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Comment by dmourati | Hacker News Reader

I had the distinct privilege of studying law under Wayne LaFave, author of the treatise on criminal procedure. When I read the headline, it brought me back to my first year in law school and the discussions professor LaFave kindled around the topic of deception.

Here are some related common tactics upheld by courts:

1. Planting a "criminal" in a cell with a defendant to elicit a confession. 2. Separating co-defendants into two interrogations and telling each the other has "ratted" them out. 3. Letting one co-defendant see the other receive a "reward" indicating that they have already "flipped." See the Wire scene with the cheeseburger. http://discoveringthewire.com/characters-of-the-wire-william...

In comparison, this seems inline. I can understand why the AP would strongly object. In reality, though, what else do you want them to do. They are a news reporting agency who's name is the subject of a news story. The result is predictable.

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Continued use of this sort of tactic, though, not only undermines the AP, it also undermines the tactic.

That is, if criminals begin to distrust reporters as being potential cops, the FBI loses that mechanism to gain trust, -and- the AP loses the ability to talk to those society deems unlawful. Unlike those other methods you mention, which don't effect society at large, just the individual (and can be weighed solely on those merits).

So this is a procedure that is doomed to make itself obsolete as a criminal trapping tool -while also having repercussions on a facet of democracy-.

Imagine if this was a common occurrence, happening prior to the Snowden leaks. Would he have leaked? Or what about people who leak drafts of the TPP? Giving a voice to those the government deems criminal is a necessary function of a democracy, and this undermines that.

This is one of the reasons we are now having trouble with eliminating polio in Pakistan[0], and are now seeing a resurgence[1].

It turns out that, when military forces pose as humanitarian workers distributing vaccines, eventually people figure that out and end up distrusting - or even attacking[2] - real humanitarian workers distributing vaccines.

(It doesn't help that similar rumors existed previously, about sterilization efforts being conducted under the guise of vaccination. But let's not forget that the reasons those rumors are credible is that the US has done similar things in the past, including against its own citizens [3]!)

The White House recently announced that they are ending spying through vaccination programs[4], though my belief is that it really has more to do with acknowledging that the tactic itself is no longer effective (as you point out), rather than a true admission of how deplorable the effects on public health are.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/health/cia-vaccine-ruse-in...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poliomyelitis_in_Pakistan

[2] http://www.rferl.org/content/feature/24803587.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-27489045

It wouldn't surprise me if Obama using vaccines as part of secret assassination campaigns was also hurting coverage in the US.

Is there any good research on the causes of the vaccination gaps here? Most of the pro-vaccine organizations claim that the main/only reason people avoid vaccinations is because they (falsely) believe that vaccines are the cause of the autism epidemic, but this seems like pharma propaganda to discredit anyone who is skeptical of any vaccine for any reason.

> Most of the pro-vaccine organizations claim that the main/only reason people avoid vaccinations is because they (falsely) believe that vaccines are the cause of the autism epidemic

Neat, a recursive strawman. Is there a word for that?

Anyway, I don't know if you count the CDC as a 'pro-vaccine organization' but they are aware of and have responses to multiple misconceptions about vaccines.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/6mishome.htm

> they are aware of and have responses to multiple misconceptions about vaccines.

That doesn't tell you how prevalent each of those beliefs is though, let alone why people actually avoid vaccinations.

And also, the very first link on the CDC's vaccine safety page is about autism.

Oh for heaven's sake. You don't have to look very hard on the internet to hear anti-vaxxer's arguments straight from the horse's mouth, although in my experience anyone who expresses disagreement with such arguments in a context where they are seriously entertained will be quickly labelled as a shill for the pharmaceutical industry.

>1. Planting a "criminal" in a cell with a defendant to elicit a confession.

If I'm locked in a cell with a big tough guy covered in tattoos you bet that I will make up some crazy story just as a defense mechanism. If I am being accused of murdering someone, even if I didn't do it, I would probably tell that story just to feel safer.

>2. Separating co-defendants into two interrogations and telling each the other has "ratted" them out.

>3. Letting one co-defendant see the other receive a "reward" indicating that they have already "flipped."

These two tactics can lead to a false confession too, just out of spite or fear.

So you have to consider if it's better to convict an innocent person or to let go a criminal. And you would not really be letting him go, you'd just need to gather more evidence.

The government has gamified the justice system: if you win (get more convictions) you will be promoted.

You will not be rewarded for putting guilty people in jail and letting go of the innocent, you simply have to do your best to score as many convictions as possible and anything you do to achieve this (intimidation, parallel construction, playing mind games and so on) is fair game. Guilt or lack thereof does not enter into the game.

