We Should All Have Something To Hide
thoughtcrime.org
thoughtcrime.org
This, a thousand times this.
I was struck with the same idea in the past. Law should not be 100% enforced, or it will be a dystopia. I wouldn't want to live in a world were the Grateful Dead couldn't do any drugs, teenagers could never drink a beer, nobody could express himself with a graffiti in a drab wall, no child that wants to be a graphic designer could ever pirate Photoshop, being a few months less or more than the legal age to date sends you off as a molester, playing a different region DVD lands you to jail, and a million other things...
Imagine driving on a residential street at 60 mph. That in and of itself is not a problem (other than noise), but hitting something at that speed most certainly is, especially in a neighborhood. Likewise, drunk driving is not a problem until you hit someone or crash yourself. Not coming to a complete stop at a 4-way stop sign. (all traffic examples, sorry)
Those traffic behaviors are not destructive, until something goes wrong. So if we reduce the law count but increase penalties, we're on the right track. For instance, if we really want to stop the effects of drunk driving, we have 30 days jail time for the first offense.
I think that if we had the proper (minimum) set of laws, then we should have no problem with 100% enforcement.
Now, on the issue of privacy, actually achieving 100% enforcement would be impossible without a complete surveillance state (or zero laws, but this is the trivial case).
We do have the power to change the direction of this country, and the author of the article points to gay marriage and pot use to champion this idea of liberty. But the author also points at the sheer scope of federal law as a huge problem. If the government has a problem with you, they can (probably) put you behind bars -- and this is a problem indeed.
So how should you vote? Vote for candidates who want to reduce the burden of government on the people and enhance personal freedom. I contend that gay marriage wouldn't even be an issue if the government weren't involved in marriage in the first place (and it shouldn't be). The Left loves tearing down the moral codes of previous generations, claiming bigotry, homophobia, etc., but it also loves to build up government in a huge way. The Republicans, unfortunately, have lost the way of small government, but I believe they are a better hope than the Dems, in the long run.
We experimented with lax traffic laws, and accidents were far more common per mile driven than they are today.
"There is a clear link between people's surroundings and their behaviour. If people are in an unpleasant environment, they will behave badly." - Ben Hamilton-Baillie
Also, in Montana, for example, adding speed limits to interstates which previously had none resulted in more traffic fatalities[3]
1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4213221.stm
2. http://www.salon.com/2004/05/20/traffic_design/
3. http://www.motorists.org/press/montana-no-speed-limit-safety...
David Snowden (I ran across his name searching for items related to another Snowden in the news) mentions in a YouTube video a roundabout in England which, despite its visually frightening appearance and apparently very high traffic densities, is one of the safest intersections in the UK.
1) The other road users are operating at a slower speed so it is considerably easier to get out of the way.
2) emergency access is affected by the issue causing the emergency ( a crash for example )
3) normal congestion will put the effective speed lower anyhow.
4) traffic calming can actually increase the throughput of a street For example, converting a street with 2 lanes each direction to a single lane with a central left turn lane: eliminates the congestion caused by people stopping to make turns from the left lane.
You're assuming the other traffic is the problem. Speed humps etc. will considerably slow down e.g. a fire truck even if there are zero other cars on the road.
>emergency access is affected by the issue causing the emergency ( a crash for example )
Again, you're assuming traffic to be the primary problem. If my house is on fire or there is some intruder then there will be negligible effect on the local traffic but structural impediments to haste will still delay the emergency response.
>normal congestion will put the effective speed lower anyhow.
Traffic again.
>traffic calming can actually increase the throughput of a street For example, converting a street with 2 lanes each direction to a single lane with a central left turn lane: eliminates the congestion caused by people stopping to make turns from the left lane.
That's not really traffic calming, or to the extent that it is, should be distinguished from what I'm complaining about, e.g. speed humps or other measures solely designed to reduce traffic speed or annoy motorists into being diverted onto other roads.
Also, the better solution in such cases is to make the road have 2 lanes in each direction and a central left turn lane.
My larger point is that smaller laws help curb behavior that leads to larger consequences.
That means public nudity is legal, nothing about same sex should exist, you can smoke whatever you want (unless it kills you, or permanently maims you, which is why I think self-harm being legal is acceptable, and you should only criminalize the acts of harming others) but not be mentally compromised in public, you can grow whatever you want, you can bear firearms but not take them in public (unless unloaded), you would set speed limits to the first standard deviation of the average speed of a road (ie, the bounds of safety) rather than some arbitrary unrealistic number that causes everyone to speed, etc.
I mean, hell, you could make this very simple in what is criminal:
* Do not directly endanger others excessively through reckless behavior or use of dangerous tools.
