[melville_X]

France temporarily made undercover police work illegal until the mid 2000s. That would be an interesting study.

But either way, there are obvious risks in this type of law enforcement. The vast, vast majority of humans are capable of committing crimes. This is why thought-crimes are so dangerous when they start being enforced because everyone is guilty. People flirt with the idea of crime but that capability is rarely utilized. The line one has to cross to commit a crime is high for most people, but there is a significant portion of the population where it is much smaller (poor people or people with lesser intelligence).

LE is overly consumed with making their careers on the back of latter portion of the population to the point where they covertly push them hard to commit crimes. While the intelligent criminals conducting sophisticated plots usually get away with it because noone wants to do the legwork involved.

(deleted my other comment which was not-HN quality).

[danielweber]

Almost all American laws are "thought" laws.

In the US, if I pick up your property and walk away, I need to have an intent to permanently deprive you of it for it to be theft. (Obviously state law has particulars here.)

Strict liability -- where it's illegal for me to do X no matter what I was thinking -- is the exception. It's a growing exception, and that is unfortunate, but that speaks to the opposite of your narrative.

The fact that the prosecution has to show state of mind, rather than that some serious of actions happened, is a good thing, not a bad thing.

EDIT I changed the example in the second graf away from talking about car theft to avoid weird exceptions

[AnthonyMouse]

There is a difference between the prosecution having to prove intent as an element of the crime and having the totality of the offense be intent on its own, or the offense being some collection of innocuous actions that cause no harm to anyone on their own but happen to be correlated with undesired activity.