War (possibly a world war) is breaking out in Eastern Europe, and the top story on hacker news is about cows being caned on farms in Idaho...
If you're coming to HN for news about geopolitical world events, you're gonna have a bad time.
Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
81–90 of 138 posts
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
So how would you propose someone expose (what they consider to be) criminal or unjust practices? It's only ok if an impartial observer just happened to find themselves in the middle of a commercial farming operation with a video camera? I get that it sucks for someone to be acting in bad faith toward their employer, but isn't that justified and even necessary when the employer is acting in bad faith toward the popula…
Snowden is a hero because he exposed that our political class was lying to us. We make broad exceptions when it comes to the government itself because there is no other form of recourse . If the government is lying to you, you're truly hosed. Here, all sorts of things could happen to bring crimes to light. A worker might rat out his employer. A news crew could be filming some other story. A civil suit might involve d…
Well, a lot of people don't have a lot of faith in the institutional processes (cf. Deepwater Horizon, many other regulatory failures), and don't want to wait around for a serendipitous happenstance, that doesn't seem very reliable.
And yeah, there is a fine line between "exposing wrongdoing" and "interfering with legal business operations," and an activist might not always know which side they will fall on, but I would prefer to live in a country where they have some liberty to act on their beliefs.
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I consider myself a far left liberal and I certainly don't condone abusing farm animals. However, taking a paying job under falsified pretenses with a made up resume and then spending your working hours secretly filming internal operations for future public release with the sole goal of harming your employer, that is just sketchy. If you believe in the cause so much that you call it war - well understood. But protect…
The goal isn't to "harm the employer", the goal is to expose their behavior. If exposing your "internal operations" harms you, the problem isn't person doing the exposing, the problem are the "internal operations". I find it fascinating how everytime someone makes scandalous practices public, people come on the scene to condemn the people who go to the public. If there is no legal way to publicise abhorrent practices…
This: "Illegal looking" law could be expanded later on to require hardware shutters on a persons eyes. So when they step on a farm, a machine checks to make sure your eyes are completely covered.
Then later on, we may also have to make sure that the person visiting a farm also cannot hear, or smell, or touch, or taste. When you set foot on my property, any data you collect is not admissible in court.
This could be a good thing. I want to make it illegal for people to collect any kind of data of what I do on my property. If you want to come see, then you'll have to talk to my secretary and pay a million dollars for an exclusive interview.
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#84War (possibly a world war) is breaking out in Eastern Europe, and the top story on hacker news is about cows being caned on farms in Idaho...
War (possibly a world war) is breaking out in Eastern Europe, and the only means warineurope has to do anything about it is by creating a new hacker news account only to point that out on a completely unrelated topic.
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#85Of all things, you would think that the first amendment would protect such a thing, can any lawyer weight on that? > The measure passed Idaho’s Senate earlier in February to the applause of agricultural representatives who said it would help ensure farmers’ right to privacy. There is a certain irony in the US that everyone can get privacy, except private citizen.
This is similar to the tort of public disclosure of private facts. (Libel protects me against you lying about me, but this tort protects against you publicizing my strange hobbies or sexual practices or other private practices so long as, and this is huge, there's no public interest).
I know Idaho was a late adopter to the tort, while many other states committed the tort to statute. They may just be coming around.
The best argument for harmonizing it with first amendment law is in a Yale Law Journal note from 1973:
> [F]ree speech is protected not for some intrinsic value of speech but because it is a necessary condition for the making of informed decisions about matters of government, decisions which all citizens in a democracy are called on to make....He who performs his listening and deciding functions in a glass house is coerced by public opinion, whether anyone is actually looking in or not. If every magazine he reads, every rally he attends, every person he speaks to might somehow become a matter of public knowledge, he would feel inhibiting pressure.
David B. Roe, "Privacy in the First Amendment," 82 Yale L.J. 1462.
That said, some facts aren't merely private matters. If leading public figures are violating the law or lying to constituents or abusing their family, the public has a right to know.
Farmers abusing animals is at least slightly harder, because whether or not that's a matter of public concern hinges on the conclusions we've made about animal rights. If we live in a world where animals are robotic automatons deserving of no relevant moral consideration, then these are probably private, embarassing facts that don't bear any exposure. If we live in a world where the pain and suffering of animals is valued very near as to the pain and suffering of humans, ie, heeding Peter Singer's allegations of "speciesism," then these are absolutely 100% public facts.
We don't live in either of those worlds though. We live in this messy, complicated, in between world where we are still trying to figure out where animal rights rank between those two extremes.