I don't think it's fair to say the government has gamified the justice system. In most American jurisdictions, district attorneys are elected and so are state attorneys general. Candidates for such office aim to give the electorate what it wants, and it often seems as if the electorate wants prosecutors to be tough on the guilty to a far greater degree than it wants to protect the rights of the innocent.

You could run for DA on a platform of safeguarding the rights of criminal defendants and prosecutorial restraint, but that's not a winning platform in most jurisdictions except very liberal places. As long as we keep electing DAs (and in many jurisdictions, judges, albeit to a lesser extent), most of them are going to go for the lowest-common-denominator platform of promising to bring crime down and throwing the book at defendants.

big tough guy covered in tattoos

This tells us more about your stereotypes of criminals than anything else. If you made a story up out of whole cloth to impress someone it would be unlikely to fit with any other evidence in the case. Back in reality, if you read cases where such tactics are employed, they usually involve pairing someone up with a cellmate who is in for some relatively minor crime and gain's the suspect's confidence by talking freely about their own situation. Admissions to cellmates usually come after days or weeks, once the suspect has become comfortable, at which point the suspect may brag about their criminal activities - in much the same way as everyone else likes to share 'war stories' about their line of work from time to time.

A threatening or scary cellmate that glared aggressively at a suspect would be a gift to defense lawyer, since it would make it a lot easier to argue that the confession had been coerced and should therefore be suppressed. Criminology texts emphasize this point; the object is to elicit a confession that will stand up in court. In the vast majority of them the informant presents a friendly demeanor towards the suspect, and furthermore is instructed not to prompt or ask questions but simply to pay close attention to the suspect's conversation and report anything interesting to investigators - again, to avoid complaints that a confession was coerced or that a defendant was put in a position where they felt obliged to provide information without benefit of counsel. Indeed, law enforcement often uses undercover officers posing as prisoners, and courts don't consider this a violation of Miranda rights as long as statements made by a suspect are voluntary.

That makes much more sense than the big tough guy that I mentioned. But there are still many reasons why an innocent person thrown in jail could make up an story. I guess that it would be OK to use that confession if it leads the investigator to new evidence, but using it in court as an evidence in itself seems very wrong to me.

My knowledge about criminology or criminal justice is very limited, and it's probably polluted by all the cop movies and TV shows. So any input from somebody more knowledgeable on the subject is more than welcome.

Your instinct about using it in court as evidence is basically good - the 'hearsay rule' forbids testimony of the form 'so-and-so told me that the defendant was guilty,' with a few very narrow exceptions like the last words of a dying person that accuse someone of a crime. Because of teh 6th amendment, informants and undercover officers have to testify in court, where the defense can question them and challenge the veracity of their statements.

Of course this is not perfect. There have been cases where law enforcement or prosecutors told the informant what to say in an overzealous effort to gain a conviction, and sometimes innocent people have languished in jail for years on the basis of such false testimony. That shouldn't be allowed to happen, but when it does it doesn't necessarily mean the entire judicial process was corrupted. For example, a trial may have been properly conducted but if the defense lawyer was lazy or incompetent and failed to challenge the prosecution evidence the judge and jury may not have had any way of knowing about the flaws int he prosecution's case.

One important thing to bear in mind about American courts is that trial courts do not have an investigatory function to discover all the information about a case, but rather a decisive function to select between competing arguments from plaintiffs/prosecutors and civil/criminal defendants. So even if the defense lawyer is an obvious imcompetent the court inn't supposed to pre-emptively assist the defendant - the defendant has to ask for a new lawyer or bring up the issue at appeal.

In many other countries they use a different sort of system called civil law, where the judge is basically the lead investigator in the case. That can prevent some kinds of miscarriages of justice that occur in our system but as you might expect it opens to the door all sorts of other kinds.

Thank you so much for such a thorough and informative answer.

Who said anything about being upheld by the courts? This is contentious because news organizations have long held that it undermines the functioning of the free press when government agents pose as journalists. But I don't think anyone (including the AP) is suggesting it's illegal.

I don't think impersonation of a reporter would ever be considered illegal (as opposed to say impersonating a police officer). In the best/worst case, the evidence obtained would be deemed inadmissible. Once that happened, the FBI and other police would be less-inclined to employ the ruse. That would be the remedy that would help the press. Short of excluding the evidence, there is no other remedy I can think of that would help the AP in this instance.

One of the large issues with this kind of thing is that it undermines the safety of real reporters, and also provides a chilling effect on the access reporters will have in the future.

On the other hand, the CIA got into a bit of trouble when it ran a vaccination program in Pakistan.[1]

The problem in this case is that the specific activity puts reporters in danger, since the nature of their job puts them in contact with criminals.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency#Use...

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