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GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com
mikesd81 writes "Wired is running a story about GoDaddy shutting down a police watchdog site called RateMyCop. However, GoDaddy can't seem to give a consistent answer as for why. From the article: 'RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for suspicious activity. When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. "How can it be overloaded when it only had 80,000 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?" Sesto says police can post comments as well, and a future version of the site will allow them to authenticate themselves to post rebuttals more prominently. Chief Dyer wants to get legislation passed that would make RateMyCop.com illegal, which, of course, wouldn't pass constitutional muster in any court in America.'"
I am hopeful that mankind can avoid ending up like in 1984, for the simple reason that the same technology that enables today's widespread spying by our government on its own citizens can also be leveraged to help us keep tabs on them. Even if they make sites like this one illegal, they will be hosted elsewhere. Furthermore, unless they figure out how to take away all of our camera cell phones, tiny solid state audio recorders, etc then we will continue to have vastly more power to document police corruption than we did just 10 years ago when you'd have to have a camcorder at hand, charged and with a tape in it, to capture anything.
I might even go so far as to say that I'd _like_ to see the government try and crack down on sites like this (and wikileaks etc), as this will only draw more attention to the problem, causing replication of the data and hastening the process of smart people finding even better general solutions for circumventing censorship.
The current situation in America really does look like 1984 already - not just the spying and media manipulation, but also the continuous fearmongering and blatant lies to justify this protracted and costly war. However I believe there really is hope for us to turn this around, and that the solution lies in leveraging the internet, encryption, and the same technologies being used now to spy on us. Let's keep finding better ways to protect information, let's keep uncovering the corruption, and let's turn this around before it's too late.
Hot-or-not-cop.com.
Careful What You Wish For....
ratemycop.com is back up now... which makes this story pretty uninteresting.
When a company gets to a certain size, particularly relative to the industry it is in, it begins to associate more and more with various branches of government. Lobbying begins, favors are asked and given, and in the end government branches get their very own wiretap rooms in the offices of the naturally "private company".
GoDaddy is the largest registrar and webhost. Do you think, even for one second, that they would dare sully their good relations with government by allow a "seditious" site like ratemycop.com to exist on their servers? Of course, we can talk about the rights of "private companies" and "free association", but lets face it; that's mostly a crock of shit.
Western governments no longer officially nationalize companies. They now get the companies to come into the fold all by themselves.
May the Maths Be with you!
Who the hell is Chief Dyer? Some actor or something? Why should I have heard of them?
I disagree. The police have tremendous powers and a despicable thing called: "discretion". On my street, I watched two cops go down the street and give out parking tickets, which is legal. Then, this one guy ran out of his house and complained. He pulled some card out of his wallet and showed it to the cop. The cop responded by tearing up the ticket. Now, what do you think that guy showed the cop to make him reverse a legally given ticket? It's the discretion of the cops that is so unfair: they have the capability to pick and choose who they enforce laws against. This is the primary reason why sites such as this are valid.
How soon before someone starts selling Streisand Effect World Tour t-shirts?
This will earn its place on the list for sure.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Where did you get the 30 days from?
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Maybe the guy was the driver for a disabled guy, and the card was proof of disabled vehicle exemption to parking restrictions in that area?
Don't be too quick to assume corruption.
Pirate Party UK
If cops are not doing anything illegal they have nothing to hide..
We should definitely have websites like this.
AFAIK this site went down after it was mentioned on Fark last night. That could easily surpass the limit for a GoDaddy hosted site.
Some punk kid shoots out my headlight with a BB gun. I'm driving to the store to get a replacement. You're saying I should get pulled over on an equipment violation that I'm in the process of correcting?
How about speeding to the hospital because I've got someone suffering a heart attack in the back seat, and the ambulance would have taken another 10 minutes. I'm doing 50 in a 35 zone with light traffic. The cop should give me a ticket right there? Or perhaps escort me to the hospital THEN ticket me?
Even Rule of Law can be taken too far.
become a participant for http://www.copwatch.org/ .
