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As a general rule, I oppose outing anonymous people online — as a practical matter, for many people anonymity is the only economically viable way of participating in online discourse. It should also be pretty obvious that outing someone who specializes in casting people in online porn without their consent is a justified exception to the rule.
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This seems like the type of shit that Douglas would defend in some warped way.
Nah, DD’s too busy jerkin’ his gherkin to his own war porn site.
He gets off on bloody limbless brown bodies and brown women who were gut-groin-and-head-shot after being gang-raped.
I’m glad every site I go to has banned that sociopath.
I don’t know how long I have been reading your nym, but I just got the joke. A) awesome nym. B) wow, I am really dense.
Less dense than me, I still havent gotten it
I have also never spent the time necessary to get this before, but as I understand the way the kids type out their textual messages on handheld phones, they often use single letters to stand for entire words, when the single letter is pronounced similarly to the word. So I think the first four letters of our friend’s name can be read “see you in the . . . .”
For the longest time I thought the nym was an obscure reference to Candide’s girlfriend, Cunegonde, and I was too stupid or insufficiently dirty-minded to figure it out. Then one day I said it aloud and the light-bulb lit and I understood. Talk about a “Doh!!” moment.
*puzzled look*
*squint*
…
Ooooooooh!
The part that always weirds me out is how… normal Violentacrez is in meat life. Married, has kids, appropriately humiliated to be connected to his Mr. Hyde stand-in. How do people DO that? I can be more aggressive online than I am in person, but… I don’t turn into a low-functioning sociopath.
Perhaps all of the positive reinforcement he received had something to do with it.
One suspects that the sociopath is the real person and the rest is a facade he projects to function smoothly in society. Sociopaths are often if not generally like that. Internet anonymity simply allowed him to real his true self.
Bingo!
You don’t have to be a sociopath to be a payday loan shark, but it helps.
As a functioning sociopath, you’re right on the money.
Though, since I treat the Internet on the whole as a useful tool, I actually tend to be more polite online than off, as it’s more efficient.
This is a scary response.
If you look at it closely, it’s not like his non-internet life is particularly normal either. I’m with “the sociopath is the real Violentacrez” view.
Same way socialists put on suits and ties and say “yes sir no sir, I’m a good little capitalist sir” when they go to get jobs working in cubicles so they don’t starve to death.
It’s pretty easy to construct and maintain a public persona that’s radically different from your private or personal one. It takes only the smallest amount of discipline.
Are you implying that I am not actually a zombie?
FIGHTING WORDS, SIR!
I think he’s implying you’re not hardly evil at all. Paranthesis becomes master’s thesis
I dunno, perhaps I’m sheltered but people who may have had sex with their stepdaughters don’t strike me as having normal family lives.
Studies suggest it’s not all that abnormal, sadly. An awful lot of molestation going on.
Never read the book, but I heard somewhere that all happy families are the same. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its unique way.
I feel lucky to live sheltered life.
Me to. The biggest scandal in my town when I was growing up was that a beloved high school English teacher committed plagiarism on his PhD thesis. There were divorces but nothing this deeply weird. I mean it might have happened but every adult seemed to be very competent and high functioning. There was very little bullying of any sort. No teenage pregnancies, teens didn’t even brag that much about their sex life. The rule was not to gossip about it. It was a very pleasant way to grow up.
College is where I learned how dysfunctional and creepily weird some seemingly normal people could be.
Statistics would indicate that your idyllic childhood was a carefully concealed hellhole for substantial numbers of your friends.
Or maybe you grew up in paradise.
I think people were just better at keeping secrets when I was a child. I know it was expected in my family that we put our best face on for the neighbors and pretend everything was healthy and happy at home (when it certainly was not). I remarked to my sister once that all my mother’s stories revolve around shame, being caught in her curlers and bathrobe (because she was looking for the cat or something) by the neighbors being a prominent theme.
I have not lived all that sheltered a life, but that is not normal anywhere.
He bragged on Reddit that he had had sex with his stepdaughter. We don’t know that he actually did, do we?
Bragging about it, even if he did not do it is still well outside the norms. Having read the original Gawker piece, he clearly seems to be a disturbing piece of work by any standard.
The Online Disinhibition Effect, or sometimes referred to by its more common name, The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
Look up the BTK Killer sometime. He murdered (and in some cases raped) ten people over a seventeen year period, and may have never been caught if he hadn’t started sending taunting letters to the cops about eight years ago. When he was identified, they found a family man who volunteered at his church and for the Cub Scouts, and when they asked him why he’d started writing to the cops, he responded that his kids were grown and he was bored.
It always pisses me off on a personal level when I find out that creeps like this have girlfriends or wives. Why are these bastards in a relationship even though they are miserable excuses for a human being and I’m freaking single.
I have the complementary reaction when I hear about Kardashians getting married and such.
This particular story has me so thoroughly creeped out, though, it’s pretty tough to at the same time even entertain thoughts about relationships of the sort any semi-healthy person could want…
May you find thorough appreciation from a suitable source soon!
Yeah. The take-away from a story about the exploitation of girls and women is the suffering and neglect of your peen.
I’m sorry, I was dealing with romantic frustration at the time I wrote that comment. Still, there lots of people who really shouldn’t be in relationships in a just world who are.
I think it’s often because the wives/girlfriends either a.) don’t know how disgusting their guy is or b.) are in denial.
Or are themselves being abused.
That or the women might be fairly disgusting pieces of humanity themselves and attracted to the type.
“The part that always weirds me out is how… normal Violentacrez is in meat life. Married, has kids, appropriately humiliated to be connected to his Mr. Hyde stand-in.”
Had sex with his 19 year old step-daughter.
Said on Reddit that he had sex with his 19 year old stepdaughter. Not the same thing.
Am I right in feeling (self-righteously? smugly?) vindicated in having regarded Reddit as little more than a slightly more respectable 4chan and avoiding it from the start? Their community sucks and it’s got nothing on Metafilter or even Fark.
Sort of. The internet as whole is really only slightly more respectable than 4chan. Sure, they might be the drain… but we’re all swimming in the same water.
Even with 4chan there’s plenty of good non-raunch art, as well as gender-positive and queer-affirming smut, mixed in with all the horrifying, nightmare-fuel porn it’s so widely known for. And say what you want about the whole Anonymous kick, but you can’t deny that it got lots of young folks involved in political activism at a young age -something pretty dang difficult to do for more conventional US political orgs- as well as popularizing a hostile critic of corporate power across the internet, and finding some innovative ways to mildly annoy the high and mighty.
I think stuff like that might be why some people who typically have nothing but scorn for creeps like violentacrez might feel the need to condemn Chen on this. They see the internet as a place where oppressive and unhealthy social norms can be transgressed, and feel there’s something hypocritical about not extending the same “courtesy” to others so long as they aren’t doing anything illegal.
The obvious response to that sort of thinking is to point out that male privilege is probably the biggest social norm of all and that va’s behavior, far from challenging that, revels in reinforcing it.
…as popularizing a hostile
criticcritique of corporate power across the internet…bah
FTFM
:/
And say what you want about the whole Anonymous kick, but you can’t deny that it got lots of young folks involved in political activism at a young age -something pretty dang difficult to do for more conventional US political orgs
How many more young folks were reached by Anonymous than, say, The Republican Party?
Only 6% of Republican voters are between 18 and 27. Let’s round McCain’s 59950 to 60 mil, giving us 3,600,000 young folks willing to vote for a Republican President. At the most general level, I’d put that number up against the number of young folks on the internet supportive of Anonymous anti-corporate actions any day of the week.
That’s only the most shallow level of political activity, though. Unfortunately, the GOP doesn’t seem to keep records on it’s political activists by age, and the Young Republicans give no evidence of how many of their members are between 18 and 27. The Young Democrats, however, claim over 150k members, out of a much larger pool of youth support of ~20million. That’s less than 1 percent of the young people actually voting for the Dems (something like .75%). Assuming a similar level of political activity among young Republicans(3.6mil x .75%), we get about 27000 young Republican activists. I don’t know anything about the demographics of Anonymous and the battalion of script-kiddies plugged into its LOIC -it’d be rather difficult to know them considering it isn’t really an organization so much as a tag used by fellow-travellers- but given that 4chan gets 18million unique visitors a month I’d be surprised if it were lower than that number.
Typically, people think 4chan is all /b.
/b is actually better than most of 4chan, if you’re not a wannabe child rapist.
Havnt been on 4chan in many years, but /b used to be the cesspool of the internets. Did that change?
That’s true too; there’s plenty more to 4chan than the art channels and the meme threads.
I went on 4chan once and couldn’t make heads or tails* of it. Saw some cheesecake photos of some woman, and since I’m a woman, I made the mistake of clicking on “handsome men.” And was treated to some man on man buttsex. Which, while I have absolutely nothing against it, was not exactly searching for. And it was at that very moment I decided that 4chan was probably not the place for me.
*heh
I had a somewhat similar experience (without the buttsex) in my one and only venture over there. Seemed a lot like a 14 year old boy’s fantasy playground and came to the same conclusion as you.
Yeah, I definitely got the feeling it was very “teen boy.” And I don’t have a whole lot of interest in teen boys.
No offense, teen boys.
The trolls need to be fed and so they naturally gravitate towards the most likely potential food source. If you read the full Gawker piece you’ll see that this guy was attracted to reddit because there are so many people on that site that called him out for being a sociopath. He, of course, gets off on being called out because he’s a sociopath. So no, don’t hate on reddit for that reason. Hate on reddit because so many idiots upvote pictures of dogs and cats to the front page.
http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-the-web
Clinically, it appears that sociopaths love being sociopaths and love the validation that being called a sociopath brings.
Can a sociopath not love being a sociopath? Since sociopaths lack empathy, I can’t really imagine one wishing he or she was a person with even average levels of empathy. If sociopaths wished they had greater empathy for others than they wouldn’t be sociopaths.
Sociopaths are generally understood to be massively narcissistic.
“Their community sucks”
And so does the site design. Makes Craigslist look slick.
I find Reddit’s technical sub-forums very enlightening. Great place for help on PC building or hobbyist construction.
Good for Adrian Chen. Just seems like journalism to me.
I think it’s pretty hard to get a decent job without the prospective employer Googling your name. I really don’t think that rendering this guy permanently unemployable was necessary in the name of journalism.
Really? I certainly would not what this pathological creep working with or for me.
The above comment said that it “just seems like journalism.” It’s not just journalism. You can debate the merits of identifying this guy, but you can’t pretend its run of the mill journalism.
Identifying a sexual predator is not a proper journalistic enterprise? That would come as new to most local papers I know about.
