Off-topic, abstracting laws away from the harm they aim to prevent has always bothered me a bit. By punishing behaviors (e.g., making a device with a certain set of capabilities) other than the ones people care about (e.g., careless or malicious RF activity) you're nearly guaranteed to introduce unwanted loopholes and second-order effects.
E.g., CA requires tags for your vehicles (fair enough -- gotta charge people for the privilege of driving at all, not just incrementally through gas taxes and whatnot /s), but the law isn't that your vehicle be registered and have tags purchased; it's that valid tags must be displayed on the vehicle.
That makes enforcement super easy because an officer can just walk up and down a line of cars handing out tickets, but it also means that people can break the law for no fault of their own even after having taken the action the law was intending to promote (paying CA in this case). If you tried to renew your tags at the right time in 2020, even months before they were set to expire, you couldn't pick them up in person (covid) and wouldn't receive them in the mail till after the governor's order temporarily allowing you to drive with expired tags had expired. Moreover, at least one police department was excited to cash in on that discrepancy :)
The problem in that example is that the behavior the law is supposed to encourage (paying CA if you own a car) only partially aligns with what the law punishes (not displaying a valid tag on your car). That lack of alignment leaves room for exploitation.
That's just a small example (intentionally so -- hopefully it's simple enough so as to not be controversial), but it's a constant pattern in our legal system:
- Taser-immune meth-heads robbing people at knife point is bad, so let's make a hint of a whiff of any kind of drug anywhere near an individual for any reason a felony.
- Child pornography is bad, so let's (try to) make encryption illegal.
- Pump-and-dump scams are bad, so let's make [thousands of pages of financial legalese] illegal.
- (intentional hyperbole on this point) Low quality medical devices hurting people is bad, so let's give a private corporation the privilege to write up a set of standards, never change them no matter how far the world progresses, and charge people for the privilege of reading them to know what's legal or not.
E.g., CA requires tags for your vehicles (fair enough -- gotta charge people for the privilege of driving at all, not just incrementally through gas taxes and whatnot /s), but the law isn't that your vehicle be registered and have tags purchased; it's that valid tags must be displayed on the vehicle.
That makes enforcement super easy because an officer can just walk up and down a line of cars handing out tickets, but it also means that people can break the law for no fault of their own even after having taken the action the law was intending to promote (paying CA in this case). If you tried to renew your tags at the right time in 2020, even months before they were set to expire, you couldn't pick them up in person (covid) and wouldn't receive them in the mail till after the governor's order temporarily allowing you to drive with expired tags had expired. Moreover, at least one police department was excited to cash in on that discrepancy :)
The problem in that example is that the behavior the law is supposed to encourage (paying CA if you own a car) only partially aligns with what the law punishes (not displaying a valid tag on your car). That lack of alignment leaves room for exploitation.
That's just a small example (intentionally so -- hopefully it's simple enough so as to not be controversial), but it's a constant pattern in our legal system:
- Taser-immune meth-heads robbing people at knife point is bad, so let's make a hint of a whiff of any kind of drug anywhere near an individual for any reason a felony.
- Child pornography is bad, so let's (try to) make encryption illegal.
- Pump-and-dump scams are bad, so let's make [thousands of pages of financial legalese] illegal.
- (intentional hyperbole on this point) Low quality medical devices hurting people is bad, so let's give a private corporation the privilege to write up a set of standards, never change them no matter how far the world progresses, and charge people for the privilege of reading them to know what's legal or not.