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I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with th
by dpwm 9y ago
I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised.
This seems a really difficult area that's almost incompatible with the way we do criminal law, because intent and knowledge are so hard to prove either way. Even where there's plenty of circumstantial evidence of intent it is not going to prove it either way.
You could plan to murder somebody for years, leave an evidence trail and then run them over by complete accident. Should that be premeditated murder or manslaughter? In the eyes of a jury it will almost certainly be premeditated murder. You could black out at the wheel and for a while have no knowledge that you have killed. From the philosophical perspective the lines are blurry: Only the individual can actually know, and given the amount to which people can self-delude themselves, even that isn't guaranteed.
Juries do not make decisions on reasonable doubt, and often default to balance of probabilities. Depending on the jurisdiction, when a unanimous verdict cannot be determined a majority one is accepted.
Let's say I have a HDD I write random data to as a block device. What are the implications for me in twenty years if somebody creates an image file format that can decompress some of the linear subregions of my random HDD data. I haven't the time now to do anything but a very simple analysis of this. Intuitively this depends on the size of the drive and the size of the compressed file. Let's say for arguments sake it can encode a prohibited piece of data in 10kB.
At what point of completely random storage material are you likely to have a forbidden piece of data? Well, each terrabyte contains approximately 1e12 such linear subsequences. And we need 1e3010 such subsequences to match a forbidden sequence. So that's 1e2998 or so TB if there is only one forbidden piece of data. With more I think the birthday paradox kicks in. Now if we can encode the forbidden data in 8 bytes or such then we reach the problem much sooner. I doubt that will happen somehow.
- zeth___ 9y ago>I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised. No I am making the very simple case that a number is a number and you can't make a number illegal. All digital information is numbers and banning any of the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse at mere possession will ensure we retard most useful technologies. The only time that flesh space laws should apply is when flesh space actions are taken. An example: terrorist training material is sent on how to build a bomb. Until a bomb is built, or a conspiracy to build a bomb is made, nothing illegal should have happened.
- Freak_NL 9y agoWouldn't that make cyberbullying and slander even in its most extreme forms legal? In those cases often someone is being harmed (with real, flesh space consequences), despite the material being nothing more then numbers.
- zeth___ 9y agoSlander and cyberbullying are civil law, not criminal law.
- zaarn 9y agoBut it's just digital information, as you mentioned. It never enters flesh space as real.
- zeth___ 9y agoCivil law is again very different to criminal law. You can obviously have a contract between two people for sending digital information between them. That this only happens in digital space does not mean the contract can't or shouldn't be enforced.
- Tomte 9y agoAll writing is just splinters of carbon or drops of ink. How can an element or a wster-based solution be illegal?
- zeth___ 9y agoAre you attacking freedom of writing now? I am confused. This is one thing that most of the free world has gotten mostly right: you can say anything you want in writing without having to fear the government. It needs some corner cases ironed out, obviously, but for the most part you can write whatever you want and not be arrested for it.
- 9y ago
- cataphract 9y ago> This seems a really difficult area that's almost incompatible with the way we do criminal law, because intent and knowledge are so hard to prove either way. Even where there's plenty of circumstantial evidence of intent it is not going to prove it either way. Not incompatible at all. Most criminal laws actually have a mens rea requirement.
- slededit 9y agoYour comment really shows how far we've slid away from the Mens Rea requirement in law. It used to be that every major crime required an intent component. Where the crime was serious enough we had lesser punishments where there was no intent (e.g. manslaughter vs murder). In the old days it was unfathomable you could be locked up for something you didn't know was a crime.
- Xylakant 9y ago> In the old days it was unfathomable you could be locked up for something you didn't know was a crime. This pretty much has never been true, at least in Germany. "Unwissenheit schützt vor Strafe nicht". Even the Roman Law didn't excuse for lack of knowledge https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_legis_non_excusat https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_legis_non_excusat There are edge cases where you may escape punishment (Verbotsirrtum) but only if it was unavoidable that you erred. Involuntarily distributing child porn may carry lesser punishment, but it will certainly be investigate unless you can assert a privilege such as common carrier status or inability to control the transmission, as for example Tor nodes could.