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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

How can you have the right of habeaus corpus when nobody knows which agency seized your corpus?

We urgently need a federal statute to require that armed federal agents wear prominent identification. Even just a number that we can lookup for the details.

Cops with no accountability are how we got in this mess and this anonymity amounts to more of the same.

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The article says which agency it was (CPB), and quotes the CPB as saying that the agents identified themselves as CPB agents. It also says that they weren't individually identifiable, which is an issue, but a different issue.

I don't see the CPB supposedly identifying their agency as alleviating the first issue your parent mentioned: habeas corpus. The litmus test is: can a family/friend/attorney reasonably find the arrested/detained person within a few hours?

And uotes the CPB as saying that the agents identified themselves as CPB agents.

Not that we have any reason to take CPB for their word on what they say about these events, after the fact.

Yup. What I would like to see: Normally, to act as a law enforcement official you must have clearly displayed identity. Without this identity you are not considered to be an agent of the state and have no powers a passerby would not have.

The identity may be pseudoanonymous but the agency must be able to link it back to the individuals.

I would make exceptions for undercover officers who are discovered or who choose to break cover, and I would make exceptions for circumstances beyond their control. (You don't cease to be a cop because someone destroyed your identification in the incident etc.)

Likewise, I would like to see their powers go away if they aren't filming, likewise with an exception for something that happened during the incident. (But turning off one's camera is voluntary, it doesn't count unless you did it under duress.)

What good are laws when the government doesn't obey them anyway? They will just find some way to side step it, Like "This a national security matter" and that will be that.

Or just straight up ignore it completely like the president has done with some laws. Sometimes the courts catch up to him, sometimes the senate doesn't give a shit

Something that an observer said when Trump was elected has really struct with me : "the next 4 years are going to be a stress test for the checks and balances of the US political system".

I could not have been truer and damn ... the system is not faring well.

This is one of the classic pillars of fascist politics. Justify atrocious, anti-democratic actions by citing widely shared ideals.

Implement Jim Crow laws and prevent Black people from voting under the guise of "states' rights".

Invade a nation that does not threaten us in order to "liberate their people" and "spread democracy".

Encourage paramilitaries to intimidate peaceful protesters with weapons of war to "protect property and the rule of law".

And now send heavily armed mercenaries or federal agents into cities, with no identification and no accountability, against the will of local leaders, to kidnap citizens from the streets to "protect federal property".

Justifying things you do - atrocious and anti-democratic or not - by citing widely shared ideals is a pillar of any kind of politics. To claim that sending feds into cities is like Jim Crow in a meaningful sense because it was also justified with widely shared ideals is ridiculous.

The difference is that in fascist politics, the justifications are lies.

The US didn't invade Iraq to "liberate its people", and federal thugs aren't abducting people from the streets to "protect federal property".

Those are lies and transparent pretexts.

In non-fascist politics, the justifications aren't dishonest pretexts. For example, when non-fascist Roosevelt established Social Security, the stated reason was to safeguard "against the hazards and vicissitudes of life".

That was not a lie or a pretext. It was true, and that's the difference.

"Statutes" have no power when nobody wants to enforce them. I think the generic uniform trick is a way to hire random folks to deal with protests. DHS probably doesn't want to risk its own personnel, so they hire "disposable" folks from the streets and give them generic uniform to hide what they are doing.

I've heard some talk that the NDAA allows overriding habeus corpus, but I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if it's entirely true.

Source: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57c9b648e4b06c750dd9cd6f

If it's legal then there's even less prospect of accountability, so it's worse.

The John Yoo interpretations of existing law during the early Bush 43 administration already did that. NDAA and subsequent updates weren't required, but I wouldn't doubt if they solidified some of the weaknesses of just having White House / NSC council interpretations.

Also, in practice, law is very subjective and frequently doesn't supply any prior constraint against government actors, only recourse after-the-fact.

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