The entire US Code is now online in XML • Hacker News Board

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#171

Post by krapp » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:10 AM UTC

jamieb wrote: post #163

minor_nitwit wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, those are exactly the questions that need to be asked, discussed before implementation, and then included in the law if it passes. What meta-data is truly anonymous and what is not? Is the agency permitted to built a tool to de-anonymize data based on academic research, or is the data in some ways protected against these tools? They may get to the end of this process and in this instance find that such a gover…

Yes. This is my point. =) Only by actually working out all these details can we have just laws, and IMHO, we would discover that most of our laws are not just. We want law that prevents criminals from breaking into banks and stealing your cash, but what we got was a law able to be used to persecute young people to the point of suicide for accessing an "open" system belonging to an educational establishment. The laws…

But the most 'just' laws aren't always the ones least open to interpretation. Also, let's not conflate Aaron Swartz's suicide into an example of the law working as designed and intended, rather than being the result of heavy-handed interpretation intersecting with his own fragile state.

The way I look at it, making laws more and more complex and attempting to codify every possible instance is a bit like adding massive bloat to a software project for the sake of maximum backwards compatibility. Just as more lines of code introduce more bugs and increase the possible attack surface of an application, so more complex laws introduce more opportunities to manipulate and undermine those laws through legalistic means (while giving the people who have to interpret those laws on their face little leeway for context-specific interpretation.)

In Florida, to use an obvious example, the law as intended makes it legal in a certain context to kill an unarmed teenager without any ramifications, whereas firing a gun into the air can get you 40 years in prison. This is what the people of Florida wanted, and this is what their legislators gave them. America's prisons are stuffed with minor drug offenders for whom the sentencing laws were absolutely unambiguous. How complex is the tax code and how many ways are there to dance around it? Most of those holes are there on purpose.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#172

Post by mpyne » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:12 AM UTC

thwarted wrote: post #121

lobotryas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make this sound like a bad thing. Would you really prefer "black and white" laws that leave zero room for flexibility or interpretation in light of a given situation?

This preference isn't even black and white. One quote that sticks in my mind is this one from P.J. O'Rourke in Parliament of Whores, concerning Ken Starr's written position on a flag-desecration law: Congress had "acted narrowly." (That is, the law is very specific, and you can't be arrested for having a smart look on your face near the flag or anything like that—which is good because being specific is the essence of…

> The law should be written as "it's a crime to kill someone" (although, that may be too specific, and a more appropriate wording may be "it's a crime to rob someone of their life and livelihood")

Either of your examples would involve me still technically breaking the law if I kill someone while trying to save myself from being murdered by that person, even if I do eventually receive a lenient sentence.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#173

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:13 AM UTC

jamieb wrote: post #105

lobotryas wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make this sound like a bad thing. Would you really prefer "black and white" laws that leave zero room for flexibility or interpretation in light of a given situation?

Yes, we should have black and white laws, and unit tests for them. So someone could write a unit test for "Will this allow the NSA to create a secret court that is outside the rule of law?" or "Does accessing a university computer that has an open access policy allow for a sentence of 130 years?" I believe we'd see a lot simpler laws.

> I believe we'd see a lot simpler laws.

Only if you model the domain with fuzzy logic. Otherwise you have a combinatorial explosion of specific definitions.

And guess what? That's already how the law works:

"Reasonable person similarly circumstanced".

"Beyond reasonable doubt".

"Balance of probabilities".

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#174

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:15 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #76

rayiner wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interpretation isn't an unguided, irrational process. When your lawyer answers "it depends" its because you've placed him at one point in what's really a decision tree and asked him: "where does it end?" It's like asking a programmer whether a particular token in a C++ program is a type name or an identifier. It depends. If you imagine the universe of human activity as a multi-dimensional space, you can think of laws…

For the answer, see my future law review paper "A complete multi dimensional polytope model of US law"

I'm not writing one of those either :-)

...although there's been some interesting work from Dan Katz at UMich summarizing progress in this area http://computationallegalstudies.com/

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#175

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:16 AM UTC

minor_nitwit wrote: post #160

mayanksinghal wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data? Anonymity is not binary. - What lower level of anonymity is acceptable? Is 1 in 30 acceptable? - What about edge cases where it becomes much lower? Say only one person in a small county has an account to a web service because it is largely targeted at people elsewhere? - What about academic improvements that keep decreasing anonymity by improving understanding of collected…

Right, those are exactly the questions that need to be asked, discussed before implementation, and then included in the law if it passes. What meta-data is truly anonymous and what is not? Is the agency permitted to built a tool to de-anonymize data based on academic research, or is the data in some ways protected against these tools? They may get to the end of this process and in this instance find that such a gover…

> Right, those are exactly the questions that need to be asked, discussed before implementation, and then included in the law if it passes.

