8 ms·

Imagine if our justice system worked like this, where you could get convicted without ever seeing the evidence against you because it would reveal the methods t

by madrox 4y ago

Imagine if our justice system worked like this, where you could get convicted without ever seeing the evidence against you because it would reveal the methods the police used. I realize it’s not entirely the same thing, but it’s also not entirely different.

rdtwo 4y ago
Traffic and as speeding tickets almost work the same way
- cjbprime 4y ago
  You can contest them in court and demand that evidence is shown. That's not almost the same at all.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    You can but at least in the last state I lived, a cop's guesstimation is accepted (they count in their head or watch and count the lines or something, or that's the theory). In practice if the cop used an uncalibrated speed gun or whatever he'll always just say it was his guesstimation and precedent holds that the preponderance of the evidence shows that the ticket is valid. So it returns back to the evidence being hidden and parallel construction being used to present the court case.
    - ______-_-______ 4y ago
      I honestly think that's still better than most online bans. If you find out you were ticketed because a cop had a bad day, it's not justice, but at least it's closure. Now you know, and you can accept it or fight/appeal if you're so inclined. If you're permabanned because of a google/ebay AI bug, you can't even get that far.
    - cormacrelf 4y ago
      Not sure if this is your intention or even what jurisdiction you’re talking about, but “a preponderance of the evidence” is a fancy way of saying “to a civil standard” ie “more likely than not”. Seems unlikely for a criminal offence, where that’s never the standard. It was probably a fair bit more complicated than you’re making out.
      - tyrfing 4y ago
        > in some states, minor traffic violations aren't considered "crimes"—they're "civil" offenses. So, in these states, the government might be held to a lesser standard of proof for traffic cases. For example, in New York, the standard of proof for traffic violations is "clear and convincing evidence." And in Oregon, the state needs to prove traffic offenses only by a "preponderance of the evidence."
      - notch656a 4y ago
        Those are the literal words spoken by the judge the last time I challenged a speeding case. I was also forced to testify against myself and told clearly and specifically by the judge I had no fifth amendment right to remain silent. [admittedly that challenge happened in a different state than the guesstimation state. I don't even bother to challenge in the guesstimation state because you're basically fucked no matter what.] The judge's explanation to me was that any offense without possible jail time are held to preponderance of the evidence and constitutional rights such as 5th amendment are revoked. I've also been called to show up in a 'Mayors court' for speeding where the mayor who is the cousin of the cop oversees your case. Good luck with that; the ACLU has actually done a pretty extensive documentation on Mayor's courts and the corruption involved there.
        torstenvl 4y ago
        The 5th amendment (or rather the 14th in this case) requires "due process" before taking your life, liberty, or property. As is probably intuitive, the process that is "due" for taking property, which is less than is "due" for taking liberty, which is still somewhat less than is "due" for taking life. (This latter hasn't always been the case, but read Brennan's concurrence in Furman v. Georgia and progeny cases establishing the death-is-different axiom of American criminal jurisprudence.) A property interest that doesn't implicate any liberty interest may be taken with a bare minimum of due process, often just notice and an opportunity to be heard. If a hearing is granted, the standard is a preponderance (not beyond a reasonable doubt). I assume the penalty for your speeding ticket was a fine only, yes?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
koolba 4y ago
> Imagine if our justice system worked like this, where you could get convicted without ever seeing the evidence against you because it would reveal the methods the police used. That exists and it’s just as prone to abuse as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
- em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
  Also the US No Fly List.
  - Tao332 4y ago
    Also the Disposition Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
    - xvector 4y ago
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - teawrecks 4y ago
        We are in charge of protecting our country. We choose who does it, and should hold those who don't do it appropriately accountable.
        xvector 4y ago
        And the Disposition Matrix has been hailed as an extremely effective component with regards to protecting our country. It does not target US citizens, so there isn't really any concern here.
        4y ago
MichaelBurge 4y ago
That's actually how it works though. See "Parallel Construction". Except instead of saying "Access Denied" which immediately makes you suspicious and comment on the internet, they construct an alternative evidence chain so you waste your effort defending against the wrong thing, and the true techniques never come into question.
epistasis 4y ago
This is the difference between public and private entities. However when a monopoly starts to take over, what is a private entity starts to have governmental powers. In the US, there has been a century long politics effort to reduce anti-monopoly protections, to the point that the standard is now "are consumers being actively harmed in pricing" and what you experience would likely never be considered something that could now result in anti-monopoly action. And without those anti-monopoly protections, eBay gets to collect economic rents—pure economic waste that profits eBay and hurts everyone else. We need a return to Georgism to help fight some really bad politics that have developed over the past century.
rzwitserloot 4y ago