* Do not actively hurt another through physical or excessive emotional violence (the latter would have to be extended mental trauma, not just calling someone a name).
And there you go. The first needs a jury to decide if it is a true endangerment in certain conduct, the latter is pretty straightforward, and it only gets murky if you consider ones ability to self-harm being outlawed, which makes a lot of behavior illegal.
Trying to extend them to animals gets complicated, but I figure the distinction is the act of causing pain and suffering vs killing for function. IE, don't endanger or harm other animals unless for the purposes of harvesting resources from them, and only do so causing as little suffering as possible, and that you can't "harvest" an animal owned by someone else (ie, don't murder your neighbors dog saying you wanted to eat dog steaks).
The fundamental problem is proportionality. And the reason it's a problem is that perfect enforcement is impossible. The actual harm posed by driving down a residential street at 60MPH is not proportional to the existing penalties (i.e. reckless driving, jail time, suspension of license). You could do it a hundred times and likely nothing bad would happen. The problem is that a) if you do it 50,000 times then likely someone will be injured, and b) you can do it a hundred times and likely not be caught by law enforcement.
So here comes the trouble. If you set the penalty equal to the risk-adjusted harm (i.e. penalty for 60MPH in a residential zone is a $25 fine) then it serves as no deterrent because you'll only be caught less than 1% of the time which makes the risk-adjusted penalty 100 times less than the risk-adjusted harm. However, if you adjust the penalty to account for the low risk of getting caught, you now have a penalty which when imposed is disproportionate to the offense by a factor of 100 or more. Which is problematic when the effectiveness of enforcement increases without adjusting the penalties. And extremely problematic when the reason for enforcement ineffectiveness is that enforcement is expensive or unpopular, meaning that someone targeted for investigation (e.g. for political reasons) could be found violating many such laws in a way that wouldn't be financially or politically viable to investigate every member of the general public, and then be subject to 100X the proportional penalties for the offense(s) because the penalties were set under a set of assumptions about the effectiveness of investigation and enforcement that are invalidated when the investment of investigative resources is politically motivated.
It is why I brought up pets as property, to cover animal cruelty. If someone else recognizably owns something in the legal system (via valid transaction recognized as voluntary exchange on the part of both parties) than someone else misusing that possession in any ways is grounds to cause harm to the owning party, given that the violence against property was not agreed upon (ie, the owner didn't say demolish my house in a contract).
Having many laws and inneficient law enforcement is the recipe for disaster. You just get corruption and lack of isonomy (poor people get jail, rich people get a bail for stupid crimes). Come to Brazil and marvel at the result of your theory. Police is inefficient, rich people get away from murder, and when they catch a poor criminal they execute for banal crimes (e.g., drug posession) with the understanding the judiciary doesn´t work.
What you want is less bogus laws around individual liberties rather than less law enforcement.
Conversely, if we lived in the same world of intensive surveillance, but where law enforcement was instead 100% efficient, we wouldn't have the often valuable ability to break the law.
It's possible to say that we should have better laws, or different laws, or only the "right" laws. But we don't actually have any agency over that (or to the extent that we do, it's often a result of breaking those laws). What we do have some agency over is the internet, and the technical means to stymie surveillance.
You can break the law. You just can't avoid punishment. Difference is subtle, but important.
My country lived 20 years in a dictatorship but the people breaking the law (including intellectuals/communists from middle class), for good or for worse, were the ones that forced a change back into democracy. Now the president is an "ex-terrorist", and we have superfluous legislation and bad law enforcement because the ones now in power abhor it. The result is corruption and crime.
This is just arguing two sides of the same crap (paternal, surveillance state in one side; granny, lenient state in the other) without changing the rules of the game (e.g., less state).
Yes and no. If you can break the law and the penalty is tolerable then you can get the same result as if enforcement is less than completely effective: People break the law and just take their lumps.
The trouble is that when a movement is only just getting started and doesn't yet have popular support, the first thing the government will try to do in the face of people taking their lumps is to ratchet up the penalties to try to deter them. And then, against perfect enforcement, the number of people willing to break the law falls off a cliff because it isn't worth spending decades in prison for the vast majority of would-be supporters -- or if it is then all the supporters end up imprisoned indefinitely or executed and the movement fails.
Where I grew up, kids on the hockey team, or whose dad owned the car dealership, would repeatedly get away with drunk driving and beating up their girlfriends, whereas poor kids were regularly taken down to the station for skateboarding, even though there were no laws against it.
Nothing about some "white boy perspective" to what I said.
That's based on a misunderstanding about what I meant by saying the police should not be totally efficient.
Less efficient != discrimination.
Less efficient != corruption.
