Yes, You've Got Something To Hide
from the and-yes-i've-been-recording-this-conversation dept
We've tried a few times to debunk the ridiculous logic of "if you've got nothing to hide..." argument in favor of surveillance, but leave it the awesome Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal to do a much better job in the form of a simple webcomic.
Everyone has something to hide and usually no one cares. By surveilling everyone, you catch the benign breaches of law and taboo. If the public are all guilty, the executive part of the government can selectively enforce laws, essentially giving them both judicial and legislative power, which defeats the whole point of separation of powers.Right. That.
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Filed Under: privacy, something to hide
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Then they will push for more laws against hacking, not limited surveillance.
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Yea, not OK for Google to do it, but perfectly OK for the FBI/CIA/NSA.....
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You trust a heavily-fined, multi-billion dollar corporation more than your own government?
That's seriously fucked up.
Google didn't intend to collect the full data and they didn't do anything with it. The government would have done so intentionally and would have archived and mined the data.
oh, I understand now. They programmed you well.
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I would say that any company (Google included) that pours a lot of money into lobbying IS the government these days.
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I heard aluminum foil protects against that.
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The federal government? Yes, yes it is.
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That must be the most brilliant phrase I've read in a while. Sex in your car at night for fun and for the thrill of being in public? Expect the SWAT at your house for a myriad of reasons. Need to pee badly and the closest place is, unfortunately, the street? Expect the FBI to visit you. Did that prohibited turn to save a few miles because you got the wrong lane (and there's no vehicle in sight anyway)? Damned. Sped up above legal limits out of pure lack of attention for a few instants? Expect the bill. Wanna get a hooker to relax? Lawsuit.
There are several small "wrongs" we do either intentionally or not. Heavy surveillance would simply make everyday life a nightmare. And for those who argue that the Government will be reasonable in such cases... Will it? Aren't there any recent examples where they went overboard?
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That suggests that maybe it shouldn't be a crime. Or should be regulated, taxed, licensed and with health checks. Eliminate street walkers offering this service.
> Heavy surveillance would simply make everyday life a nightmare.
Unless, it were applied to everyone including politicians and the rich, and the video was available to all. Then all of a sudden, a lot of things that are crimes would be legal. A lot of taboos would go away.
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That's always the sticking point isn't it? Suddenly, murders, human trafficking, drunk driving, all these heinous crimes that would ruin a normal persons life become a mere trivial exercise in pushing court paperwork when the right person with the right money is involved.
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Re: Re: No this woudn't change things a bit...
Video shows a Senator hiring a hooker, buying blow, doing the blow and the hooker on the roof of his limo while sitting in the middle of the congressional parking lot. Results: "An investigation found that the video equipment was 'out of license' (video equipment has to be properly licensed to avoid capturing potentially copyright infringing materials, you know) during the time period in question and thus the footage for that time period can not be relied upon and has been destroyed and is not available as evidence.
Video shows Joe Schmoe handing cash to the guy sitting on the corner and getting a handshake in return, the next block he hands a 'self help' pamphlet to what appears to be a streetwalker and spends a few minutes talking to her about life. Results: We have evidence of you purchasing drugs from a street thug and soliciting a prostitute, fine of $1000, mandatory 're-education' for the solicitation charge, and a fine of $5000 for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute for consorting with a known prostitute...
Sure once we are all being watched, we will ALL be treated the same.... I've got a great bridge that spans the Mississippi in Wyoming that I'm looking to unload cheap on the down low.. .give me a call
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Re: Re: Re: No this woudn't change things a bit...
While the hypothetic situation is far from the real world, there are some clever references to real situations in it. Keep 'em coming.
I am the one pushing the "sad but true button".
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There's no unless. It's so damn intrusive that the rich would perceive it as bad and push for less surveillance. As I said, everyday life would be hell.
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Street walking is still a crime when a pimp is involved, though it is legal to prostitute oneself under self employment rules or in a partnership/cooperative arrangement.
Oh and condoms are by law mandatory.
The Industry is actually very much self regulating too with constant improvement in conditions since employment laws and OH&S laws are very strong and the workers also pay taxes.
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Eh?
That's not nearly as enlightened as some folks here seem to want to make it sound. =)
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Actually you just nailed the main defense against massive surveillance programs/bills being put into effect, because for the strangest reason, the 'if you've got nothing to hide' group tend to shriek the loudest when they find themselves under the microscope, so the best way to defeat attempts to put such systems in place is to make it so that they would cover everyone, no exceptions.
Do that and I can all but guarantee that support for such bills/systems will all but dry up.
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That suggests that maybe it shouldn't be a crime. Or should be regulated, taxed, licensed and with health checks. Eliminate street walkers offering this service.
Not according to the Gun Debate logic... the reasonable action would be to outlaw marriage.
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Fixed that for you.
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In any case there is no such thing as a benign violation of the law. Violation of an invalid law, and the resulting justicial mechanism, is what protects us from the fallibility and corruption you cite. Violation of a valid law is, obviously, not benign.
