Hacker News Reader

Comment by josinalvo | Hacker News Reader

I disagree that this is, per se, a violation of due process

As long as the matches are not being used as evidence on trials or as evidence to get warrants, the police can generate their list of leads by consulting a hamster, or by taking names out of a hat. Right? Or is there/should there be a right to not be considered a suspect on foolish motives?

Also, maybe these techniques are useful, in the sense that they allow for police to use a bad image to reduce a pool of suspects to a manageable pile that can be examined by hand.

View on HN

Yudkowsky wrote about this.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privilegin...

In short, it does seem like it should be illegal to pull names out of a hat.

All I am saying is there are 2 different questions:

* Is the method good? (FR with celebrity, maybe not. A hat, surely not)

* Is the method legal? (IANAL, but the relevant question seems to be if they are using it as evidence or just for lead generation)

So you would be comfortable with police essentially randomly selecting people to arrest for various unsolved crimes? And we'll just let the courts sort it out?

The reason the fourth amendment exists is exactly to prevent this sort of thing.

Considering a large percentage of inmates have yet to be charged with a crime this would probably be incredibly lucrative for the prison industry.

No, but it is my understanding that to even detain a person you need to meet some standard of evidence. I am saying: let the police use whatever lead generating method they can, as long as they are not using it as evidence to detain, search, or imprison.

That is, their system can be whatever they want to generate a list of names. Afterwards, they need evidence to search a persons house, or to detain them, or to arrest them.

(In legal lingo: I am okay with them using these methods, as long as they are not considered probable cause https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/when-police-can-make...)

For looking for leads in an investigation it doesn't seem that different from having a person look through mugshot books. I agree it gets very sticky when figuring out where it appropriate to use it as evidence for a warrant or in a trial.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com