All you gotta do is just simply watch the police go about their usuall routine. If they threaten you to leave remind them that they are public servants and that you are fully within the scope of the law if doing so
Go on and observe, It is your patriotic duty!
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
The site is a stupid, terrible idea anyway. I'm personally aware of many people who have an irrational hatred for the police and police officers, simply because of what they are.
Yes, you have bad cops. You've also got a lot of good cops who would be harassed and defamed by users of this site. Frankly, it's as stupid as that site that lets high school kids make unsubstantiated complaints about their teachers. Just because you have free speech, doesn't mean that you can use it to make a person's life hell.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
As for the 1984 allegories? I suspect that you all-too easily attribute to malice what can be more easily attributed to incompetence, greed, and disparate desires that happen to run in parallel.
I suspect that you all-too easily assume that the erosion of our freedoms is driven mainly by malicious intent.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
... than GoDaddy. It just goes to show if you're not running a website that shows all people in a light and happy and cheery manner, don't use GoDaddy hosting or GoDaddy DNS registration services. They've interfered with other sites as well, if they cannot shutdown your website, they'll just turn off the DNS resolution for your IP address like they did with Seclists.Org http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2007/0000.html
GoDaddy is the Self-Proclaimed Internet Police and just because they have the ability to interfere with certain websites they think it's OK. Of course they'll argue Terms of Service, but no company should be able to interfere with one's First Amendment rights. Also why should they want to disable websites in this manner anyway? All the negative press must affect their profit margin.
I disagree VEHEMENTLY. I don't think Secret Police belong in any country that claims to be a free society. IMO every police agent should be in uniform with his or her badge prominently displayed. Rather than bring a slashdotting to my site, I'll reproduce a blog posting from September 2005 here in its entirety.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Short of libel or fire in a crowded theater, I favor no restrictions on free speech. I think the cops can stand this free speech.
He was parked across a drive way of another house. I did not relate to you but it was clearly illegal where he was parked and the cops had given him a legal ticket. It was merely discretion.
In the States, anonymous political speech is held -- at least to date -- to be strongly protected under the 1st Amendment; furthermore, slander and libel, especially in the case of discussion of a public official's official conduct, are insanely hard to prove (much easier in Commonwealth countries, and thus, they have their access to information cut off in cases -- most recently, the Tom Cruise biography -- where there is a powerful corporation or government against them.)
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
it would be easier to put a colony on Mars than to organize that gaggle into any sort of overlord-type Big Brother organization...
I've often rolled my eyes when people have suggested varying data-collection-from-various-agencies kind of conspiracies; here in Massachusetts, they can't even handle informing the Registry of Motor Vehicles when you've paid a parking ticket that was overdue.
However, competence and thoroughness are not necessary to suppress and control. You can have a third world dictator whose goons are lazy slobs and sleep all day and never manage to come to the right conclusions on investigations when they're not taking naps. What makes them feared is whether they run around shooting people.
Want a great example? The TSA. They're feared and hated, and it has nothing to do with them being thorough or competent. Tests have repeatedly shown that they miss more than half the stuff secret testers try to sneak by. Rather, it is their complete ineptitude and nearly limitless power- you never know if you're going to get pulled out for additional screening, or told your car key is a 'switchblade' key and thus can't be allowed on, or told to drink your own breast milk because agents think it's liquid explosives instead of milk for your baby, or, or, or...and there's always the thought that you could end up in Gitmo with a black bag over your head 18 hours a day.
In fact, incompetence and power are more likely to suppress the population, because now they can't even count on living by keeping their noses squeaky clean.
Please help metamoderate.
There is a legitimate concern for cops that do go undercover (they tend to do so off and on throughout a career), in that once they do, there's a big, fat online database that folks can check against before even asking "are you a cop?". This can present a legitimate danger if there's pictures or other personally identifiable information right there on the site.
