President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Yes, I thought that was what you were doing. I just think it's a morton's fork. Created deliberately, too, because nothing is more tried and true than calls to national security, patriotism, emotion, etc. to get people to hand over their rights without fighting it.

 

I wasn't suggesting that we shouldn't have laws making it illegal to hack someone's server and steal information off of it. That is the kind of theft I think most people would agree should be illegal. And it is, for what it is worth.

So if the question is should theft be illegal, yup, I am all for that. Whether it is vault full of money or hacking someone's server and taking information off of it.

But there are major differences between the content of John Podesta's e-mails and a safe full of money, in terms of what they are. ... if you were really equating the two things. For one, you don't have to label tangible things with innate value as "proprietary," the way you did, in order to establish their value. Hand a fistful of money to almost anyone and it has immediate value for them. Regardless of where it came from. Expose someone's e-mails to a random person, and it may or may not contain anything useful to them. More likely not, actually.

Also, if I steal money from you, I can spend it once. I can't turn that money over to everyone else on the Internet -- the way information works. Information is just a different beast. And the most important way it's different is that informs people, which makes it really vital to a functioning free society. The freedom to disseminate information is also essential to what makes a person free, too, in an age of enlightenment way.

There is a first amendment implication that has nothing to do with the theft itself. The theft you were pointing out should be illegal. Find whoever hacked the servers if you can, and we have laws to deal with that. What they did is criminal.

But if someone commits that kind of theft? It's not as simple as just returning the stolen property, once the information gets disseminated -- perhaps by someone who didn't commit the theft itself. The cat is out of the bag. And if you try to criminalize the act of having disseminated that information, after the fact, a la going after Julian Assange? I really don't want our government anywhere near being able to stifle information based on grounds like that. It gets abused -- history is full of us bumping up against this one.