> It's not illegal to change your mac address or wear a ski mask. It can be illegal to do both of these things while committing other crimes.
Honest question: why is that? Why is it not enough to charge someone for the actual crime they committed? Why does someone need to be charged for committing it a specific way?
It's not so much that wearing a ski mask is illegal (though that's true in some cities) but it demonstrates you are deliberately committing the real crime, not an accident. You can wear a mask. You can tell a bank teller "I'm here to make a large withdrawal." Doing both at the same time? Good luck convincing the jury you were just trying to hide from your wife while getting some cash for a friends bachelor party.
> but it demonstrates you are deliberately committing the real crime
So once again you're back to saying that it provides evidence of another crime. But many people are saying the anonymity becomes a crime itself when in the context of another crime. I'm kind of bothered by that as it puts a liability (or a chilling effect, if you like) on being anonymous, something I do every day and cherish very much as an important aspect of my privacy. Even though it won't become relevant until the day I am (perhaps wrongly) accused of another crime, suddenly it will become a very huge liability if that ever happens.
Now if you say the anonymity crime is "planning and preparing to commit a crime" then that's (sort of) OK. Once again, the anonymity is part of committing a separate crime that I can at least rationalize is wrongful. But if you tell me that the pure anonymity itself is a crime then I'm very disturbed by that.
Anonymity is anathema to the government. There are plenty of laws on the books prohibiting it even if you're not committing any other crimes: many locations (most? all?) ban wearing masks at legal, peaceful public protests, even if the protesters have legitimate reasons to fear employer or community reprisal for participating in the protest.
That's because State Power is not, contra popular imagination, based on a monopoly of violence, which only exists nowadays thanks to the triumph of its real source. It's based on legibility: by abstracting the world and identifying and naming its subsystems, the State creates its own power. Naming and identifying people is a natural part of that: indeed, adding last names to a first name to create a (ostensibly) unique global identifier was one of the first projects of the modern State. One hundred faceless people you have to monitor at the moment is far more dangerous than a thousand identified people you can attack after the fact.
Honest question: why is that? Why is it not enough to charge someone for the actual crime they committed? Why does someone need to be charged for committing it a specific way?