Brontoforumus Archive
Discussion Boards => Thaddeus Boyd's Panel of Death => Topic started by: Thad on June 12, 2008, 10:40:25 AM
-
Times Online: Supreme Court ruling cripples Guantanamo trials (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article4123181.ece):
In its third rebuke of the Bush Administration's treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the court ruled that the 270 foreign terror suspects have the right under the US Constitution to challenge their detention in civilian courts on the American mainland.
Good for Kennedy. I think it's a stretch to describe him as the swing justice, but he has been on the issue of due process for prisoners in Gitmo.
(Also, recommending Gitmo from the other night's Daily Show as the thread icon.)
The court's four conservative justices dissented. Antonin Scalia said America "is at war with radical Islamists" and that the decision "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed".
You know what else does that?
INVADING A COUNTRY THAT POSES NO THREAT TO YOU.
Mr Bush, speaking from Rome, said he did not agree with the decision and would consider new legislation to overcome it.
It's always amazing to watch him completely deny reality here. BOTH of the men who could be President by January are saying they'll close Gitmo.
"I strongly agree with those who dissented," he said. "Their dissent was based on serious concerns about US national security."
"Also, seventy-five percent of them were appointed by someone named Bush."
-
BOTH of the men who could be President by January are saying they'll close Gitmo.
Whoops, looks like McCain's actually criticizing the ruling (http://www.philly.com/inquirer/breaking/news_breaking/20080613_McCain_blasts_Gitmo_ruling_in_Burlco_visit.html) and saying he'll do everything he can to minimize its impact, despite his earlier comments that he wanted to close the place down.
-
What can you say? Sometimes McCain just loves a yummy meal from Waffle House.
-
Attorney General: Supreme Court Ruling Doesn't Apply to Military Trials (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/6/13/163744/765/989/526852)
:confused: Oh.
-
McClatchy: America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/story/38773.html).
John McCain: giving habeas corpus to these people is "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country." (http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2008/06/13/mccain-on-gitmo-ruling-one-of-the-worst-decisions-in-the-history-of-this-country/)
-
AP: Federal judge rules Bush's aides can be subpoenaed (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hq-4ZBiiUcq8IsbGQ0SHW04WS4kgD9291NR80)
This in the wake of a contempt citation for Rove.
I still don't see the Justice Department complying, but if Obama's President in January, we're hopefully going to see a lot less obstruction.
(Plus, if Obama's President in January and the Bush Administration is still working on appealing this case, they're going to be in the rather awkward position of continuing their attempts to expand executive powers when there's a Democrat in the White House.)
-
So, all this chatter about how we have to keep these bad bad terrorists in Guantanamo Bay and torture them or we're all gonna die?
It turns out the CIA allegedly protected war criminal Radovan Karadzic (http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jCovFg-V0kb2R__18YiGMA6zyVvA) for years in exchange for his keeping a low profile.
Am curious what my roommate's Bosnian Muslim girlfriend will have to say about that.
-
So what's it take to get the entire SCOTUS to actually agree on something?
Apparently police claiming they can just slap GPS's on people's cars without warrants (http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/supreme-court-warrants-needed-in-gps-tracking/2012/01/23/gIQAx7qGLQ_story.html).
The question of whether GPS tracking ITSELF is okay, however, is left for another day:
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said the decision also should have settled some of those questions instead of deciding a case about a “21st-century surveillance technique” by using “18th-century tort law.”
“The court’s reasoning largely disregards what is really important (the use of a GPS for the purpose of long-term tracking) and instead attaches great significance to something that most would view as relatively minor (attaching to the bottom of a car a small, light object that does not interfere in any way with the car’s operation),” Alito wrote.
Alito’s point was that it was the lengthy GPS surveillance of Jones itself that violated the Fourth Amendment and that “the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy.”
“For such offenses,” he wrote, “society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not — and indeed, in the main, simply could not — secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
-
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband.
-
It's been a while now since I figured a time would soon come, when I'd take the decision that I would not set foot in the US for love or money, if the opportunity arose. Well... there ya go.
-
Cop pulls over some kids in Illinois, spends the next hour doing drug searches and trying to get them to admit that they're carrying marijuana. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/31/drug-search-trekies-stopped-searched-illinois_n_1364087.html)
-
Ha, Collinsville. That's where I lived until I moved earlier this year, and yeah, it's a dump. Not as bad as some of the neighboring towns, though.
EDIT: Oh man, THAT cop. I never had any direct contact with him, but yeah, he has a reputation for shadiness.
-
Oh good: that bit of the NDAA that allowed for indefinite detention without trial is already suspended (http://boingboing.net/2012/05/18/judge-suspends-us-law-that-pro.html).
"This court is acutely aware that preliminarily enjoining an act of Congress must be done with great caution," she wrote. "However, it is the responsibility of our judicial system to protect the public from acts of Congress which infringe upon constitutional rights. As set forth above, this court has found that plaintiffs have shown a likelihood of success on the merits regarding their constitutional claim and it therefore has a responsibility to insure that the public's constitutional rights are protected."
-
Oh, hey, welcome back checks and balances. We missed you. A lot.
-
(THAD EDIT: Split from Cheerful News; adding quote of OP for context.)
Okay, so if this guy (http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/7986979/redemption-brian-banks) makes it on an NFL team I will seriously consider becoming a football fan and rooting for his team.
What the quote says.
(FURTHER THAD EDIT: Seeing as the quote does not actually add all that goddamn much context, I will summarize: a 16-year-old boy was accused of rape 10 years ago; on his lawyer's advice he copped a plea despite the total lack of evidence. Recently his accuser got back in touch with him and admitted on tape to making the whole thing up; the conviction was overturned.)
That's great for him, but seeing a high profile case that seems to provide grist for the "women just make up rape allegations for fun" defence making the news doesn't exactly set me walking on sunshine.
-
Well, absolutely any verdict can be reduced to some stupid caricature to support an existing viewpoint.
While I'm sure there IS a loud minority of people whose default assumption is "women just make up rape allegations for fun", I think there's a far larger section of the population that's inclined to automatically sympathize with a woman who claims to have been raped. That's obviously not inherently a bad thing, but in this case it just so happens that it was.
Of course, a really thoughtful and nuanced interpretation of this case must, necessarily, get into the flaws in our justice system itself -- first of all, the racial biases that would lead to a situation where a lawyer actually says "Look, they're gonna convict you with or without evidence so you'd better just cop a plea"; second, the sheer horror of what it can mean to be branded a sex offender; and third, the ramifications of trying juveniles as adults, and the dilemma that poses even in the case of serious violent crimes.
And fourth, the mess that passes for the American mental health system. Because if that article describes the accuser accurately, then armchair-psychologist Thad thinks that maybe she should be evaluated for a medical diagnosis that's somewhat more specific than "oblivious".
-
That's great for him, but seeing a high profile case that seems to provide grist for the "women just make up rape allegations for fun" defence making the news doesn't exactly set me walking on sunshine.
Considering that that's actually what happened in this case, I think it's a pretty fair point that attention is being brought to it actually having occured.
When our justice system is built on the presumption of innocence and the idea that you are only guilty if it can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, and you can still be convicted when there is literally 0 evidence and the accuser stands to gain from the lie (in this case, she stood to gain 3 quarters of a million dollars) maybe we should be asking if the victim is lying instead of mincing around the point because we're afraid someone is going to get offended and accuse the news media or the state of blaming the victim.
-
Shinra...
There can be not enough proof for a conviction without calling the presumed victim a liar.
-
In this case there wasn't, but the lawyer of the man accused convinced him to cop a plea because he thought he would be convicted on the weight of the victim's statement alone. The accepted logic is that there does not need to be physical evidence in the event of a rape, be it signs of physical attack or a rape kit, and that the fact that the accused is a male and black is motive. This leads to situations like the one this guy was in, where he spent six years in federal prison, was a convicted felon and sex offender, and couldn't get a job anywhere because nobody will hire a rapist.
Rape victims experience horrific emotional trauma that they will live with for the rest of their lives. I'm not trying to diminish that. Somebody convicted of a felony is also going to experience the horrific trauma of being in a prison and enjoy the side effect of never being able to get gainful employment for the rest of their life. If we're going to essentially destroy the prospect of an individual ever having a meaningful existence - when they're at the age of 16, no less - then we need to make the standards for that destruction more stringent then they are.
"X's word against Y" should never be the grounds for a conviction for anything pretty much ever, let alone a life-ending felony.
There can be not enough proof for a conviction without calling the presumed victim a liar.
And for the record: that's not how the justice system is supposed to work in America. In the case of he-said she-said like this, it's the prosecution's job to prove there was a victim at all. The presumption of guilt from the onset - even by a casual observer such as yourself after it was proven no crime took place - is why wrongful convictions like this happen in the first place.
-
The presumption of guilt from the onset
Nowhere did I presume anyone's guilt, and it is offensive that you'd ever think I would.
Why would you even think that?
-
There can be not enough proof for a conviction without calling the presumed victim a liar.
If you are presuming there is a victim, you are presuming there is a guilty party. The word you should be using is alleged.
-
Moved over here because I think we've gone somewhat afield of "cheerful news".
That's great for him, but seeing a high profile case that seems to provide grist for the "women just make up rape allegations for fun" defence making the news doesn't exactly set me walking on sunshine.
Considering that that's actually what happened in this case
Well, no, I don't think she made it up "for fun"; as I said, I think there's probably something chemically wrong with her.
Rape victims experience horrific emotional trauma that they will live with for the rest of their lives. I'm not trying to diminish that.
Well, and having people say "I don't believe you" is a big part of that trauma. Approaching it from the standpoint of actually calling an accuser a liar is a nasty business; if she's not lying that's tremendously hurtful, and even if she is lying, a defense attorney who says as much risks losing the jury's sympathy.
I think Classic is right -- generally speaking, saying "There is no evidence" is a much more neutral proposition than saying "She's lying."
In this specific case, though, yes the accuser was lying and I find it very hard to believe they couldn't have handled this better.
There can be not enough proof for a conviction without calling the presumed victim a liar.
If you are presuming there is a victim, you are presuming there is a guilty party. The word you should be using is alleged.
That's a fair semantic point under the circumstances. Personally I'd go with "accuser" over "alleged victim" simply because the latter creates a weird kind of circular passive voice -- who's "alleging" in "alleged victim"? The "alleged victim" herself.
-
Speaking of semantic points:
You can presume a guilty party while presuming that any defendant is innocent.
The justice system (and most civil machinery, come to think of it) needs to assume that its users come in good faith and that those who don't (or in the case of this woman, maybe can't) are the exception.
-
Took a couple readings for me to get what you're saying, but you're right: assuming the defendant is innocent is not inherently the same as assuming no crime occurred.
