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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

I would be okay with it if the court system actually bothered to protect people's rights and police didn't abuse their power. But abuse of power is now industry standard. In all likelihood the data will be keep beyond what is necessary to collect the necessary evidence. In all likelihood this data will then be used as a springboard for indiscriminate civilian surveillance. I don't even trust that the excuse given for the collection is in any way true. Our government has shown a willingness to enforce secret laws, put people in secret prisons through extrajudicial processes, torture them in secret, lie about it repeatedly, lie about evidence. And at no point has our justice system seen fit to hold anyone accountable for it.

What balance is there when one side operates without limits or consequence and can use gag orders and the ability to classify information to operate in secret?

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One issue is that if the police find evidence of a crime during the investigation of another crime, then they are bound to pursue the newly found crime too [0]. Under such dragnets, which you can nearly 'grep' for crime, many more totally innocent people can be found to be felons without their knowledge. 2011's Three Felonies a Day by Silvergate and Dershowitz [1,2] is a good launching point into issues with the US federal justice system. If you'd like to learn more, Ken White's twitter is a great place to start the learning process into law's foibles [3].

[0] Under many complex and often conflicting legal codes, this is admittedly a dubious statement. Add in budget issues and whoo-boy, might as well throw dice. But, in general, this is mostly true. Also, I am not a lawyer, consult your own lawyer.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00505UZ4G/ref=nosim...

[2] https://www.popehat.com/2018/12/18/alan-dershowitz-is-lying-... The book is HOTLY contested and Dershowitz may or may not be an insane person

[3] https://twitter.com/popehat

I agree with the points you're making, but I should mention that now that I clicked on your Amazon link, Amazon is recommending me nothing but Sovereign Citizen nonsense and anti-Semitic ramblings. Like, Amazon's recommendation system decided it was suddenly going to form a completely different opinion of the sorts of books I'm interested in.

Holy cow! That's strange. Derchowitz is a Harvard Prof. and though he may lean right, he's not that crazy of a person. Try clearing your cookies?

Guilt by association, I suppose.

His behavior since Trump’s election puts your latter claim into serious doubt. I am not surprised that now he is being associated with what flows from Info Wars, etc.

> I would be okay with it if the court system actually bothered to protect people's rights and police didn't abuse their power.

This country was founded on the principles that all governments decay, and all legislation should take this into account. We can't give the government power which could be abused to public detriment with a simple change in leadership.

How does your argument about secret data collection apply to the case of non secret data collection?

It's not an argument over secret, or non-secret data collection. It's an argument over abuse of power, secret data collection being one of the examples of abuse of power.

Just so I understand, do you include this particular incident as an abuse of power? AFAICT, as long as they end up only using the data for the stated purpose, and not to charge random other people with random crimes, it would be a correct use of power, at least by my judgment.

That is correct. In his first sentence he made the assumption that this will not be the case. As such I do not see a discrepancy here.

Once you have data, how can I tell you what you're using it for? Parallel construction is a thing.

They do get warrants and they do serve subpoenas just because they are awarded them under a pretext that you don’t like does not mean there is an abuse of power. If you are to make a claim as huge as that you can at least back it up with some sort of data.

> I would be okay with it if the court system actually bothered to protect people's rights and police didn't abuse their power.

The court system does a pretty good job, in fact that's why the police want to bypass it so often. It's much easier for the police to catch real criminals if they don't have to worry about due process (it's just that due process is what removes the false positives).

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