Rubbish (2002) | Hacker News Reader

Rubbish (2002)

wweek.com

138 pointskyleblarson30 comments

There is a long standing constitutional interpretation that your garbage, once put on the street, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The state constitution and precedent based on it may provide additional protections that the federal one does not. (It does in Washington, for instance, as the city of Seattle learned when they tried to inspect people’s garbage and fine them for not recycling or composting.) I’m not familiar with the nature of the situation in Oregon.

FTFA:

> The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution gives you no privacy rights over your garbage, but individual state constitutions can offer more stringent privacy rights. Warrantless trash searches by police are not legal in Vermont and New Jersey.

Seems like an incredibly blurry, ill-defined concept though. Even if my garbage can is "on the street", it's still a foot away from the street and firmly on my property. How is that any different than breaking into a storage container around back or elsewhere on my property? Is it considered to be "on the street" when it's sitting on the side of my house, waiting for trash day?

States and city laws define exactly where the boundary is and how it is different based different activities. Say you have a fence vs you don't have a fence, or say sidewalks are on your property, but city will maintain them, and you shouldn't block them.

Usually if trash is put on the street by the curb, it is not on your private property and can be taken and inspected. There would have to make an explicit law I think to protect it. But what if the police follow the trash truck to the dump, does it extend there as well?

That's why things should be shredded and some intelligence agencies have their own incinerators and so on.

I don't think the legal principle rests on where the trash lies (public or private property); rather, on the idea of abandonment.

In many US states streets were never formally deeded to the municipality when the lots were platted, and there's a long standing legal principle that the lot owner has a fee-simple interest to the middle of the street. (Washington included, not sure about Oregon) ie, it's not public property, it's private property with an easement dedicated to the public.

Ah you're right. It is more tricky than what I imagined.

Right if I drop my bag on the ground it should immediately be free for all and available for police search. But trash is considered "abandoned".

I didn't know about easement but it makes sense thanks for pointing that out.

Yeah but it's another interpretation/ruling in a long line (speed stops, dog searches, exigent circumstances) that allow cops to violate your 4th Amendment rights whenever they want. Cops can pull you over for crossing yellow lines while driving without proof. Cops can say their dog signaled it detected contraband without proof. Cops can say they heard someone yelling without proof. It's very rare for things like to sink prosecutions; basically the cops have to have lied, there has to be evidence, and the judge has to agree there was a violation. Practically speaking these rights don't exist, and if they do they really only exist for upper-income people.

When someone says they don't mind surveillance and have "nothing to hide", ask them for the password to their primary email. Most people simply don't think through the practical implications of their information being sifted through.

Indeed, this is exactly the topic of the OP article.

They mean you have nothing to hide form them. They still insiste upon their own privacy:

> "Things inside your house are to be guarded," [Police Chief Kroeker] told WW. "Those that are in the trash are open for trash men and pickers and--and police. And so it's not a matter of privacy anymore."

> Hours later, the chief issued a press release complaining that WW had gone through "my personal garbage at my home." KATU promptly took to the airwaves declaring, "Kroeker wants Willamette Week to stay out of his garbage."

> A few moments later, [the mayor's] office issued a prepared statement. "I consider Willamette Week's actions in this matter to be potentially illegal and absolutely unscrupulous and reprehensible," it read. "I will consider all my legal options in response to their actions."

What will the freegans do if we outlaw trash picking? Not to mention, I've found some awesome working computer parts (1000W ATX power units, with cool looking internal cables, fuck yeah!) and completely reasonable, non-branded, desktop chassis on the side of the road.

Surprising as it is that a blood test for drug use gleaned from one's bio-waste is slightly rotten, maybe it's the vice laws that should be thrown some shade. Fourth amendment, sure, but I think it's worth noting that it's still the burden of the individual to render their discarded waste non-incriminating.

What this means for genetic privacy, finger prints and other powerful personal identifiers (the what-you-are authentication factors), I simply don't have a good answer for.

I shred my screwed up tax returns and anything with SSN.

I'm generally not a tin-foil hat wearer, but is it prudent to shred register receipts? Anything else?

> but is it prudent to shred register receipts?

I'd say so. First, it makes life more difficult for an attacker who does want to recover sensitive documents (simply: there's a lot more noise from the receipt shreds), and purchase patterns tell a lot about you - in 2012, for example, Target got flak for finding out a girl was pregnant before the girl herself did (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...)... for example while you may decide to take all your whiskey bottles to the recycler, when I see weekly purchases of a dozen Jack Daniels bottles I can assume either you are a heavy drinker, or your family likes to heavily drink. Both stuff I could use as extortion leverage.

I prefer to drop the receipts in the store as I leave the property unless there's something on the receipt on which I might want/need warranty worth more than 50€ - it's not tied to me, the store and anyone present at the property can see what I bought anyway and as I like to pay cash for most things now I don't leave any data in big-data analysis companies which match purchases with my DC account data...

I'm reminded of George Orwell's quote:

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”

Orwell is wrong, because most of public relations (and propaganda more generally) is printing what someone else does not want printed, too.

Orwell isn't wrong in this case... because the quote wasn't Orwell. Who actually came up with it is lost to the mists of time https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/20/news-suppress/

Orwell did state a similar notion, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear", in the preface to Animal Farm.

I think in this case it's best to attribute the quote and the Orwell attribution to Michael Scott and call it a day :)

The liberty quote means something quite different, and quite controversial. Contrast against "Freedom of speech does require anyone to listen"

Forgive me but that is pedantic.

You know exactly what Orwell means.

I have no idea what the (probably not Orwell, as others have pointed out) author meant if it wasn't what the words say; I assume, though, that they meant exactly what they said.

Perhaps something like "journalism is revealing what someone wants to be hidden" would satisfy a stricter reading at the cost of being less punchy?

EDIT: On starting to read the article, I quite like the slogan "comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable" that they mention.

Note: this was posted under the much-more-useful subtitle, "Portland's top brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage--so we grabbed theirs".

Please put a 2002 tag on this.

Published December 23, 2002 Updated December 11, 2017

Might have missed it while reading the article, but what was updated?

Good question- but it's clearly posted "updated" in an almost unreadably light gray font on the byline.

I diff'd the text with a Wayback archive and it appears to be nothing more than minor formatting and sentence structure changes. Nothing of substance.

They updated the update date (see also: autometalogolex).

>We set it down next to the rest of our haul from District Attorney Mike Schrunk's trash--the remains of Thanksgiving turkey, the mounting stack of his granddaughter's diapers

If they really wanted to make his skin crawl they should have donated them to "Pamperchu" and his friends.

Encyclopedia Dramatica informs me Pamperchu has only been around since 2008, six years after this article was published.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com