If laws are ambiguous, governments run the risk folks will conclude they'll get in trouble no matter how diligently they try to suss out the spirit of said laws.

When combined with a comical inability to secure government systems, it's honestly super cute that any federal agency thinks engaging in such dark patterns is in any way, shape, or form going to achieve their goals.

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collingreen 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If the goal is chilling dissent, then it sounds like it would be working perfectly.

Your point only holds if the government is trying to act fairly on behalf of the people and actively uphold justice.

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idle_zealot 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> If laws are ambiguous, governments run the risk folks will conclude they'll get in trouble no matter how diligently they try to suss out the spirit of said laws

Well, yeah, but that's the goal. People will correctly conclude that their ability to act unmolested is entirely contingent upon remaining in the good graces of local and remote authority figures. This produces extreme chilling on dissent or disagreement and promotes deals, bribes, and bootlicking. The law is transformed into a transparent legitimization mechanism for what the powerful wanted to do anyway, applied and ignored according to the real power structure adjacent to the legal bureaucracy. This is the default state of human civilization when the rule of law is not proactively defended.

	▲	firefax 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But to "chill dissent", you must be capable of tracking it down before it hangs you from a gas station. I don't think you're fully grasping how sudden and forceful change could come if just small number of folks decided to stop giving a fuck about the spirit of the law and do whatever they feel they can get away with. In my experience, folks from a legal/court context who think they can get cute playing the "you can't prove I broke the rules" game will literally void their bowels in fear when the same is done to them by just one skilled hacker, let alone a group of them all focused on a singular task.