Yeah, but we don't want "elimination", we want justice. And we have set up a procedure for delivering justice which cannot be dismissed as "bureaucracy". The laws and procedures for enforcing them have been developed taking into consideration tons of matters and responding to tons of real world feedback on how to be improved.
They are not perfect, far for it, but for the scope and extend that they cover, they are way better than what any vigilante jerk's version of "elimination" or "payback" is.
For example what stops me of adding your name in the exposed list of names, and ruining your life? I don't even have to do it with malice, maybe I'm just a nut that I am convinced that you too are a pedophile and see the addition of your name as justified.
Ha! Ironically enough, the namecalling part you're pointing out now, is the result of my loosening-up on my own self-editorial controls, because I knew this part of the thread wouldn't end up seeing much daylight, and I started treating it as a one-on-one correspondence! (And I was still rushing a bit.)
What I'm getting at is more that making offenders into victims is precisely the intent of the whole system. It's not that the categories are supposed to be mutually exclusive, it's that we are trying to make them as close as possible to 100% mutually overlapping. (If they were 100% mutually exclusive that would mean one class of people was victimizing another class and getting away with it.)
Now... is it cruel to do this? Probably. It might be nothing more than vengeance. Does it lead to recidivism ("cycle of violence")? Yup. But it exists for the benefit of the victims. (Does it actually benefit the victims? Not necessarily. It doesn't bring back their murdered relatives for example. But at least they have a sense that they live in a just world where someone's looking out for them.)
So in other words it is intentionally cruel. Which is why, if anyone is worried about the cruelty of the system, there are ways of staying out of its jaws, mostly involving not being a jerk to your fellow man in the first place. (Does this guarantee you won't be wrongly convicted or even stop-and-frisked? No.)
Anyway you're doing your editorial job and I don't particularly mind being detached from the thread -- actually I'm sort of enjoying this part now. But there are basic parts of who I am that don't fit in with Hacker News, too.
Sure, but it's always much more frustrating and disappointing when those tasked with protecting the innocent end up ruining innocent lives. In particular, it's frustrating that better auditing procedures and transparency would prevent things like this from happening.
It's also scary how, due to the persistence of (mis)information on the internet, it is possible to end up with (either undeserved or at least excessive) notoriety that follows you across the world with little chance of escape. Who the hell is going to hire someone when a google search of their name mentions that they were arrested on pedophilia charges? Never mind whether they were innocent.
[edit: as another poster pointed out, it seems his partner was not the pedophile, but rather that their shared IP address, which was registered to her, was the incorrectly entered value]
I disagree. I strongly think the justice system should be first and foremost protecting victims and not exposing them to more harm.
That would encourage victims to not bring wrongdoings to trial in fear of their personal info being exposed.
If someone is convicted, then yeah, go ahead and put them on a sex offender registry with their address. Loss of privacy is a consequence of their actions. That's justice.
But goddamn no don't put the victim's address in public view.
Reporting to the law enforcement and removing a "number" are not mutually exclusive. But law enforcement has got their hands full with the more illegal stuff already. So leaving the not too difficult to detect - simple spam, scam and malware to the registrars and hosts to deal with - is not ridiculous.
I'm really sorry, but this infrastructure has functioned for more than two decades. It takes a massive amount of manhours daily to deal with abuse. How can you unironically defend and claim that a system that removes most punitive measures will be good or usable? Is it delusion or naivety?
This is irrelevant to my post. Would removing all transparency from it help, or make it worse? Are there better-regarded ones that don't reveal anything whatsoever to the accused and convicted, because that'd make it so hard to stop criminals that everything would fall apart?
[EDIT] My point is simply that somehow we manage in basically every other space to let those accused of wrongdoing know what we think they did that looked like wrongdoing, but somehow when it's an Internet giant calling the shots that's just impossible and waaaaah too hard and the sky would fall if they ever treated anyone with any amount of humanity and respect. I think it's grade-A bullshit and they've just figured out they can get away with being assholes at scale and no-one will make them stop.
Agreed, it's not hard to identify those at the source or root of most of the worlds problems. It would be great, but I think it would be very hard to permit and allow the Internet vengeance machine to only be unleashed on these select targets and to be restrained and forbidden on lesser offences, because the vengeance machine just wants righteous vengeance and doesn't care if the target is a lesser offender.
When accusing someone of a crime that serious you tread with care. There is no 'undo' button on that operation.
I can sneak large numbers of files on to your computer without your notice (you'll have to trust me on that one, I'm not going to explain here how for obvious reasons, but if you want we can correspond by email about it, I'm sure I'm not the only HN'er that can think of tricks like that but I don't want to give the less capable ideas), one phone call later to some anonymous reporting facility and you'd be in a world of trouble.
It shouldn't be that easy to ruin somebody's life.
If a case isn't iron clad why spook the suspect (after all, simply monitoring them would give you hard proof or reason enough to drop the case quietly, maybe issue a warning that the guys card was cloned, which after all is what the police was for).
