> "We have a 99.6 percent conviction rate in cybercrime"
I'm sure he sees absolutely nothing weird in that. The Spanish Inquisition managed to get similar rates. I'm very surprised the Dutch (as in: my) government is agreeing to this extradition. It's very well possible that this is in part because of the current animosity between Putin and the rest of the world.
It's quite possible the guy is guilty but Ari Baranoff is on the record as having said that he will not be given a fair trial.
> I'm sure he sees absolutely nothing weird in that.
If this were a discussion of Japanese conviction rates based primarily on (coerced) confessions or something like that, then yes, a 99.6% conviction rate would be suspicious. But you have to remember two things here:
(1) 99.6% is not that much higher than the usual federal prosecution rates (I think they get a net of ~96% when I looked it up a few months for a different discussion),
(2) and when Baranoff says “We don’t build our cases on one piece of evidence. Our cases are built on evidence that is curated over many years. We take our time to build these cases to make sure we have them right.” (the part you didn't quote), he's not kidding. That's exactly what they do with cyber-crime cases. They spend years investigating an organization or figure, flipping people, running markets or forums, extracting records from ISPs and Amazon and Google, and so on and so forth. Look at the whole tangle of carding cases in the 2000s with cardingplanet/shadowcrew/etc. For that matter, look at the Ulbricht Silk Road case right now - the agencies involved spent years busting random vendors, looting people's emails (eg Ashley Barr's Gmail was searched on only the vaguest possible suspicion), flipping multiple employees... Read the trial transcripts if you have a few days to spare.
If anything, I'd say that a rate of 99.6% says bad things about them, but for an entirely different reason than you: because it implies that they're inefficiently overdoing their cases, goldplating them & gilding the lily.
The person we're talking about in this thread is accused of a spectacular crime: playing an instrumental role in the theft of millions of identities from several of the largest companies in the world, for profit.
What's the role "plea bargaining" plays here? He could legitimately be facing a double-digit custodial sentence no matter how cooperative he is.
Since when is being accused equivalent to being guilty because the crime is spectacular? How spectacular a crime is should have very little to do with the judicial proceedings.
> He could legitimately be facing a double-digit custodial sentence no matter how cooperative he is.
That's roughly the problem right there.
For all I know he's as guilty as they come. But on the off chance that he's not guilty there is an extremely large chance that that will never be taken into serious consideration because of the plea bargaining system. It basically makes the justice system a casino where the house wins when you refuse to play and will likely win bigger when you do.
Do you truly believe that a Russian 'hacker' on American soil in the current political climate will be given a fair trial?
I put a really simple question to you, and you responded with a smokescreen of random questions. I won't answer them. I will, however, repeat the question I asked, rephrased an expanded:
A 20 year old street level cannabis dealer caught with a couple eighths could be faced with a plea structure requiring them to choose between a felony guilty plea with a 6 month custodial sentence, or a trafficking conspiracy indictment with double-digit years attached to it. That is an unjust predicament to put the accused in†.
This person isn't a 20 year old street level cannabis dealer. If this person is guilty, they are guilty of a spectacular offense. What role does plea bargaining have in this case?
† The problem isn't the plea bargain, though: it's the outrageous sentence attached to the more severe charge.
I started out from the premise that given the prosecutor was boasting the conviction ratio that a fair trial was likely not in the cards. See GGP comment, my questions were in line with that.
As for whether or not this person is guilty, my point is that even if he is not he will likely accept a plea bargain because the alternative will be one that is unacceptable.
That means his guilt won't enter into the equation at all, it's not as if he's going to win even if not guilty in an all-out confrontation with the DOJ, which is likely exactly what will happen if he does not accept, aka being made an example out of.
Whether or not he's a 20 year old street level canabis dealer or someone guilty (partially guilty?) of a spectacular computer crime (which we all know carry penalties roughly in line with similar non-violent white collar crimes) shouldn't make any difference in principle.
