Ross Ulbricht's Lawyer Says FBI's Hack of Silk Road Was "Criminal" 208
First time accepted submitter apexcp writes Trading blows with the prosecution, defendants for accused Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht continues to press for the exclusion of evidence seized during what he says is an illegal hack an awful lot like the one that got Weev 15 months in prison. "The government posits two standards of behavior: one for private citizens, who must adhere to a strict standard of conduct construed by the government, and the other for the government, which, with its elastic ability to effect electronic intrusion, can deliberately, cavalierly, and unrepentantly transgress those same standards. Yet neither law nor the Constitution permits rank government lawlessness without consequences."
when the president does it (Score:3, Funny)
it's not illegal!
The solution is obvious. Ross Ulbricht should run for president and win.
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Today on Slashdot I learned that the only purpose of the constitution is to allow sex slaves in South Carolina and make it possible to steal Ohio from the Indians.
Thanks for that valuable analysis. No, no, don't bother with any citations, they aren't even remotely necessary. I'll just assume that Article V is all about sex slaves in South Carolina. Or the Ohio thing, whatever. I'm sure it's one of the two, anyway. I'll teach this to any child I can find. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go educate
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Who said anything about only? That's a straw man.
As for cites, I will note that the Constitution could not have been passed if South Carolina had any reason to believe the north could deprive it of it's sex slaves, therefore the document must have been designed specifically to allow SC to keep it's sex slaves.
I will also note that the first thing the new government did was recruit a Legion of the United States to conquer Ohio.
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You don't seem to understand what "cite" means. Or "designed specifically".
I'll get you started on that second one with a hint: "Specifically designed for X" is not synonymous with "Not specifically designed for not X".
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Is this what they teach kids today? The everything ever done by white men must be evil, and it's just a matter of deconstructing the appropriate documents to show it? That the published reasoning behind the Constitution can be ignored, as the authors were just a bunch a lying rapists anyhow?
I know the Constitution is awfully inconvenient to fans of totalitarianism - why, it limits the power of the ruler, heck, it limits the entire central government - and some people think we should just ignore it as a hi
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You really suck at this arguing on the internet thing.
All you have bothered to learn about me is that I think two statements are true. You haven't bothered to include any evidence that either one of the statements is false; yet you think you've proven I'm a childish fool who is racist against white people. I'm trying to think of a flaw in logic you didn't include in those two paragraphs, but you seem to have covered your bases pretty thoroughly.
As for the Constitution's use in a totalitarian regime, you're
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You really should drop the sex part, it makes you look like a loon.
Granted the constitution did not bar slavery, but you cannot say with any intelectual honesty that it protected or promoted it. I'm sorry you do not like the constitution or the US founding but that does not give you license to imagine crap and pretend it is true.
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I'm sorry you do not like the constitution or the US founding but that does not give you license to imagine crap and pretend it is true.
I was under the impression that an internet connection and a means to enter data grants a license to imagine crap and pretend it is true. It would appear that NicBenjamin has both, and has no problem using this license to imagine crap and pretend it is true. :)
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You know its true, i read it on the internet.
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You really should drop the sex part, it makes you look like a loon.
Granted the constitution did not bar slavery, but you cannot say with any intelectual honesty that it protected or promoted it. I'm sorry you do not like the constitution or the US founding but that does not give you license to imagine crap and pretend it is true.
I didn't say it promoted slavery. I said it protected it.
And it did. There is no enumerated power that would have allowed an Emancipation Proclamation. This means the new federal government could not abolish slavery, which means slavery was (by definition) protected. Regulated to an extent, by the end of the foreign trade, and the 3/5 clause; but 100% protected.
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Wow.. you certainly are clueless.
Not addressing does not mean protecting. It means it was ignored. You not stopping a mugger from grabbing granny's purse does not mean you protected the criminal.
The 3/5th part had absolutely nothing to do with slavery either. It was only a way to limit the tax burden on slave states and prevent excessive representation.
And yes, the emancipation proclamation was constitutional. The abandond and captured property act of 1863 allowed it. Remember, congress has the ability to g
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BTW, the sex part is included because I've actually dealt with people on technology forums who claimed slavery wasn't that bad. They tend to go away after you've pointed out it involved an awful lot of rape, but I am sick of explaining to white people that slavery as practiced right here in these United States was as bad as anything humans did to each-other prior to the 20th century.
