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Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of bad laws out there. This is not the first really dumb case involving children out of Nebraska, back in 2008 the do-gooders there passed a child drop off law that said you could abandon your child at a firestation without problem, thinking it would save babies from dumpsters, but instead they had people from as far away as Florida driving to Nebraska to drop their teenagers off.

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How is this a bad law or dumb? It seems pretty reasonable that people shouldn't be allowed to bug their ex-spouses houses.

It's bad because it criminalizes catching this sort of abuse:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/nanny-cam-captures-abuse-on-...

Isn't that different though? In the case you linked, the camera was in the homeowner's house (where as a guest, I would expect little to no privacy), whereas in this case the recording device traveled with the child into several different places (where there's an expectation of privacy).

Those are called Safe Haven laws, and every state has them in some form or another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe-haven_law

I, personally, would rather not have children being raised by the type of person willing to drive from Florida to Nebraska to dump them at a fire station.

There's a saying that the one law that always passes is the law of unintended consequences.

This law has been enacted in exactly the sort of scenario that was imagined in its passing. There's no unintended consequence here, this is the exact consequence that it's supposed to protect against.

There's something inherently evil in invading someone's life like this, an orwellian scenario that only a fool can think benefits us precisely because of the human behaviour described in the article, the eavesdropper just picks and chooses the most damaging conversations completely out of context to disclose.

This was a gross invasion of privacy and a despicable act on the behalf of the mother. It's good to see law ruling on the correct side of the debate.

You're right about the OP, however I was referring to the Nebraska example.

Actually, the wiretapping law is a federal, not state, law.

The people of nebraska are do-gooders, used in an apparently pejorative sense, because they want to help get children out of situations where the children aren't wanted? What?

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