It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors have high success rates. Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. Studies of jury psychology show how much peer pressure and other factors extrinsic to the law come into play.
Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz. Law is the mask of power. By all means defend and assert your rights, but understand the costs. I find people are under such illusions about how cruel the American justice system is that this leads them to make foolish decisions. Do not underestimate the adversarial nature of the justice system, nor the accompanying incentives agents of the state who are on the other side of you have to lie.
This is a misunderstood statistic.
Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success. They don't operate like two private parties suing each other to force the court to decide something. If the evidence is there or the charges aren't fully formed, they don't waste resources on it.
This leads to a contradictory set of complaints that the legal system lets too many people go or doesn't have enough teeth.
To be clear, I totally agree with your points, I just think this is more of a case of "lying with statistics" than being a misunderstanding.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Because of this, no true justice is possible. Trials don't just try the defendants, it forces the prosecutor to prove that there really was a case and that they weren't just trying to bully someone who felt it was hopeless and would rather get out of pre-trial jail early. It forces the cops to actually make a fucking case, rather than rely on horseshit to lock someone away that can't bond out.
And no reform is possible. If you explain any of this to someone who actually understands it, they panic and say "but the prosecutors wouldn't even be able to bring 1/50th of those cases to trial, the system would overload" as if that were a bad thing that they couldn't. In the same way that you're not caught in a traffic jam but rather you are traffic, you're not caught up in these problems... your apathy, your ignorance, your rejection of boat-rocking, in short you are the problem.
Given the incarceration rates compared to average western standards, that's a moot point. Even if they selectively pursue, they do pursue a hell of a lot, and they do get a hell of a lot of convictions - relatively. Factor in the severity of the convictions, also much worse compared to average western standards even for the same offenses, and it's an ever worse picture.
I don't think you make anything moot by compounding more regional stats. Some countries have more crime, they underinvest in rehabilitation, addiction treatment, and social diversion programmes. Shock horror: jobless, homeless addicts commit crimes. The US also has a land border with long land borders.
That is all to say, comparing apples and margaritas doesn't do what you think it does.
In a way that matters here, I don't believe you are correct, but I cede I haven't the time or machinery to hand to prove it.
Why is convicting and sentencing criminals a bad thing?
The problem with this theory is that it ignores the incentives on the other side in a criminal case. When you get charged with something, the prosecutor offers you a deal and that deal is almost invariably a significantly lower penalty than what happens if you go to court and get convicted. The plea deal is a lesser charge, if you demand a trial then they throw the book at you, stack charges and ask for more severe penalties for each one.
With the result that if someone actually did it, demanding a trial instead of pleading guilty for a lesser sentence has a large negative expected value. Which in turn implies that it doesn't make sense to do unless you think there is a high probability you can win, for example because you know you didn't do it. The coercive force is so large that it can cause innocent people to plead guilty, since even a 10% chance of losing can screw up your whole life when it means a 10x higher penalty.
And yet > 90% of the people who thought their chances of being acquitted were high enough to be worth taking a much large sentence on conviction, still get convicted. Which seems suspicious.
The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty. The reason can often be attributed to overbroad laws, but that still means you are guilty and will likely lose your criminal case. The prevalence of plea deals is just a performance optimization on top of that fact - most people are guilty at that stage and we'll let you off a little easier if you avoid the time and cost of a trial.
Innocent people are coerced to plead guilty, but you also have to realize the number of "innocent people pleading guilty" also contains guilty people who convinced lay people, who never saw or reviewed the evidence, they were innocent. As a prosecutor during a plea negotiation I once almost dismissed a charge against a girl who convinced me that she was innocent until I actually looked a security tape before signing the dismissal. She was 100% guilty. This is another interesting point about how busy prosecutors are - i didnt even bother to review the evidence against her before offering her a plea deal.
All this to say, if you end up coerced into accepting a plea deal despite your innocence, you are not a normal person. Yes, there's at least one normal person out there who was coerced, but they're the exception that proves the rule.
Courts need more funding, laws need to be relaxed and fine tuned, we need to stop the school to prison pipeline, but even with all those problems the system works pretty damn well.
This is not the reality, but your own justifying premise. which is why you instinctively began it with the proclamation "this is the reality."
I personally pled guilty for something that I didn't do, and that no one involved thought I did. I was offered a plea bargain of zero time, zero fine, and it would be expunged from my record in a year if I weren't convicted of anything else - which is evidence that the prosecution knew that I hadn't done anything. This was actually a systemic kindness - the people involved in the system couldn't live with the idea that they were punishing me for nothing.
The alternative was going on trial for a stupid felony called "possession of the instrument of a crime" which not only had nothing to do with the conditions of my initial arrest, but carried something like a 5-15 year sentence. The odds that they would have gotten a conviction on such a bizarre felony (the only reason it existed was to have a lower standard) in the state I lived, and with the race I was, and with a public defender, was around 100% imo. They go hard as a punishment for forcing them to hold a trial - that would be the excuse for those same kind people as before to label me a troublemaker who had turned down their kindness, and now deserved to go to prison for nothing.
You've made a comment with a lot of words, but the only reasoning you have is "the reality is," and you surrounded it with pronouncements and some personal anecdote about one woman. You're talking about a system that convicts 90% of the people (unlike me) who said "I didn't do anything, they know I didn't do anything, they certainly will let me go once they figure it out."
> if you end up coerced into accepting a plea deal despite your innocence, you are not a normal person.
The system is unjust because people like you support it exactly as it is...
> need to stop the school to prison pipeline,
...with lefty sloganistic jargon, playing the part of a good progressive prosecutor. You won't see it until it happens to you or someone you care about, then it will become the most important issue in the world. The fact that the US criminal justice system is hard on black Americans is not "racism" or "white supremacy" but because black Americans are not the friends or loved ones of people in power, and will never be. When you personally are prosecuted for nothing, or even for a crime that your peers deem trivial, the resumes of the people at your protest and your candlelight vigil will force people to pay attention, or risk their own comfort. Most people are not so lucky.
The system is an atrocity. It fails the victims of crimes, the accused of crimes, the perpetrators of crimes, and to protect the safety of the public in the aftermath of crime. It is simply an enrichment device for its participants, and an empty performance to mollify the middle class. It also serves to warehouse the wealthless underclass of the descendants of freed slaves away from view when they are found unfit for menial work.
Let's unpack this.
The first assertion is that most people who get prosecuted are guilty. This is assuming the conclusion -- the whole question is whether the system is getting it wrong. The presence of convictions can't be used to prove the absence of false convictions. The presence of more convictions increases the probability of more false convictions. And if we had a reliable way to know the real truth then none of this would be a problem to begin with.
The second is the implication that they're all guilty because there are so many overbroad laws that actually everybody is guilty. But that's just a description of a mechanism by which the system convicts "innocent people", i.e. ordinary people who never had any intention of committing a crime. Making so many things illegal that following every law is beyond human ability and anyone can be convicted at the government's discretion is the thing people are objecting to.
You countered about plea deals being coercive because the plea deal is generally much lower than the maximum or even average sentence of people who go on to be found guilty and ultimately sentenced after a trial on the merits.
I then countered that people who ultimately "become subject" are generally guilty and therefore the coerciveness, if you accept it as such, doesn't really matter.
I'll concede two things: 1. "become subject" is doing a lot of work there. What I meant is people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute. There are plenty of people who are arrested and ultimately not charged for various reasons. So my assertion is really that if the state ultimately chooses to proceed with prosecuting someone, they have some evidence that a crime has happened and that you are connected to it in some way that implies some degree of culpability. 2. My definition of "the system" is just the adversarial trial of evidence in front of an adjudicator. I would not include the laws or legislative system in that, although it is obviously related and we both hate that.
So my whole point is really to say that because of overbroad laws, it really is more likely than not that a prosecutor can find a law for which there is evidence that you are guilty of breaking it. Hence, plea deals existing or not, you would have been found guilty in court, and therefore my assertion from personal experience is that most people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute are guilty and plea deals are not the terrible coercive force on innocent people you claim it is.
The point of which is to say that even if the majority of people charged were guilty, that should not be expected to extend to the people who demand a trial, because the system severely penalizes anyone who does that and is then convicted. Which implies that only the people who believe they have a high probability of being acquitted, e.g. the subset of the accused who know they didn't do it, have the incentive to demand a trial. And yet > 90% of those people are convicted, which seems suspicious.
> I then countered that people who ultimately "become subject" are generally guilty and therefore the coerciveness, if you accept it as such, doesn't really matter.
It matters both to the falsely accused (who can be a minority of the accused while still being a large number of people), who face that coercive pressure since the probability of being falsely convicted after demanding a trial is non-zero, and because it acts as a filtering mechanism on who demands a trial and consequently makes the trial statistics peculiar, which was the original point.
> So my assertion is really that if the state ultimately chooses to proceed with prosecuting someone, they have some evidence that a crime has happened and that you are connected to it in some way that implies some degree of culpability.
This seems like a fair assertion in most cases, but it also leaves room for a lot of trouble.
Suppose an iPad is stolen and someone is spotted on camera just outside the scene of the crime carrying an iPad. It happens that they didn't do it, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time carrying a different iPad than the one that was stolen. But the actual perpetrator wasn't caught on camera so the footage turns them into the prime suspect and their apartment gets searched.
The police don't find the stolen iPad but they do find a high precision scale, which he says is used for cooking, and a bottle of pills prescribed to his ex, which he says he didn't know was there. These explanations seem plausible enough that you might not want to charge them on their own, but the drug possession is technically illegal if he actually knew they were there.
Meanwhile he keeps insisting he didn't steal anything, but there he is on the camera and there are no other suspects. So he gets offered a deal, and then charged for the drugs and "drug paraphernalia" as the penalty for refusing it. Which he then gets convicted of because the requirement to prove that somebody knew they were in possession of something that someone else left behind is the sort of thing the system tends to forget about or work around since actually proving it such an inconvenience.
So now he's getting a conviction whether he pleads guilty to the false charge or not. If he really didn't know about the bottle of pills then none of the charges are true, and if he did it still rings of an injustice when the only reason he was charged with that is the refusal to plead guilty to the thing he was innocent of.
> Hence, plea deals existing or not, you would have been found guilty in court, and therefore my assertion from personal experience is that most people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute are guilty and plea deals are not the terrible coercive force on innocent people you claim it is.
It seems like there are two alternatives here.
Either your claim is that there are no innocent people because there is always something anyone can legitimately be charged with, in which case the entire system is a sham. Then claiming that innocent people aren't being convicted is like claiming that no one can commit murder because everybody dies anyway. It implies that if the system was acting non-hypocritically then it would self-immolate because all the police and prosecutors would start by filing all the relevant charges against themselves.
Or, we consider the possibility that someone might actually be falsely accused, e.g. it's not a matter of whether selling drugs is illegal or should be, it's a case where they didn't actually sell any drugs. But then, because they've been accused of selling drugs, they have to plead guilty to something they didn't do or else they'll be charged with some other things that they did do, which they wouldn't have been if not for the false charge, and which many other people have done without being charged. So they'll be convicted and harshly sentenced on that for not pleading guilty to the thing they didn't do.
And maybe these aren't even alternatives since they can both be true at the same time.
The most classic case of federal offense is tax fraud. You can't record tax fraud on a camera or believe the witnesses, you actually need to look at the balance sheet and contracts of the company and make sure there is actually a crime to prosecute.
For comparison, Japan has a 99.9% conviction rate, but defers prosecution in 60% of cases. And police aren’t arresting or even attempting to enforce the law for every crime. Citizens complain that petty crime laws aren’t being enforced enough, leading to a rise in things like graffiti, litter, and traffic violations (the “bosozoku” motorcycle gangs are having a resurgence). But if you do face prosecution, there is enormous pressure to sign a confession and avoid trial, as a conviction at trial may be punished more harshly. Very similar in some respects.
Prosecutors pick their cases. Defense doesn't. The cases that aren't 90%+ sure aren't charged.
it should be about 50% conviction rate so that juries dont go in with non-evidence that the case is good because the feds thought it should go to court
And you think that benefits defendants how???
That is, yes, a ~50% conviction rate would be decent evidence that the Justice system is neither over-aggressive or under-aggressive in pursuing protection.
If it were an explicit goal, it could not serve that purpose any longer.
Prosecutors will often lower charges to ones where it can be tried without a jury too
OP is strongly implying that the 90% success rate for prosecutors is due to the courts being stacked against the defense. IMO that is where the logical fallacy is. Since prosecutors have wide latitude in deciding which cases to charge in the first place, it is very possible that the high success rate is due to prosecutors only charging cases where the accused actually committed the crimes being charged. Indeed, for the ~10% of cases where the accused is not found guilty, about 8% are due to the government dropping the case - only 1% are the jury acquitting the defendant outright. Thus, it would appear from that data that when the prosecution sees they are not likely to win a case, they drop it.
I'm making no argument that the courts or law are "fair", I'm just making the argument that quoting the 90% number is in no way evidence that courts are inherently biased towards the prosecution.
The legal profession is incentivised to not seek to change rules that disadvantage their clients…
What? A jury system is far from perfect but this is about as intellectually rigorous as “the lottery is a tax on the poor”. Many people are thrilled to do jury duty because they are invested in their community, your nihilism is not a universal truth, jury duty isn’t a burden, it is a civic duty, an honor.
But that's good no? People who got out never would have taken it seriously.
I sat on a jury trial and was highly impressed with how seriously my fellow jurors took it - especially the presumption of innocence. When they started to go down some incorrect logical path, someone would step up and correct it.
Not to mention the public defender ripped apart the DA's case. It was the exact opposite of what I was expecting.
> Prosecutors have high success rates.
You're forgetting that the prosecutors don't bring cases they think they're going to lose to trial, they either drop the charges or try a plea deal. So you'd entirely expect the success rate to be high.
Luckily that has never happened /s
That has to be incorrect, by the time someone is under actual attack from a criminal that criminal will have allready comitted crimes that the police can and have to punish for, i.e. Threat of Force with a Lethal weapon or sth like that.
1981 Warren v. District of Columbia
Arresting people because they might/could commit a crime would be a bad route to go down.
> The police exist to protect the government, not the people.
The police exist to protect the rule of the land. The military exists to protect the government.
- Michael Parenti
It’s not even just who couldn’t get out of it. It’s filtered for people who answer honestly. I was disqualified for a grand jury because the judge asked me if I would believe the testimony of police officers as truthful and I said it would depend on the police officer.
The system already had their hands forced on accepting that some cops lie with Brady disclosures but the fact that I didn’t just naively accept police testimony meant I was an unscramble juror.
Even if you’re a true believer in the system you won’t be allowed to participate because you didn’t lie.
Indeed. There are certainly parallels between him and Sam Tunick. But I'm not sure the public is ready for all the parallels.
We should all know it though!:
It has been commonly used to oppose what jurors perceive as unjust laws, such as those that once penalized runaway slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act, prohibited alcohol during Prohibition, or criminalized draft evasion during the Vietnam War.
Honestly we didn't even throw the book at him, prosecutors were charging him with a bunch of offenses and we decided guilty on only two, but the repeat offender bit probably locked him up for a few decades.
The funny thing was that all the jurors thought the victim was a complete douchebag and thought both parties deserved time. As it turns, somebody I knew at the time knew the victim from childhood and he apparently molested his 8 year old cousin.
I feel like many court cases are textbook instances of Everyone Sucks Here. I needed therapy after the case because it had so shaken my faith in both the justice system and humanity.
Forensic sciences and experts hired by prosecutors is a big problem.
I really don't think most of the people posting here understand what the professionals working in criminal justice/law see on the average day. They see the worst of the worst on one side, and then the public who they are trying to get a paycheck to defend on the other attacking them.
This in no way excuses bad behavior, but we're all human and these people aren't robots.
Hell Americans know this too which is why you have a professional judge and lawyers. And you guys don't have a night watch with pitch forks and muskets to police the village anymore.
