When I drive on the freeway, any time a police car gets behind me and turns on its lights, I have to stop. If I don't stop, I can ultimately be charged with evading arrest, or fleeing police, or some similar offense. I can be fined and even put in jail, even if a judge decides that the officer didn't actually have a valid reason to stop me.
If a police officer approaches me (when I'm not in a car) and tells me that I'm under arrest, I don't have the legal permission to leave. Even if I know I didn't break any laws. Even if I happen to know why the officer wants to arrest me and I know that it's not a valid reason for an arrest.
Why? Why does the law require me to obey without question, especially when honest mistakes that I might make are treated very differently from honest mistakes the trained officer might make? Fundamentally, because we have decided that the alternative is worse.
Do officers abuse their authority? Of course they do. But we've decided that toothless police departments aren't worth anything (and, in fact, lead to more vigilantism and crime). And we've decided that "self help" solutions (e.g., giving people the right to violently resist arrest if the officer is in the wrong, while punishing people who resist valid arrests) are worse.
Of course, the example chosen for the article didn’t involve anybody abusing their authority. It involved police doing what I’d expect them to do. But I’ll acknowledge that if all of the relevant details were different, then I’d also be concerned.
Yes, it is true that police have powers that can be abused, and police have abused them.
It’s also true that they have those powers because we’ve decided the alternative is worse. The example used in the article was a case where police did not obviously abuse their authority. If you want to get me worked up about police overreach, you’ll need a different example.
> I do not want to live in a world where random drones/cameras control my every move
How did the drone control anybody’s move in the example? It seems that the drone wasn’t even noticed.
Police drive around in patrol cars. They don’t call judges every time they look at other cars. There may be problems with this system, but adding drones hasn’t created a new loophole.
I don’t understand the problem. Police saw something they thought was suspicious, took a closer look, and then decided there was nothing illegal happening.
I don’t think there’s a constitutional right to know when you’re being tailed. Or to be notified every time a police officer does a double-take.
This is a very common position. But I’ve never understood the argument that police should have to do some amount of busywork for things to be fair.
Warrants aren’t required so the police are sportsmanlike. Warrants are required because interacting with the police can be inconvenient or hellish, depending on the interaction.
“This Court has to date not deviated from the understanding that mere visual observation does not constitute a search. See Kyllo [v US]. ... We accordingly held in [US v] Knotts that ‘[a] person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.’ ... Thus, even assuming that the concurrence is correct to say that ‘[t]raditional surveillance’ of Jones for a 4-week period ‘would have required a large team of agents, multiple vehicles, and perhaps aerial assistance,’ ... our cases suggest that such visual observation is constitutionally permissible. It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means, without an accompanying trespass, is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question.”
The fourth amendment is supposed to address invasive and inconvenient general warrants and search warrants. And that’s “inconvenient” from the point of view of the person being investigated. I don’t understand the view that all’s fair as long as the police do a certain amount of busywork, but that does seem to be popular even among some judges.
I really hope this doesn’t turn into yet another case of judges looking at irrelevant facts when making decisions.
The fourth amendment does not say “private conversations,” so when police started tapping phones, the courts focused on whether the phone tap physically intruded on somebody’s house, papers, or effects. Police apparently could tap phone conversations by watching reflections on a nearby window, and the fourth amendment didn’t apply because there was no physical intrusion. The “reasonable expectation of privacy” test come from Katz v. US ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/389/347/ ) where the Supreme Court realized that whether there was a physical intrusion was irrelevant.
In 2012, Windows 8 stopped booting on computers without UEFI secure boot. Hardware companies weren’t enthusiastic, but they couldn’t ignore Microsoft’s demand. Microsoft published the spec for how Windows 8 would handle secure boot, and that included the crypto key that will be expiring in September. Microsoft’s spec did actually have provisions for non-Microsoft operating systems.
Linux developers didn’t all agree about whether Linux needed to do anything about Microsoft’s plan, but ultimately a Red Hat programmer convinced enough people that it would be easier to follow Microsoft’s spec than to tell new users to “turn off secure boot” if they wanted to run Linux ( https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/12368.html ). This wasn’t a popular decision, and it hasn’t become any more popular over time, but it has worked.
It's definitely possible. And common, at least in some projects. The only real drawback is that sloppiness will lead to multiple slightly different nonstandard string types in the same project.
You would think so. Strangely, even though warrants have to be specific, police are allowed to seize things they come across during the search, even if those things aren’t on the warrant ( https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/496/128/ ).
Manuel Noriega and “el Chapo” Guzman were both convicted of crimes they committed outside the US but that caused other people to commit crimes inside the US.
Traveling to countries for child sex abuse is illegal and severely punished, although it appears that the law is about the traveling with intent, and not (officially) about the actions that take place overseas: https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ceos/extraterritor... .
Well, they made a big deal about saying that while they sold their software to the Defense Department, it wasn't actually being used to kill people. Except for well-known military contractors (e.g., Raytheon), who have sold plenty of software specifically to kill people.
I guess there's a reason we saw plenty of articles about software used somewhat defensively -- such as distinguishing whether a particular "bang" was a gunshot, and where it likely came from -- instead of offensively -- such as improvements to targeting software.
I'm sure it was meant as "kills the wrong people."
People are always worried about getting rid of humans in decision-making. Not that humans are perfect, but because we worry that buggy software will be worse.
It's easy to say "I will never let the Department of Defense use my search engine for evil!" Or "the more money they spend on me, the less they have for weapons!" ( https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt ) when you aren't really expecting money. But when somebody shows up with a check, it becomes much harder to stick to your principles. Especially after watching Palantir (and "don't be evil" Google) rake in plenty of dough.
"Yes, but it only has two senators. The 39.5 million people in California have the same Senatorial representation as the less than 600 thousand people in Wyoming.
"In what world is that fair or remotely democratic?"
I answered "Not everything in the constitution is meant to be democratic."
I'm sorry if you are not capable of understanding how that answers your question.
If somebody has a really stupid proposal -- such as "make all 3D printers refuse to print guns" -- I don't see why I have any obligation to "compromise" with them. Or to talk with them at all. Other than, perhaps, explain that they ought to learn about the things they want to regulate before they start making proposals. The fact that they have an incredibly long track record of bad proposals, and many strongly-held opinions based mostly in ignorance, is just entertaining.
It is, in fact, legal (but very expensive) to own a tank ( https://www.drivetanks.com/ , yes, that's a company, but a rich enough motivated person could fill out the same paperwork). Apparently each exploding shell is a NFA taxed destructive device ( https://youtu.be/GW2U0qORdLE ).
When I drive on the freeway, any time a police car gets behind me and turns on its lights, I have to stop. If I don't stop, I can ultimately be charged with evading arrest, or fleeing police, or some similar offense. I can be fined and even put in jail, even if a judge decides that the officer didn't actually have a valid reason to stop me.
If a police officer approaches me (when I'm not in a car) and tells me that I'm under arrest, I don't have the legal permission to leave. Even if I know I didn't break any laws. Even if I happen to know why the officer wants to arrest me and I know that it's not a valid reason for an arrest.
Why? Why does the law require me to obey without question, especially when honest mistakes that I might make are treated very differently from honest mistakes the trained officer might make? Fundamentally, because we have decided that the alternative is worse.
Do officers abuse their authority? Of course they do. But we've decided that toothless police departments aren't worth anything (and, in fact, lead to more vigilantism and crime). And we've decided that "self help" solutions (e.g., giving people the right to violently resist arrest if the officer is in the wrong, while punishing people who resist valid arrests) are worse.