Wow – so Myers may have committed a federal offence? Will Mathis want to get the G-Men onto him?

Probably not wire fraud. Theft of service would seem to cover it though. Someone paid for that conference call and someone else used the service without permission. Consider that you have a contract with a telephone company to provide you with long distance service and you have a cordless phone system with a security code. Your neighbor happens to acquire, in a perfectly legal manner, the security code for your phone, enters the code into his cordless phone, and starts using, without permission, your phone service. That is theft of service and it’s definitely illegal just like any other form of theft. If the theft involves crossing state lines, which I believe in this case it does as the alleged thief was in one state and the victim in another, then it becomes a federal crime as it’s now dealing with interstate commerce.

This may be an area where our different jurisdictions have differences in law. I am in the UK, but I am vaguely aware of laws in the US concerning wire fraud (is that the right term?) that don’t have quite the same parallel over here.

But from a legal point of view I would still want someone to quote me the relevant statute or precedent before I took the view that something was illegal.

Laws concerning the privacy of electronic data and communications are many and harsh. If you acquired, even by perfectly legal means, the password to someone or some corporation’s computer or phone system then used it in a way that caused damage to that person or company there is almost certainly cause for civil action and perhaps criminal action as well.

Maybe, but it’s difficult to think of any law to peg that action on. Doubtless if there is one then Mathis et al. can look at using it.

Arguably there was a civil crime committed in the conference call incident. Imagine someone walks through the door uninvited at a wedding ceremony while vows are being taken and disrupts it by announcing to the whole assembly that the groom is a despicable liar. Would a judge or jury consider that one or more parties were reasonably entitled to freedom from such harassment and was damaged by the actions of the harasser? I think it’s reasonable to suppose they might. In the theater incident I think there’s a lot less expectation of privacy and little ability to show damage as Dawkins asked for and was given permission to speak by the people who paid for the event.

Whoa, whoa, Dave! We’re not talking about crime here! This Mathis/Myers business is not a criminal matter at all, it’s just about what is or is not socially acceptable behaviour and competence and incompetence. Let’s not get carried away and start making category errors.

A crime isn’t being alleged in these incidents with most discussions, so suggesting criminality is stretching the metaphor quite a bit.

Nonetheless, the question isn’t simply the competency to prevent a crime but includes the competency to enable an undesirable action. Undesirable actions aren’t always criminal, in constrast to the premise of your question.

I was not making any comments at all about PZ Myers’ behaviour, I was commenting on the competence of Mathis et al.

Exactly. And I was commenting on a woman who’s not competent enough to protect herself against a rapist.

What does the competency of the victim to prevent a crime have to do with the criminality of the perpetrator?

Would the vagus nerve work better if it took the proposed shortcut? If not then there’s no need to change it. Engineers usually don’t bother changing things without a good reason.