The argument against this is that, to be guilty, one must have committed a crime. While Turing did break a law, breaking laws doesn't and shouldn't equate with committing crimes. People break laws all the time doing things that should not be considered a crime. There are all sorts of mitigating factors, including the mental state of the individual breaking the law and the justness of the law itself.

Imagine that you see a disoriented, elderly person in the street with a large truck inbound. You can break the law and save the elderly person by not making use of a cross walk, or you could let the elderly person get hit by a truck. What are you going to do? Probably save the person. Should you receive a ticket from the officer far enough away to see what happened but not to save the person himself? No, of course not. Despite the fact that you broke the law by not using a cross walk, you didn't commit any crime.

I think it's important to remember that, in order for this movement to be successful, the entire surveillance apparatus needs to be dismantled - not just the US component of it. The US is a terrible offender when it comes to mass surveillance, but the UK is just as bad. If we also don't restrict the actions of the GCHQ and other entities, it would be pretty easy for the US to farm the intelligence work out to foreign countries by making sure that all communications are being routed overseas. It's easy to imagine a deal where the US and UK only collect metadata about foreign communications (which include UK communications rerouted through the US to make them foreign and US communications rerouted through the UK) with the intent of sharing that data in an intelligence partnership.

So... why am I not rioting? Well, I live in the middle of no where and there aren't enough of us TO riot. If I could have attended the anti-NSA protests in Washington, I would have... and I think this is a general problem with US protests. Our country is too large for large protests to be easy from a logistical prospective and the current protest movement hasn't addressed the logistics in the same way that former protest movements have.

Beyond that, I also think that the system fundamentally works. Call me crazy - and there are plenty that do - but I believe that voters still have the power to cause change. I can vote for leaders that will restrict the NSA's actions. Unfortunately, believing in the system means that there isn't much I can do when it comes to restricting the actions of the GCHQ. The best I can do is not give the UK my tourism, despite a life long dream of visiting London.

I think there's real problem here when it comes to understanding the subject matter. I suspect the those pesky real journalists probably don't enough about the tech side of things to ask the questions they really need to be asking in order to debunk this.

Well, there's a couple of technical problems with that. While I'm certainly not a lawyer, I have informally discussed the issue with a friend of mine that is a lawyer. He raised a few of the following points, which I've supplemented.

First, it's not clear that this is actually theft. The crime of theft typically denies the owner of the property access to the property, which isn't the case with electronic documents. Rather, it's more likely to be a violation of the No Electronic Theft (NET) act. NET criminalizes copyright infringement. This may not be a bad approach given what kind of punishments one sees for copyright infringement Massachusetts. More often, the punishment for copyright infringement is fines and I think the prosecutor was looking for jail time.

As far as breaking and entering goes, that seems doubtful. The networking closet he accessed was unlocked. In fact, a homeless man used the area to store belongings. Again, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me that breaking and entering would be difficult to argue. Trespassing might be a more successful charge. Trespassing, though, is a relatively minor offense that's unlikely to produce a lengthy jail sentence.

I wonder how long it will be before a company attempts to make a DoS case against someone for visiting a site once. I could see the prosecutor in the Aaron Swartz case trying this. He was conducting a denial of service attack simply by visiting the download site for those academic journal articles. It just wasn't a very good DoS attack.

That's definitely fair response.

First: While he may have some assaults on his record, he wasn't arrested for doing some kind of violent hacking. In fact, with the exception of the insulin and pacemaker hacks, it's hard to see what a violent hack would actually be.

Second: He actually did uncover some government wrongdoing.

Third: I agree that a second offense should be punished more harshly. That being said, 10 years is way too harsh even for a second offense. His first sentence was also too harsh. You don't see these kinds of punishments for other white collar crimes, do you?

You might want to read my post a little more carefully. I realize that it's easy to skip over the first sentence, where I stated that "I don't see anyone saying that hackers aren't criminals or that Jeremy Hammond doesn't deserve to go to prison."

The claim that I was making was that the prison sentence was excessive (probably because the Judge's husband was a victim of the crime). Somewhere in the 2-4 year range would probably make more sense.

I'm certainly no expert in the history of South Africa, but didn't Mandela consistently deny ever being a part of the organization involved in those bombing and violent acts? Of course, I'm sure the 1960s South African government would never have dreamed of fabricating evidence.

I don't see anyone saying that hackers aren't criminals or that Jeremy Hammond didn't deserve to go to prison. What they're saying is that criminals and dangerous people are sets that overlap, but that don't totally overlap. Or, another way to put it: Criminals aren't dangerous. Dangerous criminals are dangerous. Some hackers might be dangerous. Some hackers might not be dangerous. For hackers that are dangerous, 10 years in prison might be appropriate. For hackers that aren't dangerous, like those engaged in political protest, 10 years in prison is overkill.

Tyranny? No way. This is 'murica, the land of the free. The government was just exercising the freedom it has to seize his stuff.