I fat-fingered my moderation and accidentally modded parent down when I meant to mod +1 Insightful. I couldn't figure out how to undo my moderation, so I decided to post in the thread to cancel it out.
Sorry about that.
I'm reasonably knowledgeable about cryptography, and I'm a lawyer. That's one of the most powerful and succinct arguments for Fifth Amendment protection of passphrases that I've ever heard. I wish I had mod points.
It should be pointed out that sometimes these tracking features (such as OnStar) can be used in ways that actually do not serve the interests of the government.
For instance, in my jurisdiction, police recently set up a sting operation designed to catch car thieves. Undercover agents set up a storefront for purchasing stolen cars, and collected dozens of vehicles over about a half-year period. When car thieves would come in to sell the cars, they would be paid in marked bills, and the undercover agents would drive the cars into a hidden parking deck.
The agents didn't want to blow their cover early, though, so they didn't immediately return the stolen cars. (After all, in their minds, catching criminals was considerably more important than returning stolen property.) They left the vast majority of the recovered vehicles in the hidden parking deck for months, without ever notifying the victims that their property had been recovered. This, of course, translated into a significant financial loss for the victims (and their insurance companies).
There was one class of victims, however, who got their cars back in short order -- the ones whose vehicles were equipped with OnStar. When asked by law enforcement to keep the operation secret from the vehicle owners so as not to hinder the sting operation, OnStar flatly refused, notifying police that they would immediately provide the GPS coordinates of the missing vehicles to their customers so that the customers could begin legal actions to recover them. Faced with this problem, the undercovers immediately drove the OnStar-equipped cars out to an abandoned lot and then anonymously notified local law enforcement that they had been discovered.
The cars that were not so equipped sat in the hidden deck until after the entire sting operation had concluded.
You made me curious, so I just read the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code. I don't think that you are correct in your statement of the law. Neither Section 419, Section 419A, Section 419B, nor any of their subsections establishes any such sort of affirmative defense. The language of the statute looks pretty similar to most other fraud statutes, and is rather unremarkable: http://www.nigeria-law.org/Criminal%20Code%20Act-Part%20VI%20%20to%20the%20end.htm
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I fat-fingered my moderation and accidentally modded parent down when I meant to mod +1 Insightful. I couldn't figure out how to undo my moderation, so I decided to post in the thread to cancel it out. Sorry about that.
I'm reasonably knowledgeable about cryptography, and I'm a lawyer. That's one of the most powerful and succinct arguments for Fifth Amendment protection of passphrases that I've ever heard. I wish I had mod points.
It should be pointed out that sometimes these tracking features (such as OnStar) can be used in ways that actually do not serve the interests of the government. For instance, in my jurisdiction, police recently set up a sting operation designed to catch car thieves. Undercover agents set up a storefront for purchasing stolen cars, and collected dozens of vehicles over about a half-year period. When car thieves would come in to sell the cars, they would be paid in marked bills, and the undercover agents would drive the cars into a hidden parking deck. The agents didn't want to blow their cover early, though, so they didn't immediately return the stolen cars. (After all, in their minds, catching criminals was considerably more important than returning stolen property.) They left the vast majority of the recovered vehicles in the hidden parking deck for months, without ever notifying the victims that their property had been recovered. This, of course, translated into a significant financial loss for the victims (and their insurance companies). There was one class of victims, however, who got their cars back in short order -- the ones whose vehicles were equipped with OnStar. When asked by law enforcement to keep the operation secret from the vehicle owners so as not to hinder the sting operation, OnStar flatly refused, notifying police that they would immediately provide the GPS coordinates of the missing vehicles to their customers so that the customers could begin legal actions to recover them. Faced with this problem, the undercovers immediately drove the OnStar-equipped cars out to an abandoned lot and then anonymously notified local law enforcement that they had been discovered. The cars that were not so equipped sat in the hidden deck until after the entire sting operation had concluded.
You made me curious, so I just read the relevant section of the Nigerian criminal code. I don't think that you are correct in your statement of the law. Neither Section 419, Section 419A, Section 419B, nor any of their subsections establishes any such sort of affirmative defense. The language of the statute looks pretty similar to most other fraud statutes, and is rather unremarkable: http://www.nigeria-law.org/Criminal%20Code%20Act-Part%20VI%20%20to%20the%20end.htm