Comment by Lawtonfogle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lawtonfogle | Hacker News Reader

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>I don't think that it matters that this is a "cheating" site, your privacy should still be guarded and it's not fair that all these people are being exposed.

What about those Tor sites that were recently busted. Yes, the content was far worse, but if we argue that usage of a site can be bad enough to warrant a loss in deserving your privacy protected, the difference between the two becomes only a difference in determining what is 'bad enough' and the argument you presented, that it doesn't matter since privacy should be protected anyways, no longer applies (as the people who are arguing it 'serves them right' are disagreeing with you only in terms that the content of this site is bad enough to warrant the same loss of any rights to site usage privacy).

Please note I am not saying the content of the two sites are equal. I am only saying that the wrongness/harmfulness of the content (which is clearly different) isn't taken into account by the point presented here.

False equivalence. Adultery is not a crime. Trafficking in child pornography is. Nobody has a right to private criminality.

And nothing done entirely in consensual privacy should be a crime.

There is a disappointingly large number of "privacy" advocates on this site who disagree with that.

So in places where it was a crime, the argument doesn't apply? It seems quite odd to base a moral argument using legal definitions of criminality as those definitions do change. Consider the absurdity of applying such reasons to a place where certain political protests are illegal.

Also, the argument presented does not make a distinction between legal and illegal usage.

It doesn't matter whether the distinction was made, because there's no reasonable discussion to be had about privacy that doesn't engage with criminality. An argument about an absolute right to privacy is intrinsically an argument about how society should respond to crime.

In reality, almost nobody who thinks they believe in an absolute right to privacy really believes that.

Adultery is a crime in some states.

21 states! Since Lawrence v. Texas though, there is some doubt that a conviction for adultery would withstand a constitutional challenge.

There have been more recent challenges to laws based on the arguments presented in Lawrence v. Texas and yet the laws were upheld. It isn't a safe bet either way. Also, it is far easier to show harm from allowing adultery compared to what was covered under Lawrence v. Texas.

So is sodomy, a yet its legal for gay people to get married... law is confusing.

What's confusing? Clearly lawful married gay people engage in oral sex only</s>

Oral sex is often prohibited [0] by sodomy laws.

[0] To the extent anything is prohibited by an unconstitutional "law" that cannot be enforced.

> So is sodomy

Well, on the face of the statutes, yes, but unlike statutes criminalizing adultery, those criminalizing consensual sodomy have been pretty clearly struck down as unconstitutional, so the fact that they remain "on the books" does not actually mean that they are criminal, since the law purporting to make them so is itself invalid.

(There's some debate about the Constitutional status of adultery statutes, but AFAIK no federal court has yet stuck them down for violating the federal Constitution.)

No federal court but pretty much every state court has.

The United States is one of few industrialized countries to have laws criminalizing adultery. In the United States, laws vary from state to state. Up until the mid 20th century most US states (especially Southern and Northeastern states) had laws against fornication, adultery or cohabitation. These laws have gradually been abolished or struck down by courts as unconstitutional.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultery

> No federal court but pretty much every state court has.

No, that's not true.

> The United States is one of few industrialized countries to have laws criminalizing adultery. In the United States, laws vary from state to state. Up until the mid 20th century most US states (especially Southern and Northeastern states) had laws against fornication, adultery or cohabitation. These laws have gradually been abolished or struck down by courts as unconstitutional.

True (and, unlike the first sentence, a direct quote from Wikipedia) but also potentially misleading as to the trend with regard to adultery specifically by lumping together those three different things into a collective group.

Crime or not, they're both immoral. Nobody has a right to private immoral activity.

Anyone can make that argument about anything, so what you're saying is "I don't believe there should be such a thing as privacy".

Maybe, maybe not -- I'd love to discuss it.

More importantly, I wanted to reframe your comment in a way that was productive. Instead of "Nobody has a right to private criminality.", it seems more conversational to say "Nobody has a right to private amorality."

Clearly the disagreement here is that I do think people have a right to privacy w/r/t/ amorality.

But not criminality? That's a baffling stance that entirely ignores the source and designated purpose of law.

If you think the law is best seen as a mechanism for enforcing a common morality, then that's another thing we simply disagree about.

Luckily I don't, so we don't have to go there.

First of all, I'm not one of these big-L Libertarian theorists, but I'm still baffled by "Nobody has a right to private criminality."

That's exactly what the 4th is meant to draw a line around: If you can't detect the crime without building a pervasive surveillance state, it probably shouldn't be a crime and we're going to make it hard to detect and prosecute. "Private criminality" is an oxymoron.

Making abortion illegal is way into the territory of the criminalization of supposedly "private criminality." So would be the outlawing of encryption without back doors.

If you can't detect the crime without building a pervasive surveillance state, it probably shouldn't be a crime and we're going to make it hard to detect and prosecute

This makes no sense to me at all. It is, for instance, incredibly difficult to track and prosecute child pornographers.

Child pornographers are a criminal enterprise. They have to do physically significant things like kidnap children and produce pornography, and then sell it and accept payment for it. That's not "private criminality" at all. That's comparable to detecting and prosecuting counterfeiting, or a protection racket, or other forms of human trafficking. Any time you are doing something criminal for money, that takes it far outside the realm of "private criminality." It's racketeering. Organized crime.

Are you referring to the buy-side of CP? Yes, that's hard. But those are also the low-value targets. They would mostly get rolled-up once a producer of CP is caught, no?

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