[marshray]

NOTE: This is what is called a 'rhetorical question'. I'm not trolling.

> Shouldn't he be able to use it as he sees fit?

Say it ends up in the wheelhouse of an old oil tanker and the Captain prefers its GPS and maps application to the 1980s-era thing built in to the ship. If the legitimate owner of the laptop "saw fit" to modify the displayed GPS coordinates such that a catastrophe ensued, "shouldn't" he be able to do that?

After all, it's not his fault that a coastline packed with baby seals was standing in front of it.

[freehunter]

That gets into the territory of intent. If he intended to crash the ship, then it's illegal. If, in the normal course of working on his laptop, he changed the map's endpoint to somewhere else (say, the local Wal Mart), he did not intend to crash the ship.

Is Dom intending to cause harm with these pictures? Is he actually causing harm? Those are the relevant questions.

[marshray]

Right, so it's all about the intent.

But for a portable 'personal' computer like this Mac laptop, it's difficult to "use it as one sees fit" in the normal way when it's in Iran. Sure, it's possible he could make a remote connection and continue to edit documents on it or something. But in practice Dom is unlikely to get any real utility out of it by treating it as cloud server in the hands of untrusted parties. We probably all agree that Dom should be free to recover and wipe his own data from it, but that's purely an attempt to cut his losses rather than derive further "use".

So Dom continuing "to use it as he sees fit" is not really possible. Nearly everything Dom can do remotely to this computer will be inseparable from his intent with respect to effects on these other parties.