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> "did transmit and cause to be transmitted by wire, radio, and television communication"

Note to self: Remember to use only free-space lightwave communications to avoid committing wire fraud.

Edit: Removed "fiber" because it looks too much like a wire and avoid being busted by outside1234!



The fact that they named the chat group channel for their executives (SBF, Caroline, others) "Wirefraud" is jawdropping.


Tell me they didn't...


They did, Caroline also made a Tumblr post that said something like, "When I add being feminine to my dating profile should I put it before or after the section on wire fraud?"


I refuse to believe this. No one uses Tumblr.


it works better than twitter


SBF denied it but the Guardian picked it up. No idea if it's true.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/13/sam-bankman...

https://archive.ph/fUnp3


RFC-1149 is the only safe way to commit fraud.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1149


Unless some stool pigeon testifies against you.


That's when you call in some Goodfeathers [0] to make the problem go away

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZPwdGbxwNU


Make sure you set the evil bit to true too.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3514


That's considered "a wire" by the law now :)


Curses! Foiled again!

Does it help that I've now removed the fiber?


Odds are the legal system will converge on a non-technical, highly abstract meaning of "wire" to the effect of "any medium for conveyance of a signal over long distances (where long distances can reasonably be concluded to encompass multiple jurisdictions).

This is why Legalese and English are truly seperate beasts linguistically.


Alas, it looks like I'll have to use my Maxwellian knowledge for good rather than evil after all.


did transmit and cause to be transmitted

I often wonder why lawyers cling to this archaic form of verbiage, when they could just write 'transmitted, and had others others transmit [...]'.


I assume if your trying to prove someone violated a law, it makes sense to use the exact phrasing in the law, rather then paraphrase and leave the defense some possible semantic wiggle room.


"The device transmitted on its own, my client didn't cause the transmission."


They could make that argument anyway. The semantic content is identical.


Aren't light waves and radio waves the same phenomenon at different wavelengths?


Of course, but the fact that they redundantly spell out "radio" and "television" (as though they aren't the same) makes me think we have a good chance of convincing a jury that "light" is something completely different.


And the prosecution will spend an entire day trotting out some physicist in front of the jury saying why light and radio are the same thing. I’d love to hear the defense question the physicist about why they are wrong


I think the defense would handle that pretty easily. Question the physicist until things are confusing, get him to repeatedly state that he is not an expert on the law or legal definitions (he is a physicist) and leave the jury thinking "Well, I didn't understand that guy, I'm sure it was some physics thing, but doesn't apply to the law."


radio is a narrow range of frequencies of light; a subset of light. there's a technicality in there that could still work.


Carrier pigeons should still work.


Then you have to worry about falcons, or Blackadder. Smoke signs, maybe... but then you have to worry about the weather and wild fires... Seems they thought that one through!


What about flag signaling? Asking for a friend.


Ok as long as you don't use a halyard, since rope could be considered wire.


Pigeons would probably fall under `mail fraud`.


If the laws of USPS made during 1800s pigeon mail carrier are still on the book, then yeah, mail fraud.




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