https://www.thepostemail.com/2020/06/03/twitter-user-compile...
The posts are public and the police cannot go after anyone for simply engaging in protected speech, but they can and have identified looters and murderers who have tried to discredit the fact that black lives matter with their actions.
So I'm not clear why so many people are against the police catching the violent criminals who undermine the message of the many peaceful protesters.
>Sharon Rondeau has operated The Post & Email since April 2010, focusing on the Obama birth certificate investigation...
Linking to a website like that is going to destroy whatever point you were trying to make for a large portion of your audience.
If the only important pieces of that article are the links to primary sources, you could have linked to them yourself. That has potential to make you sound like a conspiracy theorist tying photos on your wall together with red yarn. However that is still better than linking to a conspiracy theorist website that seemingly proves the same point.
Even to the point of missing that it's an honest compilation and includes those killed by police during the protests. But he's the biased one here, right?
Besides, that's a silly shibboleth all told. I voted for Obama and I wouldn't have cared even if he was born in Kenya (he wasn't). McCain was born in Panama and I didn't care about that, either.
Mostly they were done by looters, a few by police. That's all shown in the linked articles, which give names and dates and locations.
> How do these number of deaths compare to other protests?
You remember that Charleston protest? One death. Number of unarmed black people killed by police in 2019? Ten. That's eleven too many, of course, but you wanted context and those are the most recent and closely related stats. Most protests are smaller scale and have few or no deaths, though, e.g. other big protests like the Women's March, March for Life, etc. don't normally involve looting or fatalities. Nobody died protesting Trump's inauguration, either, that I'm aware of.
> Questions like that need to be answered for the facts to have value.
They are answered, by the links to mostly local news stories where you can read all about David Dorn, a black cop murdered by looters. You can watch the video from the sister of the girl murdered outside of a Davenport, IA Wal-Mart. There's tons of context in the sources, that's just a convenient set of names and links.
> That is why people attack the source. Because the story here is the context of the facts and not the facts themselves.
The context is available to anyone capable of clicking two links. There are also names given which can be looked up to find sources you prefer. But maybe you're right that I should compile a giant list. I just feel that it's hard to justify it as worthwhile when people engage on a non-factual level. I can't take the beliefs of lazy thinkers seriously.
>I just feel that it's hard to justify it as worthwhile when people engage on a non-factual level.
Which brings me back to the first reply to you. You are asking people to click through at least 3 level of links before we get to a non-biased source that can provide facts. People aren't going to think that effort is worthwhile if the first page they land on is a site founded on spreading conspiracy theories.
Also I quickly googled Dorn and you are fudging the facts a little. He is a 77 year old retired police officer. His death had nothing to do with him being a police officer. He was working as a security guard when he was killed. Coincidentally police have also recently killed an on-duty security guard[1]. Mentioning one and not the other can be an indication of bias.
[1] - https://www.ajc.com/news/police-shoot-kill-year-old-hispanic...
Insofar as you want to compare crime stats, CHAZ/CHOP is part of a huge % increase in crime. Even CHAZ "security" managed to shoot people.
I only said that Dorn was a cop, not that he was murdered for being a cop--you're putting words in my mouth. I believe I did mention that some of even the 17 had been shot by cops and there were more deaths after that.
I take making false claims about what I've said to be a red flag.
Once again more context you are expecting your reader to look up rather than have explained by an unbiased news source.
The question isn't whether looting happened. Of course it did. However there are also hundreds of thousands of robberies and millions of larcenies. Those don't just go away during times of civil unrest. How do you decide what is considered looting connected to the protests versus traditional robbery or larceny?
>I only said that Dorn was a cop,
Here is what you actually said:
>>David Dorn, a black cop murdered by looters
There was no past tense on being a cop there.
There's a video of the people looting the store and several arrests were made. But you know that because you reviewed all that context, right?
> There was no past tense on being a cop there.
You do realize that I mentioned that he's dead, right?
But let's humor this for a moment... the fact that he was an old retired cop trying to keep his friend from losing his income and ending up in the proverbial poorhouse somehow makes his murder less awful to you?
Of course, that would only last until you found out about Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller or Dave Patrick Underwood, one assumes. Or will I hear more complaints if I neglect to mention that neither is black and the second is more of a security guard than a cop?
"police SHOULD NOT go after anyone for simply engaging in protected speech".
FTFY
They can do lots of things they should not. They should not run cars into protesters. They should not push over old men who are not causing trouble. They should not shoot unarmed people in the back who are running away. They should not kill a black man by choking him to death with their knee over a false counterfeit bill complaint.
