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Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

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Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#121

Post by mellavora »

So my question is what can we, the hacker community, do to change this? Would pervasive sousveillance help?

Thinking deeper: we need to change the culture of LE in the US. What needs to change such that LEOs become part of the wider community, so they are held accountable etc..

Silly idea: a "trip-advisor" or "4-square" for police encounters. Any encounter with a LEO, you upload the location, their badge number, and give them a ranking. Did they show compassion/understanding? 5 stars.

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#122

Post by dagw »

roel_v wrote: post #116
skrebbel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how do you google for an appropriate lawyer when in custody and you only get one phone call? Not cynical, I really wonder. I guess the exact same problem exists where I live (the Netherlands).

In the Netherlands, you don't 'get one phone call'. You have (since very recently, and only in some cases) the right to talk to 'a' lawyer before you are questioned. Hence, either the police provides you with one if you don't know who you'd like, or the questioning has to wait until your lawyer is present (bar some limits like withing x time, I don't know the procedural rules by heart - how things are actually applie…

The whole "you get exactly one phone call" is largely a movie trope used for dramatic effect. The exact number of phone calls you get is very much dependent on where you got arrested, what you got arrested for and even the mood of the person in charge. But basically you'll generally be allowed to (eventually) make the number of calls necessary to either get a hold of your lawyer or get a hold of someone who can find and call a lawyer for you.

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#123

Post by dghf »

ptaipale wrote: post #115
dghf wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do read the story further, and the NBC story it links to, you'll see that these 16 000 arrest warrants were issued by the Ferguson Municipal Court; they're not merely warrants known to Ferguson police but originating elsewhere. > It tells us that people are comparing numbers in a way that does not make sense. From the HuffPo article: "To give some context as to how truly extreme this is, a comparison may be us…

"arrest warrants on more than half of its citizens" -- that is clearly not true. Many of the warrants are on people who are not its citizens. There sure are problems in places like Ferguson, but this comparison seems not entirely honest. Why do you compare arrest warrants of a single municipal court vs. number of residents in that small municipality, and then the arrest warrants of a much larger municipal court syste…

> Of course these ratios are different, because by nature a single, small municipality issues many arrest warrants for people who are not residents, while a larger system mostly handles people living inside its constituency.

Could you explain that in more detail? I would have assumed, perhaps naively, that the larger municipality would have had more non-residents (commuters, tourists, out-of-town shoppers, people coming in for an evening out) than the smaller one.

And even accepting your point for the sake of argument, can that really account for the Ferguson courts issuing a hundred times more warrants per head of population than Boston's?

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#124

Post by mellavora »

Remember also we need to end civil forfeiture, which lets police take your stuff without charging you with a crime. It is a growing business in the US, police are now regularly trained in the game and rewarded based on their daily take.

more reading: https://www.aclu.org/criminal-law-reform/civil-asset-forfeit... and google suggests the following: http://fear.org/1/ http://endforfeiture.com/

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#125

Post by Padding »

snowwrestler wrote: post #29
NhanH wrote: post #10

The question that I have every time I read about something similar to this is not about the law itself, but about the human who's applying the law: how/ why/ what is the line of thought that would lead them to (supposedly) knowingly do something like this? I realize that processes, bureaucracy and generally abstraction can allow people to do less than desirable behaviours, but I can't quite figure out which abstracti…

Put yourself in the shoes of a federal agent investigating a crime. Crimes happen all the time; they're commmitted by people who then try very hard to hide what they did. So a criminal investigator is going to treat everyone they interview with suspicion from the start. That suspicion is not a personal failing any more than a software QA tester who doesn't trust the latest build. It's inherent in that type of job. An…

> That suspicion is not a personal failing any more than a software QA tester who doesn't trust the latest build.

There’s no reason to assume software being innocent/bug-free unless proven otherwise. This is not the case with humans, at least in civilized parts of the world.

