State has a duty to prosecute law breakers. This is a load bearing wall of civil society. Everywhere.
Making sweeping general statements is good for riling up the mobs but I would implore HN readers to be more pragmatic about these things.
Look at the context. This person sought to ignite racial tensions for personal gain. He was given a sweetheart deal. The State is going after him and those protected him. They (the State prosecutors) have every right to collect and gather evidence to build the case.
I would agree with you if our legal systems were built for that, but our legal systems are built to deal with a society that has privacy. People unknowingly commit crimes, or implicate themselves in crimes, all the time, because there are too many ways to do that. No reasonable person can be expected to avoid committing crimes when the government itself can't even keep track of the number of criminal laws there are.[0] You're supposed to follow rules that the government itself can't even keep count of. This works reasonably well as long as the government doesn't have evidence about everything you've done, but the moment that they can track a large chunk of your life is when this system stops working.
With data from Google they can prosecute you for all the things you've done wrong or seem to have done wrong. It just takes an ambitious prosecutor to do it. This pretty much destroys the point of the fifth amendment. The "Don't Talk to the Police" lecture [1] is still relevant today, but if the state has this much evidence of what you do, then I'm not sure that will protect people. It is a nightmare scenario if this sets a precedent on law enforcement being able to vacuum up all of your data about your life.
I agree that Smollett seemingly getting a slap on the wrist was outrageous, but I think that this is Pandora's Box that they're playing with.
I wrote this comment elsewhere below but it still applies
The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute.
It's way different because big tech cos acquire and retain far more data about individuals than anyone ever expected to be available.
10-ish years ago, it wasn't possible to retroactively subpoena a year of minute-by-minute location history, because unless you had an ankle monitor, that data didn't exist. You couldn't get a letter-by-letter log of every term typed into a search engine or a log of the amount of time spent looking at pages of reference material. You couldn't get a record of every keystroke ever typed into a mail client or word processor. You couldn't get every photograph ever taken by the individual, because cameras didn't automatically send a copy to the mothership. This is way above and beyond standard paper seizure or record demands.
"Write angry letters, but don't send them" used to be good advice, but now that the government can just casually dash off a search warrant to produce every keystroke and every location ping within a year of a suspected crime, we all have good reason to be scared. Why'd you search "marijuana" that day last October? You expect me to believe you were just researching a ballot measure? Pfft.
This makes Big Brother a tangible reality. It certainly feels big to me.
Well you can also view things a different way. It will be a lot harder for real criminals to get away with anything in the future.
Now it becomes scary only if the authorities decide to go amok and make criminals of us all, but assuming it goes this way without anyone pushing back is not too realistic.
Many of the things we consider just and right today were illegal at one point in time but change was eventually made because of people who would have been considered criminals.
I had the misfortune of looking through your link, finding it to be a waste of time. The "committing three felonies a day" is the title of a book, the Amazon reviews claim it to be extreme hyperbole and just a series of case studies where the process of the law was admittedly abused.
The other anecdote in that link is the story of Joseph P. Nacchio, a CEO who was convicted for cashing out over $50 million in stock when the price was around $40, only for the price to drop all the way to $2 a year later. The NSA involvement was a failed bid by his defense to make it seem like his trading was legitimate.
> a series of case studies where the process of the law was admittedly abused
This is exactly the point. The way the law is written gives prosecutors too much leeway to convict, and if you become a problem in the eyes of the powerful, they can "throw the book at you".
> The other anecdote in that link is the story of Joseph P. Nacchio, a CEO who was convicted for cashing out over $50 million in stock when the price was around $40, only for the price to drop all the way to $2 a year later. The NSA involvement was a failed bid by his defense to make it seem like his trading was legitimate.
You left out how the government canceled their contracts with Qwest after Nacchio refused to give them access to phone records, which impacted the company's health. There were certainly other problems at Qwest, of course, but given the lax prosecution of many others involved in such scandals, it certainly feels like this is an example of this process in action.
> Only a police state can totally stop crime entirely.
