Privacy expert put away for 9 years after 'grotesque' cyberstalking campaign A scumbag who used to work as a privacy consultant has been put behind bars for nine years for a "grotesque" cyberstalking campaign against more than a dozen victims. Sumit Garg, 33, of Seattle, was indicted [PDF] in March 2021 and has been held in a US federal prison in Washington state. He was convicted in March this year of …
This guy seems to have absolutely no life, absolutely no worries at all about being caught, and an incredibly delicate personality where everyone directly or indirectly involved seems to rub him up the wrong way to just such an extent that he targets them relentlessly
He is an absolute nutjob who is not safe to be in society, it only takes the idea of buying a gun to pop into his head and those things mentioned above are going to lead to the massacre of innocents
needs to be committed
...absolutely no worries at all about being caught, and an incredibly delicate personality where everyone directly or indirectly involved seems to rub him up the wrong way to just such an extent that he targets them relentlessly
Yes, I've heard about someone just like that who is currently running to be the next President of the United States.
Spoiler alert: It's not Joe Biden.
The dark triad is a psychological theory of personality, first published by Delroy L. Paulhus and Kevin M. Williams in 2002, that describes three notably offensive, but non-pathological personality types: Machiavellianism, sub-clinical narcissism, and sub-clinical psychopathy. Each of these personality types is called dark because each is considered to contain malevolent qualities.
All three dark triad traits are conceptually distinct although empirical evidence shows them to be overlapping. They are associated with a callous–manipulative interpersonal style.
• Narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy.
• Machiavellianism is characterized by the manipulation and exploitation of others, indifference to morality, lack of empathy, and a calculated focus on self-interest.
• Psychopathy is characterized by continuous antisocial behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, callous and unemotional traits (CU), and remorselessness.
High scores in these traits have been found to statistically increase a person's likelihood to commit crimes, cause social distress, and create severe problems for organizations, especially if they are in leadership positions. They also tend to be less compassionate, agreeable, empathetic, and satisfied with their lives, and less likely to believe they and others are good.
Do you want to know the scary thing? There are lots of men out there who have behaviours like this, to some degree or another.
Women typically suffer this behaviour in silence, for fear of ridicule or escalation, so other men don't know it goes on.
It is almost always women who are the victims, and men who are the perpetrators, but not always (such as the Baby Reindeer case), and you only generally hear about it if the case is unusual, or particularly severe. Just ask any woman in your life about such abusive behaviour they have experienced or seen others suffer, and be ready to be shocked and saddened.
From the downvotes, I can see that 3 out of ten people here are either hopelessly naïve, wilfully ignorant, or domestic violence perpetrators themselves. (Stalking, especially of an ex-housemate falls under the definition of DV).
For those who don't believe me about how common domestic violence is, should take a look at crime statistics. If you've ever wondered why the police aren't doing anything about the antisocial behaviour in your neighbourhood, it's because they are responding to a domestic incident somewhere else, and protecting the life of an abuse victim is more important than the graffiti on that bus shelter, sorry.
I mean, I know a fair number of women whose exes would have felt entitled to do this sort of thing and just couldn´t be bothered/wouldn't have known how to. There's a level of entitlement that some men will have towards women they're attracted to; they treat it almost as a crime when they get turned down or broken up with. It's a more common mindset than I think any of us like to think about.
The fact is that I do not want to understand why someone would do that sort of thing.
Reading his text message about not killing his victim was bad enough, I'd have nightmares if I truly understood him, and I'll leave that to the psychologists. I have met a few creepy people in my time, but I don't think I've met anyone even vaguely as bad as him.
Sympathy and best wishes to all of his victims.
I have to agree with you. At first, I was expecting the story to involve someone who had studied complex surveillance tools and consulted on how to get rid of them, which would also provide an unhinged person with plenty of experience on what to use to commit crimes. That doesn't seem to have been what he did. Using email addresses with his name, his personal phone, and various other obvious traces suggests that, in addition to being criminal and possibly mentally unstable, he wasn't an expert on anything privacy related or he could have made his crimes harder to pin on him.