Again, that doesn't really wash in this specific case (or probably in rape cases in general, as the vast majority ARE committed by someone the victim knows), but speaking of crime in general, yeah, people get accused of crimes that were actually committed by somebody else all the time.
-
The justice system (and most civil machinery, come to think of it) needs to assume that its users come in good faith and that those who don't (or in the case of this woman, maybe can't) are the exception.
I don't see why this needs to be the case. Plenty of people currently and willfully attempt to abuse all parts of the legal system. Why shouldn't there be checks to deal with this?
-
There are checks, but if public services are going to assume that (all, not some) people come to them in bad faith then you're constructing an authority that is expressly antagonistic toward its charges/benefactors.
This is why we presume defendants innocent until proven guilty, for starters.
I don't see why this needs to be the case.
I guess it's not strictly a necessity, per se, but in the extreme you're left with services that won't do their jobs. An emergency line that assumes all calls for service are fake has no hope of directing first responders to where they're needed.
-
This is why we presume defendants innocent until proven guilty, for starters.
That's not true. It's a natural side effect of the burden of proof being on the accuser. Now, some parts of the system have been refined because of the assumption that the majority aren't criminals, but the meat of the presumption of innocence is because of burden of proof and not because of any optimism about the quality of the defendant.
I guess it's not strictly a necessity, per se, but in the extreme you're left with services that won't do their jobs. An emergency line that assumes all calls for service are fake has no hope of directing first responders to where they're needed.
... If you assume all calls are fake but still direct first responders, you direct the calls EXACTLY how you would if you assume all calls are legitimate. In each case the false calls still muck up the system in the same way.
-
Remember, the court system exists for the specific purpose of protecting the defendent from the prosecution. Without it we'd still have law, it'd just be a law where the defendant has no voice and sentencing is carried out on the spot.
This is not incompatible with the assumption that the plaintiff and/or the prosecutor is honest; it simply means that the plaintiff or prosecutor must provide irrefutable proof of their claims. Basically, it's "show your work" for law enforcement.
-
Thanks for stopping me from posting an inept explanation Brentai.
I guess it's not strictly a necessity, per se, but in the extreme you're left with services that won't do their jobs. An emergency line that assumes all calls for service are fake has no hope of directing first responders to where they're needed.
If you assume all calls are fake but still direct first responders, you direct the calls EXACTLY how you would if you assume all calls are legitimate.
Then how can you tell if the emergency line is assuming a call as being in bad faith or false? If the assumption doesn't effect policy or function of the public services then it's an assumption of good faith.
Does that make sense?
-
No, it doesn't.
If you assume everyone is truthful, you assign respondent resources based on priority, and some of them will be wasted.
If you assume most people are truthful but have some checks in place, you presumably waste fewer resources (possibly in exchange for an occasional low response to a real incident, but this is basically a slider you can adjust).
If you assume most people are false, you're farther on the low-reponse-to-real-incident slider.
If you assume everyone is false, but you still assign resources at all, presumably you still assign them on the priority system. I mean, you could have a system where you assume everyone's false and just stab your dick at a dartboard to assign resources, but....
What I'm saying is that your extreme example doesn't work because the opposite end of the spectrum works exactly the same (Hey, it's like politics!), and that a system which does not assume everyone is telling the truth can still save resources with effectively 0 consequences. Unscientifically, from reading the news, I get the sense that in almost all tragic incidents where respondents were assigned late release of the 911 tapes reveal it to be gross individual incompetence rather than borderline cases or a systematic failure. While an "everyone is good" system will technically fix this specific human incompetence, the tradeoff is that wasted resource allocation will also occasionally result in the same scenario.
-
We're a little off topic here but when I say:
There are checks
Before proposing the ad absurdum case it's clear that we're not talking about the two middle-of-the-road/on-a-continuum cases that I've crossed out.
If you assume everyone is truthful, you assign respondent resources based on priority, and some of them will be wasted.
If you assume most people are truthful but have some checks in place, you presumably waste fewer resources (possibly in exchange for an occasional low response to a real incident, but this is basically a slider you can adjust).
If you assume most people are false, you're farther on the low-reponse-to-real-incident slider.
If you assume everyone is false, but you still assign resources at all, presumably you still assign them on the priority system. I mean, you could have a system where you assume everyone's false and just stab your dick at a dartboard to assign resources, but....
But if you're assuming that every caller is false, why allocate resources at all? If you're assuming every caller is false and must allocate resources, by what priority system do you allocate them?
By assuming all incoming information is false, our thought experiment call center has no way of reliably distributing resources.
By assuming all incoming information is true, our call center wastes resources at exactly the rate of bad calls.
I get the sense that in almost all tragic incidents where respondents were assigned late release of the 911 tapes reveal it to be gross individual incompetence
Me too.
I specifically chose emergency response call centers because the cost of false positives (i.e. sending to scenes that aren't emergencies) is low when compared to the cost of false negatives. I think that we agree also that the most tragic cases are due to individual failures suggests that we expect our calls to emergency services to be presumed honest, or in good faith.
It's an "easy" (and more insidiously, emotional) example of a public service that functions in our society because we presume good faith.
Are you willing to agree that at least some civil services presume* "good faith" to function and move on to arguing over a different example or something else entirely?
Maybe we should define exactly what it means to presume good faith.
*I realize now that I've been using "presume" and "assume" interchangeably, when in this context the difference between the two terms may be critical. For starters, I think my original assertion was mistakenly, "assume good faith" rather than "presume good faith," and I think I've already tacitly conceded the former.
