn't a treatment (and I assert, never has been). If we actually designed our justice systems to first and foremost rehabilitate, all convicts would be on treatment plans.
Personally I think that we should get away from punishment entirely, and move to incapacitation complimented with rehabilitation.
Well, that is why sentences are reduced for things such as "good conduct".
Someone steals something, you try to convince him not to do it, but you're 80% sure he'll do it again. Do you keep him in prison forever because he cannot be "rehabilitated"?
I really can't think of any value to retribution, so if we write it off we are left with rehabilitation, incapacitation, and deterrence^:
Rehabilitation: Doesn't work in this hypothetical scenario.
Incapacitation: Works. When he is in prison he is unable to reoffend.
Deterrence: Doesn't work in this hypothetical, because if it did then it could be seen as a form of rehabilitation.
That leaves us with incapacitation. What else could be done?
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment#Possible_reasons_for...
People that just want murderers to rot forever are not as major, but they're still a problem.
When prison makes people worse, something has gone very wrong.
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN.
edit: it is an injustice that people are jailed for minor crimes, it seems wild that this is longer than some murderers receive, but recognize that what effectively happened here's was the monetization of widespread psychological and social abuse. 18 years is likely less than the sum time his victims have spent trying to deal with the abuse he inflicted, willingly and for profit.
edit 2: removed downvote gripe, in response to feedback, previously the first paragraph ended with "Let the downvotes flow."
Sorry, but that's an automatic "stop reading and downvote" in my book.
See the last two items: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>it only reinforces how reactionary people can be
You're calling raldi reactionary even though the downvote was not for your 'meaningful comment', but because you literally asked to be downvoted?
Edit: on inspection of your profile you seem intimately aware of the gratuitous downvotes on HN. Why is pointing it out considered a faux pas? Why should we be goaded into not bringing it up?
People commenting are asking you to not do it.
Saying thigs like "I expect I'll get downvoted for this" guarantees downvotes - but those votes are for that part of the comment and not for the rest of the comment.
I've seen people say "I expect I'll get downvoted for this" but then say something bland and uncontroversial.
I will add that in practice, adding this defensive layer has had the opposite effect, it has resulted in more compassionate voting, rather than more downvotes, on my comments, which reinforces why I did it here and have done it in the past, so I question why it's such a big deal, to me, the big deal is the fact that there is an expectation of surprise downvotes, that you can't expect a discussion without driveby negative feedback is a sign of a very toxic community.
Since this is a point of contention, though, I'll try to resist in the future, but I still call out to anyone to ask of the community – why do you downvote so readily, rather than upvoting equally as readily? Check out the Wikipedia article for critical positivity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_positivity_ratio – there's no reason we can't make HN a positive environment.
They don't. The vast majority of users have positive karma scores, including yourself. You just can't see positive votes for other users, as they're invisible. You're arguing from selection bias here. If you are interested in a higher quality conversation, then try out those guidelines.
You may also want to find better links when you want to support your argument - that wiki page starts out "The critical positivity ratio ... is a largely discredited concept", and most of the article is spent arguing against it.
I didn't force anyone.
I didn't say you did. If force is involved, it's not an 'invitation', but a 'summons'. In any case, if you think you can pass off "Let the [X] flow" as being something other than an encouragement for people to do X, perhaps you should consider a career in politics.
Yeah, it would be funny to read a business plan or YC application. How could anyone think this type of "business" was a good idea?
edit: Actually a Judge must sentence a non parole period of at least 10 yrs and up to 25, but it differs between states.
That cruelty might not be a crime on its own (sometimes it is) but the logic is that deeply antisocial criminals should be kept away from society for longer. Or they need more time for rehab, or they should just be punished more harshly. Whichever explanation you accept.
Also, extortion has never been a minor crime. A long history of psychologically cruel extortion? It's hard to have sympathy for people who flaunt their own lack of it.
Bollaert earned about $900 a month in website ad revenue and collected about $30,000 from victims.
Ha ha ha. Yelp and the Better Business Bureau laugh at him. This guy was an amateur in the extortion business, that's for sure. And he's paying for it with 18 years! Can you believe it? 18 years! He should have raped a nun while he was at it and got 19 years instead.
18 years is absolutely insane. Utterly, terrifyingly insane. That's more than murder gets in many countries. That's more than rape gets. That's more than terrorism gets.
How long before someone just automates building these sort of websites on a prepared template. Who'll be punished then?