In the article the author even discusses his own qualms about what he is doing. One of the key aspects of the story is that the author knows he is going to wreak havoc on the subject’s life. I don’t think you can fairly compare that to a newspaper reporting on people charged with or convicted of crimes.
Is the theory that A) this guy doesn’t deserve to have havoc wreaked on his life, or B) that society doesn’t have a stake and a compelling interest in this man’s double life?
I think the theory is that person A gets to write about anything they want on the internet whereas person B does not get to write about anything they want on the internet. Free speech is complicated!
His identity is not newsworthy. Exposing his identity makes the story more compelling, but was totally unnecessary as a matter of journalism.
Of course, some people obviously believe that a journalist should print anything if doing so will accomplish what they perceive to be a normatively good outcome.
I guess my biggest beef is the idea that a person would say “it’s journalism, so it’s no big deal.” It is a big deal. You may think it’s a good thing, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that there is no moral/ethical issue “because journalism.”
His identity is not newsworthy.
The identity of a known, self-admitted sexual predator is not newsworthy? Pull the other one please, this one is getting sore.
You seem to have a broader definition of “sexual predator” than I do.
You seem to have a broader definition of “sexual predator” than I do.
How would you define his behavior? It is clearly a sexual violation. Those women had a right not to be violated in this manner. You do not have to be violent to be a sexual predator.
I dunno, I’m pretty comfortable calling a man who rapes – oh, excuse me, “has sex with” – his stepdaughter a sexual predator.
Actually this is very much like reporting on people charged with a crime. Or do you somehow think that everyone charged with a crime is guilty?
Not claiming this is a perfect analogy, but what about the infamous Duke lacrosse players? Guilty of a crime? No. Guilty of sleazy behavior? Some of them, yes. Deserve to have this follow them the rest of their lives? Not in my opinion (5 years maybe but how do you do that?) Did they deserve anonymity at the time of the charges? No.
I beg your pardon, but his identity is extremely newsworthy.
This is a man who has a seemingly-normal life in meatspace, while indulging in gross sexual harassment online.
The details of his normal life are precisely what make this story relevant. It is absolutely proper for a journalist to point out that a normal-seeming member of the community is engaging in this online behavior, and to bolster his story by divulging the creep’s actual identity.
I couldn’t care less about his fucking job prospects.
“I don’t think you can fairly compare that to a newspaper reporting on people charged with or convicted of crimes.”
A great deal of important journalism is about things that are not, in fact, illegal, but either should be illegal, or are at best unethical, and raise serious questions about the person or organization in question.
In fact, the practice of publishing lists of offenders and the whole idea that you can NEVER actually ‘pay your debt to society’ and start over is extremely controversial.
I am not arguing that, merely that this constitutes a normal part of journalistic practice, which was the point at issue.
Really? I can’t think of a single person without a skeleton in their closet that would make an employer toss the resume if it were revealed.
Please note that many employers will not employ you if they learn you have a medical condition, or a child with a medical condition, or a medical pot license…
Privacy becomes extremely important when your entire life is potentially an open book to everyone, and your desire to be insulated from a skeezy pervert does not outweigh the real necessity for people to have actual private lives.
See mine at 12:48. This is not some minor pecadillo or some indiscretion in the distant past. He is a sexual predator and this is an ongoing activity. My local paper routinely publishes the sexual offenders registry (which includes peeping Toms and flashers) and this is no different.
Yeah? Who sets the standards? What’s to stop me from publishing the names of every woman who gets an abortion, so that any potential employer who is prolife can toss her resume.
Nobody is denying that the guy is loathsome, what I am saying is that google, coupled with active investigation and exposure of private lives, is a far more serious danger to our lives.
Abortion is legal.
Sexual predation is not.
And yet women at beaten and abortion providers are murdered.
The article doesn’t say he did anything illegal.
Has he been convicted. Sure he says he did some of this, but as Paul Ryan taught us people about quite a bit of stuff for all sorts of reasons
Has he been convicted. Sure he says he did some of this, but as Paul Ryan taught us people about quite a bit of stuff for all sorts of reasons
He posted those images.
What’s to stop me from publishing the names of every woman who gets an abortion,
If you keep moving the goal pasts like that we are going to need to build a new stadium to accommodate it. Those women did not harm anyone else, this guy did. Also, there basically is nothing to prevent you from doing that, anymore than there is to prevent him from doing what he did. The fact that it is at least possibly legal does not mean that it such be consequence free. Indeed posting those women’s names would hove more in common with what our creep did.
Moving the goalposts? I raise a point about doxxing being potentially dangerous to what we would both call innocent people (women seeking an abortion), and that is moving the goal posts?
Had a few people actually paid attentio
You seem to be under the impression that I am defending his behaviour. Frankly, my point has nothing to do with violentacrez and his creepy habits.
Yes. You keep saying that this guy should not have been outed and when someone challenges you, you shift the terms of the debate, just as you did here.
Just took a look through the thread to make sure, and I can’t find a single instance of me stating that violentacrez should not have been outed. Found several instances of me agreeing it was appropriate, though.
The terms of the debate that I have been participating have to do with whether or not doxxing is actually something that decent humans should be in favour of. To this end I have given examples of how easy it is for normal people who do normal things can be dodder and suffer for it. This is not goalpost relocation, it is reasoned argument.
Anyway, I’ve said my piece, that in our glee at seeing a creepy perv exposed we should not forget that Internet privacy and anonymity are important and fragile elements of our lives. In so doing I have been called a creep, a concern troll, and frankly am a bit disappointed in many of you.
I come to LGM to read well reasoned comments that look past the surface and into implications and consequences. Maybe next time.
Anyway, I’ve said my piece, that in our glee at seeing a creepy perv exposed we should not forget that Internet privacy and anonymity are important and fragile elements of our lives.
A couple of points that I also address below.
1) There is absolutely no “right” to anonymity on the internet or in any public forum. There are, however, social conventions which generally respect that anonymity under most conditions.
2) All norms, including respecting anonymity, have exceptions. I generally feel that people’s sex lives are their own business and should not be reported and put on display. That said, if the mayor is having an affair with someone whose company later gets a contract with the city, then it should be reported, whether or not any actual laws were broken. The same is true here.
3) Decent people not outing predators and bullies like Violentacrez will have no impact on folks like the Westboro Church. The reality is that respect for internet anonymity relies on a sense of decency, no matter how much you disdain that, and people without any decency will continue doing what they are doing regardless of what we do. At the same time, our allowing Violentacrez to retain his anonymity actively promotes, protects, and enables predators and bullies.
Technically what stops you from publishing a list of the names of women who’ve had abortions is HIPAA. It is illegal for medical providers to release a patient’s medical records without explicit permission from the patient.
I’m more concerned that outing people we don’t like exposes them to the potential violence of crazies or injured parties determined to take justice into their own hands. But there are already laws against that.
The law. HIPAA, to be exact.
Otherwise, if there is no law, is there anything to stop a journalist from publishing a story divulging that someone did something that violated their community’s standards? Whatever those standards might be?
Nope. That’s journalism. And in this case, it coincides perfectly with justice. Sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s not really the point of journalism.
does HIPAA actually apply to individuals
In what way does HIPAA stop radical antiabortion groups (as one example) from doxxing women who seek abortions? I am not sure you actually understand what doxxing is.
In this specific example, the information would not be coming from the doctors office, but from places like reddit, facebook, myspace, et etc etc. Trolling an individuals online persona And social media to deduce private details of their lives.
What should stop you, or anyone else, from doing that is actually exactly the same bundle of stuff that stops most of us from ever even wanting to post pictures like that guy did, or even to look at them. Conscience. Empathy. Judgment. A respect for others’ privacy. Basic human values.
This simple restraint on the part of most of us isn’t sufficient to deal with the people like that guy who feel at liberty to go ahead and do it anyway, so it was both necessary and desirable to strip away his concealment. Conversely, people who are putting any effort into the work of being worthwhile human beings can look at a lot of other things people are doing and say “You know, this really is their own business, harming nobody who hasn’t explicitly chosen to be involved, and there’d be no good to exposing it.”
You probably can boil it down to a rule, in part, but the rule wouldn’t start by asking “Is someone trying to conceal this because it would harm or embarrass them if it came out?” It should start with “Is this person harming and abusing others, whether they’re doing it under their own name or anonymously?”
This is a good point. It does not, however, address the fact that the technique is as easily used by nasty people bent on evil, as it is by crusading journalists. How you gonna keep the westboro baptist church from doxxing people and destroying their lives?
A legal framework protecting Internet privacy and anonymity is my answer. Either make it the province of law enforcement to dox at all, or at least make it illegal to cyber bully and give the law some real teeth. That way when somebody starts outing gay people or spreading their fetlife profile all over their church, the victims have recourse.
I have no problem with outing violentacrez, as stated many times, but I have a huge problem with the idea that nobody deserves online privacy, as that leads to enormous harm to innocent people.
Wait, you’re saying someone who molests you have a greater right to their privacy than you do of your person?
What?
The story doesn’t say he molested anyone. He asserts he had consensual sex with his adult stepdaughter, which is creepy and is illegal in some places. But no where in the story does it say that he molested anyone.
As far as I can tell, all of his activity on Reddit described in the story was perfectly legal.
‘it was perfectly legal’ is a terrible standard. It’s quite possible for someone to leave a trail of wreckage behind them as they go through their lives, proving themselves the sort of person that, in a properly run world, would at least be exiled from every sensible community, while staying quite within the bounds of the law.
There’s a fair amount of legal and social theory on this subject. The law is flawed, made by flawed people and even the best of them cannot anticipate all cases. ‘Hard cases make bad law’ is simply true. ‘it was legal’ is a recipe for allowing the worst of us to define appropriate social behavior.
Further, journalism putting these pieces together and allowing people to see the full story of the way this man lives his life is, in fact, entirely legal as well. The heuristic ‘is it legal’ is simply not applicable to this case. So… how then do you propose that we judge it?
I didn’t say that what he did was good. For that matter, I haven’t said that outing him was bad. I simply said that it wasn’t necessary in the name of good journalism. I suspect that a journalism professor could craft a compelling final exam question out of this issue.
If he was posting upskirt photos without the consent of the photographed, then he did break laws. If any of those photographed were under 18, boy howdy did he break some laws.
No, if he took those kinds of photos he may have broken laws. While there are different laws in the fifty states, I doubt there are any that say that reposting photos other people took without the consent of the subject is illegal. If there are any, I highly doubt that the legality of the act turns on the age of the victim.
I doubt there are any that say that reposting photos other people took without the consent of the subject is illegal.
Depends on the context. Public use of someone else’s image without their permission is at least grounds for suit in many states.
No, if he took those kinds of photos he may have broken laws.
