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Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

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Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#81

Post by ben_w »

maxcbc wrote: post #50
quercusa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

451 is a great status code, right up there with 418.

My favourite part of GDPR is getting to use 451 legitimately everywhere.

It’s a Carol business decision that letting Alices & Bobs view content for free isn’t cost effective if Carol isn’t allowed to track Alice and Bob without their permission and make money by letting Eve, who is unknown Alice and Bob, to build up a detailed profile of Alice and Bob.

Project Guttenberg in Germany (and The Pirate Bay in the USA, I think) would be 451.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#82

Post by jedberg »

guitarbill wrote: post #77
jedberg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you don't target/do business with Europeans specifically, there is nothing to comply with. what jurisdiction does Europe have? Because as you said yourself, they're part of a large organization that DOES do business with Europe, but that part of the business doesn't get any money from Europe, so there is no reason for that part of the business to go to the effort of complying.

sure, if they do business with Europe, they should be complying with the laws. i don't think that's controversial. you said "local news organizations", and i was simply pointing out if that is what they truly were, they wouldn't have to comply. so i think we agree?

Even for a truly local news org, it might make more sense to just block Europeans then allow them, because Article 3(2) of the GDPR, which gives the EU extraterritorial powers to prosecute.

While it's never been tested, there is a good chance the USA would cooperate with an extraterritorial prosecution, and so it's easier to just avoid it altogether by blocking Europeans.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#83

Post by fuzxi »

abeppu wrote: post #65
mynameismonkey wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to participate in a city-wide water pistol assassination tournament. Skipped the hard hat, got white coveralls from Home Depot, pinned my work id to it, carried a clipboard. Got in everywhere I needed to be, including a heliport and a private boat dock. I forget where I read it, but the phrase "just act like you're supposed to be there" has stuck with me a long time, and paid dividends.

What city was this in? Is it in a place where other people have real guns? Is it in a place where the cops have guns? I both want to play and suspect that it would go really really badly.

For the most part, water pistols look nothing like firearms. I very much doubt that you'd be in danger of being treated as an armed threat when holding a transparent, green, plastic gun that's leaking water.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#84

Post by mshumi »

One has to wonder what legal frauds, asset grabs, and impersonations have transpired that were never discovered. Some perspective on this is the story of Alves dos Reis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis) who in 1924 stole ~1% of Portugal's GDP in bank notes printed under forged orders. The scheme may have never been uncovered had Reis succeeded in maintaining a controlling interest in the Bank of Portugal and eliminated the paper trail.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#85

Post by aksss »

Good effort. I wonder if she would have been able to ascertain whether the evaluation was scheduled and in doing it over could have covered that base proactively, or if there was no way of her knowing about that angle (even in doing it over again, no way she could have known about that in order to address it). In other words, was this defeated because of an oversight on her part, or was this an unknown unknown for her.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#86

Post by autarch »

asdff wrote: post #80
clairity wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a teenager, i remember marveling at a friend who could successfully walk into bars and order drinks. you have to both look the part and play the part (i could do neither). even at places that carded, they wanted to serve you, so the ID had to only provide enough plausible deniability to the bouncer or bartender to credibly claim they were duped into serving you. i'm sure some bartenders secretly got a kick out of…

In college there was a beer delivery service that would even deliver directly to the dorm if you gave that as your address. If you paid with your debit card over the phone, they wouldn't even card you since the beer was already bought and paid for. One time they did check, and my friend lied and said he didn't have his ID with him. Then the delivery guy who was probably only a couple years older than us just asked to…

> Then the delivery guy who was probably only a couple years older than us just asked to see his actual underage ID to prove he wasn't a cop and handed us the beer anyway.

The liquor enforcement folks (usually not cops, AFAIK) could easily hire someone under 21 to attempt to purchase alcohol. In fact, I'm pretty sure that in some places they do exactly this.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#87

Post by rkagerer »

shadowgovt wrote: post #29
supernova87a wrote: post #23

I guess this brings up and interesting issue -- once someone knows the ins and outs of a system, sometimes there are very few barriers internally to check that an order/paperwork is legit. There was a story in WSJ like last week about how the Japanese red stamp / seal still survives and is a barrier to them adopting new technology for practical every day speeding up of tasks. And keeps things like faxes around unnece…

One could argue the internal barriers are unnecessary if "trust but verify" works. In this case, it worked; she was able to play the system until verification identified something was wrong, and now she gets to go to jail over it. (Technical systems often need more stringent protections because "screw around and go to jail" isn't a threat that, say, Facebook can bring to bear).

Did it really work, or was it due to a happenstance:

In November, Hillsborough County prosecutors became suspicious when they heard from a state forensic examiner, who had been scheduled to perform a competency evaluation on Landon.

The examiner saw a notice in Landon’s court file that prosecutors had dropped charges; the examiner wanted to know if the examination should go forward.

How would it have been detected if there were no loose ends like this out there or anyone who cared enough about the case to prompt a double-check?

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#89

Post by noir_lord »

cannam wrote: post #62
danellis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I'm visiting the UK, and I'm astonished at how many sites are blocked.

They're not blocked, they're blocking themselves.

Yep, so far "We can't serve you for legal reasons AKA we won't comply with the reasonable provisions of data protection" has been met with a broad shrug.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#90

Post by wizzwizz4 »

causality0 wrote: post #78
shadowgovt wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue the internal barriers are unnecessary if "trust but verify" works. In this case, it worked; she was able to play the system until verification identified something was wrong, and now she gets to go to jail over it. (Technical systems often need more stringent protections because "screw around and go to jail" isn't a threat that, say, Facebook can bring to bear).

How many times have people gotten away with something similar without every being discovered, though? It could be very many.

There's no such thing as a perfect crime.
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