Wednesday, February 07, 2007

The Law Is Not A Machine

I have a number of projects I'm working on right now. Given that I'm taking two law classes - most of my ideas at least involve the law in some way.

I've had two conversations in the past few days - where I have sought advice from super intelligent and seriously kickass legal experts - and both of them have ended with me receiving a sharply worded (yet friendly) warning:

The law is not a machine. You cannot find a loophole in it in the same way that you would with a computer algorithm. The law is pliable, and if a judge wants to rule against you - he'll find a way.

As plain and simple as this may be, I'm still struggling to get my head around it.

I remember as a high school senior being amazed by the EFF's trickery regarding the Deep Crack machine. Since it was illegal to export the source code to this machine, they simply had it printed as a book - where it was transformed from code to speech - sent over to Europe, and then run through OCR scanners to turn it back into usable computer code. This single event was deeply inspirational, and got me thinking, way back then, that perhaps the law could be abused in the same way as the bugs and holes I was (ab)using in online games.

Clearly, there are loopholes to find - but the act of finding them is far more dangerous than in computer security. When you fail online, you get locked out of the service you want to analyze. When you fail with the law, you go to jail...

These are truly dangerous, yet interesting times.

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