Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Veratyr 4631 days ago
In the link he posted originally: "Penalty: 20 penalty units or imprisonment for one year."
1 comments

Apparently that's about $3,400 ($170 x 20): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penalty_units

A year of incarcerating someone is only worth $3,400 to the government? Strange, considering that if you're going to be pedantic about money, the cost of incarceration is surely at least one order of magnitude more than that.

It's not about how much it costs to do it, it's about the effect on the subject. $3,400 is a lot to a typical criminal.
We're talking about a particular subset of criminal/person that can afford a computer, has the knowledge and forethought to encrypt it, and is committing a type of crime/action which makes the state want to see the encrypted contents of said computer badly enough to invoke that law. I would think that someone in that subset could easily afford $3,400.