And how do the authorities establish your total wealth? Income can be obtained by looking at your income tax return. But there's no government record of people's wealth (not yet, anyway). And penalizing people based on their wealth would only encourage people to store their wealth offshore.

Actually it grew out of a combination of Old English and Medieval French.

There may not be legal penalties, but there could be academic penalties. Minors get caught and punished for cheating on school tests all the time.

Can you cite these laws please? If there are laws as you describe, every President of the United States should be in prison. Also, we don't know for a fact that taxpayer resources were used.

What happened to Aaron Schwartz was a tragedy, as it is any time someone takes their own life. But he broke into a Harvard networking closet (that's physical trespass), and rewired a router (that's computer trespass) in order to download the journal articles that he otherwise did not have access to (or at least not at the speed with which he downloaded them). That's hardly "easily available". Was the justice department wrong to lay charges in that case? If they were wrong to do so, was it because what he did wasn't a crime or because he was a suicide risk due to mental health issues? If the latter, do we allow anyone with mental health problems to get away with any crimes because they would be a suicide risk if arrested and charged?

First of all Wikipedia isn't "public records". Secondly, Wikipedia is set up that way. People can make edits. Other people can edit the edits. It's bad form to try to bias an article with opinions or to state facts without citations, but it's not illegal. These changes were caught by editors and presumably corrected if they were in error or introduced bias. That's the way Wikipedia is supposed to work. This revelation might be embarrassing for the NYPD, but it is hardly criminal.

Right, but I have put a Google account on the device. I hope the device protection is still optional. Since I'm already using encryption, I'm not sure the device protection will add much security. Will a thief return my device when they discover they can't use it?

So, how do you explain the fact that the RSA public key encryption algorithm was patented for 20 years?

Are you aware there is a fee of somewhere around $10,000 USD to renounce your citizenship, plus any back taxes and penalties you may owe? Also, you are required to file U.S. tax returns even if you make ZERO income if you have any money at all in a non-U.S. bank account. The U.S. is one of the few countries that requires you to file tax returns in that case even if you don't owe any taxes. And they have been enforcing this rule: a lot of Canadians found themselves owing huge amounts of money in penalties to the IRS for failing to file these returns even though they didn't owe any U.S. taxes, and many of these people didn't consider themselves to be U.S. citizens and weren't even aware that the U.S. considered them to be citizens till they got their tax bill.

Effectively they can by revoking citizenship, which they can do for security reasons. There has to be a hearing, of course; a customs officer can't do that unilaterally, but the end result can be Canadian citizens being denied entry into Canada.

I believe the phrase is "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." It means that if you willfully commit an act, and that act happens to be illegal, then you are criminally liable even if you didn't know the act in question is illegal. That is to say, you don't have to have to form an intent to break the law, you merely have to form an intent (and act on that intent) to commit some action, and that action has to be illegal.

What's at issue here isn't ignorance of the law, but ignorance of the facts, and that, oftentimes, is an excuse. Although possession of child pornography is illegal in most jurisdictions, almost all the statues generally say something along the lines of "it is unlawful to knowingly possess...". There is a very practical reason for this: absent the word "knowingly", anyone could simply e-mail anyone else some images that are illegal, and the recipient could be criminally liable for possession even if they hit the delete key immediately upon seeing it. Defendants could e-mail such images to prosecutors and judges and said prosecutors and judges would be guilty of the same crime the defendant is accused of.

So it is very relevant here whether or not the owners, administrators, or employees of the data storage service knew that they were storing child pornography.

I don't think they have to prove actual knowledge if your activities facilitated the crime. I think they need only prove a lesser "subjective test": that is "would a reasonable person have known that their work was facilitating crime?". This kind of reasonable person test is commonly used so that people can't use a "blind eye" defense. Willfully turning a blind eye to criminal activity doesn't absolve you if you were actively participating.

Not directly, but it does facilitate infringement which is what is needed in a conspiracy charge. It's similar to working as receptionist for a hit man or something like that. If your job activities facilitate crime, you can be charged.