People pay ransoms because they want back whatever is being ransomed. Making it illegal to pay the ransom isn't going to stop that. It will just push everything underground and make it harder to catch the ransomers.
Not saying I agree with it either way, just pointing out that y'all appear to be talking past each other.
If you get mugged you are coerced to give your wallet, on pain of _much_ greater punishment, usually the greatest there is - death.
If your company’s data is cryptolocked, you are coerced to give money on pain of getting that data lost.
The difference is that the punishment for non compliance is much different.
If you made paying a ransom in this case illegal you would actually promote better backup/restore/security practices, at the cost of sometimes loosing data.
If it was vital for that data not to be lost then not having adequate backups is a _much more_ serious problem as that data could be lost for different reasons. And you’re funding organized crime which has very bad downstream effects.
If you had to make a more adequate analogy, imagine someone stealing your personal documents then demanding money to get them returned - you should have a strategy to restore those in other events like fires and stuff, so you might pay money, or not. But if you do you encourage future theft like that for you and others, and that money might be used for some other, usually nefarious stuff.
If, say, the mafia threatens to assassinate someone if a document is leaked and a hacker obtains and leaks it the hacker still didn't kill anyone - the hitman sent by th mafia is the killer. And regardless that this kind of situation seems very far fetched.
Someone getting hacked is only acting under the threat of information or access to systems being released or eliminated. There is no immediate threat if force. Sure, if you want to get pedantic someone might hack a power plant and threaten to blow it up, but I've never heard of that happening and it's far, far different from the overwhelming majority of hacks.
This did not make it illegal to pay ransom and also gave the victim family a reasonable justification for not being able to pay.
Compared to just putting the victim between a rock and an hard place it looks like a nicer option.
This seems so absurd. Freezing banks accounts cause so much issue to everyone involved, you just made an incentive not to declare a kidnapping and trying to solve it without interference from the police.
For sure you'll see much less bar if you make drinking illegal, but believe me, they are still there ;).
the same as the other method proposed.
> you just made an incentive not to declare a kidnapping and trying to solve it without interference from the police.
agree, but this does not make it illegal to pay, it just forces the ransom to be delayed so that the police can investigate. If the family manages to get money in another way then they can choose to pay.
We could get into the monetary value of a life and whether a sufficient amount of virtual harm, especially when that virtual harm might reasonably translate into a life (emergency systems, insurance payouts, etc.), but I don't think we even need to.
Edit: On the other hand, if the counter-factual was a mugger at an ATM demanding you enter your PIN, that distinction doesn't exist. So maybe you're right.
Maybe the right answer is to outlaw paying the ransom except to save human life, but also create a federal fund to compensate victims of these attacks.
The town should have bylaws to force resignation and emergency elections in the event that this happens. Then the town should have legal precedent to bring the administration to civil court for damages. The town administration, personally, should be collectively on the hook to the town the cost of the ransom.
It really does amount to a dereliction of duty.
If you are attacked by an unarmed person and you shoot them while defending yourself it's fairly common for that case to go to trial to test whether the homicide was justified. Presumably people have gone to prison under just those circumstances.
You could quite easily frame a law around justified ransom-paying, how fair it would be is unknowable.