Originally by: riddick Liddell
If he isn't involved I hope they have the brains and common sense to let him go. Lulz wins if they turn this in to a witch hunt.
Some would say turning it into a witch hunt is the entire point. You haven't figured out how this whole "free society" thing actually works yet have you? The idea is to ignore and or encourage something in order that a whole bunch of people become angry about it, then you step forward with new legislation that solves everybody's problems. Sometimes referred to as the "Hegelian dialectic" (Named after the famous German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Dialectic) of problem-reaction-solution. Thus, in order to introduce policies that would otherwise be rejected by the public government may synthesize or through omission of action allow to escalate a problem that the desired policy could solve - generally as a side effect of the policy and unrelated to the policy's true intent.
For example, if you wanted to pass a law whereby all internet users had to identify themselves with their social security numbers and consent to having all their online words and deeds recorded for all time potentially to be used as evidence against them - kind of like when you're arrested - then it might be efficacious to instigate a wave of "hacking" against services guaranteed to annoy large numbers of people. Paranoid governments with some remaining elements of legacy oversight, such as in D.C., might take a more "hands off" approach and simply encourage the disruption by, say, declaring that script kiddies are carrying out an "act of war" - with all the obvious threats that entails. That is sure to generate a reaction, followed by the prepackaged, ready-made, and innovative cook-chill solution: Throw somebody in jail.
That's it in a nutshell. You people will be happy to see script kiddies jailed, let alone bombed, and pay whatever social price that costs so long as your ability to amuse yourself with games, tv and other trivia while not working or shopping remains uninterrupted.
What is important at the moment, is the government can be seen to be acting. They care even less than you do about the people they arrest and don't waste a whole of money on checking if they've got the right guy or not. Anybody will do, so long as they fit the part and are not wealthy enough to defend themselves. Just so long as somebody is found to blame, and thrown in jail, then the voters will be happy. Everybody will have forgotten all about it within a week - except the guy in jail of course - but will retain warm and cosy feelings of how quickly the government stepped in to defend their right to spend their lives on trivia.
In five or ten years time when the verdicts get over-turned and the tax-payers are made to pay compensation nobody will remember why the guy was busted in the first place, and even less will they care. "Well, justice was done in the end", they'll say, then go and max out another credit card to pay down the interest on the previous one.
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