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Killing in self-defense is not murder. If you commit such a killing an investigation and prosecution will commence not because you're a murderer but to establish the facts of the case so that murder can not masquerade as self-defense. Do you dispute it?
Copyright as we currently concieve of t is an invalid law: what harm does it prevent? By virtue of the fact that it would, if enforced, negate it's own proposed purpose - to promote progress in the useful arts - it should be plain for all to see that it is invalid. Do you dispute it?
There is no benign violation of the law.
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Being homosexual was considered to be harmful at the time thus they were considered valid at the time. They were rendered invalid because society evolved thanks but not limited to a whole bunch of people violating them.
If you commit such a killing an investigation and prosecution will commence not because you're a murderer but to establish the facts of the case so that murder can not masquerade as self-defense. Do you dispute it?
It is still a violation of the law. There's a trick here: does self-defense exist as an exception since the beginning? How was it introduced in the law as an exception if not by many violations that proved to be 'benign' in the end? That's true regarding many other laws.
Copyright as we currently concieve of t is an invalid law: what harm does it prevent? By virtue of the fact that it would, if enforced, negate it's own proposed purpose - to promote progress in the useful arts - it should be plain for all to see that it is invalid. Do you dispute it?
An incredibly vast amount of people violate it and yet the Governments have done little to nothing to fix those laws. They even made them worse. Do you really believe that we should blindly follow the law till the Govt decides to change it despite the financial powers that do not wish such reforms? Do you think homosexuals should just had followed the law and behaved as heterosexuals to wait the Government fixes?
Your reasoning is a failure.
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The harm never existed. They were never valid laws. What was considered is irrelevant.
It is still a violation of the law.
The law is against murder. Murder is unjust killing. Self-defense is not unjust killing. Ergo self-defense is not murder. Ergo self-defense is not a violation of the law. Self-defense is not an "exception" to the law against murder, it is simply not-murder, the same way drinking a soda is not-murder.
Do you really believe that we should blindly follow the law till the Govt decides to change it despite the financial powers that do not wish such reforms?
No, but you seem to be willfully ignoring what I am saying, so I don't see the point in repeating myself again.
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Yes but the first ones that disobeyed the law which led to it changing to encapsulate the exceptions were de facto violating it. You won't get a law challenged easily if there's no violation of it whatsoever because when the violations actually cause no harm it is then that enough evidence will be produced to repel that invalid law.
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Self-defence is usually legal, but subject to reasonableness - in most places, if someone spits at you or even takes a swing, an appropriate response is not to pull a knife or a gun. Usually, murder is defined as killing someone outside of 'allowable' situations. These include non-intentionality/accident (manslaughter), war (and other government-sanctioned killing), and self-defence. However, these need to be specfically called out as not all killing in 'self-defence' is legit (look at the Trayvon Martin situation - there was a need for a Stand Your ground law to give people the right to gun other people down without it automatically being murder).
So ninja's point makes more sense here.
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Explain the "harm", and therefore by your argument validity, in taking a leak behind a bush in public. That would get you arrested for public indecency if seen by an officer of the law, but probably no more than a disaproving "tut" if even the most conservative old lady were to see you.
Explain how "harm", and therefore validity, can be geographic. Prostitution is as I understand it, legal in a few states in the US but not in most. How does harm happen by driving 10 miles?
In the UK people have been arrested for calling someone the "N" word... and yet in some black areas it can almost become a term of endearment.
Laws have the context of life and are never, ever, black and white no matter how much you or law enforcement may try and pretend they are.
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It can't be. I never said it could be. I never addressed the question of prostitution.
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"There's no such thing as a 'benign' violation of law or taboo of the laws and taboos I'm now going to cherrypick to support my sweeping and binary-state assertion."
Got it....
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When I said "benign violation," I meant in the sense that the comic proposed of a violation which should simply be ignored, by the perpetrator, by witnesses, by law enforcement. Such a thing does not exist for the reasons I have spent dozens of comments trying to express.
Harm can not be regional. It can not be social, it can not be relative. There either is harm or there is not. Perception of harm is all of these things, but that's why we need to cut through perception and get to the heart of is there harm or not. Violations of invalid laws should be noted and prosecuted because that is the mechanism for identifying this invalidity.
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Consider these scenarios:
1/ Guy goes behind tree in park at night, whips his tackle out and takes a leak. Person passing by sees him taking a leak.
2/ Guy goes behind tree in park at night, whips his tackle out then steps out as person passes by. No threats, just stands there exposing himself.
In both cases by the law the same crime is committed: indecent exposure. Now assume the person who happens to see in each case is a police officer. In case 1 there's a good chance that nothing more happens - the police officer carries on their way, or maybe "cautions" the guy to be more careful where he relieves himself.
In case 2, the chances of the guy not being arrested are slim.
This is exactly what is referred to as a "benign breaking of the law" and the point being made is this:In scenario 1, it is the police officer's discretion that no arrest occurs, though a crime has been committed.
Now scale that up and imagine that there is documented proof of everyone who ever took a leak in public or went skinny dipping in college, or smoked a joint just to see what it was like, or brought in an extra bottle of alchohol duty free through customs. Now everyone can be prosecuted and locked up at the whims of law enforcement for doing nothing that society does not consider benign.
Imagine that you were suspected of, let's say, an assault. There's no proof, you are just the prime suspect. Now, if they want, they can "get you off the streets to protect decent people" any time they like for the myriad tiny laws you've broken - they don't need proof of what you're supposed to be locked up for, because they have the proof of all that other stuff. That's what it's talking about. To say that "benign lawbreaking" doesn't exist, or to think that excessive surveillance isn't a problem is seriously ignoring reality.
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Similarly protest leaders can be locked up as a means to deal with political unrest, even if they are leading a peaceful protest.
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Why should THAT be the mechanism? "This law is obviously invalid. Let's arrest someone for it so we can fix it." Why not just fix it, and skip the arresting of people who have obviously not violated a valid law? If Alabama tomorrow passed a law outlawing blacks from voting (which is an obvious direct violation of the Constitution) would you seriously say that the police should arrest every black who attempted to vote? Do you not see why that would be a horribly bad idea, and why the police should NOT attempt to enforce it?
I would also like you to recognize that your arguments only make ANY sense with a benevolent government. Imagine 100% surveillance and enforcement in Iran, and how THAT would work. And then remember that Iran was not always run by religious extremists.
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"Let's stress test the system"
I do believe if something we know before hand that something is broken (or invalid), we must immediately either fix or scrap that. However, not everything can be determined before hand so easily. Sometimes the problem only appear when the "thing" is put in real world use. This is what I believe what he meant by "prosecuting offenders of an invalid laws", so that a law which was considered as valid before, can be shown/proven as invalid.
The caveat is that the prosecutor is a good sport, who can take can take the newly found "invalidity" gracefully and make real changes; not someone who use every loophole under the sun just to save face.
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Murder IS predetermined killing.
Your argument is full of fail... you murder logic sir!
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Are mss-shooters not guilty of muder because they killed many people? Or maybe you'd say that's several successive cases of one-on-one killing? What if it's a bomber instead who kills a dozen people with one device?
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This is why exception to laws are written in. Laws are not absolute, and are not black and white. Lots of gray areas and they are very necessary.
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You have still committed an illegal act until tried as a defense under the laws of the land.
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"It is not an exception to the law,(
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What Potyomkin is pedantically stating about the usage of the word benign though is true since a law by itself cannot be benign, though the way it is applied can be absolutely benign.
Law itself though is in effect a social (read nowadays governmental) construct to impose order, predictability, equity, structure, security, and above all else confidence onto the public in its many institutions.
The problem comes about when these things neither actually happen or the perception is given that they do not occur or the law is ambiguous. That is when laws need to be changed, amended, or wiped.
Law also needs to be simple, succinct, and relevant otherwise it is prone to abuse - Tax law is a prime problematic example of this.
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If laws ceased to exist under such conditions you'd have a point but they don't so you don't.
It is? Says who?
The fact of the matter is that getting laws repealed is almost impossible and new laws aren't necessarily better than old ones. Let's say you do violate an invalid law though and the 'judicial mechanism' protects you. Does this happen immediately or even painlessly? No, it's still a huge deal to have to prove that in a court and it takes a lot of time and money.
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Civil Disobedience II
Of course it does. With eyes wide open, a person places themselves into the justice system specifically to call into question the unjust nature of the law.
Where have you been the last century? =)
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Re: Civil Disobedience II
Bless you, sir.
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Re: Re: Civil Disobedience II
You must live inside a Frank Capra movie. Don't you know that in Scotland under the reign of King James, men caught having sex together were tortured by the State, tied in a burlap sack and held under water until almost drowned, then burned at the stake? That was 400 years ago, but only 60 years ago the government of the UK chemically tortured Alan Turing for the same "crime". How many millions must be tortured and murdered under your self-regulating system before the "problem" is "rectified"?
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It worked so well for Alan Turing. I mean, well, it rectified the problem 50+ after he was convicted and about as long since he took his own life, as a direct result of being convicted of an invalid law. And it has worked so well for copyright cases too. Sorry, but the world isn't black and white, and there are a lot of people destroyed as the result of invalid laws.
I agree that good people tend to be abused by invalid laws before they are overturned in most cases, but there are other ways to fix the law without resorting to such atrocities. Turning the world into a police state will not likely bring about the change you think it will...except, maybe, in kicking off a world wide change of government, which is not likely to be any better.
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Re: Civil Disobedience and Homosexuality
Murder does not become palatable if you do it in the privacy of your own home. The issue is really never the surveillance. It is the nature of the law itself that is problematic.