Only if that involves a complete overhaul of the police itself. Currently we have body cams that just fail at convenient times, policemen stalking their ex girlfriends and whistle blowers that get the short end of the stick. Giving the police more and more power is more likely to reach a turning point where it inherently starts to attract the corrupt and power hungry, increasing the abuse well above what we already see.
The police already attracts the corrupt and power hungry. This is just how security services work and why their power needs to be checked and there has to be oversight.
The State has not always been able to do that. The idea that a search can be executed merely for the purpose of collecting evidence is a relatively recent development. Records, papers, etc. used to be protected under the Fourth Amendment.
In broad strokes: Originally, the Fourth Amendment only allowed for the seizure of stolen and counterfeit goods, the "fruits of a crime." This was slowly expanded to include the "instrumentalities" of a crime, i.e. the things used in the commission of a crime. The difference between the instrumentalities and mere evidence was always shaky, and eventually crumbled.
40, or even 20 years ago, the State might have been able to note a record of phone calls, postal correspondence (look up "postal covers"), some financial purchases, periodicals subscriptions, and with a great deal of effort, some of my travels and movements, mostly limited to specific port entries and exits, and air travel.
But unavailable would have been: dictionary queries, encyclopedia queries, books read, specific magazine articles read, the contents of virtually all conversations, detailed movement and location history, social associations, detailed purchase history, and more.
Today, mobile devices report location to a precision of inches at a frequency of minutes. Any random query of momentary interest can create a permanent record. As a HN submission earlier today notes, simply casually perusing a document -- clicking a link -- can result in having your home raided and all electronic devices confiscated and held for a year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21992491
The scope and scale of intrusiveness is absolutely unprecedented.
Yes, the State has some rights and powers. It also has a tremendous responsibility, which it increasingly seems to fail to excercise appropriately.
And I say this regardless of specific country or jurisdiction -- the story linked above comes from Germany, and instances readily come to mind from the UK, US, Japan, China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere.
The corruption of absolute power is not bounded by culture, constitution, or ideology.
Sorry to go off on one irrelevant point but I feel it is highly important to say this at every opportunity: states don't have rights. It is an absurdity and a mockery of human rights to claim such a concept and legitimize fiefdoms over real people. So called rights in their case would be entitlement to powers for power's sake.
Anyway to get to your main body I agree and note what makes the scale bad ultimately is abuse potential for it. For a fantastic example being able to look up details of everyone but only 500 years or more ago wouldn't be abusable for instance because everyone is long dead and it wouldn't be viable to try to change ownership based on it because it already diverged for several generations. Even if you could backtrace they couldn't be reconciled very effectively.
If you add all those records together you get a fraction of the information you get from someone's Google history. We're talking records like search history, live GPS data and emails. That is a completely different level of scrutiny.
So the difference is seeing something through a window with curtains vs. having a camera installed in the room. In principle, not so different. In practice there really is no comparison. It is basically a warrant to ruffle through someone's life.
"You went 61 in a 60. Here's a ticket. Also, because you broke the law once and I'm in a pedantic mood, I'm issuing a warrant to go through all of your GPS history for the past two years. Oh look, 1 year ago you went 36 in a 35. Another ticket for you. 2 years ago you jaywalked. Another ticket."
At what point do we want the legal system to no longer have the power to scrutinize an individual's history?
I don't believe that a warrant to "ruffle through someone's life" without limits is within the powers of a judge. A warrant to procure relevant evidence to a case being investigated, legally, certainly.
Issuing an order for someone's entire Google history for a year is bordering "an unreasonable search and seizure", by my understanding. Do they have legitimate reason to believe that there is an email containing evidence? Or a document in Google drive? Location data for an entire year - how is this relevant to the case?
It’s not the same thing. He is suing the city of Chicago for “malicious prosecution”. As part of that lawsuit, the city must attempt to show that the prosecution was not malicious.
That’s different than stating that you would like to browse through someone’s history for the purpose of finding crimes where they may not exist.
