I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet over the years say things like “the government can’t make x illegal, it’s just y.” For example, the government can’t make wiping your phone at the border illegal, it’s just punching four numbers into your phone, just like a pin, only a different four numbers, which could just have well been your pin.
U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is just as important as what you superficially did. Hell there could have been a third set of four numbers that were the nuclear launch codes. It’s not the fact that it was four numbers, it’s what you were trying to make happen when you typed them. Now of course whether they can prove what your intent was when you typed them is another matter, but generally a duress pin should be for when robbers are breaking into your house, and the government will be on your side, and not when the government will be against you.
"U.S. law though is highly non-autistic" hilarious but also another point to emphasize is how truly depressing American courts often are. Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers.
It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty. Prosecutors have high success rates. Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%. Studies of jury psychology show how much peer pressure and other factors extrinsic to the law come into play.
Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz. Law is the mask of power. By all means defend and assert your rights, but understand the costs. I find people are under such illusions about how cruel the American justice system is that this leads them to make foolish decisions. Do not underestimate the adversarial nature of the justice system, nor the accompanying incentives agents of the state who are on the other side of you have to lie.
As a convicted felon for the last 25 years without a single incident since I was released. I tell everyone I know to never trust a single thing anyone says if there is any chance you are being looked at for criminal charges. It's "I want a lawyer" and nothing else. Just SHUT THE FUCK UP, don't call me, your parents, someone to bail you out. Call a mother fucking lawyer. Because once you get your sleeve caught up in the gears of the system and you dont rip free fast enough, it's over. Once the system turns on you, your entire life will never be same. It will effect more aspects of your life than you can imagine. The system will chew you up. It never forgets. It's incapable of forgiveness.
This is the most logical comment in the entire thread. The only thing to say is "I want a lawyer". Although in this case, he repeatedly said that and wasn't given one. Which just shows that the state can do whatever they'd like, even if it's "unconstitutional". They have a monopoly on violence.
I've been thrown in immigration jail as US citizen. They will not provide or allow you access to a lawyer and you won't see a judge to determine if they have PC to hold you. You just sit there until they decide to eject you. Nothing else to be done and no one to contact, plus most of the other prisoners cannot speak English.
CBP via a bunch of crazy court cases, basically operates outside constitutional constraints. This is also why DHS has been used as private army by POTUS (snatching up people in unmarked vans in Portland for instance) because they can be ordered essentially directly by POTUS and not have to worry about the constitution.
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> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%.
This is a misunderstood statistic.
Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success. They don't operate like two private parties suing each other to force the court to decide something. If the evidence is there or the charges aren't fully formed, they don't waste resources on it.
This leads to a contradictory set of complaints that the legal system lets too many people go or doesn't have enough teeth.
True, although many prosecutors do also try to put their thumb on the scale when possible.
For comparison, Japan has a 99.9% conviction rate, but defers prosecution in 60% of cases. And police aren’t arresting or even attempting to enforce the law for every crime. Citizens complain that petty crime laws aren’t being enforced enough, leading to a rise in things like graffiti, litter, and traffic violations (the “bosozoku” motorcycle gangs are having a resurgence). But if you do face prosecution, there is enormous pressure to sign a confession and avoid trial, as a conviction at trial may be punished more harshly. Very similar in some respects.
>Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success.
Given the incarceration rates compared to average western standards, that's a moot point. Even if they selectively pursue, they do pursue a hell of a lot, and they do get a hell of a lot of convictions - relatively. Factor in the severity of the convictions, also much worse compared to average western standards even for the same offenses, and it's an ever worse picture.
> Given the incarceration rates...
I don't think you make anything moot by compounding more regional stats. Some countries have more crime, they underinvest in rehabilitation, addiction treatment, and social diversion programmes. Shock horror: jobless, homeless addicts commit crimes. The US also has a land border with long land borders.
That is all to say, comparing apples and margaritas doesn't do what you think it does.
US does not have that much more crime.
It's tempting to redefine as "crimes that result in prison sentencing", but the more you pick at these scabs, the more international discrepancies you uncover in law, policing, sentencing and statistics.
In a way that matters here, I don't believe you are correct, but I cede I haven't the time or machinery to hand to prove it.
Might as well not leave a comment then
"also much worse …"
Why is convicting and sentencing criminals a bad thing?
> Federal prosecutors won't even pursue cases unless they think there's a high chance of success.
The problem with this theory is that it ignores the incentives on the other side in a criminal case. When you get charged with something, the prosecutor offers you a deal and that deal is almost invariably a significantly lower penalty than what happens if you go to court and get convicted. The plea deal is a lesser charge, if you demand a trial then they throw the book at you, stack charges and ask for more severe penalties for each one.
With the result that if someone actually did it, demanding a trial instead of pleading guilty for a lesser sentence has a large negative expected value. Which in turn implies that it doesn't make sense to do unless you think there is a high probability you can win, for example because you know you didn't do it. The coercive force is so large that it can cause innocent people to plead guilty, since even a 10% chance of losing can screw up your whole life when it means a 10x higher penalty.
And yet > 90% of the people who thought their chances of being acquitted were high enough to be worth taking a much large sentence on conviction, still get convicted. Which seems suspicious.
What youre saying is true, but the reality is that the number of people actually affected by it is vanishingly small. Of course its not vanishing if youre that person affected, but as far as the system goes, its negligible.
The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty. The reason can often be attributed to overbroad laws, but that still means you are guilty and will likely lose your criminal case. The prevalence of plea deals is just a performance optimization on top of that fact - most people are guilty at that stage and we'll let you off a little easier if you avoid the time and cost of a trial.
