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PC Repair In Texas Now Requires a PI License
JohnnyNapalm writes "In some shocking news out of Texas, PC repair will now require a PI License. Surely this stands to have a substantial impact on small repair shops around the state if upheld. Never fear, however, as the first counter-suit has already been filed."
I know this is /. and reading the article is bad form, but from the article:
Imagine that doing a "find . -name file.jpg" or similar might be considered an "investigation".
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
When you see a couple of strangers breaking the window on a neighbor's house and climbing in, that's a pretty well-founded belief.
Running when someone points a gun at you and tells you to freeze is also pretty damned stupid. If you believe the police officer who was an eyewitness, the folks in question ran at such a trajectory as to be closer to the neighbor with the gun when they were shot than they were when he told them to freeze -- which is exceptionally stupid, as it gives said party with the gun grounds to be legitimately afraid for their life, and thus the ability to shoot. If you're going to run away from the person with the gun who told you to freeze -- which is a bad idea to start with -- you want to run unambiguously away, not towards and then turn.
I don't fault the grand jury for deciding not to prosecute; I would have gone the same way.
In Ontario this is actually the the stance taken. They have set up a telehealth phoneline staffed by nurses and other qualified people so that people don't go down to the emergency room, or run to the doctor every time you have a rash or a cough. We've used their services quite a few times, and the answers they give are quite good. It's really nice to have a nice way to get quick qualified answers to health questions.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I read the law. Well, skimmed it. Either the legislators were really smart or really stupid. "Security industry" is listed there. If computer security is part of the security industry, then a lot of people in TX need PI licenses. I know McAffe had an office there (in North Dallas, and they use the word "security" all the time. Anyone installing an anti-spyware program or virus scanner could fall under this as well. But it hasn't been enforced. What has been told to the computer repair shops is that if they "perform and investigation" they need PI licenses. That hasn't been defined by anyone. Perhaps that means that if you look for spyware, you are performing and investigation. It certainly should include if a husband drops off a computer and tells them to find out what his wife had been doing. Probably covers looking at email headers to determine where a specific email came from. The law is long, hard to read (it isn't a law, but an amendment to one, broken up in chunks and missing all peices not amended, making it pretty much unreadable, and I didn't bother to look for an updated version of the law in its entirety). But also not mentioned, if you help your neighbor set up his X-10 system, both of you committed a crime.
From what I can tell, the lawsuit is preemptive. No one has been charged. It was intended to be enforced against repair shops that do actual investigations that a PI would be doing if it wasn't on a computer (tracking usage, seeing what people were up to). However, the law was vague enough in some aspects that it could cover much more than was apparently intended, and the lawsuit is to determine what is and is not allowed under the law, and overturn any parts that are onerous enough to violate the state or US constitutions. The law did not say "all repair shops must have PI licenses." The people enforcing the law didn't say that either. However, if they are in the "security industry" or if they perform an "investigation" (and I couldn't find specific definitions of those) then they would need to be licensed.
Learn to love Alaska
I'm guessing the Geek Squad will just need to have a PI on duty any time the kids are tinkering on other people's computers.
If this story is true, then whatever harebrained idiot thought this one up should have to do penance in the form of having to take the place of one of those undocumented maids for the next twenty years. That said, I don't see anything in that law that suggests that computer repair people have to be licensed PIs. The only people that are covered there are people who are doing forensic analysis on data not available to the general public. If you hire someone to do computer forensics (e.g. investigating the contents of a hard drive), that's a completely different service from merely replacing a defective power supply or even reinstalling Windows. Stretching that law to cover basic computer repairs is a fairly blatant perversion of the law as written and almost certainly won't hold up in court unless I'm either grossly misreading it or the story linked from this one is linking to the wrong law.
In any case, assuming the story is legit, let's take this same logic one step further. A maid finds child porn while cleaning some guy's den. We should, therefore, obviously require that every illegal, undocumented maid working in the state of Texas have a PI license. Similarly, every maintenance crew working for a company, every IT employee, every office assistant who might potentially use his/her boss's computer, every school computer lab administrator, every plumber (child porn could be hidden under the sink, you know), every electrician (going to rewire somebody's entertainment center), and every employee at every hard drive refurbishing center.
In short, this same logic would apply equally to large swaths of our population for precisely the same reason, and I predict this law will be struck down swiftly for precisely that reason. It unfairly singles out one small group for regulation out of a much larger group of people for whom the same conditions apply.
Further, as someone said a couple of posts up, the difference between laws requiring a PI license for this and laws requiring a PI license for someone doing an investigation, a medical license for a doctor, etc. is that in all of the cases where such laws have been considered constitutional in the past, the reason for the license was for the protection of the person hiring out for the work to ensure that the person doesn't get shafted, while in this case, the laws are predominantly for the protection of the state and are in direct contradiction to the needs, desires, and best interests of the person hiring out for the work.
As for planting evidence, there's really no more protection against that just because somebody has a PI license. There are plenty of crooked licensed private investigators, lawyers, doctors, etc. At best, there is the additional disincentive of losing your license if caught, but it's not like a computer repair tech can't get a job doing computer repair in a corporate IT department, which presumably would not entail such licensing requirements, or else there are likely to be a lot of high-tech companies (e.g. Apple, Dell, etc.) telling Texas to go f*ck themselves and moving their operations to another state.
More importantly, computer companies that contract out mail-in repairs are likely to eschew Texas from now on. Why? Too much extra expense. Instead of hiring a minimum-wage person and training them in a week, they'll have to hire someone with an expensive license and/or spend months training them at tremendous expense. I know a couple of businesses that are likely to dry up overnight.
Sounds like yet another stupid law written by stupid people for stupid reasons that won't actually fix what it was intended to fix. Since that describes about 98% of all laws passed in my lifetime, could somebody explain why this is news? :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Or to put it another way, see the metaphor used by Princess Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin.
I think the trend to move responsibility into the hands of licensors has rational limits. I believe it is the purpose of satire to determine what those limits are.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The liberal mindset is that you are not allowed to choose
That's not a liberal mindset. The original liberalism, Classical Liberalism which stems from The Age Of Enlightenment and The Age of Reason, was all about liberty and small government. Among the USA's Founding Fathers who were Liberals were Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine. The father of Capitalism Adam Smith was a Liberal. As used today "liberal" and "liberalism" has been twisted to mean something a lot different than it did.
Then again other words have had the same thing done to them, like "hack" and "hacker". Whereas a hack used to mean something creative and a hacker was someone who hacked, and writers were hacks too, today they are used for crimes and criminals. As used with computers a hacker follows the Hacker ethic.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Actually, this is great for geeks. When my neighbor asks me to swap-out the hard-drive in his PC, I can say, "Sorry, that's illegal. But I will stand over your shoulder and walk you through it." That way, some people will learn (with help) how to do these things for themselves, and others will stop asking. The second type of person will contribute to great dumpster-diving days ahead. That is a win-win.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain