Way back in August, the story of a guy getting busted for getting busy with himself on the NYC subway after a woman took his picture with her cameraphone spawned our irregular series, Mobile Phones: Empowering Stupid Criminals. Now, New York magazine has profiled the guy (via Boing Boing), and unsurprisingly, he comes off as pretty much a complete jackass.

Not surprisingly, Hoyt himself disapproves of such tactics. In his account, the perpetrator is Nguyen, who misread his intentions (he claims he was already mid-masturbation when she stepped onto the train) and then humiliated him by posting his picture on the Web. He says he didn’t even realize he’d been photographed. “Even so, I wouldn’t imagine somebody throwing it up on the Internet for millions of people and destroying your life like that,” he says. “It’s one thing to take it to the police. But on the Internet, I read a lot of people saying, ‘That was not too cool of her. That was really screwed up.’ ”

Hoyt believes that if he and Nguyen had only met under different circumstances, she might really like him. “You know, she’d go, ‘That guy’s pretty cool. He’s got this restaurant, and he’s fun,’ ” Hoyt says. “She’d probably want to go out with me.”

So when we say “empowering stupid criminals”, remember the emphasis is on stupid.

[tags]mobile, sousveillance[/tags]