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by matheusmoreira·8y ago·view on hn ↗
I think it's strange how citizens are fined and jailed when they crack other people's computers but it's legal and necessary when the state does it. Apparently, they maintain vulnerability stockpiles.
1 comments
If you see it that way, it seems unfair. But if you look closer, you'll see that it is at least consistent with other qualities of the state and it's agents, namely that only state agents are allowed to do certain things like, for example, to judge a trial and execute the verdict. If those rights were equally held by individuals, you'd end up with the chaos of people not recognizing each other's jurisdictions. (Perhaps there is a middle-ground, e.g. something like classic anarchism that allows for tiny, hyper-local states. But even micro-states must interact with each other in ordered ways for the system to work.)

"Cracking someone's computer" is, these days, equivalent to acquiring total surveillance on them, past present and future. So yeah, personally I'm very okay with this being illegal, and I'm not really okay with the state doing it either. It's not actually like wire-tapping, it's more like acquiring panopticon with perfect memory over the lifetime of the target, and it seems to me with such a power you could find countless illegal activity in virtually everyone's life.