I really hope his wife takes the opportunity to get out and change her name and location. She may still believe he is the victim of course, as I expect he created an alternate reality that they lived in. Does remind me a little bit of Nicholas Alahverdian, if a bit less creative/evil and I think his latest wife is still under the spell.
While I'll concede that there are distinct law enforcement issues in the excited snakes, it was neither the extent nor the stupidity that got this pile of excrement prosecuted, but rather the fact that there was a *member* of the law enforcement community targeted by the activities in which the pile of excrement engaged. Otherwise, this would likely be a slap on the wrist and minor fine.
If stalkees had waited for this guy to show up, killed him when he did, and were arrested and taken to court for murder, were I on the jury, I'd vote "not guilty."
This guy did so much that the stalkees were genuinely, reasonably in fear for their lives, while the authorities could/would not take sufficiently-effective measures to protect the stalkees.
Meh.
Society-affirmed sense of impunity is not mental illness.
It is still a societal issue, as overprotection nurtures, cherishes and reinforces it, but it is not mental illness by any means.
Ref the untrained puppy discussion in Starship Troopers (the book).
“Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.”
> Society-affirmed sense of impunity is not mental illness.
Doing illegal things, without taking any meaningful precautions to hide your identity or avoid creating the means of proof, when you *know* that such actions *do* at least sometimes get punished, and there's nothing about your own case that would lead a person to believe that didn't apply to you... sure points to mental illness and waggles its eyebrows.
The idea that this guy, or anybody else, has a "society-affirmed sense of impunity", is something you've built up in your own head, and probably says more about you than it does about him, society, or anything else.
> Ref the untrained puppy discussion in Starship Troopers (the book).
Heinlein had a lot of dumb ideas, and sure as hell wasn't an authority on anything remotely related to psychology or politics.
"...Doing illegal things, without taking any meaningful precautions to hide your identity or avoid creating the means of proof, when you *know* that such actions *do* at least sometimes get punished, and there's nothing about your own case that would lead a person to believe that didn't apply to you... sure points to mental illness..."
Does it ?
Could it surely point to plain lack of intelligence and abundant presence of dumbness ? A "privacy expert" who sent pics without clearing the EXIF tags - that poor thing must be ill, NOT dumb ? :-D
Might I add - gratifying plain stupidity with a mental illness status would be, to quote someone, "...something you've built up in your own head, and probably says more about you than it does about him, society, or anything else... :-D
If dumbness and stupidity qualified as mental illness, we'd be in very deep trouble. The vastly overwhelmed healthcare systems all over the world are having hard time enough as it is.
As for Heinlein - fair point. He had however one thing going for him - if he was to create a society that would work by his rules in a closed environment, said society would survive, develop and evolve.
Can't say the same for today's societal specialists, the loudest ones, who have built their shouting booths on a society mostly built by people like him.
I don't think the logic that committing a crime when there's the remotest chance of punishment is indicative of mental illness. There are two options that are both more likely in my opinion: pragmatism and stupidity. There are some criminals that actually analyze the risk of getting caught and decide that the reward of the crime is greater than the risk. Sometimes, their analysis is correct from their perspective. We also have another group that thinks this is the case and are wrong because they didn't think it through. I don't think there's a mental illness that clearly applies to either group. Both are immoral, and the second are stupid, but immorality and stupidity are not generally classed as psychiatric disorders.
Yeah, you do know that book is a parody of fascism, and that particular piece of dialogue is written from the point of view of a defender of that fascist state, don't you? Just checking.
