> but this began with gang affiliation lists

Civil courts have been able to exercise significant control of your life, including extended imprisonment without due process, for longer than these lists have been in effect. Frankly Americans have a lot fewer rights than they think they have, including the non-right of due process for being on a government list.

Edit: To pre-empt some comments I know are coming, civil courts do not require due process in the way you probably think of due process: a civil court can act against you without giving you representation, without allowing you to have representation, without you present, in secret from the public, and even without notifying you

EDIT2: While I'm soapboxing I'll note the power the civil court has over you isn't much different than the power three-letter agencies have over you (since they are usually given very broad mandates), it's just that civil courts have been around so much longer it's a good retort to people thinking they used to have rights. Whatever three-letters can't do to you is generally picked up by similar state agencies.

> a civil court can act against you without giving you representation, without allowing you to have representation, without you present, in secret from the public, and even without notifying you

While there is no right to be afforded free legal representation in civil court in most US jurisdictions (some do) and a civil court can render rulings and judgments against parties who are not represented by counsel, a civil court cannot prohibit a party from having legal representation, which is what your comment seems to suggest.

A civil court can render a ruling against a party if the party is not present, but it will typically go to great lengths to ensure that notice is given to parties before doing so (pleadings served to last address by process server, notice published, etc.). There are typically strict requirements that have to be met before civil court can render a ruling or judgment without a party present, especially where there is no indication that the party has received notice first.

A lot of anecdotes about drastic judgments and rulings being handed down by civil courts happen when parties ignore notice of the proceedings. There are a lot of rules for handling cases in civil court and they are grounded in the constitutional right to due process. Notice and due process are taken really seriously in most US jurisdictions. Federal Courts are especially strict about following the rules.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp

"A civil court can render a ruling against a party if the party is not present, but it will typically go to great lengths to ensure that notice is given to parties before doing so"

In many types of cases, but not all. Protection from abuse order hearings generally happen without the knowledge of the target of the order.

For good reason, even starting the process can set off violence and it's not instant to complete.

I honestly don't see a good reason.

The process is commonly abused by divorce lawyers to gain control of the house for their client, and the bar for evidence is extremely low. The way our adversarial justice system is supposed to work is that the truth comes out in a fair fight. This process obviously ignores this foundation.

If there's really enough evidence to suggest immediate violence, then they should be arrested for terroristic threats and other stuff. And let's not forget that the protective order is just a piece of paper and won't stop any violence if the person is truly motivated.

Frankly, I think a lot of civil court actions have been created just to avoid the protections guaranteed in the criminal system.

> I honestly don't see a good reason.

I presume you're one of the fortunate majority who've never had domestic abusers injure (temporarily or permanently) or kill someone loved.

I think the brunt of their points are there are few protections and they tend to have far to much power over those who not in the 1% and can afford to drag a case out for years. Also judges are people too and quite often are affected by emotion. Statistically your are significantly more likely to get off with a better judgement if they've just had a good lunch. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/justice-is-ser...

> a civil court cannot prohibit a party from having legal representation, which is what your comment seems to suggest.

> https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp

This is a good point for federal cases, but I meant my comment to cover civil action in state courts too. These are the courts that are most likely to affect someone's life. For instance in California small claims courts you are not allowed to be represented.

That’s by design to make justice more accessible. IIRC, you can petition the judge to adjourn the case and move it to normal court.

Also, I believe in small claims as a defendant you can appoint an attorney to represent you. I sued a tow operator in small claims court and the dude who showed up was definitely an attorney.

> I sued a tow operator in small claims court and the dude who showed up was definitely an attorney.

That might be because you were suing a company, though. How would a company "represent itself"? Get the board of directors in?

Correct -- In many jurisdictions, corporations cannot proceed pro se. They must retain counsel.

As far as a company speaking for itself, a corporate representative is often designated to speak for and bind the company in any civil action.

See, e.g., Federal Rule 30(b)(6): https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_30

Lots of times they just send an executive. See the Uber civil cases.

Small claims courts have very limited powers though. They cannot impose any sanction except a small amount of remuneration.

"Frankly Americans have a lot fewer rights than they think they have"

Very true

Classic George Carlin - "You have no rights!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9-R8T1SuG4

I've never had a good experience "pre-empting" comments that will inevitably be used to derail your thread.