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#126

Post by kghose »

If you have a competent lawyer, not even a high powered one, a jury of your peers will be convinced that is indeed bullshit. The problem, of course, is all the other shit you've done, which HN types think is ok, like running a drug site on the dark web, which is the actual problem ...

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#127

Post by ptaipale »

dghf wrote: post #123
ptaipale wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"arrest warrants on more than half of its citizens" -- that is clearly not true. Many of the warrants are on people who are not its citizens. There sure are problems in places like Ferguson, but this comparison seems not entirely honest. Why do you compare arrest warrants of a single municipal court vs. number of residents in that small municipality, and then the arrest warrants of a much larger municipal court syste…

> Of course these ratios are different, because by nature a single, small municipality issues many arrest warrants for people who are not residents, while a larger system mostly handles people living inside its constituency. Could you explain that in more detail? I would have assumed, perhaps naively, that the larger municipality would have had more non-residents (commuters, tourists, out-of-town shoppers, people com…

When the small municipality is part of a larger metro area, those commuters and out-of-town shoppers come from a large area and pass through this small administrational area, so it is natural that the ratio of things like arrest warrants can be large when compared to number of residents.

To understand this outside the context of Ferguson and the racially loaded atmosphere in this discussion, take for an example the City of London Police.

It's a police force that handles an area which has just 7400 residents. (Yes, that's the resident population in City of London). The police force for this area has 1300 employees, 750 of them full-time police officers. Are we saying that the ratio of policemen to residents is a sign of a horrible police state in London, with every tenth person in the city a police officer? No, of course not. There's a huge amount of crime? Well, many think so.

The ratio is so silly precisely because we're looking at a small area that belongs to a greater metropolis.

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#128

Post by ptaipale »

jpatokal wrote: post #120
ptaipale wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is slightly weird. How would I, for instance, arrange a lawyer to be present when I step out of a plane at JFK and talk to the immigration officer, who quite legitimately just wants to see my passport? He'll also be asking questions which I'm obliged to answer. There's no choice, but there's seldom any trouble, either.

If you're a US citizen returning to the US, you actually are not obliged to answer their questions. That said, this is a pretty grey area and they certainly don't like it if you don't. https://greyenigma.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/i-am-detained-by...

Right, that's nice to know. I'm not a US citizen though, so I think I really need to answer those questions - without a lawyer - unless I want to be put back to the next plane heading back where I came from.

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#129

Post by akent »

tempestn wrote: post #67
serve_yay wrote: post #14

The only time I ever did this, it was a routine traffic stop and I was with my wife and my parents. The cop was asking me a bunch of questions about why I was driving so fast, and I just played it off like I didn't understand, just trying to say as little as possible. It was a bad tactic - it raised suspicion and I later learned that my mother thought I was actually holding drugs or something because I was being evas…

This is a good point though. What do you folks suggest for the standard traffic stop, along the lines of, "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?" Presumably both "yes" and "no" would be bad. (The former is obvious, and the latter could mean you're not paying sufficient attention, etc.) So, do you just stare at them in silence? Do you say something like, "I'd rather not answer," which while accurate, sure sounds l…

> "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?"

Do as politicians do; don't answer the question, change tack. "Here's my driver licence, officer."

Re: Reminder: Oh, Won't You Please Shut Up? (2011)

#130

Post by Spooky23 »

mhaymo wrote: post #99
SilasX wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LEOs - especially Feds - will do everything they can to intimidate you, make you uncomfortable, lower your confidence, etc. It's literally their job to make people like you make mistakes. It sucks, but that's what you're up against. I don't know why we tolerate that. Imagine if doctors used such techniques to get people to participate in medical trials. We'd reject any claim that the subjects gave consent. Or imagin…

We don't expect criminals to consent to being prosecuted. Those parallels really don't make a lot of sense.

The problem is that everyone is viewed as a perp, particularly if you are black. "Innocent until proven guilty" means something.
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