William Weber, a LowEndTalk member, was raided by Austrian police in 2012 for operating a Tor exit node that was allegedly used to distribute child pornography. While he was not arrested, many of his computers and devices were confiscated. He was later found guilty of supporting the distribution of child pornography through his Tor exit node, though he claims it was unintentional and he was simply supporting free speech and anonymity. He was given a 5 year probation sentence but left Austria shortly after. Though some articles portray him negatively, it is debatable whether he intentionally supported child pornography distribution or simply operated in the legal grey area of Tor exit nodes.
The charges usually end up falling onto the last one who can’t stick them onto someone else.
Like, a carrier can blame the ISP, who can blame the VPN, who can check its logs and blame an address owner, who… better keep their own logs capable of identifying someone else if they’re letting random people do random stuff using that address. And a good lawyer, and will and money to fight it.
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Is there really a realistic way to do it differently? Situations ending up in court are complex and ambiguous. It’s never a simple “if this then that” kind of thing. So in the end it’s about making arguments and convincing each other. Different people have different skills and depending how you match up, arguments are lost or won. There will always ever be a limited amount of extremely skillful people. Even if you would make sure that money isn’t a barrier, time/availability will still be and so still most people will end up with inadequate council.
If a justice system is so hard to use that only a small portion of the trained professionals can do it adequately it needs a massive overhaul. This of course is basically impossible and won’t happen. The US is a particularly bad case because of the sheer outdatedness of its constitution an court procedures.
I think most laws started out simple. Reality isn’t simple, however. And I would bet that any attempt to simplify it will be adjusted over time and will end up being just as complicated again.
I mean, the law could be simple in the sense that it basically says “don’t to stupid shit”. But then it just becomes more subjective which in the end will be even less fair.
All the complexity in the law comes from the attempts to make it as fair and objective as possible.
So if simplification isn’t a good way of making it so that poor people aren’t more likely to get screwed over in courts, what is? ~Strawberry
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It does not. In my last sentence I specifically said “Even if you would make sure that money isn’t a barrier”, which rules out capitalism. So in a system where everyone has equal access to everything, you still only have a limited amount of skilled people with the right profession. If there are currently 1000 first-degree-murder cases where life sentences are on the line, and you only have 10 extremely good lawyers … 990 people will still end up worse than the 10 that had the luck (!!) to get these 10 good lawyers assigned.
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I didn’t say “competent”, I said “extremely good”. We have hundreds of thousands of competent lawyers. But the rich can typically afford to get the absolute best there are, not “just” competent. But over-the-top competent. Lawyers who don’t just handle this case as one of many, but who put private investigators and what-not on their pay roll to get everything they need to do the absolute best for their client. Who have, on top of their experience and resources also lots of connections.
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