A jury system is an anachronistic relic.
The random selection of juries was supposed to ensure they aren't any special class of people. For instance judges are usually from upper middle class backgrounds and it used to be that your innocence or guilt was decided entirely by the aristocratic nobility. By using random selection, that sort of thing is avoided.
There's a kind of fog of incomprehension over indirect crimes which makes them much easier to get away with.
People still die though.
There is a reason that Elon Musks companies and others put a ‘you agree to not have a jury trial…’ clause in their terms as Judges are easier to influence - when a legal case is filed it’s allocated to a judge and certain cases will go strategically to a Judges with certain bias
For example in Europe when someone dies somebody always has to go to jail, even if they were defending themselves or responding to a potential threat. A jury could show compassion or empathy. Judges are extremely stoic in that regard.
Please cite the european law that states this.
Self-defence can be a valid justification for manslaughter, at least in the UK.
https://se-legal.de/services/criminal-defense-lawyer/self-de...
The only ones getting a free pass are criminals. When they shoot and kill each other judges usually rule that it was self-defense. Ordinary people...no such luck.
Besides in Europe you always have to use physical violence to kill someone because firearms are illegal.
He killed himself before the trial even began. I think he would have won the case if he actually went through it.
Josh Greenberg from Grooveshark died of unknown cause in 2015 after taking a settlement rather than going to trial. He wiped all the music (did he really need to do that?) and then gave up all the software. The service may well have been seen as a massive cost center during its life and the death was a message or warning. I don't know. Business is war, isn't it? - quite literally.
One person's savior can become another person's scapegoat or witch. Even all three.
Personally, I would be suspicious of any death around a high profile trial - at least as a possibility. Greenberg introduced a 'tipjar' eventually to compensate artists but I think he would've been better off making a swapping service where users can trade their own CD-ripped or purchased files for another person's. Just like swapping physical CDs or LPs. So 1-to-1 personal distribution rather than Grooveshark's 1-to-many public distribution without the required licenses. An escrow service for file-swapping.
Sort of unrelated, though.
To me, litigation may be an incredibly dangerous route to justice. "Winning at all costs" may mean stopping a case going to trial in the first place. Judges can also end up the biggest losers too. Justice always gets served - but whose justice?
CBP via a bunch of crazy court cases, basically operates outside constitutional constraints. This is also why DHS has been used as private army by POTUS (snatching up people in unmarked vans in Portland for instance) because they can be ordered essentially directly by POTUS and not have to worry about the constitution.
(By the way, in many countries, like in India, if you do/say that to the police you might lose few of your bones and possibly normal functioning of few limbs and organs. Oh the constitution prevents that just fine here as well and quite strongly at that. The thing is constitution isn't an omnipotent and omnipresent just vigilante sentient being that is available to protect everyone everywhere all the time.)
Uber avoided medallions.
I guess that proves law is not code!
The reason cable companies have to pay these fees in the first place is a narrow and somewhat pedantic argument that is entirely based on connecting multiple households to the same antenna. Which Aereo doesn't do, no trickery involved.
If there had been a style of "cable" company that used one wire and antenna per house from the start, they could have avoided these fees too. They only didn't exist because cables and antennas are expensive.
Any single person could have legally set up their own server and antenna. But Aereo building these en masse makes them a cable company instead of an antenna-building company because... vibes, basically.
The best evidence that this was a failure of justice is that they pivoted to "okay, we're cable, we'll pay the fees for a mandatory license" and got rejected for not being a cable company.
“laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispu...
It's worse than that: a lot of engineer types reason about almost everything as if it were code. It's a manifestation of Engineer's disease.
Programmers have trouble seeing color (two identical numbers are the same bits, how can typing '1234' to unlock one phone be legal, and '1234' to unlock another phone be illegal?)
Courts care about color (intent, provenance, permission), even though that color cannot be digitally represented.
Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.
Take the hypothetical as posed: duress code one digit off, entered while detained after being interrogated for hours, and repeatedly pressured to unlock. The government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he knowingly triggered the wipe and did it for the purpose of impairing the seizure. Nothing about that scenario makes mistyping an unreasonable explanation unless there is more circumstantial evidence that indicates him intentionally providing the wrong PIN.