Can't wait for an AI that does that after a subpoena. Given these terabytes of personal data, find all infractions. Palantir working on it? </sarcasm>
Also imagine just how much more power law firms on the plaintiff side would have if they want to find something wrong with the defendant's profile. Which, if there is power misuse, like in current society, is bad.
>>is a warrant that is perfectly within the powers of a judge to grant.
Not under the 4th amendment of the US Consitution they don't, they have the power to grant a warrant for a Specific thing to be searched pursuant to probable cause a specific crime has been committed
General Search warrants are and should remain unconstitutional
"If you add all those records together you get a fraction of the information you get from someone's Google history."
With 'Google Home' etc. it changes everything. Door locks, home cameras, audio recordings etc. etc..
Can the argument you had with your wife, totally irrelevant to the case, wherein you got angry and called her a big 'B' be used against you in court as demonstration of your character?
The time is now to be concerned about 'police state'. I think we can mostly have our cake and eat it too. Proportionality matters on all sides.
I met with someone from a privacy focused search engine and a line from his deck stuck with me: “you tell your search engine things you wouldn’t tell your friends or spouse”
It’s different because tech companies have inserted themselves as intermediaries into aspects of our lives that used to be essentially private. Activities such as: reading, dating, talking to friends, exercising, driving, reading a map, cooking, checking the weather, listening to music, watching movies, viewing pornography, getting medical advice, breaking and forming habits, menstruating, learning, sleeping, and many others are now frequently monitored and analyzed “in order to provide and improve the service”. All of this is subject to subpoena.
Edit: A few more: reading a newspaper, turning on a light, making a grocery list, setting the thermostat, going for a walk in the park.
In my view, the state has to ask a court to approve the purpose of each request, based on a reasonable hypothesis about what might be found.
How this seems different is the lack of any limitation on the kind of content that can be turned over. And in my view, that was a mistake on the judge's part for approving such a sweeping request.
For instance if I were accused of committing a crime against X, then I suppose that Google could be asked to turn over e-mails that I wrote about X, but not e-mails about my bicycle. This is how the system prevents the state from going on a hunting and fishing expedition.
How do you propose that works? Someone at Google searches for the information? An algorithm or an actual Google employee? If it is a human being then what about your privacy then?
What if the Jussie and his manager were using codewords to disguise intent? A search algorithm would not be able to recognise that but a human being can easily infer meaning and intent from the context. What then?
Warrants shouldn't be intended to discover evidence, they should be intended to secure evidence that is expected to exist in a particular location.
This distinction wasn't a major concern when the former was impractical.
Because of digital records and search agents, suddenly either is practical.
The intent of privacy law has always been to raise the cost of targeted prosecution. E.g. "We want to charge this person with a crime, let's find a crime."
The state absolutely has a duty to prosecute and hold individuals accountable. And in extraordinary circumstances, may even need to target prosecution.
What is unacceptable in a free society is that the state should have the ability to target anyone for prosecution with no effective bounds in the number of simultaneous times it does so (aka everyone).
The difference between Orwell and a safe democracy is scale.
In this case, the state is expecting evidence to exist in the form of incriminating email communication between Smollett and his manager, and possibly additional people. From the public evidence so far, it sure seems like a reasonable expectation! I'm a pretty hardcore civil libertarian, and I'm having a hard time faulting the judge here.
I would expect a warrant for just the e-mail exchanges between Smollet and his manager (and perhaps other digital communication methods), not for his entire life.
I hear you, but that doesn't seem like how anything works in our legal system. When warrants are issued for cellphone records, text messages, financial records, etc, they don't have so narrow a scope.
The state has probable cause to believe there is evidence of criminal behavior in your <insert anything here>. Therefore the warrant gives them access to it in order to look for that (previously specified) criminal behavior. In this case everyone expects to find a smoking gun in his email - either talking to his manager or talking to someone else. That seems like probable cause to me.
> In this case, the state is expecting evidence to exist in the form of incriminating email communication between Smollett and his manager, and possibly additional people.
