For reference, I think this is one of the relevant sections of the USC (18 USC 912):
Whoever falsely assumes or pretends to be an officer or employee acting under the authority of the United States or any department, agency or officer thereof, and acts as such, or in such pretended character demands or obtains any money, paper, document, or thing of value, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
IANAL but I can see interpretations where telling Claude you’re the FBI would qualify. It’s probably unlikely anyone is prosecuted for it, but there’s a chance
Additionally, mens rea refers to the cognition that one is doing something wrong. It's not at all clear that lying to a person and lying to a computer program are subjectively equivalent or even similar to the liar, and given the previous paragraph I'd argue they are not. Why would someone feel guilty about doing something that can't possibly have repercussions?
You can't impersonate something to a text editor as there's no special compliance you could get; WYSIWYG. But to a chatbot, you could get special compliance based on your identity.
How does that change anything? The HTTP protocol is just how I communicate with the program, just like how the USB protocol is how I communicate with the word processor. The dividing line is when the message crosses computer boundaries? Then it should also be illegal to write "I am an FBI agent" in a text file and upload it to Github.
>The same way you can't type everything into Google.
Who says you can't, physically or legally? Maybe Google will refuse to fulfill some search requests, but that's a different matter from it being illegal.
i think it may affect how people would communicate with you there. And based on that it would seem like impersonation, wouldn't it?
I bet it could be some interesting caselaw actually, if it resulted in circuit court judges (or whoever) writing opinions about the essence of impersonation, fraud, etc. and what kind of actual or hypothetical agent is needed to make the crime a thing that could have happened. E.G., basically, if you sit alone in a room where nobody else can see or hear you, and you put on a realistic local police uniform and declare to the room that you're a licensed police/peace officer, is a crime being committed (i.e., is the nature of the crime "pretending/claiming to be a cop" or "making an actual person really believe it" or something else)
(could also be an intent element to satisfy, not sure)
Here's a site that automatically uses your browser to do questionable searches to get you on a watchlist. Try it! Nothing will happen.
Works great.
