The trouble is that there's a colloquial meaning of "defamation", and then there's the meaning the term has under the law, and the former is very much broader than the latter.
One part of the definition from gcide is simply "the wrong of maliciously injuring the good name of another", with no reference to truth or falsity about it, and I think that's probably reasonably close to the colloquial meaning of the term.
Attempting to apply the penalties provided under the law for the law's definition, but using the colloquial definition, would be so excessively restrictive as to violate the First Amendment - and so the law isn't going to be expanded to use the colloquial definition any time soon, if ever.
It might be possible to combine broadening the definition of defamation to the colloquial one with reducing the penalties to something that doesn't result in violation of the First Amendment - but the end result would be penalties so weak that they would not remotely satisfy someone who'd be likely to sue for defamation in the first place, so that's not likely to happen either.
When that agreement was drafted and signed, Trump almost certainly wasn't President yet. The "Company" being referred to is probably the Trump Organization, i.e. the umbrella under which all of the Trump family's properties operate and those individual properties, collectively.
Trump would be more likely to care about damage to that Company than to the office of the President, or to the USA, anyway.
Interestingly, I saw a piece recently (I believe in the Washington Post) which argued that he may have gotten the term "fake news" from Hillary Clinton's use of it (in a different and more traditional sense) a few weeks earlier, post-Election-Day, and simply decided to co-opt it for his own use and his own Humpty-Dumpty meaning.
If this is the usual "regulations" guy, his position appears to be that:
Regulations which have been in place for decades have raised the bar to entering the market, thereby protecting the incumbents and preventing competition from occurring. (This is what he means when he talks about "regulatory capture".)
Therefore we do not have, and never have had, a free market in this field.
Therefore the free market has not failed here, because we haven't tried it.
Therefore what we have here is not a market failure.
As evidence for this, he cites the fact that the establishing documents of the FCC talk about "regulating natural monopoly". He interprets this to represent a statement of intention to protect and support the companies which have local monopolies in this market, rather than break up or prevent such monopolies. He therefore concludes that the FCC has been corrupt and protectionist from its very outset, and for that matter in its official reason for existing.
In so doing, he fails to recognize - or (more likely) outright rejects - what the term "natural monopoly" actually means (despite the fact that it has been explained to him many times in past comment threads); it's not a kind of monopoly which can be prevented or abolished, although one can occasionally be rendered obsolete by later technological development.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How does this matter when you kids believe even NEW works are yours for the taking?
I think the suggestion is that "because there aren't enough movies in the public domain for there to be an industry around making public-domain movies available, there aren't people doing that, so the few movies which are in the public domain don't get made available".
Whether that's true is another question, but that's how I read that phrase.
One is, indeed, (at least closely akin to) "might be evidence of a crime": that information on the device might serve to indicate that the person coming into the country may be intending to carry out criminal, or (more to the point of those justifying it) outright terrorist, actions.
The other is that border enforcement is also customs enforcement, and that includes enforcement of intellectual-property rules in regard to importing copyrighted / trademarked / etc. things. Bringing certain copyrighted, trademarked, etc., information into the country - without due authorization from the holder of the intellectual-property right - can indeed itself be a crime.
For good or ill, there seems to be a long-established principle that it is presumptively reasonable to search the effects of people coming into the country for customs-enforcement reasons, regardless of whether there even is a suspicion that any crime may have been committed - and that includes intellectual-property-related customs enforcement.
It's just the government's good luck that they can find things useful for other purposes in the course of carrying out that sort of customs search. (Though IIRC they can't necessarily use what they find for other purposes without getting a post-search warrant first.)
If you want to counter that, you may need to start by developing arguments against that initial (long-established) presumption in general, rather than against the specific cases of it where information is involved - because as long as that foundation stands, overturning the things which are built on it is going to be difficult.
The idea is not so much that the Constitution (or rather, specifically, the Fourth Amendment) does not apply.
The idea as I understand it is, rather, that searches pursuant to enforcement of the rules which govern crossing of the country's borders are de-facto not "unreasonable search"es under the terms of the Fourth Amendment (thus, not requiring a warrant unless other circumstances render them unreasonable), and that any place close enough to a border that someone who crossed illegally could have gotten there in a sufficiently short amount of time is within the jurisdiction of those who conduct border-enforcement searches.