It's not a two way association. One could say that a "corrupt police" is "less efficient" but the inverse is not true.
If anything, with it being less efficient, in the way I describe, FEWER poor, black, "wrong kind of white" etc people will actually get caught.
Robust liberties and clear restraints on law enforcement powers at the expense of law enforcement efficiency are a cornerstone of liberty and have been everywhere and throughout history.
The reason why it is only to a point though is that less efficient police driven to maintain quotas will typically focus on the poor who are less able to defend themselves. Most of the data i have seen suggests that there are not major class differences in drug use in the US, but there are huge class differences in enforcement because buying habits are different and so it takes more police work to bust the middle class than it does the poor.
I think that this is one of those cases where we have a perpetual social problem which cannot be remedied by automating the system.
The actual proverb is "two wrongs don't make a right".
Those are not the results of "my theory". Heck that's not my theory either!
First, who said anything about "many laws"? I'm also against having too many laws.
Second, inefficiency != lack of isonomy. Or rather, it can lead to random lack of isonomy (ie. whether rich or poor, colored or not) -- which is not the same as the situation you describe, which is about inequality of law enforcement between rich and poor.
For example, if the police cannot demand a drug testing, then neither rich nor poor can be found with 100% certainty after having taken some. If the police cannot demand your ISP records, then they have a harder time enforcing 100% crackdown on piracy, whether you are rich or poor etc etc.
I was talking about "less efficiency", in the sense of being against giving those kind of "enablers" (which make 100% enforcement a closer possibility) to the police.
Not in favour of discriminating between rich and poor.
>What you want is less bogus laws around individual liberties rather than less law enforcement.
That's good too, but my point was another. That even for good laws, total enforcement of them would make a nightmarish situation. A couple of examples:
1) I wouldn't want everybody to have free reign to spray paint anything they wish. But I'd like for people determined and willing to express something to be able to do it, even if it means I also have to stand some people that just spray BS tags.
2) I wouldn't want all people to go 150 miles on the highway whenever they like. But if the road is empty, it's straight for miles, and you have a nice car, I wouldn't like people to not be able to step on it for some innocent fun.
In this case, fines and speed cops are OK. But not devices like "compulsory speed control" on all cars, or "total speed radar tracking" on all roads, which would enable something like 100% enforcement of the speed limit.
So, when I talk about less "efficiency", I mean not enabling the police to the point of it being a total control state for every aspect of people's lives.
A lot of the times, some of the improvements to society, art, morals, etc, come by breaking the law. Rosa Parks, IIRC, broke the law that day, too.
Automatic fines reinforces isonomy (everybody is fined equally), and that's a good thing. If some people can game the system, regulation is useless (traffic turns into survival of the fittest, it's game theory).
If someone feels like speeding for civil disobedience, they still can, the state is not making it impossible to (it would if cars couldn't go over limit, for technical reasons). So one can break the law, but face the consequence as everybody else, and argue on the legal system wether this is fair or not. That's what judges and public opinion are for.
When enough people break the law, either the legislation changes or the people change the legislators. But you need penalties being applied to cause pressure for change, otherwise you only get inertia in the legislative.
Look for example at our experience in the US with mandatory sentencing guidelines. This was done to take away leeway in sentencing from judges and in the name of isonomy.
What happened however was different. The problem is that not all cases of a crime are created equal and so instead of judges having sentencing discretion, that was put in the hands of the prosecutor (who would then decide when to prosecute a lesser included offence).
The result is quite striking when you look at drug prosecutions today. It's not law enforcement that makes the difference but prosecutorial discretion. The problem is that human life does not really admit of a situation where a purely mechanical view of justice actually does justice. Total isonomy would not be a justice system but merely one which distributes injustice equally and blindly.
I don't there is a way around this, and I think further we are better just openly admitting that isonomy is neither attainable nor desirable, but instead work to ensure that we really try to ensure real justice and hold people accountable, from the grass roots, for their decisions.
Again, I'm not saying I want a 100% effective police state, but these are problems we have to grapple with. The salience of an issue will often depend on how much it affects you personally. Selective enforcement may diminish the motivation to protest unfair laws within populations that tend to escape said enforcement. In fact, most of the things you mentioned probably shouldn't be crimes to begin with, but I bet many people don't feel strongly enough to protest them because they assume most people can break those laws without punishment. Some people aren't so lucky though.
Oh, I agree. I wasn't advocating selective enforcement. Just less EFFICIENT enforcement.
That is, that the police/government should not be allowed the means (even if they were available) to suppress crime 100% or even 90%.