Then why is the warrant not for _that_? Instead, we have a broad-reaching data pull that will be filled with a ton of information is irrelevant.
Google records include every place you've ever been (if you use an Android device), every wifi hotspot you've ever connected to, every website visited, every app executed, every message (text or email) you've sent. It's like having a voice recorder permanently on your shoulder and then having to turn that over to law enforcement.
It's very bad. Text and email should be private, unless it is in the context of the action being pursued. This is just too much data to just turn over willy nilly. Very slippery slope.
>The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute.
>How is this any different?
The cost of doing those lookups. Both in money and time.
Looking up an entire life's history would have taken months if not more, and would involve a lot of legwork, from picking up the phone and making calls, to traveling around neighborhoods or farther. That cost limited the charging/prosecution only to people suspected of, or implicated in crimes.
Today you can do that on a whim because you don't like a person or because they are your political/business opponents.
Our internet communications are way more intimate than physical or telephone or bank record searches of the past (which was the scope of the law when these things were legislated). These search and seizure laws have been grandfathered in unreasonably imho. A person's google searches are literally his thoughtstream, they are private expression that doesn't incite anything, and there is no reason why anyone would judge people by their thoughs. Police used to need torture to get this kind of data, it shouldn't be handed to them on a platter. imho it's very different
He allegedly did something quite bad, and if guilty I’d like him to face justice. But if the cost of convicting him is setting a precedent that effectively strips hundreds of millions of people of their privacy and subjects us all to an unofficial form of state surveillance, then let him walk.
This seems just as with any other search warrant - it's a specific search sanctioned by the court; just as a physical warrant for your house will involve LEO's that can search your underwear drawers for to verify if there's something relevant for the case, the same applies for your online records.
There's no new precedent involved, noone ever had any privacy whatsoever from a properly court-approved search. What's the most privacy-invasive thing I can think of? If a judge believes there's probable cause in searching your anus and other internal cavities and authorizes such a search, then such a search is compatible with all the precedent regarding fourth amendment in USA.
> This seems just as with any other search warrant - it's a specific search sanctioned by the court; just as a physical warrant for your house will involve LEO's that can search your underwear drawers for to verify if there's something relevant for the case, the same applies for your online records.
No, not really. A physical warrant might be issued for your home, your work and maybe one other place you frequent.
However, because this is very much not a specific search, but rather the whole year of data, it's more akin to issuing search warrants against every business you've walked passed in a year, whether or not you actually entered the premises, and that's just to begin with.
And if you tried to issue warrants in that matter, they wouldn't approved, because you do have certain reasonable expectations of privacy with regards to a court-approved search. Specifically, that a court will not explore things that are not pertinent to the case.
The precedent lies in law enforcement getting their hands on minute by minute details of your life from a year ago and probably much more. There might not be protections against this, but there should be. Judges shouldn't have too much power.
woah, woah, hold on. don't let him walk?! just use the old way for finding evidence. data gathered by companies like google is mostly permanent, too easy to retrieve, and in one place. that's the real problem. nobody likes doing hard work.
US police are fat and lazy. The days of a skilled gumshoe hitting the streets for information is a romanticized memory. The only time they get their blood pumping is when they get to use some new toys, kicking in a door guns blazing, shooting the family dog, killing innocents at the wrong address.
The State has always been able to look up phone records, bank records, land records, criminal records, medical records etc etc as in order to pursue justice and prosecute.
This is a necessary "evil". We give up some freedoms so that we have a civilisation and an orderly society.
And this isn't setting up any precedent that is egregious. This is on the front page of Chicago Tribune newspaper and on the front page of HN. This is not some shady in the shadows invasion of privacy.
Those things do happen and I think we should preserve our outrage for those moments. Otherwise it just becomes background noise to be constantly and without context offended.
Those records are mandated by The State and are very limited in scope. Nobody is idly wondering about the legality of X or Y in them, as one might in a google search, or making a culturally insensitive remark, as one might in a private message to a friend.