In the justice system of most western countries, the general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars". To live up to that statement, society pays. Through the nose - letting criminals walk free is annoying, we do pay the cost of trying to find them, and we pay a large cost gathering evidence to make it stick in court even when e.g. the cops are 80% sure. Courts are very expensive; judges have a salary. As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'. eBay could choose to pay these costs. It will mean: * Paying for a tribunal of sorts, paying to have them set up procedures and checking that they live up to them. * Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'. * Accepting that fraudsters who do get 'caught', still spend a lot of time 'free' whilst the laborious process runs its course. * To manage fraudsters, rules are created and publicised which interfere with legitimate business to some extent; everybody on the platform will have to deal with the fact they can no longer do this. (Laws that oversimplify - in society parlance: Walking through a red light even when there are clearly no cars at all is still illegal; that anybody can clearly see it was safe to do this doesn't change either the fact that you could be ticketed for this offense, or that police should just arbitrarily let this go). In this case, 'society' becomes 'ebay users'. Do ebay users want to carry the burden of this cost? In any case, ebay users carry the burden of paying for the salaries of eBay's board which may well be excessive. Why isn't there an ebay alternative? One that is more expensive for buyers and sellers but has all this? In large part, network effect makes it infeasible to have many ebay-esques out there. None of them would be any good at that point, and/or you get services that make it easy to post to all of them.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > In the justice system of most western countries, the general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars". > To live up to that statement, society pays. … As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'. Aren't you describing a cost that is alleviated by (allegedly) making sure that the innocent aren't imprisoned, or, rather, a cost that would be borne if the legal system made sure to imprison those whom "the cops are 80% sure" were guilty?
mulmen 4y ago
Well you have a choice in e-commerce marketplaces. You don’t have a choice in justice systems. eBay does not have a monopoly on violence.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  Well yes and no. In the UK ebay has a monopoly. There are no other marketplaces that offer the same services and the same reach. That is why it should be regulated.
vitro 4y ago
Read Kafka's The Trial [1], nice description of how it feels to be a person living in such system. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial
- version_five 4y ago
  Just a reminder that Kafka's book like The Trial and The Castle are based on his experience working within the Hapsburg Empire bureaucracy. He wasn't imagining some nightmare world so much as documenting it.
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  I wasn't arrested, repeatedly seduced by a barrage of women with ulterior motives, or killed by the government, so my story would make a terrible novel, but this is how I felt dealing with the government as the executor of a family member's estate. After I grieved for some time and taken sentimental items, her house had fallen into disrepair, so I sold it at a loss to an investor, and I was mostly ready to start moving on with my life. Somehow, the death certificate provided to me by the government about a year prior to this did not indicate that the government was aware of her death, and I needed send them back a copy of that very certificate in order to make the government officially aware of what happened. Then I was told that I would need to wait six months for the estate process to end. During that time, I was given random tasks to do at no set interval, usually with deadlines of only a couple days. Then literally one day before the six month time period was over, I was told that the government would be taking the money in the estate due to unpaid medical bills from some years before her death (the same trips to the hospital that had failed to diagnose her illness in the first place). After getting more lawyers to investigate whether this was possible and correct (it was, private creditors' time limit starts at the time of death, but government's time limit starts whenever the aforementioned paperwork is filed (also this only took me a day or so to figure out, because I do not enjoy long drawn out bureaucratic processes unlike the state government I was interacting with)), I resigned to give up and give them the money. However, that was not an option either. It took ANOTHER six months of random tasks to actually give them the money. I honestly don't remember what most of the tasks were, because none of it made any sense, but the final task really summed up the whole process. I received a call on a Thursday afternoon: I had to mail a physical check to my lawyer to then hand-deliver to a department within seven days, but that department was only open on Mondays 10AM to noon. All for the terrible crime of having a family member die without having memorized estate law ahead of time. I do consider what they did some unnecessary abstract form of violence/coercion, because otherwise I obviously would not have voluntarily signed up to do any of that shit. At least if they had been honest enough to tell me at the start they were planning to just take everything, I would've just declined to be the executor and let the government do what it wanted with the property. They could have had that money (probably more money, since I wouldn't have paid a third of it to an estate lawyer and the house would've been in better condition) close to two years earlier and left me alone at the same time.
bambax 4y ago
> I realize it’s not entirely the same thing It is absolutely the same thing.
kingcharles 4y ago
You have no constitutional right in the US to see any of the evidence against you before trial. And where I am in Illinois, until a couple of years ago, if you were held in a county jail awaiting trial you were prohibited by law from having a copy of any of the evidence against you.
ajross 4y ago
> Imagine if our justice system worked like this Imagine if our justice system had to operate at a profit. eBay isn't operating as a democratically endowed, taxpayer-funded operation for the public commonwealth. They're just a company trying to make a buck. It turns out, if you want to make a buck by providing market-making services to third parties, you become a huge magnet for scams and fraud. And you need to deal with that. This is how it works. If you really got what you seem to want, it would be a government-regulated online market. And... let's be honest, that would probably be much worse for the buyers (who are the targets of fraud, remember) than eBay ever has been.
charlieyu1 4y ago
So pretty much China. The methods used should be as vague as possible so that anyone could be convicted when convenient. Keeps the fear factor up.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
A law professor in my country just recently stated that proactive bans on online platforms are not a problem. My country is known for being digitally underdeveloped but I was still surprised that you can refrain from touching grass so effectively.

