The police seem to have done what they could. We don’t want to live in a country where that would be enough evidence to invade and search his property without consent.
(incidentally, I believe this is the first time I have encountered the name “Throckmorton” in real life)
We need accountability. We are entitled to it. We are entitled to asking law enforcement to demonstrate the actual need for the tools they are given and the latitude we allow them, not a landgrab during a moral panic. Currently, we seem to have none of that.
Search warrants are not intended to be difficult to obtain, but there must be some reasonable basis for the search. A close associate of the person in question with information regarding illicit activity on the property in question is probably sufficient cause, but IANAL. It is likely the police treated this as a frivolous complaint. There have been cases that were clearly bunk that were followed up with excessive zeal because of questionable reasons and just as many valid ones have probably been ignored.
> (incidentally, I believe this is the first time I have encountered the name “Throckmorton” in real life)
Weakly related fact: Throckmorton St. is a major thoroughfare in Fort Worth, Texas named for James Webb Throckmorton and 100 Throckmorton St. was once headquarters for Tandy Corporation -- Radio Shack.
You can't be serious. Think about this for 2 seconds. Tips to the police from "close associates" are probably the ones that are in most need of corroboration prior to a search, to ensure that police powers aren't being abused.
It is clear neither of us are interested in search warrants being issued on glorified hearsay. Let me be more explicit that it is the responsibility of law enforcement to ascertain the trustworthiness of an unsubstantiated claim and to determine whether or not it is worth going forward or if they need to gather more evidence, or if the entire thing is just nonsense. No judge in their right mind should be approving search warrants on the basis of hearsay and the evidence gathered would almost certainly be ejected at trial as originating from an invalid search if the sole evidence presented for the warrant was, "This person who claimed that they were so-and-so's girlfriend said he was building bombs." See: Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U.S. 108 (1964).
In this specific situation, the woman's attorney reached out to law enforcement after being alarmed at statements she had made to him. Local law enforcement met with both the woman and the attorney at various times and both appear to have expressed strong concerns about what the terrorist was doing. At one point the woman appears to have explicitly stated that bombs were being made. The attorney is on the report as having stated that the terrorist, "knows what he is doing and is capable of making a bomb." This attorney seems to have extensive local connections and had also represented the terrorist in a previous civil matter.
I think this is sufficient grounds for a search warrant, if the local authorities really wanted the warrant. This isn't a criminal trial nor a writ of assistance, we only need a preponderance of the evidence here and it could and should have been narrowly tailored to only target the RV. I think that local law enforcement thought this was a nothingburger. They did their basic due diligence -- they ran some background checks and they came up clean. They tried to establish contact with the terrorist on a voluntary basis and were rebuffed. They then basically seem to have dropped the matter. The attorney seems to imply as such:
> He disputes that he told police they couldn't search the RV.
> "I have no memory of that whatsoever," Throckmorton said of MNPD's claim that said they could not inspect the RV. "I didn’t represent him anymore. He wasn’t an active client. I'm not a criminal defense attorney."
Either the authorities are lying or he is.
I've seen search warrants issued on a lot less. You seem to be unfamiliar with what judges consider sufficient for a warrant, in practice.
The idea that normal people are somehow protected from search warrants if they're not doing anything wrong is... not supported by facts.
As technology accelerates, it's going to become easier and easier for a crazy person to inflict massive damage. With a knife, you can only kill a few people. With a gun, you can only kill a few dozen people. With a bomb, you can only kill a few hundred people.
Eventually, the only way to solve this problem will be mass surveillance.
We already have that, didn't seem to work in this case.
https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...
https://www.genscript.com/gene_synthesis.html
https://www.idtdna.com/pages/products/genes-and-gene-fragmen...
https://www.genewiz.com/en/Public/Services/Gene-Synthesis
If you want to see someone do cool stuff with the above:
1. 300 people die each day from a random disease that didn’t exist the day before
2. 300 people die each day from a terrorist incident
Are those equivalent problems in your mind? Are the long term consequences of each about the same?
Also, I would say that the disease would still be a bigger problem than the terrorism even in your scenario. Unknown diseases have unknown effects, and generally scale exponentially. Terrorism is not going to see an exponential explosion.
I remember reading news about an old Indian man in America who was reported to be 'snooping around' by some concerned neighbors and then since he didn't understand English and comply with the police officers ended up in a hospital paraplegic (1). People condemned the police for being too harsh and making mountain out of a molehill situation.
Edit: Here's the video for those who are curious. A 58 year old skinny man in handcuffs versus 2 young policemen.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/police-chief-guil...
It might make sense to switch this to "should be", as innocent people's privacy gets invaded by unlawful search and seizure all the time. Between civil forfeiture, DUI checkpoints, stop and frisk, etc, America is a country in which invasion of privacy under the guise of searching for nonexistent malicious intent happens very frequently.
It's all the more interesting that it happens so frequently without any evidence at all, and yet was not acted upon with actual evidence. Almost as if there was a bias modifying police behavior. You'll note, Anthony Warner was white.
As to invade and search without consent... you just get a midnight court to rubberstamp your no-knock raid. There’s your consent.
Maybe you didn’t notice the extensive protests about bias in policing in the US this year. The police do a hell of a lot more over a hell of a lot less - it just depends on your socioeconomic background and skin colour.
[a]: Not actual quotes; they’re paraphrased from what I’ve heard previously
I remember the HN post about Marak Squirs getting arrested for homemade explosives going off in his apartment and AFAIK the police didn't killed him.
(edited to make the tone a bit less pointed)
I was making a list, but if you really need a list, then you’ve not been following the news. Ever hear of a woman called Breonna?
Wouldn't Ahmed Mohamed be a counterexample, not an example? He has a "foreign sounding" name and there were no deaths or nighttime SWAT raids as a result of the bogus bomb threat his teacher called in.
>Ever hear of a woman called Breonna?
If you're referring to Breonna Taylor, I don't think she was accused of building bombs and no-knock warrants are an entirely different issue IMO from warrantless searches resulting from bomb threats.
From perusing the wikipedia list of unsuccessful terrorist attacks [1], I didn't notice a single alleged bombmaker who was killed by police. Including many who were foreign-born and who were of African-American or Middle Eastern descent.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist...