How Police Exploited the Capitol Riot’s Digital Records
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
- "The EFF sees the tremendous scope and power of geofence warrants as a bug, not a feature. “We believe that geofence warrants are unconstitutional because they don’t start with a suspect,” says Lynch. “They don’t rely on individualized suspicion, which is what’s required under the Fourth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution]."
With panopticon and big data, investigators can rule out everyone with an alibi, sifting thru mountains of data to reveal who must have committed a crime.
I'm not arguing right or wrong, morally. Just what is.
Hopefully the people will push back on it, can't say I have much hope since the political system is purposely broken.
Feels like we are already living in a world where both superpowers nations are in agreement that surveillance capitalism and disinformation is the best way to control their local population.
Leading with the capitol attack doesn’t highlight to me why wide scope of these powers is a problem. Tell me more about the civil rights campaigns that are being disrupted with these technologies and powers.
It’s not helpful to highlight how it was used to arrest violent separatists. Tell me how it’s being used to punch down!
Without an example like that, I’m inclined to say this is a time where the federal government’s reliance on norms is working. As in, they have the power to do these kinds of things, but they choose to apply that power pretty selectively.
That's definitely a "citation needed" statement.
In Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Ass’n, 489 U.S. 602 (1989) the Court upheld mandatory drug testing for railway employees involved in accidents or safety violations despite no probable cause or individualized suspicion.
In Michigan Dep’t of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990) the Court upheld sobriety check points in which all cars are briefly stopped for questioning and observation. There's no individualized suspicion there. See also the cases involving border patrol checkpoints. A checkpoint 50 miles from the border doesn't involve any individualized suspicion.
Individualized suspicion is required I believe to target an individual, but hasn't targeting a place where a crime has been committed to get more information to try to figure what individuals might be involved been standard, uncontroversial, police procedure in the United States for hundreds of years?
E.g., if a clearly murdered body is found in a maid's closet at a hotel when the maids go to start their shift in the morning police are going to get a warrant to get the list of all staff and guests that were known to be in the hotel between the time the closet was last known to be dead body free and the time the body was discovered.
That seems at least somewhat similar to a geofence warrant and has been pretty normal since basically forever.
There's "the Constitution" the document, which has some words in it.
Then there's "the Constitution" the spirit, which is what the American public feels abut the document, irrespective of the words therein.
The two are never quite the same, and the latter is often the deciding factor when it comes to writing laws. The former factor, carefully parsing the words in the context of laws, has been where the courts come in. But these days is seems the court's view on the Constitution is colored as much by their feelings about the words as the words taken literally themselves. For example, for decades one court can say that a right to privacy is implied by the Constitution, and then suddenly a new court can completely flip that. Despite the words in the Constitution remaining the same in the intervening period, the feelings of the court about the document changed, and so what is considered "Constitutional" under the law changed as well.
In that sense, what is normal can in fact be Constitutional, as long as people with the right power say so, even if the document doesn't say as such in literal words.
The biggest difference I see "time". Mostly that it can be done retroactively.
Would a geofence be allowed while the event is occurring?
Just don't riot.
Obviously I am not lawyer, but I would think it could be codified somehow.
I get the politicians in D.C. might have trouble to see what's in front of them, but Im unsure the population is so against it.
Perhaps you can. History has shown that most people cannot.
Some kid (I suspect) wrote a naughty racist word on sone piece of playground equipment (easily cleaned off) and the reaction by people on an unofficial town FB group were amazing. One person called for cameras everywhere and the imprisonment of parents if their kid was recorded writing a racist or w/e word.
Hell the whole defund the police thing started turning into an alternative where there are cameras everywhere. I’m pretty sure that will be the future.
It questions: are the trade offs worth it?
I suppose the corrolary being: what if this protest was more legitimate but the police was corrupt?
I live in China myself so I find it interesting to ask this question before it's fully done and lost, even if I feel I know the answer: yes, it is worth it, and you'll never shock people with stories of criminals being founds thanks to general surveillance as much as they're shocked by unsolved horrendous crimes, so the abuses will be tolerated (or hidden thanks to the new structure of standard police work) as price to pay, when a critical mass of crimes that could have been solved will be reached.
And I am sad to tell you, that trading freedom for safety is paradise, and when I left the scary city I lived in before to Hong Kong where I live now, I felt such a surprised relief at the total absence of small crimes (all citizens prints are stored on a central database for instance, all 7M of us can be found in an instant). I'm never going back, they can read my emails and track my phone.
They discussed their plans openly on social media then streamed evidence of it after the fact.
Ignoring the question of whether the ability to hide from law enforcement is a necessary component of liberty even when one has committed a crime, these guys weren't even trying very hard to cover their tracks.
'The EFF sees the tremendous scope and power of geofence warrants as a bug, not a feature. “We believe that geofence warrants are unconstitutional because they don’t start with a suspect,” says Lynch. “They don’t rely on individualized suspicion, which is what’s required under the Fourth Amendment [to the U.S. Constitution]. In the January 6th context, it’s likely that there were many journalists whose data was provided to the police.”'
I understand this is a private venue and not police but the principle is the same. She wasn't caught hacking anything or breaking in to anything she just wanted to see the dancers. The big problem with geo fence warrants is that they lead to a 1984 style big brother surveillance state. For example: should the police constantly get everyone's cell phone tower ping data and automatically issue speeding tickets for every 5 minute window someone was speeding?
> If we get to the point where that becomes the case [...]
Then it will be far too late to do anything about it.
You're obviously going to be convicted of speeding if your geolocation data shows you going 80mph for an hour on the expressway, right? Do you really want to wait until this case shows up in court to try to prevent this kind of dystopia from emerging?
See the current top post about individualized suspicion.
You might want to conjure up a different example. I am having trouble considering enforcement of speed limits to be dystopian.
There are toll roads all around the US that conclusively prove tens of millions of people are speeding every day for many decades now, just from the entry and exit point time data.
Government leaders have yet to start mailing everyone automated speeding tickets.
What would be dystopian would be if that data collection was applied to protected activity or especially to unrelated activities: your attendance at a non-violent protest leading to your student loan rates going up, a religious prosecutor starting to “preemptively” investigate teachers & other government employees who went to a Pride parade, etc.
So gross, sorry couldn’t continue after that.
What was so offensive about it?
I interpreted it as "does not fit the overweight, bearded, too-old-for-military-service mountain-man militia stereotype."