Embed Notice

It feels like a lot of news sites kind of buried the lede with the "GTA6 hacker sentenced to life in mental hospital" headlines.

He wasn't sentenced to life for hacking rockstar. He was sentenced to psychiatric hold for doing hacking, then getting arrested for hacking, then while arrested for hacking doing even more hacking, then when arrested for that hacking and having all his computers taken away, doing ever more hacking to get computers to do even more hacking with. Like, he made it pretty clear he has no intention of ever not doing crime.

Then on top of that he was posing as a law enforcement officer and sending fake emergency disclosure requests to tech companies in order to get the home addresses of several women he was stalking and harassing. When they finally did put him in custody, he was then involved in several dozen violent incidents.

There's plenty of cases of the justice systems being heavy handed with hackers, but this is like the exact kind of person that psychiatric detention was made for. It's not a life sentence or even a sentence at all. In the UK you can be released from psychiatric detention at any time, so long as the doctors assess you're no longer a continuous threat to society.