To many, a hacker is anyone who does something with a computer that is not trivially understood. To law-enforcement and the criminal justice system, a hacker is someone who commits a computer-involved crime.

So to clarify, it's actually still a great time to be the former. It's not now, nor has it really ever been, a good time (or a good idea) to be the latter.

The rest of the article seems to just be an explanation of why that is.

Why does anyone continue to give Adrian Lamo a platform? He is like the Kim Kardashian of computer security--he's famous for being famous. I'm not aware of any evidence that he knows what he is talking about, particularly when it comes to various criminal penalties (he gets these blatantly wrong).

Edit to add example: Lamo says

>To put this into some kind of perspective, if Swartz had committed violent battery of a Supreme Court justice or a member of Congress he would have faced, at most, a year locked up in the pen — as long as he didn’t use a deadly weapon.

The maximum prison sentence for aggravated assault in DC is actually 10 years. And if you use a deadly weapon, it adds an additional maximum penalty of life in prison.

I’ve also worked the other side of the fence, working with law enforcement and the US Government on computer-involved national security issues, most notably in the apprehension of Bradley Manning for leaking military and diplomatic secrets to Wikileaks.

This isn't something to be proud of.

This is the "meat" imho:

> A law becomes unjust when a person of ordinary — or even extraordinary — intelligence cannot readily predict what charges might arise from a given activity.

...if I were to commit armed robbery, I could easily find out what law I would be breaking and what kind of prison sentence I'd get. With infosec and IP laws, you'll never know how they could be wielded against you!

Look, I'm all for better laws and such, but most of what constitutes being a hacker (in the HN sense) doesn't even approach illegality. I think it's never been a better time to be a hacker.

It's a bad time to be a whistleblower too.

It certainly is with people like the author dropping the dime.

Hackers should form security companies and offer hacking as a service. Many private companies would rather pay a third party security firm a fixed price to solve any vulnerabilities versus hiring a team of fulltime security experts on their payroll.

Who cares what Lamo thinks

This piece was written by Adrian Lamo and can be summarized as follows:

faaaaaaaaaaarrrrttt, pffffffffffttttttttt, pffffffffffttttttt, faaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrttttt, innuendo, lies, bullshit, faaaaaaaaaaaartttt