Even for crimes we all agree are abhorable, like murder. I wouldn't trade freedom and privacy etc to have some way to prevent murders (from current surveillance to some futuristic chip implant in your head to prevent you from committing it). I'd rather live with some potential danger, than with several leashes.
Laws that are easy to break are easy to ignore. But these laws can still be used by a government entity as a legal weapon against you, and that seems a bit scary.
Perhaps. But it could also be the other way: that in such a dystopia, protesting and civic engagement would also be more difficult if not impossible.
E.g anything beyond voting between a couple of candidates you are given. A dystopia that would enable the police like that, will in all probability also have laws prohibiting public assembly, rallying, etc.
And on top of that, they could also enforce any BS laws to dissidents -- since, with 100% efficiency, they could always find something to pin on them.
Just curious, are you thinking of The Alliance?
Snowden is a great example of this. He demonstrably has broken the law, the law itself has a valid purpose.
Without selective enforcement he is in for a heap of shit because how do you design a law ahead-of-time that accounts for every possible nuance of how the greater public good might outweigh the risk to national security of analysts routinely disclosing classified information? We here on HN can't even design websites and programs that are secure and the computers do exactly what we tell them do, the legal code has to deal both with human agents who screw up and smart individuals looking for loopholes.
But with selective enforcement we can keep the law simple: "Don't leak classified information", and then allow for public outcry (or common sense) to prosecutors or the POTUS to ensure that he's either not tried, or even has an eventual sentence reduced or commuted.
Even now we live in a country where the police routinely don't 100% enforce the law even without invasive oversight, so it's obvious that merely having the police know about lawbreaking alone doesn't inevitably lead to trouble; oftentimes they care even less than the public does as it results in more paperwork for them.
We know that in the civil sphere getting sued is so bad it often doesn't matter whether you win or lose: the mere threat is enough to compel or punish. Likewise in the criminal sphere, people often settle rather than fight, which would mean bankruptcy and the risk of worse jail time. Now imagine in the criminal sphere if a computer could look at everything you wrote and raise a flag every time something looked suspicious. It's important to have a buffer, some kind of resistance that must be overcome before subjecting people to that. Hence the Fourth Amendment.
"Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature. So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world." (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant#Groundwork_of_th...)
Do you mean going through the trial and then occasionally choosing to impose a null sentence, as opposed to skipping the trial altogether?
Otherwise I'm not sure how what you propose is different, given that there are so many levels of enforcement within a legal system.
The military is in fact struggling with that issue right now, with debates on sexual harassment in the military taking up a lot of time in the House and Senate. And in fact it seems that Congress will probably remove the ability of the court-martial convening authority to acquit someone at all, due to abuses of that power. So there is no panacea.
Much as your quote seems to imply, there is really only the consideration of what scheme would work best overall. And right now selective acquittal (as opposed to selective enforcement) is destroying the credibility of the military on sexual harrassment issues.
Maybe that is a tradeoff we should make. I am not yet convinced. My concern is that as soon as you say "let's make this flexible" you ensure that we can find something to charge people with if we want.
The problem is not the law itself in those cases, it is the people enforcing the law. If your cops and judges can be bribed then no law or defense is ironclad, "selective enforcement" or not.
This is not to say that we can't improve the legal system. But if engineering has taught me anything, it's that it will always be prudent to design a relief/safety valve into the system.
I hadn't heard of the USS Thresher before today, but I did just read a bit of the Wikipedia article.
When a disaster occurs in engineering, the lessons learned are applied to the next design. When a disaster occurs in politics, the other party gets its turn to cause the next disaster.
This isn't to say that nobody makes mistakes, but it's worth remembering that engineering is applied science. It's not practiced in a vacuum, it takes into account economic and political influences and balances them against public well being. The buck stops with engineers.
Yet, those systems had "accidents" only after politicians overrided the engineers and acted against their recommendation. Using them as evidence that engineers create systems that are as flawed as the ones created by politicians is wrong.
Anyway, it seems that we still can't engineer social systems. It may be either because the political interference inherent on it makes it impossible, or because we just don't have the right technology... Or maybe we can, and PRISM is the kind of tool that makes it possible. Engineers create all kinds of systems, for all kinds of reasons, well intented or not.
In the case of Chernobyl, the problem was actually inexperienced plant operators running an experiment about disaster recovery on a reactor with a positive void coefficient and poorly designed control rods. The positive void coefficient was a limitation of our nuclear design capabilities at the time, the control rods were just poorly designed by some engineer. Either of those factors could have prevented the disaster, and neither of them can be attributed to any politician.
And how does that work for software engineering thus far?
What we know of it, is that errors tend to repeat themselves, and little is learned from design to design, especially across projects and teams.
Software engineering is much more like law than civic engineering.
