As a convicted felon for the last 25 years without a single incident since I was released. I tell everyone I know to never trust a single thing anyone says if there is any chance you are being looked at for criminal charges. It's "I want a lawyer" and nothing else. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP, don't call me, your parents, someone to bail you out. Call a mother fucking lawyer. Because once you get your sleeve caught up in the gears of the system and you dont rip free fast enough, it's over. Once the system turns on you, your entire life will never be same. It will effect more aspects of your life than you can imagine. The system will chew you up. It never forgets. It's incapable of forgiveness.

> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%.

This is a misunderstood statistic.

Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success. They don't operate like two private parties suing each other to force the court to decide something. If the evidence is there or the charges aren't fully formed, they don't waste resources on it.

This leads to a contradictory set of complaints that the legal system lets too many people go or doesn't have enough teeth.

> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%

Prosecutors pick their cases. Defense doesn't. The cases that aren't 90%+ sure aren't charged.

Is the high success rate because they are good at winning or good at picking winning cases? Does that 90% include plea bargains?

Some of us report for jury duty just itching to nullify something. Don't you? Checks and balances...

Exactly. People complain police dont prevent crime, but dont realize that is not their purpose. The police exist to protect the government, not the people.

>Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz

He killed himself before the trial even began. I think he would have won the case if he actually went through it.

It is not surprising. They just don’t go to court unless they think they have enough evidence for a conviction. In a perfect world the conviction rate would be 100% because in a perfect world the prosecutor would drop the case before if they don’t have enough evidence.

> Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz.

Indeed. There are certainly parallels between him and Sam Tunick. But I'm not sure the public is ready for all the parallels.

If it’s a malicious prosecution by the country/state then Jury is your best best over a Judge.

There is a reason that Elon Musks companies and others put a ‘you agree to not have a jury trial…’ clause in their terms as Judges are easier to influence - when a legal case is filed it’s allocated to a judge and certain cases will go strategically to a Judges with certain bias

> Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.

What? A jury system is far from perfect but this is about as intellectually rigorous as “the lottery is a tax on the poor”. Many people are thrilled to do jury duty because they are invested in their community, your nihilism is not a universal truth, jury duty isn’t a burden, it is a civic duty, an honor.

> It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.

But that's good no? People who got out never would have taken it seriously.

I sat on a jury trial and was highly impressed with how seriously my fellow jurors took it - especially the presumption of innocence. When they started to go down some incorrect logical path, someone would step up and correct it.

Not to mention the public defender ripped apart the DA's case. It was the exact opposite of what I was expecting.

> Prosecutors have high success rates.

You're forgetting that the prosecutors don't bring cases they think they're going to lose to trial, they either drop the charges or try a plea deal. So you'd entirely expect the success rate to be high.

There is no law. There is only power, and the will to use it. Remember and internalize this at all times.

> It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.

It’s not even just who couldn’t get out of it. It’s filtered for people who answer honestly. I was disqualified for a grand jury because the judge asked me if I would believe the testimony of police officers as truthful and I said it would depend on the police officer.

The system already had their hands forced on accepting that some cops lie with Brady disclosures but the fact that I didn’t just naively accept police testimony meant I was an unscramble juror.

Even if you’re a true believer in the system you won’t be allowed to participate because you didn’t lie.

Yeah, but without a jury O.J. Simpson never would've walked out of court a free man.

For example in Europe when someone dies somebody always has to go to jail, even if they were defending themselves or responding to a potential threat. A jury could show compassion or empathy. Judges are extremely stoic in that regard.

Indeed, but should he say his real code was one digit swap off, could you prove intent? Color matters, but you can't paint with only one

"Color" absolutely can be represented digitally; C compilers were doing it before we even knew they were doing it. We just like getting away with shit. It's part of the hacker ethos. Probably.

For one example of this, around 10 years ago there was a company called Aereo that tried to act as a "cloud television provider". The idea was that they had thousands of tiny antennas hooked up to servers in a warehouse, and they would lease an antenna to each subscriber. This gave an experience similar to cable TV but without Aereo having to pay broadcasters cable transmission fees. The major broadcasters sued Aereo and ended up getting it shut down for exactly the reason you mention. Despite Aereo technically being a TV antenna leasing service, it functionally acted like a cable TV service so they were violating copyright by not paying transmission fees.

> A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.

It's worse than that: a lot of engineer types reason about almost everything as if it were code. It's a manifestation of Engineer's disease.

It reminds me of tax law in many countries. You can follow the letter of the law, but if the vibes are off, you can still be found to be in breach of a vague catch-all provision (e.g. economic substance doctorine in the US, GAAR in Canada/UK, Part IVA in Australia, etc).

There is a strong bias by the courts to interpret the law in such a way that it makes sense, and achieves the goals the legislature had when enacting it.

Maybe this is because of the TV dramas where a genius lawyer saves their client through an obscure technicality. It looks exactly like hacking a system using a 0-day exploit.

It's not that there's a human interpreting the law. It's that there is a politically motivated human interpreting the law, or in other words, you are sol if the state wants to get you. The engineer's arguments aren't reductionist, they are idealistic.

Does anyone think law is computer code? I mean any courtroom drama (even if far fetched) shows it is not.

I favorited the comment for the same reason. It's a perfect way of describing it.

Why even choose a mental health condition as the linguistic pivot point for a zingy social phrase?

When talking about costs we should remember who is paying. Maybe overall the cost of the government getting that data is higher than the cost of them getting mad at you, but when a single individual is paying for all of it the equation might change.

I think it's a matter of personal privacy. You shouldn't show it to other people.

There's a chilling effect from even just the arrest.

It doesn't matter.

Mamy will read this and think that crossing a border with a GrapheneOS device is a bad idea, or just drop using what is a nice security feature entirely.

Just being charged is already a massive pain in the ass (both in terms of stress and costs) to an individual.

Would it have been wiser if that person had, as a US citizen, just refused to provide a PIN?

Purely technically it would also depend on the state of the phone. Phones can be read out/exploited more easily after first unlock (AFU) than before first unlock (BFU). So, a middle path would be putting the phone in BFU. Much harder to use exploits against the phone and biometric authentication doesn't work. One way of fairly reliably doing this is setting the reboot timer to 10 minutes or turning off the phone in critical situations.

It's also relevant to take into account that he wasn't protecting himself by wiping the phone, but fellow activists. So, he may have taken the risk of potential legal issues by wiping the phone to project others.

This is a form of legal evasion similar to warrant canaries imho : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

i m not sure how legal a protection it is, and whether the courts would interpret your choice of OS as complicit in evidence destruction.

And all of those arguments are entirely academic, and subject to change depending on economic status, skin color, or nationality.

Law is effectively a weak gentleman’s agreement we tolerate because the alternative is violence.

(Well, law is enforced with violence too, I suppose.)

Well, you need to be eating a burrito or something

If a government operates outside its remit, competing forces (opposition parties, civil society, counter-elites, foreign influences) use that as an opportunity to gain power by calling attention to the violation. “The law” may be a fuzzy illusion, but it’s delineating a real social boundary. Legal processes are a way of processing that conflict symbolically rather than jumping straight to open warfare. But you better believe that open warfare will result if those boundaries are ignored for long enough or if they are violated egregiously.

It’s impossible to remove (even just nearly) all ambiguity.

People already complain that there are too many laws on the books.

Well he told them. He said something like: haha that wiped my phone, now you can't get the data