In any case, I was mostly thinking that it has to be a form of privilege to feel like a particular slippery slope hasn't happened yet. I think about how the word "privilege" is used, and its more like "exemption from some inconveniences that aren't obvious". Your post about people not noticing that civil courts and agencies have these power over assumed rights is a decent example of that.

Worse than that, sometimes these intelligence agencies create said terrorists.

> Of these defendants caught up in FBI terrorism sting operations, an FBI informant was the person who led one of every three terrorist plots, and the FBI also provided all of the necessary weapons, money, and transportation.

I'm sure such a thing is something no American would agree with. I wouldn't be surprised if similar actions were happening at all levels (gangs to terrorists). I'm sure this also isn't isolated to America either, as it appears to be the incentives that causes this and how we measure success (i.e. how many criminals are caught).

These conversations are extremely complex. But I think we need large social discussions about how to actually solve crime and prevent animosity in the world. I think it is time for a big rethink. If there's 2 million people on a list, I'm not sure that list is very effective. It's like looking for needles in a haystack by adding more hay.

[0] https://www.brandeis.edu/investigate/government-corporate-wr...

> I think it is time for a big rethink.

I'm in. Where's the convention, and how do we get our idiot representatives to play along?

Here's my positions, but of course I'm open to other opinions. I wrote a big list and I realized I could distill a lot of my ideas. For one I'm a big fan of STAR and Approval voting. We've seen over a hundred years of ordinal methods in various countries (including America) and seen the failure. Time to move to what the experts are suggesting. Which brings me to the second point. Lots of these topics are extremely complex and contain a lot of nuance. Us non-experts can see a high level but sometimes these nuanced points matter a lot. So let's not be so aggressive in asserting how right we are. Also, we need to focus on unity. Mic drops and calling people names doesn't help us. We need nuanced and calm conversations. Our fellow citizens, no matter how crazy their beliefs, are not our enemies. Don't dehumanize people, that's divide and rule. Lastly, we need to stay focused. I think there is a new thing to be outraged about every other day. Let's talk about what the big important problems are and focus on those first. Let's recognize that doing so isn't dismissing the other problems. We only have so much bandwidth. Right now we have no such priority list, we're just jumping from thing to thing. Solving problems takes time (a thing we often forget). If our attention to the problem is shorter than the time it takes to solve the problem then we will never solve these problems.

Edit: One thing I wanted to add is that we can have different groups focus on different things. It's not a zero sum game. This is because not everyone is an expert in everything, and thus the utility they contribute isn't the same as every task they contribute to.

Approval voting and STAR voting are the BOSS.

You refuse the two party system and work on a third party geared towards pre-emptive avoidance of the corruption mechanisms that got the two big ones. Do that at the local and state level first, attacking gerrymandering and other incumbent favoring electoral manipulation methods to weaken the two party strangle hold, such as heavy petitioning and lobbying to force state Secretaries of State to fix election laws.

Until we the people are actually represented in the legislative branch nothing fundamental will change. Being that the other branches are largely unaccountable to the citizenry, the legislative branch is the logical entity to focus on (and the fourth estate, heavily under attack by the executive et al)

Under the US system as it is, with first-past-the-post voting and all votes for a state going to the presidential candidate who got the most, a third party can't gain any traction. Worse, third parties under the US system are another vehicle for corruption (example: Republicans paying fees and collecting signatures to get Greens on the ballot to divide the left vote and get a Republican in office, though this problem could be fixed with some form of instant runoff). You'd need constitutional reform.

While imperfect, I think that German electoral system is much better. Any party that gets 5% or more of the vote is guaranteed fair representation, gerrymandering isn't a possibility.

However, in a multiparty system deals still have to be struck to put together governing coalitions, so a party that insists on being purist is likely to be shut out.

> to get Greens on the ballot to divide the left vote and get a Republican in office

If people are serious about voting reform (and they should be) then this "spoiler effect" can be weaponized: start a grassroots campaign to vote third party until the Democrats support changing the voting system at the state level (and vote in primaries for Democrats who support this change).

This may lead to few tight state races being lost, but that means that only a small percentage of the population would be enough to get the Democratic Party officials to take notice. To make the signal even more clear, the third party chosen should be one that focuses as narrowly as possible on voting reform, such as the Alliance Party[0], which may also encourage some disgruntled Republicans to temporarily lend their votes, whereas they would be more reluctant to support the Green Party, for example.

Of course there is a danger that voting reform would get portrayed as a pro-Democrat policy (if it isn't already), but once enough Republicans (in majority Democrat states) have experience casting their ballot in a more expressive and representative system, it will be harder for Republicans in other states to oppose it.

[0] https://www.theallianceparty.com/political_reform

To be honest, a lot of this is already happening and I don't think the Democrats care. When voter turnout is high, Democrats win hands down. When voter turnout is low, Republicans win. But the kicker is that both parties thrive when they are losing. This may often be counter intuitive to many people but I think many have bad priors when modeling the game that politicians are playing.

Actually, Democrats are generally in favor of instant runoff voting, and many more liberal places have enacted it.

But yes, there are a lot of professional campaign consultants who have the system wired that they profit whether they win or lose, and many of those work for Democrats.

> Democrats are generally in favor

To be clear are we talking about the politicians or the people? The people, yes. Politicians I'm not so sure about. Also I'd encourage you to read my other comment which addresses ordinal voting (like IRV) and the issues with them. It might be why the party likes it (still having vote splitting in the primaries).

We are looking at a republican party the majority of which would happily end democracy to end the threat of them ever being tossed out again. Tipping the scales in their direction at this critical juncture to motivate Democrats seems like a spectacularly bad idea.

Seems like it would be a better and safer idea to to work towards the same goal using primaries to tilt already democratic districts in the direction of reformers.

> While imperfect, I think that German electoral system is much better. Any party that gets 5% or more of the vote is guaranteed fair representation, gerrymandering isn't a possibility.

How do we bring this to the US?

> While imperfect, I think that German electoral system is much better.

I often see people compare the US system to European systems and use "party" in both. I think this results in a pretty bad comparison, but takes some nuance to understand why. Democrats and Republicans are more accurately compared to coalitions in European systems than they are to European parties. As a point, AOC or Bernie have very different political ideologies than say Pelosi or Biden, yet are in the same party. Similarly Trump is very different ideologically than say John Kasich. While there is variance within European political parties I believe that we see a larger variance within American parties and thus it makes it more accurate to compare to coalitions.

In addition to this we should recognize that most European systems are working under a parliamentary system which causes this proportionate representation. We don't quite have a system like that in America and it would be tough to change the entire system. This is why many people, such as myself, are proposing systems like STAR or Approval. By being able to score (or rate) candidates (instead of ranking) we can achieve a proportionate representation with very minimal change, especially since systems like Approval already work on current voting machines. It is also a lot easier and more transparent compared to many round systems from ordinal voting.

>(example: Republicans paying fees and collecting signatures to get Greens on the ballot to divide the left vote and get a Republican in office, though this problem could be fixed with some form of instant runoff

But I also want to be clear about this. Ordinal systems (such as IRV/STV) fix this kind of spoiler there is another spoiler that is fairly important: the favorite betrayer. That is because the green party here is called a weak spoiler, they don't have a large voter base. But we need to also be VERY concerned with strong spoilers. For example: if Bernie ran against Biden. Ordinal systems are still vulnerable to this type of spoiler while cardinal systems are resistant to both strong and weak spoilers.

Edit: I wanted to add that we actually saw strong spoilers in the 2016 and 2020 elections, in the primaries. In 2016 it happened in both parties. Bernie and Clinton were a split. Many people didn't vote Bernie because they thought Hillary would better beat Trump. Similarly in the Republican party you had Trump, Cruz, and Kasich. Many Republicans liked a moderate like Kasich but didn't think he was a strong candidate. In the 2020 election we again saw this vote splitting in the Democratic primaries. While these cases are more obvious, such splitting also happens a lot in congressional races and other down ballot races.

While most of the above is ease to agree with, there is this uneasy feeling that one could change "two parties" to "one", and use it in a Chinese context. Which would also hold true, after all there's nothing wrong with a single party system as long as it is democratic and consists of a wide spectrum of political ideology?

Well, in practice there kind of is. It probably doesn't have to be that way, but just from what little experience I have, I wouldn't hesitate which one I'd rather live in. The more heterogeneous system tends to bring a more heterogeneous culture and with it a wider range of ideas.

> most European systems are working under a parliamentary system which causes this proportionate representation.

Could you clarify what you mean here? There is nothing about a parliamentary system which inherently requires or leads to proportional representation, as the UK system shows. Similarly it would be possible in the US congressional system to have proportional representation by having multi-member districts (as was allowed[0] before 1967) and using a system like STV, also called multi-winner ranked-choice voting.[1]

> cardinal systems are resistant to both strong and weak spoilers.

