Yes. I had prepared a sarcastic rebuttal to your post, as I am wont to do, but I'm sure someone would have misread it.
The game is rated M for a reason, and they aren't trying to sugar coat it. I mean, anyone who played WaW knows that the COD series is not for children (dismemberment and all). There may be a place for more child-friendly war games (aka, the T rating), but that doesn't mean we can't have games that try to present reality. In fact, presenting nothing but child-friendly war is probably more harmful to society as a whole than presenting a smattering of reality. The main problem is that too many parents aren't going to know/care enough to stop children who are too young from playing such things, but there's no easy cure for that (except where they ban such things, and that's a whole other problem).
Encryption simply forces them to tap your keyboard, and the costs of that are much higher than the costs of running Wireshark on a router somewhere.
Not only that, but it usually requires a much more involved process of those troublesome warrents and all to get actual wire-tepping done (usually, not always). Curse that due process!
Let's not be too disparaging here, the police sometimes have legitamte interests in information gathering, there really are some people who need to be taken down. It is not their job to just protect our rights politically, that's our job and the job of the politicians (who epically fail in internet law). It is their job to protect our rights in life, but not to lobby for it in law-making; so they serve their own interests here, but they do so legitimatly (refering to other posts, not yours here). At least it does point out one of the social problems of treating practitioners internet freedoms as common criminals... it makes real criminals easily lost in the system.
...they are educated and savvy enough to inject their opinions in any arena they see fit, and how dare anyone presume to tell them otherwise.
You mean like passing judgment on an entire generation? Don't for a second pretend that ego is a phenomena new to this generation. The simple fact is that every older generation in history has felt that the next generation was presumptuous and rude, and all too full of themselves. But what does that have to do with the law?
Young people will be immature, and, since it is a forum on which they are a disproportional demographic, will be the majority of the forum trolls and flame-baiters and haters out there, and thus are most likely to get caught under this law (yes, I know the law doesn't cover trolling, but the trolls mentality is much closer producing threats than is the average mature person's). This does not change the fact that classifying threats online as illegal breaks with free speech precedent. Free speech does not include threats ONLY if it is backed by the threat of imminent violence, or if it is defamation (ok, most trolls fit here, but that's a civil matter, not a felony), or if it incites to riot. Threatening online matches none of these; no threat is imminent, as I'd have to get up, drive to your house, and THEN do whatever I said (in which case the prosecutable act is the physical one, the speech is peripheral and can only be evidence of forethought and intent, not a crime itself). So no, we are not claiming "responsibility-less intrinsic rights;" we are merely pointing out that the same rights that we enjoy elsewhere also should apply online.
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones