Blackmail is illegal, but how is that enforced in practice? As I'm sure you are aware, blackmail is illegal. However, I am curious about how this would be enforced in a real-world scenario. Could any lawyers provide some insight on this? For example, if I killed someone or my company is committing significant fraud or tax evasion, and someone threatens to reveal this information unless I help them with something, this would be considered blackmail. However, if you were in this situation, what could you even do? Report the person to the police and potentially face consequences yourself? What are the practical implications of blackmail being illegal?
Canadian law defines a crime of extortion, but not blackmail. An alternative theory of &quot;blackmail&quot; is that it is coercion. This is the law against extortion in Canada. We start with the definition of extortion, §346 (1) Every one commits extortion who, without reasonable justification or excuse and with intent to obtain anything, by threats, accusations, menaces or violence induces or attempts to induce any person, whether or not he is the person threatened, accused or menaced or to whom violence is shown, to do anything or cause anything to be done. To simplify, one person makes another person do something using threats, accusations or violence and doesn't have a good reason to do so. A parent can altruistically threaten to write a child out of their will if the child doesn't stop taking heroin: that's a good reason, so that is not extortion. If you threaten to turn a murderer in to the police unless they give to $1,000, that is extortion. However, the law also provides that &quot;A threat to institute civil proceedings is not a threat for the purposes of this section&quot;. It is legal to threaten to sue the pants off of a person if they don't settle for some cash reward. The wording of the law is very broad and it's not obvious from the wording of the statute where the line is drawn. These guys give a number of examples of acts leading to convictions: A teenager who said he would bring an AK-47 to school and shooting people unless he was compensated for his damaged vape; A man who was found to have implied violence by asking for money and stating that ‘things will get a lot worse’, and ‘if you can’t pay with money you’ll have to pay with something else’ if he didn’t receive it; Three men who were accused of threatening, harassing, intimidating, and extorting a man who tried to start a new chapter of a Montreal-based Motorcycle club; A man who allegedly committed acts including arson, telephone threats, molotov cocktails, and paintball-gun shootings against his former business associates; A man who threatened to post nude pictures of people on social media unless paid; A man who pretended to be a photographer and threatened to send nude pictures to family or pornorgraphic magazines unless sexual favours were granted; A person who threatened to sell a story to a newspaper unless the victim paid a sum of money (the story regarded the victim’s recent conviction); A woman who threatened to send a letter to another woman’s employer unless the other woman repaid a debt she owed As they say, &quot;the threat must go beyond what a reasonable person in the accused’s situation would view as a legitimate means&quot;: the issue is dealt with on a case-by-case basis. In case you murder someone or commit tax fraud, and another person threatens to turn you in if you don't {pay them / mow their lawn}, the law takes the position that you should turn yourself in, provide the evidence to the police, and the police will prosecute the other person for extortion. There is no &quot;I was blackmailed&quot; get out of jail defense. One practical implication of the law is that you can't extort a person because they committed a crime: instead, you are expected to just turn them (and the evidence) in to the police – that's your civic duty. You can also hold your tongue: what you can't do is extort the other criminal.
&quot;Revenge&quot; is not a legal concept. If you injure someone other than in self defence or for another legal reason than you are committing assault. Hence dangerous booby traps for trespassers are illegal, so anything that might cause injury, however minor, is definitely out. That includes itching powder. However I would make an analogy with anti-climb paint. This allows you to use a paint that damages clothing provided you put up warning signs. So if you were to leave a parcel coated with anti-climb paint or containing a bag of paint or glitter rigged to spill it over the person opening it then that would be legal as long as there was a warning that tampering may cause property damage. (Note &quot;spill&quot;, not &quot;squirt&quot; or &quot;splash&quot;: anything ejecting paint or glitter under pressure might get it in someone's eyes, causing injury). So your friend could put a notice up saying that unauthorised tampering with parcels could cause damage to property and then put out parcels that might do exactly that. Your friend could also put a GPS tracker in a parcel to try to find out where they are going. Update Here is someone who did this. The BBC story does not mention any legal issues for him. A former Nasa [sic] engineer spent six months building a glitter bomb trap to trick thieves after some parcels were stolen from his doorstep. The device, hidden in an Apple Homepod box, used four smartphones, a circuit board and 1lb (453g) of glitter. Mark Rober, who is now a Youtuber, caught the original thieves on his home security camera. [...] The former Nasa engineer said: &quot;If anyone was going to make a revenge bait package and over-engineer the crap out of it, it was going to be me.&quot;
This is known as a retroactive or ex post facto law. Such laws are explicitly forbidden by the US Constitution (Wikipedia reference), and are generally frowned on in jurisdictions where the rule of law applies, partly because it is difficult to prove criminal intent when your action was not at the time criminal.
If an employee takes home information that his or her employer considers confidential, that would be a matter of company policy. The employer could discipline or fire the employee if it learned of the incident, and chose to act. If the information is considered to be a trade secret, or part of one, disclosing it or mishandling it so as to risk disclosure could be a crime under US law. However, only in unusual cases is criminal action taken on such matters, normally it is left to civil lawsuits or internal company action. I do not know if Canada has a similar law.
Generally speaking, what isn't illegal by law is legal. It's possible for law enforcement agencies to share crime rates, maps, and their data, but within any laws regarding access and sharing of that data. Such crime data may be publicly available, but that depends on local and state laws. The local or state agency would have to enter into a legal licensing agreement - if local and state laws allow such sharing - with the GPS company to provide the data, update it, and reasonably assure that it is accurate. The more realistic reason GPS systems might choose to not show crime data may be public relations. If a GPS user lives in an area that has been objectively identified by data as having a higher than baseline crime rate, i.e. for carjackings, that user may not be very happy with that designation. Worse, what happens to public relations when data errors show an area is wrongfully identified as high crime? What kinds of lawsuits could result? Real estate agents suing since bad data from a GPS unit soured the sale of a house?
You call their employer and impersonate them The onus is on the employer to keep your personal data secure. If they do not take reasonable steps to verify that the caller is indeed you, they fail that duty and can be held to account. So, not a loophole.
No. It is illegal to hire someone to kill someone else. Even if the killer enjoys diplomatic immunity, the person hiring the killer has committed a crime. As to your last paragraph, that is properly a separate question, but the answer is that they can't do it because murder is illegal.
Although your "title" may not of itself have legal force, that doesn't necessarily mean you can do as you please in every situation without fear of liability. For example, if you falsely claim to be a medical doctor or lawyer, you could find yourself liable for civil damages to defrauded clients; you may also violate criminal laws. (An anonymous bureaucratic form probably won't create that problem, because as another answerer pointed out nobody really cares or pays attention to titles most of the time. But stranger things have happened; and by "form" you could mean "tax form" or some declaration made under penalty of perjury. Lawyers generally avoid blanket "that's fine" answers, because there are almost always many ways that it might not be fine.)