The question that I have every time I read about something similar to this is not about the law itself, but about the human who's applying the law: how/ why/ what is the line of thought that would lead them to (supposedly) knowingly do something like this? I realize that processes, bureaucracy and generally abstraction can allow people to do less than desirable behaviours, but I can't quite figure out which abstraction that would encourage people to do things like that (note: with the term "abstraction", I meant that by using incentives or measuring the wrong intermediate metrics, we've created a wrong set of objectives, which might be completely misaligned with the actual goal we're trying to achieve).
Laws are complex set of statements, which naturally will have more accidentally complexity as they're developed, a phenomenon that hackers are extremely familiar with. That's something to be expected. On the other hand, human, abusing the accidental complexity of law, is not ideal - as anything else, there should be place and time for trickery, but not the SOP.
That said, what's the rationale for the behaviour of law enforcement officer in pursuing various type of trap-y actions?
- Do LEO routinely believes that everyone they investigate to be committing the crime. Do we have a good priori of P(criminal | under investigation) that would support this?
- Did we actually manage to create a powerful enough abstractions that let actors within the system to, well, behave psychopathically (ie. this button should be pushed because I'm supposed to do that, I don't really know what happen behind it)?
- Trickery are generally being reported out of proportion, and should not be a general concern for the the majority of us.
- Malicious intention -- I will assume this percentage to be not higher than those from a general population.
Laws are complex set of statements, which naturally will have more accidentally complexity as they're developed, a phenomenon that hackers are extremely familiar with. That's something to be expected. On the other hand, human, abusing the accidental complexity of law, is not ideal - as anything else, there should be place and time for trickery, but not the SOP.
That said, what's the rationale for the behaviour of law enforcement officer in pursuing various type of trap-y actions?
- Do LEO routinely believes that everyone they investigate to be committing the crime. Do we have a good priori of P(criminal | under investigation) that would support this?
- Did we actually manage to create a powerful enough abstractions that let actors within the system to, well, behave psychopathically (ie. this button should be pushed because I'm supposed to do that, I don't really know what happen behind it)?
- Trickery are generally being reported out of proportion, and should not be a general concern for the the majority of us.
- Malicious intention -- I will assume this percentage to be not higher than those from a general population.