What balance is there when one side operates without limits or consequence and can use gag orders and the ability to classify information to operate in secret?
[0] Under many complex and often conflicting legal codes, this is admittedly a dubious statement. Add in budget issues and whoo-boy, might as well throw dice. But, in general, this is mostly true. Also, I am not a lawyer, consult your own lawyer.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00505UZ4G/ref=nosim...
[2] https://www.popehat.com/2018/12/18/alan-dershowitz-is-lying-... The book is HOTLY contested and Dershowitz may or may not be an insane person
This country was founded on the principles that all governments decay, and all legislation should take this into account. We can't give the government power which could be abused to public detriment with a simple change in leadership.
The court system does a pretty good job, in fact that's why the police want to bypass it so often. It's much easier for the police to catch real criminals if they don't have to worry about due process (it's just that due process is what removes the false positives).
Likewise, if live in SF and someone breaks in your car, the police won’t investigate it unless you’re A-Rod.
I respect the law, and the lawmakers should work for me. The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for, otherwise why am I being taxed?
I understand the goal of this sentiment, but this is not how most societies work. Equality under the law is the proper ideal, but it's not at all how things work. There are a lot of reasons for that, from bias to lack of resources. But whatever the particular reason may be, most people only notice and complain about inequality when they are its losing side.
Make no mistake about it though, from the police at the bottom of the stack, all the way up to how the judges rule on cases at the top of the stack, the legal system has never been equitable.
In fact, most of the time, there's very little alignment, because there's no incentive to have those things be aligned. Sometimes even disincentive: there are laws on the books nobody wants enforced, and a culture in policing of enforcing the letter of the law, not the spirit—but one can always choose to not enforce a law one doesn't agree with by just making an informal agreement that certain crimes (of basically equal severity) take enforcement priority, such that those crimes nobody sees as crimes just get "de-prioritized" to the point that they're never enforced at all.
>The ROI calculations are to be budgeted and accounted for Often this would require you to pay more in tax than the value you would get back from it. Are you ok paying $1000 to track down the person who smashed your window when you will likely never get any money from them or will you just pay the $100 it costs to get a new window which doesn't happen very often.
Generally, a tiny fraction of the population commits the vast majority of such crimes. People will do 500$ worth of damage to make 30$, work out what it takes to make useful amounts of money and these people end up destroying a lot of property. So, the ROI calculation needs to account for windows not smashed.
A good example is copper wire thieves. They pull up to a house and access the electrical panel in the garage which they turn off. Using a winch, they pull out all the copper wire in the house that's directly connected to the box (there's also many branch lines left behind). They then sell the wire as scrap for $20 or so and presumably use the money to buy drugs.
Fixing this damage can run $30,000 to $100,000. The whole house can have to be torn apart from the inside to reinstall all the electrical.
A massive miscalculation -- stolen wallets, cell phones etc are individually small-ticket items, but the criminals who make a living stealing them do hundreds per month and thousands per year. Taking the perpetrator of a thousand muggings or pickpocketings off the street is a job worth doing, possibly more so than chasing small time drug dealers or runaway teens.
You got a source for that claim? At least in the US, it’s significantly higher than any number I’ve ever read in a study / report.
Punishing an already poor and marginalized person is counterproductive to that goal, so we try to avoid it as much as possible. And that's probably who you're going to find on the other end of a car break in. So why bother looking?
"How much justice can you afford?"
It's often that crimes restore lost order and stability for some people. Not saying it's moral on one side or the other, but it certainly doesn't feel like a neat little package.
Why does SF have a sizable increase in property crimes over the past 10 years but a drop in violent crimes? I'd imagine if chaos did truly beget chaos, then rates of crime across the board would be going up.
It's one of many reasons I moved away from there and do not entertain any job offers from that region, regardless of how much they are offering. At a certain point one needs to write off these cities. That or accept being a victim with no legal recourse knowing your car's going to be vandalized damaged and stolen on a regular basis and you are going to be hassled by guys with guns when walking down the street.
So judging by off the napkin math on costs and optimistically assuming stronger enforcement would lead to 50% less car break ins, if strong enforcement costs more than $15 million is it worth it? When does the cost of enforcement become inconsequential to the results? A good question to debate on either side IMO.
That's not really the point, though. It's not just a simple monetary calculation. Even if the true value of repairs and stolen items was $30M, I would allocate several times that of taxpayer money just for the quality of life benefits, assuming it would do some good.
Spending more on the crimes with negative ROI, makes the total ROI higher because it acts as a deterrent for future would-be criminals.
Reddit was full of video of really trashy kids, driving their bicycles through malls and stores harrassing random people there, and "nobody could do anything" about them. If those kids were arrasted, sent to juvie, given community service (or maybe even just shown on tv crying in court, instead of acting all badass on their bikes), that would sure stop many others from repeating what they did.
Of course all of this feels gross, but as someone who was homeless in SF for a bit, going after people on the outs feels really backward.
"We can only give them a citation, and the thieves know that, so they don't care," said officer Pete McLaughlin (retired) to me.
Admittedly, this was in regards to stealing bikes and not into breaking cars, but I suspect the punishment is the same.
Surveillance still is one of the most uncreative and probably also one of the worst forms of crime prevention/reduction.
We don't need draconian surveillance measures enacted to solve this type of crime. We need police resources to actually follow up and prosecute petty theft for all victims, not just corporations and celebrities. A couple of years ago my father was involved in a hit and run when a man in a red late model corvette turned out of a small subdivision right in front of traffic. This was during morning rush hour on a weekday, there's only about a dozen houses on that road, and only one red late model corvette parked in the driveway of one of those houses. That single red corvette was also parked with a car cover on it afterwards. Even though there were numerous witnesses to the hit and run given that it was during morning rush hour traffic, and even though it is pretty obvious what happened and there are plenty of ways to get evidence to support it, the police couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. As far as I know, they didn't even so much as question him about the hit and run.