And yet all these things happen. The police should not go after innocent protesters, but there's no way in hell I will believe that they will not, or are not doing so.
They shouldn’t kill even for legitimate counterfeit bill complaints. Police should use the absolute minimum force required to both apprehend suspects (as limited by relevant law) and is required by public safety; not one ounce more.
If someone is accused of committing a crime, it’s up to the courts and the jury to determine if they’re guilty and what the punishment shall me, the police don’t get to play judge, jury, and executioner.
Why Some Cops Think They're The Punisher https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM7z7pDmEC4
...dozens of police looked on, in some cases chatting and sharing pizza with the group. They included Officer Joseph Goodwin Jr., whose brother Richie shoved one protester and was photographed punching another. [0]
Maybe it's the same thing with the looters.
0 - https://www.inquirer.com/news/fishtown-philadelphia-communit...
What did you expect the police to do? Stop the mobs while the looting happens? With anti police sentiment so high here, it would be a thousand times higher on the street. I'm not sure stopping the looting there and then would be a good idea.
Isn't that their job?
Because someone can be against physical violence and simultaneously think surveilling everyone is wrong.
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-ferguson-acti...
It's because human beings are tribal by nature and tend to take social queues from those around them. SV and most major metro areas are overwhelming liberal, and right now it's trendy in those circles to issue blanket condemnations of all police activity with little regard for nuance.
In a lot of ways it's very similar to George W. Bush and co.'s "You with us or against us" mentally shortly after 9/11. Then, like now, any nuance or pointing out of grey areas were seen as a form of disloyalty and siding with the enemy, despite the matter itself being very complex, and yes, nuanced.
As someone who don't live in the US but which country has a bunch of laws protecting protesting under specific conditions, I wonder a bit about that statement.
Looking around for an answer, while the US governments may not deny a person's constitutional right to peacefully protest, they may regulate the time, place, and manner in which the protest is conducted. They can also deny permits as long as they have a compelling, objective reason to do so.
So its a mixed bag when it comes to the US courts, and the question that seems to have most significance is what is or isn't an compelling objective reason. In order to sue the court you would need to both demonstrate the infringement of the right, and that the government does not have objective reasons (such as keeping order). I suspect the result of such court case would not be obvious, but rather uncertain with a lot of variation based the judges in question.
The Government contends that the Harlan standard shows that no search occurred here, since Jones had no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the area of the Jeep accessed by Government agents (its underbody) and in the locations of the Jeep on the public roads, which were visible to all. But we need not address the Government’s contentions, because Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights do not rise or fall with the Katz formulation. At bottom, we must “assur[e] preservation of that degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”
As a tax payer, I would prefer my tax dollars are used as efficiently as possible - so if the alternative is to hire human police officers to manually search twitter and create reports then I would oppose that in favor of automated technology. I don't think the technology is the debate here, it simply enables us as humans to be more efficient. The decision to surveil is the debate here, and I can see it both ways. Do I think the police should be aware of a large gathering (regardless of purpose) in their cities? Yes, I think that's prudent for a variety of public safety reasons. Do I want this done in a way that does not interfere with protests or have a chilling effect? Yes, absolutely.
As a society we are only starting to become aware of the implications. "Fair game" is the biggest misnomer - it is anything but.
This is not to have a blanket claim that law enforcement should always have less data. The point is that innovation in law enforcement tech has to be balanced with accountability, experience and changes in the actual law. Especially in a climate in which rightful use of authority is in question, the last thing we would want is to empower further asymmetry.
However I'd say changing the law is the best option of them all. Restricting surveillance protects people out in suburbia from cops who are almost never there anyway, while poor schmucks downtown have to deal with the "broken window policies" getting tickets for a lot of nonsense.
Many of the ugliest chapters in our history involve failing to uphold this standard.
> Many of the ugliest chapters in our history involve failing to uphold this standard.
I don’t have data to back this up, but I certainly would not be shocked to read a study which showed that police, rather than enforcing laws universally, are far more likely to be using their discretion attempting to steer society by selectively punishing segments of people who they view as “unamerican.” Whether it’s done to juggalo types from “the wrong side of the tracks”; strange religions; different races; or like in the past, pot smokers, guys with long hair, or punks with colors in their hair. etc... etc... etc...
I don’t know how we fix this problem, but I suspect the tendency to view “others” as problematic and applying pressure to other groups in a misguided attempt to steer them into compliance is part of the problem.
There are lots of things that are protected activities that I would like surveiled. Militias. The KKK. Neo-nazis. I certainly hope the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are keeping tabs on their activities.
