anon345235

When you switch roles in the console, you don't have to enter in your credentials. So, if I get access to the account, I have access to all the roles. So, what additional protection is provided by separating out permissions into roles that are trivially accessible?

I can see how if conditions are added to the AccessRole action, such that I can only switch roles based on time of day or IP address, then that might be useful (although those conditions could be applied directly to policies as well).

So, absent the conditions mention above (which is still questionable), is there any point to using roles in the console?

Unfortunately, rights may exist but police can still violate those rights with immunity unless those rights are "clearly established". In this case, the court ruled that sure, there is a First Amendment right to film police, but that in this case "there was no clearly established First Amendment right to record the police at the time of Turner’s activities." So, it was OK for the officers to detain Turner.

They also said the police should have quickly investigated whatever crime they suspected. Instead they cuffed Turner for "not providing ID" (which BTW is not a crime in Texas) and placed him in a hot patrol car for "a while" without actually investigating any crime, which the court found to be an unreasonable arrest.

The court also has a section named "Whether the Right Is Clearly Established Henceforth" which is the interesting part. Sadly, in that section they only affirm that the right to film exists, heavily quoting other court rulings that already ruled the right exists. There doesn't seem to be anything new in this ruling that would cause another court to say the right to film is now "clearly established". The threshold is not whether some court says the the right is "clearly established starting right now!". The actual threshold is that "every reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates [the law]." I suspect it's still going to take a Supreme Court ruling and years of police training before plantiffs can really prove their rights are "clearly established" using that criteria.