Anal probes are fine, if you've got nothing to hide [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Anal probes are fine, if you've got nothing to hide [pdf]

thobbs.cz

211 pointstimthelion104 comments

While she was standing in line, a CBP dog handler walked by Ms. Doe and hit the ground by her feet, but did not hit the ground by any of the others in the line. The dog responded by lunging onto Ms. Doe and landing its front paws on her torso.

Good grief, is every LEO "investigative" technique such total bullshit? If the dogs have been trained to alert when prompted to do so by the handler, they're really just a fig leaf for LEO discretion, which is rightly subjected to strict enough scrutiny to prevent "just search the Mexican lady, every single time". If the whole ridiculous expensive exercise of training and keeping dogs is a mere detour around such scrutiny, they're working a lot harder on that than they are on any of their stated objectives. One would like to think that LEOs might occasionally use a valid procedure, if for no other reason than by mistake, but one is eternally disappointed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J41K2XHpNnE

Demonstration of fake alerting.

I don't know what the intended meaning of LEO is supposed to be in this context. Low Earth Orbit?

Law Enforcement Officer.

Law Enforcement Officer?

One of the things I love about HN is that it's such a nerdy community - you gave me quite a smile!

it's what you call the cops when you're more inclined to make a donation than make a run for it

Pigs.

Police dogs have rightly been referred to as "pooping probable cause machines."

I refer to it as getting your warrant signed by Judge Dog.

If judges and magistrates are going to abrogate the actual critical judgment portion of determining whether probable cause exists to a trained animal, I suppose we could also dress up monkeys in black robes to do the rest of their job.

We could also just start flipping coins. Probably nearly as effective and far cheaper.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-06/news/ct-met-ca...

Dogs are just a proxy for the racist, hateful attitudes of the police. After all, their accuracy is no better than a coin toss [1]. It's clear they are there so the police can claim they're not racist/hateful/etc. while still being so. Any other claim is instantly disproved by both science and common sense.

1. https://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/8/7/1409751/-Court-rules...

Haha, classic:

Also in that study, turns out the dogs are super duper racist against latinos because their rate of correct detection dropped to 27 percent when sniffing a latino driver's car.

Hardly surprising. If the handler/owner is racist, the dog reacts accordingly. The dog just responds to his human master. Also, the dog could be "racist" without his handler/owner being so because he's a dog and he doesn't need a logical reason.

Like how Brian in Family Guy just barks at black folks.

Seems to have been settled. Found this:

Mention of "Doe v. El Paso County Hospital District, et al. No. 3:13-cv-00406 (WD Tex., filed Dec. 18, 2013)" at this blog, https://holdcbpaccountable.org/category/texas/ links to "Texas Hospital Reaches $1.1 Million Settlement" http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2014/07/0... (July 2014)

In particular, "Texas Tech University, which operates a medical school campus at the hospital [will pay] $500,000."

Happened in Albuquerque too.

An earlier HN story is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7123442

The follow up articles are here:

http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/16/nation/la-na-nn-new-...

The poor guy one $1.6 million - and I'm not saying this sarcastically. I was absolutely outraged what they did to him, it was tantamount to rape.

Disturbingly, the police officers who forced the illegal probe are still employed:

https://www.rt.com/usa/163428-nm-cops-jobs-anal-probes/

These officers should have been thrown into jail, and each one of the medical staff who participated struck off.

Wow. So in both cases, money was squeezed out of somewhere that should have been providing actual services (hospitals), but the actual thugs had little to no consequences, at least not yet. Sad.

These situations need to be taken as criminal acts. There should be jail time, and real and direct consequences for those who take part.

If people who do these things can do them with impunity, then they are likely to do them again and again. And the system, already teetering on the brink, will go right over.

"The hospital said it will pay $125,000, its insurance carrier $475,000 and Texas Tech University, which operates a medical school campus at the hospital, $500,000."

If I understand correctly, this means the hospital and affiliated entities have settled for a total of $1.1M. AFAICT the CBP & agents are still defending.

And that's good and fine, on the civil side in the specific suit against the hospital.

Unfortunately, there are some criminal statutes that appear to have been violated by all concerned and some professional medical codes that have been violated by individual doctors; There is tampering with federal evidence (prompting the dog) in order to falsify probable cause. There is also the matter of precedential rulings associated with the guidance given border control officers on how far to go.