Actually, publishing them, which he did by posting them, would be illegal in many jurisdictions even if taking the pictures was not.
I highly doubt that the legality of the act turns on the age of the victim.
Google “child porn”. On second thought, don’t; you’ll bring down the wrath of God upon your head. Let’s just say that there definitely are laws regarding the reposting of pornography and the age of those participating in it.
What I said: “I doubt there are any that say that reposting photos other people took without the consent of the subject is illegal.” As described in the article, the photos were not nude. Posting a picture of a woman in a bikini, taken of her while she was in public, is not illegal just because she didn’t consent to it.
And regarding child porn, the article expressly states that the photos of juveniles were photos of clothed juveniles. Furthermore, the guy that everyone thinks deserved to be outed was the moderator who removed child porn photos from these threads. That doesn’t make the threads good, but it means that his actions weren’t illegal.
Nudity is not a requirement for pornography. Upskirt photos fall well within the classification in most jurisdictions.
You’re talking about voyeurism laws, not pornography laws. My point is that I doubt there is any jurisdiction that says reposting voyeuristic photos is illegal. The tone of the entire article implies that the subject did nothing illegal, and I suspect it would have been a central fact in the story if he had.
No, I’m talking about pornography laws. Looking makes you a voyeur; taking photos & trading ‘em with your friends makes you a pornographer.
Taking voyeuristic photos is illegal in some places. Pornography, in and of itself, isn’t illegal anywhere in the united states. Only certain kinds of pornography can be banned, thanks to the first amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California. I have never heard of a jurisdiction that bans possession of upskirt photos. If you know of one, please say. How could you ever prove that the mere possessor of such photos knew they were taken without consent?
In Canada, that would almost certainly be child porn. The laws here are very strict (for which I think we have Catherine MacKinnon to thank, at least in part). Even cartoons judged to contain sexualized depictions of underage folk are child porn.
I meant in the United States. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
Taking voyeuristic photos is illegal in some places. Pornography, in and of itself, isn’t illegal anywhere in the united states.
But taking, possessing, or publishing (as in posting) sexualized images of children under the age of 18 is illegal everywhere in the US. The age is somewhat lower in many European countries (tied to the age of consent). Art exhibitions featuring nude, but nonsexual, images of children have been raided and closed under these laws.
Anyone who posts nonconsensual upskirts he took himself has no privacy right to claim. I am baffled by those of you claiming otherwise.
Anyone who posts nonconsensual upskirts he took himself has no privacy right to claim. I am baffled by those of you claiming otherwise.
Simple – those women were not pillars of their online communities, and therefore do not deserve the same right to privacy as admins with a reputation for writing helpful moderation guides for immensely popular websites do. Rights are allocated based on the individual’s usefulness to their community, you know.
aclarke – Sadly, I think the attitude is more “those women had vaginas, and therefore do not deserve the same right to privacy as people with penises”.
This is nonsense. Good journalism isn’t about “necessary” and “unnecessary.” It’s about factually telling stories that are of public interest, as this story is.
And what was done to him was perfectly legal as well.
This guy’s main project was reposting photos of underage women in an explicitly sexual context with links to the sources. It was an implicit invitation to harassment.
His excuse for all of this was, “if you don’t want it reposted, don’t put it online” and blaming the girls for not protecting the photos.
Well the same goes for him.
If he didn’t want to be known as an online pervert, he shouldn’t have sought troll celebrity by perving on teen girls without bothering to protect his anonymity.
Thing is, what he was doing was at the edge of illegal as it tacitly encouraged harassment of these women.
He also started threads for non-consensual sexual photos which is technically illegal.
If he was just some random obnoxious commenter who got his account hacked and personal data shared, it would be unfair. This guy chased attention with determination and was too egotistical to maintain a disguise.
If he didn’t want to be known as an online pervert, he shouldn’t have sought troll celebrity by perving on teen girls without bothering to protect his anonymity.
Per the article, he did TRY to protect his anonymity, but ultimately failed. Which makes this unmasking all the sweeter. Ah, delicious schadenfreude…
Lol wut?
Try reading it again.
No, I am saying you don’t take away everyone’s right to online privacy or anonymity just to catch a molester. You find a way to safeguard the innocent and still catch the molester.
If you’re on the internet and are not taking some serious safety measures, you should never pretend you’re anonymous. Period.
People who think the internet is this anonymous heaven are fooling themselves. It’s like if I went around streaking in my town and got upset someone wrote a story about it. I exposed myself, it’s my fault.
The First Amendment protects your right to say things, and certainly other people’s rights to say you said things when you did in fact say them!
Privacy becomes extremely important when your entire life is potentially an open book to everyone, and your desire to be insulated from a skeezy pervert does not outweigh the real necessity for people to have actual private lives.
He deserves all the privacy rights that he showed to others.
Not arguing there. Did he attach the names of his victims to the photos?
Seriously. I agree with Scott. This is a justified outing. I’m concerned about unjustified ones.
Let’s wait for those cases to actually exist before we concern troll the outing of a monster, hm?
Yeah, let’s wait til people commit suicide or have their lives destroyed or lose their jobs before we think about it.
People ARE thinking about it. They just choose better places to voice their concerns than threads that justly condemn someone very very creepy.
Interesting that you’re more concerned with people like ViolentArcez committing suicide, and apparently not so much about teenage girls who actually *have* killed themselves over Internet harassment. Which creepshotting definitely is.
There have been hundreds of cases of people harassed over Internet information. Don’t be ridiculous. A girl in BC just committed suicide over issues that involved, among other things, doxxing of her private life by bullies.
First they came for the hell buzzards, and I did not speak out because I was not a hell buzzard;
Then they came for the shoggoths, and I did not speak out because I was not a shoggoth;
Then they came for the halfling slaves, and I did not speak out because I was not a halfling slave;
Then they came for the minimal jaguars, and I did not speak out because I was not a minimal jaguar;
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.
Did he attach the names of his victims to the photos?
At least some of the women would have been identifiable from the photos. You are demanding more rights for sexual predators than for their victims.
Bit of a leap there.
Bit of a leap there.
Not even a tiny step compared to some of yours.
You do realize you can search Google using images, correct? And that some of these photos were pulled from Facebook profiles?
Actually, I’m a bit surprised that no one’s brought up the copyright infringement aspect of the photo republication this guy engaged in. Pulling someone’s Facebook profile photo and posting it elsewhere for people’s wanking pleasure is unlikely to fall within the bounds of fair use.
Respond to your bogus invoking of Amanda Todd in another comment – Todd was harassed by someone exactly like this predditor. She flashed a camera, it got circulated somewhere with her info and she was stalked by some guy. Nothing in her story is like Brutsch getting called out, except his victims. And, as I’ve point out elsewhere,Brutsch made no secret of his identity, he told many people and he was selling merch – not something you do if you want to keep a secret identity. He wasn’t secret, he was just so entitled he tought he could do anything and not get named.
Time was when “decent” people wouldn’t report their neighbor the wife beater because they thought reporting him would be a violation of his right to privacy.
We can agree that privacy is important without believing it to be an absolute right.
The ability to keep a secret is usually a virtue, but it becomes a vice when you start covering for horrific behavior.
Violentacrez was broadcasting huge numbers of potentially illegal images to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. He was trafficking in the stolen facebook pictures of 14-year-olds, for fuck’s sake.
Michael Brutsch had to be unmasked because there was no other way to make him stop.
Also, too, if you want to keep it private, keep it private.
As you said, he was broadcasting this shit all over the internet, which is clearly a public space. Once he started doing that, and encouraged others do the same, he gave up any right to scream about his privacy being violated.
And of course, there’s the privacy rights of his victims, which ought to count for something, but never do with these assholes.
I don’t disagree that he deserved his outing, only that this is a dangerous trend in modern society, and that the ease of uncovering private aspects of a life, and of broadcasting that information to people who will use it for evil, are being insufficiently considered in the dialogue over this issue.
Also, I am curious: what makes you think this will put any sort of curb on his activities? All he has to do is create a new user ID and carry on. In fact, now that he has been exposed, he has actually less to worry about. It isn’t like he can be outed twice.
Upthread, substance McGravitas pointed out that people are in fact conscious of this issue, but that this thread is more of a dogpile on a pervert than anyplace to consider nuance. Perhaps he is right.
Upthread, substance McGravitas pointed out that people are in fact conscious of this issue, but that this thread is more of a dogpile on a pervert than anyplace to consider nuance.
That doesn’t seem to me to be what I said, but if we want subtext it might be more appropriately expressed as “It is very creepy for you to be concerned about this right here and right now.”
Sorry, no. The dangerous trend is using the internet as a place to spread nonconsensual porn. If you’re so concerned about suicide, the danger is at least as great from the other end: what about the victims of this creep’s behavior? Or the behavior of others like him? Persistent misogynistic harassment can destroy lives at least as easily as the “outing” of a misogynist troll can.
If he comes back under a new name, he’s not going to have anywhere near the platform that he used to. He’s radioactive to reddit at this point. Sure, they could try bringing him back under his new handle, but he could be outed again, and the scandal would be twice as big the second time around because of the coverup. He’s not the most discreet individual, so I wouldn’t trust him to keep his new identity a secret.
Yes, substance, it’s always creepy when somebody looks past the surface and wonders about consequences and implications. Very creepy. It’s almost like they think this stuff might actually matter, to people like Amanda Todd, for example. Who recently killed herself after enduring cyber bullying that includes incidences of doxxing.
Oh but I forget, you posted a link to it. Did you read it?
Own your creepiness.
Whatever subbie. Whatever.
With you until the end there.
It was perfectly ethical to out him so that his future will be appropriately impacted by his sociopathic behavior.
Whether it stopped him or not is irrelevant, whether others are cautioned away from ths type of abuse of women and girls by the prospect of being treated as what they are (sexual predators) is irrelevant–it was the right thing to do because others have the right to know that Michael is a creep. Not because it will teach Michael a lesson.
Agree completely.
It is absolutely maddening that the reply buttons are missing on half the posts. Makes it essentially impossible to have any kind of discourse.
Uh, the journalist is not the one engaging in behavior a prospective employer, to say nothing of ordinary decent people, find perverted, reprehensible, potentially dangerous and at times questionably legal.
If you don’t want to be known as a creepy pervert, don’t do creepy perverted things. Doing them anonymously doesn’t make them any more okay and doesn’t entitle you to be shielded from other people knowing that you’d like to fuck their 12-year-old daughter.
Creepy, perverted, non-consensual things.
Your comment falls down if you imagine someone outed for going to a BDSM club on Friday nights, fired by a prudish employer.
In the instance of the kinds of things Violentacrez was doing, yes, I absolutely agree.
Precisely. A lot of people seem to be missing the point that doxxing is a two edged sword. It’s great when someone as self evidently scummy as violentacrez gets nailed for his transgressions. Not so fantastic when some wingnut beats up his daughter when she gets outed for going into a planned parenthood clinic, or your boss starts surveilling you because of your posts on LGM, looking for an excuse to fire the librul pinko comuuuunist. It’s too easy, too cheap, for groups with an axe to did up the ‘dirt’ on anyone these days.
Not so fantastic when some wingnut beats up his daughter when she gets outed for going into a planned parenthood clinic, or your boss starts surveilling you because of your posts on LGM, looking for an excuse to fire the librul pinko comuuuunist.
Please explain how not outing Violentacrez would make these any more or less likely to happen. Be specific and use examples.
THANK YOU.
The internet is not a court of law. Precedent has no binding effect.
Outing is a tool that can be used for good or ill. Not using it for good doesn’t actually stop people from using it for ill.
How many times do I need to state in his thread that the outing of violentacrez was justified and appropriate?
Not outing violentacrez doesn’t make any of those other things more or less likely.
Not thinking long and hard about what to do about the implications of doxxing makes all of those things inevitable.
This issue strikes me as a potential locus for a shock doctrine style assault on privacy. Violentacrez strikes me as a fantastic excuse to erode Internet privacy, after all if you are not in favour of mandatory real identity laws, you must be on the side of people like that creep violentacrez.
How many times do I need to state in his thread that the outing of violentacrez was justified and appropriate?
Until you quit arguing, however obliquely, that this is problematic. There is no point of comparison between this situation and any of those you have cited in this thread. End of argument. If you do not want to come off as defending this asshole, quit objecting to his outing. There is absolutely no guarantee of anonymity on the internet. He was outed for things he did and said on the the internet, not because he had an abortion, but never talked about it anywhere.
You. Fucking. Idiot.
I have never objected to his outing. Not once. Not ever. I have referred to him as a creep, a pervert, as loathsome, and vile. Maybe you read that as defending him, but if you do, then once again, you’re an idiot.
As for the rest of it, hey if you can’t understand that exactly the same techniques are used to dox anyone, be they loathsome pornographers or gay high school kids, then once again, you’re an idiot.
Finally, you keep saying there is no guarantee of anonymity on the Internet as though this is somehow profound. We all know that. What I’m suggesting is that maybe there should be.
The Internet has functioned for a couple of decades as a place where marginalized people have been able to safely form communities for mutual support, and if we start tolerating the exposure of people just because somebody finds them objectionable, a great deal of evil will be done.
Why don’t you get that your last paragraph is the objection you claim you’re not making?
I don’t follow.
I don’t follow.
No kidding. Read what you say carefully and think about what it says and implies.
Clearly implies that no one, even the assholes and predators, should ever be outed. That is what you are saying, repeatedly. Since we cannot read your mind, we do not know if that is different from what you mean.
The key phrases to take away are, in my opinion ‘just Because someone finds them objectionable’ and ‘tolerating’.
As in: doxxing is an incredibly powerful, easy to use tool of privacy destruction. And should we allow an ethical and legal framework to exist where just anyone can dig out and display your personal Internet life to the world, then we ain’t just going to see filthy perverts unmasked, we are going to see a world where the kind of oppo research performed on political candidates is going to routinely happen to innocent and law abiding people. We do not need to have private actors digging into Internet lifestyles to fine juicy gossip. Such an invasion of privacy is a huge can of worms, and bullying high school kids, radical anti abortionists, /btards, and you and I should not be doing it.
If someone is doing something all that bad, call the fuckinh cops. It is what they are for. At least they have some constraints and ethical guidelines on which lives they will destroy.
And should we allow an ethical and legal framework to exist where just anyone can dig out and display your personal Internet life to the world,
Nice strawman there. Neither I nor anyone else here has suggested this. My take away points are that it is OK to out predators and bullies who abuse anonymity to harm others.
If someone is doing something all that bad, call the fuckinh cops. It is what they are for.
And as I and others keep pointing out, not all bad things are illegal.
That world already exists. However, anyone with a brain can easily distinguish between “behavior that actively harms specific, defined, other people, many of them minors”, and “behavior that some might find objectionable but which does not actively harm other people”.
False comparisons again. This dude did not keep his identity secret and aggressively sought attention. Not every secret is magically hackable and harassing women who go to clinics is still illegal.
I know, right? I mean, who cares that he’s ruined the lives of the women and girls he’s posted on the internet? Bitchez ain’t shit, but men are.
Who are you talking to? Nobody here has expressed anything like support or sympathy for violentacrez.
Yes you have, at least implicitly.
The fucking hell I have. Listen up, asshole, for about the tenth fucking time, I have repeatedly stated in this thread that i support his outing.
Who the fuck are you, the reincarnated ghost of mcarthy?
if we start tolerating the exposure of people just because somebody finds them objectionable, a great deal of evil will be done.
That is exactly what I am talking about.
Yeah, so calling out the dangers of a particular technique of pervert exposure is the same as defending perverts is okay?
I oppose the detention of non combatants in guantanamo bay without trial. That doesn’t make me pro-terrorist.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that no one here other than you is aware of the dangers. You are wrong. However, everyone else has obviously decided that those risks are acceptable under certain circumstances, such as, when the person being targeted for outing is a predator who harms other people. We are capable of distinguishing between people who harm others, and therefore deserve to be outed, and people who don’t, and therefore don’t.
It is also utterly incoherent that you keep arguing that you in fact support this guy’s outing, and then turn around and lecture everyone else that we are sending the world into a tailspin of destruction if we also support his outing.
I really don’t think that rendering this guy permanently unemployable was necessary in the name of journalism.
Gee, the “who” question seems like an elemental part of any story.
Without his identity, what’s the story? “There are creeps on the internet”?
It’s great journalism. I don’t know how this fact is missed, but the “creepshots” that this guy posted for years are in fact felony assault in every state in the US.
The guy deserves to be prosecuted for each picture he posted.
To be clear: The conversations on this thread so far have only considered the possession of those photos. The act of taking the photos is the felony, which he already admitted to.
Well, his nasty behavior in Reddit alone justifies outing him.
It’s hard to disentangle precisely what “forced to participate in online porn” actually means; is this just people taking pictures in public and posting them to some board?
Google “upskirt”. You might find it informative.
For all values of “informative”=disgusting.
Right, so it’s creepy and, in some places illegal (?), but it’s not “forcing” anyone into anything. I’m betting the pervs would, in fact, rather their subject not know what they were doing
How would you articulate the difference that you seem to be drawing between ‘forced’ and ‘unwilling’?
because I’ve seen pretty pictures of girls on the internet? Many of which were taken by themselves.
I’ve even seen pretty pictures of ladies wearing poor fashion choices in the back of Cosmo. Were those anonymous ladies forced into something?
They did not give their consent to have sexualized images of themselves published.
Just to clarify, they were forced to participate in pornographic activity when he posted those images without their permisson.
what makes the photo pornographic? the content or the reaction?
Context.
How do your examples demonstrate the difference between ‘unwilling’ and ‘forced’ that you were drawing before?
I think that is true only for the time they are actually doing it. I think many of them get off on their victims being aware that they were victimized after the fact.
It’s forcing women to pose for photos. They did not give their consent for the use of those images, nor were they reimbursed for their use. If I take a candid snap of you out a bus window and use it in an ad campaign, you have the right to sue, and in some jurisdictions, I have actually committed a crime. This is even more the case when porn is involved. This is why porn producers who want to avoid jail meticulously document consent and that their models are all over 18. If someone wants to play amateur pornographer, that someone getting hit with all of the weight of the laws and restrictions that the professionals deal with is fair game. Anonymity should be no more a protective device in this instance than in, say, generating industrial pollution or manufacturing stimulant medications.
This is stretching logic to the breaking point. If you’re putting a hidden camera in a bedroom or bathroom then there is an obvious invasion of privacy. But my privacy is not violated if I’m walking on the sidewalk and someone takes a picture of me.
If you want to sell a picture of me – yup, you need my consent. But that’s not at stake here as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, we can disapprove of some things that are legal. And this is precisely the sort of case where I see absolutely no problem with sunlight – if you want to post pictures of others on the net, then they should be able to post your name, and you should own the consequences of what you do.
If you are on a bus and a guy aims a camera up your skirt surreptitiously, that’s a different matter, nicht wahr?
But a picture of someone in a bikini on the beach isn’t the same thing, no?
Did you read the piece? Specifically, did you read about the schoolgirl upskirt photos?
There are also legal limitations on publishing the image of someone without their permission and it is at least grounds for a lawsuit in many, if not most jurisdictions. This is why news agencies sometimes blur the faces of people in pictures and video. In many cases, you have to show real or potential harm from the publication, but that would be pretty easy to do here.
If a person doesn’t make money from the exchange, then there’s no fair use violation
Timb, that’s a common misconception about fair use. The fact that you’re not making money doesn’t make it fair use to reproduce the images.
Granted, if you’re not making money off the pictures, it may not be worth the copyright holder’s time to sue you for damages, but that’s not the same thing.
At the very least, using stolen facebook pictures of minors on your perv site is a copyright violation.
If a person doesn’t make money from the exchange, then there’s no fair use violation
This doesn’t even make any logical sense, generally speaking.
If I have a copyrighted work that is capable of generating income for me, and someone else is making copies and giving them away, am I not harmed by the loss of revenue?
It has nothing to do with whether the copyright violator makes money. The issue is whether the copyright owner’s interests are harmed.
Lack of knowledge = lack of consent = force, in the eyes of the law.
Stop it with the creepy-ass assertion that if the victim of your sexual predation doesn’t KNOW you’ve taken her picture, it’s all good.
I hope the people who drove Amanda Todd to suicide are outed. Facebook is a magnet for sociopaths as well.
Second that. Stalking and blackmail are not less vile (and probably not less illegal) for being online.
Thirded.
I don’t have a problem outing anyone who posts anonymously on the internet (including myself). I don’t see where I signed a contract saying I have an obligation to help anyone protect their identity.
This doesn’t mean I’m going to go out of my way to blow people’s covers. But I claim a free-speech right of my own to do so when I think it’s justified.
Adding, no one is forced to post on Facebook, Reddit, LG&M, etc.
You should hang out at Protein Wisdom and see what happens when aggressive right wing a-holes try to destroy someone’s life. Or, go see what happened to Aaron Walker
Yeah, I got harassed for posting under my own name back in the dot-com days. Lesson learned: Libertarians aren’t the least bit libertarian. Ultimately irrelevant, though, in the land of ECHELON and CARNIVORE. Every keystroke you make, every utterance over a telephone is potentially being recorded and scrutinized. I can’t get to worked up over the privacy rights of a guy whose specialty is fucking over other people’s privacy rights.
I’m well aware of this. I’m also well aware that, as Scott says, some people would not be able to participate in some internet communities without the protection of anonymity.
My points are (a) if you want to be anonymous, it’s up to you to take the necessary precautions, which violentacrez did not — no one else has any inferred responsibility to protect your identity; and (b) your first amendment rights to be a dick don’t supercede my first amendment rights to tell the rest of the world who the dick is that’s hiding behind the mask of anonymity.
I really don’t see how you can lay the blame for rendering this guy permanently unemployable at the feet of the journalist. If Adrian Chen published my name in Gawker tomorrow I don’t think I’d have a hard time finding work. But then again, I don’t distribute nonconsensual porn, moderate fora dedicated to hate speech, post pictures of domestic violence, or brag about having sex with my (hypothetical) stepchildren.
The question isn’t whether the guy is loathsome, the question is whether you want to live in a world where you can have no secrets.
I find my secrets can be relatively well-hidden if I’m not bragging about blowjobs from stepdaughters on the most visible site in the world.
That is the point of Scott’s post, that in some cases the outing is justified. In fact, I agree with him.
There is, however a continuum here. Upskirt photo predators are on one end of it. 14 yr old girls getting abortions and gay men who wish to remain closeted are on the other end.
All the people on this continuum probably have Internet presences that reveal their secrets. And all these people will suffer consequences if those secrets are easily available to anyone who cares to enter a few terms into google.
Including me. Including you, don’t kid yourself.
And all these people will suffer consequences if those secrets are easily available to anyone who cares to enter a few terms into google.
You can strike that word “if”. Those secrets are easily available, period.
Right. There is no general right to anonymity in public fora. There are some public fora which make explicit guarantees of at least limited anonymity (like AA), but in the absence of such explicit guarantees, you have no such rights. If you do not want to be outed, do not post anything on the internet, ever.
I use a pseudonym more for discretion than anonymity and do not make much effort to conceal my identity. Anybody who really wants to can figure out who I am (as one of our purity trolls did a while back and emailed me at work). It is simply a light barrier between my personal and professional life. Of course, i do not do or say anything on the internet than I do not do or say in real life.
If you do not continuously do loathsome things and then bragging about them, it really is not that hard to keep the skeletons in the closet.
The creep’s first amendment rights don’t change because he uses pixels instead of paper. But neither does the right of others to expose him. He may yet have exposure to civil liability as well, which would leave public records whatever medium he chose. There is no magic pixie dust associated with these here toobz that exempts users of the medium from real world consequences.
This.
Yeah? I double dog dare you to go publish your legal name on 4chan, sir.
Go ahead. I’m sure you have nothing to hide.
We seem to have teleported those goal posts to another dimension. At issue is revealing the identity of someone actively engaged as a sexual predator in the present. I do not think I would necessarily support outing him for indiscretions committed many years ago, as long as they were not illegal.
No, at issue is whether or not it’s good for society that any asshole can sit down at a computer and snoop your entire life. At no time have I said that violentacrez should not have been outed.
My suggestion that you attract the attention of some of the most talented doxxers in the bowels of the Internet was intended to start you thinking about how little you want your own life pried into.
And when that becomes an actual issue in the real world, we can discuss it. This thread is not about that and your commentary all seems to say that all outing is bad.
What is this thread about? Based on the post and the linked article, I would have thought the question in play would be something like “when does the it become appropriate to violate someone Internet privacy by connecting their real life identity to their online activity”
My position, honestly, is that if someone has made an effort to actually maintain anonymity, that the only people who should be violating that anonymity are law enforcement officers in the investigation of an offense. And that if you or I do it, it should constitute some sort of cyber assault.
Frankly the appropriate course of action inthis whole violentacrez affair was notifying the police. It seems fairly clear to me that the guy has broken a number of kiddie porn laws, just for starters.
So yes, i think I would say that all outing,( at least all outing that involves the doxxing of a person who intended to be anonymous), by any private actor, is bad.
So yes, i think I would say that all outing,( at least all outing that involves the doxxing of a person who intended to be anonymous), by any private actor, is bad.
And that is the basis for our disagreement. The internet is a community and, like all communities, it has social norms. One of those is that we should respect the privacy of those who post anonymously or pseudonymously. The question under debate is how far does that respect extend.
I, and everyone else here, would agree that under most conditions personal anonymity should be respected. That does not mean that this is an absolute right. Such absolutism lends cover to predators, like Violentacrez, and cyberbullies. Both of these are also violations of internet norms. I, and I think the others arguing with you, feel that when you use your anonymity to harm others, you lose your right to that anonymity. This is not saying that it is always acceptable to out anyone you choose, only that there are exceptional cases where it is the interests of the society to do so in these particular cases.
You are the one arguing for an absolutist position, not us. The fact remains that what is legal is not always socially acceptable or right. Much of what Violentacrez did was at least marginally legal, but it was still morally and socially repugnant and harmed others. This is why your standard does not work on the internet, anymore than it does in society at large.
So yes, i think I would say that all outing,( at least all outing that involves the doxxing of a person who intended to be anonymous), by any private actor, is bad.
How can you say the above and claim that you also support the outing of violentacrez? The two positions seem mutually inconsistent. This inconsistency is the root of why people are arguing with you so much: if you oppose all outings, then you oppose this outing; whenever anyone criticizes you for opposing this outing, you claim you don’t oppose this outing, usually concluding your comment by repeating that you do, in fact, oppose all outings.
the question is whether you want to live in a world where you can have no secrets
If you want unbridled free speech, you’ve answered your own question.
Indeed. The reporter has at least as much, likely more, right to reveal his identity as he did to publish those pictures.
Only an utter fool would want unbridled free speech.
I guess the writers of the Constitution were fools.
Well, they did come up with the Electoral College, so I’m open to the possibility that they were, in fact, fools.
Sigh. Yeah, so you want to be able to yell fire in a crowded theater? You oppose libel and slander laws? You don’t like purgery laws?
All of those are restrictions on free speech. Don’t be an ass.
What the fuck is “purgery?” If you’re going to run up and down the abstraction ladder, learn to spell so it’s not doubly insulting to the rest of us.
Yeah. The spelling error is certainly the salient point.
It helps illustrate how your bizarre contributions to this discussion make no sense.
How is the assertion that doxxing has the potential to be extremely harmful bizarre?
Or the opinion that anonymity on the Internet might be a desirable thing? Is that bizarre?
Or that in our haste to condemn a creep, we should take care to also consider the implications of the right to privacy?
Is it bizarre to be concerned that innocent people who do legal things, like get abortions, or have sex with men, or are members of the communist party, might get doxxed and harassed?
Gee, i wonder.
None of these seem bizarre.
They sure do move about!
So your response is a copypasta gif? Well that was intellectually stimulating.
What the fuck is “purgery?”
Disingenuousness and pedantry don’t exactly contribute to the discourse, do they? A perfectly understandable (and homonymic!) spelling mistake in the heat of the moment.
Yeah, it’s a little ironic that you get upset about people calling out your spelling error when you keep using the non-word “doxxing”, wherever that came from. Seriously, I have never heard or seen that “word” before this thread but you use it all the time as if it were a perfectly cromulent word. What is it?
I am not the one being an ass here.
My opinion of you has certainly dropped. Precipitously.
Mine as well.
Secrets, by and large, aren’t secrets. They are things that we pretend not to notice about each other so that we can live together amicably. It’s pretty much the way that humans live in groups without killing each other. The question here isn’t about keeping secrets or not, but what abominable habits rise to a level where we can no longer turn our heads and must instead confront the person.
That Violentacrez was Michael Brutsch was not a secret in any meaningful sense, except that it was something that literally thousands of people had decided to not notice. Adrian Chen decided that he could no longer be one of the people that pretended not to notice. He is right to have done so, and the people that ignored this for so long should be ashamed.
This is no small point. Brutsch was attending cons as Violentacrez and asking people to blur his face in photos and not reveal his identity. He was basking in his internet fame and then utilizing that admiration and/or his status to maintain his anonymity. Curiously, many of those complaining about doxxing are the same ones who argued that if women post pictures of themselves online/take pictures of themselves in the nude/appear in public they are asking for it. He was hiding behind a set of social norms that makes outing anonymity the worst thing you can do to someone and utilizing it to generate internet fame and hurt as many people as he possibly could. For him, violating social norms that kids deserve protection from adults or that women are autonomous beings who should be able to make decisions about their own bodies is a source of great pleasure but the norms of the community he benefited from are sacrosanct.
So I guess you all are still for a Libertarian!First Amendment? Even though it works like how Libertarian!Anything does? It took massive amounts of social cohesion and coordination and people willing to take serious hits onto their employability in a seriously bad job environment, just to stop one seriously malignant personality backed by a crowd that cares more about enjoying the violation than anything else. Does “more free speech” cure the ill of bad free speech before it does tremendous harm? Aren’t we already far too subject to the control of private power to really worry about the slippery slope to state mind-police? When it comes to heckler’s veto, isn’t the record of effectiveness rather mixed, say when you look at desegregation of schools?
Look, Libertarian philosophy is the opiate of the petite bourgeoisie who think they built that. Entrenched in law, it does not provide more liberty. Entrenched in the First Amendment, it carves out an unregulated space free for the domination of private powers without fear of social justice. That’s why vicious people get more protection than people who want to, oh, advocate for Palestinian causes or alleviate their suffering. Those Westboro Church folks never had to worry about NYPD plainshirts hovering around with a wire…
There really needs to be more laws about speech w/r/t civil peace and incorporating a deeper understanding of what manifestation of malignant intent should be repressed. If there were, the intersection of speech, media, and sexual assault would not be so lightly moderated, and the community as a whole can move much faster to deal with serious malignancies. That such communities can go overboard is quite true–it just means that people have to be more involved and engaged in politics, despite all the discouragement and distraction offered by the media.
Did it?
It looks to me like its Brutsch, not Chen, who is about to take a serious hit to his employability. Reddit may be powerful, but Chen has Gawker, CNN, Pandagon, and now LGM on his side. The marketplace of ideas appears to be working.
In contrast, some folks are really concerned about Brutsch’s future, and want to see some anti-libertarian right to privacy enforced (I guess by the State).
Not I, I’m libertarian. I’m heartless. I don’t care if the market punishes people for exercising their 1A rights. I might even toss down a Martini or two, in honor of Brutsch’s impeding suffering.
Shouldn’t you be part of that toast?
This analogy works so well because George Wallace and Orville Faubus were clearly private actors (and ones who hated the New Deal and were well-versed in Von Mises, Rand, and Uncle Milt)
Ooookaaaay!!