Where technology runs afoul of the 4th ammendment is it ceases to be a search because your "personal" effects are not hanging around out in public.
Almost from the beginning I felt that most people misunderstood the nature of the internet and needed to realize it is much more like a huge ball room with many cozy tables for people to gather at than it is like some psychic, private, inviolable direct connection between people or organizations. Your privacy on the internet has always been largely illusory.
It's still a useful tool, but it's no place to keep evidence that you broke the law.
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But things like 'Jury nullification" is a term that is liable to get you locked away for the 'good' of the public nowadays. And if your a solicitor/attorney who brings it up in court.. OMG!!!!
Though the other route, non-violent protesting is now being equated to anarchy (the oxymorons are strong in governments nowadays) which is to any government authority an absolute form of assault on their power base which must be stamped out with much fear and hand waving.
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If we lived in a society where the courts treated everyone equally I might agree with you. As it is, with the high court/low court problem we have, we must avoid this total surveillance society.
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Why is there a speed limit? Because at some point the conditions of the road and the realities of human capabilities (senses, reaction time, etc) make excessive speed dangerous. If the law says that the point where speed becomes dangerous is 36mph then yes, +1mph is not benign, by definition.
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Civil Disobedience
You seem to include in the definition of "ineffective" the concept of injustice.
An unjust law needs to be violated until such time as it is "improved" enough to stop being unjust. Law does not take precedence over justice. The "rule of law" is absolutely meaningless otherwise.
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Enforcing unjust laws mean that corrupt LEOs and prosecutors can ruin the lives of innocent people if they want to. Just because the law is invalid and might be overturned by a court after a lengthy, possibly life- and finance-destroying trial doesn't mean that innocent people should have to be sacrificed for that purpose. It also doesn't mean that people who have guns pulled on them by cops or bullied in interrogation rooms won't take bad advice or won't get pressured into taking a bad plea bargain on bullshit charges.
The system of overturning unjust laws is not perfect, so doing things "properly" won't always result in justice.
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I doubt that many people know that in all states or countries for that matter there are old laws that nobody not even law enforcement use anymore, those laws are dead for all intent and purposes and never get "rectified" the ones that get "rectified" are the ones that affect a large part of the population in some way and create friction, which can be expressed by many forms for which the most common is disregard for it.
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Re: Re: Civil Disobedience
Monopolies fell(e.g. Revolt of the Commons) because people started disrespecting them.
Disrespect for the written law is friction caused by some factor.
A law never enforced is a useless law, a law not followed by anybody is a useless law and more important a law that nobody wants to help enforce is a weak law.
You seem to assume that the law as mandated should be the only thing that can impart order but it is not.
Even to "rectify" "invalid laws" as you so call it you say they need to be prosecuted to show how they are broken, but to prosecute it first there need to be disregard for that law in the first place.
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No, if the law says that you cannot go faster than 35 mph, that makes 36 illegal. It's still benign in the sense that it poses no greater risk to anybody if you do it.
Actions aren't dangerous because the law declares them so.
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I agree: the law declares them to be dangerous because they are, in fact, dangerous. You are arguing nonsense if you reverse that flow.
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I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I assume it's merely because my words are ineffective rather than a failure of your intellect. The correct response to an invalid law is to let the mechanism of government correct itself; simply violating the law erodes the respect of valid laws, does nothing to correct deficient laws, and leads to anarchy.
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What do you do when the Government does not abide by such mechanisms or does not have the will? And how do you explain that despite general violation of the so-called "invalid" laws has not led to general violation of valid laws through the times?
I agree with most that you said except that you seem to treat the governmental and judicial way as the only channels and you simply disregard civil disobedience as part of the process. Any history book will show you how it is a key part of the process. Laws should and MUST be violated if they are unjust or too draconian.
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As to your other question... "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them..."
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For your quixotic system to work, there'd have the be enough people to prosecute all the violations that take place in order to systemically weed out all the invalid laws. The problem with that is people still get prosecuted under invalid laws and the laws don't always get overturned, so it can still perpetuate invalid laws to prosecute them and that's worse that just not enforcing the invalid law. It takes less effort on both the citizen and law enforcement to ignore an invalid law than it does to prosecute and overturn a law.
There aren't enough people, there isn't enough time, and we shouldn't have to pay for the number of lawyer man-hours it would take to overturn all the invalid laws, even if you could indeed overturn every invalid law.
On top of all that, there are clearly examples of benign violations of valid laws that completely negates your entire argument:
Exceeding the speed limit is against the law. You exceed the speed limit in order to get a person to the hospital who has an emergency medical condition. By all facts, you have indeed violated the law, but you did so for the purpose of saving a life. That is clearly a benign violation. You didn't hit anyone. You didn't endanger lives by any demonstrable measure. You in fact might be argued to have saved a life. If the purpose of the speeding laws is to reduce the danger to lives, and you fulfill the spirit of the law by breaking it, then why should you be prosecuted? And the law is clearly valid, so you wouldn't want to overturn it.
The practical reality of what you're advocating for is either zero tolerance (and thus very unjust application of the law) or else an even more complicated legal system than we already have in which every exceptional scenario for every law is amended to it so that your lawyer would have to hire a lawyer to figure out how the law even works.
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That's a strange definition of civil disobedience.
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Surveilance vs.
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I'm also not sure that i agree that it erodes the respect for valid laws. Violating a speed limit doesn't make murdering someone more acceptable. In general people have relatively good judgement when faced with common problems. This is the heart of the trial by jury mentality.
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I agree that laws should not be selectively enforced, in general. Common exceptions should be codified. Rare exceptions should be RARE. 1 MPH over the speed limit should be allowed because of calibration errors (if you're tracked at 56 in a 55, there's reasonable doubt that you were in fact going more than 55.) And sometimes there's just not the manpower to enforce the laws - if every single driver is going 60, then you may want to wait a minute and catch the guy going 70, because he's more dangerous and you'd miss him while pulling over a random 60 guy.
You can claim that a particular law is "invalid" but what good does it do you? I personally think that drunk driving roadblocks should be unconstitutional searches, but the Supreme Court disagrees with me. I know a place where there's a 35 limit on a wide, straight road with farm fields on both sides... is the 35 limit automatically "invalid" because it's ridiculous? Who decides that? What limit should be placed there if 35 is "invalid"?
But separately from enforcement, 100% surveillance is a bad thing. There are plenty of LEGAL activities one can engage in that may be used against them if they ever run for Congress, for example. Do we really want whoever's in power to have access to everything that everyone has ever done?
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In Potyomkin's idea, those rare exceptions would be prosecuted. Either you would have people routinely* going to jail for things that society deems acceptable, or the laws would become (if possible) even more labyrinthine than they are now. There are no other options if we went down that route.
* rare exceptions times 320 million people times millions of laws becomes quite common
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Good call.
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Please explain the danger that necessitated copyright laws and what danger they are preventing today in the digital age?
If laws were only made to remove danger from the public, you might have a point, but so many laws on the books today have been bought to prevent competition or to somehow limit or restrict competition in specific markets.
What is the 'danger' in practicing law without a law degree (other than ending up in Jail for having no clue what is going on)? Yet there are laws that prevent this very thing (other than pro se self defense)... and those laws are to prevent competition on the legal arena by non-lawyers.
But you are just trolling, so trollallalalal
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That's incorrect. There is always danger, at any speed. The speed limit is just where the people in charge of speed limits have decided the danger is at the highest acceptable level.
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And nobody is arguing otherwise.
But only when they go to court, and to get to court, someone had to violate the law.
Laws are never corrected by just waiting for the law to be corrected. The government is not automatically self-correcting.
Violating bad laws does not erode the respect for good laws. The mere existence of bad laws erodes the respect for all laws. Violating them is a symptom of that erosion, not a cause.
Also, much (maybe most) of the time in our history that bad laws were ultimately corrected, those corrections only happened as a result of civil disobedience: violating the laws to be able to get the case into court.
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The danger of a thing is either real or not. If it is real, and law against it is valid. If it is not real, and law against it is invalid. The validity of a law has nothing to do with the assertions of lawmakers and everything to do with the basic facts of the validity of the danger.
But in order to prevent anarchy and utter lawlessness, you can not simply violate the laws and call it benign. that erodes confidence in valid laws and the whole of the governmental mechanism. This is WHY, in great part, we have the courts. If a law is invalid because there is no harm the courts will identify this and it will be corrected. But the notion of "benign" violation short-circuits that, to our ruin.
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It isn't unreasonable just because you declare it to be unreasonable. In this specific case the margin of error on a speedometer could very well be 1 MPH or more.
And here we come to the heart of the issue. You're apparently incapable of seeing a law as being anything other than what it is intended to do. Is that what every speed limit is for? Not a single one is set to what it is for any other reason? If all speed limits are honestly set by this metric then they should be able to prove it and if they can there are for more effective methods to enforcing speed limits then a few cops pulling people over to meet quotas every month.
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Now you're arguing whether you actually broke the law or not. Or are you arguing that you broke the law out of carelessness? In either case I do not see why it's meaningful: you are a danger.
You're apparently incapable of seeing a law as being anything other than what it is intended to do.
You are misinterpretting me. A law is invalid unless it protects against a real harm. If a speed limit, for instance, is set at 25mph not because 26mph is dangerous but because the city needs more money, that (25mph on this road) is an invalid law and should be rectified. But it is not rectified by ignoring it.
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And if it can't be rectified or isn't rectified because the government is packed with self-interested people i.e. is a government that exists on earth? Everyone should just dutifully following the law without question then?
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What if I have a speedometer that only shows increments of 10 mph? Does that mean I can go 9 mph over the limit? Isn't it just as insane to apply the law based on insufficient equipment?