Proving that to a jury looks very hard.
Is a piece of software subject to patents? Is it export controlled?
Both of those can change without the data changing at all. A new patent can be applied for and accepted, at which point all code the patent description matches is potentially encumbered (even if it was written with no knowledge of the patent or before the patent existed, yes our patent system sucks).
Export controlled is also a matter of laws, not an attribute of the data itself, and laws change independent of data.
All of a things properties are not contained in or expressed by the thing itself.
https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3559-rust-has-provenance.ht...
Like we know X but the colour of the fact is red, and we need some way to figure X out with a colour of green or blue.
Love this way of putting it. Stealing for future conversations with fellow software developers.
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
If you don't understand what I mean, swap out "autistic" for "retarded" and the joke still functions, but a lot more people will be offended by it.
I still laughed though.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but autistic in that comment is attempting to capture that "literal rhetoric but socially unaware" style of argument people can have when they argue a point too black and white.
"Retarded" does not imply this
I would say the problem with the comment is more in line with how OCD or adhd is used, improperly. Like despite autism being a spectrum with traits that can't be reduced to that one stereotype.
It's being used to invoke a stereotype of neurodivergence. Not as a stand in for general stupidity.
It's being used as a stand in for a very specific example of stupidity, and it is "clever" because it evokes strong imagery in an unexpected way. Which is why it is funny. But still offensive. It's best to avoid black and white thinking about things like this, as hard as it is for the ego to admit that it takes pleasure from cruelty.
FYI it was a reference to fictional character Michael Scott from television production The Office (US). The characters main trait was unintended verbal faux pas, where he meant well but actually caused awkwardness and offense.
Often by stereotyping the traits of specific minorities.
it is time
Him deleting his phone was very likely a matter of safety for his fellow activists. Sad that our government does this but it’s not like this guy was a drug dealing or something.
Best outcome is he successfully sues for the violations.
And people are still convinced that's the land of the free, when it's a distorted non-representative democracy on top of a police state.
US is closer to South American banana republics than Iceland or Japan.
Mamy will read this and think that crossing a border with a GrapheneOS device is a bad idea, or just drop using what is a nice security feature entirely.
Just being charged is already a massive pain in the ass (both in terms of stress and costs) to an individual.
When we met it was interesting how our jurors decided “I don’t believe anything that guy says” and so on when it came to their motives and so on.
The trial itself was very carefully choreographed, almost pre determined and static.
But the decisions and jury activity was very dynamic. There was absolutely no magic legal mechanisms at that point.
However there are arguments morally, and constitutionally, and logically, about what can be done.
Law is effectively a weak gentleman’s agreement we tolerate because the alternative is violence.
(Well, law is enforced with violence too, I suppose.)
When I was a kid I wanted to be a police officer because I wouldn't have to follow any laws or rules. Then I got a little bit older and realized that wasn't how being a police officer actually worked in practice. Then, I got a little bit older than that, and realized that it actually does work like that.
This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice. Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law. High trust societies with less corruption and a strong justice system try to limit these circumstances.
I'm imagining that IQ bell curve meme, just with you at different ages.
You raise the standard for justice to perfection. There also has never been perfect corruption and anarchy.
> Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law.
That's like saying night has always superceded day. Everyone recognizes that recent years have been very unusual or unique in US history. That means for the great bulk of US history, it was different. Why doesn't 99% of US history outweigh the 1% (picking numbers very loosely) in determining what is somehow inevitable to you.
In fact, law is universal among human cultures. We are naturally social and live in groups with rules. Those that violate rules are generally outcasts.
But the most fundamental and significant error is attributing the current situation to some unavoidable system instead of the actions of people, especially those that stand aside and allow these things to happen. Many of them stand aside because they are told - probably messaging ultimately from the lawbreakers - that they are powerless and should despair.
Liberal democracy with sometimes-fair application of it is the aberration.
