4 ms·

> he law is drafted to close a loophole where you can open a black market site The point is that the law says any Tor onion service market is illegal, by defin

• gmueckl 8y ago
  No, not any service. Read the actual proposed section 126a. The service must be related to one of the listed criminal activities to be illegal. In essence, this law is aimed at dark net sites like Silk Road.
  • fapjacks 8y ago
    Who gets to decide what "related" means?
    • derefr 8y ago
      Why are you trying to nit-pick the law based on the words the GP used in their gloss of it, rather than reading what the text of the law actually says? The whole point of legal jargon is to say things in an airtight way. You cannot summarize legal jargon without removing the airtight-ness—lawyers really do use as few words as they can manage to get a concept across (in a loophole-less manner), so removing any single word further usually reintroduces a loophole. This implies that there is no point whatsoever in trying to poke holes in a law you only understand through summary, since it is vanishingly unlikely that the holes that appear in the summary appear in the law. You have to read the actual text.
      • gcb0 8y ago
        is anything related to obstruction on that section? if yes, simply running the guard or exit node from any criminal investigation gets you jail time.
      • fapjacks 8y ago
        Yes, the body of text in law is usually nearly burdensome with all the flowery language that makes it seem like they're trying to cover edge cases (and sardonic comment aside, I'll grant your assumption legislators want to cover as many edge cases as possible to prevent loopholes). But at least in the United States, very many of the sentences in our laws end with weasel phrases like "or similar uses" and "or other software" and "or related activity", which is exactly where the problem arises, and where interested parties are inserting their own special loopholes. And sure, we hope that these loopholes get hammered out in the courts in our favor some years later -- that is, if there happens to be a good and willing samaritan that is more "invested" in taking the issue to court to try for an outcome which is favorable for the public versus one favorable to corporations or the police or the wealthy. But I'll just go ahead and continue supporting the option where the stupid law isn't created in the first place. Even if that means the police don't get their bogey man running a dark market.
        • derefr 8y ago
          Many of these things that look like loopholes are actually invocations of standing case-law. I.e., lawyers are relying on an implicit layer of interpretations for these jargon phrases, that have already been "hammered out" in previous litigations. (Admittedly, some are not. But law written by teams of legislators with centuries of combined legal experience—and passed through dozens of third-party QC checks + redraftings before being submitted for consideration—usually does not have this problem. Or, if it does, then usually it is an "out-of-context problem" nobody could see coming—an interpretation that wouldn't have even made sense to consider at time of drafting—and the first time anyone hits the relevant snag, we get some equally-good lawyers [e.g. the US Supreme Court, for US-Constitution out-of-context problems] in a room to re-interpret the law.)
          • fapjacks 8y ago
            The problem is that this isn't legislation about the proper manufacture of bicycles. This is exactly the kind of legislation that governments and the police are looking for, to cut into civil liberties and fortify their own positions of power. This is exactly the kind of law in which the NSA specifically went looking for loopholes, in order to conduct its dragnet warrantless surveillance of American citizens -- and then shielded its exploitation and abuse of the loophole using its secret rubber-stamp court system, effectively making it impossible for the loophole to be actually hammered out in the courts. When a proposed law bumps up against civil liberties and so clearly has the potential for abuse, it's not right to treat it with the same sort of irreverent attitude changes to the tax code or military spending are treated. This is one of those laws where people need to stop and think about what an authoritarian political outsider would do with this kind of power if they were to end up winning the right election. Generic language doesn't belong in laws like this.
    • 8note 8y ago
      a judge, most likely