-
Really, we're talking about hypotheticals here; actual emergency response teams have had from decades to centuries to figure out how to deal with that kind of stuff, so what they do is probably not relevant to this Epimenides Paradox thing we've got going on here. Or maybe it is, since I suspect the correct and actual policy is similar to the legal one: "Assume all parties are in good faith at all times, but make the system difficult or impossible to use without a showing of it."
For emergency response this basically means that all calls are assumed to be in earnest but are subject to standard triage rules which must, especially in situations of dire circumstance, account for most people's natural tendency to overestimate their own distress.
-
I also think Rico and I are talking past each other a little.
It seems like he takes offense (and I kind of do also) to the idea that our systems can't be improved and/or that they are "routinely" exploited.
I'm arguing that presuming good faith is (an essential) part of our existing systems.
But I like our hypothetical emergency response center. So, who cares?
-
But if you're assuming that every caller is false, why allocate resources at all? If you're assuming every caller is false and must allocate resources, by what priority system do you allocate them?
If you assume every caller is false and don't assign resources, then you don't have a center. If you assume every caller is false and do assign resources, why would you not assign them based on the same triage system? The difference between all-true and all-false is only in the attitude of the workers. The only opportunity for difference is in the middle.
I specifically chose emergency response call centers because the cost of false positives (i.e. sending to scenes that aren't emergencies) is low when compared to the cost of false negatives.
This is not necessarily true. If you've assigned all your resources there's nothing saying you are any more or less likely to have your next call (which you can't handle) be trivial or a 3,000-person building explosion (this is true whether all units are distributed to true calls or if some are distributed to false). There's also nothing saying the false negative is more or less likely to be trivial or tragic.
My issue in this particular topic has nothing to do, really, with the functioning of our current system, though I do have plenty of opinions about it. This specifically sprung out of your unsupported claim that "The justice system (and most civil machinery, come to think of it) needs to assume that its users come in good faith and that those who don't (or in the case of this woman, maybe can't) are the exception." I disagree that it needs to or ought to. You've brought the claim forward and I'm interested in whether it's supportable.
I think the specific counterfactual you've brought up doesn't really address it that well. There's all sorts of problems with the assumptions, and the extremes at the end don't really help prove anything (and you seem unwilling to discuss the middle).
-
If you assume every caller is false and do assign resources, why would you not assign them based on the same triage system?
Because if you assume every caller is false then you don't have enough (or maybe any) information to implement a triage system.
If you do enact a triage system based on information the calls are giving you, then you're not assuming the calls are false. Get what I'm saying? Your still-making-a-triage-from-the-calls emergency center is more a facility that dislikes its callers than one which has a policy of believing its callers false.
If you've assigned all your resources there's nothing saying you are any more or less likely to have your next call (which you can't handle) be trivial or a 3,000-person building explosion (this is true whether all units are distributed to true calls or if some are distributed to false). There's also nothing saying the false negative is more or less likely to be trivial or tragic.
If the emergency call is "trivial" (i.e. doesn't actually call for emergency intervention) then it's not a "false negative," now is it?
While I appreciate your counterexample, I don't think it's applicable.
First, because our hypothetical presumes-callers-false center has no reason to allocate resources to that emergency.
Second, because the presumes-callers-true center, while naive, has no special reason to waste resources or massively over-allocate to a call. In fact, I've been assuming that the call centers make optimally intelligent allocations based upon what they consider true about their information (the calls for service).
Also, an emergency response center, by its nature, can't predict future emergencies. What emergency response policy ignores known emergencies to instead be ready for an unknown future emergency? If all of the center's resources are allocated it doesn't make logical sense to blame false positives over true positives or to malign an aggressive response strategy.
There's all sorts of problems with the assumptions, and the extremes at the end don't really help prove anything.
I'm assuming that we have: call centers with finite resources; that can optimally allocate to reported calls; receive only information about the readiness of their resources and the incoming calls requesting service; and that their assumptions about incoming calls actually effects policy.
If the presumption of good or bad faith as part of policy doesn't otherwise effect policy or outcomes then how can we tell the difference?
Anyway, I think I mentioned that I might have been using presume and assume interchangeably.
The justice system (and most civil machinery, come to think of it) needs to assume presume that its users come in good faith
Presume in good faith until proven in bad faith.
Anyway-
I suspect the correct and actual policy is similar to the legal one: "Assume all parties are in good faith at all times, but make the system difficult or impossible to use without a showing of it."
This is essentially what I think occurs.
If you're going to presume people come to you in bad faith, by what machinery could a request for service prove that it is in good faith?
We should probably also decide what we mean by "good faith" vs. "bad faith" at some point. It feels pretty freaking vague right now. I know what I want it to mean, but I'd rather make sure we have a sensible consensus about it.
EDIT:
Fuck, I hit post instead of preview.
Giving it the once-over.
EDIT EDIT:
It probably deserved a few more minutes on the drawing board, but going back and editing it now is probably unfair if I caught someone in the middle of reading it.
-
Honestly I think you would do well to give your posts fewer minutes on the drawing board, and fewer everything in general.
-
Generally, when revising stuff, I edit down. So, point taken?
...
Brentai, did you just make a long :tl;dr: ?
