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Yes that's the definition of entrapment as interpreted by American courts. Very challenging for lawyers to use as a defense. Which is exactly why law enforcemen

Yes that's the definition of entrapment as interpreted by American courts. Very challenging for lawyers to use as a defense. Which is exactly why law enforcement loves using informants and undercover agents for everything these days. In heavily bureaucratic agencies like the FBI, the only thing that matters is looking good to management by getting arrests and 'foiling plots'. So why not go for some easy prosecutions? You'll be upper management in no time. Plus there are a ton of dumb people and nearly everything is a crime these days, so all you have to do his handout a crime on a platter and fill prisons with the incompetent criminals who take the bait. Why hunt down criminals when you can fish for dumb ones.

tptacek 12y ago
The crimes we're talking about here aren't "the crimes every American commits while squeezing orange juice in the morning" crimes. Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily difficult to catch people in the act of committing computer crimes; the most effective investigative approach to enforcing computer crime laws probably is to find people who are predisposed to commit them, stage an opportunity to commit a specific instance of it, and then apprehend them. So, yes, computer crime enforcement does have a "fishing for dumb people" element to it. What would be really interesting in a thread like this is, after pointing out how US criminal law makes it hard to raise an entrapment defense, providing specific examples of how some other country's criminal law handles the same circumstances.
- deleted 12y ago
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  - tptacek 12y ago
    Whatever crime you commit while squeezing orange juice will be accidental, and something you had no inkling was a crime. That's the gist of Silverglate's _Three Felonies A Day_, which is I think the origin of the "everything Americans do is somehow a crime" meme. (I edited the comment you responded to, to add the "what's it like in other countries" question, after you wrote your response).
    - melville_X 12y ago
      France temporarily made undercover police work illegal until the mid 2000s. That would be an interesting study. But either way, there are obvious risks in this type of law enforcement. The vast, vast majority of humans are capable of committing crimes. This is why thought-crimes are so dangerous when they start being enforced because everyone is guilty. People flirt with the idea of crime but that capability is rarely utilized. The line one has to cross to commit a crime is high for most people, but there is a significant portion of the population where it is much smaller (poor people or people with lesser intelligence). LE is overly consumed with making their careers on the back of latter portion of the population to the point where they covertly push them hard to commit crimes. While the intelligent criminals conducting sophisticated plots usually get away with it because noone wants to do the legwork involved. (deleted my other comment which was not-HN quality).
      - danielweber 12y ago
        Almost all American laws are "thought" laws. In the US, if I pick up your property and walk away, I need to have an intent to permanently deprive you of it for it to be theft. (Obviously state law has particulars here.) Strict liability -- where it's illegal for me to do X no matter what I was thinking -- is the exception. It's a growing exception, and that is unfortunate, but that speaks to the opposite of your narrative. The fact that the prosecution has to show state of mind, rather than that some serious of actions happened, is a good thing, not a bad thing. EDIT I changed the example in the second graf away from talking about car theft to avoid weird exceptions
        AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        There is a difference between the prosecution having to prove intent as an element of the crime and having the totality of the offense be intent on its own, or the offense being some collection of innocuous actions that cause no harm to anyone on their own but happen to be correlated with undesired activity.
- walshemj 12y ago
  There was a BBC program a couple of years back on secret services MI5/6 and they contrasted how we do it in the UK and The USA. One example was an IRA arms dealer caught bang to rights actually at the buying point he got off on a tiny technicality - whereas the amount of stuff that the FBI where allowed to do was interesting and slightly disturbing. It might have been on PBS or BBC America at some point

tptacek 12y ago

The crimes we're talking about here aren't "the crimes every American commits while squeezing orange juice in the morning" crimes. Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily difficult to catch people in the act of committing computer crimes; the most effective investigative approach to enforcing computer crime laws probably is to find people who are predisposed to commit them, stage an opportunity to commit a specific instance of it, and then apprehend them. So, yes, computer crime enforcement does have a "fishing for dumb people" element to it. What would be really interesting in a thread like this is, after pointing out how US criminal law makes it hard to raise an entrapment defense, providing specific examples of how some other country's criminal law handles the same circumstances.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- tptacek 12y ago
  Whatever crime you commit while squeezing orange juice will be accidental, and something you had no inkling was a crime. That's the gist of Silverglate's _Three Felonies A Day_, which is I think the origin of the "everything Americans do is somehow a crime" meme. (I edited the comment you responded to, to add the "what's it like in other countries" question, after you wrote your response).
  - melville_X 12y ago
    France temporarily made undercover police work illegal until the mid 2000s. That would be an interesting study. But either way, there are obvious risks in this type of law enforcement. The vast, vast majority of humans are capable of committing crimes. This is why thought-crimes are so dangerous when they start being enforced because everyone is guilty. People flirt with the idea of crime but that capability is rarely utilized. The line one has to cross to commit a crime is high for most people, but there is a significant portion of the population where it is much smaller (poor people or people with lesser intelligence). LE is overly consumed with making their careers on the back of latter portion of the population to the point where they covertly push them hard to commit crimes. While the intelligent criminals conducting sophisticated plots usually get away with it because noone wants to do the legwork involved. (deleted my other comment which was not-HN quality).
    - danielweber 12y ago
      Almost all American laws are "thought" laws. In the US, if I pick up your property and walk away, I need to have an intent to permanently deprive you of it for it to be theft. (Obviously state law has particulars here.) Strict liability -- where it's illegal for me to do X no matter what I was thinking -- is the exception. It's a growing exception, and that is unfortunate, but that speaks to the opposite of your narrative. The fact that the prosecution has to show state of mind, rather than that some serious of actions happened, is a good thing, not a bad thing. EDIT I changed the example in the second graf away from talking about car theft to avoid weird exceptions
      - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        There is a difference between the prosecution having to prove intent as an element of the crime and having the totality of the offense be intent on its own, or the offense being some collection of innocuous actions that cause no harm to anyone on their own but happen to be correlated with undesired activity.
walshemj 12y ago
There was a BBC program a couple of years back on secret services MI5/6 and they contrasted how we do it in the UK and The USA. One example was an IRA arms dealer caught bang to rights actually at the buying point he got off on a tiny technicality - whereas the amount of stuff that the FBI where allowed to do was interesting and slightly disturbing. It might have been on PBS or BBC America at some point