Be wary of the motte-and-bailey fallacy - the issue is not that The State can look at certain records in certain prosecutions, its that the records currently being requested are too broad and too potentially intimate to trust The State with.
>Those things do happen and I think we should preserve our outrage for those moments
That creates an almost arbitrary, "this fits my worldview so I'll support rights this time" thought process. Like, "Well, this guy's a Nazi so we should trample his rights. But this woman's an abortion activist, so we should be sure to protect hers."
How do you propose we prevent ideological blindness in the protection of rights? Should we take the government's word that, "this time, it's really worth trampling rights"? Or would you create an unbiased oversight board that tells us when protecting rights is appropriate? Or should each person look at a case and decide for themselves whether or not they should take a stand against rights infringement?
How is this different from a warrant that lets prosecutors read your snail mail?
I mean this passed the proper checks and balances of the law, and the only reason this is on HN is that's about electronic instead of paper mail, and it involves a big Corp.
Ok, lets look in context. In 1920 records were kept about beeing a jew. It was perfectly ok, no harm done, some record no one cared about. In 1942 those records became mortal, sponsored by state. Should we talk about anti-gay laws? One day it is fine, second day you can get prisoned.
No one should keep such records as society is changing and not always to best. This is one of the reasons, privacy is one of fundamental human rights. And is blatantly violated for the profit.
> In 1920 records were kept about beeing a jew. It was perfectly ok, no harm done, some record no one cared about. In 1942 those records became mortal
As a legacy of this, the US government doesn't count Jews in the census. (And, to preserve nondiscrimination values, doesn't count other religious denominations either.)
Interestingly, the census does enthusiastically collect race data on everyone. This is logically incoherent; racial groups (such as the Jews, actually) are at least as much a natural target of extermination efforts as religious groups.
It’s hard to understand how things that are harmless today can be prosecuted tomorrow. Imagine a drugstore keeping a list of its customers who have diabetes... or AIDS.
Maybe, do you have a source you could share please ? I often read this argument around but have not verified it. I've also heard some records produced under Napoleon were used.
But this was a real crazy time. Hypothetical scenario (in the sense that I have not verified it, but I do think it's a very likely scenario to have happened): There were medical records of people with physical conditions before 1933 (so they could be treated) that were used under the Nazi regime to persecute them. Does that mean it that hospitals and doctors maintaining a list of medical records to treat their patients efficiently was a bad idea ?
I don't have the answer to this, I just wanted to point out that this is a delicate issue that society needs to figure out fairly quickly if they want to have an influence its outcome.
I wonder what godwin would have thought about all this :)
Just for the last part, for everything else you can use duckduckgo (or qwant).
Anyway it is not such a hypotetical scenario, nazis were really killing the disabled persons based on their medical record (yes, qwant or duckduckgo for it).
Yes, it is a bad idea that doctors keep those data. If insurance companies get those information (and my dentist said he was already aproached by some company to sell dental records, I wouldnt be surprised if this is a common practice in states) you will have issues. Same with employees etc., even if nothing wrong with your health but there is x% chance that you get terminal disease.
Those records should be handed over to the patient, tamper proofed (no, not blockchain, just RSA will do fine) or stored, but encrypted with patient key. Actually when writting this I remembered that we (as in my country) are having a medical smart card that needs to be given to the doctor to access our medical records. Maybe we already have such a system.
Anyway it is a bit sick comparing google with doctors. The need and trust is on completely different scale not to mention that trust between doctor and patient is handled by laws and hippocratic oath since 257 AD.
Doesn’t seem like the issue is with the state, it’s that we’re entrusting third parties with enough information to paint an incredibly intimate portrait of our personalities and proclivities. This in turn is available to the state at essentially zero cost, which may then be leveraged heavily to ensure compliance.