While I support any serious alternative to FPTP, it's worth being aware of the deficiencies of Approval voting. Firstly, it can confront voters with difficult questions about whether they support a certain candidate enough to approve of them. For example, a Democrat voter might hedge their bets by voting for a moderate Republican to prevent a more extreme Republican winning, while hoping that enough Republicans approve of a moderate Democrat.

Secondly, though, I think that an important goal for a voting systems is that it doesn't increase (and ideally decreases) the dependence on voting machines. As recent events have shown, every additional element to a voting system is just expanding the attack surface for people to target FUD at, and a voting machine is a complex system which is very hard for the average voter to reason about (even if the purported hardware designs and source code were publicly available).

While it is still feasible to count Approval ballots by hand, and the process can be split between districts to produce sub-totals which can be summed, the fact that a given ballot can have multiple marks on it does increase the complexity for human counters, which makes the counting slower and more expensive. In particular, if there are N candidates in an election, then a FPTP ballot can be placed onto one of N piles, whereas 2^N piles are needed to group all possible Approval votes physically together.

I don't know how much that complexity would actually slow down the counting, but in a world where election workers are being threatened with violence for doing their job, even an extra hour of counting is hard to justify. Fortunately, though, there is a voting system which satisfies the above criteria, namely Asset Voting.[2] In its single-winner variant, the election proceeds just like a FPTP one, with the same ballot papers, instructions, and counting process, but after the count is complete, the candidates from fewest to most votes get to reassign their share to a remaining candidate, until one candidate has a majority. This removes the spoiler problem, and relies on the fact that voters are choosing someone to represent them and who can therefore be entrusted with the job of assigning their votes to the ultimate winner if necessary.

[0] https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/recommendation-1-3

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#As...

> it's worth being aware of the deficiencies of Approval voting. Firstly, it can confront voters with difficult questions about whether they support a certain candidate enough to approve of them.

I'm sorry, but I find this concern a bit in bad taste. This type of strategic voting exists in every voting system. In ordinal systems (such as IRV, STV, etc) you artificially rank candidates higher than what your actual preference is. The same thing about the second concern (you add the Republican to your ranking). It's a pretty universal strategy in voting so I'm not sure why this is a problem specific to Approval, and thus why it it is being brought up. This can easily be mitigated by using score voting. In addition, I would like to point out that the benefit of STAR is that is is extremely resistant to strategies. AFAIK it is the most resistant voting system.

> As recent events have shown, every additional element to a voting system is just expanding the attack surface for people to target FUD at, and a voting machine is a complex system which is very hard for the average voter to reason about (even if the purported hardware designs and source code were publicly available).

I'm confused by this comment. I see Arizona as the prime example of why we would NOT want an ordinal system. Ordinal systems like STV and IRV have multi rounds. Let's look at the two algorithms (at an abstract level. This will be fine for STV/IRV/Approval/Score)

Ordinal:

Count tallies of all ranked candidates. If top candidate >50% declare winner else remove argmin from list and goto top.

Cardinal:

Sum scores of all rated candidates. Declare argmax as winner.

I don't know about you, but summing columns and taking argmax seems way easier to me than the multi-round system. We've seen that in many ranked elections that you have many many rounds. The NYC Mayoral race had 8 rounds FWIW. Approval is one round (like FPTP) and STAR is at most 2 rounds (it is always 2 rounds in fact). I do not know how anyone can argue that the counting of cardinal systems are more complex. You note that even an extra hour is difficult and I'll note that IRV takes days to count, as seen in NYC and others.

I should highlight, again, that the US has had STV in the past and then many of those cities went back to FPTP because it was complicated and didn't solve the issues they wanted to.

> In its single-winner variant, the election proceeds just like a FPTP one, with the same ballot papers, instructions, and counting process, but after the count is complete, the candidates from fewest to most votes get to reassign their share to a remaining candidate, until one candidate has a majority. This removes the spoiler problem

I'm not sure why you felt it was important to explain this to me when I've already demonstrated a working knowledge and at this point I also feel that you ignored a good portion of my previous post that was about strong and weak spoilers. Where I talked about how ordinal systems prevent weak spoilers but not strong spoilers. Maybe a source would help?[0] Weak spoilers aren't a concern. Strong spoilers, aka a favorite betrayer, are. Solving weak spoilers allow third parties to exist, but it doesn't allow them to win.

