Tag: privacy

The BBC reports that “Gordon Brown has called for the age that teenagers are prosecuted for carrying knives to be lowered from 18 to 16 in the wake of a rise in attacks.”

I don’t understand. This implies that the way the laws are currently setup, a person can legally carry a knife till they turn 18. At 18 and onward, carrying a knife is illegal. That makes no sense. Shouldn’t it be the inverse?

The whole notion of outlawing knifes seems absurd. It is our species’ first substantial technology. For better or worse, it may be argued, the knife set us down this evolutionary and cultural path. And today, the knife remains a valid tool. It is something that I use regularly in my daily life and is critical to my survival should this hyperreal, simulacra of an existence fall apart.

When I first started carrying a knife, I researched the laws in my area regarding them. The laws, collectively, are so varied and convoluted as to make them irrelevant. Today, I simply ignore them.

Why is that I can earn a license to carry a concealed gun, but cannot, under any circumstance, carry a concealed blade of a certain type or length? I would much rather someone with the intent to kill me be armed with a knife than a gun.

These violent deaths that the PM is attempting to prevent will not be mitigated by prosecuting the youth for carrying a tool. A pre-meditated murderer will not curtail his action because knives are frowned upon. A murder committed without prior thought may be executed with a pen. Or hands! Does Gordon plan to outlaw these? Perhaps his intent is to turn the UK into a population of sedate amputees?

Better they should focus on the cause of this high rate of youth crime. Perhaps it has something to do with the massive surveillance, the elimination of privacy?

Judge rules defendant can’t be forced to divulge PGP passphrase

A federal judge in Vermont has ruled that prosecutors can’t force a criminal defendant accused of having illegal images on his hard drive to divulge his PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) passphrase.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that a man charged with transporting child pornography on his laptop across the Canadian border has a Fifth Amendment right not to turn over the passphrase to prosecutors. The Fifth Amendment protects the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Niedermeier tossed out a grand jury’s subpoena that directed Sebastien Boucher to provide “any passwords” used with the Alienware laptop. “Compelling Boucher to enter the password forces him to produce evidence that could be used to incriminate him,” the judge wrote in an order dated November 29 that went unnoticed until this week. “Producing the password, as if it were a key to a locked container, forces Boucher to produce the contents of his laptop.”