Libertarian philosophy is the opiate of the petite bourgeoisie who think they built that.
That deserves to be chiseled into granite.
And mounted above the door to every Chamber of Commerce. Also to be used to pelt actual libertarians.
And loosely mounted above the door to every Chamber of Commerce so as to be used to pelt actual libertarians.
FTFY.
Great visual.
Libertarian pelts? Is there a market for those?
No, too thin-skinned to be commercially useful.
I believe shah8 is arguing for more 1A restrictions. He’s doing this my associating free market fundamentalism with the free speech kind. Presumably he figured the LGM faithful have no power to resist an anti-libertarian orgy when one presents itself.
But I am told that you support the 1A consensus…and therefore uttering the name Catherine Mackinnon is akin to screaming Mao in a crowded university.
Either shah8 has cleverly tricked you, or you hide the Herbert Marcuse posts whenever I visit.
I defy you to make less sense.
Please don’t do that. You know how Manju loves that kind of challenge.
Sure, everyone has something in their history that will make them unacceptable to some employer somewhere. But part of being an adult and participating in society entails being able to recognize that in some of those cases, the employer and the outer would be the ones morally culpable for your unemployment, and in some cases, it is you yourself who is to blame. Hiding personal details to avoid being persecuted or oppressed by a fucked up society is not the same thing as hiding personal details to avoid the consequences of doing terrible things behind an anonymous Reddit account.
Sure you can. Just because Violentacrez’s actions were technically legal doesn’t mean that they were any less morally repugnant than those of a peeping Tom or groper, or that he should be provided any additional respect or consideration. No one’s talking about arresting him, and outing is an effective way to fight back. Why would you insist on sympathizing with the sexual predator in this situation, simply because he hasn’t broken the law?
Nobody’s contesting that what he did was legal. It was also predatory. Outing him isn’t illegal either. You guys are the ones arguing that outing a predator is worse than the predatory behavior itself when both are equally legal.
Preachy time.
Welcome to life in a giant stadium filled with 10 million of your closest strangers. You’re going to be spending the rest of your lives here so perhaps you’ll want to remember a few things.
First, you are in a giant stadium. Which means you’re going to see shit you didn’t want to see. If it isn’t; in fact, criminal behavior than look away and move on. If it is please notify your local law enforcement office.
Second, remember you are in public. Stop thinking of the internet as some sort of personal private playground. It’s not! Never has been and never will be.
Third, your anonymity is a facade, don’t count on it as protection.
Finally, if you want to act like a shit-stain pedophile wannabe, spare us all the whiny ass sniveling when you get treated like one.
I don’t know, basic decency? There’s a reason that this post is entitled “Why norms have exceptions.” Outing an anonymous person on the Internet is generally a dickish thing to do, but that’s not a universal law of nature. In this case, it’s totally ok. If you honestly can’t tell the difference between outing a sexual predator and outing women getting abortions, then I don’t know what to tell you except I hope you don’t work with children.
Basic decency? Google westboro baptist church, come back and tell me again why I should rely upon basic decency.
The Westboro perverts have been around a lot longer than the internet.
And as far as it goes, 99% of entire life off and online relies on basic decency.
Well, unless you can afford a lifestyle that completely shields you from having to deal with anyone you just can’t fire.
What does whether the Westboro Baptist Church behaves indecently have to do with whether or not you do?
What?
I don’t need a way to keep myself from doxxing people, I already think doxxing is bad and should not be done in most situations. I want a way to keep the westboro types from doing it.
Sure, we can pass laws that make it illegal to utter other people’s names without their explicit consent.
There is no way to stop people from getting their online identities revealed. The whole world operates on social norms, and that is the way it should be.
Sometimes these social norms are enshrined into laws, but only in case that present bodily harm.
Also, if you want to be anonymous don’t put your information out there. How many people without Facebook pages get stalked on Facebook?
Not sure why my comments aren’t threading, but it should be obvious who they’re in response to.
Sometimes the reply button does not work right when you post from a cellphone.
That must be it, thanks.
I couldn’t agree more.
Spoken like guys who have never been the target of a sexual predator.
His actions were explicitly sexual in nature. He stalked his victims. He did this without their consent. This pretty much defines the term “sexual predator.”
In real life I think most people recognize that free speech isn’t necessarily consequence free speech… but on the internet we seem to embrace and celebrate the rights of people to say whatever they want without real world repercussions.
As a amateur photographer I’m actually more conflicted by horrible these creep shots sound vs. the right to take pictures in a public place.
You have a right to take pictures. You don’t have a right to post people’s images without consent, in many cases. You definitely don’t have a right to make porn out of those images without consent, in most cases.
And I would argue, that one is on very, very sketchy ground indeed, when one is using pictures that minors have made of themselves. It’s fairly universal, and rightly so, that minors are held to different degrees of culpability in their behaviors, because they are not fully developed emotionally, mentally and physically.
Sick fuck decided that children are the same as adults. He has a lot of sick company.
Cheers,
Alan Tomlinson
P.S. As one might guess, I am personally not a fan of internet anonymity and feel that using my real name promotes transparency and accountability.
Completely transparent and accountable.
I’m not donating any tears to cleanse the blood of violentacrez’s sacrifice from the altar of free speech, but I think the proprietors of reddit are more culpable than this creep, because they knew what he was and were willing use that, as well as his and thousands of other “mods” unpaid labor, to increase their profits and the sway of their internet kingdom. The fact that he was a vile troll and perv was a feature, not a bug, for the feudal capitalists who own and run reddit.
Damn good point.
Okay, I’m done here. The essential point, which is that a bunch of sick fucks are making bank off pictures of 14 year olds looking sexualiized, and have thrown this volunteer into the volcano as a sacrifice, has been made.
Reddit would benefit from a band of crazed separatists armed with dull wooden spoons bent on the creation of an army of castrati. Also too.
I think I read that a bit differently than you did.
who was “making bank” exactly?
Does Reddit make anything on advertising, and is that amount affected by number of page hits?
There’s your answer.
i have adblocker
so i have no idea
I also got the distinct impression that as he continued starting subreddits of other items (in particular, the lovely ones about beating women) that the proprietors left him to be more and more responsible for them, as a way to provide some distance, to inoculate themselves, when the inevitable shit hit the inevitable fan.
Agreed.
Are there any consequences people can impose on Reddit for this?
Really, Scott, a link to Marcotte? Ugh. Are you trying to make this creep sympathetic?
It takes a real misogynist jerk to think that Brutsch is more sympathetic than Marcotte.
Thanks Anonymous. You said it better than I did.
Pretty much the though that came to my mind, as well. Some of us here actually like Marcotte.
Same here. She’s got damned good taste in music too.
I really do not understand why Marcotte is hate so much. She is very passionate in her beliefs and this leads to a strident writing style but her beliefs aren’t really that extreme. She always struck as being on the more practical, what can we actually implement in the real world side of feminism rather than the more theoretic types where you don’t have to worry about putting theory into practice and could therefore advocate anything you want.
This seems weird. What’d Amanda ever do to you?
Had a vagina, of course.
Unless I miss my guess, this commenter is the one who’s been low-grade stalking her for years. In other words, of course he finds Brutsch more sympathetic.
Well, let’s be fair. There’s lots people with vaginas and Toasters hates all of them to some degree or another. But Marcotte’s principled and utter refusal to use polite language and engage in looking-the-other-way, in the fashion expected of having-a-vagina people in our culture around misogynistic assholes, seems to trigger a sort of incendiary rage in that class of asshole.
Well, you missed your guess. And I don’t find Brutsch more sympathetic than Marcotte, nor did I say anything of the sort. Scott could have linked directly to the Gawker article, instead of having us go to Marcotte’s insane ramblings about surreptitious shots of women in public as being “non-consensual porn.” But if he links to Marcotte he gets a Certificate of Righteousness, I guess.
The DukeLax episode put Marcotte in Nancy Grace territory. Therefore, I agree, she’s not the best cite/link for someone trying to make a case against a sex criminal.
But putting aside the messenger for a moment, “non-consensual porn” is a pretty clever description of “upskirts” and the such.
I would be careful. Laws against filming someone w/o permission could have an adverse effect on stuff like this:
http://www.theagitator.com/2012/10/09/stop-and-frisk/
…but a carefully constructed law could pass even “Libertarian!fistammendment” (credit to shah8, who is on this thread) muster.
I know, if you are out in public there is no expectation of privacy. But lets start with an upskirt. There is an expectation there. Pics (even non-nude ones) of children posted on the Internet and taken w/o the parent’s permission (for the purpose that Brutsch has)…I can see a compelling state interest.
“Non-consensual porn” isn’t that far off, assuming its even off in the first place.
I agree with much of this, but even Marcotte (who is generous in her biasing) doesn’t claim that her vignette relates to an upskirt.
““Non-consensual porn” isn’t that far off, assuming its even off in the first place.”
If a man masturbates to a picture of a woman he took on the subway and expects to never see again: how much of a victim is she (in a case where the picture is not uploaded)? Certainly, there is some harm in knowing that it’s likely to happen, but to use a term that parallels that for rape? There has to be a difference between (pick your fantasy) molesting or subjugating or seducing a person in fact versus in thought. It’s even possible to masturbate fantasizing about someone you know without having a picture of them. Surely this is “non-consensual.” And masturbation is sex– voila! It’s “non-consensual sex”!
See everyone in jail.
If I get a thrill getting your bank account number and PIN online but don’t immediately access you accounts or give the numbers to friends, have you been harmed in any way?
Bring the question to money and it becomes clearer, n’est-ce pas?
I’m not sure what “immediately” has to do with any of this, but, for all I know, someone has accessed my account number and PIN. And since I would measure harm by the loss of money, and I haven’t lost any money, I don’t feel I have been harmed.
But AFAIK, even the published photos of these women have been without name or address. A better analogy might be: someone published a picture of me in an expensive car or the like. Now all his online “friends” can fantasize about robbing me.
Just to clarify– it seems clear in the encounter Marcotte describes that the man and woman don’t know anything about each other. There would be no way for him to inform his “friends” about how to increase their chances of molesting/assaulting/raping her with little chance of being caught. OTOH, a bank account # and PIN # is sufficient to make the crime easy and nearly unsolvable.
I spend a lot of my day using Google and other things. You can do a LOT with it, and a lot with just a picture.
How does Amanda Marcotte being wrong about the Duke lacrosse team case make her Nancy Grace, exactly? A lot of people get things wrong when something that so clearly aligns with our prejudices shows up. I know I didn’t question the official story at the time.
