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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Why do the press feel entitled to show up on someone's doorstep in mass?

That is quite literally trespassing. They just feel like they can get away with it.

Leave him alone, if he wanted to be found he would have shared it awhile ago.

IT's not trespassing to go up to someone's front door, otherwise the mail wouldn't get delivered. You can step on to the curtilage of someone's property, but you must leave if you are asked to do so - although nothing prevents you hanging around on the street in front of the property in hopes of getting an interview. If this becomes onerous, one can get a restraining order, but courts are cautious about handing them out to journalists engage din legitimate news gathering.

In short, they feel like they can get away with it because they can legally get away with it.

I don't think you need to be 150 to “gather information”.

I don't know what you mean.

You wrote:

> courts are cautious about handing them out to journalists engage din legitimate news gathering.

I doubt that it it News Worthy to be the 150th person with a TV camera standing at a recently declared news-worthy spot, or that most of those are gathering something that isn’t being recorded.

So, serious argument:

What if you purposely did not have a mailbox on your home but at the edge of your property (like much of rural America vs suburban) and you had no obvious front-door.

Would a person then be entitled to wander around your property looking for you? I would hope not.

So by having a front-door you are suggesting people are allowed to just walk onto your property, up to the door, anytime they feel like it and harass you?

If no door or you do not answer, how about your back window? Bathroom window?

I'm curious how the logic works.

You're conflating two different things - walking onto your property, and harassment. In general trespass to land - meaning to enter onto someone's property without a valid excuse, although the range of acceptable excuses can be very broad - is a tort, although it can also be a criminal offense in most US states. If someone refuses to leave or keeps coming back, then are of course within your rights to eject them,sue them, get a restraining order against them and so on.

But in general, if you don't want people to knock on your front door then put up a sign, or a fence, or some other indication that you want to be left alone. you'd better, because if you allow people to trespass on your land without doing anything about it - say they cross your land to go fish in a river that lies just beyond it - then they may develop a right from your failure to challenge them, sometimes known as adverse possession or an easement by prescription. And no matter how vigorously you defend your borders, you can't stop planes flying over unless they're going so low as to be hazardous to you.

So, next time I want to walk across town, I am just going to put a reporter's notebook in my pocket and just skip walking on the roads.

Instead I will walk across everyone's property and if the police eventually stop me, I will say I intended to interview the homeowners but changed my mind.

I will occasionally walk up to people's doors and knock on them just to be plausible but since the law cannot read my mind or intent, they have to accept I am a journalist and have free speech rights to walk across anyone's property.

Obviously this is an absurd extreme example but it follows your basic rules. And shows why they fail. You cannot just walk across town, across everyone's property. Yet do it on a small scale to harass a single person and it is okay?

The law is not executed on some sort of Turing engine. It is guidelines for humans to interpret real-world situations.

I encourage you to post what happens when you do this and explain your theory here to a judge. Having seen what happens when somebody tries to outsmart a judge in his own courtroom, I promise it will be memorable.

The law can't read your mind or intent, but the court can and will draw inferences from your observed behavior and in this case will almost certainly conclude that you are trolling. Why don't you try learning something about the how the law operates in practice instead of projecting your mechanistic conception onto it? I suggest How Judges Think by Richard Posner, who's quite readable and probably the most widely-cited living legal scholar in the US.

Instead I will walk across everyone's property and if the police eventually stop me, I will say I intended to interview the homeowners but changed my mind.

For example, this might come off as a plausible argument if you walked up a few houses and then turned away, but the plausibility of your argument diminishes in inverse proportion to the number of property lines you cross without acting upon your stated purpose. You seem to think that judges live in some sort of vacuum which renders them incapable of applying common-sense standards or their own experience to the facts of a case. Now, this is arguably the case in some civil law systems - Posner offers an amusing example of a French law which made it illegal to disembark from a stationary train carriage due to a drafting error - but it's a far cry from how our common law system works or has ever worked.

Yet do it on a small scale to harass a single person and it is okay?

Here you're doing something called begging the question - you're assuming your conclusion as a fact. You consider unwanted journalistic attention to an individual to be harassment, and so you ascribe that as a purpose to the journalist. Think about it; the journalist isn't going to someone's house to make their life miserable, but in pursuit of information, which information may (or may not) be an object of legitimate interest. Finding out whether someone is the architect of a multi-billion dollar digital economy seems like an entirely legitimate subject of journalistic inquiry to me.

Would a person then be entitled to wander around your property looking for you?

In the UK, they sort of would. You can wander onto most private property until asked to leave, as long as you do not break anything. Only if you then refuse to leave is there any issue for a court or the police. Of course, if you just wander into someone's house and they attack you as an intruder, then you are not going to get much sympathy, however just the act of trespass is not inherently illegal. Other than in Scotland, where it gets a little more complex, on open ground I think trespass is criminal but defined as breaking camp, so walking around is still fine.

>Why do the press feel entitled to literally show up on someone's doorstep in mass?

Mostly? The first amendment...

Not on your doorstep.

Free press means the GOVERNMENT cannot restrict their free speech.

First amendment does not mean as an individual you can go harass someone at their home.

Ah yes, the first amendment. The right to trespass given only to journalists.

You are confusing their entitlement, a psychologically concerning lack of proper upbringing, respect and human decency, with rights. I could fill your inbox with abuse, threats and sickening images arguing it’s my god-given privilege — you’d still wonder why on Earth I would feel like ruining your life like that.

And as pointed out, you are wrong about to whom the First Amendment applies to.

To clarify; I wasn't saying the first actually gives journalists the right to trespass or harass individuals.

Just that some poorly trained journalists and misguided internet armchair pundits choose to interpret it that way.

to literally show up on someone's doorstep in mass?

Hate to be that guy, but... it's "en masse" :) http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/en%20masse

That's educational, surprised I didn't know that one.

"in mass" seems to still make sense though in plain english

What is funny is in the legal dictionary "en masse" is described as "in a mass"

http://thelawdictionary.org/en-masse/

Is "in mass" completely incorrect? I know "en masse" is the French version and what is usually said (and what I typically say/write, too), but "in mass" sounds syntactically and semantically correct to me.

Sort of depends on how you pronounce it. "En masse" is not pronounced like "in mass" (check http://www.merriam-webster.com/audio.php?file=en_mas02&word=...).

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