Probably the best argument that these are public facts would note that outlining the actual practices under consideration (ie, literal animal rape and torture) help us determine which part of that spectrum we're in, because it helps animal rights activists note that their depictions are not absurd hypotheticals.
Probably the best argument on the other side is a claim that footage is cherry picked out of a much larger sample, that this activity happens exceedingly rarely, and the footage is closer to malicious slander or misrepresentation. (Not sure if that's true, but if it is, it would be a relevant consideration.)
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Snowden is a hero because he exposed that our political class was lying to us. We make broad exceptions when it comes to the government itself because there is no other form of recourse . If the government is lying to you, you're truly hosed. Here, all sorts of things could happen to bring crimes to light. A worker might rat out his employer. A news crew could be filming some other story. A civil suit might involve d…
Well, a lot of people don't have a lot of faith in the institutional processes (cf. Deepwater Horizon, many other regulatory failures), and don't want to wait around for a serendipitous happenstance, that doesn't seem very reliable. And yeah, there is a fine line between "exposing wrongdoing" and "interfering with legal business operations," and an activist might not always know which side they will fall on, but I wo…
This isn't very difficult to do.
Take 100K. Hire private investigators to find people who work at the place in question and who are not happy. Pay these people for affidavits stating that animal cruelty goes on. Based on that sworn testimony, go to a federal prosecutor and get a warrant. Take the warrant and gather evidence. Or, start a civil action and begin discovery.
This kind of thing is done all the time. But you know what it lacks? Publicity. Because at the end of the day, that's what activists want. It's not necessarily to stop the wrong, it's to get TV and internet coverage -- just like we see here -- and to use that coverage to raise money, gain attention, create an even bigger movement.
So yeah, I'm all for activists speaking out. Hell, I'll go march with them. But not onto somebody else's private property. They can go jump in a lake as far as I care, no matter what kind of impassioned cause they're thumping their chests about this week.
Look, either civilization depends on the rule of law or we all get to make impassioned speeches about things and do what we want because we believe our beliefs to be so special (more than other people). Count me in as a "rule of law" guy. Otherwise neither you or I are going to like things very much.
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#87Meanwhile it's ok to film citizens to "prevent terrorism".
I bet you that Idaho law would still allow filming if you suspected terrorism inside the farm lol
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I stumbled upon you committing a crime in your rape dungeon, recorded and made videos of it public, I would fully expect negative consequences to come my way. For one, the victim probably doesn't want those images shown to others. It seems to me that the more logical course of action would be to report you to the police and let them deal with it, not try to shame you in public.
The victims in this case are cows.
And, more often than not, the owners who happened to hire a bad employee. Sure, there should be repercussions for the choice to hire the person, but realize it is not always obvious who is bad without hindsight. It is embarrassing to have hired a programmer who botches your application, and it is equally embarrassing to have hired a farmhand that abuses your animals.
I wonder how Google/Facebook/Microsoft would react if people started posting videos of people writing bad code while on the job?
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#89It may sound like a rhetoric question but it is not. Why is the gov. banning filming? What's in it for the gov.?
One side will say that what's in it for the gov is millions of dollars in campaign contributions from big agriculture. The other side will say that bad publicity for their dairy industry will hurt the state's economy and cost jobs and tax revenue.
... and yet the third side says that if an entire state's economy is based on sweeping illegal (and immoral) acts under the rug for the 'greater good,' then something is severely wrong.
Re: Idaho law criminalizes secretly filming on farms
#90I think the issue isn't family farms, most small farmers take their job seriously. The issue is big conglomerate farms that don't want their industrial processes to be aired and criticized, much less have people discover practices that produce tainted and diseased products that might kill people. It's easier to control the fallout when things go bad when there are no pictures, such as in lawsuits.
My background, I am from Idaho, my father, brother, and brother-in-law are all dairymen, and I worked my dad's dairy for 15 years.
I also know the guy who owns the dairy the film was taken on, and I know quite a few of the people performing the most ageegious acts were fired soon after it was published.
But, as an issue, the film was just published, in the most sensational way they could, and NO effort was made to contact the dairyman ahead of time. The point of making the film was not help, but to hurt, permanently.
The film that was produced, is being used against all areas of the milk industry. The people using it add words to the effect of "this is how all dairies treat their cows". I've already seen it used in campaigns against yogurt and cheese producers.
Also, the debate continues over here about the law. Some dairymen are campaigning to reverse the law and open things up completely. But a big issue is education, too many people in America have never really touched a cow, and think people treat them like a cat.