Of five matters of concern, the least pressing to us has been settled out of court without the benefit of an enjoiner against future repetition of the abuses by the hospital (in re: rules that permit participation in a kidnapping and rape of a captive). My expectation is that a $1M reward is not especially protective to the rest of us, when it's our turn to be kidnapped and raped as some kind of practice exercise of authority. I am less worried about the hospital than the men with guns and dogs, however the fact that the hospital has a goddamned specialized billing procedure associated with torture of unwilling captives of a rogue federal agency worries me.

Justice has not been done yet; Generally by my limited understanding a Bivens Action is only filed when justice is limited in availability by a whole arm of the government who are denying any wrongdoing and prosecutors who are refusing to operate in accordance with their duties to the people.

The solution quite simple: when the suspect had evidence of wrongdoing (drugs, etc), they pay for the cost of the procedure.

When the suspect does not have evidence of a crime, they should be reimbursed. I am all right with a legitimate search warrant giving law enforcement the right to tear my house inside and out, but after it is established that they found nothing, I can bill them for the clean-up, as well as any lost time from work.

To me the biggest problem with law enforcement today is that there is no punishment for being wrong, even when lives and families can be shredded in the process. We have malpractice insurance for doctors, why not cops?

Also the cops and doctors who were committing unethical acts as part of this scam should be disciplined and/or removed from duty.

Am I too far off base?

I don't know much about medical sonography but they should be able to detect something without invasive searching.

They need a warrant for anything more than a surface check, period. The core of the problem is abuse of authority without a warrant.

Fines to the government and hospital aren't enough to prevent the abuse. The abusers need to be disciplined.

Just take a cut of the lawsuit damages out of the police pension pool. You would be surprised how quickly things can change when one's retirement is at stake.

Why punish the other officers? Wouldn't it make more sense to put the offending LEO in jail and/or fire him/her?

Because much of the most egregious police misconduct isn't the cause of the rare bad apple alone, it's the blue wall of silence that has officers looking out for each other more than the general public. If everyone suffers, even a small amount, the tolerance for misconduct will plummet.

Politics, mainly. Professional liability insurance would help solve a lot of the problems (if not entirely, then at least somewhat), but I can't think of a single policy police unions would fight more. And once they roped in other public-sector unions to help them fight (in the name of solidarity, of course), it'd quickly turn into a quagmire of epic proportions. There's an effort to get such a measure on the ballot in Minnesota, but success is unlikely [0].

0. https://ballotpedia.org/City_of_Minneapolis_Police_Brutality...

Erm, why should any suspect ever be paying for a procedure they did not order nor consent to?

"Don't fight it son. Confess quickly! If you hold out too long you could jeopardize your credit rating."

Or "go ahead and search me. You'll find nothing but a bill for my next vacation."

In the context of TFA this is more like being paid for work as a sub.

No, it hasn't been "settled."

It won't be until the perpetrators have been held responsible for the crime they committed: 2 counts of aggregated sexual assault (for the forced voyeuristic inspection of her lower parts, and the forced bowel movement), and a further account forced sodomy with a foreign object. That means jail time; lifelong bans from participation in any form of law enforcement (or private security detail); and of course, a very prominent place on local and national sex offender registries (which I'm normally against -- but I make an exception for egregious acts of sexual assault and indecency enacted by government officials).

Fines? Against an institution? That's just a number on some spreadsheet somewhere.

You have a point there -- the problem goes beyond the victim of this case.

Most police aspirants have to be sprayed with mace before they are allowed to use it on other people.

We should require aspiring border patrol agents to undergo complete invasive searches as a part of their training before they are allowed to demand them for others.

We should have all their assets seized and they should spend a few years in jail also...

edit: for the slow among us, obviously I don't believe this.

They should spend some time in jail, yes -- like a month or so. Judges too.

While it might clash with the "but they're proper human beings while those in jail are lesser humans" mentality some have [1], they should absolutely have a sense of what their punishments mean to people, and what the conditions where they sent them are.

[1] To which I have to say, I hope you get thrown in jail sometime, something lots of otherwise upstanding citizens get to experience at some point or another, and not always because they were guilty (or unethical/unjustified which is a different thing), and then we'll see if you'll change your tune about prisoners being some kind of subhumans deserving everything they get. Especially in the US, a jail-happy country with 5% of the world's population but 25% of its prisoners.

My spouse is a fan of trashy reality shows, to my eternal dismay. Naturally, these shows advertise other similar shows to their viewers. I have seen advertisements for a program where the apparent premise is to put a non-criminal into a "PMITA" prison for a month, and record their reactions.

Even if they are only inside to get a taste, they will at least have "I get to go home after this" to hold on to while they are in.

Far more important than that, they have "The producers will pull me out if I'm in any serious danger." to rely on.

I don't know about mace, but I have seen people claim that police who are tased before being able to use a taser are only electrocuted for a couple seconds where as in the field police usually electrocute people for much longer.

I imagine the same kind of thing would be done if they had to go through invasive searches. The searches wouldn't match reality.

Much longer? What does that mean? 4 seconds, minutes, hours? Whenever I have seen people tazed by police, it seems over rather fast.

Training might be a single (machine timed) 5 second dose. You're held be two people, and drop onto a crash mat.

Real life might be repeated tasings with no one to support you as you fall onto tarmac.

electrocuted?!

TASERs kill a lot of people (more than one a week), but it's usually ostensibly not intentional.

I believe the technically correct term is "electrotetanized" when the current does not actually result in death.

This is something of a personal mission for you, isn't it?

https://www.google.com/search?q=electrotetanized

My personal mission is actually to destroy the word "amazing". Getting electrotetanized into the OED is more of a hobby.

I don't know what's up with that fourth result, though.

Sorry, I almost put tasered because I didn't know the correct word and didn't feel like looking it up. Electrocuted sounded better in my head. Either way, obviously what I meant was clear to others.

Of course they wouldn't match reality. Only reality can match the experience of being detained and violated without knowing when or if you will ever be allowed to leave.

In an early episode of Star Trek Voyager, the emergency medical hologram subjects himself to a time-limited disease program ostensibly to better understand his biologc patients' suffering, but claims to do so to demonstrate that illness is no excuse for poor productivity. When the disease afflicts him for hours after the programmed end time, he freaks out. Later, his nurse tells him she extended the time, because "the worst part about pain is not knowing when it is going to end."

Perhaps the best way to match reality is to drug the aspiring officers, stash "contraband" inside one of them, then subject all of them to the same invasive searching until the "drugs" are found. The "smuggler" then has to spend an undetermined amount of time (~1 week) in a jail (not prison, jails are for temporary holding) cell under an assumed crime in another district, as to ensure the jailers treat him or her the same way as any other criminal.

We wouldn't do that because there would be too much FoF violence. If the holding org found out the perp was a cop they would probably destroy the evidence.

Fake evidence. I'm not advocating the placement of cocaine baggies in anyone's hoo-ha.

I think that's unnecessary. Obviously police officers shouldn't have to be shot before they are allowed to shoot people, so where is the cutoff?

They should be shot at before they're allowed to shoot anyone, for sure.

Shoot them with beanbags instead. You'll live with a hell of a bruise and a memory you won't soon forget.

Obviously you won't do anything that leaves actual lasting harm. Let's not get silly here.

Shooting is obviously deadly force, which is usually unreasonable in most situations. There are other ways to deal with this - not allowing cops to carry guns on their person (kept in cars, with alarms and paperwork each time they are removed, plus automatic backup, etc) seems to help people think twice before entering a situation. In addition, you can have them talk to recovering gunshot victims, show graphic gun damage before they are out in the field, and other such things.

Invasive searches, however, I fully agree with. Even at a lesser scale, standing there naked in front of your fellow workers getting your anus probed correctly is surely going to be memorable. I would fully support them using each other for training and proper procedure.

I don't see why we should be relying on the emotional responses of people rather than on cold hard policy. I mean, to be fair, we already have the policy, but I think we should address why it's failing to be implemented. I'd guess that it's only a small part that due to an underestimate of the amount of harm various police tactics cause targets.

This particular post clearly points out that that this is common and that there is a pattern, which IMO points to management rather than officers being the root cause.

An officer should be thinking, "Wow I'm going to lose my job or face criminal charges if I do this search", not "Hmm I don't think this person is going to enjoy this search very much". And it's pretty obvious to me from the terrible epidemic of police brutality that this attitude is not common, nor encouraged.

"Though Defendants conducted these searches against the will of Ms. Doe and without her consent, the Medical Center billed Ms. Doe more than $5,000.00 for its “services."