by madrox 4y ago

rdtwo 4y ago

Traffic and as speeding tickets almost work the same way

cjbprime 4y ago
You can contest them in court and demand that evidence is shown. That's not almost the same at all.
- notch656a 4y ago
  You can but at least in the last state I lived, a cop's guesstimation is accepted (they count in their head or watch and count the lines or something, or that's the theory). In practice if the cop used an uncalibrated speed gun or whatever he'll always just say it was his guesstimation and precedent holds that the preponderance of the evidence shows that the ticket is valid. So it returns back to the evidence being hidden and parallel construction being used to present the court case.
  - ______-_-______ 4y ago
    I honestly think that's still better than most online bans. If you find out you were ticketed because a cop had a bad day, it's not justice, but at least it's closure. Now you know, and you can accept it or fight/appeal if you're so inclined. If you're permabanned because of a google/ebay AI bug, you can't even get that far.
  - cormacrelf 4y ago
    Not sure if this is your intention or even what jurisdiction you’re talking about, but “a preponderance of the evidence” is a fancy way of saying “to a civil standard” ie “more likely than not”. Seems unlikely for a criminal offence, where that’s never the standard. It was probably a fair bit more complicated than you’re making out.
    - tyrfing 4y ago
      > in some states, minor traffic violations aren't considered "crimes"—they're "civil" offenses. So, in these states, the government might be held to a lesser standard of proof for traffic cases. For example, in New York, the standard of proof for traffic violations is "clear and convincing evidence." And in Oregon, the state needs to prove traffic offenses only by a "preponderance of the evidence."
    - notch656a 4y ago
      Those are the literal words spoken by the judge the last time I challenged a speeding case. I was also forced to testify against myself and told clearly and specifically by the judge I had no fifth amendment right to remain silent. [admittedly that challenge happened in a different state than the guesstimation state. I don't even bother to challenge in the guesstimation state because you're basically fucked no matter what.] The judge's explanation to me was that any offense without possible jail time are held to preponderance of the evidence and constitutional rights such as 5th amendment are revoked. I've also been called to show up in a 'Mayors court' for speeding where the mayor who is the cousin of the cop oversees your case. Good luck with that; the ACLU has actually done a pretty extensive documentation on Mayor's courts and the corruption involved there.
      - torstenvl 4y ago
        The 5th amendment (or rather the 14th in this case) requires "due process" before taking your life, liberty, or property. As is probably intuitive, the process that is "due" for taking property, which is less than is "due" for taking liberty, which is still somewhat less than is "due" for taking life. (This latter hasn't always been the case, but read Brennan's concurrence in Furman v. Georgia and progeny cases establishing the death-is-different axiom of American criminal jurisprudence.) A property interest that doesn't implicate any liberty interest may be taken with a bare minimum of due process, often just notice and an opportunity to be heard. If a hearing is granted, the standard is a preponderance (not beyond a reasonable doubt). I assume the penalty for your speeding ticket was a fine only, yes?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

koolba 4y ago

> Imagine if our justice system worked like this, where you could get convicted without ever seeing the evidence against you because it would reveal the methods the police used. That exists and it’s just as prone to abuse as you think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

em3rgent0rdr 4y ago
Also the US No Fly List.
- Tao332 4y ago
  Also the Disposition Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix
  - xvector 4y ago
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - teawrecks 4y ago
      We are in charge of protecting our country. We choose who does it, and should hold those who don't do it appropriately accountable.
      - xvector 4y ago
        And the Disposition Matrix has been hailed as an extremely effective component with regards to protecting our country. It does not target US citizens, so there isn't really any concern here.
        4y ago

MichaelBurge 4y ago

That's actually how it works though. See "Parallel Construction". Except instead of saying "Access Denied" which immediately makes you suspicious and comment on the internet, they construct an alternative evidence chain so you waste your effort defending against the wrong thing, and the true techniques never come into question.

epistasis 4y ago

This is the difference between public and private entities. However when a monopoly starts to take over, what is a private entity starts to have governmental powers. In the US, there has been a century long politics effort to reduce anti-monopoly protections, to the point that the standard is now "are consumers being actively harmed in pricing" and what you experience would likely never be considered something that could now result in anti-monopoly action. And without those anti-monopoly protections, eBay gets to collect economic rents—pure economic waste that profits eBay and hurts everyone else. We need a return to Georgism to help fight some really bad politics that have developed over the past century.

rzwitserloot 4y ago

In the justice system of most western countries, the general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars". To live up to that statement, society pays. Through the nose - letting criminals walk free is annoying, we do pay the cost of trying to find them, and we pay a large cost gathering evidence to make it stick in court even when e.g. the cops are 80% sure. Courts are very expensive; judges have a salary. As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'. eBay could choose to pay these costs. It will mean: * Paying for a tribunal of sorts, paying to have them set up procedures and checking that they live up to them. * Accepting that most fraudsters will just go 'free'. * Accepting that fraudsters who do get 'caught', still spend a lot of time 'free' whilst the laborious process runs its course. * To manage fraudsters, rules are created and publicised which interfere with legitimate business to some extent; everybody on the platform will have to deal with the fact they can no longer do this. (Laws that oversimplify - in society parlance: Walking through a red light even when there are clearly no cars at all is still illegal; that anybody can clearly see it was safe to do this doesn't change either the fact that you could be ticketed for this offense, or that police should just arbitrarily let this go). In this case, 'society' becomes 'ebay users'. Do ebay users want to carry the burden of this cost? In any case, ebay users carry the burden of paying for the salaries of eBay's board which may well be excessive. Why isn't there an ebay alternative? One that is more expensive for buyers and sellers but has all this? In large part, network effect makes it infeasible to have many ebay-esques out there. None of them would be any good at that point, and/or you get services that make it easy to post to all of them.

JadeNB 4y ago
> In the justice system of most western countries, the general trend is: "Rather 10 criminals who go free, than one innocent person behind bars". > To live up to that statement, society pays. … As a society we pay this, because, well, take the frustration of OP and now imagine the penalty is not 'banned from ebay', it's 'in jail for life' or even just 'most employers will no longer employ you because criminal record'. Aren't you describing a cost that is alleviated by (allegedly) making sure that the innocent aren't imprisoned, or, rather, a cost that would be borne if the legal system made sure to imprison those whom "the cops are 80% sure" were guilty?

mulmen 4y ago

Well you have a choice in e-commerce marketplaces. You don’t have a choice in justice systems. eBay does not have a monopoly on violence.

jimnotgym 4y ago
Well yes and no. In the UK ebay has a monopoly. There are no other marketplaces that offer the same services and the same reach. That is why it should be regulated.

vitro 4y ago

Read Kafka's The Trial [1], nice description of how it feels to be a person living in such system. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial

version_five 4y ago
Just a reminder that Kafka's book like The Trial and The Castle are based on his experience working within the Hapsburg Empire bureaucracy. He wasn't imagining some nightmare world so much as documenting it.
MiddleEndian 4y ago
I wasn't arrested, repeatedly seduced by a barrage of women with ulterior motives, or killed by the government, so my story would make a terrible novel, but this is how I felt dealing with the government as the executor of a family member's estate. After I grieved for some time and taken sentimental items, her house had fallen into disrepair, so I sold it at a loss to an investor, and I was mostly ready to start moving on with my life. Somehow, the death certificate provided to me by the government about a year prior to this did not indicate that the government was aware of her death, and I needed send them back a copy of that very certificate in order to make the government officially aware of what happened. Then I was told that I would need to wait six months for the estate process to end. During that time, I was given random tasks to do at no set interval, usually with deadlines of only a couple days. Then literally one day before the six month time period was over, I was told that the government would be taking the money in the estate due to unpaid medical bills from some years before her death (the same trips to the hospital that had failed to diagnose her illness in the first place). After getting more lawyers to investigate whether this was possible and correct (it was, private creditors' time limit starts at the time of death, but government's time limit starts whenever the aforementioned paperwork is filed (also this only took me a day or so to figure out, because I do not enjoy long drawn out bureaucratic processes unlike the state government I was interacting with)), I resigned to give up and give them the money. However, that was not an option either. It took ANOTHER six months of random tasks to actually give them the money. I honestly don't remember what most of the tasks were, because none of it made any sense, but the final task really summed up the whole process. I received a call on a Thursday afternoon: I had to mail a physical check to my lawyer to then hand-deliver to a department within seven days, but that department was only open on Mondays 10AM to noon. All for the terrible crime of having a family member die without having memorized estate law ahead of time. I do consider what they did some unnecessary abstract form of violence/coercion, because otherwise I obviously would not have voluntarily signed up to do any of that shit. At least if they had been honest enough to tell me at the start they were planning to just take everything, I would've just declined to be the executor and let the government do what it wanted with the property. They could have had that money (probably more money, since I wouldn't have paid a third of it to an estate lawyer and the house would've been in better condition) close to two years earlier and left me alone at the same time.

bambax 4y ago

> I realize it’s not entirely the same thing It is absolutely the same thing.

kingcharles 4y ago

You have no constitutional right in the US to see any of the evidence against you before trial. And where I am in Illinois, until a couple of years ago, if you were held in a county jail awaiting trial you were prohibited by law from having a copy of any of the evidence against you.

ajross 4y ago

> Imagine if our justice system worked like this Imagine if our justice system had to operate at a profit. eBay isn't operating as a democratically endowed, taxpayer-funded operation for the public commonwealth. They're just a company trying to make a buck. It turns out, if you want to make a buck by providing market-making services to third parties, you become a huge magnet for scams and fraud. And you need to deal with that. This is how it works. If you really got what you seem to want, it would be a government-regulated online market. And... let's be honest, that would probably be much worse for the buyers (who are the targets of fraud, remember) than eBay ever has been.

charlieyu1 4y ago

So pretty much China. The methods used should be as vague as possible so that anyone could be convicted when convenient. Keeps the fear factor up.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

A law professor in my country just recently stated that proactive bans on online platforms are not a problem. My country is known for being digitally underdeveloped but I was still surprised that you can refrain from touching grass so effectively.