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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

It would work about as well as banning abortion - of course it would still happen, just outside of the view of the law. Like, come on. If the life of your child was on the line, you wouldn't figure out a way to pay the ransom even if there was a potential for prosecution later?

Also I'm not sure how the fine would even be decided to be effective? 3 years in prison? Would absolutely gladly trade it for the life of my child. Probably any amount of time in prison would be spent gladly in order to save your child. And once we start throwing ideas like life imprisonment(because really, can't go much higher than that) it would be struck down as not proportionate to the crime.

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> It would work about as well as banning abortion - of course it would still happen, just outside of the view of the law. Like, come on. If the life of your child was on the line, you wouldn't figure out a way to pay the ransom even if there was a potential for prosecution later?

By this logic the Great Firewall of China is a massive failure because some guy, somewhere, was able to access illegal content from China. But that's not the case. It works quite well to control public opinion and it doesn't have to be 100% effective at blocking content to do so.

The same applies to disincentives to ransoms. Of course some people will still pay ransoms. But why let criminals have a monopoly on the market? The total ransom someone can pay is fixed by the market (basically how much your child is worth to you and how much money you even have, otherwise there'd be no ceiling on ransoms). Since the government is in on the action, the revenue from ransoms is split between fines/jail time/criminals. If the government's actions are decided ahead of time, and cannot be changed based on any single ransom attempt, then kidnappers will know that their potential income from ransoms will be severely cut, thereby disincentivizing ransoms by some degree. The degree to which it is disincentivized depends on how good of a competitor the government is in the market (enforcement/detection of ransom paying events).

> Also I'm not sure how the fine would even be decided to be effective? 3 years in prison? Would absolutely gladly trade it for the life of my child. Probably any amount of time in prison would be spent gladly in order to save your child. And once we start throwing ideas like life imprisonment(because really, can't go much higher than that) it would be struck down as not proportionate to the crime.

These are implementation details. If there is no ceiling to what you will pay/rob/steal/do then don't let the kidnappers out there know! But also, you'd be a massive liability to society assuming other people don't care about your kid as much as you do, since criminals can leverage you to a 100% degree. If they know this about you, they don't even have to estimate your net worth. They can get you to go rob a bank instead!

> These are implementation details.

Which are what a plan is made of. If you live in a democracy and not a dictatorship, you have about a 0.0002% chance of keeping the parents of a kidnapped, murdered child in jail for more than a day for the crime of "attempted ransom paying" without you and your family becoming pariahs and being screamed at in public places, and your political party being annihilated from politics even after press releasing your expulsion.

It's not just the parents that would have to sacrifice.

And yet here we are imprisoning people for simply using drugs. Whether you agree that's good or bad it should be obvious that criminal penalties for drug use at least disincentivize a lot of potential drug use.

Sure; criminal penalties for criticizing the government disincentivizes a lot of potential dissent, too. Works well in China.

I think you're right that imprisoning people for paying ransoms would probably decrease the probability that a victim would pay a ransom. And imprisoning people for blasphemy would probably decrease the probability that someone would take Jesus's name in vain. But I'm not sure how useful it is to discuss things like this. (And, for the record, I also think it's unconscionable that the US imprisons people for simply using drugs.)

And then there's the question of overall efficacy: it disincentivizes a lot of potential drug use, but does it also disincentivize drug sales? Does banning drug possession decrease the amount of drugs sold? I don't know. They could always just try to sell to more people than they otherwise would have.

Similarly, ransomers could just go for more of a spray-and-pray approach and ransom more victims per unit time to offset the fact that there's a lower probability that any one victim would pay. They could also hike up ransom prices to offset it, so that each victim is hurt more even if there may possibly be fewer total victims.

I think even if it did objectively, inarguably decrease the amount of ransoms - which I acknowledge is plausible - it'd still be completely unethical and an extremely terrible idea. But I'm not even sure if it would. We aren't exactly winning the War on Drugs by penalizing drug use, and I'm not convinced we're going to win the War on Ransomware by penalizing ransom payments. And even if we could win both those wars that way, I think it'd still be really fucked up and major governmental overreach.

There are a lot of issues with this idea, too, but I'd be more sympathetic to the ideas some others have suggested in this thread: bring back letters of marque and reprisal and provide some legal structure for American/European citizens to target international cybercriminals in certain countries and perhaps also take money from them and keep a percentage of the proceeds, etc. I'd be way more in favor of vigilante justice against perpetrators as a remedy compared to draconian punishments against victims. These people currently face absolutely no repercussions, so adding some repercussions may help deter them.

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