As for Asset voting I'm extremely against this. That's just making collusion rings easier. Again, let's look at the 2016 and 2020 elections. That's just letting the parties dictate who can run in the elections. This is a major problem in our system.

[0] https://electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

> I'm sorry, but I find this concern a bit in bad taste.

And I'm sorry that you feel this way, as I was not trying to insult Approval Voting (which, as I indicated, I would strongly support over FPTP) nor trying to detract from the positive contribution you have made to this discussion.

> The same thing about the second concern (you add the Republican to your ranking).

I think that, at least conceptually, it is easier for a voter to say "I support Hillary more than Romney" or even to give those candidates different scores out of 10, than to say "My 'approval threshold' is calibrated such that Romney is below it and Hillary is above it".

You're probably right that in (some?) ordinal systems there are counter-intuitive outcomes that can result from ranking a less preferred candidate too highly, or even from ranking them at all (if the system doesn't require an exhaustive ranking of all candidates), but the question being asked of the voter at least doesn't require them to pick a parameter for which there doesn't appear to be a "correct" value even assuming they have perfectly formed opinions of each candidate.

> the benefit of STAR is that is is extremely resistant to strategies.

I would have difficulty predicting what would happen if I under/over-voted a candidate I grudgingly accepted, so my instinct would be to vote honestly (which is probably the best outcome of a voting system given the impossibility of a strategy-free system), but my objection to STAR is that it is harder to fill in and count by hand (requiring 2^6N piles, or the use of N calculators).

> Ordinal systems like STV and IRV have multi rounds.

Agreed. From that perspective, Approval Voting is clearly preferable.

> I should highlight, again, that the US has had STV in the past and then many of those cities went back to FPTP because it was complicated and didn't solve the issues they wanted to.

I know of examples of IRV being abandoned, which I assume is what you're referring to here. (Voting system terminology probably differs around the world, but I tend to think of STV as being a multi-winner system and IRV being single-winner).

For me, the most important property of a voting system is for it to have a strong chance of being adopted, which is the only reason I support more US jurisdiction adopting IRV, but you're right that there is a potential "well-poisoning" effect where a reform gets adopted and then quickly abandoned, harming future reform efforts. This risk has to be balanced, though, against that of a less popular reform being proposed and failing to be adopted, which is likely to be portrayed as a lack of support for any reform, and that could be just as harmful.

> I'm not sure why you felt it was important to explain this to me when I've already demonstrated a working knowledge and at this point I also feel that you ignored a good portion of my previous post that was about strong and weak spoilers.

I'm again really sorry that you seem to have taken this so personally, as I do respect your position. What I was explaining was how Asset Voting works, since I suspect most readers of this discussion would not have heard of it and I didn't know that you were familiar with it. The reason I didn't include anything in my reply about strong and weak spoilers is that I agreed with you and didn't have anything to add. You, on the other hand, completely skipped over the direct question at the start of my comment, asking you to clarify your point on parliamentary systems, but it seems that wasn't important to you.

> That's just making collusion rings easier. Again, let's look at the 2016 and 2020 elections. That's just letting the parties dictate who can run in the elections.

Asset Voting doesn't require the existence of parties at all, and I'm not sure how you think a collusion ring would work, or how the 2016 and 2020 US elections are relevant to Asset Voting. There would be no harm in voting for Kasich in the Republican primaries because he would have been able to assign his votes to Cruz, for example, if he had come third.

> but my objection to STAR is that it is harder to fill in and count by hand (requiring 2^6N piles, or the use of N calculators).

I honestly encourage you to attempt it. Create a fake election and test ballot counting with IRV, Approval, Score, and STAR. The last 3 you can actually use the same ballots so you only need two sets, one ranked and one rated (approval would be scores above a threshold).

I am absolutely certain if you do this exercise you will see that the cardinal systems are far easier. Remember, you are doing many of the same operations in both ordinal and cardinal, but in ordinal systems you have a longer outer loop. In cardinal systems you don't have that outer loop (i.e. dropping candidates). The issue is that you're not considering this into your complexity calculations.

Let's look at the algo again, but in a bit more detail.

While > 2 candidates: # This loop cannot be parallelized

- For each ballot: # This can be parallelized by prefix sum

--preference = argmin(ballot) # The highest ranked. This is a lookup on all rows btw

--preference += 1

--update table of candidate score list

- pop argmin candidate score list

We'll probably make this computationally easier by first sorting each ballot's preference. This will reduce the complexity of argmin

Now Cardinal

For each ballot: # This can be parallelized by prefix sum

- for each candidate: # This loop is trivially parallelized (prefix sum again)

-- candidate score += ballot candidate score

argmax candidate score list # You're doing this on the final score (row), not per ballot.