So, it's quite invalid to compare law (which deals with people, perceptions, norms, ever shifting societies and situations, intentions and other delicate situations) with some well known ways to build things with very tangible, hard physical constrains and behavior.
Quite well, in the long run. Ten years ago we had mountains of buffer overflow-ridden web software written in C++ being replaced by SQL-injection-vulnerable Perl and PHP. Twenty-five years ago the Morris worm easily found its way onto thousands of systems.
Now, tools like Valgrind help detect buffer overflows and other memory access problems, ORMs help prevent SQL injection, stringent standards are used for development of safety-critical systems (e.g. MISRA-C), and automated testing is much more widespread. Naive software developers still make naive mistakes, but as a whole, the industry is much better protected against known mistakes.
More Gimp users? ;)
But on a serious note, I completely agree with you. Perfect, law-following society will not have any social progress.
Laws are not perfect, and they will never be. But some people often treat them like they are. They prefer following laws instead of using their brain to decide what's wrong and what's right, and it's really dangerous to society.
Laws are based on morals, and what people think is right thing to do, not the other way around.
This sounds extremely common sense, but I've met too many people who do not seem to understand this.
In other words, in some (perhaps distant) past, marijuana was not illegal until a legislator decided to pass a law prohibiting its use.
Marijuana prohibition was pushed by Reagan because he didn´t liked hippies, not based on anything palpable.
Problem is not law enforcement, it´s the way bogus legislation gets pushed on "democracy" without direct involvement of the people.
I didn't get that idea at all, and I think you are misreading it. Many examples are given of things that recently were or still are explicitly illegal.
If you want to read up on when Marijuana was made illegal, you can start here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_history_of_cannabis_in_th... but I'm not sure of the relevance.
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Some things, exist and are possible for good reasons...
People might condemn me and think I am some sort of crazy satanist for believing that even rape has its use...
For most part, rape is utterly evil and should be harshly punished, yet sometimes it was needed, and it might be needed again (I hope not, of course).
Also, how you get 100% effective in getting rid of murder, without also getting rid of soldiers, security guards, hunters or even construction workers? Well, then you need to separate intentional murder, from unintentional one (like a construction worker dropping a hammer from his toolbox into the head of a random person nearby the construction site), but even then, you end with issues like: if law was 100% effective, how you separate the preemptive killing of a armed rapist from murder?
Being a soldier and engaging a suspect enemy spy on your land is murder if he ends dead?
What if your iPhone has the only password needed to open a door to some secure building on fire, and you for whatever reason refuse to give it, it is wrong to steal your iPhone to save a life?
We cannot have 100% effective law enforcement, because there is no such thing of black and white issues on crime, several criminals do not believe themselves to be some sort of evil creature, yes, evil exists, but sometimes the actions of a criminal are just actions that you do not understand the motivation.
Please explain its use?
Thankfully, we are very, very, very long ways from that right now...
But nature developed that behavior for a reason...
Thankfully, we are very, very, very long ways from that right now...
I doubt that rape was ever needed for the population to reproduce. Why do you think it was needed?
But nature developed that behavior for a reason...
Reason, yes, but not purpose. It may simply be a side-effect that didn't suffer enough evolutionary pressure to be extinguished. See male nipples, for example.
Evolution operates on genes, not groups; not even individuals, really. Genes that somehow code for rape[1][2] will spread if and only if its carriers reproduce. The "use" of rape, then, should be fairly obvious: If successful, it lets its carrier reproduce.
Any such adaption is bound to be situational, as a healthy relationship is far more likely to produce surviving offspring, then and now. It'll be an "If you cannot get a girlfriend, then get urges towards rape" kind of thing, though typically enough there'll be a lot of variation in that.
There will not, however, be even the slightest degree of adaption in terms of what is best for the group. Group selection doesn't exist, outside of extreme laboratory conditions.
1: Or anything else.
2: Please don't read that as suggesting there might be a single "rape gene". Anything to do with the brain is really, really complex.
I don't.
Remind me of Orson Scott Card's story (Ender in Exile), in which human crews building off-world colonies consisted of many more women than men (and temporarily allowed for polygamous relationships) to bootstrap the population faster.
Or you could just have decent laws. Most European states get the alcohol laws mostly right.
Not only is it informative, it is fascinating and very well delivered.
Example: the neighbors see/hear you having rough sex with your wife and report it as abuse. The police knock on the door, you have two options:
A) Explain (better: let your wife explain) that the neighbors probably heard you playing around and promise to be more discreet in the future. The police agree that more discretion = better and leave.