People throw that out all the time like it permanently discredits her. I guess I’m a big softie, but even someone like Andrew Sullivan gets a few wrongs before we permanently put him on ignore. And his wrongs were way less forgivable, in my eyes, than Amanda’s, given that prejudices ‘rich frat boys rape’ and Dukies are assholes and the prejudices ‘black people are less intelligent,’ ‘liberals are fifth columnists’ and ‘Neocons came up with a good idea’ ain’t exactly created equal.
Afterthe rape charges had been dropped, after the DNA tests exonerated them, and after the North Carolina bar filed ethics charges against Nifong, Marcotte wrote:
I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out. Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair
A lot of people seem to rabidly hate Amanda Marcotte for things she’s never said or done, or for an image they project onto her.
She’s done some annoying or even god-awful stuff, sure. She has said and done things that are racist (the cartoon debacle with her book a while back) or misogynist (condemning as “immature” all women who have a problem with attempted girlfriend-murderer Hugo Schwyzer going around lecturing girls on good relationships).
But the hate seems way disproportionate, and also generally has nothing to do with what she’s actually done.
Other than be an uncompromising feminist who doesn’t take shit and probably wouldn’t sleep with a sad sack Nice Guy(tm) out of pity, of course.
Hmmm. I have very mixed feelings about Marcotte. She’s done good and bad work, but I found her constant trollfeeding on twitter such that I had to unfollow.
(I’m sorry for the weasel phrase I’m about to use, but I can think of no other.)
I don’t actually think the following about her, but at times she has done things that I worry leave the interpretation that at times she is a white woman of privilege leaning on her gender so as to distract herself and/or others from the the privilege part. That she is probably aware of this possible critique and hopefully has thought about it as a legitimate question, regardless of personal applicability, is why I don’t actually think it of her.
Apologies for being so verbose, to anyone who bothered to read.
*leave the interpretation *open* that at times she…..
*keeps dancing*
I’ve gotten this impression about her too, from time to time, but like you I don’t think it’s a defining trait of who she is.
I dislike a lot of her writing (mostly because of her style), and I am put off by her apparent inability to admit when she’s wrong, but she *is* right about a lot of things (especially Nice-Guyism).
I think that Marcotte’s main writing problem is that she sometimes writes in the style of a propagandist rather than advocate combined with an occasional lack of study about what she is writing about. At times being a propagandist is a good thing but it isn’t always.
Yeah, I get that concern, and I also get annoyance and dislike of her. I just think the knee-jerk reaction and hatred is disproportionate and generally based on imaginary stuff.
I can definitely agree with that. If I learned anything from Twisty Faster it’s that when such talk bothers you, you’re probably the one with more to learn, regardless of the right to wrong ratio of the individual case.
One of the things that makes me feel that almost all of the people who regard Marcotte with loathing is that the more white-hot the rage, the more than person seems to be someone with some very serious learning yet to do. Conversely, the people that dislike or disagree with her without, you know, spontaneously combusting, seem to be decent sorts.
One of the things that makes me feel that almost all of the people who regard Marcotte with respect is that the more reflexive the defense, the more than person seems to be someone with some very serious learning yet to do.
This is a fun game. Try another.
And the more reflexive the denunciation of Marcotte, the more sure I am that the author is a dumfuck misogynist, swimming in privilege.
You’re right: this IS fun.
WTF? Dude, you just shit in the punch bowl.
I gather this is under the law of “he who smelt it, dealt it.”
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/108/s1301
Anonymity is the only protection criminals have from the consequences of their activities.
I’d wager that’s more about keeping citizens from recording police abuse that stopping scum like va.
You’d lose that wager.
Doubtful. The us government doesn’t care much about perverts (except at election time) but they sure don’t like Rodney king style videos on YouTube.
You should read the bill.
I’ve never looked at those sub-reddits but based on the description in Chen’s article they were not “upskirt” pictures. At least, he does not mention that those were among the types of photos posted there.
Many were closeups of T&A in everyday clothing, which these days leaves very little to the imagination.
The claims of “sexual predator” seem over blown (no pun intended)
Many were closeups of T&A in everyday clothing, which these days leaves very little to the imagination.
So because she dressed sexy she deserved it?
The claims of “sexual predator” seem over blown
Tell that to the pedophiles picked up for lurking around schoolyards just watching.
i was describing the content of the photos which seems to have been inaccurately described in this post and comment thread.
The point remains that they did not give their consent to have their pictures to be used for sexual gratification. You seem to imply that it is OK to post those images because they chose to dress in a manner you consider sexy or borderline indecent.
What you do in the privacy of your home is one thing. What you publish in a public forum to be seen by potentially millions of other people is something else entirely. If he just whacked off to the images in the privacy of his home, he would still be a creep, but publishing them elevates him to predator status.
what they were wearing speaks to the legality of his act.
upskirt photos not equal to everyday dress.
I imply that it’s okay to post these images because people in public have no expectation of privacy even if some creep is whacking off to it on the Internet.
I think the vast majority of women, when they were a skirt or dress outside the house, have a quite reasonable expectation that no one will look up their skirt (or down their blouse, for that matter).
is it the case that there were in fact upskirts on the thread?
the adrian chen article and the story he links to about the teacher fired for taking photos of his students don’t mention that these were upskirt pics. chen doesnt accuse Brutsch of uploading any upskirts himself.
Well, looking is one thing, and taking a picture is quite another. I teach 17-to-21-year-olds, and while I dress in plain stuff and am more in the healthy-pleasant than the “hot” category, it has happened that students have had crushes on me. Fine. They may sometimes look at my modest boobage. Okay.
Taking a picture to get off with later? Ick. SHARING that picture for the same purpose, with the poster and the other viewers all knowing the picture was not consented to for any purpose let alone that one? SICK. sick sick sick sick. Get a gorram Victoria’s Secret catalog and stay off tween/teen facebook pages already!
it’s certainly not nice and definitely icky, but something icky can still be legal.
So what?
Except above you said it was “okay,” not just legal. Stop moving the goalposts. It’s a weaselly move.
If it’s okay to publish pictures of people just because they left the house like that, then why isn’t it okay to publish this creep’s identity because he chose to post online? And don’t give me that “he posted pseudonymously” crap, because there’s no such thing–many people were in a position to identify him, that’s how it happened.
Making a distinction between taking a photo of someone and simply remembering how they looked seems somewhat arbitrary. People in your class already have access to the information of how you looked, a photograph merely allows them to incrementally enhance their memories. And since the sharpness of people’s memories can vary wildly to begin with, I don’t think adding photography to the mix really changes things all that much. Getting off to memories and getting off to photography seems about the same in the grand scheme of things.
But sharing the photo is a different matter, and that seems like it more plausibly violates privacy in some sense. People behave in such a way based on their actions will only be visible by the people within a line of sight of them, and when that changes that drastically changes things. Even when the content is in of itself fairly benign, it does seem fair to want to control that information.
I think I follow your reasoning, here. At the same time, memories are a heck of a lot harder to leave lying around for roomates, etc., to encounter, harder to photocopy, to use later for blackmail, etc. So perhaps my concern about sharing the photos (following your point) influences my view of taking them in the first place. (probably obvious: IANAL.)
Paragraph #1 speaks to legality.
Paragraph #2 speaks to ‘okay’. That is to say, social acceptability.
In between the paragraphs, there is a small team of assholes working in close cooperation to move goalposts, hoping nobody notices.
The difference between ‘legal’ and ‘acceptable’ appears to be quite a topic of confusion in this comment thread.
A deliberate confusion in connection with those goal posts, I would say. I find it mildly disturbing that anyone feels compelled to defend this creep. As has been pointed out repeatedly, the internet is a public forum and you have no right to anonymity on it. If you do not want things to be public, do not post them on the internet like this asshole did.
I think many of us disagree with your assertion that there is not, or should not be a right to anonymity on the Internet.
It is a public forum. There is absolutely no right to anonymity in public fora. Period. What you do in public is not private.
The sound of your scraping goalposts makes it terribly difficult for me to hear. Brutsch used a pseudonym and posted lots of identifying details. This is not “anonymity.”
Also, there is no right to anonymity, on the internet or anywhere else, from anyone who isn’t the government. This is a difficult concept, apparently for you, and for a legion of buffoons who complain about, e.g., Juan Williams’ “right” to be paid to talk on NPR. Of course, there is no such right. Just like there’s no “right” to not have your identity published by a journalist when you’re a disgusting creep.
I’m not sure why you want to have a discussion about the anonymity of women who get abortions, or people who post to LGM, as those things are wholly dissimilar to the Brutsch case. It’s mystifying, but perhaps your can explain over the goalpost screeching.
You guys have a goalpost obsession. Are you failed kickers from highschool football?
What you refer to as moving goalposts are what we call ‘illustrative examples’. See, when I need an example of why outing people based on doxxing could be a bad thing, I have to give you a scenario in which an innocent person gets harmed. Then you can understand that we are in fact not just talking about how loathsome vile purveyors of kiddie porn got their just desserts. Or rather you would understand that if you were capable of thinking more than 15 seconds into the future, and usually about cheetos.
What you refer to as moving goalposts are what we call ‘illustrative examples’.
‘Illustrative examples’ which have no bearing or relationship to the topic under discussion, unless you want to say that the outing of this creep for what he did online is exactly like what those women did by privately having abortions.
Mal, I am fairly certain I have seen you opine that we should not pass laws that are easily abused. Is it that big a leap to opine that we should not leave legal black holes that can be likewise abused?
Yeah those goalposts would be moving if i were attempting to conflate the acts of seeking an abortion with the act of posting skeevy jailbait pics. But since I have repeatably condemned violentacrez while repeatedly expressing concern over the METHOD by which he was exposed, a person with any sort of interest in actually addressing my point would have realized that.
Instead, of course, you have employed the time honored debate technique of accusing me of ‘being on the side of the perverts’ because i decline to submit utterly to your point of view.
I have repeatably condemned violentacrez while repeatedly expressing concern over the METHOD by which he was exposed
Is there a method that both 1) would have stopped the fucking evil behavior, and 2) you would not concern-troll over? Because I’m not seeing one, actually.
And you insist on conflating our assertion that “internet predators and bullies should be subject to outing” with “there should be no protection of anyone’s identity.” The argument we are making is for a narrow, specific exemption to the general norm of respecting anonymity, as I have said repeatedly. Therefore, when you try to shift the argument to women getting abortions, that is moving the goal posts, as nobody here has even vaguely suggested that this is OK and the two are radically different situations.
Also regarding your assertions about a “legal framework”, let me remind you once again that there is no legal right to anonymity in a public forum like the internet. Indeed, the existing law holds what you do in public as “in the public domain” and exempt from general privacy protections. The only thing that protects your identity at present is a shared sense of decency among internet users. Making exceptions to the internet norms in regard to predators and bullies will have no effect whatsoever on those who maliciously dox others, anymore than a norm that no one should ever be doxed would. They have already demonstrated that they do not share those norms and are willing to violate them at will.