The second is far easier to do by hand and far more easily done by computers. You're just summing columns. Anyone with an excel spreadsheet can do this. Anyone with the spreadsheet can easily read and verify this too. I would not argue that the same can be said for ordinal systems. Take a look at the NYC Mayoral race[0]. Now imagine if Rounds 2-8 didn't exist. Easier to read and compute, right? What's happening inside each round is pretty similar. The difference is if you're doing += 1 or += score. And with cardinal systems you don't have to sort or determine who the preference is before doing the increment.

I'm not sure where the confusion is here.

[0] https://vote.nyc/sites/default/files/pdf/election_results/20...

Thanks for the detailed analysis of the different systems. I think that the way you are viewing things differently to me is that you are considering the ballots as abstract entities in a data structure. For example you say "Anyone with an excel spreadsheet can do this", but my point is that people don't cast their votes in Excel, they cast them either on opaque voting machines (which you have to trust is running the firmware that your auditors approved), or ideally they are casting them on paper.

To give an example of an easy paper-based algorithm, for FPTP you can group each ballot based on the candidate marked and store those as separate piles, and then whichever candidate has the biggest pile wins. Alternatively the piles can be weighed (using a non-electronic set of balance scales if necessary). Also note that the ballot counters only need to decide on the presence/absence/location of a single mark on each ballot, and not decide, for example, whether two marks are "approvals" of two different candidates, or an approval and a crossing out of an approval. These are the sorts of factors which your Excel spreadsheet model overlooks.

I do completely agree with you, though, that IRV/STV in practice tends to be slower than both FPTP and ordinal systems, and its counting process can't be run in parallel, so I would only support it in the circumstance where it was the only reform being offered, and where I was confident that its failure modes wouldn't cause it to be quickly abandoned and used as an excuse to stick with FPTP over better alternatives. Where there is a choice of reform, I support Asset Voting because it retains all the simplicity benefits of FPTP while being resistant to the spoiler effect.

Honestly voting is high on my priority list. The reason is because I believe that voting will have a lot of downstream effects. It will make a lot of other things easier. But I don't believe we should be trying to change things at the national level at this point (that's down the line). I think we should be trying to implement systems like STAR and Approval at local levels. City, County, State. We know that these are the systems the experts are suggesting. So let's stop doing the same experiment we've seen fail a hundred times. And while the dragon is the end goal, if we can't defeat the low level monsters it would be insane to go fight the final boss.

There have been many third parties, and I'm not aware of any that have achieved even middling success (maybe Libertarian?) since I've been alive. How would this party fare any better?

>but this began with gang affiliation lists.

An old coworker of mine was on a gang registry because of people he associated with when he was a teenager. He was in his late 20's-early 30's when we worked together. Really nice guy, super hard working, spent his free time gaming or hanging out with his girlfriend, got really into his puppy and being a dog owner. Hadn't been around gangsters for at least a decade.

He'd regularly get pulled over and hassled by cops just because when they scanned his plate he'd show up as being on the gang registry. Ended up losing his license for several months because his friend who was his passenger one time had a very small amount of weed in a bag in his pocket when he got pulled over.

Pretty much any time cops are around or even whenever he drives, there's always a chance he's going to get pulled over and harassed randomly.

Not because of anything he ever did, just because he chose the wrong friends when he was young.

plus even more relevant to HN is when authorities are using algorithms as a scapegoat. we probably know what will happen when they start using black box ML with a ton of bias baked in.

There is a scary (gross in my mind) story that reports on some dystopian pre-crime Minority Report Sheriff targeting kids.

Looks like the court case is in process, though not sure why court didn't immediately shut it down pending trial given how (to my non-lawyer brain) this seems that plaintiffs will almost definitely prevail given clear violations of multiple Amendments.

From the reporting: "Over the span of five months, police went to his home 21 times. They also showed up at his gym and his parent’s place of work. The Tampa Bay Times revealed that since 2015, the sheriff's office has made more than 12,500 similar preemptive visits to people.

These visits often resulted in other, unrelated fines and arrests that further victimized families and added to the likelihood that they would be visited and harassed again. In one incident, the mother of a targeted teenager was issued a $2,500 fine for having chickens in the backyard. In another incident, a father was arrested because his 17-year-old was smoking a cigarette. These behaviors occur in all neighborhoods, across all economic strata—but only marginalized people, who live under near constant police scrutiny, face penalization."

https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...

https://ij.org/press-release/pasco-families-win-round-one-in...

I've heard of this, going back a year or two. The sheriff's target the households presented by the algorithms with the intention of fining, arresting, and otherwise legally harassing the targeted families in an attempt to drive them out of town.

Selective enforcement of laws is a problem, and there are plenty of laws to selectively enforce.

It's not even enforcement it's before any crimes, or after a crime has been adjudicated. What's worse the article shows that the visits induce crimes because of police behavior...

But yeah for sure on selective enforcement = super biased. On race and wealth.

> fine for having chickens in the backyard

Land of the free. The arbitrary harassment of the population is one thing, but then there is that mountain of actual laws and regulations that would be considered an overreach even by the standards of most totalitarian dictatorships in the world. What could possibly be wrong with having chickens in the back yard?

Or collecting rain water in a barrel! I wonder if here is a legal concept of the commons, sort of like a really low speed limit on the highway that would be dangerous to follow given every other car goes 15+ over it.

The slippery slope is only a fallacy if there is no reasoning presented between steps though.

"We should track who is gang affiliated" -> "We should track who has done terroristic acts" -> "We should track who is affiliated with terrorists" -> "We should track who may be affiliated with them"

All seem to be reasonable steps, which IMO makes it not a case of the slope being a fallacy.

The slope to totalitarianism is always slippery.

Its not a slippery slope when we've been at the bottom of the slope your whole life

The people on the bottom of the slope are the people on the lists. As they grow to 1.9MM people.

> You mean being put on a restricted rights/law enforcement attention list with no due process?

What novel 'due process' do you believe is necessary for the police to unintrusively start investigating someone?

We already require judge-issued warrants for intrusive investigations (Searching your things, tapping your phone lines, arresting you, etc).

I don't believe there's any country in the world that requires a judge to review the police putting you on a list as a person of interest. I am no legal scholar, so I should probably cut myself off right here - but do you not think that perhaps, there is a valid reason for this? You're inventing novel legal practices without precedent, here.

If I, as a police department, put you on a secret list of possible pedophiles based on the fact that we saw you speaking to another person on that list, noticed you in a board game store patronized by many local young Magic: The Gathering fans, you were single with no children, and you were the brother of someone who once dated the sister of the cop who put you on the list, would you have a problem with that?

What if we weren't allowed to confirm or deny you were on the list, except to a prospective landlord or employer who filled out a form?

What if there were no way to find out those were the reasons I put you on the list, and no appeals process to be removed from the list?

What if you couldn't prove standing in court because there was no legal way to prove you were on the list at all without a friendly judge?

> You're inventing novel legal practices without precedent

Which is why people are forced to rely on the racial makeup of these horrifying lists in order to challenge them. The problem becomes a lot clearer if your local police force makes up a list of all Jews in the neighborhood (whatever criteria they decide to use, i.e. "valid reason") for special treatment.

edit: and, of course, what if the list leaks, and is used as an automated first step for disqualification by employers and landlords for the rest of your life?

Would I have a problem with being on a list that, from my perspective, I can't tell the difference between being on it, and not on it?

I don't know, I wouldn't be able to tell. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody's there to hear it, does it matter to anyone whether it makes a sound?

> What if we weren't allowed to confirm or deny you were on the list, except to a prospective landlord or employer who filled out a form?

You're swinging at strawmen. Nobody in this thread is defending intrusive lists.

For some reason, though, you are conflating unintrusive lists (Which don't require oversight anywhere in the world) with intrusive lists (Which do require oversight in... well-governed parts of the world).

Do you have arguments against the former? I'm not interested in being convinced that the latter are bad, I'm already convinced that they are bad.

> edit: and, of course, what if the list leaks, and is used as an automated first step for disqualification by employers and landlords for the rest of your life?

If there's an unholy decades-long alliance between the FBI, the background check bureaus, and millions of employers and landlords, that neither my federal, state, or municipal government is interested in doing anything about, I think my main problem is not 'the FBI has a list'. I think my main problem is 'My society, on every imaginable level, is broken.'

>Would I have a problem with being on a list that, from my perspective, I can't tell the difference between being on it, and not on it?