On its face that doesn't sound terribly problematic, and back when the precedents which established that border-enforcement searches are presumptively reasonable were set, it probably wasn't; back then, travel was slow enough that "close enough to a border" probably meant only a mile or two, and almost certainly no more than 10 to 20 miles. It's only when you factor in A: the speed of modern travel (such that anywhere within 100 miles of a border is considered "close enough" to qualify) and B: the fact that airports capable of hosting international flights are considered to qualify as "borders" that you get the "exception swallows the rule" clearly-excessive results we have today.
I've always been given to understand that Israel's border- and transportation-related security measures are more effective while simultaneously being less biased, privacy-invasive, and so forth, than those used in the United States.
At a minimum, I've certainly seen it claimed at least once that we'd do better to adopt the methods used in Israel in place of those currently used by the TSA.
This is the first time I've seen it claimed that we're already using the Israeli methods, much less that this is a bad thing.
Also, because giving trolls attention gives them what they want, and taking special note of them as is done with the "most insightful" (etc.) would be an especially big boost to their egos.
There's a reason DFTT is a thing.
(...although now I'm trying to think of expansions for that where the D and final T stand for Donald Trump...)
I, for one, would not be entirely happy about it if you left. You're clear-spoken and articulate, much of the time, and you occasionally have a good and valid point - and even when you don't, you sometimes have a point that's worth addressing in discussion.
I just wish you'd tone it down considerably - because while your anti-Techdirt bias and attitude are not as blatant or as offensively presented as those of some other resident trolls, they're still very much present, and that takes away much of the value your comments could otherwise have.
If you said many of the same things you say, but tried to take an objective perspective and tone in saying them - one of pointing out problems and trying to help find solutions to those problems, or of "you have a point, but I'm not sure I agree; here's why", rather than "you're wrong, as usual" - you could potentially even be a net positive presence here.
(That said, given other aspects of your posting history, I'm not holding my breath for this to happen.)
As the mouseover tooltip on the "flag" button indicates, flagging is intended to be used for posts which are "abusive/trolling/spam".
Even if we assume that "abusive" covers only "malware" posts (which seems like an unwarranted assumption to me), many if not most of the non-spam posts which get flagged are clearly trolling, and some of the exceptions are arguable.
Some people have clearly come to the conclusion that certain commenters are purely trolls, and that anything posted by those commenters is therefore automatically trolling, regardless of its contents. You may disagree with the classification, but the logic does not seem inherently faulty, and that approach would explain most of the non-arguable exceptions without invoking "flag because disagree".
(I've even gone so far as to mark a single post as both "Insightful" and "Trolling", at least once in the past; I think it may even have been one of yours.)
I'll also note that I've seen many spam comments, which had been flagged as such, disappear (i.e., be deleted, presumably by moderators reviewing the flagged comments) on later reload of that comments page - but I have never once seen this disappearance happen for a non-spam flagged comment. Food for thought in consideration of the "censorship" label, perhaps.
It's law when a bill which has been passed by Congress, and signed (or at least not vetoed) by the President, and not overturned by a relevant court, contains language which authorizes it.
As these agencies have been established by such language in such bills, and granted the power to make regulations in certain areas by such language in such bills, the regulations which they make in those areas have the force of law.
Or in other words: the way in which Congress has chosen to make law in these areas is by stating that "as long as what this designated organization says does not stray outside of certain boundaries, whatever that organization says is law, is law". (The policing of those boundaries being done by the relevant courts, based on the wording of the bill which was passed by Congress.)
That statement has made it past both houses of Congress (as witness the votes which passed the bills in question), and past the President (as witness the lack of veto of those bills), and has not been rejected by the relevant courts (although whether it has been raised before them I do not know).
You may (and some people here clearly do) think that this represents an unconstitutional act on the part of Congress, and that the failure of the President and/or the courts to rein that in represents a dereliction of duty on the part of the other branches of government.
But if you want to advocate that position effectively, you need to do so by arguing it explicitly as such - not by arguing about the meaning of the words involved.
That doesn't make sense to me, though - because by continuing to possess and use the software, you are not creating new copies, except for the transitory copy-into-RAM ones which are explicitly not covered under US copyright law.
It seems to me that as long as you do not create an unauthorized copy (or derivative work, et cetera), it should not be possible for you to be in breach of copyright law, because what copyright law limits to those authorized by the rightsholder is specifically the right to create copies - not the right to possess a copy, or to use a copy, or any other such thing.
Once the copy has been created, the right to create it is no longer relevant, and only control over the copy itself matters.
