| ▲ | fasterik 4 hours ago |
| I agree up to a certain point, but there has to be some legal boundary between freedom of thought/speech and literally planning a crime. I'm protected under the First Amendment to say "someday I'll rob a bank" but not necessarily "I'll rob this bank on Friday and here's how I plan to do it". |
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| ▲ | saulpw 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think you should be allowed to write that exact line in your journal. If you rob the bank that can be used as evidence against you, but in no way is it acceptable for private reflections alone to be used to arrest you. Or else every author who's written a novel with 'bad' characters would be arrestable. |
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| ▲ | akoboldfrying 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm coming to saulpw's house tomorrow at noon with a gun, and I'm gonna make them pay. If a policeman notices the sentence above on my phone screen during a routine traffic stop, the response you want him to take is... nothing? | | |
| ▲ | soerxpso 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | For the record, under current US law, it is not illegal to have a sentence in your locally-stored notes on your phone outlining a plan to commit a crime. There has to be an overt act. The police in that instance could inform the intended victim, surveil you, etc, but they would not be able to successfully charge you with attempted murder. It's not illegal to be considering committing a crime, even if you have a tendency to write down your thoughts. The law in this particular case, which seems to be intended for threats that you actually send to someone, is being interpreted broadly to apply to any "threat" that you transmit to a server. So in your hypothetical, the legality would depend on whether your notes are backed up to icloud or not. | | |
| ▲ | wolfy1993 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | >the legality would depend on whether your notes are backed up to icloud or not I agree, and it's nuts. This feels like less of an issue with anthropic per say as it is a broad reading/misuse of the law's original intent. | |
| ▲ | openasocket 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is true for the general criminal conspiracy law, but be aware that an “overt act” doesn’t have to be an illegal act, just some action in furtherance of that crime. That can be purchasing a weapon, or scouting out a location. There may also be other laws in play depending on the specifics | | |
| ▲ | Arodex an hour ago | parent [-] | | Just having saulpw's physical address is already furtherance of that possible crime. The commenters here are cute little HNers who think they have found a loophole in the law. They are not the first ones innover their head. Spoiler: the law is written in words, and those words aren't strictly executed like in a computer program, they are interpreted by actual humans who can see what you are trying to do and will stamp it out. |
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| ▲ | akoboldfrying 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're absolutely right, at least according to my own quick check on Gemini. I find this state of affairs amazing. In my country, no "overt act" is required, but both here and in the US a "conspiracy to commit" charge requires an agreement with a second party. This is indeed consistent with a very broad interpretation of "no thought crimes". |
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| ▲ | devin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Correct. Nevermind how ridiculously contrived the scenario you've just concocted is. | | | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > If a policeman notices the sentence above on my phone screen during a routine traffic stop, the response you want him to take is... nothing? Anybody showing a cop their hacker news comments at a traffic stop should be arrested, for harassing the police | | |
| ▲ | autoexec an hour ago | parent [-] | | You joke, but part of the issue here is we're supposed to have laws that keep cops from reading over everything we type and using it to turn us all into crime suspects. There's a whole constitutional amendment about that, but our personal "papers and effects" that should be protected against unreasonable searches are increasingly really "owned" by others who are all too happy to snitch. Part of me says that the solution is stop entering any personal data into any device and service you don't own, but I'm not sure if that's really what we want considering that there are zero private cell phones. Even desktops and laptops aren't 100% owned by you these days. The only thing you can really do is keep them offline 100% of the time so they can't spy on you, but that seems like a lot to demand. |
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| ▲ | naasking 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you really think reading a snippet like that completely out of context should qualify as probable cause? | | |
| ▲ | akoboldfrying 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes! When you read something describing in detail a person's intent to do something very bad, in a place where they write things that they intend to do, and which in the past they have in fact consistently done, you don't attach any significance to that at all? | | |
| ▲ | anigbrowl an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I certainly think a police officer that stumbled across such a thing would be justified in asking follow-up questions like 'hey, what's this about you going to shoot someone?' and then maybe making an arrest based on your replies/demeanor. 'Probable cause' should involve a degree of certainty, because 'possible cause' would be altogether too loose of a standard. It's possible that you're intending to shootme and you just mentioned saulpw to throw other HN users off the scent. Possibilities are only limited by the assessor's imagination. | |
