Stop and Seize
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The extent to which authority figures intervene in normal citizen life in the US always seems like some medieval European feudal lord stuff to me.
[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEpZWGgJks&list=PLmKbqjSZR8T...
I'd love to see a citation on that, because I can easily see that going the other way: cop considers you a smart-ass and decides to teach you a lesson. Maybe you appear nervous or he/she claims that your eyes are glazed, and now has probable cause to detain you further and get a warrant to have your car torn apart looking for drugs or other contraband.
Yes, you'll eventually win in court if you're truly innocent and you keep saying you don't consent to searches, ask if you're free to go, and ask for a lawyer. Of course, that doesn't mean the officer can't make your life hell during and after the stop if they so desire. The point is, they have the power, not you. You can't even leave until they say you can. The best you can hope for is that the cop maybe gets a reprimand after you complain, and good luck getting any compensation beyond that.
I'd bet far more of these people are getting being hurt by this than the "bad guys"
That's crazy talk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530
I'd also recommend that people get more involved in politics to stop stuff like this. However, please do that elsewhere - there are tons of places on the internet to talk politics, but only one Hacker News.
The Washington Post is a fairly mainstream news organization, isn't it?
It's very, very much a political and "outrage" story. Does anyone really feel 'intellectually gratified' after reading it? I know I don't. I feel angry. To me that means it's not really something that belongs here. This isn't a site for political activism.
Upvoted you.
How is this not inflammatory? How does this lead to intelligent and insightful discussion rather than just stoking the flames?
All you've really done is group together everyone with a particular view point that you don't like and attempted to trivialize them into a couple of strawmen that you can easily tear down (presumably so that you don't have to deal with people that might have a strong points against your opinion on the matter).
If you really believe what you have said, all you've done is troll the people that you are upset with for posting/commenting on this stuff on Reddit & HN. If your intent was not to troll, then I think that you should rethink your tactics with respect to commenting on these stories.
I have seen this in other areas involving questionable practices, especially involving law enforcement. Training agencies put together professional seminars- just as any of us might take a programming seminar- and teach lessons that "improve" the officers' skills, but at the same time, in the privacy of the seminar, strain the boundaries of what's legal.
That's the part that I find fascinating. In contrast to larger-scale fascist movements, in which anti-national behavior is spread from the top-down (I'm thinking of slave-era American and modern Arabic racism here or the classic example of Nazism), this type of nation- and rights-destroying behavior emanates from numerous, distributed "educational facilities."
It's fascinating to me because there's no single identifiable point to put the finger of blame on, because the erosion happens so gradually, the damages to the common good take place in such tiny increments and because it's not motivated by a common, uniting goal (although law enforcement is the simulacrum), but by numerous distributed organizations motivated by making cash via the trainings and who motivate the participants the same way. It's as if multi-level marketing were getting applied to professional gang-banger training.
And through the logic of "training seminar," why exactly not produce week-long seminars in gang-banging? It's not illegal to teach people how to break the law, there is a need in the form of customers who want to know how to do it and there is money to be made in educating others in the arts of carjacking, robbery and drug sales using slides, role-playing and case studies. It is up to the customer whether or not to make use of the information...
One final point is that there is an implied escalation of consent in the "professional" veneer of the "training seminar." This happens due to our assumptions that 1. spending money on a seminar results in at least some useful information 2. information learned in a private seminar is not expected to be unethical or useless. This leads to training seminars on law enforcement (and several other topics) operating as an "offshore zone" where unacceptable behavior gets legitimized: The police chief could never train their officers to perform manipulative, borderline illegal practices, but he can easily sign off on a training where these practices occur and become part of their department[s repertoire. The kinds of conversations and education that could never take place in a public-supported institution such as a police station can easily happen outside the publicly-supported sphere, in the conference room of a hotel, led by a small, scarcely memorable, unaccountable training organization.
I'm sorry, do not pass go, do not collect $200, go straight to jail.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130908/00044524444/eight...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/09/polygraph_countermea...
That's a disproportionate amount of bluster given that 1. That was a single counterexample. 2. The article you posted says:
Federal District Judge Liam O’Grady said: "There’s nothing unlawful about maybe 95 per cent of the business he [Dixon] conducted” but found criminal fault in his willingness to assist would-be applicants and others to lie to federal agencies, the Washington Post reported.
In other words, the polygraph-beating information was not illegal, but he was prosecuted for helping people lie to federal agencies (a crime itself). Undercover agents ensnared him via a technicality. But if the class were restricted to polygraph-beating, without persuading students to lie to federales, he wouldn't have served his relatively minor sentence of 8 months.
Contrast one guy going to jail for 8 months with the hundreds of millions of dollars seized from people not charged with crimes in the original article. Consider the zillions of materials and resources available for learning to assault someone, to hack into computer systems, to break locks, websites on "how to rob someone" (google it) and make explosives and the distinction is clear.
What you don't understand is, you don't understand the full technicalities of the law and your adversary does. Does it really matter if they don't convict you in the end if you exhaust all your resources fighting them on lawyers?
If you haven't heard of it yet, what you are describing fits quite well with the undervalued Sheldon Wolin's idea of inverted totalitarianism.
Like http://www.getfixed.me/ but on a more serious scale!
(I'm not in the US so not something I can do)
Kudos for posting this.
I like to see what happens then. It should be a sufficient hurdle.
Or the gentleman buying a car, who had the car ad, contact information for the prospective seller, who confirmed that he had an appointment to meet that person? “No, based on my investigation I have concluded this is money for a drug purchase”.