Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

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Murders are detectable outside of homes. Is someone missing? Yes? Then start an investigation.

Fraud can be detected with perfectly normal well understood investigation techniques. No literally peering through walls is required. It is an important difference because fraud investigation techniques were conceivable when the laws we run our legal system with, laws put in place to protect us from it, were created.

Nobody is proposing we deploy these sorts of technologies to patrol for these crimes. Once we are reasonably certain that a particular crime has occurred, break out the UAVs for all I care. And get a warrant first. That is how the system was intended to work; if you breach that intention you breach the implied contract citizens have with their society.

Any crime should have an effect that is noticeable in a reasonable way. If there are absolutely no other methods of even determining if a crime has happened, then it is not a crime. A crime must have an effect, and an effect is noticeable. If there are other methods, the use those.

The error in your reasoning is that all these things do have external effects, but the connection between an external effect and the source is not always apparent. To specifically use the example of fraud, a great number of business operations are under forced reporting requirements for specifically this reason. Your answer to this point is flatly incorrect, as fraud cannot and is not effectively detected in this manner today.

Regarding murder, you suggest "if someone is missing, start an investigation." Of course, the error in your logic is that we do have evidence of drug crime -- and plenty of it. There is no question that Alameda county is full of grow-ops, which produce drugs for the surrounding region. I know, because I live here. There are many, many busts every year. Mountains of evidence.

The reason to limit this sort of investigation is found in the 4th amendment, and it is more than adequate when applied here. Kyllo v. United States is very clear on this point.

You have completely missed my point. I have to wonder if you are being willfully dense; right now you are violently agreeing with me while nevertheless misconstruing everything I am saying.

My point, stated succinctly: If a law cannot be enforced without violating the 4th amendment, it is not a legitimate law.

Alternative expression of my point: "When the police cannot catch you legally, they are not permitted to catch you anyway"

Application of my point: If grow houses cannot be found without using drones, which violate the 4th amendment (or should), then grow houses should be legal. Bans on grow houses should only exist if there are legal ways of finding them. If there are legal methods of finding grow houses, than illegal methods should not be employed. Of course grow houses can be found without drones, so no drones should ever be employed.

The purpose of this rule of thumb (notice that I never claim that this principle could be effectively coded into law) would be to provide the population with an effective way of telling Sheriffs to "Fuck off" when they say "We need to violate your 4th ammendment rights to enforce this law.".

On the contrary I understand your point well, and it appears to be nonsense.

You have, however, missed mine.

Please stop.

I apologize. I thought I was quite clear here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4676144 and I was overly brusque in my latest response (due to the language above).

Murders are detectable outside of homes. Is someone missing? Yes? Then start an investigation.

They could be missing already, or be unregistered kids, or recently arrived unregistered migrants. Not everyone who is murdered is noticed missing. Also, very few of the people who are missing have been murdered.

So what do you propose we do, regularly search all houses looking for bodies? These hypotheticals are edge cases which we already accept will in practice go unpunished. To eliminate them would involve violating the 4th amendment.

No, just arguing against your suggestion that they are not crimes if they are not detected by straightforward means.

If someone detects a murder by extremely technological means, say while using muons from cosmic rays to image though a structure like they are doing at Fukashima at the moment http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v109/i15/e152501, then that murder is still a crime whatever the method of detection.

Now it is reasonable to argue that growing weed should not be a crime in the first place, but to argue that growing it indoors should not be a crime on the basis of the level of technology required to detect it, does not seem to make any sort of sense.

So long as that somebody is not the police actively looking for a crime without a warrant, then that should not violate the 4th amendment.

I feel that I should emphasis that I am not proposing a change to existing law. I am merely advocating the point of view that new fancy technologies should, by default, be considered unreasonable searches.

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