You're right. The issue indeed is that these companies can just vacuum up all of this data and keep it around. The problem, however, is that this is possible now. This means that if people (or companies) somehow figure out a way to either keep this information from the state or keep this information from being collected, then the state themselves could start collecting (some of) this information. We've seen it before that intelligence agencies don't seem to care about spying on their own citizens through technicalities and then abusing that information.
Exactly this. I've seen cases where a prosecutor has gotten a John Doe warrant to send to cell companies that effectively asked for the IDs of all phones that were present the closest cell tower at the times of multiple robberies (eg "give me all phones that were present at ABC tower on Monday at 1pm, DEF tower on Tuesday at 4pm, AND GHI tower on Thursday at 10am). Which obviously only the robber is likely to show up on. To me, they're effectively searching my data even though I don't meet all the criteria because I was only near one tower one day. This is way different than what the court did to Smollet. They already had tons of dirt on him - and thus probable clause to dig deeper.
I'd be weary of them using this data to try to go after him for some obscure crime completely unrelated to the false report (e.g. pics of him walking his dog in a state park that forbids pets).
They did this very thing to associates of Trump in the course of the Mueller investigation. Unrelated tax issues, failing to register as a foreign agent and other charges were brought against certain individuals for things they did years before they joined the Trump campaign. Whatever your thoughts are on this, there is already established precedent for it.
Which all seem like notable things to encounter when doing an investigation like that and to not drop when encountered?
'Let's look if money was sent from x to y. Get bank and tax statements. Well (it didn't come from x but) it sure as hell wasn't taxed'
It's not like this was brought up as part of a single court case if not related which would make it a relevant precedent here.
What a sweeping authoritarian view on human rights. I'm sorry but this really raises my hackles. The state absolute does not have every right to collect and gather evidence to build a case with such a sweeping dragnet. There is a reason that search warrants have to be specific and evidence of even obvious other crimes is not admissible.
There is nothing pragmatic about being totally ignorant of Fourth Amendment protections that have been eeked out, injustice after injustice, over two centuries.
You're completely missing the point. Whatever Smollett did or didn't do is immaterial. What is material is that Google, Facebook, etc are now single points of privacy failure that make abuse by law enforcement much easier than it used to be. This case may or may not be an example of said abuse, but the potential is clearly there. The solution is to retake control of our digital lives from these companies.
In a democracy the job of the police must be difficult.
> They (the State prosecutors) have every right to collect and gather evidence to build the case.
They should have the right to do it. Actually doing it should be as difficult as humanly possible. It should not be as easy as sending a letter to Google and getting a suspect's entire life records in return.
Why not? How is this different from a warrant to search a home? Would you argue in that case that personal paper letters should be kept in a safe that's very difficult to open for law enforcement even if they have the warrant to do it?
What does that have to do with the case being discussed? A judge issued search warrants for information that Google has. Your hyperbole about the government being able to access anyone's information whenever they want isn't helpful to a conversation about privacy.
At anytime a judge could order your information and put a secret gag order. A valid concern. The government seizes domains they deem possible copyright infringement. One judge order could open the floodgates.
For a judge to issue a warrant, a prosecutor or cop has to swear that they have probable cause to believe that you've committed a specific crime. Judges can't just write warrants arbitrarily. (Of course, this process can be abused, but it's still pretty far from a judge being able to authorize pulling the data of random people.)
The Fourth Amendment says: "... no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
they didn't access at will but with a warrant, there's a foundamental difference in that, which is the warrant process's guarantee oversight against abuse
beside, it's not a case of the state tracking persons unwittingly, it's persons willingly giving up their data to private companies.
This is all fine in theory. But why this guy? With limited prosecutorial resources, why are they doubling down on this guy? That is what I am always suspicious of.
This case is not specifically about Smollett. It's a about the perceived view that that prosecutor in the case was somehow compromised by abruptly dropping the charges. When she was asked why, she gave conflicting answers.
Personalizing it is trivializing on an absurd scale. Getting the idea in prosecutors' heads that they can just grab a year of data on any accused party is the danger here, and it should scare the pants off all of us. Over the course of a year, you've surely typed something into Google that could be misconstrued.
