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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

A threat sent by mail is still a sent threat even if nobody ever opens the envelope to read it. The crime is in the sending. This woman used an online resources, one which involves transmitting everything across innumerable state lines. I am surprised she isn't up on federal charges.

Note that the law doesn't forbid the writing of a threat. You have to send it to someone. Had she kept it in a book under her bed, she would not be in trouble. But she sent it to a website/service/LLM portal.

>> It is unlawful for any person to send, post, or transmit, or procure the sending, posting, or transmission of, a writing or other record, including an electronic record, in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person

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If you draft an email threatening someone and delete it without sending have you committed a felony because someone at Google could be reading your drafts box, stored in a datacenter across state lines?

Sounds reasonable. Google's bots could pick that up easily and forward if for human review.

FYI, the use of drafts folders to transmit messages has been used by terrorists. This is likely where CIA director David Petraeus got the idea when he needed a secure way to chat with his mistress.

https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/technologist/gen-petraeus...

Ah, a simpler and more innocent time of government scandals. I miss it. Now the messages are on White House stationery and they declare themselves above the law.

Be happy for where we are in 10 years we'll living in a world of llm based decisions where all conversations, actions, thoughts will be monitored. Where llms can excuse any decision. At least we have an all show government with at best partial results who generally retreats.

It sounds extremely unreasonable to me for "bots could pick it up" to transmute a private note into a felony threat.

It "sounds reasonable" that the exact same action could be a crime or not, depending on how an engineer implemented a feature?

How about you save a text file on your Desktop or in your Documents folder, which your computer has bullied you into syncing to OneDrive or iCloud. Fair game to get sent to jail for that?

Honestly, I'm equally fascinated by the way email has changed. 30 years ago when you drafted an email but didn't send it, it was only on your local machine. There was no SMTP. 20 years ago, it might be a 50/50 shot as to whether you "transmitted" it to your "Drafts" folder if you were using IMAP instead of POP3 to read it.

We really need a way to make it clear to users when, through the normal operation of software, they are "sending" data to a third party (usually the software developer) and when they are not. This is definitely not clear/knowable to regular users, and it's kind of hard to figure out even if you're a computer expert. Even software that "runs locally" now sends innumerable amounts of stuff back to the developer, and they don't always disclose it.

This is a huge privacy problem that is only going to get worse.

What if she mailed it to herself?

What if she put it in a locked box before shipping it to herself UPS, and she has the only key?

What if instead of UPS, she hired a moving company to move the locked box?

What if she wrote it electronically in diary.txt, but it was backed up to a cloud provider?

I'm guessing there's some sort of "reasonable expectation of privacy" for certain activities. We're going to find out what Florida courts think about this new medium.

We'll only find out what the courts think when this happens to someone with a lot of money. It takes a real legal fight to push it high enough to become precedence. She'll be pushed to plea out.

Surely this is the wrong side of what "sending" here will be interpreted as?

Saving is not sending ie passive vs active act.

Everything you "save" on an online service gets "sent" to someone, be that a person or a computer, more often than not across state lines.

People really need to stop parroting this "across state lines" thing.

> in any manner in which it may be viewed by another person

Does the person have to know (or at least believe) that it will be viewed by another person?

She likely didn't think anyone would view it. Honestly, even as a career software developer I don't think it is unreasonable to think know would would see what she wrote to an AI. I assume most of what I write to an AI is not viewed by any other human, based simply on the quantity of messages sent back and forth to AIs, I would assume a vast majority are not read by another human.

What if she had written this into google docs, and she kept a diary there? That also crosses state lines, and is transmitted to another location.

I get were you are coming from but this all feels like it needs more context to make a better judgement.

You can argue from technicalities but they would need to prove intent.

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