Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikcub | Hacker News Reader

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That is what I think they must be doing, but practically it must be difficult to work.

For eg. Anonymous hack a child porn site and dump the database, which they send to police. I can't see an easy way how the police can use that information without it coming up in court as to how they got the lead in the first place. If they were to subpoena that persons email account or apply for a search warrant, the probable cause would need to be something that the police discovered independently.

The database would be a good source of leads, which would have to be worked separately.

It is very possible for something to go wrong. Everybody needs to know about Operation Ore:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ore

US feds sent a database of users of an online payments service that was servicing child porn sites to police in the UK. What was lost in the communication, or what the US feds didn't know, was that the same payment service was also being used by legal or legitimate adult sites.

The UK police treated each user as a child pornographer, and made 3,700+ arrests out of the 7,000+ suspects. Most of these people were innocent, and the dragnet caught up teachers, lawyers, police officers, etc. and resulted in 33 suicides. It took these people a very long time to have their names cleared, and most have never recovered.

> Most of these people were innocent, and the dragnet caught up teachers, lawyers, police officers, etc. and resulted in 33 suicides. It took these people a very long time to have their names cleared, and most have never recovered.

I'll bet some of them even had nothing to hide. If you just take into account the fall-out from this particular incident (which should have led to a few more heads to roll) then that alone is an excellent reason why dragnet style surveillance is a really bad thing. It leads to a large number of false positives and those in turn will have very negative real world consequences for innocent people that would have otherwise been able to just continue to live their lives.

Law enforcement should be done with the scalpel, not with the blunt end of an axe.

"it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer" -- Ben Franklin...

Today it seems the government believes it is better for 100 innocent persons suffer than to allow 1 guilty to escape....

Yeah, back then hey just convicted really guilty people, like escaped slaves.

And today they would also hang some of the slaves that didn't flee under the assumption that they might try to escape at some point as well... (and it's possible that they did in the past - the cited passage wasn't law)

Slavery was a grave error of that time. But it doesn't devalue the other, unrelated principles of yore as presented in that Ben Franklin quote of the GP.

Yeah yeah, and witches, too.

But the fact that, centuries ago, non-whites and women weren't considered Persons with a capital P still doesn't negate the fact that the USA has abandoned its most important foundational principles (rule of law, fundamental and inalienable civil rights, freedom of speech) over the past 12 years.

12 years, you say? Where was the rule of law and fundamental civil rights when 80 000 citizens where sent to internment camps based solely on the nationality of their parents?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment

Well, sadly absent, sure. That was a tragic wartime clusterfuck -- but bad as it was, it was still a far cry from the current disappearing people (including citizens) and interning and torturing them for years on end. And the Japanese interment camps were later officially repudiated by the government, and reparations were paid to the victimized families in the Reagan era. Not that reparations are sufficient to make it right, but it it still qualitatively different than the current situation.

I'm not claiming that the USA unhypocritically perfectly adhered to its stated values in the past. We broke the law and tortured people in WWII, in Vietnam, and in the guerrilla wars of South America, too. But you had to do those things below the radar. There were eventually consequences, if it was found out.

Now the US government disappears its citizens, or kills them (and whatever men, women and children that happen to be nearby) right out in the open, and the President goes on TV to talk about what a weighty thing it is on his conscience for him to approve all these murder lists in advance.

It's true, as some point out, that unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral things have always been done by the US government (and pretty much any government). However, it seems to me a fundamentally different thing when it is done without even pretending to adhere to the law or the constitution, in any more meaningful way than Nixon's claim that "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal"[1][2].

[1]: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon

[2]: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_white...

Rules have exceptions. Nobody can argue that the US government has never done anything wrong, but there is a difference between failing to uphold your principles and outright abandoning them.

We shouldn't let past abuses excuse future abuses.

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