How about "because he couldn't let sleeping dogs lie"? The guy got a lucky break when someone dropped the prosecution. He had the opportunity to shut up and let the story fade away. He didn't take it.
No matter how lucky you are, if you keep doubling down, eventually the house takes your money.
Why not this guy? Possibly because he generated a little too much infamy and now the public wants blood. Or maybe the prosecutor believes in the defendant's guilt and thinks they can make a strong case. Maybe a mix of both.
Perhaps you'd prefer the prosecutor look at some other case but then the exact same question could be asked - why that guy?
I imagine they have a lot of more serious crimes to pursue. This just seems to be high publicity so it is getting more resources. That means other crimes with high impact victims get de-prioritized. Plus it is Chicago, it is still rather corrupt there. I would mistrust anything with publicity involved until it is proven to be valid.
The fake lynching looks like a crime done in order to pass a law, possibly to help someone get elected president, which is quite serious. Dropping the charges is highly suspicious too, having been done by people who were also associated with the presidential candidates trying to get their law passed.
Yep. The prosecuter who dropped the charges was also being mentored at the time by the senator who was trying to pass the "anti-lynching" law the same week. Their bill had failed several times, then this incident happened and the bill passed within a week. The actor was also close friends with the same senator.
This story isn't about politics, it's about corruption at the high offices.
Something that should never be overlooked in this case is that after police identified the suspects and made arrests Smollett still stuck to his lie.
He was ready to send innocent people to a potential life sentence or the death penalty (which is how hate crimes are treated), and in fact is still maintaining his lie.
Not to diminish what a dunce this guy was, but the only crimes currently punishable by death in the US are ones in which the victim has died. And maybe treason, espionage, and other weird crimes against the government. Those are unclear at the moment.
Even someone who has done wrong has a rights and I would think that a year of Google data would compromise too much information not relevant to the case. In my opinion this clearly qualifies as "unreasonable searches".
Even if you have been naive enough to voluntarily share data with Google.
I don't see how the context of his alleged crime (he's not been found guilty of anything) is relevant. Beyond a felony/misdemeanor the means available to the state to build a case/prosecute should be identical regardless of the specific crime alleged.
If any community has the power to reverse that trend, it is HN and the rest of the software community that actually builds the tech. I am constantly battling it in my own company, where they want to track everything our users do. And they even have some legit reasons for it, to use the data to build better UX, etc. I am the only person fighting against it, saying that tracking should be limited to only the cases where there is truly a compelling business question it can answer.
If Google were to apply the same logic to their tracking, we'd be in a better place. For example, they may want real-time location data for the traffic alerts when using Maps. And they may desire some aggregated form of that data long-term. But I cannot see any business benefit to Google maintaining my personal location data at specific times and dates in the past. There is zero business benefit to keep that level of detail in their logging.
Or, to answer your question more directly, that is the line I do not want to cross - where we are logging personal data "Just in case" we ever might need it. I'd like to see every piece of tracked data tied to a specific business need, and then have it deleted when that need no longer is relevant.
This is yet another reason why for profit media should be taxed like cigarettes and liquor. People like it, it's bad for them, and it costs money to undo the damage it causes.
Plow the money into courses on basic reasoning, civics, and grants to non-profit, independent media so that the people benefit when for profit media pushes a war for profit or racial divison for more ad revenue.
This suggestion befits an authoritarian dictatorship which seeks to control the press and muffle its critics, but it is ill-suited for a people who wish to remain free.
Everyone seeks to ignite racial tensions for personal gain. Politicians, journalists, even a lot of people on HN are out doing it in the comments all the time. But you can't prosecute every jay walker, nor every speeder. That doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't punish any speeders.
The problem here is that they are going about it in the wrong way. Issuing a warrant that says, "Well, show me everything this guy ever did, and I'll tell you the crime I want to prosecute him for later."
