As much as I dislike the guy, he's still a human being and he is already being punished (serving time).
The fact that he is a (black hat) hacker should not make his life any worse than if he were a bankrobber or a burglar. Weev strikes me as an excellent touchstone for your own personal ethics, how much can you despise what a person does or stands for and still demand that we treat him with respect?
Is respect the right word? Maybe I'm just socially undeveloped, but while I am for treating people with humanity, I'm not sure all people deserve my respect simply by virtue of being people.
Actually, I believe that people from post-totalitarian countries might be more sensitive to human rights related issues than people from countries that never experienced totalitarian regime.
As an adult I had lived in both US (only 7 months) and UK (2.5 years) but I grew up in communist eastern bloc and my experience leads me to believe that our collective bad experience made us sensitive to warning signs that people from always-free countries just don't see.
I know this is highly subjective and I might be over-sensitive but if I were an American I would freak out about news like "a guy not given gluten-free food in prison" or "TSA forcing dying woman to strip in public" or "warrantless surveillance" or "indefinite detention"... because I would perceive them as not only signs of serious erosion of respect for human rights but also signs of pre-totalitarian state, and I would be scared shitless that really bad times are coming again.
I cannot comprehend that Americans mostly just don't care.
I think it's not like that at all. The bulk of population can rationalize (and kind of push out of sight) poor and homeless because most of the population are not poor and homeless... it's just 'them' and we don't care about them that much.
But living in a totalitarian country was different. Human right violations were so widespread that basically everybody was somehow affected. Everybody had some grandma who had her family farm taken away by communists or uncle who was not allowed to study because their family was not loyal enough, everybody was not allowed to travel... It's way harder to rationalize things when you are directly affected by them - when it's 'you' and not just 'them' any more, you become sensitive and when you see that happening to other people you can relate more and your reaction is stronger. Also, you are more afraid that if it's happening to them now, you are going to be the next.
But that's obviously just my experience - I don't have any research to back it up, just some anecdotal evidence based on nothing more than just me observing things in different countries.
