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Comment by Lucadg | Hacker News Reader

In the 80s there was a wave of kidnappings in Italy. A new law made it so that relatives bank accounts were frozen immediately and they where forbidden to pay. I don't remember the details but it was a wildly successful move.

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Why relatives of a victim didn't stopped informing police about the kidnaping? If government didn't know, then bank accounts wouldn't be blocked. Now a victim has a reason to not inform government, and now it is possible to kidnappings to continue without any government record, and we may come to a situation when it is all nice on the paper, while it becomes even worse than was before law-maker's intervention.

Was those bank accounts blocks where a successful move, or kidnappings stopped due to other measures government made?

I can only assume that hiding the kidnapping of a prominent person for months is really hard. Also in a time of high distress most people probably preferred to seek help from the state rather than making the situation even more complex and stressful.

This is different, though. Freezing their bank accounts makes it impossible to pay and thus gives the victim a plausible excuse not to pay.

Right, in the same way that making it illegal for cities to pay would. Probably wouldn't stop normal people paying but they don't have $400k of data to steal.

So I'd say it's exactly the same.

It is not the same as the city essentially is put in the situation were they need to choose between losing data and paying both a ransom and a fine (unless you want a federal agency to freeze ALL city controlled funds).

If you want to stop city from paying the the law need to state that even if they get their data back they need to delete it.

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