Where in the US Constitution is the right to conduct undercover investigations, or to do so free from risk? Or to conveniently use the same officers for beat duty and undercover duty, instead of having separate officers/departments?
Please help metamoderate.
A former employee of my company had a handicapped parking permit, and she was told by the police that because of her handicapped parking permit, in Illinois the parking rules basically did not apply to her. She could pretty much park anywhere and not get a ticket. She'd park all day in the two hour parking spaces on the street, park across the lines, you name it - and there was nothing the police could do - nor did they make any attempt.
Had she been blocking traffic, that might have been another question, but the simple reality of it was that she never got a parking ticket in a town that lives on parking ticket income.
Putting moderation advice in your
This is a few minutes away from where I live: A driver got a ticket for driving too fast to the hospital. He was taking his buddy who was accidentally hit by a co-worker's powerful nail gun.
Now if this cop only had discretion enough to waive the ticket.
I have a better idea. It should be ILLEGAL and punishable by immediate death (without a trial) to write or publish anything, whether in print or online, without a special license from the government, and without every word being placed under government scrutiny and censorship. The current system in which anyone can post online is extremely dangerous, as it may expose embarrassing scandals in the government. It doesn't matter if there are scandals. The important thing is not to allow those scandals to be exposed by the public. Not to mention that it is extremely unfortunate when such exposure causes our leaders to be accountable for their actions. That's definitely something we don't want, either. No, what this country really needs is traffic cops who can stop you for no reason, plant a joint on your dashboard, and then force you to bribe them to avoid arrest.
Doctors for instance have them. Think next time will you?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You know what? Fuck undercover cops. The idea that my tax dollars go towards tricking people into doing illegal activities annoys me to no end. This website has far more potential for good than bad. Hell, I am a clean looking law biding white male, and I have been arrested and lied to by police. Just last week I had three rifles pointed at me by overzealous police. A friend of mine from Kenya who has never committed a crime in his life gets thrown down on the street with guns pointed at his head about once a month. How the fuck is that fair, or even legal?
I should mention that I live in Portland, Oregon. We have one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Whenever there is a story of a shooting on the news, it is most likely a police officer shooting an unarmed man. A few years back, police tasered a man to death while he was still in his car with his seatbelt on. The excuse that the police gave was that it looked like he was putting drugs in his mouth.
A couple summers ago, in the neighborhood I grew up in (A peaceful lower middle class suburban neighbourhood, I never heard of a crime anywhere in the area the entire 18 years I lived there), a woman called the police saying that her 18 year old son was suicidal, and he needed help. When the police arrived, three officers shot him a total of 8 times in the back.
http://blog.oregonlive.com/washingtoncounty/2008/01/previous_stories_and_the_tort.html
These police officers are all back on duty doing their regular routines after murdering all of these people. These are the people that are protecting and serving me. This is why we need services like this.
ilians? Other cops can turn on them, too. Just look at the book about the LAPD, in which the author wrote because his fellow LAPD cops decided he was a risk to their clandestine, domestic-CIA-like ops. They shot up his house from a moving motorcycle, sent him messages to conform, and so on.
Cops who are problems to other cops sometimes get dispatched to an "upcoming shootout" radioed as a domestic disturbance or petty theft or 2-11 in progress, or something. If s/he's riding alone, it's easier to take him out. The shoot out starts, s/he agonizingly awaits non-arriving backup, and other radios and their freqs are blacked out or knowingly ignored until it's pretty certain that s/he's a a gonner.
i've sometimes tell people that the Rodney King incident would NOT have happened had things been different. Oh, you ask, "what?" Well, as i understand (read/heard from a source), it was a FEMALE CHP officer in pursuit, but she was (purportedly) bullied by LAPD officers assisting in the pursuit. If this is true, then since CHP has authority to pursue and arrest just about ANYwhere in the state, whereas local LE has to make a courtesy request (can't have Rosemead police running over Glendale or Burbank pedestrians or crashing into property outside PD jurisdiction...), she recalled the history of "The Jungle's" PD (LAPD) and knowing she was outnumbered and could be felled, she likely assented to their demand to take him into custody themselves. Likely THEY wanted him because he had a history with them.
