What situations would those be? Hard time in a federal prison simply for having the bits on your hard drive is really hard for me to justify, no matter what those bits represent.
It also creates a chilling effect on someone who winds up saving they don't want to save (browser caching!) and want to report it to the proper authorities.
It also makes framing someone easy. Just send them a link...
What about hard time in federal prison just for having atoms in your possession? No matter what those atoms represent? It makes framing someone easy, just mail them some atoms.
Reductionism is cute, but in this case, wrongheaded. A certain collection of bits on a hard drive cannot, no matter how arranged, turn into smallpox or ricin or a gun or a nuclear bomb.
You're forgetting Stuxnet, a computer virus that had the ability to physically kill people as it destroyed the equipment they were working on. You're forgetting cyber attacks that can shut down medical equipment or power systems, leading to deaths. You're forgetting attacks on bluetooth systems in cars that can remotely shut them down or control their steering.
You seem to be of the opinion that just because things are digital means they can never be dangerous. Your opinion is very wrong. A collection of bits on a hard drive is very much able to kill people.
Stuxnet and Bluetooth vulns, merely sitting on someone's hard drive, not deployed against a target, not being executed, are absolutely inert and are of no harm to anyone under any circumstance conceivable.
Criminalizing the use and transmission of some kinds of information makes sense. I've yet to hear a convincing argument why mere possession should be criminalized, especially given the incentive it induces in otherwise law-abiding people to hide, rather than report. Browse the wrong web page, and you are immediately guilty, the actions you take afterward to hide it or not the difference in how the rest of your life ends.
That is not an action that a normal person should ever have to take.
Oh okay I didn't realize you were redefining what "dangerous" means. Makes sense, I completely understand your point now and I agree 100%.
Nuclear bombs aren't actually dangerous, so everyone should be allowed to have them. It's only dangerous if you actually use it as a weapon.
Smallpox isn't dangerous unless you're infecting people, we should give everyone a vial of smallpox to wear on a chain around their neck.
Children should be given hand grenades in school, I mean they're not dangerous unless you pull the pin. We would just teach them not to do that.
I completely agree with you. Weapons are just atoms. We shouldn't criminalize the possession of WMDs, only the use and transmission of them. The fact that I'm stockpiling mustard gas in my apartment is of no concern to my neighbors and the police have no right to question me until I actually release the nerve gas into my city. I'm glad we've cleared that up.
Do you have any rebuttal that isn't an obvious reduction-to-the-absurd fallacy?
Or you are you seriously making the equivalence that information on a hard drive is equivalent in danger, scope, or really anything else to a nuclear fucking bomb? Smallpox and nukes are not "inert" even when sitting unused.
At least try to continue this discussion in something resembling good faith?
You didn't start it in good faith so I haven't seen any reason to try to steer it in that direction.
You argued that bits on a hard drive could never hurt anyone. I provided examples showing the opposite. You responded by saying that those examples can only hurt someone if they're being used, to which I reminded you that any weapon can only hurt someone if it's being used.
It's not reduction to absurdity, it's the exact and obvious truth. Stuxnet is completely harmless until it blows up a centrifuge in an Iranian nuclear facility. Which is its only designed purpose it has. And there is no way to argue that you weren't planning to commit a crime with those bits and bytes. We used a cyber weapon to physically stop someone from developing a nuclear weapon and it worked. How's that for "bits on a hard drive"?
Now tell me: how many times have we used a nuclear weapon against another human in the past 50 years? Even though we have thousands of them scattered across the country, and thousands more across the world, they haven't hurt a single soul since WWII. Sounds pretty god-damn inert to me. Meanwhile people are using "just bits on a hard drive" as weapons constantly. Not just being used by the military like with nuclear weapons. Civilians attacking governments, civilians attacking civilians, governments attacking civilians, governments attacking governments. Every single day.
So no, I'm not arguing that information on a hard drive is equivalent to a nuclear fucking bomb. I'm saying it's worse.
You are the one being reductionist. Child pornography, documents proving corruption, Stuxnet, those are all "bits on a hard drive" that can cause real damage, as in life or death even. That's like saying a gun or a nuclear bomb is just an arrangement of atoms.
Creating smallpox given any amount of any information would come as a surprise to most scientists and religions, and I can look up information right now how to create ricin, guns, and nukes, and nobody would stop me from doing so.
But information so powerful that merely having it should be worth automatic prison time? With no possibility to safely report the possibly much more harmful act of transmitting it or using it?
> Creating smallpox given any amount of any information[...]
That's why I used "enable", but point taken.
> But information so powerful that merely having it should be worth automatic prison time?
I don't think any prison time should be "automatic", but I do think that there's information that you should not be allowed to possess. In my view that doesn't include your examples, because that sort of scientific and technical knowledge, as you correctly point out, doesn't make a lot of sense to criminalize.
It does however include another human's private information that they did not consent to. What that entails exactly, is not clearly definable in all cases and I believe is open for argumentation, but I firmly believe depictions of sexual exploitation falls well within that area.
The general rationale that I have for this, is that someone else possessing my private information gives that other person power over me. That is bad, in my view, because it creates inequality. Now, one could argue that a society in where all information about everybody is available to everyone. But clearly, we don't live in such a society.
The general rationale that I have for this, is that someone else possessing my private information gives that other person power over me.
How do you figure? If someone has on their person a thumb drive containing your.. by way of example: PII, bank account info, and browsing history for the last week - but isn't giving it to anyone else, using it in any way, heck, they might not even know they have it:
How, exactly, do they have power over you? Be specific.
We can, and should criminalize those two things, but we're not talking about use or transmission, we're talking about existence.
For a sobering thought experiment, consider how many times someone may stumble across video or images of sexual exploitation, and then make the rational decision to scrub their history and cache rather than report it because doing the right thing opens them up to life-ruining liability.
> but we're not talking about use or transmission, we're talking about existence.
A part of me wants to apologize, because I wasn't using that narrow of a definition, and under it, I think you are correct.
The other part of me likes arguing on the internet.
You're of course correct, that just by mere existance information is not power, nor is it anything else, nor is anything else. But to tune one parameter of an issue to an extreme that make the entire issue absurd, is not a useful way to have a conversation about a real life issue.
The point being, that of course existance implies the possibility of use and transmission.
Clearly, nothing is dangerous just by existing without the possibilitiy of interaction with it's environment, not guns, not anthrax, not information, and clearly not humans.
But the whole point about something "being illegal", whatever it is, is that there it the possibility for it to interact with the system it's a part of.
But to tune one parameter of an issue to an extreme that make the entire issue absurd, is not a useful way to have a conversation about a real life issue.
We are talking about the legal system, which can and does make that fine grained of a distinction. Creating, transmitting, or being in possession of certain kinds of data are all specific, individual crimes.
The absurdity of the issue under discussion is the entire point.
It also creates a chilling effect on someone who winds up saving they don't want to save (browser caching!) and want to report it to the proper authorities.
It also makes framing someone easy. Just send them a link...