| ▲ | rolosa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How can you prove that it's not just me writing a dark and morbid story? | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How does the cop at the traffic stop know that your username is akoboldfrying? Did you tell them? If so, why, at a traffic stop, did you do that? Are you posting threats on hacker news while you are driving? And the cop was close enough to see your username and what you wrote? Is that why you were pulled over? |
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| ▲ | fc417fc802 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well in your example you've begun conspiring with a second party so that's not at all the same thing. You are at least free to plan all the crimes you'd like to arbitrary levels of detail in private. It's when you start acting things out (soliciting coconspirators, blackmailing targets, etc) that you cross the legal line. The current situation is a weird one. Anthropic reported single party interactions (per the ToS and common sense), there's a statue about sending threats (as there clearly ought to be), then somehow the definition of the word "send" was tortured by the local police. If a crime has been committed here it's almost certainly an infraction by the local authority against the spirit of the law. |
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| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | akoboldfrying 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I totally agree. People seem to be stuck on the notion that we must not punish thought crimes, and have elevated this above all other considerations, when really it's just one among several. However, those other respondents to your post seem to be accurately describing the current legal situation. I asked Gemini, and apparently "conspiring" to commit an offense requires an agreement with another person in both my country and the US, where an "overt act" is also required (that may not be incriminating by itself). I find this alarming. The fact that someone's private diary entry describing in detail a plot to kill me does not amount by itself to anything is... incredible to me. |
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| ▲ | LorenPechtel an hour ago | parent [-] | | The thing is plotting a crime is not illegal. Authors do it all the time. Usually against fictional characters, but some authors use a real world backdrop. And look over on StackOverflow. You can get some really weird ones that only make sense when you look into the details. When they manage to show up in the hot question list those details are missing. "How to kill a cat" comes to mind. (Note that you won't find it anymore--the question is AFIAK still there, but the title has been edited several times. The cat in question is the Unix command, not the feline. What do you do when you inadvertently tell the system to display the contents of a large binary file?) And, AFIAK still there, "How to kill Indiana Jones". (There are always the ancient mechanisms that somehow still work perfectly, springs and all. How to make something that actually would work?) And one I've heard of but not seen: "How to kill my wife", from some game I didn't recognize. | | |
| ▲ | TrajansRow 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I’m sure the average UNIX admin has a trove of misinterpretable web searches. fork a child and kill it - Google Search google.com/search?clie...067j0203j0i20i263j0i22 kill child and fork parent - Google S...
google.com/search?clie...o...1...5.0j0171j35i39j kill parent with fork - Google Search google.com/search?clie.....1...
..0171|35139|33116 kill parent without killing child - Goo... google.com/search?clie...4589.0j32j1.0....1...... kill child without killing grandchild -...
google.com/search?clie...5.0j37.
....о...1...5..0j3 kill all children - Google Search
google.com/search?q=ki...&hl=en-bg&client=safari kill child with fork - Google Search
cooale.com/search2o=ki
&hl=en-ha& client=safari |
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| ▲ | Brian_K_White 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You just said the words right here in this public vbenue, not even in private. This argument holds no water at all. |
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| ▲ | fasterik 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Obviously, I'm not talking about the verbatim quotes I provided. There has to be some level of evidence that proves intent to commit a crime and the second quote is meant to represent that whole class of statements, but it depends on context. Any given quote won't constitute evidence in every case, but it will in the cases where it proves intent beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm not sure why you think my argument holds no water when there are clear legal precedents that speech is not protected in some cases where there is "imminent lawless action". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio | | |
| ▲ | tikhonj 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not a lawyer so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems like there is a big gap between speech that is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action" and just saying that you will do something. Depending on context saying "I'm going to rob the bank X tomorrow" might also count as a threat? But, in either case, writing this in a private diary could not be incitement or a threat because you are not communicating with anybody except yourself. |
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| ▲ | buellerbueller 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| action in the real world, i.e., not just words. |
