It just smacks of fear-mongering. "They'll literally lock up your children!"
Here's one example. Let's say there's a 16-year old girl and a 17-year old boy who are in a consensual dating relationship and, you know, take some racy photos of one other. The photos were taken consensually, not shared with anyone else, and stored only on their own computers/accounts. And let's say they're living in Florida and under state law, they're legally old enough to have sex with each other.
It would be fear-mongering to expect that these two happy teenagers would ever be prosecuted and convicted on "child pornography" charges, right? Except they were. And, as I wrote in 2007, a Florida appeals court upheld their criminal conviction: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-6157857.html
Yes, sorry, Timmy and Mark, sometimes a judge and jury will let it go that far. Sometimes they will "literally lock up your children..."
Firearms might be a good analogy here. You don't need to actually shoot a robber for your firearm to be effective. The mere presence of it is often enough to scare them off.
I don't think anyone will argue with you on that one.
This and the fact that 'compiled' code is sometimes altered by applying some money-based side effects gives us some pretty ridiculous results.
Correct me if I'm wrong but there's no easy way to fix this problem.
BEFORE: go to jail
APPLY: expensive lawyer, public pressure
Prosecutors had every intention of sending Aaron Swartz to prison. We don't need more stupid laws, we need to remove the existing ones.
If you make this sentence mean anything at all, which requires redefining "criminals" as something like "moral wrongdoers, independent of whether their wrongdoing is actually a crime", then it still isn't true, as the existence of a law prohibiting an act is neither necessary nor sufficient to create disincentives to committing the act.
Now that we've gotten to quoting dictionary definitions to words, I think we've killed any good spirit that may have been left in this conversation.
Oh they will, and in a few short years this will be the new status quo, and people will be wondering how we used to allow child pornographers and drug traffickers to hide behind encryption. YOU don't have anything to hide, do you?
Besides, when was the last time government-induced fear mongering failed? Not in the last decade.
The question isn't whether sanity would prevail in court. (I'm somewhat optimistic that it would, eventually.) The question is, given the current fear-driven mindset, isn't it probable that something like that will be written? And how do we stop it from being written (or at least enacted)?
Sanity in the court room is the last line of defense, not the first...