The problem with plea bargains is that it puts the accused in a terrible dilemma while at the same time revealing a prosecution that somehow believes simultaneously that the accused is liable to a trivial crime and a monstrous one, which is an intellectually and ethically incoherent position to take.
How is that dilemma happening in a case where someone is being accused of stealing, for profit, millions of identities? Wouldn't the injustice of the outcome be inverted if a plea deal, secured for the purposes of burnishing the prosecution's career stats, let the accused off with a slap on the wrist?
> The problem with plea bargains is that it puts the accused in a terrible dilemma while at the same time revealing a prosecution that somehow believes simultaneously that the accused is liable to a trivial crime and a monstrous one, which is an intellectually and ethically incoherent position to take.
Agreed.
> How is that dilemma happening in a case where someone is being accused of stealing, for profit, millions of identities?
> How is that dilemma happening in a case where someone is being accused of stealing, for profit, millions of identities? Wouldn't the injustice of the outcome be inverted if a plea deal, secured for the purposes of burnishing the prosecution's career stats, let the accused off with a slap on the wrist?
First, you are comparing wildly different cases. Fidel Salinas was accused of an attempt at a nonremunerative crime. The defendant in this thread is accused of very successfully and indiscriminately defrauding millions upon millions of people.
Second: as always, the media refuses to report on the real sentencing structure used in these cases, and instead negligently repeats the fallacy that like charges in felony cases are served consecutively, which is not the case. Ken White at Popehat --- a former prosecutor and no friend to the prosecutorial status quo in the US --- explained this brilliantly here:
A conviction on all forty-four of the felony charges Salinas faced might still not have produced a custodial sentence, depending on the accelerators applied during sentence. First time offender? Minimal damage? No profit motive? Probation is a possibility. The sentencing guidelines are a Google search away, FWIW.
Once again, you haven't actually presented an argument for how plea deals have harmed the process of justice in this case.
> A "coerced confession" places you under duress, a plea bargain does no such thing.
My understanding was that plea bargains are criticised in the context of being offered as an alternative to fighting the case against a very significantly tougher sentence, so that you might win but you're much worse off if you lose. The criticism is then that there is certainly duress - not literally forcing your hand, but forcing a choice that is unreasonable given the nature of the crimes and (so is the claim) encourages confessions by people that are innocent or even just an overall sentencing distribution that ends up being a bad fit for the crimes.
I could have understood wrong previous discussion of this though, or perhaps the problematic cases are not widespread.
That's true of any criminal court case though. Imagine for a moment that the bargain wasn't a thing. It's you vs whatever the possible maximum sentence is for what you might be accused of. That hasn't changed.
You are missing the point here. People that are quite possibly innocent when intimidated with 'plead guilty and you get 5 years or try for innocence and we'll hit you with 50' will choose the 5 years guilty plea because they do not have the power of the state at their disposal to fight.
This means that instead of justice being about truth finding it ends up being about conviction rates, which is gamifying the justice system in a way that is very detrimental to society. Couple it with such things as three strikes laws, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_compl... and a system that is punitive rather than corrective and you have a major problem.
Plea bargaining could be put to good use but in practice it is used as a means of intimidation and to short-circuit the justice system.
It's not simply the existence plea bargains that is coercion, I don't think anyone would argue that, and it's easy to find situations where plea bargains can be good things.
But, this is not the point of the criticism - it is also easy to think of situations where plea bargains could be used to distort justice rather than to make it efficient. Wikipedia has a good discussion of this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plea_bargains#Controversy .
You can disagree that these criticisms are a problem in practice, that is fine and something that could be discussed, but you must recognise that plea bargains could in principle be used in a coercive way, and that many people fear that this happens in practice.
What is the substantial difference of facing a possible 50 years for breaking some law, vs facing a possible 50 years for breaking some law (but we'll give you 10 if you plead guilty)?
The penalty faced, the court case, none of that changes because you have a prosecutor that says "you face (max sentence) if you go to trial" - which is a factual statement, judges have great leeway in setting sentences between minimum and maximum within the guidelines.
