The AssociatesMind article[0] on this is much better than the ArsTechnica link, and goes into detail in the legal dimension of this question. In this case, Kurt's situation likely constitutes assault; and this would also likely be considered assault even if you believe that Eichenwald lied about having a seizure, as I've seen some people question.
Here's the conclusion of that article:
"Just as someone can be held liable for a spring-gun despite being miles away, there is no reason to think that someone cannot be held liable for assault delivered electronically across great distances."
Wow, this is equivalent to sending someone a mail "bomb" that doesn't explode but electrocutes them severely.
I hope the offender ends up with a reasonable length prison sentence. There's a clear line, and the intentional infliction of physical harm is well beyond it.
I don't think prison is a best solution for such thing. He will get out and might become only worse. Maybe a psychology professional will make him understand what he did and prevent him from doing it again instead of sticking him into a jail and complain in couple years when he did something more serious. Prison only make it worse in most cases
Let's go over what the attacker did (and note, I'm not even going to touch the anti-semitism component).
They demonstrated premeditation, this appeared to be a second attempt at a prior failed attack.
The intent was to cause serious injury.
Max penalties for these types of things is ~10 years in prison.
Hypothetical : Let's say I had an powerful/advanced sniper rifle where I can target a specific person and cause them to have a seizure. Let's say I use this rifle from across state lines. Should I not be getting a visit from the FBI and ending up in federal prison?
Yes. This is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theatre [1] or phoning in a bomb threat. In the United States, freedom of speech is limited in certain cases where the harm caused by the speech outweighs the damage of limiting freedom.
Please stop using the "fire in a crowded theatre" phrase, it's not actually part of law in the US. [1] The standard for restricting speech in cases like this is if it poses a "clear and present danger". That's likely the case here, as a premeditated attempt to cause a seizure is a clear and present danger to epileptics. There's plenty of law to cite that doesn't depend on over-broad censorious decisions that got overturned later on.
The target could have died. The actions of the attacker were deliberate in trying to induce a seizure that could have killed him. That's attempted murder, and whether it's via a tweet or not is irrelevant.
I imagine if he'd been the victim of a deliberate hit-and-run, you'd be saying something like "so to be clear, you want someone to be imprisoned because they drove a car."
I believe that the OP wants the attacker to be sent to prison for inflicting harm, pre-meditated, and with intent to do so. that he used a tweet to do this is irrelevant, and frankly, your statement is disingenuous and asinine. But I'm sure you already know that, and are simply trolling
I'd support criminal charges for attackers who do this. It's just a digital way of causing physical damage. The federal government is already all over this stuff in terms of things like SCADA attacks. The FBI would be sympathetic to the case given that plus hating hackers in general.
I wonder how hard would detection be for this kind of dangerous content. A basic detection for rhythmic spikes in frame brightness should not be very hard to implement.
Seems like the best solution to me would be an accessibility option on the device that prevents this type of flashing. May seem hard, but compare that against stopping people from being immature/malicious on the internet.
The added upside would be that it would prevent completely accidental cases of exposure to flashes (e.g. watching an episode of Pokemon).
I'm looking at http://www.epilepsy.com/learn/triggers-seizures/photosensiti..., and it seems it's not just the framerate that matters. In particular, 5 to 30 frames per second might be enough, and it depends on the actual image contents. It also makes it sound like static images might also be triggers.
This explains why a guy had epilepsy in the metro few days ago. There are bulbs every few meters apart in the tunnel and while the train travels fast it looks like the windows of the metro train flash.
Twitter has a prominent checkbox in the setting allowing you to turn off autoplaying of videos and GIFs. Given that most are not epileptic, and that Eichenwald is, he should have had the mindfulness to check whether the platform could be adapted to his needs.
The checkbox is present in Twitter's main settings page (the one you land on immediately after clicking "Settings", not a subsection) and is also above-the-fold.
Also, I just found out he said a few months ago: "I was carrying my iPad, looking at the still image on the video and, without thinking, touched the PLAY button."
Sure, that's why I threw the word usually in there. My point isn't that what happened here is "Right" or "wrong" my point is, 10% of the internet freaks out about all of these things, and 10% trolls, and 80% shrugs.
If you want to understand the other 90% you need to read all of what they say before you downvote it.
No, what I mean by that is that it will always be legal to hurt people in certain ways with words. Those ways are not threats but emotional... such as:
What I had in mind was a mother saying "I never loved you" to her kid. Or a father suggesting it's the kid's fault that Mommy left/died/drinks. Or telling somebody they're a loser and will never amount to something. Or that they're ugly and unloveable.
When you go to the grocery store and you see a mother be really awful to her kid (or dog), you don't call the police (and you couldn't, unless it was physical). But instead you give them a dirty look-- you use social pressure instead of legal pressure.
And we do this because the legal system isn't well equipped to handle such injustices (these cases would often be heresay, too expensive, too long/convoluted). But the social-pressure system has its own limits, and gets abused too.
So those people who have been the victim of politics (you used a gender-specific pronoun, now I will shun you, but I'm really doing it because I don't like you and want to hurt you but have a convenient social excuse to ostracize you and look like the good guy for doing it) often overreact and take out their anger anonymously online.
