51–60 of 82 posts
What a pleasant surprise this ruling is. The DC area (of which Fairfax county is part) is probably one of the most government tracking heavy regions of the US. This is a curve-ball on par with the CA judge that overturned the mag ban recently. I would never have predicted this ruling. >Nine states have passed laws limiting how long the police can maintain the data, ranging from three minutes (New Hampshire) Now that…
What a pleasant surprise this ruling is. The DC area (of which Fairfax county is part) is probably one of the most government tracking heavy regions of the US. This is a curve-ball on par with the CA judge that overturned the mag ban recently. I would never have predicted this ruling. >Nine states have passed laws limiting how long the police can maintain the data, ranging from three minutes (New Hampshire) Now that…
Wait, what ?
I had no idea this was the case ... fascinating.
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2019/03/john-boch/breaking...
What a pleasant surprise this ruling is. The DC area (of which Fairfax county is part) is probably one of the most government tracking heavy regions of the US. This is a curve-ball on par with the CA judge that overturned the mag ban recently. I would never have predicted this ruling. >Nine states have passed laws limiting how long the police can maintain the data, ranging from three minutes (New Hampshire) Now that…
> If any state is going to proactively curb law enforcement's capability to build a dragnet it's gonna be NH. License plate collection used to be outright prohibited there (with toll both exception) before they caved on Real ID.
I blame that on two things (in no particular order).
1) There's been tons of money dangled in front of state legislators incentivizing them to break from what their constituents actually want because both the national parties want to make the state theirs. If you have enough money (from voting how the people with the money want you to vote) to steamroll whoever you're running against you don't actually have to listen to your constituents that much.
2)The MA 5th column.
Anyone have an open source license place reader software? I always thought this would be good for a neighbourhood watch kind of project.
https://medium.freecodecamp.org/how-i-replicated-an-86-milli...
We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds an awful lot like the FISA court. No way to make sure they don't just rubber stamp such warrants.
Here's a little secret. Courts already rubber-stamp warrants. There is no court on Earth where the average request for a search warrant will be declined. The purpose of asking a court for a warrant that it will 100% approve is to permit targeted investigations, while preventing fishing expeditions. If the police wants to investigate someone, or something, courts will rubber-stamp their request. This is by design.
We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…
I think we're not going to have easy wins here, and people will need to think about their values and make their own ethical decisions. Prohibiting these databases will absolutely take a useful tool away from law enforcement, and it will also absolutely reduce the potential for abuse. There might be some middle ground out there, but nonetheless at some point we, as a society, will have to decide if, when, and how we p…
People who trust governments to secure such a device and do not think modern governments can ever repeat something such as Nazi Germany will vehemently support the system and nothing short of the system. They'd see it as ushering in something approaching utopia. Those who do believe history has a habit of repeating itself will vehemently oppose the system in any way, shape, or form. They'd, in turn, see it as the first steps towards an unimaginable dystopia. And there are going to be big chunks of people on both sides. How are you supposed to solve this in a democracy? And as ever more issues become not only politicized but sharply polarized, this is going to be a recurring problem.
There seems to be no conceivable answer to this problem (the fundamental one, not necessarily just liberty vs security) outside of Balkanization. The founding fathers would have appealed to the conflict leading to a deadlock and thus no progress in either direction, but this itself cedes the case for one side or the other on topics like this. It's not a question of doing A or doing B. In such cases, deadlock would leave the question unanswered and thus neither side would get what they want. In this case it's a question of doing A or not doing A. And so deadlock is itself an answer to that question, giving one side exactly what they want.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's a little secret. Courts already rubber-stamp warrants. There is no court on Earth where the average request for a search warrant will be declined. The purpose of asking a court for a warrant that it will 100% approve is to permit targeted investigations, while preventing fishing expeditions. If the police wants to investigate someone, or something, courts will rubber-stamp their request. This is by design.
I don't understand, it sounds like you are contradicting yourself. First you say courts rubber stamp warrants, then you say they they distinguish between fishing expeditions and targeted investigations. Which is it?
Most judges will not approve a search warrant for an entire city block, with a justification of: "Officer Harry had a 'hunch' that a criminal may live somewhere there, or that criminal activity of some kind may be taking place in this area."
As long as warrants are targeted, they tend to be rubber-stamped. The purpose of the warrant process is to make sure that law enforcement is targeted.
We want to protect innocent people from snooping and harassment, but we also want law enforcement to have useful resources. These shouldn’t be mutually exclusive requirements. It always baffles me that nobody thinks to set up a best-of-both-worlds system whereby all the data is gathered, but stored in a secure database under the control of an independent government entity, possibly the courts themselves. If you’re tr…
Why would it baffle you? Have you looked at the atrocities committed by governments throughout history?
The idea that these systems wouldn't be abused by the government, even given my limited understanding of human history, is more baffling to me...
I work in this space, building the tools to help LEAs seach their databases. I also have conflicting feelings about how this could be used. We built in access control down to the specific camera, auditing of every user action, requiring the reason you are performing an action, and mandating the user associate an open case in the same access group as the camera you are querying in order to view the data. Its pretty lo…