Innocent people are coerced to plead guilty, but you also have to realize the number of "innocent people pleading guilty" also contains guilty people who convinced lay people, who never saw or reviewed the evidence, they were innocent. As a prosecutor during a plea negotiation I once almost dismissed a charge against a girl who convinced me that she was innocent until I actually looked a security tape before signing the dismissal. She was 100% guilty. This is another interesting point about how busy prosecutors are - i didnt even bother to review the evidence against her before offering her a plea deal.
All this to say, if you end up coerced into accepting a plea deal despite your innocence, you are not a normal person. Yes, there's at least one normal person out there who was coerced, but they're the exception that proves the rule.
Courts need more funding, laws need to be relaxed and fine tuned, we need to stop the school to prison pipeline, but even with all those problems the system works pretty damn well.
> The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty. The reason can often be attributed to overbroad laws, but that still means you are guilty and will likely lose your criminal case.
Let's unpack this.
The first assertion is that most people who get prosecuted are guilty. This is assuming the conclusion -- the whole question is whether the system is getting it wrong. The presence of convictions can't be used to prove the absence of false convictions. The presence of more convictions increases the probability of more false convictions. And if we had a reliable way to know the real truth then none of this would be a problem to begin with.
The second is the implication that they're all guilty because there are so many overbroad laws that actually everybody is guilty. But that's just a description of a mechanism by which the system convicts "innocent people", i.e. ordinary people who never had any intention of committing a crime. Making so many things illegal that following every law is beyond human ability and anyone can be convicted at the government's discretion is the thing people are objecting to.
I'm agreeing with the comment you originally responded to about the statistic being misleading because it is an almost self-evident truth that prosecutors ultimately expend their limited resources on the cases they are most sure of the defendant's culpability based on the evidence.
You countered about plea deals being coercive because the plea deal is generally much lower than the maximum or even average sentence of people who go on to be found guilty and ultimately sentenced after a trial on the merits.
I then countered that people who ultimately "become subject" are generally guilty and therefore the coerciveness, if you accept it as such, doesn't really matter.
I'll concede two things: 1. "become subject" is doing a lot of work there. What I meant is people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute. There are plenty of people who are arrested and ultimately not charged for various reasons. So my assertion is really that if the state ultimately chooses to proceed with prosecuting someone, they have some evidence that a crime has happened and that you are connected to it in some way that implies some degree of culpability. 2. My definition of "the system" is just the adversarial trial of evidence in front of an adjudicator. I would not include the laws or legislative system in that, although it is obviously related and we both hate that.
So my whole point is really to say that because of overbroad laws, it really is more likely than not that a prosecutor can find a law for which there is evidence that you are guilty of breaking it. Hence, plea deals existing or not, you would have been found guilty in court, and therefore my assertion from personal experience is that most people who the state ultimately chooses to prosecute are guilty and plea deals are not the terrible coercive force on innocent people you claim it is.
> The reality is that most people who become subject to criminal prosecution are guilty.
This is not the reality, but your own justifying premise. which is why you instinctively began it with the proclamation "this is the reality."
I personally pled guilty for something that I didn't do, and that no one involved thought I did. I was offered a plea bargain of zero time, zero fine, and it would be expunged from my record in a year if I weren't convicted of anything else - which is evidence that the prosecution knew that I hadn't done anything. This was actually a systemic kindness - the people involved in the system couldn't live with the idea that they were punishing me for nothing.
The alternative was going on trial for a stupid felony called "possession of the instrument of a crime" which not only had nothing to do with the conditions of my initial arrest, but carried something like a 5-15 year sentence. The odds that they would have gotten a conviction on such a bizarre felony (the only reason it existed was to have a lower standard) in the state I lived, and with the race I was, and with a public defender, was around 100% imo. They go hard as a punishment for forcing them to hold a trial - that would be the excuse for those same kind people as before to label me a troublemaker who had turned down their kindness, and now deserved to go to prison for nothing.
You've made a comment with a lot of words, but the only reasoning you have is "the reality is," and you surrounded it with pronouncements and some personal anecdote about one woman. You're talking about a system that convicts 90% of the people (unlike me) who said "I didn't do anything, they know I didn't do anything, they certainly will let me go once they figure it out."
> if you end up coerced into accepting a plea deal despite your innocence, you are not a normal person.
The system is unjust because people like you support it exactly as it is...
> need to stop the school to prison pipeline,
...with lefty sloganistic jargon, playing the part of a good progressive prosecutor. You won't see it until it happens to you or someone you care about, then it will become the most important issue in the world. The fact that the US criminal justice system is hard on black Americans is not "racism" or "white supremacy" but because black Americans are not the friends or loved ones of people in power, and will never be. When you personally are prosecuted for nothing, or even for a crime that your peers deem trivial, the resumes of the people at your protest and your candlelight vigil will force people to pay attention, or risk their own comfort. Most people are not so lucky.
The system is an atrocity. It fails the victims of crimes, the accused of crimes, the perpetrators of crimes, and to protect the safety of the public in the aftermath of crime. It is simply an enrichment device for its participants, and an empty performance to mollify the middle class. It also serves to warehouse the wealthless underclass of the descendants of freed slaves away from view when they are found unfit for menial work.
I don't think it's so much a "misunderstood" statistic as much as a number that people (like the commenter you are replying to) deliberately trot out to use as evidence for their position because they are depending on most people being statistically illiterate.
To be clear, I totally agree with your points, I just think this is more of a case of "lying with statistics" than being a misunderstanding.
I think in this case Hanlon’s Razor very much applies.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
When it comes to political statements everything is opposite day.
No. When it comes to statements by politicians, maybe. But when it comes to what people say in a setting like this thread, being so flippant in discounting people’s earnest-ness is a mistake and gets in the way of actually moving understanding forward.
Thank you for brightening my day. Keep on acing the vibe check!
I think you forgot something even more basic. Federal prosecutors handle federal crimes and the vast majority of those require extensive investigations to gather evidence before you can even initiate a court case.
The most classic case of federal offense is tax fraud. You can't record tax fraud on a camera or believe the witnesses, you actually need to look at the balance sheet and contracts of the company and make sure there is actually a crime to prosecute.
They never pursue court trials, because it's too much work. But they'll pursue plea deals, because there's this gigantic pipeline and everyone in it (including public defenders) is on the same team: Team Make Him Plead.
Because of this, no true justice is possible. Trials don't just try the defendants, it forces the prosecutor to prove that there really was a case and that they weren't just trying to bully someone who felt it was hopeless and would rather get out of pre-trial jail early. It forces the cops to actually make a fucking case, rather than rely on horseshit to lock someone away that can't bond out.
And no reform is possible. If you explain any of this to someone who actually understands it, they panic and say "but the prosecutors wouldn't even be able to bring 1/50th of those cases to trial, the system would overload" as if that were a bad thing that they couldn't. In the same way that you're not caught in a traffic jam but rather you are traffic, you're not caught up in these problems... your apathy, your ignorance, your rejection of boat-rocking, in short you are the problem.
> Federal prosecutor success rate is over > 90%
Prosecutors pick their cases. Defense doesn't. The cases that aren't 90%+ sure aren't charged.
Yes.
Prosecutors will often lower charges to ones where it can be tried without a jury too
And this is as it should be.
no way!
it should be about 50% conviction rate so that juries dont go in with non-evidence that the case is good because the feds thought it should go to court
So prosecutors should bring you to court even if they think there isn’t evidence that you are guilty just to make the conviction rate go down? Today they would let you walk but you would want them to take you to court for a crime the prosecutor don’t even think there is enough evidence?
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
That is, yes, a ~50% conviction rate would be decent evidence that the Justice system is neither over-aggressive or under-aggressive in pursuing protection.
If it were an explicit goal, it could not serve that purpose any longer.
That would be a nice outcome but whose responsibility would you make it to encourage it? Judges and juries should not grade on a curve. Prosecutors shouldn't waste taxpayer money chasing convictions that are out of reach. There's nobody with access to that calibration dimetion.
You do realize that what you're advocating for is for prosecutors to bring more cases to trial that previously they would have dropped.
And you think that benefits defendants how???
Is the high success rate because they are good at winning or good at picking winning cases? Does that 90% include plea bargains?
I've been on jury duty several times and in each time the entire jury pool was dismissed an hour or so into the morning, with "all cases have been settled". As I was leaving, the official said, "see how efficient we are now?". I replied, "The guillotine is efficient, but it's not justice." Look into Aaron Swartz. The % of cases that go to trial is very small, in no small part because plea bargaining is no bargain at all. "Plead guilty and we'll do the minimum (whether you're actually guilty or not), or go to trial and we will seek the maximum sentence, which could be 30 years in prison. What's your answer?"
You're begging OP's question.
How so?
OP is strongly implying that the 90% success rate for prosecutors is due to the courts being stacked against the defense. IMO that is where the logical fallacy is. Since prosecutors have wide latitude in deciding which cases to charge in the first place, it is very possible that the high success rate is due to prosecutors only charging cases where the accused actually committed the crimes being charged. Indeed, for the ~10% of cases where the accused is not found guilty, about 8% are due to the government dropping the case - only 1% are the jury acquitting the defendant outright. Thus, it would appear from that data that when the prosecution sees they are not likely to win a case, they drop it.
I'm making no argument that the courts or law are "fair", I'm just making the argument that quoting the 90% number is in no way evidence that courts are inherently biased towards the prosecution.
The courts are stacked against the defense, but that statistic in itself is not proof of it.
The courts are stacked against the defence as the bigger the fight, the more defence lawyers can bill.
The legal profession is incentivised to not seek to change rules that disadvantage their clients…
I think it’s a valid question as far as what the nature of that success rate is.
Some of us report for jury duty just itching to nullify something. Don't you? Checks and balances...
Nullify if necessary, more likely duty to justice as best as I can come to understand it.
We should all know it though!:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullificationI got selected as juror once just hoping to laugh at anything the cops said on the witness stand and let some poor soul go free but it turns out the defendant was just a violent scumbag who stabbed random people in public, and there was a video of it. After we decided he was guilty, they listed other things he had been convicted of and asked if he was a repeat offender... Let's see, shot somebody in the back, robbed liquor stores at gun point (dressed as a clown IIRC) and some other weird shit. That decision didn't take very long.
Honestly we didn't even throw the book at him, prosecutors were charging him with a bunch of offenses and we decided guilty on only two, but the repeat offender bit probably locked him up for a few decades.
The funny thing was that all the jurors thought the victim was a complete douchebag and thought both parties deserved time. As it turns, somebody I knew at the time knew the victim from childhood and he apparently molested his 8 year old cousin.
I just served on a jury and in our case, the cop was a lying scumbag, the prosecutor's expert witnesses were people milking the taxpayers to provide the evaluations that the state wanted to hear for thousands of dollars per hour, the defense's expert witnesses copy-and-pasted an evaluation from another client but didn't bother to proofread before the prosecutor brought up that they had the wrong name in the text, and the defendant raped and molested multiple kids below the age of 8, some still in diapers.
I feel like many court cases are textbook instances of Everyone Sucks Here. I needed therapy after the case because it had so shaken my faith in both the justice system and humanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Grigson
Forensic sciences and experts hired by prosecutors is a big problem.
"I feel like many court cases are textbook instances of Everyone Sucks Here. I needed therapy after the case because it had so shaken my faith in both the justice system and humanity."
I really don't think most of the people posting here understand what the professionals working in criminal justice/law see on the average day. They see the worst of the worst on one side, and then the public who they are trying to get a paycheck to defend on the other attacking them.
This in no way excuses bad behavior, but we're all human and these people aren't robots.
That is horrible but robbing a liquor store dressed as a clown is pretty funny (in my head probably not irl)
Imagine picking the suspect out of the line-up, or drawing up a photo-fit.
Some people suck. Some of the people who suck are poor and physically violent, some are rich and politically and economically violent.
There's a kind of fog of incomprehension over indirect crimes which makes them much easier to get away with.
People still die though.
I don't understand the jury system. If your server is down you don't grab randos from the street to fix it.
Hell Americans know this too which is why you have a professional judge and lawyers. And you guys don't have a night watch with pitch forks and muskets to police the village anymore.
A jury system is an anachronistic relic.
If your server is down you might ask for advice in an IRC channel, receiving help from whoever is there.
The random selection of juries was supposed to ensure they aren't any special class of people. For instance judges are usually from upper middle class backgrounds and it used to be that your innocence or guilt was decided entirely by the aristocratic nobility. By using random selection, that sort of thing is avoided.
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The fundamental idea of a jury, when it comes down to it, is that you're asking 12 random people "was this person's actions reasonable?" given conflicting accounts of what those actions were. The process by which you get there is more convoluted than that (and generally assumes a higher competence by the jury than probably exists), but juries seem to do a very good job of upholding the basic idea of evaluating the reasonableness of actions.
In a jury system, the judge provides instructions to the jury about how they are supposed to weigh the evidence presented against the requirements of the law. They don't need to be technical experts. The theoretical idea of "a jury of one's peers" (while not perfect) is making a fresh decision based on the merits of the singular case, rather than a judge deciding based on prejudices they've built up over hundreds of previous cases.
I went itching to nullify injustices - I left wanting to reintroduce the death penalty for petty crimes.
Exactly. People complain police dont prevent crime, but dont realize that is not their purpose. The police exist to protect the government, not the people.
The police are there to enforce laws, but enforce it by punishment, rather than prevention. The potential deterrence effect still applies, as people do get discouraged from crimes by the mere presence of the police. However, there is zero legal duty for the police to protect someone who is currently under attack from a criminal.
> However, there is zero legal duty for the police to protect someone who is currently under attack from a criminal.
That has to be incorrect, by the time someone is under actual attack from a criminal that criminal will have allready comitted crimes that the police can and have to punish for, i.e. Threat of Force with a Lethal weapon or sth like that.
Legally, the police do not have to swoop in to stop someone who is actively murdering you. They can just wait until later and write a report after you’re dead.
1981 Warren v. District of Columbia
Police don't prevent crime, they arrest and charge people for committing crime.
Arresting people because they might/could commit a crime would be a bad route to go down.
> The police exist to protect the government, not the people.
The police exist to protect the rule of the land. The military exists to protect the government.
"You see there are people who believe the function of the police is to fight crime, and that's not true, the function of the police is social control and protection of property."
- Michael Parenti
Which part of the government protects the people?
None of it
The part that is afraid of not getting voted in next election. As long as they make the voting ticket a two party/person race and ensure that their voters believe the opposition is the literal devil, then they don't have to be too afraid
Luckily that has never happened /s
It is not surprising. They just don’t go to court unless they think they have enough evidence for a conviction. In a perfect world the conviction rate would be 100% because in a perfect world the prosecutor would drop the case before if they don’t have enough evidence.
> Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz.
Indeed. There are certainly parallels between him and Sam Tunick. But I'm not sure the public is ready for all the parallels.
>Remember what happened to Aaron Swartz
He killed himself before the trial even began. I think he would have won the case if he actually went through it.
Maybe that's why "they" killed him?
Josh Greenberg from Grooveshark died of unknown cause in 2015 after taking a settlement rather than going to trial. He wiped all the music (did he really need to do that?) and then gave up all the software. The service may well have been seen as a massive cost center during its life and the death was a message or warning. I don't know. Business is war, isn't it? - quite literally.
One person's savior can become another person's scapegoat or witch. Even all three.
Personally, I would be suspicious of any death around a high profile trial - at least as a possibility. Greenberg introduced a 'tipjar' eventually to compensate artists but I think he would've been better off making a swapping service where users can trade their own CD-ripped or purchased files for another person's. Just like swapping physical CDs or LPs. So 1-to-1 personal distribution rather than Grooveshark's 1-to-many public distribution without the required licenses. An escrow service for file-swapping.
Sort of unrelated, though.
To me, litigation may be an incredibly dangerous route to justice. "Winning at all costs" may mean stopping a case going to trial in the first place. Judges can also end up the biggest losers too. Justice always gets served - but whose justice?
If it’s a malicious prosecution by the country/state then Jury is your best best over a Judge.
There is a reason that Elon Musks companies and others put a ‘you agree to not have a jury trial…’ clause in their terms as Judges are easier to influence - when a legal case is filed it’s allocated to a judge and certain cases will go strategically to a Judges with certain bias
> Take the right to a jury. It sounds noble in theory. But when they say judged by your peers they don't mean your actual peers. It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.
What? A jury system is far from perfect but this is about as intellectually rigorous as “the lottery is a tax on the poor”. Many people are thrilled to do jury duty because they are invested in their community, your nihilism is not a universal truth, jury duty isn’t a burden, it is a civic duty, an honor.
> It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.
But that's good no? People who got out never would have taken it seriously.
I sat on a jury trial and was highly impressed with how seriously my fellow jurors took it - especially the presumption of innocence. When they started to go down some incorrect logical path, someone would step up and correct it.
Not to mention the public defender ripped apart the DA's case. It was the exact opposite of what I was expecting.
> Prosecutors have high success rates.
You're forgetting that the prosecutors don't bring cases they think they're going to lose to trial, they either drop the charges or try a plea deal. So you'd entirely expect the success rate to be high.
There is no law. There is only power, and the will to use it. Remember and internalize this at all times.
> It's people who couldn't get out of jury duty.
It’s not even just who couldn’t get out of it. It’s filtered for people who answer honestly. I was disqualified for a grand jury because the judge asked me if I would believe the testimony of police officers as truthful and I said it would depend on the police officer.
The system already had their hands forced on accepting that some cops lie with Brady disclosures but the fact that I didn’t just naively accept police testimony meant I was an unscramble juror.
Even if you’re a true believer in the system you won’t be allowed to participate because you didn’t lie.
Yeah, but without a jury O.J. Simpson never would've walked out of court a free man.
For example in Europe when someone dies somebody always has to go to jail, even if they were defending themselves or responding to a potential threat. A jury could show compassion or empathy. Judges are extremely stoic in that regard.
This reference from Germany indicates that self-defense is lawful even if it ends the attacker's life, as long as the violence is not excessive for the situation.
https://se-legal.de/services/criminal-defense-lawyer/self-de...
They'll always rule that the violence was excessive. They'll say you could've slapped him in the face or disarmed the attacker.
The only ones getting a free pass are criminals. When they shoot and kill each other judges usually rule that it was self-defense. Ordinary people...no such luck.
Besides in Europe you always have to use physical violence to kill someone because firearms are illegal.
> in Europe when someone dies somebody always has to go to jail
Please cite the european law that states this.
There's no specific law, but a judge will always jail you for manslaughter.
No one went to jail when my grandparents died. Stop spreading lies.
The well-known country of Europe with its single set of laws? That Europe?
Self-defence can be a valid justification for manslaughter, at least in the UK.
This was really well written in "What color are your bits": https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Programmers have trouble seeing color (two identical numbers are the same bits, how can typing '1234' to unlock one phone be legal, and '1234' to unlock another phone be illegal?)
Courts care about color (intent, provenance, permission), even though that color cannot be digitally represented.
An interesting analogue to "What color are your bits" in the tech world, as well as a direct disproof of your "two identical numbers are the same bits" statement (although perhaps only technically so), is the idea of provenance of bits memory in programming languages. Here is an RFC for rust's memory provenance:
https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3559-rust-has-provenance.ht...
An interesting parallel to this is parallel construction, where a side knows X but they know it through illegal/illegitimate means, so how do they create a trail of evidence for X through ordinary and legal means. This applies to legal cases and things like reverse engineering etc.
Like we know X but the colour of the fact is red, and we need some way to figure X out with a colour of green or blue.
Indeed, but should he say his real code was one digit swap off, could you prove intent? Color matters, but you can't paint with only one
This is where 'reasonable doubt' comes in from a jury. Would I believe that someone set up a 'wipe my phone' code, something that would be catastrophic, it was one digit different, and they accidentally typed it, or would I think they were trying to wipe their phone.
Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.
Framing this as whether he can convince you the mistype was accidental gets it backwards, and "would I believe X or would I think Y" is preponderance, not reasonable doubt - entirely different standard. Reasonable doubt doesn't ask which account you find more likely. It asks whether the innocent one is unreasonable.
Take the hypothetical as posed: duress code one digit off, entered while detained after being interrogated for hours, and repeatedly pressured to unlock. The government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he knowingly triggered the wipe and did it for the purpose of impairing the seizure. Nothing about that scenario makes mistyping an unreasonable explanation unless there is more circumstantial evidence that indicates him intentionally providing the wrong PIN.
Proving that to a jury looks very hard.
The scenario itself is unreasonable.
"Color" absolutely can be represented digitally; C compilers were doing it before we even knew they were doing it. We just like getting away with shit. It's part of the hacker ethos. Probably.
Not all color can be represented digitally.
Is a piece of software subject to patents? Is it export controlled?
Both of those can change without the data changing at all. A new patent can be applied for and accepted, at which point all code the patent description matches is potentially encumbered (even if it was written with no knowledge of the patent or before the patent existed, yes our patent system sucks).
Export controlled is also a matter of laws, not an attribute of the data itself, and laws change independent of data.
You've just merely exhibited the symptom of being blind to all the colors which cannot be represented, not proven or shown that there are none.
All of a things properties are not contained in or expressed by the thing itself.
A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.
For one example of this, around 10 years ago there was a company called Aereo that tried to act as a "cloud television provider". The idea was that they had thousands of tiny antennas hooked up to servers in a warehouse, and they would lease an antenna to each subscriber. This gave an experience similar to cable TV but without Aereo having to pay broadcasters cable transmission fees. The major broadcasters sued Aereo and ended up getting it shut down for exactly the reason you mention. Despite Aereo technically being a TV antenna leasing service, it functionally acted like a cable TV service so they were violating copyright by not paying transmission fees.
They were accused of "public performance" which doesn't make sense to the spirit of the law to begin with. Avoiding technicality via technicality is fine. They should have been allowed to run their thousands of independent servers.
The reason cable companies have to pay these fees in the first place is a narrow and somewhat pedantic argument that is entirely based on connecting multiple households to the same antenna. Which Aereo doesn't do, no trickery involved.
If there had been a style of "cable" company that used one wire and antenna per house from the start, they could have avoided these fees too. They only didn't exist because cables and antennas are expensive.
Any single person could have legally set up their own server and antenna. But Aereo building these en masse makes them a cable company instead of an antenna-building company because... vibes, basically.
The best evidence that this was a failure of justice is that they pivoted to "okay, we're cable, we'll pay the fees for a mandatory license" and got rejected for not being a cable company.
This sort of legal workaround can work (see Uber) though.
Uber avoided medallions.
I guess that proves law is not code!
It depends on how much money you have to grease the wheels.
> A lot of engineer types forget that the law is not code, and reductionist arguments almost never actually work in practice because it's a human interpreting the law.
It's worse than that: a lot of engineer types reason about almost everything as if it were code. It's a manifestation of Engineer's disease.
I now see engineers treating people like AI agents. It can always get worse...
It reminds me of tax law in many countries. You can follow the letter of the law, but if the vibes are off, you can still be found to be in breach of a vague catch-all provision (e.g. economic substance doctorine in the US, GAAR in Canada/UK, Part IVA in Australia, etc).
UK has systematic tax avoidance IIRC i.e. keep starting and closing businesses to save tax is frowned upon. Australia can treat your capital gains as income if your gains quack like trades. (Maybe now less important since the recent CGT changes).
To misquote Bismarck, only fools, drunks, and Americans actually believe the rule of law is real.
There is a strong bias by the courts to interpret the law in such a way that it makes sense, and achieves the goals the legislature had when enacting it.
Just read this point in a case revolving around the Oxford comma, stated in simple enough legalese I could understand:
“laws must be construed liberally in order to accomplish their remedial purpose" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma#Maine_labor_dispu...
Maybe this is because of the TV dramas where a genius lawyer saves their client through an obscure technicality. It looks exactly like hacking a system using a 0-day exploit.
It's not that there's a human interpreting the law. It's that there is a politically motivated human interpreting the law, or in other words, you are sol if the state wants to get you. The engineer's arguments aren't reductionist, they are idealistic.
Does anyone think law is computer code? I mean any courtroom drama (even if far fetched) shows it is not.
In this case, the government was against him due to his activism against a police training campus.
Him deleting his phone was very likely a matter of safety for his fellow activists. Sad that our government does this but it’s not like this guy was a drug dealing or something.
> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic and what you were trying to do is just as important as what you superficially did.
Love this way of putting it. Stealing for future conversations with fellow software developers.
I favorited the comment for the same reason. It's a perfect way of describing it.
I think it's insulting
Not sure if you mean to software developers, or to those who are autistic, but I'm both.
Same - also thought it was hilarious
What's the less insulting but similarly concise way to make the same substantive point?
The law is teleological. As in:
> When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
https://definitions.lsd.law/teleological-interpretation
Replace autistic with literal.
It is, and autism is just the swap-in vulnerable minority of the day that is socially acceptable to be the butt of the joke.
If you don't understand what I mean, swap out "autistic" for "retarded" and the joke still functions, but a lot more people will be offended by it.
I still laughed though.
I don't think that makes sense.
I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but autistic in that comment is attempting to capture that "literal rhetoric but socially unaware" style of argument people can have when they argue a point too black and white.
"Retarded" does not imply this
I would say the problem with the comment is more in line with how OCD or adhd is used, improperly. Like despite autism being a spectrum with traits that can't be reduced to that one stereotype.
It's being used to invoke a stereotype of neurodivergence. Not as a stand in for general stupidity.
Yeah, shit's re.... dumb I mean. It's interesting we're still allowed to use dumb this way.
Most of our insults against intelligence come from medical terminology originally. Every word eventually starts being used offensively, and then a new one gets coined and the cycle continues.
yeah like how dipshit used to be a term of endearance
I assume you're being sarcastic, but moron, retard, stupid, dumb, idiot, mad, imbecile, mongoloid, spastic, lame, lunatic, maniac and psycho were all used as medical terms before they became stigmatic. Filter out sexual and scatological insults and there is very little left.
It's kind of funny and also kind of insulting. I'd laugh if a friend said it but said seriously by some rando on the Internet, nah, find a better way to put it.
Why even choose a mental health condition as the linguistic pivot point for a zingy social phrase?
I think you’re trying to ask the person you are replying to not to use medical terminology to make a point in a catchy way but I honestly have no idea what the Michael Scott segue was supposed to mean.
I realised that reference would not be well understood, so edited it out.
FYI it was a reference to fictional character Michael Scott from television production The Office (US). The characters main trait was unintended verbal faux pas, where he meant well but actually caused awkwardness and offense.
Often by stereotyping the traits of specific minorities.
now i have to watch it again, haven't binged the office in a couple of years now.
it is time
A duress pin is useful if the cost of the government getting mad at you because you wiped your data is less than the cost of letting the government have your data. Whether that holds depends on your situation—for example, whether your phone's data could implicate other people that you want to protect
When talking about costs we should remember who is paying. Maybe overall the cost of the government getting that data is higher than the cost of them getting mad at you, but when a single individual is paying for all of it the equation might change.
ultimately everyone is paying the price of reduced rights and freedoms when the government starts wanting to check your phone for wrong-think and harass unofficial enemies of the state
I think it's a matter of personal privacy. You shouldn't show it to other people.
When I had jury duty it was quite revealing as far as “this is all evidence including people’s testimony, you can believe all or some or none of a given piece of evidence based on your own judgment” goes.
When we met it was interesting how our jurors decided “I don’t believe anything that guy says” and so on when it came to their motives and so on.
The trial itself was very carefully choreographed, almost pre determined and static.
But the decisions and jury activity was very dynamic. There was absolutely no magic legal mechanisms at that point.
I'm waiting to see whether he is convicted before I form a strong opinion around this. I'm leaning toward thinking this case will be dropped or at least severely reduced charges.
There's a chilling effect from even just the arrest.
Oh this. Poor people lose their job because of an arrest. Arrest = homeless = dead sooner.
Best outcome is he successfully sues for the violations.
If you're against an academia for further police militarization you're a terrorist apparently.
And people are still convinced that's the land of the free, when it's a distorted non-representative democracy on top of a police state.
US is closer to South American banana republics than Iceland or Japan.
It doesn't matter.
Mamy will read this and think that crossing a border with a GrapheneOS device is a bad idea, or just drop using what is a nice security feature entirely.
Just being charged is already a massive pain in the ass (both in terms of stress and costs) to an individual.
It is a massive pain in the ass, but if the case is thrown out, the gov't may be less likely to arrest someone again. Who knows, under the current regime. They seem to go after whoever they want.
If only they could be as non-autistic about the law consistently.
From the article, it looks like warrantless search & seizure and lawyerless detainment over the suspicion of participating in plain old 1st amendment activities.
Would it have been wiser if that person had, as a US citizen, just refused to provide a PIN? At the most they'd just confiscate the phone, and it'd be encrypted anyway. No actual destruction of anything.
On another note, maybe GrapheneOS should add some kind of feature where the phone involuntarily destructs if a correct PIN isn't entered for 48 hours (or whatever the user sets at installation time, and changing the value should not be permitted). That way the trigger for the wipe is the confiscation, not the act of entry of a duress PIN. You could disclose the mechanism to the officials who intend to confiscate, and also say (truthfully) that you have no control over the feature.
Would it have been wiser if that person had, as a US citizen, just refused to provide a PIN?
Purely technically it would also depend on the state of the phone. Phones can be read out/exploited more easily after first unlock (AFU) than before first unlock (BFU). So, a middle path would be putting the phone in BFU. Much harder to use exploits against the phone and biometric authentication doesn't work. One way of fairly reliably doing this is setting the reboot timer to 10 minutes or turning off the phone in critical situations.
It's also relevant to take into account that he wasn't protecting himself by wiping the phone, but fellow activists. So, he may have taken the risk of potential legal issues by wiping the phone to project others.
You can set GrapheneOS to reboot into before-first-unlock state if it hasn't been unlocked within a certain period of time, and BFU is more exploit resistant, and can't be biometrically unlocked. I have it set to 18 hours, but you can set it anywhere from 10 minutes to 72 hours.
So yeah, as a US citizen re-entering the country, you would probably want to set it to 10 minutes, or just shut down. Then hand it over, refuse to unlock, consider the phone lost.
This is a form of legal evasion similar to warrant canaries imho : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
i m not sure how legal a protection it is, and whether the courts would interpret your choice of OS as complicit in evidence destruction.
there already is an app for that. https://f-droid.org/packages/net.oblivion.wipe/
Heck, it could be unconstitutional for the government to make X illegal, but if the courts say 'no actually it isn't', or it never actually gets to that point, then it doesn't really matter much, does it? The text of the law could be simple and straightforward, and a layman's reading of that text could be valid, but all the government or courts needs to do is to find some moon logic to make what they need happen, and unless enough people disagree, then that's all there is to it. The law, in many ways, for better or worse, is just a piece of paper.
I think people are aware that the government can physically do a lot of stuff, e.g. shoot you in the face for no reason. And vice-versa for that matter.
However there are arguments morally, and constitutionally, and logically, about what can be done.
And all of those arguments are entirely academic, and subject to change depending on economic status, skin color, or nationality.
Law is effectively a weak gentleman’s agreement we tolerate because the alternative is violence.
(Well, law is enforced with violence too, I suppose.)
Yes, this is something more people really need to take to heart. As Americans are seeing, a lot of rules are unenforceable and really came down to norms and pressure. I have been thinking about this a lot over the last few years and it is roughly encapsulated in this tweet I saw a while back.
When I was a kid I wanted to be a police officer because I wouldn't have to follow any laws or rules. Then I got a little bit older and realized that wasn't how being a police officer actually worked in practice. Then, I got a little bit older than that, and realized that it actually does work like that.
This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice. Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law. High trust societies with less corruption and a strong justice system try to limit these circumstances.
> When I was a kid I wanted to be a police officer because I wouldn't have to follow any laws or rules. Then I got a little bit older and realized that wasn't how being a police officer actually worked in practice. Then, I got a little bit older than that, and realized that it actually does work like that.
I'm imagining that IQ bell curve meme, just with you at different ages.
> This has always been true and there has never really been perfect justice.
You raise the standard for justice to perfection. There also has never been perfect corruption and anarchy.
> Ultimately, power and violence have always superseded the law.
That's like saying night has always superceded day. Everyone recognizes that recent years have been very unusual or unique in US history. That means for the great bulk of US history, it was different. Why doesn't 99% of US history outweigh the 1% (picking numbers very loosely) in determining what is somehow inevitable to you.
In fact, law is universal among human cultures. We are naturally social and live in groups with rules. Those that violate rules are generally outcasts.
But the most fundamental and significant error is attributing the current situation to some unavoidable system instead of the actions of people, especially those that stand aside and allow these things to happen. Many of them stand aside because they are told - probably messaging ultimately from the lawbreakers - that they are powerless and should despair.
> Everyone recognizes that recent years have been very unusual or unique in US history.
i dont?
this is how the US has always been. its who americans are. the odd time was the obama years
The law wasn't in the state that you ascribe to it for the other 99% of its history if you were, say, African-American. Other less-extremely obvious examples also abound.
Liberal democracy with sometimes-fair application of it is the aberration.
By that reasoning any advance is an aberration and thus hopeless, but we've had liberal democracy for a long time. Again, certainly not perfect.
Advance or regression is not the way you probably want to look at it. There isn't a lot of evidence for historical inevitability.
And no, we have not been a liberal democracy for 'a long time'. We have been an illiberal democracy with very limited suffrage and distribution of rights for a very long time.
> There isn't a lot of evidence for historical inevitability.
You're the one arguing for that; I'm saying it's up to us whether we advance or go backward. Generations before us have moved us forward, so it's definitely very possible.
The definitions are just a distraction.
> Law is effectively a weak gentleman’s agreement we tolerate
Not all of us do. To be honest, the older I am, the less sense many laws make to me, and the more I'm willing to help people break them.
There is an excellent monologue in the middle of The Hateful Eight on this subject.
well, the status quo is also violence, just directed at some people and not others
Well, you need to be eating a burrito or something
He didn't type the numbers. The destruction was performed by the border guards recklessly typing in commands to a phone without knowing what it would do.
He should have backed up the phone before travelling then wiped the phone to an innocuous state before getting on the plane.
Want to see a really confused border agent? Travel without a phone. Fedex your phone to your hotel/home. Read a book on the plane. The concept that someone doesn't have a phone/computer drives cops insane.
One of the wikileaks crew pulled this one in NY. Several agencies were a set to grab his devices and detain him until he unlocked them ... But all he had in his carry-on was a magazine. His devices had been wiped and sent by mail. He re-imaged them only once he was home and safe. No devices to unlock, no reason to detain him.
Maybe I should get a thicker skin, but the prevalence of “autistic” as shorthand for “moronically literal-minded” on a place as prudish as hn is a bit surprising.
Yes, I had the duress codes but entered them by mistake. I wanted to enter the real one but
If you can convince a jury with that story then it might work. Personally I wouldn't buy it. Would you?
Please elaborate on how US law isn't "autistic".
I think you're conflating two very different things. You're completely right that the government can make pretty much whatever they want illegal, but things are legal unless expressly made illegal. Erasing your phone wouldn't be illegal because it implies guilt, but because of obstruction/destruction laws explicitly criminalize such things.
The whole case is going to come down to the nuanced and often contradictory interpretations of border law exceptions. I also don't agree that these sort of protections are for e.g. robbers, because of the criminal underground's $5 in-person data hacking tool. [1]
[1] - https://xkcd.com/538/
Mens rea
> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic
When the judge and officers of the court agree with me, the law is reasonable and just, but when they do not agree with me, the law is arbitrary and capricious. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Having the law be whatever it's thought to be by police, prosectors, judges, and others can lead to obvious injustices, but there's been no serious attempt to remove ambiguity in any country's legal code as far as I know.
It’s impossible to remove (even just nearly) all ambiguity.
People already complain that there are too many laws on the books.
If there were fewer laws, there would be less to disambiguate.
Look at this week's codeberg drama. They wrote a simple law like "no projects that are mostly AI" and all of HN was like "how dare they be so vague? I need to know what percentage of my characters are allowed to be AI! 49.999% is good, right?"
In general a government can do whatever they can get away with.
The rest (believing they can't do this or that, because it's in some constitutional document, or violates a basic right) is sovereign citizen kind of self-delusion.
If a government operates outside its remit, competing forces (opposition parties, civil society, counter-elites, foreign influences) use that as an opportunity to gain power by calling attention to the violation. “The law” may be a fuzzy illusion, but it’s delineating a real social boundary. Legal processes are a way of processing that conflict symbolically rather than jumping straight to open warfare. But you better believe that open warfare will result if those boundaries are ignored for long enough or if they are violated egregiously.
> U.S. law though is highly non-autistic
This is the thing that people should be reminded over and over here - and to be fair it tends to be more autistic than elsewhere
(Regardless if you are on the defendant or the prosecution side - or might potentially be)
>U.S. law though is highly non-autistic
LOL, that made me chuckle.
People somehow think they're the first one to think of a workaround to a law, when in fact it's been happening since the first law was written down. The law adjusted and if people think they can do one thing, then claim they intended another they have a big surprise coming.
Yes this is the whole $5-dollar-wrench XKCD thing.
"Ahah! I've won! The data has gone!! MUWAHAHAH! Take THAT border guards".... congrats you're still going to the same prison though.
If you've got something to hide (legitimately or not), don't take it across the border in the US or anywhere. Even then I am sure they'll either compel you to hand over your cloud passwords or again you end up going to the same prison for some other reason.
Good luck proving in a court what he was trying to do though.
Well he told them. He said something like: haha that wiped my phone, now you can't get the data
He gave them the unlock code, now it’s unlocked.