B) Wall of silence. The police take you in just to be sure. Your wife tries to testify in your favor at the trial but everyone thinks she's just making excuses for an actually abusive boyfriend (because that happens). Your life is ruined by the conviction, maybe her life is too. Even if you don't get convicted, rumors will spread and your time and money will be wasted on legal matters.
Am I being naive or was the lawyer overstating his argument? Strategy A is strictly worse than B if the case goes to court, but that still means that B could be the better strategy before you've been arrested.
Why would she do that? The only way you've gotten this far is because she's pressing charges.
IANAL and the little I know about the intersection of kinky sex and law comes from a single presentation I attended years ago during college. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain I have the broad strokes drawn correctly.
Sadomasochism is probably illegal in most states, but no prosecutor seems eager for the shitshow that would happen if they tried to prosecute something that was clearly consensual.
On second look, it seems that the state has a lot of discretion in these cases.
I wouldn't be surprised if some states had laws that more or less forced the potential victim to go through the trial even if she intends on testifying in your favor. I dunno. Just sayin'.
They'd never be able to convict if the both of you refused to testify. There'd be no evidence.
I freely admit that this is a worst case scenario: a court in SF isn't likely to convict on the basis of "illegal sex", but maybe you were traveling; hotels have notoriously thin walls and some places in the USA take a much dimmer view of this kind of thing.
None of this is relevant to my original point. Even if you're acquitted your "wall of silence" will have cost you time, money, and reputation, making B worse than A UNLESS you condition your expectation on the case going to court, which you shouldn't, because the point in time when you decide B vs A happens before going to court is a foregone conclusion.
Talking to the police has a high certainty they'll present your statement, or part of it, as admission of guilt and that leads directly to jail.
I'd rather waste money than my life. Me and my wife can later sue our neighbours for damages and try to get our money back from them. But I can't sue them to give me back jail time.
"Anything you say, can and will be used against you".
And people are still not freaked out about having the government know everything they've ever said or done? I think the problem is most people just don't realize this or don't think about the type of abuses that this could create.
The part you left out of the quote was "used against you, in a court of law". Even if NSA should find info on people, it won't be admissible in a court of law against U.S. citizens essentially by definition, so from the POV of a random guy on the street it's a question of whether the nerd sitting at the NSA console is worse than the nerd sitting at the GMail ops room console.
FBI would probably be a bigger worry, but no one seems to care about them for years now.
"People have been convicted in federal court for violating this statute because they brought back a 'boney fish' from Honduras, not knowing that Honduran law, not American law, but Honduran law forbade the possession of the boney fish. People have been been convicted under this law because they were found in possession of what's known as a short lobster."
In general it seems to me that there are a lot of laws, many of them are confusing and esoteric, and their enforcement is often selective. I've seen court cases where people were acting 'normally' under constant surveillance, and it doesn't go well.
However, I'm actually more interested in the question of how celebrated legal victories would probably not have been possible without the ability to break the law.
How many eggs would one have to attempt to bring with you to the US before it becomes a jail-able offense? Never-mind that most import stores seem to have them in abundance and somehow get them past customs!
[1] http://www.komonews.com/news/offbeat/Seattle-men-busted-at-C...
So, undoubtedly we need to ensure our legal code is cleaned out of cruft like that.
But I would be careful of complaining about the selectivity of enforcement. Take our hero Snowden for example. He demonstrably broke the law, and even Schneier agrees that the law he broke has purpose.
Not that Snowden is going to be pardoned of his crimes (another form of selective enforcement, btw), but he wouldn't even have the possibility of escaping charges for his "crime" without the ability to apply common sense to peculiarities and circumstances of his case.
Indeed, most legal beagles I know of complain heavily about a different type of regime without selective enforcement: "Zero tolerance" policies in schools that result in insanely stupid punishments being meted out to schoolchildren. Does anyone else remember HN's reaction to the science student in Florida who "made a bomb" at school?
However, when I talk about selective enforcement, what I mean is that in a world where we're all technically violating the law at some point, and where we're all being monitored intensively, then it's essentially up to those in power to "decide" who is punished and who isn't, without any real standard of measure. In that world, it seems pretty clear who ends up in jail and who doesn't.
Very true. :(
It's such a difficult problem in general though. In the Navy we have a term "sea lawyers" for those who try to finangle the regulations for their own personal gain.
If there was an easy way to fairly resolve each possible scenario we'd have baked it into the laws already. But even where complex solutions are standardized, that depends on the person evaluating the standard; when I was teaching my discipline method for a given failure-to-study would have been way different from a Chief Petty Officer's.
I think the only way it could possibly work in the future you point out is that, given the data exists, that the ones doing the monitoring (if any) are not able to be the ones doing the deciding.
