[minor_nitwit]

Not really, as part of making the law - congress needs to go through all possible interpretations and rule out the ones not in the spirit of the law one by one. Then the law is defined by its tests.

Is it okay to collect all XYZ data?

Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data?

Is it okay to collect XYZ data and hold it for X days?

Is it okay to store and index but not search a collection of XYZ data?

The law would end up saying something like -

The NSA is permitted to store and index anonymous data for a period of 10 days. Attempts to make anonymous data personal are forbidden. Data may only be accessed with a court issued warrant subject to the following conditions:...

[mayanksinghal]

> Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data? Anonymity is not binary.

- What lower level of anonymity is acceptable? Is 1 in 30 acceptable?

- What about edge cases where it becomes much lower? Say only one person in a small county has an account to a web service because it is largely targeted at people elsewhere?

- What about academic improvements that keep decreasing anonymity by improving understanding of collected data? What time limit would NSA get to update its systems in case of such improvements? What happens if the speed of academic improvements is larger than the speed of updates in NSA systems? Is the system scrapped right away?

I agree that formal definitions seem lucrative. But these aren't simplified mathematical static models that we are talking about.

[minor_nitwit]

Right, those are exactly the questions that need to be asked, discussed before implementation, and then included in the law if it passes.

What meta-data is truly anonymous and what is not? Is the agency permitted to built a tool to de-anonymize data based on academic research, or is the data in some ways protected against these tools?

They may get to the end of this process and in this instance find that such a government tool, even based on anonymous data is uncontainable, and should not be implemented. If you just grant blanket power and rely upon a courts interpretation of your two paragraph scribble to straighten things out, the intent of the law can be completely lost.

[jamieb]

Yes. This is my point. =) Only by actually working out all these details can we have just laws, and IMHO, we would discover that most of our laws are not just.

We want law that prevents criminals from breaking into banks and stealing your cash, but what we got was a law able to be used to persecute young people to the point of suicide for accessing an "open" system belonging to an educational establishment.

The laws we have now cannot do what they claim to do without being impossibly broad or impossible to implement. As was was discussed elsewhere today, the joke of a "Do what I mean" button, is that nobody, in fact, knows what they mean, and this goes exponentially so for a congress of 500 or so people.

[krapp]

But the most 'just' laws aren't always the ones least open to interpretation. Also, let's not conflate Aaron Swartz's suicide into an example of the law working as designed and intended, rather than being the result of heavy-handed interpretation intersecting with his own fragile state.

The way I look at it, making laws more and more complex and attempting to codify every possible instance is a bit like adding massive bloat to a software project for the sake of maximum backwards compatibility. Just as more lines of code introduce more bugs and increase the possible attack surface of an application, so more complex laws introduce more opportunities to manipulate and undermine those laws through legalistic means (while giving the people who have to interpret those laws on their face little leeway for context-specific interpretation.)

In Florida, to use an obvious example, the law as intended makes it legal in a certain context to kill an unarmed teenager without any ramifications, whereas firing a gun into the air can get you 40 years in prison. This is what the people of Florida wanted, and this is what their legislators gave them. America's prisons are stuffed with minor drug offenders for whom the sentencing laws were absolutely unambiguous. How complex is the tax code and how many ways are there to dance around it? Most of those holes are there on purpose.

[jacques_chester]

> Right, those are exactly the questions that need to be asked, discussed before implementation, and then included in the law if it passes.

Legislation is not the only source of law.

That said, more structured analysis is no bad thing. But it's not a panacea either. There's an existing analytical mechanism for legislation: depending on where you are, it's called "Parliament" or "Congress".

To participate, you must first be elected to that body. Or work for someone who does.

[krapp]

IANAL but I don't think it's possible to parse laws with that degree of certainty, or to determine an upper bound for "all possible interpretations," as different people can disagree as to what the "spirit" of a law is, or should be, or could be for the forseeable future.

The US Constitution is pretty straightforward, and people are still waging petty wars over individual words to wrest their idea of "intent" from the Founding Fathers. You're suggesting a formal procedure for legislation which might have some merit, but I don't think it would remove politics or human bias from the process.

[minor_nitwit]

What if laws are considered whitelists? If it's a whitelist then if not directly stated it's thrown out. This may slow the legislative process, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it was actually the founders primary goal.

Agreed that it's not a fully baked idea by any means, humans will always attempt to circumvent any system. With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to the safe that was first cracked 200 years ago.

[krapp]

With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to the safe that was first cracked 200 years ago.

Half the people whose valuables are in that safe find it perfectly adequate and would insist that any attempt to change the locks is just a blatant attempt to grab their money.

[minor_nitwit]

Do those 50% believe the system is working as intended and is not being exploited by special interests? I don't think any republican or democrat agrees with that.

[krapp]

Sure. But special interests are only a problem when they're not dumping money into your district or your next election -- when they are they become a 'vital national interest'.

My point is, both sides have a say. If you get ten mathematicians in a room, they don't have to reach a compromise between ten different self-serving definitions of pi. The law is never going to be like that.

[anigbrowl]

congress needs to go through all possible interpretations and rule out the ones not in the spirit of the law one by one

lulz, that will happen when programmers put out code that never has any bugs in it.