Consider this: were you to come to GP's office and show GP's boss a printout of them saying controversial things on HN, demanding GP's termination, GP would most likely keep their job and there would be a good chance you'd get kicked out by security. In order to get a company to fire someone, there needs to be a public mess, and those rarely happen organically. In this case, and other similar firings for wrongspeak that I can think of, a public storm was created intentionally.
Can't see it as anything else than a weaker, non-lethal form of swatting.
I'm not sure how "private conversation" should be defined. If someone wrote something on HN, is it really private? In the case of RMS, I don't know enough about this mailing list to know whether it was private or not.
I'm also not sure whether "private conversation" matters a lot. For instance, a governor of Puerto Rico was apparently sending homophobic and misogynistic messages around in a private messages. Is it less bad for being in a private conversation?
To your hypothetical: If I was so upset with someone that I felt the need to go to their employer and complain about them, that seems like my right to free speech and expression. If, after security kicked me out, I took the matter to the local newspaper and it caused an uproar, that also seems like my right.
I'm not sure either. HN, or CSAIL mailing list, are community chatrooms that sometimes spill out into the world at large, but their day-to-day activity concerns their respective communities. You do not expect to see what you wrote there aired in mainstream news.
> I'm also not sure whether "private conversation" matters a lot.
I suppose it doesn't in the case of publicly recognizable people or public officials; this sort of comes with the territory. But what private (or semi-private) conversations introduce in this picture is a "kill chain" - a chain of people or organizations involved in taking a private message and turning it into a mob forcing one's employer's hand. I think it's worth to take a closer look at that chain - especially in this case, where you can clearly witness an increasing level of misrepresentation happening. The original post, for instance, stayed just a bit shy of making accusations that could be subject of a libel lawsuit, implying but not stating a lot of things. And then the media coverage did its usual misrepresentation amplification.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for shooting the messenger - just that there should be some pressure in the society which ensures messengers are communicating their messages accurately. Ironically, the subject of this outrage is that pressure - RMS attempting to correct inaccuracies.
> If I was so upset with someone that I felt the need to go to their employer and complain about them, that seems like my right to free speech and expression. If, after security kicked me out, I took the matter to the local newspaper and it caused an uproar, that also seems like my right.
Depends on the reason for you being upset, I would hope that the paper would either pick it up and air it, or laugh you out of the room too. But you're right, it's technically your right to try. But still, I think there's something wrong with trying to end someone's career - thus causing significant, real, material harm to them - just because you personally found their speech offensive. It's like a lightweight form of swatting someone because you got angry.
If grouping up people does cause them to lose that right, perhaps that characteristics of rights kicks into effect when dealing with sufficiently large institutions, especially ones who have significant tie in with government far beyond some small mom and pop employer.
