How Will Law Continue to Affect Technology?

WPL510 asks: "I'm writing an article on how law impacts technology and vice versa, and would like to get the opinions of those who use technology every day. So- which laws have most affected your use of technology? Which have tried and failed? Does anyone else foresee any other possible, as yet unknown, problems posed by new technology (just as Diamond's Rio showed the holes in the AHRA)?"

Comments

Laws fuel counter attacks

[cluge]

One thing that laws fuel is technologies to fight silly laws. For instance, RADAR detectors. The police tend to enforece speed limits as a revenue source first, and for saftey second. Technology gives me a fighting chance, to know where that cop is (Under the bush ten feet past the speed limit change from 45 to 30 when the road goes from 2 lanes to four makes no sense).

I think encryption, spread spectrum wireless and other technologies are responses to governments policing (or repressing depending on your opinion)

It's sad, but in the ever present "WAR ON DRUGS" a lot of civil liberties have been thrown to the way side. In the 1930's a "no knock warrant" would have been laughed out of court. Police dressing up in Ninja suits would have cause a public outrage, but not today. The police say they need more information, and thus more weapons. The pursuit of this information and weaposn fuels some technology.

THen there is the other side of the coin. Drug dealers (if they are smart) employ technology to try and stay one step ahead of the police. Anti-bugging technology super fast scanners and so forth are fueled by concerns that people are being "listened in on". Thousands on boats that have low radar profiles and good top speeds. They even use the "Internet" to communicate which technoliges are successful with each other.

In these examples the Law is fueling a duel between police and drug dealers. So far with BILLIONS wasted, and numerous lives lost the battle still rages on. We could legalize drugs and get off this silly damn merry go round but that would stop the people that are making a profit and doing the R&D into NEW technologies, curtail the DEA's budget and put thousands of hard working drug dealers out of work. (Excuse the run on sentence :)

Just one example of laws fueling technology

The law provides a profit motive for some technologies. Some of the highest profit motive is for technologies that allow people to "skirt" the law.

How will technology affect the law?

[Randseed]

Perhaps a better question is how technology will affect the law. The government and sheeple can pass all the laws that they want, but unless they can enforce them the laws aren't worth much, particularly if they're so stupid that people won't follow them just because "it's the law."

For example, I'll focus on pornography because it's everywhere and has been a hot issue. Porn has always been around. When the camera was invented, people whined about porn there. When the VCR was invented, people whined about people having or buying porn tapes. (Ironically, porn is one of the reasons that VCRs got so much market penetration so fast...pardon the pun.) When the camcorder was invented, there was complaining that people were using it to tape their sex romps.

For some reason when it gets to computers, people freak out more than usual. When BBSes became popular, people were being jailed (e.g. Amateur Action BBS). When the Internet became popular, the news media, public, and political scum went nuts, passed laws like the Communications Decency Act, made hit-and-run attacks on the Internet such as the "computer pedophile" episode of NBC's "Crusaders" back around 1995.

But look at the change in culture between, say, the mid-80s and the year 2000 in America. Sex is nowhere near as taboo as it was. "Alternative sexualities" (sexual orientiations as well as things like bondage) are tolerated and practiced far more mainstream. It's discussed more openly. It's more prevalent in movies and on TV. This is a pretty massive change. (As a side note, you can tell how tolerated sex has become by observing how readily people like Dr. Laura freak out.

Of course, banning pornography was hard already. Banning it in the future will be nearly impossible with file sharing networks like Freenet. For better or worse, I expect that technology will have some of these effects over the next few years:

Restricting things like child pornography will rapidly become very difficult, if not impossible. (The legality and ethics of this is a completely separate issue, which is more complicated than most people think, involving things like different ages of consent in different countries.)

Intellectual property, in the form of software, music, and video, will rapidly become obsolete. New market models will have to be developed.

Strong cryptography will become more commonplace.

Many "undernets" will spring up across the Internet which use strong cryptography, tunnelling, and have their own email, news, and other systems. I know for a fact that this has already happened, and they have restricted access and fairly complex entrance systems. An infinitely more mainstream but very watered-down version of this is Gnutella.

In these cases, the law could try, but they can't readily enforce, just like they can't readily enforce laws against having sex in positions other than the missionary position. They can't regulate what they can't see. In the latter case, it's your house, curtains, or whatever. In the case of the Internet and technology, it's cryptography, systems like Freenet, and plain old practicality.