In the current system you might as well be guilty, even when you are not.
I personally hate child pornographers with a vengeance, for very good reason (they occasionally use my websites as their means of transportation), but I hate sloppy police work even more.
If any part of the site is meant to assassinate my character, I could sue you for defamation in the necessary jurisdiction. Alternatively, I could work to improve the SEO scores of my personal and professional pages, acknowledge that you are attempting to character assassinate me in my pages, and move on with my life. The problem is that in reality what's happening is that people who made stupid mistakes as teenagers are now realizing that their arrest record is searchable, and I feel terrible for them, but wouldn't it be better dealt with by passing laws to thwart the arrest record sites rather than forcing every site that indexes content to delist on a case-by-case basis.
Just to make this discussion more globally relevant:
A 'sex offender registry' is a whole different problem. Don't want to troll here, but please understand that in a global forum like this a remark a la 'at the very least' combined with a debatable ~local~ set of law(s) is a dangerous thing. In other words: No, I hope that at the very least no one ends up in any registry.
I'm all for prosecuting/convicting these people. I'm against any kind of (public) register, period.
You assume that the legal system is infallible. I don't think it should purged from the public record or search engines. This whole thing reminds me of 1984, where the government alters events in the past by essentially controlling information.
I don't like that people are wrongly charged with a crime either. I think as more information about people becomes made available, our culture will shift to become more permissive as to appropriate behavior. As the sexual revolution brought about attitudes towards personal relationships, I think eventually society will be more forgiving with the information available online about a person.
Abusers make new accounts, and they search you from public computers. Abusers are human, they can think around incomplete protections. Honestly I'm personally of the opinion that the best way to deal with abusive people is to shoot them, several times, and possibly stake and burn the corpse, but the law gets grumpy. So second best is taking a new name and making a new life, and I don't agree that people ought to have vanish themselves from the internet just to preserve Facebook's fetish for government-issued names.
The issue here is two fold: if you committed a simple offence like -say- shop lifting at some point of your life, get caught, get punished, regret it then you try to make things right and get back to society. Having a permanent record of that in the internet can pretty much destroy your life even though you didn't kill anybody. We are all humans, we all make mistakes. On the other hand, if it is okay for courts to make things "disappear" from internet gates like Google then any ambitious politician\lawyer with zero concern for public interest can make the internet his pet by hiding some of his history from the public and any dictator can mask everything they do even if their citizens use proxies to bypass their firewalls. In my personal opinion, the most practical way to address this is to prevent publishing names on newspapers for offenders in minor offences as opposed to hiding Google's search results.
So now we need to solve a problem in the legal system?
Doesn't it get to a point where you can't solve any problems because of the other systems they're tied to?
How about we just agree from a moral perspective that:
1. Anonymous defamation etc. is cowardly and should be persecuted appropriately.
2. Maintaining reasonable privacy is something we should strive for, and that it should be just as important as #1.
3. A legal system needs to be in place that we can trust to maintain both #1 and #2.
Those are our requirements. Now I'm not saying we're going to solve it right here and now, but thinking about it this way, as a problem requiring a solution and not a big wall we can't get past, definitely isn't going to hurt.
I don't know any of the people involved here, but I would rather see this handled by the law than by an Internet lynch mob. The law maybe impotent and incompetent at times, but it's the best we have for dealing with criminal behavior.
You're missing the point, it's not a case of "we've identified zirgs as someone we want to punish so let's go through their browser history to find a reason to do it" a tyrannical government hardly needs to go to such lengths as you point out. The nightmare scenario is you get people in power who say "we can make the world a better place if we just eliminate all the people who do X" and they have the digital tools to simply filter all citizens by X and get a nice big list they can hand out to the secret police.
When someone is in court on charges of child abuse, maybe we don't want them to know in case they (After serving their sentence) or their friends go for reprisals. Maybe the next child abuser might know their likely avenue of getting caught. Yet still we tell them the charges and evidence and give them a chance to defend themselves. Often in my country, given the damage such allegations could cause to both the victim and alleged (but not yet proven) perpetrator, we don't even reveal the identities of culprits until there's a guilty verdict.
If we can extend that courtesy to people accused of child abuse, surely we should extend it to people accused of internet spam?
I agree that people should face the consequence of their actions - heinous acts warrant a response.
What I can't get behind, is people sifting through the entire (online and offline) history of people, in the hopes of finding some evidence of wrongdoing, no mater how small or trivial, and then starting a cancel campaign. That kind of behavior is just plain creepy and stalkerish, bordering the psychotic.
They are not perfect, far for it, but for the scope and extend that they cover, they are way better than what any vigilante jerk's version of "elimination" or "payback" is.
For example what stops me of adding your name in the exposed list of names, and ruining your life? I don't even have to do it with malice, maybe I'm just a nut that I am convinced that you too are a pedophile and see the addition of your name as justified.
reply