In Western jurisdictions, probable cause and judicial oversight are only relevant to searches of private property, arrests/etc. Police have always been empowered to surveil public behaviour, and in my opinion, rightly so.
It would be incredibly impractical to require judicial authorization for something as simple as browsing a public neo-nazi forum, or driving around looking at known drug-spots.
The question is whether the ubiquity of social media/phone cameras has changed our attitude. Arguably, we've created an inescapable, 24/7 surveillance apparatus . If you attend a protest, there's a real chance your photo may very well end up on Twitter/Facebook/etc, inadvertently or otherwise.
I do think it's time to discuss the role of phone cameras in modern society.
How about people suspected of planning a crime?
It would be really hard for cops to prevent crimes if they had to wait until after it was committed in order to surveil.
Regardless, there are cops whose jobs are to identify people who may be planning a crime. So my question stands - any concerns with surveilling those people?
In the 2006 bulletin, the FBI detailed the threat of white nationalists and skinheads infiltrating police in order to disrupt investigations against fellow members and recruit other supremacists.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
Also, let's not forget the KKK's history of organized crime. They've earned any surveillance they're under. It's far from a straight comparison between them and ad hoc protesters when you're talking about "protected activities".
Inevitably, the microscopic amount of good that could be done would be vastly outweighed by the chilling effect on every group that was trying to create positive change at the expense of the oligarchy. Aka: true patriots.
The government shouldn't put someone under (specific|personal) surveillance without strong evidence of course. But I don't see what prevents them from reading twitter, going into public chat rooms, etc.
It's certainly possible that this is just the price of freedom. But I think its a rather heavy price.
Even if they were able to catch every crime before it started, ala minority report, they, based on past behavior, would most likely seriously abuse that power hence the strong opposition here to having them even come close to posessing that power.
Here's a long list of terrorist incidents, some of which were pre-emptively disrupted by the FBI:
https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-20...
> Even if they were able to catch every crime before it started, ala minority report, they, based on past behavior, would most likely seriously abuse that power hence the strong opposition here to having them even come close to posessing that power.
I don't really understand your point. I'm not arguing that they won't abuse their power. They will. They always do. The question is whether or not the abuses that might occur as the result of analyzing publicly available information are worse than the harms that might come from not doing so. I come down pretty squarely on the harms from not doing so being greater, but reasonable people can disagree, I suppose.
Says the FBI, with a conflict of interest large enought to drive a big truck full of fertilizer though in publishing these things. They also have a varified history of lying through their teeth.
Bring out FBI press-releases and the like and I'll just have to point you at the many FBI statements from the past that are now obviously blatent fabricated lies.
You mean like the entire practice of forensic fiber analysis, which they were forced to cop to after the fact: https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-testimo...
The thread of discussion here is that the FBI needs to have broad survaillance capabilities to catch crime before it occurs. The list you gave has verly little support for that in that almost all of the acts in the list were not stopped due to any survaillance, but rather invesigations after the fact. You could assert that they might have been stopped, but that is conjecture.
How many criminals announce their plans on Twitter in a way that law enforcement can use to prevent a crime? From my perspective, it seems like the potential for crime prevention is small compared to the potential for abuse.
And this feeling you have may stem from another political narrative being created and amplified: the fear of 'the other'. The fear that justifies all of this to so many people.
Sowing the FUD that e.g. most people from Mexico are "criminials, rapists, carrying disease", or that Moslims are terrorists. That terrorist sleeper cells may be everywhere. A gliding scale of xenophobia created for political purposes.
There is an ocean of options in between “do nothing” and “surveil and database every citizen who potentially maybe, might, could exercise their constitutional protections and protest.” A vast amount of options.
Reading public messages seems like a super reasonable thing for the police to be doing, to keep tabs on groups that have recently engaged in disruption and violence. Whether those groups are right wing or left wing.
I don't see how you can prevent the police from reading stuff that's being broadcast for everyone else to see.
And threats of violence, or evidence of organizing to cause violence, should be investigated.
The police aggregate vast sums of data and uses it in ways that the public does not understand, intend, or expect. It's not unlike the way people 'sign' away their privacy on the internet without being aware that their data will then be sold and resold and used against them.
It is a common belief that information is a weapon, and it certainly can be used as one. So does it makes sense, at least from one perspective, that our information should not be legal to catalogue? After all, it is illegal in the U.S. for the government to create a registry of firearms owners because such a registry could be used against the people and its very existence would be an infringement on the rights of those people.
