Too Smart/Too Stupid

By all accounts, Donncha O'Cearbhail, Darren Martyn and Jeremy Hammond are brilliant. They are also exceedingly stupid.

Smart enough to bypass all sorts of cyber-security and hack into computers.

Stupid enough to not understand the gravity of the offense.

Mr. O'Cearbhail and Mr. Martyn are college students, 19 years old, and when you think back to yourself at that age, you shake your head in understanding. You were pretty stupid back then as well, but at the time, you thought you knew it all. You thought you were infallible.

Jeremy Hammond was raised to be a genius, trained from birth to be a great brain. His Irish colleagues in hacking earned high marks on their Leaving Certs. Their parents might have dreamed of great things, shining futures, for their brilliant boys.

What the young men didn't learn, apparently, were social skills.

Isn't that the definition of a geek, however?

Mr. Hammond is on his way to New York to stand trial, where his juvenile brain will be hard-pressed to process the fact that he's come up against authority that is not malleable like his father, or sympathetic to the cause of social justice as a no-holds-barred sport.

Mr. Martyn claims he is helping the gardai to unravel the hacking network. There's a lad who's smart enough to understand that he's in a world of trouble and he's grabbed the only lifeline that's been thrown his way.

He's not particularly interested in a one-way ticket to New York.

Did someone explain to him how extradition works? Or is he taking a page from the purported leader of the hacking crew, Hector Monsegur, who has been singing like a chirpy parakeet to the FBI since his arrest last August?