>I don't know, I wouldn't be able to tell. If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody's there to hear it, does it matter to anyone whether it makes a sound?

Spoken like someone who hasn't had the long arm of the law drop in on them before, or a person who "doesn't care about that liberty anyway, so why not vote it away?"

Just because you don't see the problem doesn't mean it isn't there. Just because you didn't see the tree fall, doesn't mean the world is uneffected. These are concepts 3-4 year olds manage to divest themselves of once they grap the permanence of objects. Just because you don't get much out of a liberty doesn't mean that it's cool to force the loss of it on somebody else. Liberty is to be treasured and protected. The selective relinquishment, revocation, or limiting of one for anyone should be a Big. Frigging. Deal.

The fact people are so cavalier with wisking away the freedoms that underpin American Civil Life on mere suspicion of something that the State is not even required to be transparent about should disturb everybody.

I don't understand this response. He was told it was a "secret list." Why would you take such a tone in response to him saying he might not have a problem since he doesn't know about the list? It's a hypothetical about a secret list, and since he doesn't immediately agree with the conclusion, you browbeat him about not having the long arm of the law drop down on him, etc.

More importantly, this:

> Spoken like someone who hasn't had the long arm of the law drop in on them before, or a person who "doesn't care about that liberty anyway, so why not vote it away?"

Who are you quoting here? No one said this at all.

I'm actually disgusted by your comment and the logic you present in it.

Your tone is inappropriate, please try to make your point without implying GP is dumber than a third grader. It implies malicious intent and is bad for discussion.

The problem is when that list is used to prevent you from accessing common services, like fly on planes.

Edit: Because people assumed I was talking about the no-fly list specifically; I'm not. The terror watch list also winds up being used to cause problems for people.

From: THE PROGRESS AND PITFALLS OF THE TERRORIST WATCH LIST By: COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-110hhrg48979/html/C...

> Inaccurate watch list information also increases the chances of innocent persons being stopped or detained because of misidentification.

A page by the ACLU goes into some detail. https://www.aclu.org/other/us-government-watchlisting-unfair...

That list, and others, are not innocent "we're just keeping an eye on these people" lists. Their use causes serious harm.

Except that, if I understand correctly, this is not the no-fly list. So...

Yes, that is a problem. But that's not what the parent poster is talking about. It's absolutely irrelevant to this conversation.

The parent poster takes issue with the fact that an unintrusive person of interest list exists, and wants oversight on it. This is an absolutely unprecedented legal take.

It doesn't help that they are conflating the two (one of which is, at a first glance reasonable, and the other is not), when they are not the same thing. All that does is muddy the waters.

There’s no such thing as an “unintrusive” list. They make the lists for a reason.

If that's the case, you should have no trouble answering two simple questions:

1. What do you think happens to people on it?

2. Which of those actions should require judicial oversight, but currently don't?

So far, the only answers to those questions in this thread have been 'imagine if...' tangents. I don't need to imagine strawmen, I'd like to know what is currently wrong.

Imagining disasters is how we're in this mess, I'd like to know what the actionable problem is.

> Imagining disasters is how we're in this mess

I posted some links in my original comment that talk about specific problems. That being said, "allowing those in authority to do things that could be used inappropriately... and then it turning out that they did exactly that" doesn't require ANY imagination. The US government engages in such behavior on a daily basis.

Please note the four demands the ACLU makes in the publication you linked.

None of them demand that police lists should not exist, or that judicial oversight should be necessary to put a person on one.

Instead, they demand that:

1. The lists be accurate.

2. The lists be accurate.

3. Allowing people to contest them on a case-by-case basis.

4. To not blacklist people from employment based on them.

The ACLU seems to be in agreement with me.

I don't see them agreeing with you at all. I see you saying "the lists are fine", whereas they are saying "the lists are not fine, but would be ok if these things were true (but they're not atm)". Personally, I don't think it's enough. I think someone being known to be on the terror watch list is likely to cause them all sorts of problems; and anyone can be put on the list for pretty much any reason.

We can't answer that because the lists are secret. That's part of the problem.

This is how the KGB, Stasi, and other secret police organizations work. It's a way to extra-judicially monitor and control the population. This should give you pause for thought. Law enforcement that the public can trust is a big deal. Our government already bends the laws quite a bit to suppress dissent, we shouldn't enable them to do more of this.

It's a lot more straight-forward if the police investigate crimes reported to them by citizens. That's what they are supposedly there for, right?