To build on the above, it's worth thinking about the transition that happens between those two quotes: > Scraping, it must be said, is a legally murky area. It

To build on the above, it's worth thinking about the transition that happens between those two quotes: > Scraping, it must be said, is a legally murky area. It is not specifically illegal There's already a jump happening here from "it's not specifically illegal" to "it's a gray area because it's immoral." Even if it was certainly and unambiguously immoral, that does not make it automatically a legally murky area. In fact, scraping seems to be reasonably established as specifically legal. So the article is already kind of edging away from reality, where they acknowledge "this is not a crime" but they want to blur that and say that it's legally dubious, even though what they really mean is that they believe it's immoral. Which, fine, I don't respect it but whatever. But then we jump to: > But it is purpose built to commit crime. Wait, no. Scraping is not specifically illegal. This is the emulator debate again; we have something that really is strongly implied to be legal and has won court cases before. It's not like it's an untested gray area, we know that there are scenarios where scraping websites against the permission of the website owner is not illegal. So the article pretends it's more of a gray area than it actually is, and then once it has thrown doubt on it, drops the pretense entirely and calls it illegal. Not all scraping is fraud and not all scraping is illegal, and it's pretty galling for the article to admit that scraping is not illegal and then to turn around and pretend that they didn't just admit that. > It is also a good example of crime-as-a-service. No, it's not. The article admitted that scraping is not specifically illegal. Tools to help scrape websites are not "crime-as-a-service" because objectively (and there is legal precedent backing this up) scraping is not a crime. ---- The propaganda strategy being employed here is to admit a piece of factual information (scraping is not illegal), however hesitantly, and then to pretend that it was never admitted. If anyone calls the propagandist out, they can point to their admission and say, "no, I acknowledged that it's not illegal, see". But then for every other part of the conversation, they just ignore that and act like it is illegal, even though at best all they've put forward is that they think it's more dubious than courts currently recognize. They concede the point only to the degree they're forced to and only to the degree that would prevent someone from saying that they're lying or ignoring reality. But as soon as the context changes, they go back to acting like the point was never conceded. This has the benefit of not only allowing them to make the same arguments they wanted to make before, but also sort of trains listeners to think of the original conceded point as more murky than it actually is. "Sure," the reader thinks, "it's technically not illegal, but at the point we're talking about crime-as-a-service and illegal tools, surely there's something legally dubious going on, this must be more of a gray area" -- even though not only has the article not backed up that idea, it's actually admitted that the idea is wrong.