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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, if there is a blanket exception for journalists, then any group of five home invaders will have one guy doing the break-and-entering, and four of them carrying camera to claim they are just journalists reporting on a crime in progress.

If a journalist wants to follow the perpetrators of some unlawful entry, that journalist must in fact somehow possess the authorization to be there that the perpetrators do not, otherwise he or she is equally unauthorized.

There is no legal category of person called "journalist" who are authorized to enter anywhere they want.

While this situation is unfortunate due to its particular circumstances, there isn't any good way to fix the rules to make an exception.

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The law does not operate like a binary computer program. So, hacks like you are suggesting don't actually work even if their was such an exception.

The letter of the law in fact does operate that way, more or less. The non-binary consideration is in the area of interpretation and severity of application of the law.

The letter of the law can open up cans of worms.

You've never heard of the exploitation of legal loopholes?

Intent for example is an important part of the law. Holding a camera is not enough to qualify as a journalist.

The letter of the law is critical because the word choice matteres. The difference between consent and informed consent is huge.

Intent is hard to determine since someone's intent is not directly accessible. It can only be inferred from behavior and other surrounding evidence.

However, the inclusion of intent into a law doesn't inherently require any ambiguity in the law itself. The way in which intent factors into a statue can be crystal clear.

> The difference between consent and informed consent is huge.

And not fuzzy in any way; quite "binary", like a computer.

And not fuzzy

Only in theory, in practice these things decided on a case by case basis. You get things like, "Is the wording of this document clear enough not just possible to decipher."

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.[4]" is actually part of case law.

s/statue/statute/ :)

What makes you think that all written law is unambiguous?

What makes you think I wrote the statement "all written law is unambiguous"?

Do you suspect that the statutes of Canadian law which applies to this particular case are ambiguous? Or if not, should they be, and would that somehow help in some way?

All law is ambiguous. It's just a question of degree of ambiguity.

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