Having said that, 18 years does seem unusually harsh, as I know countries where the maximum penalty for murder is 25 years, 7 over and above what this guy got. Chances are the sentencing will be appealed and/or he will be able to get out on parole probably within a fraction of his sentence.
You conflate justice with punishment, when the whole premise of the parent comment what that such a term is not "just".
They are necessarily conflated.
If embarrassing people was a crime, the ex-partners who gave him the photos would be charged too. Those people are even more at fault than him.
It is a crime (disorderly conduct). See California Penal Code 647(j)(4). California Senate Bill No. 1255 made this into law.
> Any person who intentionally distributes the image of the intimate body part ... under circumstances in which the persons agree or understand that the image shall remain private, the person distributing the image knows or should know that distribution of the image will cause serious emotional distress, and the person depicted suffers that distress.
Convictions for the people who gave him the photos probably won't be news.
I feel like we've seen so many (genuine) cases of government overstep that we've been sensitized to see any crime involving the internet as "blown out of proportion." What this guy did was no better than a stereotypical Mafia protection racket.
To be fair, rape convictions result in a lifetime sentence in the US, with no chance of parole. The fact that convicted sexual offenders only spend a portion of their sentence in jail (the sad irony being that we send them there to be raped and beaten) does little to commute the effect of these lifetime sentences.
Why exactly are you terrified?
> That's more than murder gets in many countries. That's more than rape gets. That's more than terrorism gets.
Orange and Apples.
In my understanding Kevin Christopher Bollaert developed a business case where he invited people on a global scale to harm other people. Then in a second step he took advantage of the miserable situation of those victims.
Why do you and other people in this thread fail to see the highly destructive element of this crime? The problem is not just the quality of the crime, where victims experience severe violations of their privacy, it's also the potential quantitity because this business model is only successfull if a lot of people participate.
> Why exactly are you terrified?
Because disproportionate punishment on one crime could result in disproportionate punishment on another. In particular with how the US has been fearmongering "cybercrime" recently, before we know it someone gets a 10+ year sentence for an SQL injection.
> That's more than murder gets in many countries.
>> Orange and Apples.
Indeed it is. So why is apples getting a similar punishment to orange? That's the problem, that they are orange and apples, but yet get punished the same. Where is the logic in that?
> Why do you and other people in this thread fail to see the highly destructive element of this crime?
That's a strawman. Nobody is arguing that he shouldn't have been jailed, nobody. Therefore there is no way you can claim that people think what he did isn't "highly destructive." They just don't think it is on the same "level" as murder, multiple rapes, or beating two people to within an inch of their lives.
You know what else was highly destructive? Wallstreet fraud. How many people lost their jobs? Lost their homes? Literally committed suicide? And how many of them went to jail for a single year let alone eighteen? None.
The legal system is corrupt and inconsistent. That's a genuine problem and one people are right to complain about.
Since there were thousands of separate victims, I think that thinking of it as "one crime" doesn't really do it justice.
"For the lulz".
His platform was merely an enabler and the nude photos could have been also posted elsewhere.
authorities say he ran afoul of state laws against identity theft, which prevent even simple personal information like names and addresses from being used "for any unlawful purpose, including with the intent to annoy or harass."
Sounds like the legislature mixed in some privacy crimes and gave them a misleading name.
When you do think about legally risky startup ideas, one way to figure out the "badness" is to use the old world analogy: Let's say you ran a company in 1960 that accepts nude photos of your ex by postal mail and makes call to your ex that if they don't pay $300 then the photos would be in newspaper. Would you be punished for running such company? Of course, you will. However 18 yrs is insane. Looking at his income of $30,000 looks like he probably managed to get money from 100 victims. Considering 1 week of pain to get it removed, this still would come out to ~2 years in prison. To compare, people doing Enron billion dollar frauds got less than that.
I think you haven't really been following these cases. To his victims, it was far from "1 week of pain"... his actions cost people their jobs and damaged their relationships. 100 victims only counts the ones who paid, I suspect many wouldn't. You can argue that the posters should pay the price, and they should, but Bollaert is also culpable. Just like I would be culpable if I offered a "bank robbery getaway driver" service.
And let's be honest here, the masterminds behind Enron didn't get the punishment they were due. But they were rich and well-connected. Miscarriage of justice, sure, but a bad comparison.
It's 18 years because US prosecutors want to set an example for a new category of cases, and this guy is neither rich nor well-connected.