So again, where's the coercion? The fundamental dynamic of a person pleading their case in court, with the possibility of a lot of time in prison if they lose, has not changed due to the existence of the alternative.
Aaron Swartz was in trouble the moment the system got ahold of him, not the moment the prosecutor said he could be facing the maximum sentence in prison.
You are taking two steps at the time. A trial is supposed to determine your guilt and give you a fair shot at mounting a defense. Since hardly anybody can afford to go on a frontal collision course with the Federal government you'll see people pleading 'guilty' when in fact they are not. The few that take their chances with the justice process are then thrown the book at and then some in a strange kind of revenge for not accepting the plea bargain.
Even if they win it will leave them bankrupt.
From your words it is almost as if you think that there is no cost for the defendants associated with accepting the plea or the existence of the plea, but in real life there most definitely is. All of the resources of the system can be brought to bear on those few that have the temerity to refuse the plea.
You are looking at plea bargains on an individual / Case-by-Case basis.
The problem arises when you view the system dynamics as a whole. The government using plea bargains to minimize the number of cases that go to trial (over 96% of the cases never go to trial). That allows them to spend significantly more on each case that does go to trial. That significant expenditure increase dramatically increases the likelihood of a guilty verdict.
As much as we would like to believe than the amount of money spent by each side doesn't truly determine the outcome of court cases (and elections, patents applications, etc), that would be naive. It's similar to why we need public defenders to ensure a fair trial.
The result is a situation where a minority of cases go to trial, the government virtually always wins them (in large part due to having spent more money on them). That success rate is used to frighten everyone else into taking plea bargains, which reinforces the system.
Just to prove this, imagine if the rates were reversed and 96% of people went to trial. That increased case load would significantly hinder the ability of the prosecutors, and the conviction rate at trial would decrease dramatically. This would then encourage people to go to trial more, causing a reinforcement effect in the other direction.
I'm not necessarily advocating that everyone go to trial and increase the costs of prosecution because the pendulum might swing too much the other way and our justice system could fail to secure important guilty verdicts.
I do think that there is a massive asymmetry currently between public defenders and prosecutors that is to the detriment of society (exploding prison populations, devastated inner city communities, etc). This system of plea bargains is a large part of this asymmetry due to its effects on per case resource expenditure).
This would be an interesting economics / criminal justice model to create. Creating a simplified, theoretical model on the effect of expenditure on verdict, and then using game theory to find the equilibrium plea bargain rates and predicted number of incorrect verdicts (both false positives and false negatives).
"You can plea to this crime and be sentence to 2 years in prison, or we'll charge you with a felony instead of a misdemeanor and several extra things to drive your minimum sentence up to 5 years."
I would be much more okay with plea bargains if the system required that the prosecutor only allow you to plea to charges they had filed against you, and refused to allow them to file more serious versions of the charges once they offered a bargain, ie, that the bargain was exclusively setting the terms of the sentence for the crimes you were being charged for in exchange for not forcing a trial to determine your guilt.
I would say plea bargains at the federal most definitely occur under conditions of duress. It may not be physical duress (stress positions, water boarding, etc.), but the prospects you are presented with if you even attempt to prove your innocence would count as duress. The costs are prohibitive for all but the deepest pocketed individuals and even those with deep pockets are unlikely to have access to their own money since criminal cases give the government a lot of leeway in preventing you from using your money to defend yourself.
Except that I know people who have accepted plea bargains for things that they probably would have prevailed at trial on, because the risk of losing at trial outweighs accepting the plea bargain (or they didn't have the money for a proper defense to refute police misconduct, etc).
A particular instance I'm privy to the details of was a friend accepting a bargain on a resisting arrest charge (it probably got reduced to a more minor charge in the bargain) that only led to community service (and probation), when the reality is that the police officer had assaulted the defendant and they were covering it up. It simply wasn't worth the risk of going to jail and the certainty of financial trouble for him and his kids to fight the city on it. But the city got a conviction against a troublesome black, or whatever euphemism they're using these days, and didn't have to admit wrongdoing on the part of a police officer, so all good, right?