Legislation is not the only source of law.

That said, more structured analysis is no bad thing. But it's not a panacea either. There's an existing analytical mechanism for legislation: depending on where you are, it's called "Parliament" or "Congress".

To participate, you must first be elected to that body. Or work for someone who does.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#176

Post by anigbrowl » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:17 AM UTC

minor_nitwit wrote: post #146

krapp wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is, human beings don't blindly interpret and process laws as code. Human beings can honestly differ in their interpretation of a law, and the accepted interpretation can change over time. Some one, or some body, would have to decide what the 'proper' interpretation of these laws would be, and craft the 'unit tests' such that they correspond to the status quo. Then that someone or some body would…

Not really, as part of making the law - congress needs to go through all possible interpretations and rule out the ones not in the spirit of the law one by one. Then the law is defined by its tests. Is it okay to collect all XYZ data? Is it okay to collect anonymous XYZ data? Is it okay to collect XYZ data and hold it for X days? Is it okay to store and index but not search a collection of XYZ data? The law would end…

congress needs to go through all possible interpretations and rule out the ones not in the spirit of the law one by one

lulz, that will happen when programmers put out code that never has any bugs in it.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#177

Post by krapp » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:20 AM UTC

minor_nitwit wrote: post #165

krapp wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL but I don't think it's possible to parse laws with that degree of certainty, or to determine an upper bound for "all possible interpretations," as different people can disagree as to what the "spirit" of a law is, or should be, or could be for the forseeable future. The US Constitution is pretty straightforward, and people are still waging petty wars over individual words to wrest their idea of "intent" from th…

What if laws are considered whitelists? If it's a whitelist then if not directly stated it's thrown out. This may slow the legislative process, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, it was actually the founders primary goal. Agreed that it's not a fully baked idea by any means, humans will always attempt to circumvent any system. With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to…

With that in mind, you may say that rather than designing a better system, we stick to the safe that was first cracked 200 years ago.

Half the people whose valuables are in that safe find it perfectly adequate and would insist that any attempt to change the locks is just a blatant attempt to grab their money.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#178

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:23 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #63

ChuckMcM wrote: post #36

This is pretty awesome, and if it were in git/hg would have the ability to write a 'blame' tool to figure out who voted on the part of the law that is pissing you off :-)

Actually, you wouldn't. This is the US code, not the legislative info :) I actually tried to create this once (with a team behind me, in fact) with what's available or possible with the legislative info. THOMAS theoretically published in XML, but it's missing a lot of info. Not only is this info not published, it's not even stored. They still are literally passing bills around to each other in some cases. You'd have…

The US system of legislative development is quite flawed. There are a lot of places where changes can be made without attribution, emerging from committees without saying who added what.

In most Parliamentary democracies you can only propose amendments from one of the two chambers, so any amendment can always be traced to the Parliamentarian who moved it.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#179

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:24 AM UTC

BenoitEssiambre wrote: post #94

bjr- wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law can be interpreted as a set of rules matched against an action in a particular context to determine whether said action is legal. Right now lots of people do this manually. Maybe computers can do it better. If computers can do it better, maybe people could focus on writing new laws and refactoring old ones instead of repeatedly interpreting old laws for each case.

Yup, legal code isn't that different from computer code where a judge is the interpreter and evidence is fed as input. If we could invent a computer interpreter that acts as a judge, laws and contracts being its code might make it obvious to lawyers why it doesn't make sense to allow code to be patented. Every time lawyers would write laws or contracts they would have to avoid using legal ideas that have already been…

> I guess I should patent that invention.

Your comment above would potentially count as disclosure. I and probably others have previously used the black-box analogy too.

Re: The entire US Code is now online in XML

#180

Post by jacques_chester » Thu, Aug 01, 2013, 1:30 AM UTC

liscovich wrote: post #138

rmc wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually countries inherit the laws from the country they are decended from.

True, but what would it look like in the future? Would you just fork a repo?

You just say that the laws in force on a particular date apply locally, minus anything that physically can't apply (eg laws about particular locations).

The law of every country in the English-speaking world started that way. Australia's current system of law, for example, commenced as a branch of British law on 26 January 1788. All the laws in force in Britain at that moment were presumed to apply; laws governing institutions and issues peculiar to Britain-as-a-place just weren't of any consequence.

Periodically you go into the collection and clear it out. In Australia in the 80s and 90s there was a law reform movement and as a positive side-effect enormous research was done to discover the true coverage of "Imperial" laws still technically in force. Our various Parliaments passed various Acts to repeal and replace old laws.

For example, where I come from, in the Northern Territory, the Law of Property Act repealed laws going all the way back to shortly after the Norman conquest.