-
I think all rico is saying is that in order to make the system work properly everyone, from first responder on up, should be tasked with going into it with an open mind. That's not to say that we don't believe everyone who says they've been raped, just that you subjectively look at every case and you don't make your mind up until all facts are put forth, you know, like its supposed to work.
-
If you do enact a triage system based on information the calls are giving you, then you're not assuming the calls are false. Get what I'm saying? Your still-making-a-triage-from-the-calls emergency center is more a facility that dislikes its callers than one which has a policy of believing its callers false.
That's been more or less my entire point the whole time, yes.
If the emergency call is "trivial" (i.e. doesn't actually call for emergency intervention) then it's not a "false negative," now is it?
Given no other qualifications in your original example, I assumed our fictional center responded to the same breadth of calls that our real-life center responds to. If you'd like to restrict it to solely true emergency situations I suppose we can all go back and do that, but I'm not sure it accomplishes anything different.
First, because our hypothetical presumes-callers-false center has no reason to allocate resources to that emergency.
You keep throwing this out there, and I keep not believing it.
Second, because the presumes-callers-true center, while naive, has no special reason to waste resources or massively over-allocate to a call.
True, but I've also never said otherwise.
What emergency response policy ignores known emergencies to instead be ready for an unknown future emergency?
It's a good question. I recommend watching the Justice League episode "Patriot Act", which is entertaining and partially addresses the scenario!
If all of the center's resources are allocated it doesn't make logical sense to blame false positives over true positives or to malign an aggressive response strategy.
Wasn't maligning, just pointing out that it happens either way.
If the presumption of good or bad faith as part of policy doesn't otherwise effect policy or outcomes then how can we tell the difference?
Again, that's what I've been saying the whole time
-
If the emergency call is "trivial" (i.e. doesn't actually call for emergency intervention) then it's not a "false negative," now is it?
Given no other qualifications in your original example, I assumed our fictional center responded to the same breadth of calls that our real-life center responds to.
They do, but when the center responds to a situation that doesn't call for intervention, that's the definition of a "false positive". You constructed a scenario where the a center gives (at least immediately) a "true negative".
What emergency response policy ignores known emergencies to instead be ready for an unknown future emergency?
It's a good question. I recommend watching the Justice League episode "Patriot Act", which is entertaining and partially addresses the scenario!
I keep hearing great things about Justice League, but can't seem to ever work up the will to actually watch it. For the sake of the argument, maybe you could recap what's relevant about the episode?
If all of the center's resources are allocated it doesn't make logical sense to blame false positives over true positives or to malign an aggressive response strategy.
Wasn't maligning, just pointing out that it happens either way.
If the presumption of good or bad faith as part of policy doesn't otherwise effect policy or outcomes then how can we tell the difference?
Again, that's what I've been saying the whole time
First, because our hypothetical presumes-callers-false center has no reason to allocate resources to that emergency.
You keep throwing this out there, and I keep not believing it.
OK. I think I get the crux of your argument now. You're claiming that there's not a functional difference in these strategies, and I am presuming there is without making my justification explicit. Which is key, since the point of this comparison is to highlight their differences.
But before I summon that up maybe you could respond to this: If you assume there's no policy difference, you're implicitly saying the presumes-bad-faith call center's allocation is irrational or insane. On what grounds, if you're assuming these calls are inaccurate and\or in bad faith, how can you use them to construct a rational resource distribution triage?
It seems like you're either making one emergency center irrational, or you're making it a pretends-good-faith emergency center, which is something else, and a different (and maybe more interesting and valuable) scenario on the "trust continuum" that we can discuss.
-
They do, but when the center responds to a situation that doesn't call for intervention, that's the definition of a "false positive". You constructed a scenario where the a center gives (at least immediately) a "true negative".
There are plenty of real-life situations in which 911 rightfully allocates resources to non-emergency events. Consider the person with a broken foot who can't drive himself to the hospital for treatment and doesn't have friends to drive him, et cetera.
I keep hearing great things about Justice League, but can't seem to ever work up the will to actually watch it. For the sake of the argument, maybe you could recap what's relevant about the episode?
Mr. Terrific has spread the Justice League out very thin to optimally respond to a great number of events, including having assigned several "heavy-hitters" off-planet. A metahuman threat happens and there is no one of sufficient power to respond to it, and a combination of the lower-powered Leaguers who remain on Earth fail to accomplish anything. Thankfully the villain is relatively benign and everything wraps up magically by the end of the 30 minutes, but given any more serious villain there was possibility for severe damage and death to a large city because there were no resources in reserve.
While this deserves another topic if this is a discussion we're going to have, it's an interesting thought: If you have 10 firetrucks, and 10 4-alarm fires you presumably send out all 10 trucks. If you have 9 4-alarm fires and 1 1-alarm fire, do you allow the 1-alarm fire to happen and send a truck to mitigate it once an extra becomes free in case something more serious breaks out? And if so, what's the cut-off? Would the damage and loss-of-life from a 5-alarm fire be so much more severe that it's worth a couple of 1-alarm fires just in case?
But before I summon that up maybe you could respond to this: If you assume there's no policy difference, you're implicitly saying the presumes-bad-faith call center's allocation is irrational or insane....
I don't think that's true at all. Say you assume everyone's lying to you, but you have an obligation to still distribute resources (there's a government mandate, you feel a moral imperative "just in case", whatever). The only sensible way to proceed is to act as if you're being told the truth, regardless of if you believe it. And if the results are indistinguishable between either extreme, then there cannot be a need "to assume that its users come in good faith and that those who don't (or in the case of this woman, maybe can't) are the exception."