The only problem I would see with getting a ticket for going .001 mph over the limit is if that same officer was not applying that standard to everyone he saw violating that law.
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You're apparently incapable of seeing a law as being anything other than what it is intended to do
That is important, but not really something to be arguing in this context. Nowhere in the article are misused laws being talked about. 1 mph over the speed limit is not being misused in any context I can see in the comments here. What you are saying happens, but the remedy for a law that can be misused is NOT selective enforcement. In fact, a better remedy is total enforcement. Total enforcement will cause one of two things to happen. It will either cause a jury to nullify the law, or it will raise enough awareness that people will get their representatives to change the law.
Because people are used to a system in which they can "get away" with breaking some laws because law enforcement isn't always watching, changing the system to one in which law enforcement is always looking requires total enforcement of law or causes the role of judge and jury to fall into the hands of law enforcement through selective enforcement. Total enforcement would be VERY jarring for our society and cause lots of problems - and let's face it, law enforcement would LOVE to be in the business of being able to selectively enforce laws whenever they want - that's a power easily misused.
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People drive the speed they feel comfortable with.
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There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that break the law and those who lie about it.
Which are you?
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Most people do perfect crimes every day and most of them wouldn't have a clue that they have done them.
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Where I live driving the speed limit on certain interstates will almost certainly result in you causing an accident because the flow of traffic is more than 20MPH higher than the posted limit. You are more of a hazard by driving the speed limit than keeping up with the flow of traffic.
A few other examples:
Courtisy http://www.legalzoom.com/us-law/more-us-law/top-craziest-laws-still
"If you're a woman living in Michigan, you might want to check with your husband before heading to the hair stylist. According to state law, your hair belongs to your spouse and you'll need his permission before you can alter it.
When visiting Charlotte, North Carolina, don't plan on packing light. According to city law, you must be swathed in at least 16 yards of fabric before stepping out into public.
Even in fashion forward New York City, there are laws concerning how a woman dresses. In the Big Apple, wearing clingy or body-hugging clothing carries a $25 dollar fine.
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Pittsburgh has a special cleaning ordinance on the books that bans housewives from hiding dirt under their rugs.
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Memphis, Tennessee, women can't drive a car unless there is a man with a red flag in front of the car warning the other people on the road.
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Texas law "When two railroad trains meet at a crossing, each shall stop and neither shall proceed until the other has passed." "
So, yes, there are a lot of situations when it is 'OK' to break the law.
To your specific example about 1 MPH over the limit, most police will give you 7 MPH over the limit without pulling you over or citing you for various reasons. On the other hand if you piss them off or they are having a bad day, or need to make their quota they will nail you for 1MPH over the limit.
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It depends on the law. Sometimes for common cases we even make normally illegal things legal if they are done just a little bit, and sometimes we just recognize that there's no harm. Everyone agrees that drinking and driving is bad, but you don't generally get arrested for blood alcohol of 0.01%. Often, people who are technically according to the letter of the law victims of assault or battery, do not even think of calling the police because the "assault" was of such a minor nature. Many statutory rape laws make an exception for an 18 year old with a 17 year old. You can technically give somebody something worth less than $1 to vote, but not something at or above $1. Stalking and harassment laws usually only kick in after the conduct happens repeatedly. And so on. For speed limits, even though the law does not say so, you won't get arrested for going 56 in a 55 zone (and if you do, the cop was looking for an excuse to pull you over.) Why do they not pull you over? Because going 56 in a 55 is not normally unsafe.
For speed limits in particular, the laws fail to take many things into consideration when determining a speed limit. Some drivers have better reaction times, or better vision, or are just paying more attention. Some vehicles have better brakes, newer tires, and better handling than others. Sometimes the pavement is damp and sometimes it is dry. Sometimes particular stretches of road may be slightly more dangerous than others, despite having the same speed limit. Sometimes there's more traffic. Sometimes there are more pedestrians to watch out for. Sometimes it's a bright noon, sometimes it's a dark night, and sometimes the sun is in your eyes. It's not like half the rural highways in America have the exact same maximum safe speed just because they are rated 55 or 65, and it's not like half the urban roads have the exact same maximum safe speed just because they're rated 25 or 30.
And sometimes the law just changes. I'm thinking of a particular stretch of road that had the limit changed from 55 to 65 a while back. The road is the same now as it was then. So somehow, 56 was dangerous then but 65 is OK now? Even though now the road is older and has more traffic?
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Just because you don't care enough to report a crime doesn't mean a crime wasn't committed.
Statutory rape is about coersion, and the 'exceptions' you mention merely recognize that there was no coersion, and thus no crime.
The $1 mark is another legal limit thing, presumably recognizing that something worth less than $1 is not a dangerous influence.
Stalking is defined as a repeated or prolonged behavior; walking down the street behind someone is not stalking.
You're trying to find exceptions when all you're doing is emphasising how precise and reasonable laws are.
