41–50 of 397 posts
3 years of pretrial detention for anything less than blowing up a building should be enough to enrage anyone. Even then, the legal system would be a failure. How is 3 years pretrial not blatantly unconstitutional and thrown out immediately?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beatty_Chadwick
And this in a civil matter!
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By this logic, anyone who has had a Google Pixel and or is running GrapheneOS is guilty by association, right? Just wanted to understand your point.
Yup. https://www.androidauthority.com/google-pixel-organized-crim...
> Months later, the government arrested him. Their official reason? A minor, non-violent CFAA charge from an old workplace dispute that had nothing to do with Tor. This is exactly the argument for privacy to people who say "I have nothing to hide". Authoritative governments will always find a reason to dig something up and the less privacy you have the easier it will be. As a side note it sickening to see USA governm…
Privacy is not a deterrent to that. The state does what it wants and in the end it doesn't even need an excuse. An excuse is a nice to have, but that's it.
It doesn't need an excuse because people let it not need an excuse.
Every idiot, even on HN, heck, particularly on HN and other places where demographic factors result most never having been the target of government or think that they would be, is perfectly fine with it when the government behaves this way in pursuit of things they agree with. And so the only people complaining about any one government abuse are the small minority that care all the time plus whatever group care about the specific issue.
If people would stop being two faced snakes and have some principals and stand by them the problem would decrease on its own. But that's like saying "just go as fast as light", it's not a tractable problem.
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The bar for legal consequences is expected to be much higher than mere association.
It has never been perfect, nor uniformly applied in all circumstances, but it is and should remain a nominal goal of the justice system. For that to no longer be considered the case, even in a casual conversation like this, is a devastating shift of the Overton window towards authoritarianism as the norm.
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The part that should really enrage you is the way people will selectively understand this based on whether they agree or disagree with the context. If some electronics repair guy repairing vehicle ECUs in bulk who doesn't ask questions but has an inkling that they're gonna get used for emissions laws violations got rolled up on by the feds for refusing to go out of his way to help them out HN would find all sorts of…
I say this because this cultural vibe of government agencies kicking in your door for doing innocuous shit needs to die already, that is simply not how this happens. We get letters, we get calls, VERY occasionally we get visits and said visits are scheduled weeks, sometimes months in advance. We always cooperate and the relationship, therefore, is not adversarial.
Honestly we have way more fucking problems with huckster vendors trying to fuck us out of a few extra dollars on parts than anything to do with the big scary government.
While we're at it, fuck coal rollers with a cactus.
In my land of the free? No way.
This is unbelievable! How in the world! Why they do that ?! Because the police were frustrated????!
You clearly never seen police dashcam videos in the US. Besides the corruption and stops for "hunt missions", a lot of times it's simply because you shattered their ego, even with a simple laugh: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NqJdt9_1XSw
This is also why mobile phone camera tech led to BLM as more and more people became aware of how police act when they think nobody is watching.
I've seen this other cases like this. 1. The fbi asks you to be an informant or "cooperate" with an investigation in some way. 2. If you refuse, they investigate you, and basically throw the book at you.
Your local building commissioner or whatever just has a lot less money and muscle on tap and much more circuitous access to court judgements in their favor than the FBI does. Differences in their strategic and tactical approach is a reflection of this.