So, did you know that in the US you can face years in prison for just telling someone, "I can't help you commit check fraud, but Google _____ if you're interested in learning how others do it"?
Do you agree with this practice?
Do you agree with this practice?
Accessory liability generally requires you to know that someone is going to commit a crime, and know that your action will help them.
Juries can make bad decisions in particular cases of course, but if I were the defense I would have a field day constantly repeating the "I can't help you" quote.
The other side would try to say that was just hand waving or insincere, and the jury would have to decide between those two alternatives based on all the facts of the case.
(This becomes a question of fact because particular facts matter. If the Godfather leans in and says the line you gave, for instance, to one of his loyal henchmen, the law should be able to punish him.)
That pretty much means that by calling someone a "godfather" I can prosecute them for things that normally wouldn't be a crime. What if I call someone a "terrorist," or a government a "regime"?
Apparently you can push a lot of people into believing a prosecution is not purely political.
I think the point is well made - the jury has to decide what "I can't help you" means, and it means different things depending on who says it. This is the nature of human communication and we can't escape from it.
That's because the threat isn't just the words; it's also a question of intent - and in the absence of time-travelling MRI machines to objectively observe people's thoughts in the past, inferring the intent from context we can observe.
Of course, you could argue that having laws that depend on people's only-indirectly-observable mental state is a bad idea - that announcing your intention to blow up an airport should either always be legal, or never be legal. If you're interested in such questions, you might enjoy reading about the Twitter Joke Trial [1] over one such incident.
"This guy murdered three other people!" is no proof that he murdered this particular person.
Because of those rules, calling someone a "godfather" in court doesn't so much get you a prosecution as it gets you an objection and mistrial.
So I used a lazy example to illustrate the point.
But this brings up another key point -- most of criminal procedure can be summed up by "you can't use irrelevant statements to prejudice the hell out of the jury."
All in all a pretty good rule.
If the person goes and then tries it, yes, I agree you share in the responsibility for their actions. It was reasonable for you to believe the intent was serious and you provided essential guidance to making it a reality.
There's that word "just" again. "just telling someone" adds deceptive misdirection. The context of who you tell and how and why are all important.
> ...and you provided essential guidance to making it a reality.
That's called essential guidance? Man, I guess I could be an educator and mentor, providing essential guidance on software. I guess people are serious when they say software is Google-fu.
It becomes even more essential if you provide them with the proper search terms that would give them better results. Interpreting what "better search terms" is, is something a good lawyer should be able to manage.
If you say "idk, maybe Google 'how to make a bomb,'" then that's not essential guidance. If you say "Google for [list of specific key ingredients]," that's a bit different.
To the extent that would be illegal, it would only be illegal because the other person was first asking how to commit a crime. If you walked up to a random person and told them "Google 'How to commit check fraud'" then you'd be 100% in the clear.
I think it is an extremely slippery slope to prosecute people for providing public information about how to find public resources to do something already publicly known.
That means that you could go to jail for merely suggesting for someone that it's possible for them to buy drugs online via a dark net market-- something I am indirectly doing now just by having this conversation.
Or for telling them to google _____ to know how to commit suicide painlessly.
Where do we draw the line? Are we sure someone won't come along and move it further down later on?
Assange broke the law—calling him a journalist is a farce and a tactic—and has to deal with the consequences. Letting him get away with it sets a precedent for interpreting the law in any way we want, effectively rendering laws useless (and creating the exact problem you've described here).
Simply put: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbOtyWTRZ_g
"Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, has won the 2011 Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism.
The annual prize is awarded to a journalist "whose work has penetrated the established version of events and told an unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it".
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jun/02/julian-assange...
In the absence of a clear legal definition of "journalist" in the US, it seems entirely reasonable to call someone who wins prizes for journalism a journalist. Why do you disagree, and why should your opinion be weighted more strongly than those who disagree with you?
I agree, however, that calling him a "journalist" is a tactic. The goal is imply that because he's a journalist, he should not be prosecuted for breaking the law. It's a strange tactic, though, since as far as I know there are no exceptions for journalists to break US federal laws.
Anyway, I'd argue that calling him "not a journalist" is a tactic as well. Why not simplify to your stronger point of "Assange broke the law ... and has to deal with the consequences"? Do you feel that if he was a "proper journalist" he should be treated differently?
(Personally, I think trying to enforce US law on foreign nationals who have never set foot in your country is a terrible precedent. I believe that prosecuting him is selective-enforcement, intended to punish him for releasing true but embarrassing information about US government misdeeds, and to dissuade others who might be tempted to follow his example. While he likely broke the laws that he is charged with, I think journalists worldwide are right to be afraid of the change in policy that this implies.)
Classifying him as a journalist, though, fits the narrative that journalists writ large are currently under attack (i.e., sympathy vote).
> Why do you feel that it strengthens your argument to say "calling him a journalist is a farce"?
Because I'm an asshole and I find it humorous that he's cowering when he knew full well what he was doing.
> Why do you disagree, and why should your opinion be weighted more strongly than those who disagree with you?
I never claimed that my opinion should be. You did that. Pointing to awards is effectively just an appeal to authority.
It would be, if it wasn't followed by the (correct) fact that there is an absence of an official record of who is and isn't a journalist, and saying that this is a decent proxy. And an appeal to authority, when we're discussing whether someone is authoritatively a journalist, seems apt, to me.
Do you truly believe that a political journalist is not ethically allowed to commit digital forensics against an adversary who committed war crimes in secret? What gives the US government immunity from hacking but not Assange?
What if Assange does not recognize the authority of a State he has never set foot in?
If I am tipped off about a badly protected server in China which contains information about State-wide concentration camps and Buddhist and Muslim persecution which I think the world needs to see, am I acting unethically if I want to acquire this information?
Why the hell do I care about the laws of a foreign totalitarian authoritarian regime who commits human rights atrocities on a daily basis?
There is a strong social and institutional norm that we don't prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, even though it is against the law. The government is even sort of maintaining that norm here, by charging the password cracking instead of the publication.
And yes, this entire situation is definitely meant to create a chilling effect among whistleblowers, and simultaneously cement in the public mind that if data is protected/encrypted, you're not ethically allowed as a vigilante to use digital forensics against it in order to expose horrendous crimes committed in the name of the government.
Even though government digital forensics against a foreign political adversary is why they have these chat logs of Assange in the first place. It's about creating an uneven playing field.
That heuristic doesn't stand up to basic scrutiny.
The example under discussion can be straightforwardly applied to the topic of software exploits. By posting a proof of concept to a mailing list, one knows that previously obscure information will then be in the hands of ne'er do wells. The motivation even includes foreseeing the exploit being used, pressuring the vendor/sysadmins into fixing it. Yet we are all safer when exploits are shared publicly so that they can be patched, rather than kept in obscurity.
Providing general information, even to someone who will use it for abuse, should be protected speech. "Ammonium nitrate plus Diesel" or "Just Google Casio F-91W and thank me later" are definitively in that territory. A weaker standard is begging for selective persecution, just as we see here.