The law depends on compute power

This is the perfect example of what happens when a programmer (or in this case a mathematician) thinks that the law operates like a computer.<p>It doesn&#x27;t.<p>The law is interpreted by humans, based on case law, and attempts to understand the intentions of the law as written.<p>Many programmers don&#x27;t like this, but that is how the law operates.<p>(If the author would like to go down another rabbit hole, perhaps he should consider if encrypted information is actually published at all. After all, well designed encryption renders information quite close to random noise in the absence of a key. Perhaps making encrypted information available isn&#x27;t actually publishing - maybe it is the act of posting how to decrypt it that is the act of publishing.<p>Note that here, the law would answer &quot;it depends&quot;, and that is fine.)

It is not illegal to publish a social security number. Watch this:<p>268-91-7112<p>That is a social security number, but I guarantee you I will not be prosecuted for publishing it. What is illegal is publishing the <i>binding</i> between a particular social security number and a particular person.<p>Geeks get way too hung up on this idea that publishing these things should be OK because &quot;they&#x27;re just numbers.&quot; No, they are not &quot;just numbers&quot;. They are numbers with some associated semantics. This number is Bill&#x27;s SSN, that number is Sony&#x27;s secret key. It&#x27;s the semantics that matter, not the number.

Calling an SSN &quot;a number&quot; is reductionist even for a programmer. Does open() return an integer or does it return a file descriptor? Is it okay to do arithmetic on it and expect sensible results because it&#x27;s just s number? In fact, programmers go out of their way to add a rich set of semantics and behaviors to things that are, under the hood, just numbers.

<i>&quot;now that it’s public, you have to wonder whether this will bite me in the ass when I’m 60 (...) and my identity gets stolen&quot;</i><p>Could someone from the US care to explain why publication of these numbers is such a big deal, and why it can lead to identity theft (an idea that I see often on the internet)?<p>In Spain we have a unique ID number and it is pretty common to see them published all over the place. The government and administrations routinely publish lists of people with their name and ID number, for example if you have applied for a public sector job, a government grant, etc. your ID number will be published in a list that everyone can see and even find on Google. We don&#x27;t see it as a problem because knowing someone&#x27;s ID number doesn&#x27;t mean you can steal their identity - to do that they would need to forge the actual ID card, for in-person procedures, or steal passwords or keys, for online stuff. Knowing the number alone doesn&#x27;t give you access to anything. In fact, it is publicly known that the current king has the ID number 15 and the former king 10 (number 1 corresponded to dictator Franco who created the system), but it&#x27;s not that easy to go around impersonating the king :)<p>What can you do if you know a person&#x27;s social security number in the US?

The trouble with this logic - to which I am not entirely unsympathetic - is that under it, a computer program binary would also constitute an &quot;illegal number&quot;. &quot;You&#x27;ve copied Microsoft Office!&quot; &quot;Nonono, that&#x27;s just a very large number in binary.&quot;<p>The actual answer is: the law is <i>all about</i> intent.

I desperately want to read a lawyer&#x27;s answer to the questions raised by the author. My bet is that most of the gray areas exist simply because no cases involving them have been litigated. If such cases ever go to trial, courts will probably rule in a rather common-sensical way, such as by creating a bright-line rule[1].<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bright-line_rule" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bright-line_rule</a>

At some level, laws inherently have to be up for interpretation, and operate on some level of abstraction above the intimate details - because virtually everything in life is a spectrum, including the applicability of a given law. In the “fringe zone” in which it&#x27;s not clear whether a law applies or not, judges have to resort to individual judgement on a case-by-case basis.<p>This is not something that&#x27;s new or unique to technology, although technology does a fantastic job of illustrating the difference between a legal problem and a technological problem - as well as the different mindsets you have to approach both with.

Social security numbers are in the uncanny valley between something private enough to be plausibly used as a shared secret and public enough to be exploited widely. There is really only one effective solution to this: Make all SSNs public and therefore useless as a secret key. All the services that are currently (ab)using this number will find alternatives.

&gt;The case was eventually settled out of court, but the question remains whether it’s illegal to publish a specific number on the internet. The law currently seems to agree with Sony, that free speech doesn’t cover Hotz’s case. &gt; One counterargument is that if a specific number is illegal to publish, then so is anything derived from that number. An excellent example of this is the Free Speech Flag<p>There&#x27;s obviously a huge difference between publishing a number and publishing a number with a message next to it saying &quot;this number is the password for X&quot;. Clearly the intent of the law is to stop the latter.

The main problem is that parts of our society still treats social security numbers as off they were passwords. However, they are short, uniquely assigned, and not changeable - which means they are user names (identifiers.) (Same thing with finger prints, BTW.)<p>Meanwhile, designing systems that can uniquely identify consumers&#x2F;customers&#x2F;employees&#x2F;suppliers&#x2F;students with a generally unique ID world lead to a reduction in error rates and increased efficiency.<p>Security must be solved with told designed for it (state issued signing key&#x2F;device?)

The term embedding is hardly confusing. It would be impossible to prove the embedding, unless processing power raises, though.