Trouble at the Koolaid Point
The best way to do something about this kind of trolling is to make the punishment fit the crime.  This is exactly what laws were originally created for.  Before we had laws and enforcement for actions like rape, murder, theft, assault, etc, I'm sure those actions had a very similar place in society--the majority didn't engage in them, but the minority did destroyed the lives of their victims.  This is no different.  Internet assault is a recent invention, made possible by the invention of the internet.  Therefore, it follows that we need to invent appropriate laws and penalties.  And the difference in severity of penalties between internet assault and unauthorized access to a computer needs to be similar to the difference in penalties between physical assault and breaking and entering.<p>If this was the case, then we can clearly see the problems with Tor Ekeland's statement, "You may think weev is an asshole. But being an asshole is not a crime, and neither is obtaining unsecured information from publicly facing servers."  Ekeland thinks that the big problem is that weev's AT&T activities were a crime.  Regardless of what you think about that, the bigger problem is that weev's asshole activities are not a crime.<p>Ekeland consolidates a broad spectrum of harassment into one term "being an asshole", and labels it as not a crime.  But that is short-sighted.  As Kathy points out, there is a point where the spectrum of digital harassment jumps over into the realm of real-life damage.  And that should be a crime that carries stiff penalties and is prosecuted aggressively.<p>Oh, and one other point.  Kathy laments how weev has been glorified in the tech community.  My guess is that this is caused by nothing other than ignorance.  If all you know about weev is that he seems to fall into the group of people that were at least somewhat unjustly targeted by the government for, scare quotes, "hacking" and received a punishment that seemed too harsh, then you'll probably express support for him (read, that cause).  Even if you've heard that he says things on the internet that are trollish asshole material, you, like Ekeland, probably won't change your opinion much.  What tips the scale here is the knowledge that his troll speech has had the very real consequence of destroying someone's life.  That fact is everything.  If you don't know someone is bad, you can't correctly adjust your opinion of them.  So props to Kathy for speaking out.