I don't want to deal with idiots who think Sherman's March to the Sea was worse then the crime of defending the Confederacy in
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Depending on the situation that can actually be true. Classified documents, for example, are classified on the authority of the President. This means that if he decides to declassify something he doesn't have to go through any official procedures. So if Obama says something that's classified in a speech he hasn't broken the law. He's not above the law. He is the law. Literally.
You are absolutely fucking wrong. Literally.
Re:when the president does it (Score:5, Funny)
You are absolutely fucking wrong. Literally.
Hmm...So what's the right way to fuck?
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You're sticking it in the wrong hole
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Please cite a) the statute that makes it illegal for a President to declassify information that has been classified on his authority, and b) the Court decision confirming Congress has the power to make such a statute.
You need a statute for a) because Executive orders can also be unilaterally altered by the President. Without b) you have nothing, because both the Executive and legislative branches are specifically intended to go beyond their authority all the time.
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How about you cite the laws that say the President "is the law. Literally."?
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I already did. Article II of the US Constitution gives the president very similar powers to those of the English king in several areas: notably defense, and running the day-to-day operations of the government. This means that in an area where the DoD makes lots of day-to-day administrative decisions the President's word is litterally the law.
Your turn.
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He is wrong constitutionally but right in practice. The president is the head of the executive- the top law enforcement officer of the land with the ability to control the actiond of those under him.
Now that being said, he has a constitution duty to ensure the law is faithfully executed. No one takes him to task over it though. Entering the country illegally is a misdemeanor ( felony on second offense) but it doesn't get enforced. Pot is still a scedule 1 drug which means it cannot even be used as a medicin
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You're taking me right. Obama is the law in terms of determining what is Classified or not. If he decides that the campaign against ISIS will be well-served by releasing some factoid every other person in the entire government thinks should be top secret, then he can do it.
I assume most of the people who interpreted it wrong were doing so intentionally, because they pretty much all posted as ACs.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (Score:5, Insightful)
"To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution."
"Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
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It must have been great to have a Supreme Court not packed with partisan, corporate / police state lapdogs.
Re: Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (Score:5, Informative)
The US did the same for AT&T and the rest.
https://www.eff.org/cases/hept... [eff.org]
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Virginia did the same for Charles Lynch back in 1782. Of course all he did was hold an informal court which sentenced people to whippings, property forfeiture and such.
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That's a slight misrepresentation. The surveillance was thought to be legal at the time it was carried out, and it *should* have been legal - that is, the original law was not intended to prohibit it but was merely badly drafted. In circumstances like that, prosecution would be grossly unjust.
Go Ross, Go! (Score:5, Insightful)
Silk Road Kingpin or not, I'm rooting for Ross here. The fact of the matter is that the Government has made a habit out of adopting these types of double standards and ignoring the civil rights that are guaranteed to us as citizens of the United States. If Ross' legal team can bring the government down a notch or two, I'll be forever grateful to them.
Re:Go Ross, Go! (Score:5, Interesting)
So the Silk Road offered a good alternative to street gangs, measurablly better in every way. Better product(less chance of killing/hurting people with impurities), less violence, Less domination, control and indimidation on the streets. Less hiearchy.
Sure the street gangs and cartels could also sell on the Silk Road, but that would make them adapt to its culture and end most of the endemic problems with violence associated with them.
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It would be better if we simply legalized drugs and taxed them. We'd eliminate overnight the drug gangs, reduce our prison population and increase tax revenue. We spend 12 BILLION dollars a year on drug enforcement, we could recover that and probably double it by legalizing and taxing.
Next time they tell you social security and medicare are going bankrupt keep in mind that by legalizing drugs we could eliminate that problem.
Re:Go Ross, Go! (Score:5, Insightful)
No, its going to be a long slow proccess eliminating gangs. Cutting off their *easy* source of income is the first step. The next is breaking them up before they find something else as lucrative, because they will try something else.
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There isn't anything else as lucrative. That's the point. Drugs are the lifeblood of US gangs. Yes there are some in Mexico that derive revenue from other sources but when you talking about your average US street gang drugs are their only business and the only one that pays even in the ballpark.