Once they have transferred the copy into your control, they (should) no longer have any say under copyright law in what you do with it.
They might have a claim under breach of contract, true enough, although the whole thing about the ongoing war against the doctrine of first sale comes in there. But at that point, copyright law has - or should have - nothing to do with it.
Apparently I didn't get my meaning across, so let me attempt to clarify.
I was not attempting to prove that calling someone a fool is in any sense equivalent to calling someone a retard.
To my eye, given their respective etymologies, the use of "retard" as an insult is more offensive than the use of "fool" as an insult.
To reject the use of "fool" as an insult, while continuing to use "retard" that way, is therefore backwards; the fact that you do so makes you look worse in my eyes than if you did it the other way around.
If (as seems likely, though I have not seen it confirmed) you either reject or fail to see that "retard" is more offensive than "fool" based on the terms' respective etymologies, that fact makes you look either stupid, or like an asshole.
...are you sure you want to put this on an etymological footing?
Because to my eye, "retard" itself looks more questionable than "fool" does.
"To retard" means "to delay, to slow down, to hinder, to hold back", and that a "retarded" person is one whose mental development is (delayed, slowed down, hindered, held back) by something outside of that person's own control - by what in reasonably-modern terms is called a developmental disability.
The term "retard" for a person who does not have such a disability is thus a slur on those who actually do have such disabilities.
Uh... where do you see any "victim shaming" in this, at least on the part of Techdirt?
The closest thing I can see is the description of "teen taking naked pictures of self and sending them to other teen" as being "demonstrably stupid", and attaching the label of "victim shaming" to that seems like a bit of a stretch at best.
I think that latter should be questionable, actually.
First of all, once they've granted authorization for a copy to be made, they have zero say in the use of that copy. As far as I'm aware, "permission to use" is not a right reserved to the copyright holder; at the very least, the "copies necessary for use" (e.g., copying into RAM) are explicitly not covered by copyright under (US) copyright law.
Second, once they've granted authorization for a copy to be made, and that copy has been made, I don't see why the withdrawal of their permission should require the deletion of that copy. The copy was made with duly legitimate permission; as long as no further copies are made, no further permission from the holder of the copyright should be needed.
The inclusion of clauses like this in license agreements looks to me like an attempt by copyright holders to grab power which is not given to them by law, and which they should not necessarily actually have. If such clauses have become "standard", that just means that that attempt has been largely successful.
The government has no right to do anything, unless explicitly granted that right by some relevant authority (i.e., the Constitution).
The people have the right to do anything, unless explicitly denied that right by some relevant authority (which receives its power to so deny from a right granted to the government in the Constitution).
Or in other words: "the government is allowed to do nothing, unless there's a law specifically authorizing it to do something", and "[this is] the reverse [of what is true] for [the] people".
Proximity to Border, Barking Dog, and probable cause are NOT constitutionally JUSTIFIED!
The first two I'll allow (at least on the face of them, and probably all the way), assuming you're talking about these things as being invalid justifications for searches - but the term "probable cause" in modern usage is based in the Constitution itself, or at least in one of the amendments thereto.
There's disagreement about exactly what meaning the use of the term in the Constitution does have, because of unfortunate and (at least in modern terms) unclear phrasing, but the term itself is certainly in there.
The reason why Amber Alerts are needed is that children are not able to fend for themselves.
The reason why Amber Alerts are useful is that a member of the public who is aware of the alert and sees something related to the alert can do something which helps resolve the problem - if nothing else, report the sighting to law enforcement.
As far as I can see, no analog to either of these things holds for Blue Alerts and police officers.
Police officers are, generally, able to fend for themselves; if they were not, it would be unreasonable to expect them to also fend for others, as is the basis of their job.
And when a police officer is in a situation which he (or other pronoun) cannot handle alone, the odds that a member of the general public who sees the situation - whether aware of the alert or not - will be able to do anything to help resolve the problem are exceedingly slim. (Not to mention that the general public are generally advised not to get involved in anything that requires the intervention of police officers.)
As such... what useful effect, exactly, is introducing these alerts supposed to have?
On the post: Donald Trump Hires Charles Harder To Threaten Steve Bannon With A Lawsuit, Block Publication Of New Book
Re: Re: "built-in contradiction"
One part of the definition from gcide is simply "the wrong of maliciously injuring the good name of another", with no reference to truth or falsity about it, and I think that's probably reasonably close to the colloquial meaning of the term.
Attempting to apply the penalties provided under the law for the law's definition, but using the colloquial definition, would be so excessively restrictive as to violate the First Amendment - and so the law isn't going to be expanded to use the colloquial definition any time soon, if ever.
It might be possible to combine broadening the definition of defamation to the colloquial one with reducing the penalties to something that doesn't result in violation of the First Amendment - but the end result would be penalties so weak that they would not remotely satisfy someone who'd be likely to sue for defamation in the first place, so that's not likely to happen either.
On the post: Donald Trump Hires Charles Harder To Threaten Steve Bannon With A Lawsuit, Block Publication Of New Book
Re:
Trump would be more likely to care about damage to that Company than to the office of the President, or to the USA, anyway.
On the post: Donald Trump Hires Charles Harder To Threaten Steve Bannon With A Lawsuit, Block Publication Of New Book
Re: Re:
On the post: FCC Prepares To Weaken Broadband's Definition To Hide Competitive, Coverage Issues
Re: Re: Re:
If this is the usual "regulations" guy, his position appears to be that:
As evidence for this, he cites the fact that the establishing documents of the FCC talk about "regulating natural monopoly". He interprets this to represent a statement of intention to protect and support the companies which have local monopolies in this market, rather than break up or prevent such monopolies. He therefore concludes that the FCC has been corrupt and protectionist from its very outset, and for that matter in its official reason for existing.
In so doing, he fails to recognize - or (more likely) outright rejects - what the term "natural monopoly" actually means (despite the fact that it has been explained to him many times in past comment threads); it's not a kind of monopoly which can be prevented or abolished, although one can occasionally be rendered obsolete by later technological development.
On the post: Hopefully For The Last Time: The US Has Zero New Works Enter The Public Domain On January 1st
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How does this matter when you kids believe even NEW works are yours for the taking?
Whether that's true is another question, but that's how I read that phrase.
On the post: DHS Documents Show Harassment And Intrusive Device Searches Are A Common Occurrence At US Borders
Re: Why do they need to search devices at all?
One is, indeed, (at least closely akin to) "might be evidence of a crime": that information on the device might serve to indicate that the person coming into the country may be intending to carry out criminal, or (more to the point of those justifying it) outright terrorist, actions.
The other is that border enforcement is also customs enforcement, and that includes enforcement of intellectual-property rules in regard to importing copyrighted / trademarked / etc. things. Bringing certain copyrighted, trademarked, etc., information into the country - without due authorization from the holder of the intellectual-property right - can indeed itself be a crime.
For good or ill, there seems to be a long-established principle that it is presumptively reasonable to search the effects of people coming into the country for customs-enforcement reasons, regardless of whether there even is a suspicion that any crime may have been committed - and that includes intellectual-property-related customs enforcement.
It's just the government's good luck that they can find things useful for other purposes in the course of carrying out that sort of customs search. (Though IIRC they can't necessarily use what they find for other purposes without getting a post-search warrant first.)
If you want to counter that, you may need to start by developing arguments against that initial (long-established) presumption in general, rather than against the specific cases of it where information is involved - because as long as that foundation stands, overturning the things which are built on it is going to be difficult.
On the post: DHS Documents Show Harassment And Intrusive Device Searches Are A Common Occurrence At US Borders
Re: If the constitution doesn't apply....
The idea as I understand it is, rather, that searches pursuant to enforcement of the rules which govern crossing of the country's borders are de-facto not "unreasonable search"es under the terms of the Fourth Amendment (thus, not requiring a warrant unless other circumstances render them unreasonable), and that any place close enough to a border that someone who crossed illegally could have gotten there in a sufficiently short amount of time is within the jurisdiction of those who conduct border-enforcement searches.
On its face that doesn't sound terribly problematic, and back when the precedents which established that border-enforcement searches are presumptively reasonable were set, it probably wasn't; back then, travel was slow enough that "close enough to a border" probably meant only a mile or two, and almost certainly no more than 10 to 20 miles. It's only when you factor in A: the speed of modern travel (such that anywhere within 100 miles of a border is considered "close enough" to qualify) and B: the fact that airports capable of hosting international flights are considered to qualify as "borders" that you get the "exception swallows the rule" clearly-excessive results we have today.
