legal hacking

[jkreznar@ininx.com (John E. Kreznar)]

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Eric says

	``... legal hacking is almost a necessity.''

Perry says

	``You can't do legal hacks in an environment like this. It
	doesn't work.''

Delicious dichotomy.  Here are the more extended contexts:

At Wed, 18 May 94 12:13:28 -0700 hughes@ah.com (Eric Hughes) wrote

> Legal hacking is a lot of fun.  Prerequisites are a humility to learn
> the structure of legal argument and access to legal materials.  The
> study guides for law students are generally excellent introductions to
> the subject.  Access to a law library is also useful for looking up
> statute and decisions, but not essential, although reading at least a
> few decisions is necessary for ensuring an understanding of the social
> process involved in the creation of law.

> And if what you want to accomplish with your computer hacking
> requires, for implementation, something outside the computer hardware
> and networks, legal hacking is almost a necessity.

But at Sun, 07 Aug 1994 08:24:57 -0400 "Perry E. Metzger"
<perry@imsi.com> wrote

> The bureaucrats aren't
> going to want digicash, so they are going to find plenty of excuses to
> prohibit it. You can't do legal hacks in an environment like this. It
> doesn't work. If the bureaucrats don't like you, they shut you down,
> and there is not a damn thing you can do about it, period.

> True, you can leave the country and do your business there -- I know
> several hedge funds that already refuse to take any customers from the
> U.S. because they don't want the headaches, and there are other
> similar things happening in lots of other parts of the financial
> industry. However, don't think you can finesse the folks at the Fed,
> the IRS, the Treasury, and the SEC -- they are monsters, and they
> won't be stopped by the courts.

What differing views of ``legal hacking''!

It would be wonderful if society's response to legal hacking had more of
the predictability of computer hacking.  But there are a hundred million
constituents out there (the power behind Perry's ``monsters'') who
gratuitously accept government benefits.  Such a person doesn't gladly
suffer any legal technicality standing between him and the pound of your
flesh to which he thinks he's entitled.  If you can prove that the law
permits you to keep your pound, then he and his majority allies will
simply change the law, requiring the IRS to collect it from you after
all.  This inclines me to accept Perry's cynical skepticism that legal
hacking can do any good.

On the other hand, Eric demonstrates time and again that his remarks are
not made lightly.  In this case, they bear on the prospects for the
``State Citizen'' movement that seems to be so emergent these days.  I
wonder how he would respond to Perry here.

	John E. Kreznar		| Relations among people to be by
	jkreznar@ininx.com	| mutual consent, or not at all.

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