The whole book is a critique of the military-industrial complex, and the fallacy of "might is right". The film kind of misses this point, since Paul Verhoeven reputedly only bothered to read the first chapter, didn't realise it was a parody, and proceeded to make his own version of parody (that wasn't as cleverly done, yet still entertaining) from it. For example, in the book, the war against the "bugs" is started by Humanity, and propaganda is used to paint them as lesser beings (sound familiar?) despite it transpiring that they are a sophisticated species amongst a peaceful alliance of many. If I remember rightly (and it's probably a quarter of a century since I read it), the book opens with a narrative from a "mechanised infantry" trooper wearing a power armour suit, fighting against one of those other species, the "skinnies". Maybe the parallels between the mechanised infantry and Nazi stormtroopers were a bit more obvious at the time the book was written, than they are now, since it would have been fresher in people's memories, but the parody is still effective. I should probably read it again, if I can find where it is in the bookhoard, and fish it out, it's not a very thick book.
Well, yes, but the words of Dubois are not the words of Heinlein, just as if I were to write a book about a rollerblading giraffe, written in the first person, it wouldn't make me a camelid. He managed to fit a lot of nuance into his books, and one of the important bits, which we would do very well to pay attention to in the current world political climate, is that fascism very often appears to be superficially reasonable. The consequences come several steps down the line.
...and yes, the movie is also a parody of fascism; the ironic part is that Verhoeven didn't realise the book was, partly because he didn't read most of it, and partly because his parody was a lot blunter. To be fair, it had to be, for the average cinema audience to get it, and I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of people out there who still didn't and just think it's a cool action film. Those people can vote.
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"Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. "
This does not agree with animal studies. Chimps have an appreciation of morality, within their groups, and, of course their morality is different to ours. But they do have a sense of right and wrong. In lab tests chimps have been shown to share food and be outraged if they are wronged in the share they receive. So they have a sense of fairness. Even rats will help trapped individuals with which they are friends, or again, give food to an individual, in testing situations, that can't reach food itself.
Mental illness needs treatment, sure, but a personality disorder is not a mental illness and cannot be treated. There's no organic cause such as brain injury, disease, or a chemical imbalance in the brain that can cause things like schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, depression, et al, people like this are simply made wrong. If someone lacks empathy, is narcissistic to the extent that they disregard the needs of all others, and is prepared to act in a way that harms others, those are the hallmarks of a psychopath, and they are a danger to society, and should be excluded from it.
Incidentally, the fact that certain world leaders exhibit these same characteristics, and that such components of human mentality as empathy are considered weaknesses and derided with all sorts of pathetic name-calling (woke, SJW, leftie, "political correctness" and so on) only tells you that there are plenty of people around who would like to live within the civilised society of collective endeavour, whilst exploiting it for their own gains, and the expense of others. People would do well to not elect those who serve their own interests over those of the electorate.
...People would do well to not elect those who serve their own interests over those of the electorate...
Oh, how this aligns with Heinlein's "Take Back Your Government!: A Practical Handbook for the Private Citizen Who Wants Democracy to Work" :-D
Written 58 years ago, based on author's personal experience and having VERY little in common with any book that would be used by the current crop of those who scream about taking back the government.
K, rabbit hole's exit - this way.
Mental illness, personality disorders may well be the reason that someone has done something unspeakably evil, it is however <not> an excuse!
And singling out terms that often get applied to such people who think it <is> an excuse and then insulting those who disagree by referring to them as using "pathetic name-calling" is simply hypocritical tbh.
Yes, indeed you can adjust the definition of the insults you hurl at people to make them "fit". It doesn't do anything to make your arguments valid beyond demonstrating that you are focused on trying to make clever word games, rather than acknowledging that other people might have different opinions to yourself.
My point was this, and I'll state it again, because you seem to have missed it:
A lack of empathy, and understanding of state of mind in others is not a virtue. Attempting to ridicule those who do exhibit empathy through name-calling is damaging to society because it normalises divisive and selfish behaviours, and discourages cooperation.
A functioning society is based on cooperation and an understanding of the concept of common good. This is why we have laws against violence, theft, murder, etc. because whilst those behaviours are beneficial to the individual, they are harmful to society as a whole.
If we elect people who lack that understanding, or, on a more fundamental level, lack the ability to have that understanding, then they will act only in their own best interests, and against those of society as a whole. As a member of society as a whole, and not being a fan of the fascist ideal of "strongest takes all", I'd rather this didn't happen.
