Hi Crispin, Your points are well taken.
I would go further in that the laws must be simple and logical enough that it is possible to comply with and no booby traps in enforcement occur nor does a law stay on the books unenforced. In addition there has to be protection for those who fight a law that they feel is unjust such that if they are wrong, they do not get punished more harshly than if they had not fought the law. There is a famous case in Boston where 5 one way streets all pointed to a central point so the only way out was to go wrong way on a one way street. The cops wrote a lot of tickets and got away with it until a motorist finally said enough and fought it. The first cop who was told by a motorist that it wasn't fair because of the way the signs were had an obligation to look then and see if the facts were true and then make sure that something happened to keep the social peace between the police and the populace. And then, too, there is Anatole France's famous quote about the majesty of the law and bridges. Best, Allen Had he lost, given the tendencies of our legal system, it would have cost him more that the standard fine. Crispin Cowan wrote: > Patrick Cahalan wrote: >> On the other hand, I cannot countenance 1 guilty murderer going free to >> protect 1 innocent parking scofflaw. >> > If they are actually innocent, then they are not scofflaws, eh? > > One big problem with convicting the innocent is that it is unjust. > > A worse problem is that it causes people to perceive the law as unjust, > and then they stop caring about it, and commit much worse crimes. > > So if we allow the law to convict the innocent, we cause more lawlessness. > > OTOH, if we allow the law to let the guilty go free, we also cause > lawlessness. > > I expect this is a dynamic optimization problem :) but I've said that > before: > > "Timing the Application of Security Patches for Optimal Uptime". > Steve Beattie, Seth Arnold, Crispin Cowan, Perry Wagle, Chris > Wright, and Adam Shostack. Presented at the USENIX 16^th Systems > Administration Conference (LISA 2002) > <http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa02>, Philadelphia, PA, December > 2002. Postscript > <http://crispincowan.com/%7Ecrispin/time-to-patch-usenix-lisa02.ps.gz>. > or ugly PDF > <http://crispincowan.com/%7Ecrispin/time-to-patch-usenix-lisa02.pdf>. > > You get the same problem in intrusion detection systems, where if they > are not sensitive enough, you miss intrusions, but if they are too > sensitive, users ignore them. > > This problem occurs over and over when ever you have flaky sensors or > imperfect knowledge. > > Crispin > _______________________________________________ FDE mailing list [email protected] http://www.xml-dev.com/mailman/listinfo/fde
