[FirmwareBurner]

>Yes. If the alternative is a worldwide police state.

Being held accountable for crimes is your definition of a "police state"? Interesting.

What you're trying to hint at is political persecution, and there is the possibility of asylum for that. But let's differentiate between persecution and running away from crimes, and not muddy the waters. Not all crimes are the result of persecution.

Otherwise what's stopping anyone form breaking into your house, murdering your family to rob you and then fleeing abroad on asylum to avoid legal repercussions? If that was the status quo, you probably wouldn't exist anymore right now.

The "police state" is the one ensuring your family's safety. In our modern societies, we have outsourced the monopoly on violence to the police state, so that we can focus on work and hobbies, and that comes at the expense of trusting the state and holding it accountable through democracy.

[K0balt]

I don’t think op meant that at all. Your response reads a lot like “if you don’t have anything to hide…” arguments against privacy and encryption. Liberty always comes with a cost. It is de-facto a lack of control by the state. It is precisely this lack of control that creates value in liberty.

The state will always go through cycles of opinion, witch hunts, political interference, and other malfeasances of power. It will probably be corrected, only to temporarily careen off the rails again. This is -the best case scenario- for a healthy democracy.

The only way to limit the effect of this meandering pathfinding on individuals is to place some things intentionally out of reach of the state. To abuse their power, then they must break the law. This triggers the correction that brings democracy back towards the just path. Without limits to break, the state will careen so far off the path that it may have a hard time righting itself.

We must force the state to use open coercion when it wants to stretch the limits of its reach. This is a critical element for democracy to function… its reach must have well defined limits that stop well short of any legal activity, even if it means criminals and deviants will face less obstacles. This is the cost of freedom.

[FirmwareBurner]

> Your response reads a lot like “if you don’t have anything to hide…”

That's not what I said.

>We must force the state to use open coercion when it wants to stretch the limits of its reach.

That's exactly what I said.

>even if it means criminals and deviants will face less obstacles

Curios how liberal you'd be with the criminal who'd wronged you. Mercy towards criminals is a crime towards their victims.

[4bpp]

> Curios how liberal you'd be with the criminal who'd wronged you. Mercy towards criminals is a crime towards their victims.

Most societies that we would consider worth living in hold up the principle that matters of justice should be decided by the impartial and uninvolved. If the victim's feelings should determine the punishment, what would stop any petty theft and spicy insult (for the vast majority of countries where those are considered crimes) from being answered with the death penalty?

[FirmwareBurner]

>Most societies that we would consider worth living in hold up the principle that matters of justice should be decided by the impartial and uninvolved

Please, don't twist my words, I never said the victim should be the judge. I asked how would the victim feel if criminality had safe spaces where they could avoid justice because they feel like the law is unfair with them.

>If the victim's feelings should determine the punishment

In "most societies that we would consider worth living" as per your words, the victim's feelings are always taken into account in court that determines sentencing. Case in point, men and women get disproportionate sentences in the west for the exact same crime, like sexual abuse for instance.

[dingnuts]

> I asked how would the victim feel

A lot of the kinds of crimes we're discussing here are things like being homosexual in the Middle East, where there is no victim, only a transgression imagined by religious nuts.

Yes, it's good that those people have a place to go. Happy Pride.

[FirmwareBurner]

>A lot of the kinds of crimes we're discussing here are things like being homosexual in the Middle East

Not sure why you had to go make that parallel but it really isn't. You can control yourself from committing crimes, you can't control yourself from being born gay.

[spwa4]

> Curios how liberal you'd be with the criminal who'd wronged you. Mercy towards criminals is a crime towards their victims.

Of course, reality is that whether justice is forthcoming is dictated by economic interests, not law, and certainly not your idea of law. In other words, whether you criticize China's treatment of Uighur, or point out how gigantic the scale of pollution the CCP is responsible for, or which economic disaster they caused this week, will get you in hot water more than committing a (scammer) crime will. Whether you criticize India's rich, Thailand's or Saudi Arabia's royalty and actually get some attention (which, as has been demonstrated, will make them get diplomatically immune embassy staff kill you. Perhaps that's not legal, but they cannot legally be punished for that, not even financially). And if you either insult or otherwise pose a problem to western copyright interests (e.g. make a tutorial about LibreELEC) you'll get the hammer put down on you:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/tags/libreelec

Of course, it will remain trivial to sabotage judicial proceedings if you're outside of the jurisdiction of that court (and because second/third world courts simply side with scammers against victims), the stated reason of the argument is NOT something you can do in practice, and whether the law is on your side? It is already on your side if you go after scammers! It is impossible to use local laws to go after scammers. What protects scammers, as everybody knows, is less anonymity than it is third world states and attitudes, especially their total lack of respect for international treaties they signed, combined with the reach FANGs, incumbent Telco's and Banks give to scammers. Given that one of FANGs, TikTok (in practice even if not in theory) runs from within the third world even that option is fast disappearing. This law does nothing about that.

Even within the west, there's an expression from the legal profession: "you cannot get blood from a stone". It is meant to illustrate the problem that scams and most fraud are committed by people who are "on the margin" and have no money or options (almost all fraud is committed by tenants). On the margin means that while they aren't poor, even a 1000 euro judgement would make them destitute for 6 months or more. You will not get a judge to convict these people. It doesn't matter how much you legally are in the right, the justice system will refuse to destroy their lives, make them homeless, instead they will correctly point out that will achieve nothing, and leave you hanging. This is another thing you can't change. (yes, with the current attitudes if the criminal is an immigrant you may get them removed. But you still won't get your money back)

And to follow your accusatory style: is this what you want to achieve? Support scammers to advance the interests of extreme rich third-world autocrats? Because that's what you're doing.

[beej71]

The only way to definitely hold everybody accountable for all crimes is a police state.

Like Franklin said, he'd rather 100 guilty people go free rather than a single innocent person jailed. He was definitely willing to not hold some people accountable for their crimes because that was a requirement for a free state.

You said earlier that the solution was to change the laws, and this is what we're saying right now. Change the laws so that VPNs are allowed and cryptography is allowed so that we can avoid the police state.

[FirmwareBurner]

>Like Franklin said, he'd rather 100 guilty people go free rather than a single innocent person jailed.

What does this have to do with anything? All jails now have innocent people in them due to process failures. How does quoting Franklin make them feel better?

>He was definitely willing to not hold some people accountable for their crimes because that was a requirement for a free state.

If by "free sate" you mean a high crime rate state where toothpaste needs to be locked up in CVS due to criminals being let free, then yeah.

[4bpp]

> The "police state" is the one ensuring your family's safety. In our modern societies, we have outsourced the monopoly on violence to the police state, so that we can focus on work and hobbies, and that comes at the expense of trusting the state and holding it accountable through democracy.

My family is approximately infinitely more likely to be considered a "perpetrator" of a crime internet deanonymization will be used to prosecute (piracy, bad opinions, dealing in the wrong kind of crypto coins, ordering the wrong kind of chemicals from India) than to be a "victim" in our own estimation, so at least in this particular domain the "police state" is only ensuring the interests of some others, at the expense of my family's safety (which they could and would directly compromise using the violence they have monopolised).