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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Brandon Mayfield was arrested as a material witness, not as a suspect. The problem here is the increasing use of material witness warrants to arrest people suspected of a crime, rather than actually getting an arrest warrant.

According to Wikipedia, "Ensuing lawsuits have resulted in a formal apology from the U.S. government and a $2 million settlement."

I'll be honest: I feel like I'm being swindled by doyouhaveasecret.org. Instead of presenting me with facts, they're relying on emotion and hearsay. And that's just as bad as the government wanting to search my laptop. The EFF's campaign is a more mature: https://cyberspying.eff.org/

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And that's just as bad as the government wanting to search my laptop.

No, no it isn't. It isn't in the same league of bad. Even if they were lying outright, it wouldn't be.

The government has the power to put you in prison for life or even take your life. Any bad from an organization like that will always be far worse than an attempt to get an emotional reaction to a cause by stretching the truth.

> Brandon Mayfield was arrested as a material witness, not as a suspect.

If I'm sitting in jail and have not committed a crime, the underlying legal excuse for my unjust detention isn't going to matter to me. The net result is the same.

The sad part is that the people we have to convince that these laws are a bad idea will only be swayed by emotion. It's emotion that convinced them to support bills like this and it is going to take an appeal to emotion to convince them otherwise.

It sucks to admit that, but it's how many humans work.

Physicians contended for a long time that they were too educated, thoughtful, and professional to be swayed by advertising and other promotional efforts that were not directly related to efficacy and cost of drugs:

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=192314

Nobody is immune to advertising, PR, or emotional appeals. Some of us are more/less impacted by specific types of advertising, but we are all susceptible. Including the people in this community.

Interesting.

It seems physicians have a long history pompous bullshit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Conflict_with_...

Which puts them in the beautiful company of the rest of humanity.

Edit: Also Semmelweis was a badass.

We have this interesting idea that modern medicine is what is responsible for greatly extending life expectancy. Semmelweis's work largely showed at least in his day that for women it was the opposite (remember his work started with the question of why midwives had so much lower maternal mortality rates than physicians), and even today, it is probably a distant third behind year-round food supply and modern sanitation.

I agree and upvoted you but at the same time, would you put references from your terms of service on your homepage to convince people to buy? Offhand, that was the best analogy I could think of for what is sure to be some obfuscated language in the bill. It's less sad than it is a fact of life that buying is an emotional decision. This is a sales page and while it would have been nice if they could have weaved some of the bill's language in there (w/ a link to read more), maybe that would have detracted from the "conversion" percentage.

"the people we have to convince that these laws are a bad idea will only be swayed by emotion"

While ridding yourself of the core of supporters turned off by campaigns based on more emotion than fact?

Fine. Those people will instead support the EFF. There is a "market" for this advocacy media and producing material supporting a viewpoint but in different formats appealing to difference audiences is called market segmentation.

Just because people are turned off by this advertising, doesn't mean they will be turned off from supporting this cause. They'll still support it, but via other means, such as the EFF.

I agree to some degree.

However, I think it's easy to underestimate the benefit of hindsight here.

I seriously doubt Mr. Mayfield was thinking "Awwww yeah, I'm about to get paid off this bullshit!" when he was arrested.

More likely, just thinking over the possibilities of being wrongfully implicated in a horrific act of terrorism took a few years of his life.

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