When you do something like this, a mistake -- even a minor one -- can turn you from a heroic vigilante into the hunted.
The point of an indictment is to indict you, but people generally talk about accusations as if they're fact. That would give me pause before executing a plan like this, no matter how moral.
For example, ta_the_gray didn't use Tor, or else their comment would be marked dead. That means they're putting a lot of faith into HN to conceal their IP address. Hopefully they used Tor -> VPN -> HN, but even then, how did they pay for the VPN? Stuff like this takes a lot of training and preparation to pull off flawlessly.
Of course, if you live outside of America, your situation may be different.
I'm in the U.S. and I've never been a hero of any sort, just to clear the air on that. :-)
This is my last post of the night so I don't have to time right now to read all that you mentioned and maybe it's not necessary. You're saying that making a mistake going after a cracker or scammer or other douche bag of this sort can easily backfire on you if you make a mistake? The conclusion you make then is don't do it? I'm not even disagreeing if this what you're saying. If it's truly not so much heroism as I claimed but in fact reckless stupidity then I'll concede the match on this point.
To see how little tolerance people have for hackers, look at the Steubenville incident: https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/51ot8u/act...
When you do something like this, a mistake -- even a minor one -- can turn you from a heroic vigilante into the hunted.
The point of an indictment is to indict you, but people generally talk about accusations as if they're fact. That would give me pause before executing a plan like this, no matter how moral.
For example, ta_the_gray didn't use Tor, or else their comment would be marked dead. That means they're putting a lot of faith into HN to conceal their IP address. Hopefully they used Tor -> VPN -> HN, but even then, how did they pay for the VPN? Stuff like this takes a lot of training and preparation to pull off flawlessly.
Of course, if you live outside of America, your situation may be different.