4 ms·

>And they'll say "See, see! This works, this should be legal it catches bad people, look at what this guy was doing" You lost me here. Of course people are go

by treis 6y ago

>And they'll say "See, see! This works, this should be legal it catches bad people, look at what this guy was doing" You lost me here. Of course people are going to conclude that arresting a person that set fire to a car in order to intimidate a witness in a sexual abuse case is a good thing. And why shouldn't they? That sounds like a slam dunk good thing for society.

saalweachter 6y ago
This is, actually, an anti-feature for some people. People don't like things they don't like to be effective, because they'd like to be able to argue on that basis as well. "We shouldn't torture people because it is cruel and a violation of their human rights" is a purely moral argument; "We shouldn't torture people because it is cruel and a violation of their human rights, and it isn't even effective at extracting useful information or true confessions, study after study has shown blah blah blah" is a moral argument with an effectiveness chaser thrown in. Even if you don't share the same moral framework as me, I can still possibly persuade you to act in a way I see as moral because acting immorally doesn't gain you anything but wanton cruelty. People love to do this for all sorts of arguments, from taxes to environmental or fiscal policies to their monopoly house rules. Granted, most of the time people also just pull their effectiveness claims out of their ass, but it is a very effective rhetorical technique.
rmtech 6y ago
> That sounds like a slam dunk good thing for society. That particular application is a good thing. But the existence of such capabilities can be a net negative, and by a huge margin. Crime is something like a "cost of doing business" of a free society. Take all the crime away with an all-seeing Eye of Sauron and you risk a technological dictatorship that opens death camps for the currently unpopular race/class and crushes all resistance.
- treis 6y ago
  >But the existence of such capabilities can be a net negative And that's the problem with the pro-privacy side. Their argument relies on the idea that it can be a net negative but provides little evidence that it is a net negative. They argue theoretic harm against actual real world benefit. When that's not a winning argument they lament the existence of the real world benefit instead of re-evaluating their position.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution >the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences determined that at least 4% of people on death row were and are likely innocent. Keep in mind that death penalty cases get a disproportionate level of attention and process and ought to be the least erroneous. In many lesser cases people are threatened with sentences that are many times more punitive than the average perpetrator receives in order to inspire them to take a plea deal for a sentence that is merely life ruining instead of life ending. Wrongful convictions in these scenarios are liable to be much higher than the 4% innocent we murder in public. In America some jurisdictions are corrupt to a legendary degree. Recent years saw footage of both one corrupt cop staging a scene after murdering a citizen and another literally caught on his own body cam planting drugs during traffic stops. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/11/florida-cop-meth-drugs-arrests-scandal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/11/florida-cop... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-south-carolina-shooting-slager/south-carolina-cop-staged-scene-after-shooting-black-man-prosecutor-idUSKBN12Y1XU https://www.reuters.com/article/us-south-carolina-shooting-s... Countless other examples abound and I omit them only for brevity. Tech like facial recognition, geo fence warrants, and fishing expeditions that begin with search queries are inherently designed to cast a broad net that criminals will increasingly avoid to the degree possible by you know using VPNs, not googling stuff you plan to set on fire, not googling how to whack your wife etc, not bringing your phone to the crime. Whereas criminals will do the minimal work required to avoid scrutiny it will continue to pull in normal people who will be threatened with decades in prison in order to steal mere years of their lives. Logically exploratory usage of new techniques is liable to be carefully considered to establish useful precedents. Pretending that American cops would plant drugs but wont imprison black folks that happened to walk down an adjacent street in the 3 hour window where we think the rape happened seems disingenuous. Its like looking at 50s cars through currently informed eyes and saying we need to see twisted bloody metal before we prove that seat belts are necessary.
