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Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

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Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly. Bad people have to go free in order to incentivize good behavior by cops. You and I (as innocent people) are more likely to be affected by bad police behavior than the few bad people themselves and so we support the bad people going free.

>You and I (as innocent people) are more likely to be affected by bad police behavior than the few bad people themselves and so we support the bad people going free. I know anecdotes aren't data, but my only negative interactions with cops have basically been for traffic tickets. Meanwhile my negative interactions with criminals have been far more numerous, along with several second-order effects caused by their mere…

Dan White shot the mayor and a supervisor in cold blood and confessed everything to the cops. They managed to stop him from spilling out his premeditation on tape by interrupting him as his confession was getting rolling and the DA failed to win the easiest conviction of his career. The cops then went on a spree of beating people gratuitously in the Castro.

Cops aren't there to enforce the law without fear or favor. They routinely engage in petty corruption and complain when they have to be professional when on duty.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Consumption per se does not incentivize it, It can. In several public cases it seems fairly clear that there is a "community" aspect to these productions and many of these sites highlight the number of downloads or views of an image. It creates an environment where creators are incentivized to go out of their way to produce "popular" material. > Strict liability for possession in particular is nonsense. I entirely…

> It can. In several public cases it seems fairly clear that there is a "community" aspect to these productions and many of these sites highlight the number of downloads or views of an image. It creates an environment where creators are incentivized to go out of their way to produce "popular" material. So long as it's all drawn or generated, I don't see why we should care. > I entirely disagree. Offenders tend to inc…

Laws don't need to be absolutely enforceable to still work. You probably will not go to jail for running that stop sign at the end of your street (but please don't run it).

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone not from the US the fact that "uwu we didn't know" is an adequate defense for the police to do something illegal is really weird. Is there some crucial context I'm missing?

It dates back to the constitutional ban on "ex post facto" laws. Meaning, the government can't retroactively make something illegal. Which is a good thing, IMO. So, for example, it's illegal at the federal level to manufacture machine guns (and I'm not going to get into a gun debate or nuances as to what defines a machine gun--it's just an example). But a machine gun is legal as long as it was manufactured before the…

The government has totally said “destroy the thing that we said was legal to manufacture, purchase, and own when it was manufactured.” That was the entire point of the bump stock ban, which attempted to reclassify an item that they had previously said was not a machine gun into a machinegun, and therefore illegal to own (and was always illegal to own, so they weren’t going to compensate people for them either).

More strictly, machine guns aren’t banned by the federal government, but rather you have to have paid a tax to own it, and they’ve banned paying the tax for gun made after X date. If they decide to ban the ownership, grandfathering is not guaranteed.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You need to ensure you are not aiding or harboring actually harmful illegal material. Is this actually true, legally speaking?

I’m unsure I wrote that from like an ethics standpoint. The silk road guy was got on conspiracy for attempting murder and not drug or human trafficking charges. So I’m unsure of legal side. I think if you knowingly provided a platform to distribute SA/CP/CSAM and the feds become involved you will be righteously fucked. Reddit clamped down on the creepy *bait subreddits years ago. Maybe it was self-preservation on the…

I'm reasonably certain Reddit's decision to ban /r/jailbait and the like was driven by business/reputation. It was widely discussed for some time before it was banned and, IIRC given a "worst of" award by the admins at one point. Once it got major media coverage, Reddit got its first real content policy.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a double standard though, it's different standards for fundamentally different kinds of actions (state police action vs criminal activity)

Those are only nominally different, insofar as the justice system chooses to call some acts one and some acts another. It doesn't speak to the nature of the act, only what we choose to classify it as. I.e. unconstitutional searches could be criminal activity if the judiciary just decides to classify it differently. There are certainly differences in the nature of the act that we could talk about, but how the judiciar…

Idk why you keep saying way out there stuff, then repeating back mundane stuff.

Yeah, the difference between a bad thing and a good thing is what judges say.

No, there is a difference bigger than "nominal", which means in name only. Go out on the street and try explaining why someone having child porn, and cops handed a subscriber name + child porn image by Google exactly the same thing, there's only a "nominal" difference.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#286

Wow, do I ever not know how I feel about the "good faith exception." It feels like it incentivizes the police to minimize their understanding of the law so that they can believe they are following it.

> It feels like it incentivizes the police to minimize their understanding of the law so that they can believe they are following it.

It is not so lax as that. It's limited to situations where a reasonable person who knows exactly what the law and previous court rulings say might conclude that a certain action is legal. In this case, other Federal Circuit courts have ruled that similar actions are legal.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just another way cops can be terrible at their job and get away with it. If only citizens could use the Chappelle defense, "I'm sorry officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that".

Let's be clear. This guy had CSAM and was caught using digital forensics. The cops would've been able to secure the search warrant at the time had they been required to do so. This isn't some innocent person who is spending time in prison because of a legal technicality.

The systemic downsides of police overreach happen whether or not a particular person was guilty. In general, throwing out the evidence is an effective way to fight back against overreach. I'm not worried about this guy, I'm worried about everyone else.

The idea that they would have been able to get a warrant limits the damage, but it's still iffy.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just another way cops can be terrible at their job and get away with it. If only citizens could use the Chappelle defense, "I'm sorry officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that".

Let's be clear. This guy had CSAM and was caught using digital forensics. The cops would've been able to secure the search warrant at the time had they been required to do so. This isn't some innocent person who is spending time in prison because of a legal technicality.

I understand but this is literally how rights are eroded away. It's all good when it's the worst people on the planet, but very quickly it's abused against every one else. Once these rights go away, they don't come back.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the whole thing? and a more detailed examination of common perceptual hashing algorithms (skip to table 3 for the collision probabilities): https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2904/81.pdf And there was a whole lot of explanation of how probable cause works and how it's different from programmers' aspirations to perfection.

The table only proves the point. The lowest probability in the table is 1 in 100_000. Most others are 1 in 100. 28 billion photos are uploaded every week to Google Photos[1]. That’s at least 280k false positives per week. Should we really be performing 30 search warrants on innocent people per second? [1] https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-changes/

Do you have any evidence that this is happening? You don't think someone would have noticed by now if it were?

And as I pointed out, we're not talking about a search warrant on a person, we're talking about whether it's necessary to get a search warrant to look at a picture to determine if it's an illegal image.

Re: Google’s TOS doesn’t eliminate a user’s Fourth Amendment rights, judge rules [pdf]

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone not from the US the fact that "uwu we didn't know" is an adequate defense for the police to do something illegal is really weird. Is there some crucial context I'm missing?

It dates back to the constitutional ban on "ex post facto" laws. Meaning, the government can't retroactively make something illegal. Which is a good thing, IMO. So, for example, it's illegal at the federal level to manufacture machine guns (and I'm not going to get into a gun debate or nuances as to what defines a machine gun--it's just an example). But a machine gun is legal as long as it was manufactured before the…

>It dates back to the constitutional ban on "ex post facto" laws.

Not really, that's not now constitutionality works with respect to the government. Ex post facto is when the government wants to act against you, not when you want the government to behave. They use new decisions regarding constitutionality to undo previous decisions all the time, they just don't want to in this specific case and are using the "well they would have been able to get a warrant anyway if they had known they'd needed one" to justify it.

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