As for the difference between understanding why someone with a personality disorder does something, and thinking it is excusable as a result; well, I don't think I ever claimed as much. Violent crimes (and I include stalking in this, as psychological violence is very real) are not excused by the argument of "I was not well when I did it". A lack of capability of understanding the difference between right and wrong, coupled with an inability to "play within the rules of society" should earn someone a permanent stay in a psychiatric institution. Such people are a danger to others.
The DSM used to list homosexuality as a disease, so I wouldn't take its contents as gospel.
My point is that there is a category difference between illnesses that are a result of a physical cause, and those which are a result of personality. Think of it as a difference between hardware and software. If there is something physically wrong in the brain, it can be treated as such, much as faulty RAM in a computer can be replaced. If someone fundamentally is unable to experience compassion or empathy, it's pretty much impossible to instil it into them against their will. You can't install a new operating system into their brain, like replacing Windows with Linux, because the analogy breaks down a bit at that point.
This does raise an interesting question about the effectiveness of rehabilitation and of psychological therapies on people with personality disorders, because it's functionally impossible to tell the difference between effective therapy, and someone playing along. For example, Ed Kemper has behaved in an exemplary manner whilst in prison, but I wouldn't consider for a minute releasing him. Would you?
People who don't understand how people can behave this way are sheltered from the realities of mental illness. And yes, Axis II diagnoses--personality disorders--are indeed mental illness. As you quite rightly say, they are highly resistant to treatment. Sociopaths, especially, find blaming others an invincible armor against the assaults of normality.
What is truly terrifying is the prevalence of Conduct Disorder among children, which becomes APD in adulthood. God help us all when we are filling the prisons with prostitutes and pot smokers, because they were built for the antisocials.
I'm pleased to see those trigger words have invoked the Pavlovian response in some people to reflexively down-vote my post.
I suppose it's too much to hope for that those who did so pause for a few minutes to reflect on whether the world really is as black-and-white as they think it is, or whether it could be that they have been fed some divisive and superficially appealing disinformation in order to better control them. "Divide and conquer" is a very old idiom, after all.
If someone is trying to kill me, my response will be the same, whether they're a random asshole, or simply in need of psychiatric care. The danger to me ramains the same.
If everyone involved is sufficiently-lucky, such individuals will be placed in physically-secure, qualified psychiatric care before they commit any rapes, tortures, and/or murders.
Sadly, there's insufficient good luck to ensure universally-happy outcomes.
I think that if you're going to have the death penalty, then it should also apply to judges that wrongly convict and pronounce that sentence. We'll see how quickly the judiciary collapses.
Apart from the fundamental human rights issue with execution, the problem of unsafe convictions, and the difficulty of issuing a reprieve after someone has been killed has yet to be solved...
And remember, human rights are everyone's rights. The moment you start saying "everyone, except that person," is the moment someone takes those rights away from you, as well.
A statistician who was an opponent of the death penalty did the math, studying the effects of changing laws across US states. He came to the unavoidable conclusion that each execution results in 3-9 fewer murders.
So even if every death penalty carried out against someone innocent in fact, there still be fewer unjust killings than without. (And I am NOT suggesting a cavalier attitude. I very much support a meaningful appeals process.)
"A statistician" said that, did they? Oh wow, I'm convinced by your completely anecdotal and unverified evidence. "Unavoidable conclusion," was it? Of a hypothetical and untested claim? I think you might need to revisit your dictionary and look up the words "unavoidable" and "conclusion". Plenty of countries outside the US (*gasp* actually most of them) don't have the death penalty (because it's basically state legalised murder, and a bit ethically iffy as such), and for some reason, seem not to suffer such a high murder rate, which kind of calls into question the safeness of this unnamed "statistician's" conclusion. I expect you are now going to claim that the free availability of guns in the US also prevents people being murdered because "good guys with guns," despite the overwhelming evidence?
But hey, that one "statistician", AMIRITE?
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