  - UncleEntity 6y ago
    > Their argument relies on the idea that it can be a net negative but provides little evidence that it is a net negative. That's the problem with the majority of these cases, they involve testing the limits of what the government is allowed to do by defending the rights of really bad people whom most people have zero sympathy for. I don't really expect the DEA to serve a no-knock warrant on my residence because Amazon currently thinks I'm a pot grower (due to buying a bluetooth thermometer which is apparently popular with actual pot growers) but if the government had All The Data I'm actually a pretty low risk for a bad bust once you input it all into the PreCrime2000™ algorithm. I personally feel its the responsibility of the people who wish to erode our civil rights to prove the net benefit far outweighs the protections currently we enjoy as a direct result of British colonial abuses -- which, IMHO, is all the argument you need since the Bill of Rights wasn't created out of thin air for some idealized perfect society to strive for.
- hammock 6y ago
  >That particular application is a good thing How can you say that? Do you believe Williams is guilty? Has he been found guilty? Even still, suppose you KNEW he was guilty - would you be okay with the government doing /whatever it took/ to find the evidence needed to prove his guilt?
  - rmtech 6y ago
    I don't know about this particular case but I am willing to concede the point - I certainly know that criminals exist and that catching them is good.
    - hammock 6y ago
      Not to beat a dead horse, but to crystallize my point..it's not just about waiting until we find out if the guy is guilty or not to make a judgment. "Catching criminals" is an outcome/end. It's not really an action we can take. It's a future state that may or may not come into existence after we undertake certain means. "This particular application" is a means to an end. That is a key difference. I'm questioning whether the means always justify the ends.
xenocyon 6y ago
> arresting a person that set fire to a car in order to intimidate a witness in a sexual abuse case is a good thing The little problem is all the people who might have Googled 'how to set fire to a car' but who didn't actually set fire to a car. Even the basics of conditional probability are not well understood by many judges and jurors - heck, they're not even understood by many people on HN. Many people have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit. We know of many cases where people have been exonerated after years in jail. We don't even know how many people haven't been exonerated and are continuing to rot in jail for crimes they didn't commit.
- graeme 6y ago
  Presumably they’ll seek other evidence and not convict based on google searches alone. At least in this case, as it is high profile. Certainly I could see this being abused as other types of evidence are today
  - hammock 6y ago
    The US Constitution doesn't just protect against being wrongly convicted. It protects against unreasonable search & seizure - this protection applies to everyone, and is wholly separate from any protections attached to criminal investigations.
    - graeme 6y ago
      This sort of US is much wider than the US. Any government can request this information with a warrant. Restricting it to US ideas narrows the conversation.
- treis 6y ago
  >The little problem is all the people who might have Googled 'how to set fire to a car' but who didn't actually set fire to a car. That's not what they did. The got a warrant for those that searched the specific address around the specific time the crime occured. Then tracked the phone to the crime scene. After that level of identification then they subpoenaed the searches for that person.
srtjstjsj 6y ago
Your conflation of "arrest" with "convicted beyond a reasonable doubt and not just for looking the part" is terrifying.

by treis 6y ago

saalweachter 6y ago

This is, actually, an anti-feature for some people. People don't like things they don't like to be effective, because they'd like to be able to argue on that basis as well. "We shouldn't torture people because it is cruel and a violation of their human rights" is a purely moral argument; "We shouldn't torture people because it is cruel and a violation of their human rights, and it isn't even effective at extracting useful information or true confessions, study after study has shown blah blah blah" is a moral argument with an effectiveness chaser thrown in. Even if you don't share the same moral framework as me, I can still possibly persuade you to act in a way I see as moral because acting immorally doesn't gain you anything but wanton cruelty. People love to do this for all sorts of arguments, from taxes to environmental or fiscal policies to their monopoly house rules. Granted, most of the time people also just pull their effectiveness claims out of their ass, but it is a very effective rhetorical technique.

rmtech 6y ago

> That sounds like a slam dunk good thing for society. That particular application is a good thing. But the existence of such capabilities can be a net negative, and by a huge margin. Crime is something like a "cost of doing business" of a free society. Take all the crime away with an all-seeing Eye of Sauron and you risk a technological dictatorship that opens death camps for the currently unpopular race/class and crushes all resistance.

treis 6y ago
>But the existence of such capabilities can be a net negative And that's the problem with the pro-privacy side. Their argument relies on the idea that it can be a net negative but provides little evidence that it is a net negative. They argue theoretic harm against actual real world benefit. When that's not a winning argument they lament the existence of the real world benefit instead of re-evaluating their position.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrongful_execution >the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences determined that at least 4% of people on death row were and are likely innocent. Keep in mind that death penalty cases get a disproportionate level of attention and process and ought to be the least erroneous. In many lesser cases people are threatened with sentences that are many times more punitive than the average perpetrator receives in order to inspire them to take a plea deal for a sentence that is merely life ruining instead of life ending. Wrongful convictions in these scenarios are liable to be much higher than the 4% innocent we murder in public. In America some jurisdictions are corrupt to a legendary degree. Recent years saw footage of both one corrupt cop staging a scene after murdering a citizen and another literally caught on his own body cam planting drugs during traffic stops. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/11/florida-cop-meth-drugs-arrests-scandal/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/11/florida-cop... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-south-carolina-shooting-slager/south-carolina-cop-staged-scene-after-shooting-black-man-prosecutor-idUSKBN12Y1XU https://www.reuters.com/article/us-south-carolina-shooting-s... Countless other examples abound and I omit them only for brevity. Tech like facial recognition, geo fence warrants, and fishing expeditions that begin with search queries are inherently designed to cast a broad net that criminals will increasingly avoid to the degree possible by you know using VPNs, not googling stuff you plan to set on fire, not googling how to whack your wife etc, not bringing your phone to the crime. Whereas criminals will do the minimal work required to avoid scrutiny it will continue to pull in normal people who will be threatened with decades in prison in order to steal mere years of their lives. Logically exploratory usage of new techniques is liable to be carefully considered to establish useful precedents. Pretending that American cops would plant drugs but wont imprison black folks that happened to walk down an adjacent street in the 3 hour window where we think the rape happened seems disingenuous. Its like looking at 50s cars through currently informed eyes and saying we need to see twisted bloody metal before we prove that seat belts are necessary.
- UncleEntity 6y ago
  > Their argument relies on the idea that it can be a net negative but provides little evidence that it is a net negative. That's the problem with the majority of these cases, they involve testing the limits of what the government is allowed to do by defending the rights of really bad people whom most people have zero sympathy for. I don't really expect the DEA to serve a no-knock warrant on my residence because Amazon currently thinks I'm a pot grower (due to buying a bluetooth thermometer which is apparently popular with actual pot growers) but if the government had All The Data I'm actually a pretty low risk for a bad bust once you input it all into the PreCrime2000™ algorithm. I personally feel its the responsibility of the people who wish to erode our civil rights to prove the net benefit far outweighs the protections currently we enjoy as a direct result of British colonial abuses -- which, IMHO, is all the argument you need since the Bill of Rights wasn't created out of thin air for some idealized perfect society to strive for.
hammock 6y ago
>That particular application is a good thing How can you say that? Do you believe Williams is guilty? Has he been found guilty? Even still, suppose you KNEW he was guilty - would you be okay with the government doing /whatever it took/ to find the evidence needed to prove his guilt?
- rmtech 6y ago
  I don't know about this particular case but I am willing to concede the point - I certainly know that criminals exist and that catching them is good.
  - hammock 6y ago
    Not to beat a dead horse, but to crystallize my point..it's not just about waiting until we find out if the guy is guilty or not to make a judgment. "Catching criminals" is an outcome/end. It's not really an action we can take. It's a future state that may or may not come into existence after we undertake certain means. "This particular application" is a means to an end. That is a key difference. I'm questioning whether the means always justify the ends.

xenocyon 6y ago

> arresting a person that set fire to a car in order to intimidate a witness in a sexual abuse case is a good thing The little problem is all the people who might have Googled 'how to set fire to a car' but who didn't actually set fire to a car. Even the basics of conditional probability are not well understood by many judges and jurors - heck, they're not even understood by many people on HN. Many people have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit. We know of many cases where people have been exonerated after years in jail. We don't even know how many people haven't been exonerated and are continuing to rot in jail for crimes they didn't commit.

graeme 6y ago
Presumably they’ll seek other evidence and not convict based on google searches alone. At least in this case, as it is high profile. Certainly I could see this being abused as other types of evidence are today
- hammock 6y ago
  The US Constitution doesn't just protect against being wrongly convicted. It protects against unreasonable search & seizure - this protection applies to everyone, and is wholly separate from any protections attached to criminal investigations.
  - graeme 6y ago
    This sort of US is much wider than the US. Any government can request this information with a warrant. Restricting it to US ideas narrows the conversation.
treis 6y ago
>The little problem is all the people who might have Googled 'how to set fire to a car' but who didn't actually set fire to a car. That's not what they did. The got a warrant for those that searched the specific address around the specific time the crime occured. Then tracked the phone to the crime scene. After that level of identification then they subpoenaed the searches for that person.

srtjstjsj 6y ago

Your conflation of "arrest" with "convicted beyond a reasonable doubt and not just for looking the part" is terrifying.