We say "don't combine the data in the first place" but I just don't see that as a realistic possibility. Someone will have that data, and they can "leak" it to the cops just as well as the NSA could.
I think if we own up to the idea that such a data-driven world is not only possible but likely, that next we need to accept that it will happen and develop countermeasures to maintain our civil liberties.
That doesn't have to be directed against NSA alone. The FBI can legally perform domestic surveillance already (with oversight), and I've already mentioned that people at $ISP or $CLOUD_CO can leak damaging information to the cops and kick off an investigation (and such information would be admissible in court, unlike NSA methods).
Maybe adopting FBI's oversight methods for NSA and similar is enough. Certainly I think we're long past due for defining and enforcing privacy protections on-line to match what we expect in the mail and on the phone. Perhaps those protections can also protect a person in the case that a company illegally provides data about someone to the government as well. But then now we're almost back to talking about CISPA again. :)
But I think just pushing for "don't get the data" is a brittle solution at best. That only really works if you're scared of the government alone. I'm concerned about the government, but they're not at the top of my list by any means of parties that could possibly harm me.
If the Federal government could do nothing else I wish they'd change the budgeting to be something that doesn't essentially mandate spending the whole rest of a discretionary budget on stupid and only possibly-useful kit at the end of an FY to keep that line of accounting from being slashed for the next FY.
I get that the budget is so large that ZBB is probably off the table, but there has to be something we can do to incentivize thriftiness where thriftiness is an option without penalizing that agency in the out years.
It sucks when a department has some negative externalities (LEAs seizing assets in drug cases...)
For example, many cities have laws about whether or not you can tie up a pet temporarily -- say, hook your dog's leash to a lamp post while you pop into your bank for a moment. But generally they're written broadly rather than specifying only a few types of "pet" animals, so then you get "ha ha this crazy law says you can't tie up a giraffe outside a bank!"
This is not to say that government should be able to look at private data just because, or that people shouldn't have secrets.
But once you start envisioning people going so insane that they start rounding you up for things that you did which were perfectly fine at the time you did it, you are envisioning things which are pretty far beyond the protections of law and the Constitution anyways.
Or in other words, if things like PRISM could cause society to tear itself asunder in that way then obviously that program must die. But if society does tear itself asunder anyways, then PRISM would be the least of the peoples' worries, some theoretical U.S. secret police would be able to string you up on slights real or imagined, crimes that are completely fictitious, with or without PRISM.
There is absolutely no program that is "safe" to have in a situation that exceptional, so while I see why you would judge a program based on "Would you feel safe if the other Party had this program" (and we may very well fail the NSA's surveillance programs on this test alone), I don't see why you'd judge a program based on "Would you feel safe if the NKVD had this program".
I wouldn't feel safe if we were in any situation so exceptional that we had an NKVD at all. Despite all the complaints about the NSA, they do not have nearly all the elements of the NKVD (neighborhood informants, secret police, etc.), and it may very well be possible that through our separation of functions that NSA can do its job without inevitably bringing down the fabric of society.
California and a few other states love ignoring this, I believe there's even legislation going up for vote this week that criminalizes exactly this. Until the government is adequately constrainted by its contstituency, we will always have overreaches.
If there's only one lesson I wish people would take away from all this NSA drama, it's this one.
The government is in the end what people make of it, nothing more or less.
Even if you can't be convicted in a court, there's still the potential for intimidation, coercion, and embarrassment due to past activities which were once acceptable but are no longer.
And either way, it's already happening. Remember the sorority president who had her pissed-off email to her "sisters" leaked to the media? Which led to people discovering her Twitter account that showed her to be a racist?
You can't blame that one on the gub'mint; we're already living in that particular brave new world, if people don't want to acknowledge it that's their problem.
What I think will actually happen as far as societal change goes is that we will become used to the idea that people do grow up and mature and stop holding things against them that they said 20 years before.
People should be able to say things in private yesterday (not just 20 years ago) and not have it affect them in public today.
The FBI could get a warrant, or local law enforcement, but that was true in 2012, and 2001, and 1999, and 1983 and 1961 and earlier. And while I understand "Law & Order" is just TV, it's pretty amazing what law enforcement can convince third parties to voluntarily let them see, and has been for decades as well.
Ever since I figured out crypto was a thing I knew to use PGP/GPG for things that had to be secret and to not trust the rest to remain secret forever. Certainly I wouldn't trust Twitter or Facebook, have you ever seen /r/cringepics??
Of course back then I wasn't worried about the government, I was worried about Mallory, but I'm still just as worried about Mallory as I was before.
That would correlate with your statement that it isn't actually illegal, is that why? There are some crimes where it seems as though the public domain has enough knowledge that you should know better without being explicitly told so. But for something like an under-sized lobster, I think you should get a pass on not knowing.