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That's correct. Ending alcohol prohibition did not eliminate the gangs it spawned, but it did weaken them by cutting off their major source of funding. But they quickly moved onto other prohibited items and plain ol' theft. The lesson we need to learn is that prohibition creates criminals.
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Don't forget regulating them. They should be regulated much as alcohol is, so you know what you're purchasing, purchasers are of age and so on.
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there's profits to be made in those private prisons... guess who does the lobbying to keep those drugs criminalised...
[Citation needed]. I know that it is in the best interests of private prison businesses to have more people in prison. I know that these companies also have lobbyists. Having spent over a decade in a government services company (who has also provided services to state prison systems), I know that most of us need to have lobbyists just to get business, and for things like helping state legislature write RFP's that will allow us to do business together (e.g. coming up with measurable and competitive propos
Re:Go Ross, Go! (Score:5, Insightful)
There is nothing so bad about any drug to include heroin(which I think is downright terrible), that is in the same leauge as the abusive authority of the DEA, which has for the past 30 years, ignored any and all constitutional safeguards and protections, to include due proccesss(civil fortieture), and habeus corpus(parallel construction), to virtually fail at its goal of keeping drugs off the streets. Giving up our rights did not do anything for us.
You don't have to be high to see that. You need some common fucking sense.
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Or even if they're not in pain. There's nothing at all wrong with heroin, and it's quite safe for even chronic use. Opiates are among the safest and most studied drugs we know of, next to cannabis and psychedelics. The bad consequences of opiate use all result from prohibition, particularly the artificially high costs imposed by the black market.
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I'm just using the opperunity to get on my soap box to decry the disasterous war on drugs. Something that I don't think can be done enough.
Re:Go Ross, Go! (Score:4, Interesting)
Silk Road Kingpin or not, I'm rooting for Ross here.
I wonder what the people he attempted to have murdered think about all this?
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Oh, and by the way, the "group think" here at Slashdot at one time was that Hans Reiser [wikipedia.org] was innocent. Of course he admitted to murding his wife and dumpping her body in a shallow grave.
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meh, the people he put a hit out on were extortionist assholefaces
Re:Go Ross, Go! (Score:5, Informative)
You mean the people who entered into an underworld business agreement where the stakes were known to be very high and attempted to blackmail a kingpin threatening the safety and very life of both him and his various other, honest associates?
Yes, lets pretend they had no part in bringing that upon themselves.
I have far more sympathy for him than them. Blackmailers are scum. They are such scum that even the state generally agrees they are criminals even when what they threaten to reveal is crime.
Re:Go Ross, Go! (Score:4, Interesting)
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American government does it regularly, often not worrying about collateral damage as well. Just need to declare someone the right type of scum.
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Yeah, when the stakes are high enough, you arguably have the power to declare the hit, and the ordering of the hit, to be legal.
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Assuming he did of course, at this point it's just an unproven allegation.
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the people he attempted to have murdered
You mean "the people he alledgedly attempted to have murdered".
I'm not saying he didn't do it, but at this point he's innocent because he hasn't been found guilty by a court.
Unless you were his accomplice or have seen evidence that hasn't been released publicly, you're making the assumption that he's guilty based on nothing. If you were his accomplice of have seen such evidence, then perhaps this public forum isn't the best place to be running your mouth off.
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The DOJ is welcome to make their case for attempted murder if they like once the whole silk road thing is tossed for lack of admissible evidence.
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If we follow the arguments in the article to their logical conclusion, then you're talking about an accusation coming from a bunch of criminals. Indeed, one might argue that it's a criminal conspiracy against him.
If they're going to act like criminals, then the government has no credibility in any accusation they make against Mr. Ulbricht.
Now, he likely is a criminal scumbag who di
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America is the great experiment in democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess at this point we are finding out just exactly where the limits of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" really are.