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Speed Limit
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In any case there are laws in the Wales (or somewhere up there) that make archery classes mandatory for all boys that reach 16 years old. EVERYBODY breaks that law nowadays. That's benign. We have the Apartheid, racism inscribed into the law that was pretty much valid not many years ago and I am sure most of us would break that set of laws quite happily. Yes, there are benign violations of laws. Actually, some of those violations are NEEDED in order for society to advance. We just have to remember that homosexuality and marriage between those was forbidden. Until someone challenged those stupid laws. Laws CHANGE and are made by men and thus prone to errors and misinterpretations.
Further reading to help enlighten you: http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/19/debunking-the-dangerous-nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear/
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Laws are either valid or invalid. Their validity is based on the harm which they are intended to prevent; their effectiveness is based on how well they prevent that law. If a law is invalid then it should not be a law, and the courts were put in place to identify and rectify this situation. If it is merely ineffective then a better law should replace it, should a better law exist. In the absense of a better law a valid but ineffective law is better than no law at all.
In any case there is no such thing as a benign violation of the law. Violation of an invalid law, and the resulting justicial mechanism, is what protects us from the fallibility and corruption you cite. Violation of a valid law is, obviously, not benign.
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Like the FISA amendments that are clearly being abused (and considered invalid by a huge portion of the people that actually had contact with them?
Merely violating laws that are "dumb" erodes the rule of law and the respect of valid laws.
No, what erodes laws is lack of collective acceptance.
Again you stick to your ignorant black and white point of view. Laws may NOT be invalid from the start. Technologies, behaviors and societal norms change and may render laws invalid over time.
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That entirely depends upon the person judging validity. The validity of a law is entirely subjective and changes on the whims of the current power holders. Many minorities would find a lot of laws invalid, yet the majority cannot see said law any other way. If that minority became the majority, is the law immediately invalid, even though it was considered valid previously?
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Um, I would argue the opposite. "Putting (or keeping) "dumb" laws on the books erodes the rule of law and the respect for "valid" laws."
For instance many of the laws that TechDirt covers here, definitely fall under that category. The laws do not keep up with the times and quickly become invalid, not applicable or even conflict with other laws. People are not going to wait for the laws to catch up with technology.
Since most of our representatives leave it to corporate interests to actually write the new legislation, and most representatives don't even bother to read, let alone understand the laws they are voting on; and since actual public debate about new legislation is almost unheard of anymore, that also erodes the people trust in the entire process.
Want people to follow the laws, don't write stupid ones.
Ironically, it is our own lawmakers who are doing their damnedest to lead us down the road to anarchy by their own gross negligence and utter disregard for the very people they are supposed to serve.
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Those are invalid laws because they do not guard against a valid harm. Please read what I' saying before you decide to argue an unrelated point against me.
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Got it?
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To any law enforcement officer, if you ask, "valid" means if it is still on the books, it is still the law. Hypot: Is the officer then, seeing a woman in short pants, violating the law by not citing the woman? Is that a benign violation?
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To your hypothetical: the police officer is violating his oath, the woman is violating the law, the law is invalid. There is no such thing as a benign violation.
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how about crossing the street other than at a corner or at a crosswalk? Isn't that illegal?
I do that all the time.
How about kids getting into fights with each other on the playground? Domestic dispute! It's against the law! But, guess what? It's benign because it happens a lot.
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Who's getting hurt if I cross the street outside of a crosswalk? In fact, I think those are MORE dangerous because there are cars RIGHT THERE! (Hell, my ONLY accident when crossing the street was AT A CROSSWALK!) And kids fight with each other, it's what they do.
So, no, there is no harm. Hell, the people who prosecute those who urinate in public state it's a stupid law and it needs to get changed.
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You claim that it was a benign breach is wrong, you were gambling with other peoples life and limb.
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FOAD.
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I have no illusions, privacy on the streets is dead.
Is not just the government doing the snooping, but everyone, you can buy a security system for $100 and goggles with a camera for $50, everyone will be recording everybody soon.
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i think of better things you want hidden
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we could extend this type of insanity to everything, jaywalking, right-hand turns on a red traffic light, googling the wrong phrase more than a few times.
I quit listening to anyone who uses the "I have nothing to hide" statement ages ago because I know for a fact none of them would enjoy living in a fishbowl. This has also had the side effect of lowering my intake of pro-IP arguments by about half (you would think they would come up with better arguments after all these years).
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And then do it. If surreptitiously, send them a video or some other record of what they did. If not, make sure you are up next to them, close enough to hear phone conversations, read text messages/emails/etc. It'll freak them out.
Disclaimer: I have never done this.
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See http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579/29579-h/29579-h.htm
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Response to: Zakida Paul on Jan 9th, 2013 @ 8:57am
also:
"I used to play the drums. They're kinda similar."
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Readers may also enjoy Rick Falkvinge's excellent rebuttal to this distressingly common trope.