If a police officer sits down at the dinner table next to me and listens in on my conversation with friends and family, I'd be quite uncomfortable. I'd feel equally uncomfortable if they sat across the restaurant and pointed a microphone at the table to record everything. However, suddenly we treat them like normal people if they download the entire contents of our digital lives and process every word we've ever written online.
It's one thing for Twitter to be accessible to natural persons publicly. It's another for a government to treat everyone as though they are under investigation at all times, without a warrant.
For clarity, in my opinion, a police officer who just happens to follow me on twitter because he likes video games is a natural person. However, he stops being a natural person once he starts representing the organization he works for.
Innocent people should not be surveilled ruthlessly on the off chance that every now and again we catch one evil person. In my mind, it's like the TSA invading everyone's privacy without ever catching a single terrorist. It's a waste of resources, on top of being a disgusting behavior.
On the other hand, there are tons of cameras in public spaces too. So, even though people have had a built-in expectation of ephemerality, that's already been violated for quite a while now.
That said, in my view, surveillance against the average person has got to go.
Yes. That's better than the alternative. So many things can be construed as criminal that I don't think it's an impediment to the investigation of actual criminal in practice. If anything stops police from wasting our money surviving groups that are not actually threats to anything but the government wants under surveillance for political/ideological reasons.
I'd rather still have Matin Luther King around than to have whatever the FBI claims to have disrupted.
We know they tried to do so at least once while maintaining deniability.
It must be very difficult to catch (unless you want a surveillance society where everyone is suspect).
Even in cases where it's planned and announced it's difficult to stop (Al Qaeda did announce they would assassinate Charb, editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, and despite police protection they managed to do so).
This part of your comment really, really rubs me the wrong way. Your personal inclinations absolutely cannot direct the apparatus of state on a whim. Either those groups are suspected of criminal activity or conspiracy to commit criminal activity, which is probable cause for surveillance, or they aren't.
The United States is a Constitutional Republic with rights explicitly enshrined therein, including its amendments. You are more than welcome to your opinion on violating constitutional rights but if you want the rule of law then you should follow the constitutional process to add an amendment in order to revoke said rights.
> So, you are opposed to government surveillance of neo-nazi groups that eschew violence, then?
Yes! You either believe in free speech and freedom of assembly or you don't. If these groups are a clear and present danger, show probable cause already. If they aren't, counter-protest, shame them, embarrass them, whatever.
More often than not, hate groups can't help but cross that line to violence or are already linked to violence. It's really almost an oxymoron to talk about neo-Nazi groups that "eschew violence" since they almost always believe in genocide and the violent overthrow of the government and are working towards it. I know it's a tempting rhetorical device, but it's really a strawman.
Tell me: which constitutional rights are violated by the police reading your public twitter feed?
> Yes! You either believe in free speech and freedom of assembly or you don't. If these groups are a clear and present danger, show probable cause already. If they aren't, counter-protest, shame them, embarrass them, whatever.
And how are you supposed to obtain probable cause, if you cannot even read people's public twitter feeds? Can you read their public websites? Their leaflets? What kind of research exactly is the FBI allowed to do on these groups?
This has a specific legal definition which is complex and not going to be communicated in a hackernews comment, but if you want to dig deeper,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
Pro tip: pretend like your free speech is out of favor with the current extremist government.
Oppose tyranny.
The first amendment is limited to protections against government interference.
The Bill of Rights protects you from the government. Twitter is not the government.
Not that that will limit the creation of ethically dubious firms like ClearviewAI or Palantir.
There is no law restricting the governments right to collect public data.
In the 21st century, our "papers and effects" are digital, online, and stored by third parties, and the law hasn't kept up with that.
Not sure why exactly you think "aha, so you admit it is legal!" is a particularly insightful thing to say, obviously all authoritarian governments have decided that they have the legal right to intrude on their citizens' privacy and thus have self-determined their actions to be legal. That has nothing to do with whether it's the morally right thing, or is in keeping with the spirit of the constitution.
To wit: China has determined that they have the legal right to disperse assemblies in Taiwan. That is legal there too. Do you think that is the right thing?
Kohlberg addresses this with his stages of moral development - some people think "because it is law, therefore it is moral", and that's really as much thought as they need to put into it to justify it to themselves. They don't bother addressing whether it should be legal, and that seems to be the thrust of your argument.
These arguments have already been decided. Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true. If you want to further restrict the government you’ll need to petition for new laws.
One citation of many possible regarding police malfeasance: https://theintercept.com/2020/06/02/history-united-states-go...
Even though being antifa is simply being against fascism.
Equating the antifa group and it's loose "members" with just an anti-ideology is a cop-out that isn't helpful to differentiating a desirable mindset (anti-fascism) with the undesirable tactics that many "members" of Antifa use.
