I am sick of hearing about Anonymous and its vigilantism. We have courts and a justice system for a reason: to place retaliatory force under objective controls (laws) so that the rights of individuals are not violated. Their tactics are both dangerous to freedom and to justice.<p>In addition, while a few of the things they're against are actually bad things, not all of the causes they fight are just. And their illegal methods serve mainly to hurt the good fights (such as the fight against Scientology) rather than help.
Did anyone grab a mirror or better screenshot of the page?<p>UPDATE: Google Cached it: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sV8dPXftnTcJ:www.ussc.gov/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sV8dPXf...</a>
Wow, CNN, the opposite of Hacker News. What an ignorant comment:<p><i>The "warhead" names appeared as links, most leading to 404 error messages of pages not found, but some leading to pages of raw programming code.</i>
"Swartz was facing up to 50+ years in prison and a $4 million fine". 50 years from now, people will relate this saying that he was facing death penalty
"Reform or we'll release this incriminating stuff."<p>Clearly, the better way to get them to reform is to release the incriminating material and have a scandal about it. If it's really bad enough to be worth this headline, it'll do a lot more good when it's not a threat. Of course, that means it's probably irrelevant and/or useless.
I'm sure the mainstream news outlets were <i>begging</i> for a more status-quo-friendly angle to take on the Swartz story, and this just gives it to them. If Anonymous takes the spotlight, all the discussion about prosecutorial overreach could come crashing down, and (to extend the metaphor) at best we'll be back to preaching to the choir while the congregation starts throwing stones.