| ▲ | akoboldfrying 3 hours ago |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | soerxpso 2 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. |
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| ▲ | wolfy1993 2 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 an hour 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 2 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. |
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| ▲ | jrflowers an hour 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 |
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| ▲ | autoexec 39 minutes 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? |
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| ▲ | akoboldfrying 2 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 an hour 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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