These guys are really stretching... (Score:5, Informative)
The whole point of the first bit of Article II Section 1 is to give the President and his appointees powers ordinary schmucks don't have to execute the law. These powers are somewhat restricted by the law enforcement Amendments, but are still a whole hell of a lot broader then the rights ordinary citizens enjoy. Which means if you're a criminal defendant, and you're telling a Judge that evidence should be thrown out because it would have been illegal for someone who isn't the government to do it, that ain't gonna work. Weev and other hackers have Rights, but they don't have powers, so what they are allowed to do is totally irrelevant to what the government is allowed to do in a criminal case. They're intentionally wasting the Court's time.
If they were making a Fourth Amendment Argument that could get interesting because the data belonged to an American; which means the Feds should have had a warrant. However, the Supreme Court has created something called a under a "good faith exception," which allows the government to use it's search and seizure powers on anyone it reasonably suspects of not being American, and I sincerely doubt that most Icelandic webservers are rented out to dudes from Peoria.
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Except that's not the argument. The argument is that they exceeded even those broader powers granted to law enforcement.
The Constitution offers no exception for non-citizens and certainly not for citizens who might 'reasonably' be thought to be non-citizens. The court's fantasies notwithstanding.
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According to the article that is the entire argument his lawyers are making. It quotes absolutely zero statements on the Fourth Amendment. It quotes a lot of BS about "illegal behavior," and "double standards," but it says precisely jack-shit about Ulbricht's lawyers saying the Feds needed a warrant.
As for the Fourth, the actual text of what the Amendment says is that it only applies to "the people." Which means the US people, not Icelanders living in Reykjavik.
Whether the Court's right about the good faith
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Read my post again. According to the Constitution, his nationality does not matter. The whole thing about American or not is an ugly bit of unsupportable sophistry from the courts.
Beyond that, since they are not admitting how they actually obtained the information and who actually obtained it, they are now (knowing very well he is American) violating his right to face his accuser. They are also introducing inadmissable hearsay and lying under oath to make it appear to be admissible testimony.
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In US law, a document referring to "the people" with a definite article is generally assumed to refer solely to the American people. If the Founders wanted to give rights to innocent Canadians they would have simply said "the right to be secure...," rather then "the right of the people to be secure..." So his nationality is extremely important.
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But that's assuming they knew he was american the whole time.
By that logic, this a perfectly valid argument for a cop performing an illegal search and seizure:
"Well he looked like a spic at the time, thought he was a dewback"
Is that what you want?
This is why the idea that non-citizens don't have rights is really dangerous. If a cop pulls you over and manages to lose your ID, and claims in court that he had no way of knowing that you were a citizen, then you effectively have no rights. You are the lowest common denominator.
This is why the cops/FBI/CIA shouldn't be all
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Reread the Fourth.
It applies to the American people as a whole, which means that in theory even dewbacks get the benefit of the doubt. In practice they really don't because a dude whose first language is Spanish and has never earned more then $20k in a year isn't gonna be able to get a good immigration lawyer to stop his ass from being deported; but then the entire US Court system is designed to be very easy on anyone who either a) knows it's ins and outs or b) has the cold hard cash to hire somebody who do
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All of them. Seriously.
Congress gets the power to make any laws they want governing certain areas in Article I. Article II gives the President King-like powers of a) enforcing those laws, b) participating in the Legislative process (the veto), and c) he gets some King-like powers of his own.
Since your rights are circumscribed by any law the government enforces, and the government has the right to enforce said laws, it's clear that as long as the government stays in it's lane (ie: statutes emanating from an
Not surprising (Score:2)
Technical claims as reported puzzling (Score:2)
Has the defense presented any actual evidence that the site was hacked?
The Ars Technica article [arstechnica.com] says: "Experts suggested that the FBI didn't see leakage from the site's login page but contacted the site's IP directly and got the PHPMyAdmin configuration page. That raises the question of how the authorities obtained the IP address and located the servers." ... but that doesn't make sense. If having the IP address was all they needed to identify that it was indeed the droids - sorry, server - they were looki
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You're missing that the server wouldn't respond to any routable IP address. It only communicated through tor. So try them all and get nothing of worth.
That means they could only have gotten an IP address by hacking a great many innocent 3rd parties using technology only the NSA has.
In turn, that means the defendant is being denied the right to face his accuser and the FBI is trying to represent inadmissible hearsay as actual testimony by means of a few big lies under oath.
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You're missing that the server wouldn't respond to any routable IP address. It only communicated through tor.
