In a move that surprised only people who haven't been paying attention, convicted hacker Andrew Auernheimer (AKA Weev) published an article on a white supremacist blog called The Daily Stormer, declaring his hatred of Jews and Black people. The problem is that a lot of people weren't paying attention, or misconstrued Weev's previous anti-semitism and racism as "trolling."

Weev has been a cause célèbre since he was charged with identity theft and conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 2011, after finding a vulnerability on AT&T's website that allowed him to find the email addresses of over 100,000 iPad users. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay $73,000 in restitution, but his conviction was vacated on a technicality after a year.

His proponents decried the conviction as an example of how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law written in the 80's that doesn't address a range of of scenarios that simply didn't exist at the time, can be wielded to prosecute people who haven't actually done any real hacking. And they did so in spite of the fact that Weev was notorious before the hack for being outrageously offensive. He was the head of a collective called "The Gay Nigger Association of America," that delighted in harrassing bloggers and trolling web communities. He basically harassed one woman off the internet entirely.

It was this, his rambunctious, larger-than-life online persona that led people to dismiss all of his offensive behavior as an act. The word troll, in its original form, meant someone who argues a position online that they don't actually believe, and Weev speaks reverently about folks like Andy Kaufmann and Lenny Bruce, so it was easy for ignore his behavior as foolishness and goofery.

The problem is that whether it's an act or not, Weev now has a tattoo of a swastika on his chest and has espoused white nationalist viewpoints. And that is causing folks to accuse people who have written about him or supported him before - specifically Laurie Penny and Molly Crabapple - of supporting a nazi (I can't help but notice that male authors who have written about him have not seen nearly as much blowback). Weev's behavior, regardless of whether it's a performance, has become so toxic that it is poisoning other people simply through proximity.

I have been hesitant to write about him for a long time, because I recognized that he was a leaking barrel of toxic racist sludge. But maybe that's just cowardice on my part. Because even if people were incurious about his behavior in the past, even if they were lazy about confronting his racism, his prosecution was pretty clearly overbroad, and he shouldn't have gone to jail for it. The law should protect not only people whose ideas I agree with, but people whose ideas I abhor. Weev may be a shitheel, but there are no perfect poster children for prosecutorial overreach, and it's generally better to stand behind the least likable person being prosecuted under a law you dislike, because that makes your chances all the better.

The criticism of Penny and Crabapple reeks of "palling around with terrorists" style ad-hominem, and seems more like an excuse to grind axes with people who have written about Weev than Weev himself. In the same way that the ACLU defends the KKK, people who believe that the CFAA is inherently unjust should defend Weev in spite of being a bad guy. But perhaps people should approach their subjects more critically, especially when they agree with said subject's core political beliefs.