That's not how most warrants work. Most of the time it's, "We suspect X evidence generated in the commission of Y crime is at Z location". What this does is say, "We need all his data to figure out exactly what crime was committed". That's an ominous warrant.
yes we have seen you know how to make this comment.
Another way to look at that 'duty' is to say [The] state has a responsibility to ensure justice for all. That may seem like the same thing but vagueness is at times valuable given that life rarely satisfies the black and white dichotomies many of us would prefer.
We can have a discussion about how the state should behave without using catastrophic examples to shift debates about principles and policies.
The post I was responding to sees the role of the state as a absolutist binaric executor of often fuzzy laws and rules. The context of this example doesn't have any affect on whether or not that naive belief is a path to a functional and just society.
Whatever happens with Smollett, or the next example, simply doesn't support a belief that every crime should be prosecuted. There was a (hamfisted but entertaining) TNG episode about this for gods sake...
The context is extremely partisan twisting of the justice system on all sides. Normally DA's have complete discretion to drop charges as they see fit. Because of the partisan outrage a Republican special prosecutor has been appointed to overrule the prosecutor and now he's on a witch hunt going through a year of Google records trying to find everything incriminating, this is a farce and high level corruption
“Ignite racial tensions”? There was no chance of that happening. Smollett was a laughingstock the day the story hit the news. Foxx declined to prosecute because she correctly saw it as a ridiculous and embarrassing stunt.
Another thing to keep in mind: “igniting racial tensions” as an investigatory justification was how MLK got labeled the gravest domestic security threat to the United States. You’re advocating a categorical justification with a fraught and bloody history.
Mens rea is the guilty mind required for something to be a crime. Intent matters as much as outcome or chance of outcome in the judgement of whether a crime has occurred, and explains the use of "sought" in the comment you replied to.
Well, it hadn’t even entered my mind that increasing racial tensions could be a crime, so that didn’t make it through my legal framework. Why did it occur to you?
His actions and motivations in committing a crime, alleged or proven, are relevant, that's why it entered my mind - he is under investigation for a crime, is he not? Igniting racial tensions doesn't need to be the crime, just as stealing money to pay off debts doesn't make paying off debts a crime, but it's still relevant in showing mens rea and the kind of mens rea e.g. knowing, negligent, reckless etc and in assessment of the effects of his actions.
I guess I’d call it an appeal to racial sympathy more than anything else. If Chicago wants to charge him with filing a false report, they can go right ahead, but I’m pretty sure they don’t need his personal records to establish that.
Smollett may have been a laughingstock amongst people who were actually able to think for a moment about how plausible his claims were, or (if we're being more cynical) amongst people outside the left wing who were inclined not to believe his claims from the start. Most world media and all his fellow celebrities not only went along with his claims, they went after anyone who questioned them right up until the point it became clear that the police had indisputable evidence.
That’s true, and the public anger at Smollett that I see as unreasonable might have to do with that suppression of questioning. But I think the anger has more to do with a) white people who feel defensive about being called racist and b) law-and-order types who are offended by the attempt to deceive the police. They are taking this opportunity to push back against a falsehood, even though it’s a stupid falsehood.
The story was just uncomfortable for me, so I felt relief when contradictory testimony was found. I live near Chicago in an area both white and black, and mainly left-wing. I didn’t dare bring the story up with my black neighbors, and never heard about it from them either, despite its high profile. It was a very self-conscious couple of weeks. In contrast, when Obama was running for office people couldn’t help talking about that, and the sense of pride was real.
There was really no benefit to expressing doubt either; actual tragedies and abuses (Laquan McDonald murdered by the CPD, for instance) are still fresh in everyone’s mind. If current events weren’t as horrific people might be more comfortable expressing doubt and maybe even laughter over a guy with basically a homemade lanyard around his neck.
Making sweeping general statements is good for riling up the mobs but I would implore HN readers to be more pragmatic about these things.
Look at the context. This person sought to ignite racial tensions for personal gain. He was given a sweetheart deal. The State is going after him and those protected him. They (the State prosecutors) have every right to collect and gather evidence to build the case.