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Comment by batch12 | Hacker News Reader

This article has some concerning practices, but I can't help but see it as anything other than ragebait.

I came from a country that became dictatorship. Dictatorships never came one day, they always creep in bit by bit. So raging on each small point is the right thing to do.

Are you against warrants? Raging on each small point is the way to become a boy who cried wolf.

Warrants on everyone in a particular geographical region purely by virtue of them being in that geographical region? Yeah I'm against that

They didn’t get identifying information on everyone if that’s what you think. They worked with Google to narrow it down to two individuals.

That doesn’t seem like an abuse of a crazy law from patriot act. It’s not like they swatted someone’s apartment for hate speech on Twitter without a warrant, someone tried to burn down a police building.

What you are missing is the fact that Google is protecting rights against the state; but they could just as easily decide to give up all the data instead of anonymizing and parsing it for them.

When corporations are holding the privacy line against the state, there are wolves in the pasture.

It's courts, not corporations. The corporation is protecting the customer because the law says so, and the courts enforce it. This is an example of the system working, not a negative.

I'm a very big privacy enthusiast and you're right. Part of effective privacy law is passing rules to ensure companies (who have more power and financial incentive) protect their customers.

You should research the 100 mile border rights-exclusion zone that includes most major metropolitan areas, or maybe dont...

I think holding governments accountable is a pretty core job of news outlets. And the use of controversial kinds of warrants is newsworthy.

The way this is written is obviously intended to evoke a specific feeling and convey a single opinion. I am tired of being manipulated for ad revenue.

I don't know what you want, an article that's happy about geofence warrants? If reading an article about a FOIA response makes you angry, maybe the article isn't the problem.

Edit: to be clear, I did not feel rage when reading the article. I don't want to invalidate your reaction, but I'm not convinced that the article was designed for that.

Reading an article written in such a way as to cause needless flamewars makes me angry. The article is a borderline opinion piece. For instance:

> While some towns saw significant property damage in the wake of the Jacob Blake protests, all evidence shows the attack against the Seattle union building was ineffective and notable mostly as an affront to local police.

The writer is expressing on opinion that the attack wasn't that bad and didn't justify this kind of warrant- not that the warrant should never be used-- just not used to investigate activity related to BLM activity. There is no mention as to the legality of throwing fire bombs at buildings or comment on the justification actually used in the warrant.

The author seems to make a point of minimizing the crime of trying to commit arson with fire bombs because the perpetrators weren’t successful in burning the building down as a rational for why this was somehow an over reach. Seems like a nutty argument.

Gotta agree, that part was weird.

That and the refusal to call the situation a riot and instead leaning into the “protest” narrative.

because it arguably violates the 4th amendment. This stuff could be abused horribly if it's allowed to continue

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-fence_warrant

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