I am increasingly accustomed to being accused of all manner of beliefs not my own. As a business owner, I must have been a capitalist pig. (That I sold books and coffee makes no difference. That folk music on weekend was a ruse.) As a college instructor, I must be a leftist radical, brainwashing youth.

Our divisions have reached the point of absurdity. Those, like myself, in the “radical middle” are accused of not caring enough by one side and caring too much by the other — depending on the specific issue.

So, yes, we will be called names. How dare we place any faith at all in mankind. How silly of me to state that my autism and my other physical injuries do not entitle me to break various international and national laws.

Read philosophy? Heck, I teach in a rhetoric department at an R1 university and am a freelance writer/editor. Understand politics and media? I interned at both ABC News and Gannett Newspapers.

No, it’s just easier for someone to slap labels on us, call us ignorant Americans, and assume that because there flaws in our system that we must be horrible people.

I’m just an average, ugly American with high-functioning autism.

I’m sure I don’t agree with “CS” on much, due to my libertarian streak. I’m too interested in simple, basic, moderation. But, I can say from reading his site that he is thoughtful and quite apart from the far-right nuts we also host as a nation.

Accusing him of ignorance or linking him to the mercantile class of our Revolutionary War is silly.

Autism is a set of traits. That’s all it is. The question of why we mention it in legal cases is not unreasonable. It’s like mentioning race. “Oh, well those purple people just can’t help but be hackers.”

As I said, don’t agree much with CS politically, but am darn glad he’s in the U.S. to fight the good fight.

Mr. Arnold, I’m accused in my own country for being unpatriotic, a terrorist sympathizer, a left wing looney. To have you accuse me of these things and millions of other Americans who think otherwise more similar to your views on morality, is what is so very rich. The simple fact that you don’t know my views didn’t stop you from labeling me the exact opposite of what I am, for the very simple reason that I am an American. You proved your own point by exercising the exact same type of judgement you feel Mr. Cottrell has been subjected to, you subjected me to. That’s a bit hypocritical.

Larry, how about this. I’ll judge you based on your individuality, not your nationality. I hope you extend the same to other people as well.

Larry, the revolutionary war was more than 200 years ago. By the way, I’m half English as well so you should probably blame me for things you don’t like about your own racial culture. The other half is Dutch so I’m sure I could probably be blamed/held responsible for something they did as well. I believe the English side of my family came to America as indentured servants, no doubt because they were born into a lower class in England which I’m sure were beneath your own.

Group blaming is really beneath an educated man such as yourself and exposes some really ugly prejudices and says something about how you look at other people that may be different from yourself through no fault of their own.

CS be thankful at least you don’t live in Zimbabwe, someone could make a law tomorrow to make your right a wrong and it would not matter if nobody told you about it in advance you would be screwed just the same.

Convince me please that you are some aspie ubermensch and immune from it all, I see no evidence. If you can’t read Foucault read Althusser at least.

L

CS you are almost as bad as Joe Mele as a poor representative of the conditioned response of a US citizen you are just not credible in any way.

Never said that hacking is wrong, never said that there ought to be a punishment but it should fit the crime.

The US has executed minors and people of limited cognitive ability, it has used barbaric means of execution, it has justified torture.

Yes the UK has done that too and other European countries I own to that but I do think we have learnt from our experiences.

Was the verdict in the Rodney King case fair, was the verdict in the OJ Simpson Case, it is trial by media and predjudice.

I at least have the guts to tell our Government what I think.

When I can see your appreciation of the finer issues of jurisprudence I will reconsider,

Incidentally long ago and far away in that foreign country of the past, my first desire was to study law.

Regardless, my point is that I am tired of the “autism” excuse. I know when I have violated the law or my ethics. When I thought the a firm I worked for as VP/Information was misusing technology and defrauding clients, I walked away.

I could never close every hole in some computer networks. As people are slowly realizing, even the DNS was created on a basis of TRUST. It has no real security. The Internet was built to share data, not secure it. Look at the gaping holes in wireless security — to close them would cut wireless speed by 30 to 70 percent.

Do “curious autistics” require that we all bolt every system at the price of performance? What the heck does autism have to do with demanding better security protocols? Why mention the autism???

Sure, military systems *should* be perfect, but having worked on them I realize perfection is impossible. (You try to rush a requisition through the military on a contract job.)

If I leave a book on UFOs on the front seat of my unlocked car, it is still my book. Stealing it is wrong. Period. Having an obsession with UFOs doesn’t mean you can steal the book and be forgiven.

You don’t take what isn’t yours, and you certainly don’t go poking about government systems imagining you’ll do no harm.

I’ve dealt with systems so large they occupied an entire former grocery store. (100,000 sq. feet.) You can imagine the backup nightmare. There was a minimum of three to four of everything, all “hot-swappable” in an instant, plus multiple generators.

But… bad data was bad data. Someone “accidentally” damaging data could have cost us months of effort.

Wrong is wrong. This wasn’t someone trying to prove a plot to destroy nations or to uncover horrible experiments on soldiers (things great reporters have uncovered). This was a UFO zealot hopping about servers using holes we know are hard to close.

Knowing which doors are easy to pry open doesn’t make robbery or trespass less of a crime.

My point, repeated: Using “autism” or “Asperger’s” as an excuse feeds biases against those of us diagnosed and working in the tech industry. It breeds fear and distrust. All I have is my reputation when I do research or work on sensitive data. If people don’t trust me, for whatever reason, I’m out of work.

As I research autism and technology, the irony is having people on the spectrum not trust what I might do with data or access to computer logs. All based on stories about autistic hackers.

This media trend just furthers the notion that autism is equal to a lack of moral judgment.