Fortunately our legal system doesn't operate on the basis of Trump's tweets.
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/trump-cant-designate-antif...
the inaction toward the KKK is implicit consent toward their activities.
I’m not certain how you could draw a connection given the two groups respective statuses.
Their labeling of antifa as a terrorist organization sets the precedent that ANYONE engaging in antifascist activities or in opposition of fascism is a terrorist.
It's rather surreal to watch this all happen -- the gaslighting, the racists crawling out from under their rocks, the blatant corruption, and the fomenting of hate amongst the populace. I think things are going to get a lot uglier before November, and after the election to get even worse.
We live in perilous times.
Or, alternatively, you could formulate a more nuanced criteria for when the government should or should not surveil people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Enforcement_Act
Edit: It should be noted that this statue only applies to actions of representatives of the government[2]. It does not necessarily apply to the general public; the context of this comment chain is vague but implies a context that at least could include the public. I don’t mean to misrepresent the law. I am not a lawyer.
> The courts consider it unconstitutional to label any domestic organization as a 'terrorist organization', in the legal sense.
I don’t doubt this, but a citation would help me see where you’re coming from, in a legal jurisprudence sense.
To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou...
I can't directly cite the negative of never lynching anyone, of course. But a google search should reveal it. AFAIK Andrew Anglin of The Daily Stormer has never lynched anyone either. I still hope the FBI is keeping tabs on him, though.
Amren may have never done a lynching, but the shadowy nature of how think tanks can launder money may implicate an associated group in modern-day lynchings covered up by the police[0].
The Koches, one of the largest financiers of right wing groups was built oil refineries for both Stalin and Hitler(the reich’s second largest refinery). They scrubbed the latter from their corporate history and were never tried at Nuremberg.
As it stands today, an average high school girl attending a BLM protest from twitter is likely surveilled far more heavily than Taylor or Anglin from the revelations in new surveillance articles. And that’s terrifying.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/22/black-vict...
I agree. But the right would say the same thing about Antifa. Antifa, as a loose organization, has certainly engaged in various forms of violence and crime. Maybe not as much as the far-right groups, but not none, either. If the standard is simply non-zero levels of criminality, than that standard has been met.
> As it stands today, an average high school girl attending a BLM protest from twitter is likely surveilled far more heavily than Taylor or Anglin from the revelations in new surveillance articles. And that’s terrifying.
That's a nice thing to say rhetorically, but it's almost certainly not true. Anglin and Taylor are public figures who have substantial influence. I don't think you seriously believe that the average high school girl in BLM is getting more attention than Andrew Anglin.
If the point you really want to make is that BLM is getting a disproportionate share of attention relative to its violence or criminality, that's something I could agree with.
With that said, I agree with you on most of your other sentiments.
Liberalism simply can’t handle plausible deniability.
From my perspective, protests appear to just be there to amplify loud minority opinions and distort the discussion at this point. For all we know, we're hearing the vocal minority of people, instead of the actual voices that need hearing.
If we really wanted to fix protesting, to take an example: Homosexual discrimination at the workplace. Have a platform or "offline vote" if you will where all homosexual individuals are asked to rate their work experience, whether they had been discriminated against and what action they think should be taken, with the assumption that if it's found, that action needs to be taken. They then "vote", and we see the results.
I bet that if the majority saw the results, they'd rightfully make their mind up pretty quickly. Instead, we forced homosexual individuals for years/decades to protest and complain about the things that were rightfully affecting them, and only once it reached some arbitrary critical mass, we as the rest of society decided to change. What were we "waiting" for exactly? For people to change their minds? People to cave in after being worn down even though they don't agree? Societal opinions to shift? A new generation grown up with the movement being taught to them by elementary school teachers? Cultural norms to adapt?
Also, if we did get there and such a vote isn't followed up by actual action, then maybe our system of government is broken and we should fix it. Perhaps for that we should go out and protest.
Yes, and they have the right to protest too if they feel like their own voices aren't being heard. That's the beauty of freedom.
You can't seriously be against people protesting simply because you don't want to do it too. It's like arguing against voting because some (or even most) people don't vote and those who do are usually more "vocal" or political. It's a very dangerous mentality
Why not both? If your way gets better results then I'm sure people will stop the exhausting and dangerous work of protesting and civil disobedience.
But there is more to it. Courts have long recognized that state activity that can be reasonably construed to chill exercise of ones constitutional freedoms is similarly an infringement on those rights, and certainly take a very dim look on any sort of surveillance of political activity.