Comment by krapp
13 years ago
The problem with this is, human beings don't blindly interpret and process laws as code. Human beings can honestly differ in their interpretation of a law, and the accepted interpretation can change over time.
Some one, or some body, would have to decide what the 'proper' interpretation of these laws would be, and craft the 'unit tests' such that they correspond to the status quo. Then that someone or some body would have to ensure that anyone who disagrees with that interpretation gets put down. What you're describing seems like a particularly technocratic form of fascism to me.
Not really, as part of making the law - congress needs to go through all possible interpretations and rule out the ones not in the spirit of the law one by one. Then the law is defined by its tests.
Is it okay to collect all XYZ data?
Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data?
Is it okay to collect XYZ data and hold it for X days?
Is it okay to store and index but not search a collection of XYZ data?
The law would end up saying something like -
The NSA is permitted to store and index anonymous data for a period of 10 days. Attempts to make anonymous data personal are forbidden. Data may only be accessed with a court issued warrant subject to the following conditions:...
> Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data? Anonymity is not binary.
- What lower level of anonymity is acceptable? Is 1 in 30 acceptable?
- What about edge cases where it becomes much lower? Say only one person in a small county has an account to a web service because it is largely targeted at people elsewhere?
- What about academic improvements that keep decreasing anonymity by improving understanding of collected data? What time limit would NSA get to update its systems in case of such improvements? What happens if the speed of academic improvements is larger than the speed of updates in NSA systems? Is the system scrapped right away?
I agree that formal definitions seem lucrative. But these aren't simplified mathematical static models that we are talking about.
Right, those are exactly the questions that need to be asked, discussed before implementation, and then included in the law if it passes.
What meta-data is truly anonymous and what is not? Is the agency permitted to built a tool to de-anonymize data based on academic research, or is the data in some ways protected against these tools?
They may get to the end of this process and in this instance find that such a government tool, even based on anonymous data is uncontainable, and should not be implemented. If you just grant blanket power and rely upon a courts interpretation of your two paragraph scribble to straighten things out, the intent of the law can be completely lost.
3 replies →
IANAL but I don't think it's possible to parse laws with that degree of certainty, or to determine an upper bound for "all possible interpretations," as different people can disagree as to what the "spirit" of a law is, or should be, or could be for the forseeable future.
The US Constitution is pretty straightforward, and people are still waging petty wars over individual words to wrest their idea of "intent" from the Founding Fathers. You're suggesting a formal procedure for legislation which might have some merit, but I don't think it would remove politics or human bias from the process.
What if laws are considered whitelists? If it's a whitelist then if not directly stated it's thrown out. This may slow the legislative process, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it was actually the founders primary goal.
Agreed that it's not a fully baked idea by any means, humans will always attempt to circumvent any system. With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to the safe that was first cracked 200 years ago.
3 replies →
congress needs to go through all possible interpretations and rule out the ones not in the spirit of the law one by one
lulz, that will happen when programmers put out code that never has any bugs in it.