So, had SHE taken custody of him, the LA Riots might VERY WELL not have happened.
A rate-my-cop system might very well have weeded out overly-aggressive cops and forced them to resign or STAY undercover instead of interacting with the general public. I'm not for "rooting out and endangering" u/c cops. I'm just saying, just as in war and spying, they KNOW the risks/statistics when putting on the uniform, taking/making the oath, and hitting the beat or warrant task. I'm not trying to be inhumane. It's a dirty, dangerous job at times. Not one I'd rather do, mainly because i'm not one for suppressing corruption and malfeasance if I see it. So, DEFINITELY, i'd be set up for a fall, most likely, if I were a cop in a PD of over, say, 2 officers.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I use hostICan.com, I switched from GoDaddy for greater stability and usability. I've been very happy with the experience; no annoying ads for additional services, a clean set of web management tools, all the usual stuff installed and up-to-date (php, mysql, perl, etc.), and great phone and email support. They employ competent people who give me useful answers.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
http://forums.nodaddy.com/index.php?board=3.0
They've all got those escape clauses somewhere. Every single alternative someone points out has at least one person popping up and posting a horror story. There are no real alternatives.
Free Hans!
Certainly not the first time godaddy has pulled the plug on a legitimate website because someone complained. I was hosting a parody website for a while that was registered at godaddy, and they pulled the plug because some people didn't like the content. Nowadays I use moniker, but that's not due to careful comparisons of all the top registrars; it's because insecure.org uses them.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
Taxi drivers, fishermen, and garbage men all die at a rate greater than police. This was in mainstream media just a few months ago -- article probably still up at CNN.com. Meanwhile, police act like this, and pretty much get away with it the majority of the time. Criticism is more than necessary, and being skewed has nothing to do with it -- They are already skewed by being in the position they are. They can already shoot someone in the back and have internal affairs clear it in a week. That's pretty skewed too. Like the others said, Free Speech isn't necessarily about being fair. You need a little more perspective into the police. Go RSS subscribe to BadCopNews and read EVERY article for 6 months and tell me if your worldview is not changed by the experience.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Right now, it looks like the site is being moved. The name "ratemycop.com" is registered with "name.com", not GoDaddy. GoDaddy was providing hosting only. So moving it to another server is easy.
Checking with the authoritative name server for the domain (NS1.MYCPANELHOST.INFO), we get back [205.234.222.18] as the IP address. That's actually "mycpanelhost.info", indicating this is a site using named virtual hosting (many domains on the same IP address). So addressing the site by IP address just gets you a default "Welcome to Apache" page.
The new IP address hasn't propagated through DNS yet. My local DNS is returning "Addresses: 72.167.159.53, 205.234.222.18". That 72.167.159.53 address is the old GoDaddy address. There's a 7 day TTL on the DNS entry, with 6 days 5 hours to go, so it may take a while for the DNS system to purge the GoDaddy address worldwide. Some users are seeing the new site; some are seeing the old GoDaddy page.
GoDaddy is already out of the picture and has no control over the site. We're just waiting for DNS propagation, after which the new site should be visible everywhere.
So you're saying that we've got more of a Brazil-style totalitarian bureaucracy than a 1984-style totalitarian bureaucracy? That isn't exactly comforting.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
Off-duty cops are a valuable resource to the police force. In an emergency, they can call off-duty cops for backup - and forcing them to run to the station to change and get a weapon could waste a vital half an hour that gets someone killed. That is a horribly bad idea. All on-duty police officers should be in uniform, with their badge displayed proudly, not hiding their real identity in shame like some Nazi brown shirt. So any undercover cop, whether he's on an undercover assignment or just in plainclothes, is by default hiding their identity in shame? I doubt it's ever done out of shame. Every cop I know of is proud to be a cop. Sometimes it's for the safety of the people around them, and/or to keep the wrong people (read: criminals) from knowing they're cops. It's not far-fetched to imagine a gang that wouldn't care about firing through a group of innocent bystanders in an effort to kill a nearby cop.
