-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Eric says ``... legal hacking is almost a necessity.'' Perry says ``You can't do legal hacks in an environment like this. It doesn't work.'' Delicious dichotomy. Here are the more extended contexts: At Wed, 18 May 94 12:13:28 -0700 hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes) wrote
Legal hacking is a lot of fun. Prerequisites are a humility to learn the structure of legal argument and access to legal materials. The study guides for law students are generally excellent introductions to the subject. Access to a law library is also useful for looking up statute and decisions, but not essential, although reading at least a few decisions is necessary for ensuring an understanding of the social process involved in the creation of law.
And if what you want to accomplish with your computer hacking requires, for implementation, something outside the computer hardware and networks, legal hacking is almost a necessity.
But at Sun, 07 Aug 1994 08:24:57 -0400 "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com> wrote
The bureaucrats aren't going to want digicash, so they are going to find plenty of excuses to prohibit it. You can't do legal hacks in an environment like this. It doesn't work. If the bureaucrats don't like you, they shut you down, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it, period.
True, you can leave the country and do your business there -- I know several hedge funds that already refuse to take any customers from the U.S. because they don't want the headaches, and there are other similar things happening in lots of other parts of the financial industry. However, don't think you can finesse the folks at the Fed, the IRS, the Treasury, and the SEC -- they are monsters, and they won't be stopped by the courts.
What differing views of ``legal hacking''! It would be wonderful if society's response to legal hacking had more of the predictability of computer hacking. But there are a hundred million constituents out there (the power behind Perry's ``monsters'') who gratuitously accept government benefits. Such a person doesn't gladly suffer any legal technicality standing between him and the pound of your flesh to which he thinks he's entitled. If you can prove that the law permits you to keep your pound, then he and his majority allies will simply change the law, requiring the IRS to collect it from you after all. This inclines me to accept Perry's cynical skepticism that legal hacking can do any good. On the other hand, Eric demonstrates time and again that his remarks are not made lightly. In this case, they bear on the prospects for the ``State Citizen'' movement that seems to be so emergent these days. I wonder how he would respond to Perry here. John E. Kreznar | Relations among people to be by jkreznar@ininx.com | mutual consent, or not at all. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLkdKgcDhz44ugybJAQFj5gP+IMMUdQLMY8vqG4pcmNGAroSNIxvkXlbE rSIIbR3wZddeWLxNBsK+pMT8Le3RLRqQa7bRI8MVgEed23VAmpccAn8tiLsQOzSq MdUbuFIrI7MY/t3ov0fE6pWBvoZb345g0ZH83F5EZcU9NARNp6wsVDBA2bs9aQ9d 7cz/P4kxJHQ= =JBcR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Such a person doesn't gladly suffer any legal technicality standing between him and the pound of your flesh to which he thinks he's entitled. On the other hand, if you can convince them that they don't have to contribute their pound of flesh likewise, they'll take that opportunity. I wonder how he would respond to Perry here. Well, Perry's right too, in that the amount of arbitrariness is enormous and that makes it _extremely_ challenging. I point out that one outlet for legal hacking is the legislature. Some things are cut and dried. Many more aren't. For example, the SEC has no jurisdiction on commercial paper of duration nine months or less, by statute. So that gets rid of one hurdle, if you can ensure that your devices are considered commercial paper. Using wording and agreements which are close analogues of commercial paper will help. [Aside: This is a practical failing with Chaum's digicash, is that it, being relatively uninterpreted mathematics, can be _called_ all sorts of stuff, some of which fall under more regulation than others. The regulators, of course, will pick the interpretation which gives them the most control.] So perhaps now you don't have to worry about the SEC. There are four regulators of banks in the USA, plus general regulation of commerce. Lots and lots of obstacles to avoid. And it's easy, easy, easy to overlook something. In addition, much regulatory power has be statutorily ceded to the regulators. In don't think I can stress this enough, because the regulators make rules which have the statutory force of law. The regulators can change or extend these rules _at will_. You won't get much warning, if you get any at all. Therefore, you want to avoid the purview of the regulators entirely, if possible. Moving offshore is one way. Performing substantive activity in another way also works, but that usually just means switching regulators. You can, for example, transfer value by moving stocks and bonds, that puts you under the SEC; you could also transfer value by moving real estate, and that's another set of law. Legal hacking is not easy. Syntactic hacks, for example, don't work. The whole bit with "self-incriminating pass phrases" is a syntactic hack; it doesn't work because it does not touch upon the substance of the law. Moving activity to another jurisdiction is not a syntactic hack, and it works because jurisdiction is legally significant. Eric
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