Risks of deploying a legislative virus, or "legislative mal-ware"

[Kurt Cockrum]

[The following is a somewhat edited excerpt from a letter I wrote to the
 editor of a small local radical periodical, "Eat the State" <ets at scn.org>.
 This should be of interest to all the recipients. --kurt]

>From a discussion of pending legislation in the Washington State
Legislature in ETS #26:
>                                              Another gem: The
>    <B>Restoring The Balance of Powers Act</B> actually
>    abolishes it by giving the state legislature the right to
>    override any state Court of Appeals or Supreme Court ruling
>    that a law is unconstitutional. 

Yes, that's the legislation's real name.

This is even nastier than it appears, because it appears to
contains a "self-repairing" property.  That is, if *it* is declared
unconstitutional, by subsequent *self-application*, the law is sustained
and doesn't go away unless yet another undefined 3rd power (a revolution?
the US Supreme Court?  China?) intervenes between the time the court makes
it's ruling and the time the legislature meets to overturn the ruling.

(GEEK ALERT --
In software engineering, such situations are called
"race conditions" and are practically always bugs that need to be fixed.
Legislation is basically software for humans and the same principles apply.
The situation here is strongly analogous to attempting to eradicate a virus
(this proposed law) with antivirus software (the rules by which allow the
court to declare a law unconstitutional) infected with the same virus,
only to see the virus re-infect the just-repaired software (by the
legislature overruling the court's action).
END GEEK ALERT).

For this reason, the RTBOPA is easily the most dangerous
bill, since it infects the legal process with a self-propagating bit
of nastiness that will be legally near-impossible to remove.

One might justifiably tag the sponsor(s) with the term "legislative cracker"
(what journalists unfairly and inaccurately call "hackers"), with all the
implications carried by the dark journalistic image (bogus) of
the anti-social teenage cracker with a PC and time on their hands, and
thus accuse the sponsor of an attempt to sabotage the legislative
process... 

It's already illegal to loose computer viruses upon the computer-using
population.  A broad interpretation of law-as-software could make the
sponsor legally liable for attempting to deliver a virus.
--kurt
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