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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

The motivation section of the proposal you linked to contains the very illuminating sentence

Der Entwurf zielt darauf, das Betreiben von auf die Förderung illegaler Zwecke ausgerichteten Plattformen unabhängig von dem Nachweis der Beteiligung an einzelnen konkreten Handelsgeschäften unter Strafe zu stellen.

My translation:

The draft aims to penalize the operation of platforms directed at supporting illegal activities, independent of proof of participation in individual specific trades.

I.e. the law is drafted to close a loophole where you can open a black market site, lovingly curate illegal goods into categories and offer your escrow services to potential customers, but you can only be prosecuted once the police can find someone who actually used your service. Instead, they'd prefer to be able to shut it down beforehand.

All in all, I'm not too worried that the law will be passed in a form that outlaws operating Tor nodes.

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> he law is drafted to close a loophole where you can open a black market site

The point is that the law says any Tor onion service market is illegal, by definition.

And it's obviously only a first step before outlawing anonymization for the general public, including a ban on encryption.

No, not any service. Read the actual proposed section 126a. The service must be related to one of the listed criminal activities to be illegal. In essence, this law is aimed at dark net sites like Silk Road.

Who gets to decide what "related" means?

Why are you trying to nit-pick the law based on the words the GP used in their gloss of it, rather than reading what the text of the law actually says?

The whole point of legal jargon is to say things in an airtight way. You cannot summarize legal jargon without removing the airtight-ness—lawyers really do use as few words as they can manage to get a concept across (in a loophole-less manner), so removing any single word further usually reintroduces a loophole. This implies that there is no point whatsoever in trying to poke holes in a law you only understand through summary, since it is vanishingly unlikely that the holes that appear in the summary appear in the law. You have to read the actual text.

Yes, the body of text in law is usually nearly burdensome with all the flowery language that makes it seem like they're trying to cover edge cases (and sardonic comment aside, I'll grant your assumption legislators want to cover as many edge cases as possible to prevent loopholes).

But at least in the United States, very many of the sentences in our laws end with weasel phrases like "or similar uses" and "or other software" and "or related activity", which is exactly where the problem arises, and where interested parties are inserting their own special loopholes. And sure, we hope that these loopholes get hammered out in the courts in our favor some years later -- that is, if there happens to be a good and willing samaritan that is more "invested" in taking the issue to court to try for an outcome which is favorable for the public versus one favorable to corporations or the police or the wealthy. But I'll just go ahead and continue supporting the option where the stupid law isn't created in the first place. Even if that means the police don't get their bogey man running a dark market.

Many of these things that look like loopholes are actually invocations of standing case-law. I.e., lawyers are relying on an implicit layer of interpretations for these jargon phrases, that have already been "hammered out" in previous litigations.

(Admittedly, some are not. But law written by teams of legislators with centuries of combined legal experience—and passed through dozens of third-party QC checks + redraftings before being submitted for consideration—usually does not have this problem. Or, if it does, then usually it is an "out-of-context problem" nobody could see coming—an interpretation that wouldn't have even made sense to consider at time of drafting—and the first time anyone hits the relevant snag, we get some equally-good lawyers [e.g. the US Supreme Court, for US-Constitution out-of-context problems] in a room to re-interpret the law.)

The problem is that this isn't legislation about the proper manufacture of bicycles. This is exactly the kind of legislation that governments and the police are looking for, to cut into civil liberties and fortify their own positions of power. This is exactly the kind of law in which the NSA specifically went looking for loopholes, in order to conduct its dragnet warrantless surveillance of American citizens -- and then shielded its exploitation and abuse of the loophole using its secret rubber-stamp court system, effectively making it impossible for the loophole to be actually hammered out in the courts. When a proposed law bumps up against civil liberties and so clearly has the potential for abuse, it's not right to treat it with the same sort of irreverent attitude changes to the tax code or military spending are treated. This is one of those laws where people need to stop and think about what an authoritarian political outsider would do with this kind of power if they were to end up winning the right election. Generic language doesn't belong in laws like this.

My point was essentially that the people who draft laws are very, very smart—smart enough to allow for devious things they want to allow for like NSA warrantless surveillance, fully as a consequence of the text of the law (without that being obvious to your average lawyer), rather than by using "generic language" to provide a loophole to the law (which will be obvious to any pre-law student, and thus to the lawyers working for the opposition when the law is tabled.)

Again, read the text. Is there "generic language" or "a loophole" you could find with ten minutes' close scrutiny, that can't be explained away as "fully pinned down in meaning by case-law" by an average civil lawyer from that country? I doubt it. But might it somehow allow for the trampling of your civil liberties anyway, for reasons that only become clear when you know all the case-law required to macro-expand the law out to its fullest reading, and the totality of the body of law and statute of the relevant country, and the case-laws of their individual interactions? Maybe.

>people who draft laws are very, very smart

I think, I am smart when it comes to web and software, but I know little about electricity or cooking or 1000 other things. The people, you call smart, proposed to place stop-signs in the web - which sounds good and familiar to general public, but stupid to people who knows how web works. It is not enough to be smart.

Maybe the word I should use is clever. The people who draft laws are very, very clever. This means that they know exactly how to manipulate language and the courts to get the effect they want.

Whether the effect they want is a sensible effect—that has nothing to do with whether they're clever.

A person with a genie in a bottle is normally just "doomed", because genies exploit loopholes. If the person is an experienced, clever lawyer, though, then they're not doomed; they're actually quite powerful. That doesn't mean they'll use their wishes to accomplish anything good for the world, or even good for them personally. They're still a regular, irrational human being with irrational desires—desires for status among their peers, for adoration and worship by the public, for renown and legacy. Etc.

I'm pretty sure that the people who proposed to "place stop-signs in the web" knew what they were doing, and knew what it would accomplish, and wanted to accomplish exactly what the law-as-drafted would accomplish if signed into law. "But it would just make everything worse!" Not for them. Not for their voter-base, at least from the perspective of voting for them again. Not for their lobbyists. Etc. It might make the Internet work objectively worse—but whoever said that politics was about making things better? Regulation mostly serves to make various processes more inefficient and to give those processes higher barriers-to-entry—in a way that makes them safer, or less prone to abuse, or whatever else. Politicians are always thinking in that mode: "something might get worse, but it's a compromise for everyone else—some good, some bad—and a win for me personally!"

is anything related to obstruction on that section? if yes, simply running the guard or exit node from any criminal investigation gets you jail time.

a judge, most likely

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