-
The only sensible way to proceed is to act as if you're being told the truth, regardless of if you believe it.
But Rico, this is exactly what I mean when I say
You're making it a pretends-good-faith emergency center.
Iirc, you injected the mandate to act in the interests of its ward into the hypothetical example.
I assume that there is no reason for the "bad faith" call center to do anything but hoard its resources if it has no such mandate?
Because of the mandate to act, you're making the call center presume good faith as a policy anyhow, which I guess is just as good for what I want these hypothetical call centers to do. They can't get their jobs done without a policy of presuming the good faith of callers.
Anyway, is it sensible to treat as truth what you believe is a lie in the off-chance that it might be the truth? If you thought, for a fact, that you couldn't trust your senses, why would you act as though you could? We don't think Charlie Brown is making a good decision by letting Lucy hold the football for him.
There are plenty of real-life situations in which 911 rightfully allocates resources to non-emergency events.
I explained what I guessed you'd meant by "trivial", and your earlier followup left it ambiguous as to what you meant. By "breadth" I thought you meant to include, and remind me of, prank calls to the emergency line. The easy example of a call made in bad faith. This was a silly misunderstanding.
JUSTICE LEAGUE!
Uh, that's a resource distribution problem not really under the purview of this discussion, but OK.
If I'm reading you right, key resources were away from high-priority areas. This episode is also a little weird, because it seems like the League is taking on additional responsibilities that spread its resources too thin, not just needing or being prepared to respond to lots of calls at once.
If you have 10 firetrucks, and 10 4-alarm fires you
Um, that's... Your example is funny, because I wasn't sure what you meant by a 4-alarm fire and wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_alarm_fire) suggests that even a 1 alarm fire can have two engines allocated as basic policy. You're already spread mad thin.
I'm also not sure of how real triage works in real-life hellfire scenarios. It might actually make more sense to quash an easy fire and maintain a steady perimeter of damage at another site, than to let the easy fire become difficult to manage and make progress on the harder one.
Fires aren't usually like medical triage where sometimes it just makes sense to let a "lost cause" solve itself.
-
I've been saying for years that Republicans would become advocates for due process just as soon as they figured out that they would never be labeled as the "soft-on-terror" party no matter what they do.
To wit: Rand Paul sponsors bill to ban warantless domestic drone surveillance. (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/senate-bill-aims-to-crack-down-on-domestic-drone-surveillance/)
Granted, Rand Paul may not be a representative Republican, and whether the thing will pass either chamber remains to be seen. But it's a good first step.
Disclosure: I've done Web development for a company that makes aerial surveillance equipment.
-
I think calling Rand Paul a republican at this point is kind of like calling Joe Lieberman a democrat. Technically true, but I wouldn't go out on a limb expecting anyone else in his party to take him seriously at this point.
-
1. Calling Joe Lieberman a Democrat isn't even TECHNICALLY true anymore, and hasn't been since 2006.
2. The Pauls may be on the fringe of the Republican Party, but the fringe of the Republican Party is pretty damn influential.
-
I feel like the Tea Party is its own party at this point.
-
I've done web development for Experian.
Do I win?
-
Intelligence community finally allows senator to publicly state that intelligence community broke the law. (http://www.loweringthebar.net/2012/07/intelligence-community-agrees.html)
-
Appellate court says warrantless GPS phone tracking is totally okay. (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/how-a-drug-mule-named-big-wolf-helped-create-terrible-gps-search-law/)
I really don't see this passing muster with the same SCOTUS that's ALREADY thrown out warrantless GPS tracking, but in the meantime we're going to have to deal with the precedent.
-
So yeah
As the ACLU's Naomi Gilens points out, "more people were subjected to pen register and trap and trace surveillance in the past two years than in the entire previous decade."
[...]
While it's useful for the public to have these statistics, they give just one small piece of the overall surveillance puzzle. For example, these statistics likely don't include cell phone location tracking by law enforcement. They also omit government access to emails stored by third party providers. And they entirely exclude the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program under the FISA Amendment Act. While hard numbers are hard to obtain, what little evidence we do have suggests that all of these forms of surveillance have been increasing.
and this is part of my "can't really see my way toward voting Obama again" position. I'm not the kind of guy who spends eight years criticizing one President for doing a thing and then just kinda shrugs when another President does the same thing only worse just because we're part of the same granfalloon.
-
and this is part of my "can't really see my way toward voting Obama again" position. I'm not the kind of guy who spends eight years criticizing one President for doing a thing and then just kinda shrugs when another President does the same thing only worse just because we're part of the same granfalloon.
So you're not a Democrat is what you're saying.
-
I don't think that's really a startling new revelation.
For my part I'm only hoping for a decisive Democratic victory so that we can wipe the GOP off the table and create some space for the new party to crush the Democrats in about 8 years.
-
Court rules that reading someone else's E-Mail isn't a civil violation if it's in the cloud (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/reading-someones-gmail-doesnt-violate-federal-statute-court-finds/).
In a case decided on Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that accessing someone’s online e-mail without their permission doesn’t violate the 1986-era Stored Communications Act (SCA). Though they differed in their reasoning, the justices were unanimous in ruling that e-mail stored in the cloud (like Gmail or Yahoo Mail) does not meet the definition of electronic storage as written in the statute.
