If a policeman notices the sentence above on my phone screen during a routine traffic stop, the response you want him to take is... nothing?
When you read something describing in detail a person's intent to do something very bad, in a place where they write things that they intend to do, and which in the past they have in fact consistently done, you don't attach any significance to that at all?
How can I prove that all this is not just a dark and morbid roleplay?
And yet US federal law will convict you for conspiracy to commit murder on this evidence, as I understand it.
If you think the "dark and morbid story" defence is reason enough not to make writing the threat down a crime, why do you think the "dark and morbid roleplay" defence is unsound?
Are you posting threats on hacker news while you are driving? And the cop was close enough to see your username and what you wrote? Is that why you were pulled over?
Do you dispute that people sometimes discover things about other people? Do you dispute that things a person discovers about another person can change the first person's assessment of what the second person might do next?
> Do you dispute that things…
I don’t see how any of these questions are relevant to the point I’m making.
Because it seems to me that you are merely picking apart concrete details of an example situation that are not relevant to the general issue that the example is clearly trying to demonstrate.
I was reaching for a scenario that concisely demonstrated the core aspects of the general issue; maybe the example I chose wasn't very good. The core aspects are what are important, though. They are:
1. Someone in authority can discover recorded information, one interpretation of which is that that someone else is plotting a crime
2. The information might not have been subject to any agreement with (or even seen by) a second person
3. Should that discovery be taken seriously enough to warrant arresting the person?
My claim is that yes it should, unless there are other clearly overriding factors.
> maybe the example I chose wasn't very good
is just you saying that police should have evidence when they arrest somebody
'Probable cause' should involve a degree of certainty, because 'possible cause' would be altogether too loose of a standard. It's possible that you're intending to shootme and you just mentioned saulpw to throw other HN users off the scent. Possibilities are only limited by the assessor's imagination.
The law in this particular case, which seems to be intended for threats that you actually send to someone, is being interpreted broadly to apply to any "threat" that you transmit to a server. So in your hypothetical, the legality would depend on whether your notes are backed up to icloud or not.
In my country, no "overt act" is required, but both here and in the US a "conspiracy to commit" charge requires an agreement with a second party. This is indeed consistent with a very broad interpretation of "no thought crimes".
I agree, and it's nuts.
This feels like less of an issue with anthropic per say as it is a broad reading/misuse of the law's original intent.
The commenters here are cute little HNers who think they have found a loophole in the law. They are not the first ones innover their head.
Spoiler: the law is written in words, and those words aren't strictly executed like in a computer program, they are interpreted by actual humans who can see what you are trying to do and will stamp it out.
Anybody showing a cop their hacker news comments at a traffic stop should be arrested, for harassing the police
Part of me says that the solution is stop entering any personal data into any device and service you don't own, but I'm not sure if that's really what we want considering that there are zero private cell phones. Even desktops and laptops aren't 100% owned by you these days. The only thing you can really do is keep them offline 100% of the time so they can't spy on you, but that seems like a lot to demand.
It's been very obvious for at least the last decade that was the direction things were going.