An interesting take that reveals differing moral bases.
As a preamble, I have zero moral qualms about technically committing fraud in order to access my own money (almost nobody would).
More important, I choose not to respect a law that upholds an insecure and broken system. A parallel with traffic regulations come to mind: as a cyclist I regularly break rules when I consider that they do not best serve my safety. All things being equal, I follow the law. But all things are not always equal and bad laws are there for the breaking.
The correct outcome here is that the law is tested and amended. That is the way to end the perverse situation of the precise example you raise, where anybody with technical skills can fake a document and then win in court.
Hard disagree. Just because you don’t understand the rationale of a law doesn’t mean it is arbitrary and disconnected from your safety or best interest.
I’ll give a concrete example. In law school I was hired to write a memo on a traffic circle. There was a very deliberate and effective approach to identifying where pedestrian crossings were the safest. And the cross walk itself is an attempt to encourage people to go to the safe areas for crossing.
Cross walks also create a clear zone of liability. If a driver hits a pedestrian in a crosswalk they are deemed at fault. Outside the crosswalk the pedestrian is deemed to have contributed. So the law incentivizes both driver and pedestrian behavior to converge on a known safety pattern in the safer section of the road. So you can jaywalk based on your analysis that it isn’t really that big of a deal or necessary for your safety but at the scale of society the law encourages the safest behavior.
As far as signatures. I would agree there are better systems. But they still serve a valid function.
I had ATT forge mysignature on a contract to try to get me to have to pay an early termination fee. But because I had other documents with my signature I was able to demonstrate that the forgery wasn’t even close to mine. I would honestly rather have that rather than a digital stamp or Docusign.
You went to law school and you don't see any the difference between forging someone else's signature on a document and encoding one's own authentic signature into a digital document file in the manner needed by the recipient?
I do see a difference. I have said clearly there is a difference. You don’t see that the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of a signature is deliberate deception?
I’ll give a more concrete example. If you bill the government for Medicaid home health services they required an ink signature. And in fact it had to be black ink, no other color was acceptable. When I was building software for electronic visit verification it was actually a formal legal block and required several states passing law to make digital signature images legally acceptable. If I had used a library like this to make the document digital signature look like they had been analog at some point it would have been a crime.
So just because you think it’s reasonable doesn’t mean the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of the signature isn’t illegal.
It's just that such cases come down to technical advice that applies to a specific legal environment (certain states you mention), whereas I'm personally more interested in looking at such situations from the ethics, identity, and authenticity perspectives.
That’s fine. I studied philosophy in undergrad and happy to debate those perspectives but I was making a legal argument.
I never said that the act of making a digital doc look like it was scanned is fraud.
I said that process would be used in other fraudulent acts.
>I never said that the act of making a digital doc look like it was scanned is fraud.
Yes you did. Verbatim.
You’re dropping the important clause: to pass a document off as being of a different origin and nature specifically to make have a desired legal effect.
I think a library like this could be used for art or literature. For example, to make a document look like an old artifact in lord of the rings or a Sherlock Holmes mystery.
The fraud isn’t in the conversion or appearance. It’s in the intent behind it and how it’s used.