>In a similar vein I think people will need to in general get comfortable with the fact that some technology will be used by bad groups and it will make it harder for law enforcement to catch and stop people but the benefits for everyone else out weighs the downside...
Good luck with that.
I think we, as a society, may have been taken a bridge too far with the mass shootings. People are no longer interested in hearing about the "down side" of taking these guys out.
This should probably have been expected though, you swing the pendulum too far in one direction, it's naturally going to swing back in the other. Just kind of the nature of these things.
I mean, these aren't the first mass shootings, and they won't be the last.
Every time a mass shooting comes up, there's a big period of sorrow. What makes this mass shooting any different from the last few?
Last time, a bunch of children were murdered in their school. In fact, there's so many where children were murdered in their school, that you probably don't even know which one I'm talking about: Columbine, Newton, or Parkland.
The status quo is to do nothing about these events. That's the unfortunate truth about our current society. No laws will be pass, nothing in our society will change. We might make a new memorial and write up a new line on the (ever growing) list of mass shootings, but anyone who has been following the news for a few years has become numb to these events years ago.
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So 4chan brings down the ban-hammer. That's why 8chan popped up at all. There will be another site where this filth will rot, and plan their next attacks. In the meanwhile, nothing will get done from a legal standpoint.
How long do you think it will be before "16chan" (or whatever replacement) pops up, or for 8chan to find a new host? I dunno, I give it about 2 months, tops. And I give it a few weeks before everyone forgets about this event, and is suddenly "surprised again" in the next mass shooting event.
We'll get the 1-month writeup, the 1-year anniversary, and then maybe the 5-year and 10-year anniversary as below-the fold newspaper stories to remember this day. But by then, there will be other issues that will make us (largely) forget about this shooting.
Personally, I believe the change is in what you can't see.
FBI counter-terrorism are not the people you want to get the attention of. And these guys just got the attention of federal law enforcement, counter-terrorism, intel and counter-intel in a single weekend.
I mean, you gotta be a special kind of stupid to mess up that badly.
If it makes you feel any better, yeah, I agree with you. These guys have no intention of making any new laws to come after these threats. My concern is more the fact that they probably have no intention of following any inconvenient laws in coming after those threats either.
> I mean, you gotta be a special kind of stupid to mess up that badly.
You underestimate the depths of depravity of these discussion boards. 8chan is (probably) already strongly monitored due to the proliferation of child porn throughout the site.
Its not that they've messed up recently. They've messed up repeatedly and consistently over the past years. Child porn, hate speech, the works. Its all there. FBI knows this, but they are only allowed to move in when the laws provide them the opportunity to move. They can't shut down the site, they can only monitor these anonymous posters (who are probably safe behind many layers of proxies) and maybe try to figure out the troll vs the serious ones.
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As I stated before: the laws have to change before the status quo changes. Its that simple. No one will support the FBI raiding private websites on free-speech grounds however, outside of specially select circumstances like child porn.
I mean, do you want to talk to white supremacists? Just go to Stormfront or Daily Stormer. Yeah, FBI probably actively monitors them too. There's an entire dark-net out there that the mainstream stays away from.
Or what, do you really expect the dark-net to just disappear because of one or two incidents? Daily Stormer was banned from Cloudflare a long time ago, they just found new hosts and carried on business as usual.
I'm glad Cloudflare is doing what they can to stop this filth. But Cloudflare is just a small part of the internet, and a real legal solution needs to be created if we really want to fight them. This is a bigger problem than Cloudflare can handle.
> 8chan is (probably) already strongly monitored due to the proliferation of child porn throughout the site.
ISPs/websites in the US are required to proactively report child abuse to NCMEC, so they don’t need to be “strongly monitored” unless of course they’re not complying.
Good luck with that.
I think we, as a society, may have been taken a bridge too far with the mass shootings. People are no longer interested in hearing about the "down side" of taking these guys out.
This should probably have been expected though, you swing the pendulum too far in one direction, it's naturally going to swing back in the other. Just kind of the nature of these things.