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By and large, though, the criminalization of swathes of the US population is related to grandstanding politicians taking a "tough on crime" approach without actually looking for ways to reduce crime. Think war on drugs.
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Does this also figure into the discussion?
“'If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.'”
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Because of the building design, the local cop could observe whether you entered the brothel, or the flats above, and hence whether to take note of the visit or not. the danger with massive surbeilance is that such distinctions are not made by the system.
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Take it up with Eric Schmidt. Google is monitoring you to the best of its ability and what it does with that info may or may not factor in context.
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Everyone is a criminal.
Examples from NJ Motor Vehicle code
Failure to stop vehicle before crossing sidewalk
Failure to keep right
Failure to keep right at intersection
Failure to yield to overtaking vehicle
Careless driving
Reckless driving
Improper turn at traffic light
Failure to give proper signal
Improper crossing of bridge
Improper passing of frozen dessert truck (4 points!!!!)
Improper action or omission on grades and curves
If drove a car in NJ today, chances are you broke one or more of those laws. That is just a quick search of NJ moving violations that earn points.
Face it, you broke the law somewhere today.
A surveillance society allows the government to target anyone they fell like targeting and charge them with a crime. The feds already have the power to call you a "terrorist" and lock you away forever. No trial. No rights. No constitution.
Right now they are very careful about using it. Unless you are Bradley Manning. There will come a time in my lifetime, when they will abuse the law. There will be a people they don't like, communists, terrorists, liberals, Muslims, gays, Mexicans, pirates, etc. and they will start locking them away.
Maybe I'm paranoid. Maybe not.
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Surveillance Vs. Enforcement
Does everyone, absolutely EVERYONE, violate society's expectations of how we should behave in private? I doubt it. There have always been situations where something that is not alright to do in public is perfectly ok in private. The real issue is that the government and media are both complicit in using this sort of information to demonize a person before any actual legal issue is brought into play.
I remember "Wide Stance" Larry Craig "caught" trolling for gay sex in a public bathroom. His "solicitation" however was basically to touch someone's foot with his own foot and to sweep his hand under the stall partition. This only happened after a couple of foot tappings that were purportedly a signal for gay men in that area. Did the police officer not respond? If he did, how was this a violation of any sort? Are people not allowed to communicate back and forth in public restroom stalls? Who was being harmed?
It seems likely that all he did was to respond to the solicitation of an undercover police officer. This would under any normal circumstance be entrapment, but because of his position the information that he had been involved in such a thing at all destroyed his professional life and probably deeply disturbed his private life as well.
No high tech was involved.......
The issue is not that you are being watched. The issue is what we allow people to do with that information. If we establish that lying about people or sharing personal information about them without their consent is a crime, what I think will follow is that it will become counterproductive to do all this surveiling because by law it will be inadmissible to court and a violation of law to publicize without the express consent of the individual involved.
This has implications for art, and therefore copyright, as well. It has become accepted that a person does not have any rights over images of them taken by other people in public places, but as this line between public and private places is slowly destroyed by technology and (it is to be hoped) replaced by concepts of personal privacy, the right of a person to control what is done publicly with their own words and images will take center stage, and be set up against the rights of "artists" and "journalists" to their supposed "work" of merely capturing images, likenesses, or snippets of conversation.
I think we have had this exactly backwards for generations, and part of our trouble is we are straining to protect two mutually exclusive concepts - that a person creating an image or capturing the likeness or words of another has more right to decide what to do with that product than the subject of that image on the one hand, and that people have a right to be free of government or private harassment on the other.
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THAT is the kind of thing that total surveillance causes a big problem with. The "we should be able to break little laws" argument is garbage. That is a problem with the laws and should be fixed by changing the laws, not through selective enforcement of them. Law enforcement turning a blind eye to "little" laws only gives them power over people that they decide they want to persecute through prosecution.
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No. Stings are not entrapment. For entrapment, law enforcement must cause the perpetrator to commit a crime he otherwise wouldn't. Posing as a client does not meet that criterion.
Go here for a layman's summary.
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That's a pretty big assumption.
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It's built into the system now
CES: Technology Moves Off the Screen, Into Your Stuff
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MY favorite line
This coversation is being recorded.
That's a violation of my privacy!
If we wish to maintain a level of privacy regarding our activities from the government, then we must be doing something wrong. If we as the public demand or even for transparency from the government for their own activities they claim it's classified or necessary for the national defense.
Something is fundamentally wrong when the secrets of an individual aren't worth protecting, but the secrets of the government are forever above scrutiny. A lot of bad things follow that path.
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We've gone far past that. The law is laughable. Everyone breaks the law at some point, probably every week or day. Only reason society functions is no one is watching.
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Did Techdirt ever address this?
I was doing a bit of research on the topic and today plugged in the right combination of words to find this story, which was covered by quite a few different media outlets. Was it ever touched upon in Techdirt?
Court Upholds Google-NSA Relationship Secrecy | Threat Level | Wired.com
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