> Yep, making it illegal to pay the ransom is a good way to stop people from having that choice. If police themselves are paying a ransom, that might make it hard to make it illegal.
Ransoming itself is already illegal and yet people still have the choice to do it.
Why would making paying the ransom illegal remove the choice to do it?
> You don't need to get the proportion to 0 to help people. Reducing the proportion is helpful. If you reduce the amount of people paying (say you convince half the population that it's immoral to pay), the ransomware gangs will be less profitable, and will invest less money in ransomware and thus less people will be attacked.
It's something that's trivial to automate which produces positive cash flow, which makes it something approaching a thermodynamic impossibility to prevent from happening.
We made spamming illegal. Most of what is spammed is already illegal. So there's no spam anymore, right?
The policy suggested produces obviously absurd outcomes when applied to plausible scenarios.
It does more harm than good, and is an emotional knee jerk which does not survive rational analysis.
Ransoming itself is already illegal and yet people still have the choice to do it.
Why would making paying the ransom illegal remove the choice to do it?
> You don't need to get the proportion to 0 to help people. Reducing the proportion is helpful. If you reduce the amount of people paying (say you convince half the population that it's immoral to pay), the ransomware gangs will be less profitable, and will invest less money in ransomware and thus less people will be attacked.
It's something that's trivial to automate which produces positive cash flow, which makes it something approaching a thermodynamic impossibility to prevent from happening.
We made spamming illegal. Most of what is spammed is already illegal. So there's no spam anymore, right?
The policy suggested produces obviously absurd outcomes when applied to plausible scenarios.
It does more harm than good, and is an emotional knee jerk which does not survive rational analysis.