Joshua Kopstein writes about the Jeremy Hammond case, and how hacktivism and leaking have created a new type of political dissenter

There are two striking things in the article that are food for thought:

  1. Calculation of damages plays a major role in establishing penalties. Yet the methods used are largely arbitrary. This goes for hacktivism as well as copyright infringement. As this is at the root of U.S. justice, it might be worth to campaign for higher standards there. One possibility could be to require proven damage and cause, so whoever claims that a damage occurred has the burden of proof in terms of both the amount of damage as well as the cause.
  2. The U.S. justice system seems to be totally out of step with the rest of the world. It is slowly but surely getting more and more stringent. It is in fact going from a measured and fair system of justice to something quite different. The U.S. are now no longer in line with what the western world conceives of as fairness and justice, but rather with what the Chinese and arab worlds think of as justice. Now this might be because the rest of the western states have gotten weak and ineffectual, but it might well also be that there is a serious moral regression in progress in the U.S.