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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

That's a pretty absurd framing of the situation.

I find it accurate enough. The very nature of data is absurd, when even far more awful stuff than merely a pirated movie can be reduced to a single (albeit large) number. It is one area where I feel our morality has not caught up with our technology.

For example, we think of trading stolen credit card numbers as wrong, but only because we have bought the narrative of identity theft, which was constructed to pass the burden onto the populace instead of the people handing out goods/services/money to verify identity. If you disregard the concept of identity theft, and think that instead it should be considered just theft, not from the one who possesses the identity used, but from the entity that handed out goods/services/money, then we need to reevaluate the ethics/morality of trading credit card numbers.

Which is of course what the credit card company tells the SOL merchant while yanking back the damages from their own willful negligence.

Consumer facing though, they'd like to define it as "identity theft" because "identity" is a bedrock abstraction their system is built on. They would like an "identity" to be something prescriptive and airtight (rather than imperfectly descriptive) because it would make their job/business that much easier.

Why do you think it's absurd (genuine question)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809290

Perhaps if you've drank the imaginary property kool aid. How does what they actually did differ from what I said? I see nothing about them stealing the original copies or forcing people to download from them.

"Communicate within voluntary relationships" could be used to describe distributing stolen credit card numbers, hacked medical records, passing child pornography around, etc.

Clearly, they're not in trouble for sending emails. The emails were simply the evidence of the crime they got caught carrying out.

The downloads themselves are the communications I was referring to. The existence of encryption implies freedom of speech, especially between two private parties, is a fundamental right. Child pornography sure makes for a nice disgusting bogeyman, but at least it's rare and isolated. Unlike totalitarian policing of private interactions.

How do you feel about people buying/selling stolen credit card numbers?

That its largely a symptom of credit card companies not giving a darn about security or their customers.

I get more upset by the companies getting hacked once their negligent practices come to light.

Is it possible for a datum to be any more intrinsically worthless than an account number? Or a system to be more broken than to authenticate by 21 digits printed right on the card? Credit card companies have had two decades to switch to an appropriate system for scalable online transactions, but why bother if they can simply screw over merchants while guilting users into thinking they're responsible for "their" number?

And despite all this the subject has become a routine talking point for censorship proponents, nicely demonstrating a warped framework that prioritizes centralized whims over individual rights.

Shift liability to the credit card companies and you can watch that problem take care of itself.

If the number is linked to me, i.e. if they're selling "anon has cc X", then that should fall under existing breach of privacy laws.

If it's just the number, i.e. "A cc with number X exists", I'm ok with that.

If they use the number to make purchases, that's a criminal offence separate from knowledge of the number per se.

Think of it like this: seeing a person get murdered isn't a crime. Facilitating murder in any way is.

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