This also presents a problem of enforcibility - will a law be enforced, and under what conditions, if it's a "silly law"? I think this is what really makes it important to have things to hide - you could be tried for what they find if they are pursuing you for other reasons.
In other words, I sure hope Edward Snowden doesn't have an under-sized lobster.
(IANAL, especially not with respect to anything underage.)
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=173 (A more entertaining description)
But yes, I guess that most laws do (thankfully) still include Mens Rea.
It is a legal maxim that ignorance of the law is no excuse. A law that has a mens rea (i.e. intent) of "knowingly" refers to some factual circumstance that is one of the elements of the crime.
An example from the New York state penal law:
"156.05 Unauthorized use of a computer. A person is guilty of unauthorized use of a computer when he or she knowingly uses, causes to be used, or accesses a computer, computer service, or computer network without authorization."
In this case the "knowingly" element is satisfied if you knew (or should have known) that you didn't not have authorization to access the computer, computer service, or computer network.
Similarly for possession statutes, the (sometimes implicit) knowingly element is satisfied if you knew you possessed the given item even if you had no idea possessing it was illegal. A situation where the knowingly element would not be satisfied, is if someone snuck the item into your luggage.
Anyone who attempts to understand minutia and not factor in common sense to everyday life will never get to live to age 100 but will quickly perish consumed with anxiety about all the things that can potentially go wrong. So maybe there are weird laws and maybe a set of circumstances came together to cause a small amount of people to get prosecuted and maybe some of them actually did jail time. Who cares?
Having been in business for quite some time there are risks that you take every day that far exceed any chance of an even valid arcane federal law causing you any trouble at all.
It's not allowed to drive w/o a front license plate in my state. But I've been doing it for 2 years now over two different cars because I don't want to mess up the front bumper with holes. I've never been stopped and if I am stopped at some point I might get a $80 ticket. And maybe there is a small chance of me having something worse happen as well (arrest or geez someone could plant something). Who cares? It's a risk worth taking to me.
(I've driven for years on suspended licenses, so I know what you mean [I'm legal now]).
I worry about what I can do to control the things that I can control (or evaluate the risks).
(Today I met with a contractor to get a price on a backup generator for the house. More for the anxiety every time there is a storm and "potential" loss of power rather than the actual loss of power during the storm which has been nominal.)
FYI my attorney is handling part of the investigation for MIT for the Schwartz case and says a report is being released in July. He's a former federal prosecutor who handled a famous computer crime case in the 90's and worked with Ortiz. (He's actually turned into somewhat of a friend who I can talk with and ask questions w/o being billed.)
I think one thing I really wonder about that you somewhat touch upon is the fact that nearly everyone is carrying upon their person a GPS tracking device. I believe it not impossible the day will come where simply being in the area where a crime occurred is enough to open you to suspicion. Perhaps this has already happened.
Imagine an organism that perfects the trick of error correction on genetic information. That organism would not suffer from some of the afflictions that come with imperfect genetic copying. But that organism would also instantly stop to evolve.
Or we could just do away with any felony that doesn't involve physically harming a person.
Could you not just subpoena the monitoring data that law enforcement had access to and make a 14th Amendment case with a quick SQL statement.
For the love of god or anything you find holy, STOP insisting we live in a democracy!
I stop reading any article that asserts we live in a democracy or should strive to live in one.
We live in a republic. http://www.c4cg.org/republic.htm
[edit for auto-complete]
Republic refers to any form of government which is not a monarchy.
The US is a republic -- specifically, a federal republic -- it is also a democracy -- specifically a representative democracy.
The whole "The US is not a democracy, its a republic" thing makes as much as saying "16 isn't a perfect square, its an even number."
Saying democracy instead of republic just undermines the common understanding of how our government was setup to function.
Neither does saying "republic". And "representative democracy" isn't succinct compared to "democracy", its verbose.
> Saying democracy instead of republic just undermines the common understanding of how our government was setup to function.
No more than saying "republic" instead of "democracy". A "federal republic that is also a representative democracy governed under a written constitution" would avoid that problem, but its a lot to write, when "democracy" is the part that is relevant to the point you are trying to make.
A democratically elected representative republic, specifically. I agree that you are correct in a pedantic sense, but our society is a "democratic society" in a more general, looser sense. Given the context of TFA, I think the usage is correct enough.
The United States of America has a government which is both a republic (and, more specifically, a federal republic) and a representative democracy.
There are republics that aren't any kind of democracy, and representative democracies that are not republics (e.g., the United Kingdom.)
― Abraham Lincoln
Gabriel García Márquez