Reminds me of the bullet fees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_fee) charged by China and Iran.

it's similar to an EMT fee in that there isn't necessarily mutual consent to a contract

EMTs don't perform medically useless procedures on people who have refused them.

Also, according to the complaint, CBP offered to pay if Ms. Doe signed a consent form. This was after they found nothing.

What makes this even sadder is that it was done for what... to prevent someone from bringing controlled substances into the US? Who cares?

Yet another bullshit consequence of the War on Drugs.

>Who cares?

People who are hurt by drug cartels. It is one thing to let people grow their own pot and sell it when they are law abiding (or otherwise law abiding) individuals. But when you get drugs from the drug cartel, the harm that goes into the production makes it wrong to use. We should support legal production and importation from human sources. But we should not legalize anything coming from the cartels.

Agreed, and have for years, on both legalization and cartel boycotting. Every toke of cartel pot is a trigger pull.

We boycott and divest from companies for various human rights violations, why not boycott cartels?

The problem is that cartels make money because of this enforcement. US War on Drugs actually fuels the black markets and the cartels.

> But when you get drugs from the drug cartel, the harm that goes into the production makes it wrong to use.

That doesn't really follow. Nazi medical experiments were wholely unethical, but it would be completely unethical not use whatever knowledge they gained to save other people's lives.

Perhaps what you meant to say is that it would be wrong to pay for the drugs so the cartels actually benefit from their unethical behaviour. I agree with that, but that doesn't make the drugs unethical to use.

It absolutely would be unethical to use that knowledge in any way. Are u kidding, this provides a huge loophole creation of unethical research.

Absolutely not unethical. The damage is already done, and you're just doing more damage by not using it. It's irrational.

There's sufficient disincentive to conducting more unethical research by the simple fact that you'll go to jail. This wasn't a consideration in Nazi Germany.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

I do mean pay. I'm kinda assuming someone isn't going to be stealing from the cartel. That would be... bad for ones health.

This is sadly one of the reasons that the USA is one of the regions I will never go to as a tourist.

The police has too much power.

For those interested, this case seems to Still be ongoing since 2013...

http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/28cbp6h0i/texas-western-dis...

While it seems it was settled in July 2014, the case doesn't get closed until everything is sorted out.

So.. Yeah.. Happy Justice everyone!

Still ongoing, seemingly scheduled to go to trial next month:

SCHEDULING ORDER: Jury Selection set for 5/16/2016 09:00AM before Judge David C Guaderrama, Jury Trial set for 5/16/2016 09:00 AM before Judge David C Guaderrama, Amended Pleadings due by 5/30/2015, Discovery due by 12/18/2015, Joinder of Parties due by 5/3/2015, Dispositive motions due by 2/19/2016,. Signed by Judge David C Guaderrama. (lc3) (Entered: 04/01/2015)

It's both sad and worrying what's happening with the culture of U.S. authorities. From police up to the NSA, they're all now thinking that the Constitution doesn't matter, personal liberty doesn't matter, human decency doesn't matter - it's all about the mission, and the mission must be solved at all costs.

And if you have something to say against that, then you're the enemy of the state for trying to stop the state from accomplishing whatever mission it believes it has then.

I think this trend will stop reversing only when the people manage to elect someone that will hold accountable and punish severely any member of law enforcement or the intelligence community that breaks the law or does unconstitutional things. Until then, things are only going to get worse, and it will become increasingly harder to do something about it.

I think you should read the full pdf to understand where the problem occurred.

Good lord, I thought the title was a joke.

This is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read. How can this happen?

When people talk to their friends about police abuse.... their friends don't believe them.

Try to view it as an aggregation of unsound beliefs, attitudes and values.

It's kind of like code written without requirements, by someone who understood the goal of the project poorly because it wasn't described in a language they could speak, using all variables like A2, I3 and V1, built with a student compiler, executing on a static-zapped, assembly-line rejected CPU with errata, mounted on a circuit board soldered by hand connected to a compromised network, running from an intermittent power source controlling a water supply.

These are more reasons why journalism and free speech matter. We need to have the ability to self-inspect our country and intervene where it's deficient.

Yet another example of the corruption endemic to America.

America is a police state. Repeat after me, America is a police state. The first step is to admit and state aloud the plain truth of the matter.

Recent case in South Carolina:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2016/04/01/...

> Though Defendants conducted these searches against the will of Ms. Doe and without her consent, the Medical Center billed Ms. Doe more than $5,000.00 for its “services.”

God, that is the worst thing I have ever read. Ever. They horrendously violated her and then had the audacity to charge her for it.

along the same lines is how Stalin's executioners billed the family of those they had shot for the ammunition used. Often this was the only way they found out their loved-one had been killed.

Reminds me of Brazil. Information retrieval charges.

Some background from the ACLU of New Mexico, which filed this suit: https://www.aclu-nm.org/aclu-of-texas-and-new-mexico-sue-fed...

I tried to find an update on this case (originally filed in 2013) and only found this 2015 ruling on the defendants' motion for protective order: http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/texas/tx...

I just read the entire document and I'm literally trembling out of disgust and am in disbelief that such a thing could happen in a civilized society.

So many levels of wrong.

It almost makes me want to run for office or something. If good people stand by and do nothing, no change will happen.

I usually stand up for cops, but this is asinine. I mean, how many shows do you see where they're at LaGuardia or JFK with the customs people there and they're sure a person has drugs on them? All they do is either warn them they're going to take an x-ray, or just make them take it and it will show if they have drugs on them - anywhere. No anal probe needed at all.

Why cops feel anal probes are necessary are clearly not doing their job properly when suspicion of drugs are easily settled with a painless x-ray. Even the mere threat of an x-ray to get the person to tell them the truth is usually enough to get these drug mules to confess.

Without anal probes they lose one more way to say "I can do anything I want to you. I own you." These things are not just investigatory, they're for intimidation.

Remember the woman who killed herself in a Texas jail in the last year. During the traffic stop, the cop yelled "I will light you up!" He was referring to a taser, and that was pure intimidation.

Intimidation is a technique and a feature.

Similar case from around that time frame - https://popehat.com/2013/11/07/what-is-the-quantum-of-proof-...

It ticks pretty much all the boxes.

- drug dog "alerting"

- x-ray, multiple enemas, colonoscopy

- completely against the citizen's consent

The major difference is that the police officers bothered to obtain a warrant(it didn't take much). The law analysis of the case was inconclusive, but the lawyers weren't really sure that the police officers hadn't acted lawfully.

This is the part that is utterly indefensible:

"After the CT scan, a CBP [Customs and Border Protection] agent presented Ms. Doe with a choice: she could either sign a medical consent form, despite the fact that she had not consented, in which case CBP would pay for the cost of the searches; or if she refused to sign the consent form, she would be billed for the cost of the searches. She refused."

And the medial center duly billed her more than $5,000.00.

"When Ms. Doe expressed dismay about the unreasonable searches she suffered, a Medical Center employee responded that these procedures were routinely followed when an individual is brought in by CBP agents. The employee also told Ms. Doe that what happened to her was not invasive."

This is one of the reasons I will (most likely) never visit the USA.

The dogs smelled drugs? You mean those dogs that are known to be trained in such a way as to yield false positives?

I read about it a few years back. Has there been any resolution to this case recently?

Would you like to take a guess?

Educated: Cause 3 would be a no brainer. "WTF": Case dropped.

I see what you did there with the title.

Sponsored by the NSA and TSA. ~Good Day, Citizen.

Except neither of those agencies were involved in any way.

Perhaps not, but I do believe that the TSA and CBP are siblings under the umbrella of DHS.

NSA feeds surveillance data to law enforcement agencies. They are culpable in the Drug War and other law enforcement atrocities.

There are many reasons why this happened, mainly they aer transferred to a nearby medical center which do these probes due to poor training.

and the title is just clickbait.

No it's not fine there are many laws against this.

I'm surprised that the HN police haven't modified the clickbait title. They are usually on top of that for much more minor "offenses".

The medical centre is in no way obligated to undertake the search though. $1.1 million is getting off easy.

They were not allowed to do that. Even in the pdf it says

"Medical Center policy L-13 on searches by hospital personnel does not permit an invasion of a person’s body for purposes of a search without either consent or a search warrant."

"Consequently, the Medical Center’s failure to train its personnel on the constitutional limits constraining law enforcement searches amounts to a deliberate indifference to the violation of individuals’ constitutional rights"

Like I said it's a clickbait title. People are getting emotional over the title alone without reading the actual pdf

I read the entirety of the document, and I can assure you I'm pretty fucking outraged at what was done.

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