Be Afraid… Be Very Afraid

By BitcoDavid

‘E Pluribus Unum’, a white Vermont marble sculpture, 1982, President Thomas Jefferson Elementary School, Honolulu, Hawaii (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

They’re everywhere, lurking under every rock, skulking behind every dark corner. The evil doers. The criminals, bent on the senseless destruction of all you hold dear. They exist only to rape your daughters, steal your goods – oh, and hack into your identity.

Whether it’s crazed road ragers who will shoot you for cutting them off in traffic, teenaged gang initiates who kill at random, immigrants who dig through your trash looking for credit card numbers or techie geniuses who want to turn your computer into a zombie, you’re constantly being told to live in fear.

E pluribus unum should be rewritten as, be afraid and buy some crap. Build more prisons and cut the school budget. I’m scared, and only a kristallnacht  of prosecution will let me sleep at night.

But Black men with guns aren’t our only criminal problem these days. Hackers. Hackers are everywhere, using their 200 I.Q.s as weapons against us. All we want to do is go on FaceBook – but no. These Gen-Y cyber-terrorists are out to post kiddie porn all over our pages, and use our e-mail addresses to steal our jobs.

Phreaking equipment (Photo credit: pyoorkate)

Speaking as a member of the Hacker community, and as someone with – oh just a smidge – of technical skill, let me explain something to you. There’s Hackers, Crackers, Phreakers, Social Engineers and Script Kiddies. Hackers are people who want to know how things work. We’re equivalent to the Hotrodders of the 1950s. Steve Jobs was a Hacker. So was Bill Gates. Crackers on the other hand, are guys who actually try to break into computer networks – sometimes to do damage, but most often, simply to prove that they can. Phreakers are specific to telephone systems. There was a time when you could access any corporate or government network by simply punching in the right numbers on your phone. As systems grew more complex, Phreaking began to ebb in popularity. however, Phreakers still exist.  Social Engineers don’t use technology. They manipulate wet-ware (you) to get access to systems. A Social Engineer is the guy who calls you at work and says, “Hi, I’m over here in the advertising department, and I forgot Bob’s password. You wouldn’t know it, would you?”

how-to-catch-script-kiddies (Photo credit: liquidslave)

Finally, we have Script Kiddies. These are people who simply go to certain Web sites to download Trojans and other malware. They actually know less about computers than you do.

Anonymous (Photo credit: Schuilr)

So on one hand you have a group of people who work towards Internet freedom, citizen journalism, pseudo-Socialist information sharing and flash-mob protesting. And on the other you have the D.O.J. Now, I’m not saying that true cyber-crime doesn’t exist. Nor am I defending it, or trying to say that it doesn’t pose a threat.

You can download a free and very effective anti-virus program here, and none of the above will be able to do anything to hurt you.

But like everything else where the Justice system is concerned, one needs to read between the lines and develop a sense of nuance. God forbid we end up with a War on Hacking similar to our failed and insane War on Drugs.

Personally, I’m far more afraid of Bank of America, than I am of some kid who knows a little perl.

To learn more, go to this article from the NYT, or here on Twitter.

BitcoDavid is a blogger and a blog site consultant. In former lives, he was an audio engineer, a videographer, a teacher – even a cab driver. He is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and a Pro/Am boxer. He has spent years working with diet and exercise to combat obesity and obesity related illness.

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Former Prosecutor Unloads on NYT

By BitcoDavid

Tumblr.com

Paul Butler is a former Federal prosecutor who (guilty of Driving While Black) learned firsthand what our punishment-crazed culture is all about. He now writes about Justice System reform, and is best known for his excellent book, Let’s Get Free – A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. He did a beautiful op-ed piece in the Times, about the Gideon v. Wainwright case, which we discussed in You Have the Right to an Attorney… FAIL!

Two things should be clearly understood at the outset of this post. 1) The supreme court believed so strongly that all defendants deserved legal council, that they voted unanimously in the ruling. 2) Butler was a Federal Prosecutor when he found himself up against the lynch-mob mentality that is modern prosecution. If he had his rights trampled on, what chance do you or I have?

Mr Butler:

FIFTY years after the Supreme Court, in Gideon v. Wainwright, guaranteed legal representation to poor people charged with serious crimes, low-income criminal defendants, particularly black ones, are significantly worse off.

Don’t blame public defenders, who are usually overwhelmed. The problem lies with power-drunk prosecutors — I know, because I used to be one — and “tough on crime” lawmakers, who have enacted some of the world’s harshest sentencing laws. They mean well, but have created a system that makes a mockery of “equal justice under the law.” A black man without a high school diploma is more likely to be in prison than to have a job. — NYT (Emphasis, mine.)

Circle Players

In Harper Lee‘s timeless classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch is asked to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping a White, teen-aged girl – in the deep South. Finch faces huge opposition from the townspeople, but gives Robinson the best defense available – struggling between his belief in right and wrong, and his devotion to community. But the poor in America today, don’t get Atticus Finch. They get an overworked, underfunded Public Defender who merely makes a vain attempt at plea-bargaining the case down. And that’s if they’re lucky. Budget cuts and tough on crime elected officials are making it more difficult for the poor to get any representation at all.

More from Butler’s piece:

A poor person has a much greater chance of being incarcerated now than when Gideon was decided, 50 years ago today. This is not because of increased criminality — violent crime has plunged from its peak in the early 1990s — but because of prosecutorial policies that essentially target the poor and relegate their lawyers to negotiating guilty pleas, rather than mounting a defense.

After Gideon, things got better for poor defendants in the short term. Thousands who had not had lawyers at trial were released from jail. Many states and localities created public defenders’ offices. But political and legal developments soon eroded those achievements.

The so-called war on crime greatly expanded criminal liability. A prosecutor can almost always find some charge: there are over 4,000 crimes on the federal books alone. Recreational drug use is one of the more popular activities in America, but racial minorities suffer the brunt of drug-related convictions. –NYT

You can read the rest of this brilliant assessment of our current state of Justice for the poor, here.

BitcoDavid is a blogger and a blog site consultant. In former lives, he was an audio engineer, a videographer, a teacher – even a cab driver. He is an avid health and fitness enthusiast and a Pro/Am boxer. He has spent years working with diet and exercise to combat obesity and obesity related illness.

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