I'm not saying all plea bargains are bad, I'm just saying that the US makes suspicious use of them and some of them have been noted to be abusive (eg, that they charge ridiculous things for the trial and agree to plea down to what the charges should've been in the first place).
I view this as semi-rampant prosecutor misconduct, rather than a fundamental problem with plea bargains, though plea bargains make this kind of misconduct easier, if not otherwise policed.
A system without plea bargains offers no incentive for any rational person to cooperate. It instead encourages everyone, guilty and innocent, to ruthlessly impose additional costs on the rest of society --- most notably on the innocent accused, who are allocated fewer resources with which to vindicate themselves.
There is inadequate downside for prosecutors making bad-faith or risky cases. But the question I posed was practical, not moral: in the absence of plea deals, there is no disincentive for the guilty accused to grind the system to a halt with pointless litigation. The people who would pay the steepest price for that wouldn't be the citizenry at large, but rather the innocent accused.
Whatever happened to rather that 10 guilty men walk free rather than that one man be jailed innocent?
The innocent accused are paying the steepest price today, they end up pleading guilty, lose their livelihood, rights, and lots more.
If the system would grind to a halt it would grind to a halt for everybody, not just for the guilty. And maybe that would allow for a better system rather than one where might makes right and the amount of money you can muster for your defense is the biggest factor in determining the outcome.
No, it does not logically follow that because the innocent accused face an unjust burden today, stupid decisions we make going forward couldn't make their burden even worse. There was a New Yorker story about a young defendant spending years in Rikers waiting for a trial that saw continuance after continuance; that's what happens today, in a system that relies heavily on plea deals to clear caseloads.
I can't make heads or tails of your position. The fact that the justice system is overloaded has no bearing on the plea bargain situation since it is not used to lighten the load on the justice system but rather to concentrate more power on the few remaining cases.
You make it seem as if the plea bargaining system is used as an efficiency gain where those that 'know they're guilty' are going to plead guilty and all those that know they are not are going to have their day in court. If that were the case I would not have a problem with it, alas it is very far from the truth.
Sure you can. My position is very straightforward. The innocent accused already wait too long for their day in court because of an overburdened court system. They would wait vastly longer --- serving, as is the routine in places like China, the majority of their purported sentence in pre-trial detention --- if the courts were forced to pointlessly spend weeks on criminal cases in which neither party believes the accused has any chance of prevailing.
Increase burden on court system: decrease resources allocated to the innocent accused.
No, you've read my comment, made an orthogonal point, and then suggested that I don't understand that point. I do understand it; it's simply orthogonal to mine.
You're also very happy to mis-frame my point, repeatedly suggesting that I believe there's no meaningful injustice in the status quo. That is not what I believe. I've been pretty clear about the fact that there is a significant problem that urgently needs correction. It's just not exactly the problem you care about, and so you caricature my points to try to win the argument.
Once again: regardless of how often the innocent accept bogus plea agreements, those innocent who choose to fight their cases are greatly harmed by a system that eliminates plea bargains.
Those innocent who choose to fight are also greatly harmed by the current system of plea bargaining because as the linked article shows it's all about the conviction rate and not about the guilt or innocence of the accused and when the might of the state is brought to bear those innocent that decided to fight rather than to accept the plea are still convicted in suspiciously large numbers.
So plea bargaining as we see it at present does not appear to help those innocent who fight their cases. Because it's all about winning for the state, not about guilt or innocence.
The current system, which includes plea bargains, is greatly flawed. Prosecutors in the US simply have too much power as well as distorted incentives. If they did not have this power then they would not be able to abuse the plea bargain system as they do. But eliminating plea bargains would not be an improvement. Despite the abuses it does improve efficiency and if it did not exist it would not materially reduce prosecutorial power although it would reduce the number of convictions per year. Bad plea bargains are a symptom, not the cause.
> Whatever happened to rather that 10 guilty men walk free rather than that one man be jailed innocent?
