David Kernell, the young man who broke into Sarah Palin's email in 2008 was sentenced to 1 year in prison today. You can read more about it here.
Regardless of how closely our political views align to Palin, I think most of us agree that what Kernell did was wrong. I think most of us also agree that any transgressions on Palin's part wouldn't excuse his actions. As a society, we have created countless laws that govern just how illegal actions can be investigated by law enforcement. We tend to react passionately when we perceive law enforcement as overstepping it's bounds even when we know a crime has been committed.
What I find interesting about this story is the reaction most of us have. Breaking into someone's email is illegal. We wonder, "If this happened to me, would the culprit be prosecuted and sent to prison for 1 year?"
I think we know the sobering answer. No.
Sara Palin gets special treatment because she's important. Her importance to society isn't a measure of worth. It's just the result of celebrity and charisma. I think we can rattle off plenty of other "Important" people who would also receive this special treatment. The rest of us just have to buckle down and make sure our email accounts have strong passwords. I'm sure if someone broke into my email, law enforcement would agree it was wrong, but they probably wouldn't feel like expending any energy to pursue the perpetrator. Life is not fair.
However, there are some crimes of which i can be the victim and law enforcement will care! That's a thought that'll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. If you or I were murdered, there would be an investigation. Hopefully someone would go to jail, or worse if it's in Texas.
Clearly some crimes carry an importance that outweighs the unimportance of the victim. I wondered if this behavior could be represented in a simple mathematical model. The following equation jumped into my head.
N = (I^2) * T
Where N is the notoriety of the crime, I is the importance of the person to society, and T is the importance of the transgression.
I think for most people, I would start at 1/(the population of society). According to Wikipedia the US population is 310,688,000. Crazy that it's rounded to the thousands, but i guess at some point all populations go through round numbers. So my I would be 0.00000000321866 ish. Maybe it went up some because of my blog and a couple people have played my games. 0.00000000321868 is my I. I only factor in the US population because for the majority of society, people in other countries might as well not exist.
Now we assume that for people to pay attention to a crime, it's notoriety has to have a score over 5. that doesn't seem like much, but if you plug my score into the formula, you can see that the importance of the transgression has to be really big before people start caring. The fact that i square the person's importance makes it even harder for us people of fractional importance to ever get justice. Why did i square it? Well, then you get a nice curve where the closer you get to a whole number of importance the more notoriety crimes against you create. I like nice curves.
I would think a person's importance is modified by fame, money, looks, etc. Someone like Palin probably has an importance of 1. I think a Snookie could potentially have an importance greater than 1! Both are higher than Conan O'Brien.
I think we intuitively know this principal even though we don't quantify it in this way. I think we also understand that the reason people will rise up and fight for an important person who is the victim of a minor transgression is that the act raises their own importance. Are you a DA who prosecuted David Kernell? Your I just went up. Are you David Kernell? Your I went up too. I'm pretty sure the increase to a person's I is a function of the notoriety of a given transgression.
I don't know if this musing is enlightening. Now that i think about it, it's kind of disheartening, but it would be interesting to employ it in some kind of game.
