Procedural, not legal

Legality/illegality is a bad tool for analysing human institutions. Too much moral pathos, too little substance. Much better concept is procedurality. Policies may not be legal, but they absolutely are procedural. Maybe states make illogical decisions, except it's not human logic, it's procedural logic, logic of a machine

As Kafka observed, when we're dealing with the state we are not dealing with humans, but with a machine. It's working procedurally, according to a certain algorithm which is ofcourse full of bugs. Which can be exploited.