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Comment by Mendenhall | Hacker News Reader

Hmm I wonder how this would work considering its all things openly available to be recorded.

Follow a federal agent home from work and film them and their house. Film their children going to school and post pictures locations and times online, also taking photos of other relatives, friends etc and where they live and their phone numbers and post it all online.

Have your friends join in and keep posting every detail and picture you can get of federal agents and their families etc and compile it into a website.

Then let me know how that works out.

Edit: Does anyone know of any USA law that stands against such activity?

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I don't see how that's relevant. The whole point of the government is for it to have a monopoly on law enforcement. They're supposed to be able to do stuff you and I can't do.

That's not the whole point of government, that is a radical statist perspective.

See, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

> the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

It's a statist perspective, but hardly radically-so.

From your link:

> The Home Office has explained this approach as "the power of the police coming from the common consent of the public, as opposed to the power of the state. It does not mean the consent of an individual. No individual can choose to withdraw his or her consent from the police, or from a law."

That's the difference between the police and private citizens. Interactions between private citizens must be consensual. Policing, at some level, must necessarily be coercive.

Your quote says nothing about the police having unique or extreme powers, it says only that individuals have no right to opt out of society's defense mechanisms.

Further, your quoted line, that conflates aggregate consent with individual consent, while trying to distinguish them, making the utterly self-contradictory claim that "no individual can chose to withdraw his or her consent" , which comes from a 2012 commentary opinion by the Home Office, not the classic Peelian principles. (And it is likely a confusion of wording, not their actual understanding of the law or principles.)

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/policing-by-conse...

Individuals can withdraw their consent from interactions with other individuals. They cannot do so in interactions with the police. That's a unique power. And while the Home Office stated it, it's the basis for policing in every developed country.

And there is nothing contradictory about the Home Office quote. The government is the instrument through which the people, acting collectively, coerce individuals to behave. The collective needs to consent, but the individual doesn't need to. That's the point of government.

You just repeated the Home Office's mistake:

> They cannot [withdraw their consent] in interactions with the police.

> The collective needs to consent, but the individual doesn't need to

Do you see how you contradicted yourself?

The police can act without an individual's consent. That doesn't mean they have the individual's consent.

BTW, is it really your opinion that the state has a legitimate claim to nigh-unlimited rule over the public? The Constitution and Bill of Rights was a best-effort attempt to prevent tyranny, not an effort to draw a line for rulers to toe and reach over as far as they can.

You're reading "unlimited rule" into my comment. All I said was that the police are, by design, empowered to do some things ordinary people are not empowered to do.

As Pinker's research has demonstrated, when we move from vigilante "justice" to a centralized system of rules and punishments, over-all violence is greatly reduced and over-all social stability is greatly increased.

It turns out to be a really good thing to give The People In Charge a monopoly on violence and punishment. For optimal stability, The Punishers must also be accountable to the people that they serve. Lamentably, we're doing poorly on the whole accountability part, but the alternative to a State monopoly on violence is -historically- far, far, far worse than the situation that we have today.

Monopoly on police power is not a radical statist perspective. It's fundamental to sovereignty which is itself a very basic concept.

A radical statist perspective would be, e.g. suggesting the state has powers that the founding document of that state says it does not have (or doesn't grant that or a superseding power).

Small point but still relative. A citizen can make a citizens arrest, which is law enforcement (USA).

Also as far as being relative it was posed frome the idea that just because something may be legal, it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Bothering individual FBI-employees seems like a silly idea.

Reading this thread, it seems some people think the problem is that it is legal to record stuff in the open. IMHO, that is the wrong take on it.

Let's take license-plates. I don't mind that a police officer is able to see it and note where I am at a given time. But it becomes something quite different when we have surveillance-systems recording where every car is all the time. I do mind that.

It is the systems that are scary and ripe for abuse, not individuals.

Yes I agree its silly, it would also probably land you in jail.

I also share your thought on "license-plates".

My post was more aimed at a discussion on how easily openly available information can be misused, to which I appreciate the responses. I always enjoy the level of discussion to be had on this site.

I wonder this now. What if a person lived across from federal employee and all you did was have a security camera covering a view of their house and live streamed it. Lets also assume in the camera view other houses are viewable so you are not directly targeting them, I wonder if Feds would stop by and make you take it down.

>Does anyone know of any USA law that stands against such activity?

Harassment.

Stalking.

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