On the post: DHS Documents Show Harassment And Intrusive Device Searches Are A Common Occurrence At US Borders
Re: Omnipresent Taint of Israel
I've always been given to understand that Israel's border- and transportation-related security measures are more effective while simultaneously being less biased, privacy-invasive, and so forth, than those used in the United States.
At a minimum, I've certainly seen it claimed at least once that we'd do better to adopt the methods used in Israel in place of those currently used by the TSA.
This is the first time I've seen it claimed that we're already using the Israeli methods, much less that this is a bad thing.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of 2017 At Techdirt
Re:
There's a reason DFTT is a thing.
(...although now I'm trying to think of expansions for that where the D and final T stand for Donald Trump...)
On the post: New Year's Message: Keep On Believing
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I just wish you'd tone it down considerably - because while your anti-Techdirt bias and attitude are not as blatant or as offensively presented as those of some other resident trolls, they're still very much present, and that takes away much of the value your comments could otherwise have.
If you said many of the same things you say, but tried to take an objective perspective and tone in saying them - one of pointing out problems and trying to help find solutions to those problems, or of "you have a point, but I'm not sure I agree; here's why", rather than "you're wrong, as usual" - you could potentially even be a net positive presence here.
(That said, given other aspects of your posting history, I'm not holding my breath for this to happen.)
On the post: New Year's Message: Keep On Believing
Re: Re: Re:
As the mouseover tooltip on the "flag" button indicates, flagging is intended to be used for posts which are "abusive/trolling/spam".
Even if we assume that "abusive" covers only "malware" posts (which seems like an unwarranted assumption to me), many if not most of the non-spam posts which get flagged are clearly trolling, and some of the exceptions are arguable.
Some people have clearly come to the conclusion that certain commenters are purely trolls, and that anything posted by those commenters is therefore automatically trolling, regardless of its contents. You may disagree with the classification, but the logic does not seem inherently faulty, and that approach would explain most of the non-arguable exceptions without invoking "flag because disagree".
(I've even gone so far as to mark a single post as both "Insightful" and "Trolling", at least once in the past; I think it may even have been one of yours.)
I'll also note that I've seen many spam comments, which had been flagged as such, disappear (i.e., be deleted, presumably by moderators reviewing the flagged comments) on later reload of that comments page - but I have never once seen this disappearance happen for a non-spam flagged comment. Food for thought in consideration of the "censorship" label, perhaps.
On the post: Now That The FCC Is Doing Away With Title II For Broadband, Will Verizon Give Back The Taxpayer Subsidies It Got Under Title II?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
It's law when a bill which has been passed by Congress, and signed (or at least not vetoed) by the President, and not overturned by a relevant court, contains language which authorizes it.
As these agencies have been established by such language in such bills, and granted the power to make regulations in certain areas by such language in such bills, the regulations which they make in those areas have the force of law.
Or in other words: the way in which Congress has chosen to make law in these areas is by stating that "as long as what this designated organization says does not stray outside of certain boundaries, whatever that organization says is law, is law". (The policing of those boundaries being done by the relevant courts, based on the wording of the bill which was passed by Congress.)
That statement has made it past both houses of Congress (as witness the votes which passed the bills in question), and past the President (as witness the lack of veto of those bills), and has not been rejected by the relevant courts (although whether it has been raised before them I do not know).
You may (and some people here clearly do) think that this represents an unconstitutional act on the part of Congress, and that the failure of the President and/or the courts to rein that in represents a dereliction of duty on the part of the other branches of government.
But if you want to advocate that position effectively, you need to do so by arguing it explicitly as such - not by arguing about the meaning of the words involved.
On the post: New York State Eyes Its Own Net Neutrality Law
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
If you think continually insulting people constitutes "sweet talk", there's something wrong with your view of the world.
On the post: Germany Accuses Chinese Intelligence Services Of Using Fake LinkedIn Profiles To Recruit Informants And Extract Sensitive Information
Re: Re: Re: Re:
That doesn't make sense to me, though - because by continuing to possess and use the software, you are not creating new copies, except for the transitory copy-into-RAM ones which are explicitly not covered under US copyright law.
It seems to me that as long as you do not create an unauthorized copy (or derivative work, et cetera), it should not be possible for you to be in breach of copyright law, because what copyright law limits to those authorized by the rightsholder is specifically the right to create copies - not the right to possess a copy, or to use a copy, or any other such thing.
Once the copy has been created, the right to create it is no longer relevant, and only control over the copy itself matters.
Once they have transferred the copy into your control, they (should) no longer have any say under copyright law in what you do with it.