And no, we have not been a liberal democracy for 'a long time'. We have been an illiberal democracy with very limited suffrage and distribution of rights for a very long time.
You're the one arguing for that; I'm saying it's up to us whether we advance or go backward. Generations before us have moved us forward, so it's definitely very possible.
The definitions are just a distraction.
i dont?
this is how the US has always been. its who americans are. the odd time was the obama years
Not all of us do. To be honest, the older I am, the less sense many laws make to me, and the more I'm willing to help people break them.
LOL, that made me chuckle.
People somehow think they're the first one to think of a workaround to a law, when in fact it's been happening since the first law was written down. The law adjusted and if people think they can do one thing, then claim they intended another they have a big surprise coming.
When the judge and officers of the court agree with me, the law is reasonable and just, but when they do not agree with me, the law is arbitrary and capricious. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Having the law be whatever it's thought to be by police, prosectors, judges, and others can lead to obvious injustices, but there's been no serious attempt to remove ambiguity in any country's legal code as far as I know.
People already complain that there are too many laws on the books.
Want to see a really confused border agent? Travel without a phone. Fedex your phone to your hotel/home. Read a book on the plane. The concept that someone doesn't have a phone/computer drives cops insane.
One of the wikileaks crew pulled this one in NY. Several agencies were a set to grab his devices and detain him until he unlocked them ... But all he had in his carry-on was a magazine. His devices had been wiped and sent by mail. He re-imaged them only once he was home and safe. No devices to unlock, no reason to detain him.
At that point why send them at all instead of buying a cheap temp phone.
The whole case is going to come down to the nuanced and often contradictory interpretations of border law exceptions. I also don't agree that these sort of protections are for e.g. robbers, because of the criminal underground's $5 in-person data hacking tool. [1]
[1] - https://xkcd.com/538/
On another note, maybe GrapheneOS should add some kind of feature where the phone involuntarily destructs if a correct PIN isn't entered for 48 hours (or whatever the user sets at installation time, and changing the value should not be permitted). That way the trigger for the wipe is the confiscation, not the act of entry of a duress PIN. You could disclose the mechanism to the officials who intend to confiscate, and also say (truthfully) that you have no control over the feature.
Purely technically it would also depend on the state of the phone. Phones can be read out/exploited more easily after first unlock (AFU) than before first unlock (BFU). So, a middle path would be putting the phone in BFU. Much harder to use exploits against the phone and biometric authentication doesn't work. One way of fairly reliably doing this is setting the reboot timer to 10 minutes or turning off the phone in critical situations.
It's also relevant to take into account that he wasn't protecting himself by wiping the phone, but fellow activists. So, he may have taken the risk of potential legal issues by wiping the phone to project others.
i m not sure how legal a protection it is, and whether the courts would interpret your choice of OS as complicit in evidence destruction.
So yeah, as a US citizen re-entering the country, you would probably want to set it to 10 minutes, or just shut down. Then hand it over, refuse to unlock, consider the phone lost.
Although that would bring it BFU which is more secure. But there's already the reboot timer.
This is the thing that people should be reminded over and over here - and to be fair it tends to be more autistic than elsewhere
(Regardless if you are on the defendant or the prosecution side - or might potentially be)
From the article, it looks like warrantless search & seizure and lawyerless detainment over the suspicion of participating in plain old 1st amendment activities.
The rest (believing they can't do this or that, because it's in some constitutional document, or violates a basic right) is sovereign citizen kind of self-delusion.
"Ahah! I've won! The data has gone!! MUWAHAHAH! Take THAT border guards".... congrats you're still going to the same prison though.
If you've got something to hide (legitimately or not), don't take it across the border in the US or anywhere. Even then I am sure they'll either compel you to hand over your cloud passwords or again you end up going to the same prison for some other reason.
U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is just as important as what you superficially did. Hell there could have been a third set of four numbers that were the nuclear launch codes. It’s not the fact that it was four numbers, it’s what you were trying to make happen when you typed them. Now of course whether they can prove what your intent was when you typed them is another matter, but generally a duress pin should be for when robbers are breaking into your house, and the government will be on your side, and not when the government will be against you.