This new decision creates a split with existing case law (Theofel v. Farey-Jones) as decided in a 2004 case decided by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. That decision found that an e-mail message that was received, read, and left on a server (rather than being deleted) did constitute storage "for purposes of backup protection," and therefore was also defined as being kept in "electronic storage."
Presumably this applies to most any webmail/IMAP solution. Which, it should go without saying, is completely fucking insane in a world where most everybody keeps their E-Mail in the cloud.
Curious what that means for, say, my privately-run IMAP server that I control myself. Hope this gets fixed (either by Congress or SCOTUS) before a case like that has to be tested.
It's also a purely civil concern, so it doesn't address the issue of the police or other state actors getting into your E-Mail account by guessing the answer to your security question.
-
So today's big story is NBC getting ahold of a memo that lays out the Obama Administration's justification for assassinating American citizens (http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-exclusive-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans?lite).
“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.
Instead, it says, an “informed, high-level” official of the U.S. government may determine that the targeted American has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of a violent attack and “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.” The memo does not define “recently” or “activities.”
As in Holder’s speech, the confidential memo lays out a three-part test that would make targeted killings of American lawful: In addition to the suspect being an imminent threat, capture of the target must be “infeasible, and the strike must be conducted according to “law of war principles.” But the memo elaborates on some of these factors in ways that go beyond what the attorney general said publicly. For example, it states that U.S. officials may consider whether an attempted capture of a suspect would pose an “undue risk” to U.S. personnel involved in such an operation. If so, U.S. officials could determine that the capture operation of the targeted American would not be feasible, making it lawful for the U.S. government to order a killing instead, the memo concludes.
In other words, the entire thing is filled with poorly-defined, broadly-defined, and just plain undefined fucking weasel words and amounts to "Whenever the hell we feel like it." Which may come as a surprise to, well, the same sort of people who were surprised to learn last year that a Republican presidential candidate did not like poor people very much.
(Charles at Popehat (http://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/did-someone-mention-consistency/) has a bit more of a rundown of the various loopholes in the memo and why it really does amount to a blank check.)
Any politician who pushes real action -- a bill, a lawsuit, a congressional investigation -- to reestablish that no the President cannot just kill whoever the fuck he wants for any reason has my support, regardless of party and regardless of what stance he may have taken on the issue during the Bush Administration.
Any pundit who thought it was okay for Bush to do it but has had a sudden change of heart, on the other hand, or any politician who bleats about this but makes no visible effort to actually DO anything about it? Well, you can guess how much sympathy I've got for THEM.
-
Any politician who pushes real action -- a bill, a lawsuit, a congressional investigation -- to reestablish that no the President cannot just kill whoever the fuck he wants for any reason has my support, regardless of party and regardless of what stance he may have taken on the issue during the Bush Administration.
Yeah, but if they stay quiet on this one, then maybe someday THEY will be the one who gets to wield that kind of power.
-
Well, obviously, which is where the part about "any politician who bleats about this but makes no visible effort to actually DO anything about it" comes in.
-
DHS "watchdog" says DHS can stop anyone within 100mi of the US border and look at all the data on any devices they've got. (http://boingboing.net/2013/02/09/dhs-watchdog-dhs-can-search-a.html)
You'd think Doctorow would be grateful. The DHS is practically selling his new book for him!
-
Thank god I don't carry any electronic devices.
-
There's always encryption -- indeed, with SSD's becoming more standard, there's less of a performance issue with encrypted laptop hard drives than ever.
I haven't encrypted my phone or my tablet mostly for practical reasons: I figure if I ever lose one of them, I'm a lot likelier to find it again if whoever finds it can still boot it up. The most private stuff I've got on there is E-Mail, and if there's anyone who still thinks E-Mail is private, let me disabuse you of that notion right now.
That said, if I lived within 100 miles of the border I'd probably be encrypting my shit now.
-
There's always encryption -- indeed, with SSD's becoming more standard, there's less of a performance issue with encrypted laptop hard drives than ever.
I haven't encrypted my phone or my tablet mostly for practical reasons: I figure if I ever lose one of them, I'm a lot likelier to find it again if whoever finds it can still boot it up. The most private stuff I've got on there is E-Mail, and if there's anyone who still thinks E-Mail is private, let me disabuse you of that notion right now.
That said, if I lived within 100 miles of the border I'd probably be encrypting my shit now.
So hey, know any good Android encryption programs?
-
I haven't used any, but a quick search suggests that Android's built-in encryption is probably Good Enough. It can be brute-forced and won't deter someone who actually steals your phone and has some time to break it, but if you're just being stopped on the street it should keep your data safe.
Again, that's just what a quick look tells me; I could be wrong. XDA Developers probably has good information, and EFF and other privacy-focused organizations might have some links too.
-
Can't authorities just force you to decrypt all encrypted data on whatever device they want to check?
-
That's a serious constitutional question that's still making its way through the courts.
The more practical question is, if you do get stopped, is, is it worth it to refuse?
If you've got actual incriminating data on your phone, or phone that's easily misconstrued as incriminating, then the answer is probably Yes. It's worth risking arrest to refuse to decrypt your phone. (It bears noting that people have been threatened with sex offender raps for pretty damn innocuous comics on their laptops.)
But if your data's boring, it might be worth it to you to play along. Especially if you're not a clean-cut white guy.
I don't like advising people to submit to what I consider to be a clear case of unreasonable search and seizure. But I also know that, realistically, going to jail and potentially spending years on a wrongful arrest suit are not worth the trouble for most people -- and, again, I realize that it's a sign of privilege that I personally probably wouldn't get arrested just for refusing to unlock my phone.