That has always been bullshit, the way you and most of the Internet are misusing this quotation.
Why 10 to 1? Why not 1 to 1 or 1e100000 to 1?
This ratio is purely arbitrary.
Obviously, if you really followed through with the gist of your argument, we should never convict anyone, because better to let everyone go than miss the one injustice in a thousand years.
Unless you can make a case for a specific ratio, 10 to 1 has no special meaning.
The quotation only argues that the balance should be biased towards aquittal. Nothing more.
You're assuming guilt. Unless you have some special knowledge of this particular individual, the general ideal we originally strived for in the US Justice system is a belief that individuals are considered innocent until proven guilty. It's fine if you want to believe that yourself, but it's contradictory to how the US justice system is supposed to work.
I'm of the opinion that trials should be system where both sides should be allowed to put as much money as they want into a trial, but that they need to put that money into a pot that is divided equally between the defense and prosecution. You cannot have justice when there is financial asymmetry.
This would allow trials to be as cheap or as expensive as necessary to determine the truth. It provides a great disincentive for either side to pour money into the process if they know they are in the wrong going into a trial.
Stipulate that some significant portion of the accused are, in fact, guilty. We don't know which ones, but we know in the abstract that they exist. We also know that the overwhelming majority --- not all, but most --- of the guilty accused know they're guilty.
In your proposed system, what's the incentive that prevents the guilty accused from allocating infinite resources to their case? Why not do that? These are people who've drawn off-suit seven deuce in the poker game of justice. What would they have to lose?
Let them have their day, even 10 days in court. If they're guilty it will still stick. If not they should walk, no matter how long it takes to get to that point.
The way to deal with the overload is a many pronged problem, for one you could decide not to have so many crimes on the books, second you could decide which crimes are to be dealt with using fines and which are to be dealt with using prison time, and prison time could be seen as a measure of correction rather than one of punishment or revenge.
That would mean that there would be a lot less prisoners and that in turn would upset a whole pile of applecarts but on the whole that's not a bad system to have.
At least you won't have 1% of the population (and 2% of the adult population) behind bars which is generally considered to be a good thing because it takes people out of circulation causing a domino effect into the next generation. Kids of convicts are more likely to become convicts themselves.
Compromising the right to a fair trial on cost basis because you're scared the 'guilty accused' will hog the system has a much higher cost in the longer term.
How is the very concept of an appeals system not abhorrent to you? It's based on the idea that the accused receives a finite number of opportunities to vindicate themselves, and that number has an arbitrary cut-off.
An arbitrary cut-off is indeed a strange thing to have, probably some element of practicality went into designing it. Where I live there are a number of courts where one can appeal, I personally think that the ideal would be a court where no conviction would ever be overturned should be the cut-off. We're definitely not there and that system isn't perfect (nor will it likely every be), but it is one of the reason why I am mordicus against the death penalty.
Too many cases got overturned many many years later and in plenty of those cases the accused had already been executed. See also: project innocence.
Justice systems will always be imperfect but regardless of that we should strive to improve them and find better ways to release those that are innocent as fast as possible (and, incidentally, to make them whole).
The state and its functionaries should definitely not be rewarded on metrics that might disadvantage the innocent.
> (1) 99.6% is not that much higher than the usual federal prosecution rates (I think they get a net of ~96% when I looked it up a few months for a different discussion),
It's an order of magnitude better, which is mildly startling. Instead of losing 40 out of 1000 cases, they're only losing 4 out of 1000 cases. That... would be suspicious change in most statistics.
You're quoting a prosecutor, not a judge. The prosecutor absolutely should be 99.9% convinced of the guilt of the accused! Otherwise, they're taking flyers at the expense of people they themselves believe might be innocent.
Anyone who has ever suggested --- rightfully! --- that prosecutors should exercise more discretion in the cases they bring is arguing that prosecutors should be more confident about the guilt of the accused.
I don't see the logical distinction. A prosecutor achieves a high conviction rate the same way a poker player achieves a high win rate: you bet on the hands you can win.