Your comparison to a "Nazi brown shirt" is not simply ridiculous but it comes across as alarmist propaganda designed to incite the negative feelings associated with Nazis. It contributes nothing to the point you're trying to make.
Cops do not have to be wearing a uniform to still be cops. Forcing all cops to wear uniforms while on-duty could perhaps be the worst possible idea. It's easy to avoid cops if they're easily identifiable, meaning it would be easier to hide crimes simply be checking for cops. It's the same with concealed weapons - if they outlaw concealed weapons, only outlaws will have concealed weapons, and the crime rate will increase, since armed criminals could be much more certain that no one would or could resist them. Uncertainty about who might have a concealed weapon likely deters quite a few potential crimes. Uncertainty about who could be a cop likely deters quite a few potential crimes.
Without undercover cops it'd be hard to infiltrate illegal smuggling operations, gangs, and so on, in order to obtain actual solid evidence. I'd guess there are many criminals now in jail that would still be running free if not for undercover operations. Are you saying this is a bad thing? How do you propose these things be stopped?
You make a mistake if you believe that "undercover" == "Secret Police". Secret Police are, in the sense you use them (comparing them to Russian Secret Police and so on), full-time plainclothes cops with virtually unlimited authority. Undercover cops aren't anything like that. They are not full-time, as others have pointed out, instead they don their uniforms most of the time like most cops. They do not have unlimited authority, they must instead (generally) act within their jurisdiction. Traffic cops don't generally get involved with murder investigations, even if they're the ones that found the body in the trunk.
Also recall that not all cops have uniforms as we conventionally think of them. Detectives and other officers often wear normal clothes as they go about their duties. They are not undercover, they simply do not wear the same uniforms as (for example) traffic cops.
Mistakes that happen; whoever killed that cop at that game should not have shot on sight, but at the same time, that plainclothes cop that shot into the air could have come up with a better way to break up the fight. Sometimes people die when people make mistakes - this is true in any field, not just the police force.
Your "but I had a nagging worry" reminds me of an article some time ago by a lady who wrote an article entitled something along the lines of "My Flight with Terror" wherein she details her "harrowing" experience on an uneventful flight with a group of Arabic passengers (a group of musicians, if I recall correctly) who were, by all accounts, minding their own business.
Basically you were letting your imagination run wild, and it got the best of you.
Those in positions of power must not have the same protections as those who are powerless.
1: The position of police officer is a position of great power.
2: The position of police officer is extremely attractive to sociopaths.
3: Some (many) police agencies are--umm--less than perfect at filtering out these especially-eager applicants. Some departments do not filter at all (i.e. they don't perform personality inventories on applicants), with the obvious results. Given that non-sociopaths generally strongly dislike working with sociopaths, it stands to reason that these departments quickly become dominated by the latter. I've lived in city with a police department that did not test its applicants for mental disorders, and that's a large part of the reason I now live in a city with a police department that does.
4: It does not make sense to give a person in a position of power all the protections that are afforded to others. For those in a position to cause suffering to members of society, the interest of the society in preventing abuse clearly outweighs the interest of the individual. (If you want all the usual job protections, don't pursue a job that lets you hurt people.)
Yes, some police officers will be treated unfairly in such a forum. Some will be publicly embarrassed when they don't deserve it. If the forum is effective, some will lose their jobs when they shouldn't. I would think it would even make undercover operations more difficult. All these issues are far outweighed by the benefit of exposing those who should not be allowed to be in positions of power.
Most police forces in the US are pretty hostile to the idea of any kind of kind of civilian oversight. I can sympathize to some degree because cops by the nature of their job have to do things that civilians don't like. They aren't out there to pick up the trash and mow your lawn, they are out there to maintain civic order, which means keeping civilians in line.