-
Arizona Bill Would Ban Police Use of Drones Without a Warrant (http://blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com/valleyfever/2013/02/arizona_bill_would_ban_police.php)
That's good!
HB 2574 also states that private citizens are allowed to own their own drones.
That's bad.
However, according to the bill, "It is unlawful for a person to use drones to monitor other persons inside their homes or places of worship or within the closed confines of their property or other locations where a person would have an expectation of privacy."
That's...
...well, at least there's a provision for not spying on people in their homes, but I'm still going to go with "bad".
-
So remember that bit in the PATRIOT Act about how the government could issue a National Security Letter and the recipient was prohibited from even telling anyone they'd RECEIVED an NSL?
Well, it only took a little over eleven years for a court (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/gagging-recipients-of-national-security-letters-found-unconstitutional/) to strike that provision down.
Not over yet. Assuming the Ninth Circuit upholds this ruling (which is probably a safe assumption), that creates a circuit split with the Second Circuit, which also rejected the NSL language as originally written but held that it would be constitutional if recipients were given a chance to challenge the gag order.
This could still go to the SCOTUS. And while obviously there's no certainty in predicting a Supreme Court ruling for a case that hasn't even made it to the Ninth Circuit yet, I think that whatever its flaws this court has been pretty good about the First Amendment.
-
Supreme Court says police can take DNA samples after arresting someone. (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/us/supreme-court-says-police-can-take-dna-samples.html?_r=0)
-
This is already standard practice in the UK. They're also allowed to keep the DNA on record even if the person is found innocent.
-
So uhh
The Supreme Court handed down another decision last week that didn't get much attention:
Salinas v Texas (http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-246_7l48.pdf)
Now, I'm not a scholar of the law, but if I'm reading this right, it means that a suspect isn't granted their 5th amendment rights unless they specifically invoke them, and silence can now be construed as an admission of guilt in a court of law.
...please tell me I'm not reading this right.
-
Nah that's about it.
-
Well, as someone in #finalfight explained it to me, it's under a very narrow set of circumstances, where the suspect had already voluntarily spoken to police without being put in custody or Mirandized, and then went silent.
So it's still troubling, but less troubling...I guess?
-
NYT: Holder Tightens Rules on Getting Reporters’ Data (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/us/holder-to-tighten-rules-for-obtaining-reporters-data.html)
Congress has generally forbidden search warrants for journalists’ work materials, but the statute makes an exception if the reporter is suspected of committing a crime. An F.B.I. agent wrote that Mr. Rosen qualified for that exception because he had violated the Espionage Act by seeking government secrets to report.
No American journalist has ever been prosecuted for gathering and publishing classified information, so the language raised the prospect that the Obama administration was taking its leak crackdown to a new level. The administration insisted that it never intended to charge Mr. Rosen and that it had portrayed him as a criminal merely to get around the prohibition on accessing his e-mails.
The revision to the guidelines would bar such a tactic by saying that the “suspect exception” may only be invoked “when the member of the news media is the focus of the criminal investigation for conduct going beyond ordinary news-gathering activities.”
Search warrants invoking the exception, the revision adds, will not be allowed “if the sole purpose is the investigation of a person other than a member of the news media.”
Also, the new guidelines will require the attorney general to sign off on invoking the exception. Previously, a deputy assistant attorney general could do so.
Page 2 is about making it more difficult for the Justice Department to subpoena records from the press without advance notice.
It's a start.
-
Kabbage might have seen this one already, but it's new to me and I'm sure to some of you too:
Lab tech in Boston worked far too closely with prosecutors, forging evidence, fabricating evidence entirely, overstating quantities of drugs, dreamed up imaginary titles for herself and testified as an expert in over FOURTY THOUSAND CASES IN A TEN YEAR PERIOD (http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/22/annie-dookhan-former-state-chemist-who-mishandled-drug-evidence-agrees-plead-guilty/7UU3hfZUof4DFJGoNUfXGO/story.html)
Holy Christ. This woman has robbed literally centuries of human lives, maybe even millenia to feed her ambition. There'll be work for lawyers for over this for decades.
(more details and a claim that more lab techs were involved can also be read on this website of unknown provenance (http://filmingcops.com/corrupt-government-chemist-tampered-with-40000-cases-locking-countless-innocent-americans-in-prison/))
-
Yeah, heard about that one on Popehat. Utterly disgusting.
Needless to say, she will not receive a punishment equivalent to any of the innocent people she helped convict.
-
Sentencing her to live with the people she helped convict for 3-5 years? That's a lot of watching your back.
-
Yeah, heard about that one on Popehat. Utterly disgusting.
Needless to say, she will not receive a punishment equivalent to any of the innocent people she helped convict.
Don't forget all the guilty people that will now get a mistrial because she was involved in the process.
-
Yeah, heard about that one on Popehat. Utterly disgusting.
Needless to say, she will not receive a punishment equivalent to any of the innocent people she helped convict.
Don't forget all the guilty people that will now get a mistrial because she was involved in the process.
Truly a grand disservice to all. There really ought to be some way of catching this kind of thing faster. Not only for the direct reason of catching the criminal, but also because it's been shown that it's not the punishment so much as the timeliness of being caught that deters others from committing similar crimes. Or, y'know, just prevent it in the first place.
PS: Yay! I managed to suppress my urge to say something horrible/stupid long enough to forget what the profoundly stupid thought was!