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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

He has what appears to be a correct analysis of the law. I suspect a fair number of dispassionate legal observers would come up with the same analysis. Part 2, where he talks about prosecutorial discretion, is going to be the interesting part.

(I personally thought the CFAA "unauthorized access" could be fought, but that leaves 3/5. Computer Fraud and Wire Fraud are essentially always true if you do anything even slightly mean on a computer, and I'm not sure about the damage to computer systems -- that was self-inflicted by JSTOR, and IMO could have been fought. The MIT side of it was also stupid.)

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Part of the issue is that a "correct analysis of the law" is absolutely worthless if part of the problem includes the law. This notion of "if the law permits it, we're good to go" is a disease.

The law is bullshit, with respect to computer crimes and copyright. You still need to accurately know what the current law is in order to change it, though. And unfortunately it will probably require legislative action to change it, which is going to go up against entrenched interests.

Boycott or other commercial actions against anyone who supports the copyright empire would be one way of getting the law changed.

Unfortunately people in the tech community are going to get distracted by other stuff (both stupid legislation like getting involved in gun control, and reasonable stuff like working on cool new technology), so mounting the sustained, multi-year effort to fix this is going to be very difficult.

Honestly I have absolutely no faith in any sort of change coming to the system in-channel. I think we should focus our efforts on developing systems that allow the population to circumvent and would make prosecution prohibitively expensive.

In the future, in any likely reality that I can foresee, the laws are going to remain more or less the same and prosecutors are going to still be using scorched earth tactics. To change the system you need lawyers, but lawyers have a love-affair with the system and knee-jerk in defense of one-another. Ethics and the law are too intertwined for them, any effort to change the system to be more ethical will only continue to be met with cries of "But it's already legal!". I've seen it dozens of times today, and I don't see any light at the end of that tunnel.

If others are going to follow in Aaron's footsteps, they will have to make one particular change: be better at remaining unidentified.

cypherpunks write code

Yeah, I think that's what I am getting at.

> If others are going to follow in Aaron's footsteps, they will have to make one particular change: be better at remaining unidentified.

Either that or be fully aware of the consequences and do it anyway but in such a way that the genie can never be put back into the bottle. Aaron paid an extremely high price for something that eventually did not succeed.

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