However, there are enough bad cops, and enough other cops who will protect their own even if they are doing something clearly wrong, that *some* kind of civilian oversight is needed most places to avoid the worst abuses. That said, I think this board is a really bad idea, and is actually probably illegal.
First, why it is a bad idea:
The fact is that it will get a lot harder for police to do their job if anonymous systems like this become widely used. Anyone from someone receiving traffic ticket, to someone who got busted for heroin trafficking can them go online and anonymously pretend to be some totally innocent guy who suffered horrible police brutality for no reason whatsoever by officer John D. Law. Hell, people could go online from *jail* and talk smack about their arresting officer in a totally anonymous system.
Second, why this is probably illegal:
Libel and slander are and always have been illegal. The fact that it happens on "the intertubes" where information "wants to be free" does not change the law. If you start false rumors (the false part is important here) about someone being a murderer or something equally horrible and that person can't get a job and their wife leaves them, etc because of it, that person can legally sue the crap out of you. To make this clear why this is, consider if there were a website called "ratemyemployee" and people could go online anonymously and say that they were your boss and give you a performance review. Now, since that person did not have to identify himself, he could be anybody including some random guy you never worked for who had a grudge against you. You could easily lose your current job and not be able to find a new one in such a situation. Suing the person who started the rumor provides a way to clear your name in court and get monetary compensation.
As it stands, the web site may be liable for slander or libel if they don't give up information on who posted.
I think the correct thing to do is for the site to hold users contact information in escrow, and to provide some kind of means of redress, without immediately handing out addresses to police officers who just want to find out who talked smack about them. Futhermore, the site itself should probably require a contract is signed and make it clear it will fine users if they make a habit of posting slander on their site.
People on both end, police and civilians, need to be held accountable for their actions.
I'm keeping a list of stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26)
That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)
Any error or stories not included?
http://cbs4.com/topstories/Miami.News.CBS4.2.395528.html CBS4 News found that, in police departments across Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, large and small, it was virtually impossible to walk in the door, and walk out with a complaint form...there was one incident in which our tester went in to file a complaint. After several times asking for a form, being told "you're not leaving without a form," he was asked to leave and actually walked off the property, to the point where the officer reached for his gun, put his hand on his gun and said, "Take a step closer, and see what happens.". I think part of the problem is that a bad cop can hurt a lot of people before he hopefully eventually gets punished. If that undercover reporter ended up getting shot by that police officer, it wouldn't be any consolation to him or his family that the officer was punished, because he would be dead. I don't know if sites like this are more bad or good, but it's a reaction to this fact. There's police organizations that are actively fighting transparency for things like, how many complaints an officer has had filed against him. The police simply will not give you that information, so it's difficult to prove there's an administrative problem there where complaints are ignored.
Ideally you will as you said go through proper channels to force the police department to operate more transparently, but if you are in a situation where there are enough totally authoritarian citizens and/or city managers in your area, sites like this might be your only defense. Moving is not always an option, and at any rate everyone has the right to feel safe in their community and shouldn't have to leave.
Regardless of whether you believe police discretion is fair (it should be, but it isn't, because police officers are people too and therefore by definition unfair) it is necessary for them to do their jobs.
Discretion in itself is fine with me. What's not OK is laws that are only tolerable because discretion allows them to be ignored most of the time and lawmakers who write them that way under the assumption that discretion WILL be used.
Quite frankly, I don't see a point in a website like this. There are plenty of venues which one can use if one feels that one has been unfairly discriminated against by law enforcement, not the least of which are the courts.
If you're going to court with it, a site like that could be a good place to look for witnesses who can testify to a pattern of abuses and establish credibility. Even anonymous users might respond privatly to a posting requesting assistance in court.
.... Most criminal cases involve coercion or entrapment.
It is truly unfortunate that people make up their minds with ridiculous assertions based on anecdotal evidence. And yes, your personal bad experience with law enforcement does count as anecdotal evidence.