Incorrect. It was discovered leaking a public IP through the Captcha in early 2013. That info was posted a number of places, including Buttcoin.org.
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And refuted in several other places.
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I believe the Defense actually showed that did not actually happen. The logs which are in evidence from the server show that the supposed CAPTCHA leak never happened. The CAPTCHA story was apparently an atempt at parallel construction that failed. So now the defense team is working to get all the evidence gathered as a result thrown out. The prosecution is stuck either revealing their potentially illegal methods or hoping that the Judge just really likes them.
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That's why agencies that use the NSA services choose to re-route the sexting from the smart phone to ruin a person's reputation, rather than go after them on criminal grounds.
*wink*
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The article says "Experts suggested that the FBI didn't see leakage from the site's login page but contacted the site's IP directly and got the PHPMyAdmin configuration page." That's the technical claim I'm talking about, and the only one that I've seen so far in support of the contention that the site was hacked.
If this claim is credible, then the site was in fact responding on its routable address, and might (at least in principle) have been found by scanning the internet.
If this claim is not credible, t
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If it had been found by just scanning the internet, why were the FBI so keen to lie under oath? Surely not just for funsies?!
Someone's confused (Score:2)
How can you ever have rules (Score:2)
Sure... too bad they DIDN'T BOTHER TO GET ONE! (Score:4, Insightful)
[nothing else needs to be said]
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Offtopic? Wow, the three-letter-agencies have modpoints tonight.
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You posted a comment that said nothing besides "[nothing else needs to be said]", it's a weird way to agree with the GP and doesn't add anything to the discussion.
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You know that posts have subject lines, right?
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Thanks.
Incidentally, at the time I posted complaining about the offtopic mod, I noticed that several other pro-totalitarianism posts were modded up an other pro-civil-rights posts were modded offtopic. It wasn't just my post that I thought TLAs (or their shills) were spending their modpoints on.
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Only now do I notice that you put your comment in the subject. Hint, some people read the comment box rather then the subject and at least you should duplicate your message in the message box.
Personally if I was using my mod points in this article, I wouldn't have done more then skim your message and skipped it even though it deserved up-modding.
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I usually do put my comment in the message body, but in this case I was replying specifically to the parent post's subject line.
Next time that happens, I'll write something like "[see subject]" instead so that nobody gets confused.
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Now that you mention it...
Today's the first time I've ever gotten modded offtopic. And that post was anti-government because it pointed out that the Constitution was not about universal freedom until the 1860s. I'm not surprised about the flame-bait mods, but off-topic was just weird man.
OTOH, my post pointing out that you really have to stretch to believe any judge is gonna care whether a given search looked like a hack from Weev is still at 5.
Re:Sure... too bad they DIDN'T BOTHER TO GET ONE! (Score:4, Insightful)
Who reads the subject line? A post should be in the post if you want people to read it.
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I don't know where people keep getting this idea. Mabey the fact we are desensitized to it, but no they don't. Cops have the right to arrest whoever the warrant is for, they have a right to seize whatever the warrant tells them to seize, and they have t
Re:Nice try, it's called a WARRANT (Score:4, Insightful)
That'd be a good point, except they had no Warrant (Score:2)
You're arguing a strawman argument, or rather a non-existent man argument. IF they had had a warrant, what they did would not be a problem. But they "hacked" into the server "exceeding authorized access" in violation of the CFAA WITHOUT A WARRANT. Hence it was a criminal act, by their own definition.
Now if you remove the CFAA, or clarify the law so it can't be misused to prosecute innocent uses, and uses that security professionals would normally use when looking for weaknesses in systems and not from a m
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JUST USE ADBLOCK YoU LaZY MoTHeRFuCKiNG PiSS OFF SHiT
No, just use your fucking hosts file.
Re:Stop The Video Ads Slashdot! (Score:2)
Ha! I remember playing whack-a-mole with my hosts file. Some people need a hobby, I guess, but I'd rather let someone else do the work of keeping track of every new ad and tracking vector that pops up. When ad blocking software first appeared, I jumped on it. Thank you, writers of ad blocking wares throughout the years! Besides, do you really imagine the sub-literate moron who made that post, an idiot too lazy or stupid to install ad blocking software, whose Karma is so bad on this site that he doesn't have
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There are plenty of hosts file managers that handle all the shit things like ABP do.
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can you guess which Republican Governor was indicted this year in his own Capitol city?
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Every defendant is also innocent until proven guilty, so of course they're going to defend themselves. Your method is "we've arrested you, therefore you must be guilty and shouldn't bother with a defense."
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But it was never proven.... you can't argue "obvious" because brains are different.
Obvious to me is not merging into traffic going 25mph in a 70mph freeway... but today someone did just that, then flipped me the bird when I honked and slammed on my brakes.
Obvious to me is letting other people do what they want if they are not bothering society or killing people/raping/etc..... Yet some Alaskan Trooper will follow a group of teenagers 6 hours into the brush and bust them the instant they light a joint in the
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You're missing the point. I'm not saying convict people without a trial. I'm saying have the trial, throw out no evidence on the grounds that it was collected improperly, and then try not only the accused but also the police in the event that they are apparently in violation of laws themselves.
The current status quo is that if the police break the law trying to catch you break the law then the evidence against you can't be used because the police didn't collect it properly. That is wrong. two wrongs do not
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the problem you're addressing is the relationship between the District Attorney/Attorney General and the police/FBI. Currently they exist in the same branch of government. I would argue that they shouldn't.
Have a fourth branch of government or something. So the police stand before the DA or AG as members of a separate chain of command.
When there is a police/FBI cover up it is typically with the complicity of the DA/AG. Take them out of the loop and you make it harder for them to do that.
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When the guilty go free, society itself is punished, the public is punished, the people are punished.
I am saying the police go to jail under this policy. So they are punished. That is the debt paid.
Last time.
Two wrongs do not make a right. Last word.
Good day.
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The police must be punished for breaking the law. However, so to must OTHER criminals they have uncovered... even if the evidence was obtained illegally.
That's not how it works. The police is punished for illegal searches by making the results of the illegal search not usable as evidence, or as a reason for further investigation. That's it. It was decided that this is the proper way to stop the police from making illegal searches against innocent citizens.
It's also quite obvious that a police officer may make an illegal search by mistake. If the result of such a search could be used, you would expect police officers in getting more clever making illegal
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I know how it fucking works at this moment. The whole point was that it should work a different way.
Why am I constantly surrounded by damned dirty apes?
So, it should work in a way where the authorities can do whatever they want to prove someone guilty of a crime? Do you realize what would happen in a country such as the United States where for-profit private prisons exist, should your little childish scenario come into play? The punishment for "illegal search" would be a day's paid vacation for the police and a $25 fine, whereas if they uncovered some minor malfeasance by a citizen, it'd be a minimum of 3 years hard labor in a prison factory.
This is some
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If the authorities are prepared to go to jail for breaking that law then that is their choice. Just as you can do all sorts of things so long as you're prepared to go to jail for it.
Why do I have to keep saying this... the police under what I am saying would be prosecuted and sent to jail for breaking this law.
So yes, they could break the law to catch you. But they'd pay the same price you paid for committing crimes. They would go to jail right beside you.
Now here you say "but the penalty wouldn't be stiff
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A problem with this statute is that it allows people we know to be guilty to get off.
Well I don't agree. People with power to incarcerate you following the rule of law and checks and balances is FAR MORE important to me, than some dark net distributor getting away with it.
Some things are legal and some are not -- and I can see many examples of where that decision was not informed.
It's better that a thousand guilty go free than one innocent go to prison. The guilty will commit another crime and we may catch
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That would reward criminal actions of law enforcement officials. There are good reasons why illegally obtained evidence cannot be used in court.
Just to clarify: The reason for all this is _not_ to prevent criminals to get away with crimes if the police misbehaves, the reason is to protect innocent citizens from police misbehaviour.
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I'm still waiting for the defense lawyer that says..."Your honor my client is a scoundrel criminal and you should give him the maximum punishment for his crime."
It will never happen because it would be illegal for the lawyer to do so. The worst a lawyer can do to his client if he knows his client is guilty and cannot bring himself to put forth his best efforts in defense is recuse himself from the case... and even this can have repercussions for the lawyer such as have his case reviewed by the Bar Association.