5d ago

Is there or has there ever been information illegal to possess or have?

63 comments

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
A cryptographic key for Blu-Rays. The MPAA used to send out C&Ds and DMCA takedowns left and right to hide this code.
- I remember when this Streisanded hard on Digg. Good times.
- In the same vane, the root keys for the playstation 3 being released by some hacker caused a lot of hubub from sony.
- Copyright is civil, not criminal. Oh but I guess the DMCA added some criminal elements... Still, requires more than posting a string of octets.

child pornography would fit this description
- Do you really need this "information" tho?
  
  Not seeing the relevance of need at all? It seems like a legit answer to the question, at least inasmuch as any specific content or documents can be, as opposed to forbidden knowledge/ideas like crypto key numbers or (in the past) the concept of a gun-type fission bomb.

When the first DVD cracking util was released, DeCSS, it violated the DMCA and people were getting sued and threatened with felonies for sharing it. Very quickly people figured out loopholes to make it an archivable creative work, like putting it on tshirts and encoding it as a prime number: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime
- I remember an mp3 going around where a guy turned it into a song, complete with the chorus, "I don't like the DMCA."
- I had a green DeCSS shirt. It was awesome. I ditched it while coming over the border.

For a while it was illegal to export Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP from the US.
FTP servers in the US removed it for fear of legal action.
So I imported it from a University in Scotland. 😉
https://www.openpgp.org/
- Not just PGP, but any encryption strength above a certain level was considered "munitions" from a legal standpoint. Because of this, finding a windows Ssh client was a PITA for quite a while.
  
  Wait does imply that other encryption is broken since what would it matter if you used encryption greater than something the government allowed you to

Literally some of the 34 things Trump was convicted of has to do with this!
- Oh interesting, should I look up Trunp rule 34 for more information on this?
  
  Do it
- So it's illegal, but nothing comes of getting convicted. No actual consequences.
  Got it.
  
  Only if you have money and/or power, tho. If you're just some guy, you're 100℅ fucked.

High level leaks of classified material is the first example that comes to mind. The raw Wikileaks data, for example, was widely accessible and easily found by anyone with a quick search, and yet possessing that material was technically illegal, because it was never declassified.
- Julian Assange has something to say about this.
  Edward Snowden has something to say about this.
  Reality Winner has something to say about this.
  Chelsea Manning has something to say about this.
  Woodward and Bernstein had something to say about this.
  
  No doubt. It being illegal doesn’t mean it wasn’t morally justified and right in most cases. Just means it took more courage and personal risk to do the right thing.
- You've been banned from /r/warthunderforums

Instructions how to build a nuclear bomb.
They have been so very illegal during the very first years of the internet that the scanning of content by police and 3 letter agencies was invented especially because of that.
Then many people made fun of the fact, for example by putting fake hints into the footers of their e-mails or forum posts, and maybe this was the beginning of all memes.
- Yeah, if you need actual instructions to build a nuclear bomb, you will not nearly be able to build a nuclear bomb
- Beginning of internet memes? Maybe. I'd have to look up when that happened. Beginning of memes as a whole? That would be off by several thousand years at a minimum, just going by ones archaeologists have already found.

"Pornography" was illegal to own. Things like abortion information or anything mentioning homosexuality was pornographic.

War plans. Classified information in general will cause some trouble, but mostly for the person who leaked it. War plans, on the other hand, will be recovered by any means necessary, up to and including lethal force without warning.
- Or accessing it if you have a security clearance. I'm not allowed the look at any of the documents Snowden leaked. Because even though they are easily obtained they have not been declasified. I don't have a need to know or the necessary SC.

In Australia the anarchist cookbook is a banned book. We only surprisingly recently unbanned books like 1984 and brave new world.

Having info on the heliocentric solar system could land you in a dungeon or worse back in the day.
- Even the Catholic church does not do that anymore. With some American Evangelicals, I'm not that sure...

In the US it's illegal to grow poppy if you know what it is
- They can't prove I know what it is tho. 😏
  "What do you mean I had to know because I was making heroin? You mean my calming sleepy flower juice from those cool flowers I found?"
  
  You need to use a razor to bleed the poppies for their latex, which is opium.
  I'd say if you're found with poppies that you've done this to then there's a very good chance you knew what you were doing.
- Only the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum. The rest are just fine.
  
  What are you talking about that’s the breadseed poppy.
- The little seeds on bagels?
  
  Yup

This video goes over some things that are illegal to say
- Rip Trevor Moore. He burned too bright for this world.
  
  Died choking on his own dick

Under no circumstances should crabs be taught to read. There are consequences.
- Or what

I'd say classified documents if you don't have the clearance and process to legally possess them
- Just keep them in your bathroom and no one would ever find them.

KEVIN Birmingham’s new book about the long censorship fight over James Joyce’s Ulysses braids eight or nine good stories into one mighty strand.
It’s about women’s rights and heroic female editors, the First World War, anarchism and modernism, tenderness and syphilis, moral panic and about the Lost Generation and the tent it pitched at Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookstore. It isolates a great love story, that of Joyce and Nora Barnacle, one that comes with a finger-burning side order of some of the most cheerfully filthy correspondence in literary history.
https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/the-battle-to-publish-james-joyces-ulysses-1531186
And what a quest it was. "Ulysses" was illegal to own in most of the English-speaking world for more than a decade. It was banned, burned, debated, smuggled, and finally legalized following a 1933 court ruling. In Birmingham’s highly readable and erudite book, he infuses this story with drama, reminding us that the right to express oneself can never be taken for granted.
Readers will quickly realize the immense scope of "The Most Dangerous Book." Modernism, obscenity, the power once held by postal authorities, vice squads, 19th century English law, Joyce’s sex life and health problems, The Lost Generation, early literary magazines, Wall Street lawyers, the suffrage movement, anarchy in America, and even the Enlightenment are all seamlessly woven into this most fascinating tapestry.
https://www.wbur.org/news/2014/06/13/kevin-birmingham-ulysses

So much. I mean that's what the book burning was all about. There's blacklisted authors. There's state secrets. It might be information that's legal only for certain people. I mean, if we're being pedantic, it's illegal for you to have information about me if I'm not giving it to you.

Anarchist’s cookbook. Looked it up not illegal but discouraged

I think the Epstein files would cause a bit of a ruckus. I don't know if it is illegal to possess but certainly would get you in trouble.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the_United_States

Oh yes. In the early days of pirating, it was illegal to possess MP3s of music you didn't 'own' copies of.
There used to also have been and still is, legal fighting about the legality of having copies of games no longer in circulation. We have been seeing it now where Nintendo aims at people hosting file copies of some of their IPs.
They're always going to be illegal to have laying around your computer, regardless of your stance. Unless you buy said MP3s from something like Apple's store or Amazon.

Illegal primes. Used for encryption

63 comments