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These laws are dangerous because they are vague enough to give the government a free pass to legally target almost anyone who uses the internet. It is another
by nnfy 9y ago
These laws are dangerous because they are vague enough to give the government a free pass to legally target almost anyone who uses the internet.
It is another means to possibly silence whistleblowers and/or opposition.
- moron4hire 9y agoExcept these laws already apply to every other form of media and they aren't being used to silence whistleblowers or political opposition. The sky is not falling.
- nnfy 9y ago"Every other form of media" is not the same as the media on the internet, where individuals create the media. More importantly, why would you want the federal government to have such abusable power? The sky may not be falling now, but that is no excuse to do nothing while our freedoms are eroded.
- moron4hire 9y agoIt's not absolute power, as evidenced by the fact that it hasn't been absolute power.
- anigbrowl 9y agoYour whole argument rests on the unspoken and incorrect premise that such laws aren't open to challenge, when in fact they have been challenged and litigated extensively and you're only looking at the statutory side. This seems to be a common error among hackers who assume that statute = law and don't consider the history of how courts have interpreted and circumscribed statutes over the years. Of course, this is also a structural problem in our legal system which makes it quite difficult to ascertain what the actual operational parameters are without spending a lot of time in a law library or its digital equivalent. Much of what lawyers are paid for is their knowledge of how to trace and apply that history to new fact patterns. Girls Lean Back Everywhere by Edward de Grazia is widely considered the best single work on the law of obscenity, although it's heavily focused on sexuality and pornography and may seem somewhat dated by today's standards.