Slashdot Mirror
FBI Target Puts His Life Online
After the FBI mistakenly targeted him as a terror suspect five years ago, art professor Hasan Elahi began recording his entire life online for the perusal of government agents or anyone else who wants to look in. "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning. "It's economics. I flood the market."
Slashdot rules for the police:
1) Doing ANY research on an innocent individual is obviously completely illegal for the police
2) If any individual actually commits a crime, that's a failure of the police, not a problem in this individual
3) nobody, not even convicted murderers, are guilty
Obviously this is a recipe for disaster. The things the police is allowed to do should be well-defined, and respected, by "us", meaning the parliament. They should include, at least, surveillance of an individual, overt or covert, administrative arrest for a limited time, and the option to forcibly question anyone (without torture obviously), whatever violence is required to bring someone in for questioning is perfectly allowed for the police to inflict, wounds resulting from resistance against the police do NOT indicate a problem with the police, quite the contrary, a problem with the suspect.
As long as they stay within these limits, they can hopefully only do limited damage to an individual even if they are malevolent, and they actually have a chance of catching a criminal.
I do not see how this guy's rights were violated. Can someone please explain.
On the contrary, while I do not agree with the argument that his current actions are violating the rights of the state (of the police if you will), he is danguerously close to doing just that.
I understand what you're saying, but who gets to decide what the bad laws are?
In this case it's absolutely obvious that drug laws are bad laws.
How can you tell?
They have no possibility of achieving any positive effects. This has nothing to do with their unenforcibility, it's because even if they were 100% effective, there would be nothing positive achieved.
They have caused massive harm to our society and to *millions* of individuals without leading to any positive results.
They have caused massive increase in crime, massive increase in violent crime, massive increase in organized crime, and have led the US to be the worst police state in the world.
Disagree with that last bit? Name one country with more people in prison per capita than the US? Hell, name one with more people in raw numbers in prison than the US. You can't, because there aren't any.
So sometimes it's a difficult choice to decide if a law is bad or not. That isn't the case for drug laws. It's really obvious.
They do nothing good, have no possibility of doing any good and almost every problem commonly associated by drugs are created *entirely* by drug laws. The only problems actually created by drugs are far easier and cheaper to address than the problems created by the bad laws.
So sometimes, it really is that easy to know absolutely that certain laws are bad.
Why do you think it is that nobody has ever come up with an honest argument in favor of drug laws? Because we already proved absolutely with prohibition that there are no good arguments for them.
Seriously often basic common sense is all you need to make those sorts of decisions.
The only "bad" laws which SHOULD be disobeyed are the ones which conflict with basic human rights, and/or the Constitution.
Drug laws directly conflict with both of those things. Locking somebody in a cage to be beaten and raped because they grew a plant on their own property is a pretty fucking serious human rights violation. Far more so than making somebody sit at the back of a bus.