Is there a method that both 1) would have stopped the fucking evil behavior, and 2) you would not concern-troll over? Because I’m not seeing one, actually.
Exactly, which is why I have said his positions support predators and bullies by protecting them from the consequences of their actions (many of which are not explicitly illegal, but are specifically harmful to others). On that note, I do not think outing or the threat of outing will necessarily stop this kind of behavior, but it will act as a deterrent.
Yes Mal, I think there at at least two. One, and not a very satisfactory one, is to make doxxing the province of law enforcement. Lots of people have accurately pointed out that ‘legal’ is not an especially good benchmark for decent, and i think I have to agree (though this specific case is clearly one in which our pervert is about to face criminal charges, IMHO, IANAL)
The second is to give the cyber bullying laws real teeth, so that when some assholes are doing the kind of shit I have been talking about, the victims and law enforcement hav actual tools to nail them.
And finally, I object to the term ‘concern troll’. To be concerned over the broader issue is not to troll, and to disagree strongly but in good faith is not trolling of any sort.
Doxxing is a cool word you like to type a lot, but you might want to consider that it differs from the exotic journalistic art of “finding a person”.
So, given that your solutions involve new laws, the answer on what to do in this case is “nothing.” Am I correct?
One, and not a very satisfactory one, is to make doxxing the province of law enforcement.
Cthulhu’s holy appendages! If you think that my suggestion is subject to abuse, this one dwarfs all your concerns about the current situation. Are you really going to trust law enforcement to go snooping through your underwear drawer at will? I remember Hoover’s FBI, Nixon’s enemies list, and the local police intelligence units, even if you do not. Talk a bout moral hazards.
You mean do I trust law enforcement over random Internet strangers? Absolutely. Would I prefer option b, which is solid laws allowing people to go after and nail anybody who committed acts of cyber bullying? Absolutely.
You realize your basic stance on this issue is that mob rule and lynchings are superior to the rule of law, right?
Mal, yes. That would be correct.
Of course, this specific case was never my concern, the potential for real abuse of innocents using the same methods was always the thrust of my posts.
mob rule and lynchings
Yea, because this guy we are arguing about? Totally the moral equivalent of Emmett Till.
You realize your basic stance on this issue is that mob rule and lynchings are superior to the rule of law, right?
WTF? Is your reading comprehension worse than Manju’s or are you just so wedded to the idea that I personally must be wrong (and it is personal since you tend to agree with or acknowledge the validity of a number of my positions when other people say them) that you must deliberately distort what I say?
Please note what I say here and here, to which you studiously have avoided responding.
Mal, that is the entire point. Allow lynchings and watch the good and the bad get lynched. Lynching is inherently bad.
Lynching is
inherently badcompletely fucking different from what is being discussed here, to the point that the comparison is fucking obscene.Fixed.
Look, small words: what happened to this dude is that he did a fucking awful thing, to people that were actually hurt, and someone said, “this person is doing a fucking awful thing.”
That’s it. Do you see how that is not at all like lynching?
So “Seriously. I agree with Scott. This is a justified outing.” actually means “This is a terrible terrible thing and Brutsch got lynched.” Glad it’s straightened out.
Do you see how that is not at all like lynching?
Obviously not and he deliberately avoids addressing my longer, more detailed critiques of his position.
Of course, this specific case was never my concern, the potential for real abuse of innocents using the same methods was always the thrust of my posts.
Which is, of course, why you continuously lambast all of us who think it is a good thing that this guy got outed. The incoherence of this position has been pointed out by others.
I am sorry, dick, did I accuse you of basic moral failure because you disagree with me? Fancy that!
Your attitude throughout this thread has boiled down to a few basic positions. The first one is that nobody is entitled to any expectation of anonymity or privacy on the Internet. I have a fundamental problem with that issue, because I have very personal experience with what can happen when people get outed for behaviour that is neither immoral nor illegal but which IS hated by bigots. It’s obvious to me that you are privileged to be ‘normal’ and you don’t much give a fuck about those who are not.
The second one is that the end justifies the means, which can be true, if the means are subject to some sort of control or audit that prevents destructive means from being employed willy-nilly, but which is otherwise an enormously destructive framework in which to install ethical rules.
The final important thing you have shown is a complete and utter inability to understand that a tool, like doxxing, needs to be somehow controlled in order to keep it from being used by evil people for evil ends.
I am not interested in continuing this discussion, because I simply do not believe you have any respect at all for anything I have written. I do not believe you are capable of rising above what amounts to prejudice on your part, and I do not believe you have any actual empathy for the people (and I am not talking about violntacrez) who will and are suffering greatly when their private lives are outed.
The debate over this subject has led me to change my position somewhat. Early yesterday I would have held that Internet privacy and anonymity should be absolute. I no longer feel that way, largely because some of the people in this commentariat whom I respect have presented closely reasons arguments on why, even given my own concerns, outing and doxxing can be justified.
As far as you go, DrDick? I’m just tired of beating my head against the wall of your smug position of the privileged guy with no actual skin in the game. Perhaps you should consider how people who actually live in fear of exposure of their secret lives might feel? Most secret lives are not perverted sex criminals. they are polyamourous, or gay, or bdsm, or trans, or just painfully shy people who live out their lives on the net.
Perhaps you should consider how people who actually live in fear of exposure of their secret lives might feel?
You mean like women who have “upskirt” pictures posted on the internet without their consent? Yes, some consideration of their feelings might, indeed, be useful.
Sorry boys but I am done. Your continued insistence that supporting online privacy is somehow me supporting violentacrez has simply fed me up.
I sincerely hope that all of you never get doxxed, and get to find out how bad it can be.
The first one is that nobody is entitled to any expectation of anonymity or privacy on the Internet.
That is rather a gross overstatement of my position, which is there is no general right. It also is not an opinion, but the simple legal and practical reality, which everyone on the net should be aware of and which several other people have noted.
The second one is that the end justifies the means, which can be true, if the means are subject to some sort of control or audit that prevents destructive means from being employed willy-nilly, but which is otherwise an enormously destructive framework in which to install ethical rules.
This does not even remotely resemble anything I have said. I have quite specifically said repeatedly that there need to be strict and limited guidelines for doing this. I have always said that outing was only appropriate if someone was using anonymity to harm others.
I do not believe you have any actual empathy for the people (and I am not talking about violntacrez) who will and are suffering greatly when their private lives are outed.
I have great empathy for those people and have repeatedly said that this should only be done when the person is harming others. I think that maliciously outing others is at least potentially every bit as horrible as what violntacrez did (and in essence that is part of what he actually did) and wish I knew a way to prevent or punish that, but I do not.
You seem not to be responding at all to what I have actually said, but rather to the demons in your own head. I am terribly sorry if you have been harmed by malicious outing, which I have explicitly said I oppose.
You have also ignored the closely reasoned responses that I made, which are essentially identical (sometimes more detailed) to the ones by others that you responded positively to. You seem to have decided, for reasons that I do not entirely understand understand, that I am some kind of inhuman demon and ceased to respond rationally to what I have said. My own initial response was conditioned by the fact that you seemed to have no concern for the women who were violated by violntacrez, but felt outing somebody was a far more heinous offense. Now that you have hinted at your own experience, of which I was unaware until now, I can better appreciate where you are coming from and realized I misjudged you. For that I apologize.
Just a quick apology. Mal, you are correct, using the word lynching in this context is offensive and diminishes the reality of actual lynchings. I regret using it.
Thank you.
Here’s the moderators at r/politics:
“We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet if someone disagrees with you.”
Having your personal information investigated and spread around so that others can jack off to it, though, is just good clean fun!
This is what I can’t get past, frankly. I’m sympathetic to the idea that making reddit a place where people can anonymously post transgressive things is, on some level, a valid goal.
But the transgressive things we’re talking about in Violentacrez’s case is that he posted other people’s personal identifying information without their permission. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
If posting stuff like that is always a chill on free speech, Brutsch is guilty of it, and reddit should have shut him down a long time ago. If doxing people is always fine, then who cares about Chen outing him?
I just don’t see any kind of sensible argument against Chen that doesn’t also cut against Brutsch himself.
This.
In a nutshell. Yes.
Exactly. Also, while no anonymity is perfect, and few can withstand law enforcement or determined hacks, there are ways to be relatively safe.
This guy told people who he was and eventually one of them told other people. He sold merchandise with his handle and appeared on podcasts. He outed himself in many ways long ago. If you are sharing a secret identity with multiple people, some you only know online, it’s not going be be a secret for long.
Which makes it even more infuriating that people are using this as an example in support of doxxing. it’s a textbook example of a case where doxxing was entirely unnecessary to his outing.
There may well be cases where parting the veil of online privacy is the only way to expose a nasty and evil person. This was not one of them.
Very well put.
[...] half the internet applauding. Cue the other half arguing that since the guy had committed no crime, outing him was [...]
Question, because I’m confused. Is this a legitimate First Amendment issue since a government agency isn’t involved in this dipstick’s “outing”? I’ve seen that tossed around over the day, but does this guy have legal recourse in that manner against Chen or Gawker?
no
It’s not illegal to publish the name of someone who tells lots of people who he is and online psuedonyms in a public website are pretty much never a legal protection against having one’s real name shared.
Okay, thanks. And I guess the answer to the question of “is this a Free Speech issue, beyond legal question” is the discussion above.
I’m fine with outing this guy from a legal perspective, but I’m really amused by the people who justify it by referring to the story he told of getting a blowjob from his stepdaughter — because, I hope they do realize, that by Gawker outing Michael Brutsch as Violentacrez, he’s also effectively outed Brutsch’s stepdaughter.
Sorry, should be “it’s also” rather than “he’s also.” I’m aware that Gawker is a website rather than an individual.
That is a good point.
Maybe, maybe not. It says she was the daughter of his first wife, not his current wife. So it would depend on people making the connection now between this guy and the first wife and her daughter. That might be something easy to find out, might not.
Assuming the story is true. It’s not any less creepy if he made it up.
Are you seriously arguing that the identity of abusers should be protected because identifying them also identifies their victims?
I think that detail needn’t have been in the story, but I like the outing.
Big red flag here, folks.
Violentacrez deserves the worst that can be flung at him if for no other reason than that he stole his nym. Violent Acres was a blog long ago not written by Michael Brutsch.
Some threads are inadvertently enlightening. This is one of those.
[...] I’m inclined to agree with Scott Lemieux: while outing pseudonymous people online is generally a bad thing, this case is probably a [...]
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