4 ms·

What percent of warrants do you believe are issued without justification? I keep reading this comment here but no one has shown that most (or even a large amoun

by IBM 12y ago

What percent of warrants do you believe are issued without justification? I keep reading this comment here but no one has shown that most (or even a large amount of warrants) are unjustified.

hawleyal 12y ago
Does it matter? If it's possible to abuse, it's a problem. In a security-centric view, if the door is unlocked, you are inviting people in. Or at least should not be suprised by it.
- modfodder 12y ago
  I would say it does matter. If its 1%, that seems well in the realm of natural error and probably impossible (or too expensive) to solve. If its 99%, then that is a problem with the enforcement or interpretation of that law that point directly to abues and seems very fixable.
  - hawleyal 12y ago
    What I mean is, it doesn't matter if a warrant is justified or not. If the device is less secure to allow warrants to be carried out, it's less secure in general.
x0x0 12y ago
I don't have the resources to go looking, which is part of the problem. On one side you have multiple publicly funded organizations attempting to get warrants (police, local da, federal da, fbi, etc) and on the other side you have individual defense attorneys plus generally woefully underfunded public defenders. You can get some notion of what one side would do without oversight -- ie the fisa court, which essentially never turns down a warrant. Relying on individual attorneys, who are after all advocating for their clients, not for what is best for the legal system or people as a whole, to set case law opposing warrants means they will basically be outmatched. We can also get some sense, again, of how little you can trust any of these people by remembering that the fbi is supposed to be tracking officer involved shootings. In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Among its provisions was the order that “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” The Justice Department was also required to publish an annual report on the data collected. And…that’s pretty much the last anyone heard of that. The work of collecting the data was shuffled off to the International Association for Chiefs of Police, which made a few efforts at collecting data and put together a report in 2001, but has produced nothing since. [1:2] I'm sure it's just an accident :rolleyes:. Meanwhile, the police fight every inch of the way even the attempt to collect statistics on how many people they killed. And for more news in the quality of self-regulation, after the fbi decided to murder someone connected to the boston bombing under very suspicion circumstances, they discovered that shooting -- like all 150-odd fbi shootings -- was justified [3]! A stunning turn of affairs. [1] http://www.popehat.com/2014/08/25/government-priorities-compare-and-contrast/ http://www.popehat.com/2014/08/25/government-priorities-comp... [2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140822/07034228290/federal-law-ordering-us-attorney-general-to-gather-data-police-excessive-force-has-been-ignored-20-years.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140822/07034228290/feder... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fbi-deemed-agents-faultless.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fb...

by IBM 12y ago

What percent of warrants do you believe are issued without justification? I keep reading this comment here but no one has shown that most (or even a large amount of warrants) are unjustified.

hawleyal 12y ago

Does it matter? If it's possible to abuse, it's a problem. In a security-centric view, if the door is unlocked, you are inviting people in. Or at least should not be suprised by it.

modfodder 12y ago
I would say it does matter. If its 1%, that seems well in the realm of natural error and probably impossible (or too expensive) to solve. If its 99%, then that is a problem with the enforcement or interpretation of that law that point directly to abues and seems very fixable.
- hawleyal 12y ago
  What I mean is, it doesn't matter if a warrant is justified or not. If the device is less secure to allow warrants to be carried out, it's less secure in general.

x0x0 12y ago

I don't have the resources to go looking, which is part of the problem. On one side you have multiple publicly funded organizations attempting to get warrants (police, local da, federal da, fbi, etc) and on the other side you have individual defense attorneys plus generally woefully underfunded public defenders. You can get some notion of what one side would do without oversight -- ie the fisa court, which essentially never turns down a warrant. Relying on individual attorneys, who are after all advocating for their clients, not for what is best for the legal system or people as a whole, to set case law opposing warrants means they will basically be outmatched. We can also get some sense, again, of how little you can trust any of these people by remembering that the fbi is supposed to be tracking officer involved shootings. In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Among its provisions was the order that “the Attorney General shall, through appropriate means, acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers.” The Justice Department was also required to publish an annual report on the data collected. And…that’s pretty much the last anyone heard of that. The work of collecting the data was shuffled off to the International Association for Chiefs of Police, which made a few efforts at collecting data and put together a report in 2001, but has produced nothing since. [1:2] I'm sure it's just an accident :rolleyes:. Meanwhile, the police fight every inch of the way even the attempt to collect statistics on how many people they killed. And for more news in the quality of self-regulation, after the fbi decided to murder someone connected to the boston bombing under very suspicion circumstances, they discovered that shooting -- like all 150-odd fbi shootings -- was justified [3]! A stunning turn of affairs. [1] http://www.popehat.com/2014/08/25/government-priorities-compare-and-contrast/ http://www.popehat.com/2014/08/25/government-priorities-comp... [2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140822/07034228290/federal-law-ordering-us-attorney-general-to-gather-data-police-excessive-force-has-been-ignored-20-years.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140822/07034228290/feder... [3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fbi-deemed-agents-faultless.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fb...