Fortunately, most criminal cases do NOT involve coercion or entrapment. I have been around lawyers long enough and participated in enough criminal trials to know that even the most inexperienced lawyer is much more likely than not going to be able to have charges dismissed if there was any sort of coercion or entrapment going on. And this isn't to say coercion and entrapment don't happen, or that some rogue cops don't get away with it on occasion. But this is to say that those instances are much, much farther and few between than you seem to believe.
The system isn't perfect, to be sure. But the bottom line is, it is a system run by humans with their inherent faults, and because of that, it is probably about as good as it is going to get. By all means though, if you have any feasible suggestions, do feel free to bring them up.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
I was there; that martian bastard ate my neighbor.
Of course, I also have some photos of you molesting little boys (Dubya had them in his car), so I wouldn't stir up trouble if I were you.
Right, because all the mafia does is traffic in drugs and prostitution. [/sarcasm] I was also talking about other contraband - weapon smuggling and such.
Guns are legal. Why should a legal item need to be smuggled?
While I agree that we should all have the right to bear arms, I don't think criminals convicted of violent crimes should necessarily have that right - and illegal weapon smuggling gives them those weapons.
So does burglarizing the home of someone who legally owns that weapon. Criminals don't go to Mexico to smuggle weapons to use in holdups, they can get them here. They only need to smuggle weapons that the government has said nobody can posess, despite the 2nd amendment. There's no reason whatever to smuggle weapons unless the weapons are (illegally) outlawed.
While you might consider drug use to be a victimless crime, I do not - both the person taking drugs and that person's family usually suffer.
Freedom is the right to fuck your life up any damned way you choose. Alcoholics and their families suffer, too, but they legalized alcohol because the laws against it were as counterproductive as the laws against the other drugs are today. If you're against drug prohibition then you MUST be for outlawing alcohol and tobacco, the two most destructive drugs there are.
Prostitution? The families of men who use them suffer.
My marriage broke up because of my ex-wife's infidelity. You don't think my children and I suffered? The three of us were prescribed antidepressant drugs for our suffering! There was no prostitution involved (but there damned sure is now). Why is it legal for me to have sex with your wife so long as I don't pay her? It's not the prostitution that ruins lives and breaks up families, it's the adultery. Adultery DOES have a victim: the adulteror's spouse. But adultery is legal, at least in Illinois. It's grounds for divorce, but it doesn't affect the divorce settlement in any way.
Since I'm divorced, how does it hurt anyone if I hire a hooker? She gets needed cash and I get laid. If I have sex with your wife, you and your family are harmed, but no law is broken.
Gambling? If I lose all my money, if I take out a second mortgage on my house and gamble it away, where will my wife and kids live when the debt comes due?
I live alone. I'm no gambler but if I were, why should I be deprived of it because YOU are too weak and stupid to control yourself?
I actually am in danger of losing my house, but it's froem being stupidly kind hearted and loaning money to people who don't pay it back, then borrowing from places with interest that was illegally high just a couple of decades ago. Why are those places legal? Why is it legal fro the downtrodden I stupidly help to ask me for money? Why is it legal for me to stupidly give it away? My drug is empathy - I get an emotional high from helping people, and its bringing me to ruin. I can't see how that's different from drugs or gambling, yet it's perfectly legal.
If goverment is going to protect me for my own weakness, then it first should give me health care, particularly MENTAL health care. But government can't even protect me from you, how could it possibly protect me from myself? As to gambling, well, here in Illinois I can go to a horsetrack and gamble, I can go to a riverboat and gamble, why is it illegal to sit down in my back yard and play poker with my buds? Why is it illegal for me to bet on sports? Government already said gambling is ok - but only under their rules. It's a damned hypocritical law!
We are better off with them illegal. Sorry if I'm too conservative for your tastes.
Liberty is conservative. You should apologize for being a liberal, not a conservative.
but there's some pretty good evidence out there that I'm right. No, I'm not going to provide any here
That's because there is none. The Flying Spagetti Monster is real, I'll leave it to your google skills to to prove my point for me.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest