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Groklaw Turns One
JuliusRV writes "Today is Groklaw's one-year anniversary! As PJ writes, 'What a difference a year makes. When we started, all the headlines were saying that SCO was going to destroy Linux or at least make it cry. Now, looking around today, I see almost everyone predicting SCO's imminent doom instead. I think the truth, as usual, isn't in the headlines, and that it's somewhere in between those two extremes.' Thanks, PJ and all other Groklawyers, keep up the good work!"
against AOL shorthand
also known as aolbonics
As well as:
+ Other detective said he wanted to put all black people in a pile and burn them
+ Other dectective "misplaced" a half vial of OJ's blood on a late night trip to the crime scene
+ Other detective also happened to be the one who found all the evidence, including a pin head sized drop of blood on OJ's car at 5:00 in the morning
+ Blood on OJs sock shown to have soaked right through from one side to the other, indicating it was placed on the sock when there was no foot in it
+ Lead Detective testified that Ron Goldman put up a fight for his life yet OJ had no marks or bruises on his body except a small scratch on his hand
The thing about government monitoring and privacy is this:
a) it's involuntary. People don't mind their doctors having their medical records, their electric company having their usage data so it can predict their bills, the phone company recording what numbers they called for how long for billing. People do mind someone taking all that data, without permission, and collecting it.
If you want to look at central agencies knowing a lot about us, look at credit reference agencies. A lot of the time, the information they hold is out of date or just plain wrong. Personally, I dislike that some credit agency has so many records on me, but since it's impossible to get loans without such a record, and you can't stop them collecting the info on you anyway, I just have to suck it up. A government agency doing the same would be just as inaccurate in it's data, and would use it for far worse things, i.e. bugging people to gather evidence, interrogating them in secret for intelligence, or worst of all, lock them up without trial for an unlimited period - all based upon indications in a private database we know nothing about, don't have access to, and didn't agree to be collected.
b) which leads onto my second point. Such a government database is unbalanced. They know all about us, we know nothing about them. In a small community, you have virtually no privacy. But the people that move there through choice like that. It's balanced, everyone knows everything about everyone else, and it leads to greater social interaction. Equally, if you live in a city centre, you likely will know nothing at all about most or even all of your neighbours. But again, that privacy is equal - nobody knows anything.
In a sense, that distributed, non-profit internet based investigation would resolve both those problems. The information it gathers is hardly held in secret, it's there for anybody who wants it. The information it would gather would, de facto, be information in the public domain, i.e. information publically given out. Don't forget, the p-p-powerbook scammer gave over his email address, physical address and telephone number voluntarily, in the process of trying to commit fraud. Finally, it would be balanced (mostly) as anyone could try to use such a system to gain information, judged on it's merits to the crowd - a form of meta jury.
The biggest flaw I see in such a system is not the invasion of privacy (as long as they don't start doing illegal things, like bugging phone conversations) but that it could turn into mob justice - a crowd so convinced of someones guilt, they ignore the evidence and jump straight to punishment. Sending a joke package to defraud a fraudster has a certain amount of karmic justice to it, but imagine if they'd sent something dusted with a diuretic? or a poison? Imagine, if instead of reporting the scammer to the police, the London agents had just taken him out back in the alley, and given him a kicking? (Assuming they'd found him) Not that I'm impuging the SA guys, and saying they would have; but it's a thin line between a mob investigation, and a mob action, as many a modern lynching illustrates.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
+ If the glove did not fit, you must acquit.
ok.
step 1-find yourself a pair of tighly-fitting gloves
step 2-put on some latex gloves
step 3-try (and fail) to put the gloves on over the latex gloves
step 4-kill yourself for being an idiot.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016