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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy that the most dangerous people one regularly encounters can do anything they want as long as they believe they can do it. The good faith exemption has to be one of the most fascist laws on the books today.

> "the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule supports denial of Maher’s suppression motion because, at the time authorities opened his uploaded file, they had a good faith basis to believe that no warrant was required."

In no other context or career can you do anything you want and get away with it just as long as you say you thought you could. You'd think police offiers would be held to a higher standard, not no standard.

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And specifically with respect to the law, breaking a law and claiming you didn't know you did anything wrong as an individual is not considered a valid defense in our justice system. This same type of standard should apply even more to trained law enforcement, not less, otherwise it becomes a double standard.

No this is breaking the law by saying this looked like one of the situations where I already know the law doesn't apply. If Google had looked at the actual image and said it was child porn instead of just saying it was similar to some image that is child porn this would be 100% legal as the courts have already said. That difference is subtle enough that I can see how someone would get it wrong (and in fact I would expect other courts to rule differently)

Doesn’t address the point. Does everyone get a good faith exception from laws they don’t know or misunderstand, or just the police?

when the law isn't clear and so reasonable people would understand it as you did you should get a pass.

> you do anything you want and get away with it just as long as you say you thought you could.

Isn't that the motto of VC? Uber, AirBnB, WeWork, etc...

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. I thought the context provided it.

> you do any illegal action you want and get away with it just as long as you say you thought you could.

And as for corporations: that's the point of incorporating. Reducing liability.

I don't think your clarification made much of a difference: A lot of the shit those VC-backed gig-worker-abusers do probably is (and certainly should be) illegal, too.

That's not what this means. One can ask whether the belief is reasonable, that is justifiable by a reasoning process. The argument for applying the GFE in this case is that the probability of false positives from a perceptual hash match is low enough that it's OK to assume it's legit and open the image to verify that it was indeed child porn. They then used that finding to get warrants to search the guy's gmail account and later his home.

Good Samaritan laws tend to function similarly

If I'm not a professional and I hurt someone while trying to save their life by doing something stupid, that's understandable ignorance.

If a doctor stops to help someone and hurts them because the doctor did something stupid, that is malpractice and could get them sued and maybe get their license revoked.

Would you hire a programmer who refused to learn how to code the claimed "good faith" every time they screwed things up? Good faith shouldn't cover willful ignorance. A cop is hired to know, understand, and enforce the law. If they can't do that, they should be fired.

It's not exactly the same imo, since GS laws are meant to protect someone who is genuinely trying to do what a reasonable person could consider "something positive"

It is not "you say you thought you could", it is "you have reasonable evidence a crime is happening".

The reasonable here is "google said it", and it was true.

If the police arrive at a house on a domestic abuse call, and hears screams for help, is breaking down the door done in good faith?

In this case you're correct. But the good faith exemption is far broader than this and applies to even officer's completely personal false beliefs in their authority.

> In no other context or career can you do anything you want and get away with it just as long as you say you thought you could

Many white collar crimes, financial and securities fraud/violations can be thwarted this way

Basically, ignorance of the law is no excuse except when you specifically write the law to say it is an excuse

Something that contributes to the DOJ not really trying to bring convictions against individuals at bigger financial institutions

And yeah, a lot of people make sure to write their industry’s laws that way

I think the judge chose to relax a lot on this one due to the circumstances. Releasing a man in society found with 4,000 child porn photos in his computer would be a shame.

But yeah, this opens too wide gates of precedence for tyranny, unfortunately...

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