Put it differently: a prosecutor with a low conviction rate has demonstrably inflicted tremendous costs on many ultimately innocent people.
How could a low conviction rate possibly represent justice?
> The Spanish Inquisition managed to get similar rates
Is that claim about the Inquisition conviction rates based on some source?
This is a diversion, but according to what I've read, Spanish Inquisition was a lot better than its reputation, which is largely a myth (about torture etc).
"Modern researchers have discovered that the Spanish Inquisition applied torture in only 2 percent of its cases. Each instance of torture was limited to a maximum of 15 minutes. In only 1 percent of the cases was torture applied twice and never for a third time."
Makes you wonder why it wasn't done a third time. Or did you think that was some kind of strange coincidence?
Imagine: If we only tortured 2% (assuming your statistic is correct) and we did that in such a way that the word got around, don't you think that would have a positive effect on the ratio of accused that would immediately capitulate and sign anything to avoid the torture?
I think 2% is on the high side, those must have been extremely brave people. And those that survived the first round of torture without a confession apparently were given a second helping to see if that changed their minds.
Wow. Some people will try to rehabilitate anything.
The next time you catch yourself typing a sentence like "Modern researchers have discovered that the Spanish Inquisition applied torture in only 2 percent of its cases," read it first, then hit Post if you still think it's appropriate. Especially if the sentence you're typing is a quote from "Crisis Magazine: A Voice for the Faithful Catholic Laity."
Yes, anything should be "rehabilitated" if that serves truth, or helps to put things into proportion.
I'm not Catholic, I'm not Spanish. I have no axe to grind except truth. Earlier I read a lot of stories about how bad the Inquisition was. That 2 percent figure is certainly less than what I had expected based on the myths I heard previously. Overall, I think it is unfair to use the Inquisition as a particularly heinous example of juridic cruelty and oppression, if it actually wasn't bad for its times - comparing it to today is anachronistic.
Wikipedia: "As with all European tribunals of the time, torture was employed. The Spanish inquisition, however, engaged in it far less often and with greater care than other courts." A couple of sources are given for this.
Anyway, I'm just curious to know if the Spanish Inquisition's conviction rate actually was 99.6 %, or something like that?
All I will say is, when I have a question about Lyman spectroscopy or the history of the National Football League, I find Wikipedia to be a very valuable resource and guide to further reading. But when I have questions involving powerful religious entities who have historically tried to downplay their involvement in various scandals, exerted undue political influence for many centuries, actively tried to cover up atrocities, promoted ridiculous beliefs, or simply tried to make someone or something look good or bad in contexts where the facts are not always unequivocal, Wikipedia is the last place I look.
It's simply a matter of using different sources appropriately to research different subjects.
Edit: And another thing. Here in the US, we can't even agree on what constitutes "torture" now, much less assign precise frequencies of occurrence to acts that might or might not have been considered "torture" at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Attempting to boil down a complex historical picture to a simple numeric figure like "X tortured people 2% of the time, while Y used torture in 5% of trials, therefore X was better" is a fertile ground for fallacy.
This thread was spinned off from such a comparison: comparison of cybercrime conviction rates to conviction rates of the Spanish Inquisition. That sounds anachronistic indeed in my opinion.
I'm also curious if someone has good sources pointing out that the conviction rate of the Inquisition really was 99.6 %.
But of course, if we go back to cybercrime, a conviction rate of 99.6 % may be indicative of two different things: either the courts will convict almost any and every prosecution, or then only rock-solid cases are even prosecuted. I tend to think that it's mostly the latter: a small proportion of all cases is ever prosecuted, but those cases are then so clear regarding "what happened" that conviction rates are high. It is then another matter "what it means", i.e. the facts are not disputed but the interpretation of law is, and this is why convictions may be repealed on appeal.
I would also bet that 99.6% is based on plea bargains as well. Defending a federal case will likely cost you $1 million plus. On top of that, all your assets will likely be frozen or inaccessible. Basically the government always aims for a conviction based on a plea bargain, but if you dare challenge them by going to court, they will crush you with every trick they have. Basically, there is no such thing as a fair criminal trial at the federal level.
I'd love to know more about that 0.4% and what those trials did to them and how destroyed they were financially when all was said and done.
Approximately 97% of defendants plead guilty. Approximately 2/3 of the remaining 3% are convicted at trial. The reason is simple: The US has built extortion right into its laws. Most laws on our books are broad (one law can cover both very serious and very minor conduct) and carry absurdly high maximum penalties. When prosecutors offer a "deal" for a small fraction of the maximum, defendants almost always take it.
Why would a free society do this? Mainly because taking people to trial is hard and costs alot. If the plea rate dropped from 97% to 95%, the courts and prosecutors would be overwhelmed. The few politicians that have dared to introduce legislation lowering maximum sentences (which would have an effect on the guilty plea rate) have almost universally been eviscerated at the polls, so this situation is unlikely to change in our lifetimes.
I was more concerned with the apparent dependence on proving that people use specific nicknames known to be used by some suspect. I must be missing some detail.
> "We have a 99.6 percent conviction rate in cybercrime"
AUSA Paul Fishman also prosecuted the famous Auernheimer "ipad hack" case, and then went on to watch judges in the appeals court reverse the conviction on procedural grounds and admonish the way that Fishman and his office handled the case.
I wonder if the statistic takes into account situations like that, or if weev's case wasn't considered "cybercrime."
At any rate it is nice to see that Fishman also obtains indictments against real criminals from time to time.
I expect HN people to get their vocabulary straight and use the word "hacker" only for the people that build things. This story is obviously about a cracker.
And like many English words Hacker has several meanings and trying to go back to the 60's usage at MIT is I afraid a pointless exercise just Like King Cnut trying to hold back the tide.
The creative and transgressive meanings of the word "hacker" have been around about equally long and both go back to the MIT milieu. Its first appearance in print referred to breaking into phone networks. (Sorry I don't have links handy but this has been discussed many times on HN.) So it's not true that the word started out good and was corrupted by misunderstanding... but I bet that claim is also about as old as both usages!
So do you enjoy frequently posting on this computer criminal news website? How would you feel if that fact were to be disseminated in the media, were you of sufficient importance for someone to do so?
Of course it is important. But it is also simply too late. If you wanted to change the way the word hacker is being used you'd need access to a flux capacitor and a DeLorean first, and we all know how that one will end.
No, that's entirely different. Usage of a word by a very small part of the population in a way that is inconsistent - if historically correct - has an extremely small chance of overcoming the predominant usage. You'd basically be fighting all the way and I personally don't attach too much value to any word to go and worry about what people think when I call myself a hacker.
The 'third parties never win elections' thing is likely in reference to America's mostly two-party system. This is for reasons unrelated to usage of words and has much more to do with campaign financing, gerrymandering, media control and so on. It's orders of magnitude more harmful but it is more or less by design and it will take a massive restructuring of American politics before something resembling proportional representation (aka democracy) will be a real possibility.
Hacker News is trying to preserve the original wording on the article (which, to be honest, is more in line with the readership's understanding than "cracker").
The Washington Post is owned by a tech guy (Jeff Bezos), so maybe you could try to get him to use a different word :)
I think you're right. But the article is poorly edited. The final paragraph begins with the word "he", while the previous paragraph mentions both Drinkman and Kalinin.
So it's possible that "he" refers not to Drinkman, but to Kalinin, who has not yet been caught.
I'm going to go with "the entire economy of the world" as an answer to that question. Everyone does this. And there are much worse things attached to the Internet than the payment card information of virtually everyone with a credit card.
I'm sure he sees absolutely nothing weird in that. The Spanish Inquisition managed to get similar rates. I'm very surprised the Dutch (as in: my) government is agreeing to this extradition. It's very well possible that this is in part because of the current animosity between Putin and the rest of the world.
It's quite possible the guy is guilty but Ari Baranoff is on the record as having said that he will not be given a fair trial.