People aren't getting shunned for using gendered pronouns. They might think that's why people avoid them, but if that is the only thing they are doing, no.
How can you say nobody is getting shunned for gender pronouns?
Did read the link I posted about people getting in trouble for the word "Niggardly?" The fact is, plainly that there are SOME people who use the guise of political correctness as a power game. Sorry if you don't want to believe that, but the evidence is pretty clear.
Now this doesn't invalidate all of political correctness, because the world isn't black and white. The fact is, there are bad people out there, and they are on both sides (and this is true for almost any issue), and if you cannot admit this then your tribalism is actually part of the problem.
How can you say nobody is getting shunned for gender pronouns?
Do you mean how can I prove it? I can say it really easily, because I believe it. Proving it would be pretty hard (logically it's impossible). But you haven't exactly demonstrated that people are getting shunned for uttering pronouns
As far as the link, there's like 4 really not that horrible situations listed (a guy moved to a different job, a university decided to abolish its academic speech code (the opposite direction of reprimanding someone for speech), a teacher wrote some letters, unclear). It's not exactly evidence of the widespread horrors of PC shunning.
Now this doesn't invalidate all of political correctness, because the world isn't black and white. The fact is, there are bad people out there, and they are on both sides (and this is true for almost any issue), and if you cannot admit this then your tribalism is actually part of the problem.
Yes of course there are people that take things too far. But your argument is that there are so many of those people, shunning so many other people unfairly over tiny issues, that they have created a troll army on the internet. It's ludicrous.
Well I can tell you I've personally had situations in my life where:
- I was told things like "You can't understand this as a white man,"
- I had a coworker get very disturbed (and possibly go to HR) because another coworker used the word "Tight ass" about me (as a joke, which I was cool with. Unclear if he thought that was anti-homosexual, or disapproved of the word ass).
- Where I went to college, an allegedly racist student was attacked and it was recommended he withdraw from university "for his own safety" over some confusion over an allegedly racist cartoon on a fridge in a common area.
- I had a coworker recently say on slack that she would "feel uncomfortable as a woman if her manager suggested that Trump isn't racist."
- During the anti-Trump marches in SF I saw a group of people attack a man standing to the side holding a pro-Trump sign.
So, therefore, yes, some people are doing one of two things:
- Getting really emotional about equality and wanting to play hero so badly that it goes to their heads in a way that makes them the bad guys.
- Ruthless people use whatever tool they can to try to win an argument.
Now maybe you're in the South, where you are surrounded by actual racists doing actual hate crimes, so I understand you may have valid personal experiences around racism. But if you want to be a good person, it's your obligation to listen to and consider my experiences.
Because the pattern I seem to keep seeing is that self-righteousness is enemy.
While your analysis may be accurate, I don't think this case has anything to do with freedom of speech. If the attacker had walked up to the journalist with a strobe light with the intent of inducing a seizure, it would have no different to what happened here.
Did you read all of what I wrote? I'm not suggesting the action is "justified" because of "Freedom of Speech." But you absolutely cannot deny that from a legal context, this absolutely comes into a freedom of speech discussion. For the history see (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#U...)
In the information age, we are still trying to figure out the murky boundary cases in a way that makes sense, both legally and socially. Those cases include: cyber-bullying, drawing mohammad, posting people's address online, trolling, cease-and-desist[1], fake news / pizza-gate, speech-codes [2], whistle-blowing
Performance generally falls under speech, and hence is a protected right, but running up to an epileptic screaming I was going to cause a seizure while shining a strobe light at his face wouldn't be a protected "performance". It would be assault.
I see a host demanding a guest reduce their answer which might require many words down to either "yes" or "no". Clearly the guest's answer was not as simple as "yes" or "no" but the host required the answer be that simple. They clearly weren't pressed for time so I don't understand why the answer had to be only one word. Maybe the audience doesn't want to hear more than a one-word answer?
If it is public knowledge you are allergic to peanuts and I intentionally throw some at you, that's clearly intent to cause harm. Intent is a big factor in law.
So if you're standing in an area, and I start firing bullets into that area while shouting "You deserve to be shot!", you're saying the onus was on you to not be in that area when I started shooting?
So much stupidity here. If Twitter are responsible for autoplaying then the sender is more responsible because they sent it.
But seriously can't you see that the sender knew that it could cause the receiver harm, their tweet stated that was their intent, it caused harm, they are therefore responsible for that outcome.
Imagine I flew a drone into someone and they were hurt by it. I knew flying the drone I to them would hurt them, but I didn't make the drone, I didn't make the power that enabled it to fly. I didn't make people fragile enough to be hurt by the drone. But I directed it with intent, just like the sender did in this situation.
We banned that account for abusing HN. But you've also broken the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread, which is not ok. Please remain civil even when other people are not.
Here's the conclusion of that article:
"Just as someone can be held liable for a spring-gun despite being miles away, there is no reason to think that someone cannot be held liable for assault delivered electronically across great distances."
[0]: http://associatesmind.com/2016/12/16/can-you-sue-someone-for...