We're currently paying the privacy tax with existing surveillance yet people like you and me cannot benefit from that surveillance.
I've had three home break in and robberies. In no case would the police even show up to take a report. In the case where my cameras identified the perps and I tracked down and documented them trying to fence my property, and worked with other neighbors to document an actual crime syndicate that was taking orders for specific things to steal, the police would do absolutely nothing. Police are about collecting fees from "in" drug dealers in return for looking the other way, while protecting their turf against incursion from rival drug gangs. They are also involved, along with judges in the USA, with child sex trafficking. The idea we need to give up freedom and be surveilled by these people is unrealistic.
- The laws that govern legal search and seizure have departed dramatically from the protections afforded by the bill of rights.
- There have been multiple incidents of companies not disclosing extralegal "cooperation" with state actors such as the US government (and others)
- Warrant canaries are legal, yet big tech refuses to use them. Why not? Because using legal methods to improve user privacy and security are not considered "cooperative" enough.
- We have no reason to believe that governments are following the laws, even in the US. The recently revealed CIA scandal illustrates just how out of control things are.
- There is now a revolving door between big tech and state intelligence agencies, and big tech is becoming increasingly sympathetic to authoritarian candidates and hostile to third party or far left candidates.
That, right there, is the problem. That should be illegal and should have been shot down every single time such a law was challenged in court. The fact that it wasn't says something about the status of the 4th amendment. And the lack of citizen revolt over this is disheartening.
"Fuck you I got mine" might just be the death of the enlightenment.
I'm honestly starting to contemplate how hard it would be to setup on Mars and breakaway from all current earth governments. Maybe the only hope is freedom of space travel.
I upgrade infrequently. Recently I was alerted my 3G phone is not going to work after December 31 as 3G networks are being shut down in the US nationally and all bandwidth reallocated to 4G only.
So, I've bought and returned 4 phones since then because I very carefully read and analyzed the terms of service and privacy policy that I couldn't read until buying them. All were totally and completely unacceptable in every way to me. But obviously not to others.
As a result come the new year I'm going phone less. I literally could not find a single contract that was not morally reprehensible.
I know of not a single other person sharing my concerns. Some say I am a mad man or unreasonable or unrealistic, or a potential terrorist ne'er do well. But I'm none of those. I just read the contract. Something they, and no one else in the entire USA, has done.
> Investigators need to do their jobs and chase every lead they can
That's circular reasoning. What they can and cannot do is defined by the rules we set.
Systems to associate 'burner' phones to individuals, with patterns of metadata, have been commonplace for decades
https://github.com/kimgr/asn1ate/blob/master/testdata/public...
Just saying this is rational because investigators must do their jobs seems entirely ignorant of the obvious, implicit balance of powers issue here between free peoples and government authorities.
In short: There are, in fact, good reasons most civil liberty organizations fight against dragnet searches. It is not an emotional hunch.
Do they really though? This is the question.
Is there no other way to live peacefully and be good to one another without an overarching busy-bodied state apparatus causing perpetual fear even among the innocent?
I consider myself an anarchist in the sense that I believe that we should strive not to need government, taking responsibility for our own actions.
I do not currently believe we as a society have found a way to make that a reality :(
There is a crime, you get a warrant or subpoena and you act on it. As long as it’s transparent it works. This idea that percolates particularly from the very left of the software community is dangerous as you pointed out.
They are so anti law enforcement they’d prefer to never help law enforcement do their job but at the end of the day, an overwhelming majority of the crimes they investigate are in support of actual crimes and not some oppressive government overreach.
It’s ok to not trust law enforcement, the US is built on distrust of government.. But then don’t cry bloody murder when nothing gets done because now you’ve tied their hands so much that they can’t investigate properly .
There is an excellent podcast called intelligence matters where an FBI chief went on to talk about end to end encryption and said something along the lines of yes e2e encryption hinders their job but if the public wants and supports that. Then they’ll have to work around it as long as the public understands reaction to crimes will be slowed drastically or go uninvestigated due to lack of evidence.
There is a balance. I know this is Hacker News and we're all supposed to be progressive technical vanguards fighting against The Man, but genuine bad guys exist out there. And we need to protect ourselves from them.
This isn't a case of an innocent man going to prison just so we can jail a hundred criminals. This is giving up a modicum of privacy in order to make the world safer for everybody. I think that's entirely reasonable.
This isn't rational, this is purely emotional. This could be a statement from a police officer that did see some awful criminals, but that would be filed under being emotionally compromised.
If you look on large scale threats to the general population, this kind of surveillance poses a much bigger risk.
I doubt this is about protecting people or preventing crime. Justice comes after the fact and is all about retribution. Depending on the crime, the damage done by perpetrators can never be undone.
> This is giving up a modicum of privacy in order to make the world safer for everybody.
How far will you go? Would you give up all privacy for safety? What if society's idea of safety doesn't align with yours?
It is no surprise that people like you still romanticize the notion of state violence and greater authoritarian power. Fascism is always popular amongst certain types.
Is our government getting increasingly Authoritarian and Repressive? Yes. Are we anywhere near fascism? Fucking no
However rationally I think there is a balance. Investigators need to do their jobs and chase every lead they can to catch criminals. I wonder if google could have complied with a query that simply grabbed the users in the areas during the 3 time periods combined.
Maybe we just need laws that limit how much data can be returned per warrant, to encourage more limited warrants.