You Are Not a Lawyer

Paul Ohm is starting a new "very occasional" feature on the Freedom To Tinker blog called You Are Not a Lawyer — "In this series, I will try to disabuse computer scientists and other technically minded people of some commonly held misconceptions about the law (and the legal system)." In the first installment, Ohm walks through the reasons why many techies' faith in the presence of "reasonable doubt" is so misplaced. "When techies think about criminal law, and in particular crimes committed online, they tend to fixate on [the 'beyond a reasonable doubt'] legal standard, dreaming up ways people can use technology to inject doubt into the evidence to avoid being convicted. I can't count how many conversations I have had with techies about things like the 'open wireless access point defense,' the 'trojaned computer defense,' the 'NAT-ted firewall defense,' and the 'dynamic IP address defense.' ... People who place stock in these theories and tools are neglecting an important drawback. There are another set of legal standards — the legal standards governing search and seizure — you should worry about long before you ever get to 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'"

Comments

Re:Ohm's Law?

[discord5]

Sounds like the piece should be called "Ohm's Law".

Since he deals with a lot of techies, I'm sure that he's heard that joke only about a thousand times. This reminds me of a kid I used to go to school with whose name literally translated to "Out of the pants" (don't ask, Dutch names are a hoot) and his parents (presumable the father heavily intoxicated from celebrating his sons birth, and his mother heavily sedated) decided that it would a great idea to call him the local equivalent of the name "Willy".

Every time he introduced himself, people started laughing or made a joke that he'd heard a thousand times. He would then feign being amused, but you knew it annoyed him to a certain extent, which in turn amused everyone who knew him long enough to have heard the joke a couple of times.

Woe are the children of parents with a sense of humor. It's one of the few times that it's apropriate to actually feel sorry for someone while thinking "That's actually pretty funny" at the same time.

Re:Wow! Who ever would have guessed that!?

[theaceoffire]

Actually yes, a whole lot of people who call themselves techies are stupid. They also think they are far more intelligent then they are. On top of that, many who call themselves techies believe they are so far above blue collar 'mouth breathers' that with very little work they can completely confuse them. I mean, hell, you just did something similar here. You assumed that the article writer must be an idiot because, well, you said so. Go ahead and rethink your logic and consider that perhaps something happened, maybe even several times, that prompted the writer to write what he did. Most people are idiots, that they call themselves a techie doesn't change that.

I love your signature.