They might have a claim under breach of contract, true enough, although the whole thing about the ongoing war against the doctrine of first sale comes in there. But at that point, copyright law has - or should have - nothing to do with it.
On the post: New York State Eyes Its Own Net Neutrality Law
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Apparently I didn't get my meaning across, so let me attempt to clarify.
I was not attempting to prove that calling someone a fool is in any sense equivalent to calling someone a retard.
To my eye, given their respective etymologies, the use of "retard" as an insult is more offensive than the use of "fool" as an insult.
To reject the use of "fool" as an insult, while continuing to use "retard" that way, is therefore backwards; the fact that you do so makes you look worse in my eyes than if you did it the other way around.
If (as seems likely, though I have not seen it confirmed) you either reject or fail to see that "retard" is more offensive than "fool" based on the terms' respective etymologies, that fact makes you look either stupid, or like an asshole.
On the post: New York State Eyes Its Own Net Neutrality Law
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Because to my eye, "retard" itself looks more questionable than "fool" does.
"To retard" means "to delay, to slow down, to hinder, to hold back", and that a "retarded" person is one whose mental development is (delayed, slowed down, hindered, held back) by something outside of that person's own control - by what in reasonably-modern terms is called a developmental disability.
The term "retard" for a person who does not have such a disability is thus a slur on those who actually do have such disabilities.
On the post: Minnesota Prosecutor Hits Teen With Child Porn Charges For Taking Explicit Photos Of Herself
Re:
The closest thing I can see is the description of "teen taking naked pictures of self and sending them to other teen" as being "demonstrably stupid", and attaching the label of "victim shaming" to that seems like a bit of a stretch at best.
On the post: Germany Accuses Chinese Intelligence Services Of Using Fake LinkedIn Profiles To Recruit Informants And Extract Sensitive Information
Re: Re:
First of all, once they've granted authorization for a copy to be made, they have zero say in the use of that copy. As far as I'm aware, "permission to use" is not a right reserved to the copyright holder; at the very least, the "copies necessary for use" (e.g., copying into RAM) are explicitly not covered by copyright under (US) copyright law.
Second, once they've granted authorization for a copy to be made, and that copy has been made, I don't see why the withdrawal of their permission should require the deletion of that copy. The copy was made with duly legitimate permission; as long as no further copies are made, no further permission from the holder of the copyright should be needed.
The inclusion of clauses like this in license agreements looks to me like an attempt by copyright holders to grab power which is not given to them by law, and which they should not necessarily actually have. If such clauses have become "standard", that just means that that attempt has been largely successful.
On the post: DHS's New Airport Face-Scanning Program Is Expensive, Flawed, And Illegal
Re: Re: Re: Re: it gets worse
The government has no right to do anything, unless explicitly granted that right by some relevant authority (i.e., the Constitution).
The people have the right to do anything, unless explicitly denied that right by some relevant authority (which receives its power to so deny from a right granted to the government in the Constitution).
Or in other words: "the government is allowed to do nothing, unless there's a law specifically authorizing it to do something", and "[this is] the reverse [of what is true] for [the] people".
The first two I'll allow (at least on the face of them, and probably all the way), assuming you're talking about these things as being invalid justifications for searches - but the term "probable cause" in modern usage is based in the Constitution itself, or at least in one of the amendments thereto.
There's disagreement about exactly what meaning the use of the term in the Constitution does have, because of unfortunate and (at least in modern terms) unclear phrasing, but the term itself is certainly in there.
On the post: FCC Announces National Roll Out Of Amber Alerts But For Cops
Re:
The reason why Amber Alerts are needed is that children are not able to fend for themselves.
The reason why Amber Alerts are useful is that a member of the public who is aware of the alert and sees something related to the alert can do something which helps resolve the problem - if nothing else, report the sighting to law enforcement.
As far as I can see, no analog to either of these things holds for Blue Alerts and police officers.
Police officers are, generally, able to fend for themselves; if they were not, it would be unreasonable to expect them to also fend for others, as is the basis of their job.
And when a police officer is in a situation which he (or other pronoun) cannot handle alone, the odds that a member of the general public who sees the situation - whether aware of the alert or not - will be able to do anything to help resolve the problem are exceedingly slim. (Not to mention that the general public are generally advised not to get involved in anything that requires the intervention of police officers.)
As such... what useful effect, exactly, is introducing these alerts supposed to have?
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