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Phoenix Police Seize PCs of a Blogger Critical of the Department
logicassasin sends in a story about a blogger in Phoenix, AZ, who runs a site that is critical of the local police department. The police recently raided his home and seized his computer hardware. "Jeff Pataky, who runs Bad Phoenix Cops, said the officers confiscated three computers, routers, modems, hard drives, memory cards and everything necessary to continue blogging. The 41-year-old software engineer said they also confiscated numerous personal files and documents relating to a pending lawsuit he has against the department alleging harassment — which he says makes it obvious the raid was an act of retaliation." A local publication quotes Pataky saying, "We have heard internally from our police sources that they purposefully did this to stop me... They took my cable modem and wireless router. Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem."
When the Police came for the bloggers,
I remained silent;
I was not a blogger.
Then they locked up the rich,
I remained silent;
I was not rich.
Then they came for the gun owners,
I did not speak out;
I was not a gun owner.
Then they came for the press,
I did not speak out;
I was not a member of the press.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost
This is what happens when panic'd decisions are made. The police force thinks they can go in and silence the whole thing with a BS warrant and put an end to it, only for the story to be picked up nation wide and now they're drawing way more attention than ever.
Serves them right. This looks like a clear cut abuse of power by the department and now that the story is national, hopefully some heads will roll.
Unfortunately, it seems that if you want to blog and say anything remotely negative about the Phoenix police department, you better move out of Phoenix first.
This is tyrannical, a clear abuse of power. Everyone aware and responsible for this farce and the reason for the seizure needs to be jailed.
Apparently the standards and scrutiny imposed to ensure "probable cause" for a search before a warrant can be issued (or before a search can be done) aren't high enough.
Harassing a critic is just a bonus, what the police really wanted was the names of the internal informants so that they can be silenced.
No informants = No credible criticism.
...to explicitly layout stronger civil and criminal penalties for abuse of office in the US.
Use of the office to start an unjustified war, death and 50 million dollars or 50% of your wealth whichever is greater.
Use of the office to murder, death and 50% of assets.
Use of the office to take bribes, death and repayment of any contracts lost by competing companies.
Use of the office to facilitate violence or cause violence against a person, 25 years to life.
Use of the office to intimidate, threaten or harass, 15 years.
Use of the office to deny someone their constitutional rights, 5 years.
Anyone want to help get this on the ballot in 50 states while we still have the populist fervor going?
Public servants need to be held to a higher standard because of the amount of power they have been given. If we continue allowing politicians and police to be above the law than we have lost our way as a people. We need to remake the laws so that this sort of thing carries penalties that these police officers and district attorneys will be forced to reckon with when they demonstrably are routinely operating as criminals with badges and warrants.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
...that law enforcement agencies are still foolish enough to harass people in such a public and blatant way. Over time they will gain more technical expertise and find other, more difficult to detect, methods of harassing citizens who dare to criticize them. I fear the day when the police get a little bit smarter about disguising their abuses of power. Until then it will continue to be relatively easy to bring the enforcers of law to justice.
It's only going to bite us once the police report what he may have been actually doing, or what was not published. Where I find it horrible that they would do it for no reason, I also find it unlikely that they would go to such efforts, when it is obvious that it was retaliatory. My guess is there's more than they reported or know.
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
It's surprising that the police didn't realise that this would almost certainly look very bad for them, especially if there is already a lawsuit and the took files specifically pertaining to it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To quote another slashdotter's sig:
Please read 1984 before commenting on 1984.
Begging the question, IMO. "See, he's acting innocent. Only the most hardened of criminals act innocent when confronted with their guilt, so he MUST be guilty of something!"
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
For all you know they 'blogging' could be a front for a local child porn ring.
Because I know when I'm doing something very illegal, I'm going to draw as much attention to myself from the authorities as possible...
I think your scenario is kind of unlikely.
If the Phoenix police don't have a very good reason for this raid, the blogger probably won't need a job ever again after he sues the pants off them.
âoeThey broke into my safe and took the backups of my backups,â he said in a phone interview with Photography is Not a Crime on Wednesday.
Let us use this as an instructive moment: Always keep important backups at a seperate physical location.
Especially if we are dealing with information that important, powerful, or underhanded people may want destroyed.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Actually, no, or at least, I hope not. In case you haven't noticed, this took place in the USA, where people are by law presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Did you just wake up from a 20 year sleep?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We need a new mod choice: (-1 Overly Pedantic).
Ahhhh right, because the politicians and cops where you live a 'different' and 'good' ...
Do you really believe its that different here, are you that naive?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
My, you live in a nice cosy little world. Welcome to the real world, where the race is run and the good guys lost. Policemen are not nice guys, and neither are judges. Evidence, schmevidence, police departments are usually adept enough at covering their asses.
All the blogger can really do if he needs his data is to make damn sure he has an off-site backup somewhere the authorities can't get at it.
Didn't Gandhi get killed, thus losing in the end?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
People need to wake up to the realities of this shit. Modern day police departments are filled with tyrannical people who enact tyrannical policy purely for the sake of their own egos. (Not all of them, but enough bad apples to ruin the bunch in a lot of cases.) The modern day police department is a THREAT to security and liberty in this country, not a protector of it, and in all honesty people need to start fighting back against it. Unfortunately, the police are also the ones with all the guns and tear gas and media connections who will label protestors, detractors, and other enemies of tyranny as "terrorists" or "criminals." And they have their egos in a bunch over their presumed notion that everything they do is "in the right," and anything anyone says or does against them is automatically "in the wrong," largely because we've let them think that way for entirely too long.
Gahndi won. India is free today. Some people have greater goals than their own self-preservation. That is the concept behind medals, and other forms of recognition. In fact, that is the concept behind serving one's country - in the military, or otherwise.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Um, the whole fucking country is crooked
FTFY
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Your ability to blog whatever you want is no good if some stranger keeps breaking into your house and stealing stuff.
Like the Phoenix police dept?
Uhm, if he's already been to court, doesn't it stand the chance that maybe he's doing something wrong and deserves what he's getting?
Yes, he was in court before. Because he filed a lawsuit against them.
Cops don't just randomly pick people to pick on, even the most corrupt cops. They are after all, people, and for the most part they have better things to do, until you make yourself a target.
Except it wasn't random and he didn't make himself a target. He went through a bad divorce and his ex filed a lot of complaints against him. According to TFA some of the complaints happened when he was out of town.
Perhaps, just maybe, the slashdot assumption that a blogger did no wrong, is infact, wrong.
People are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty not the other way around.
This guy is doing exactly what any liar does, just like a politician does. Screams as loudly as possible to anyone who will listen that he has been wronged and trying to drag in a bunch of support from people who don't know what actually happened because all they've heard is his one sided bullshit story that paints him to be a saint.
The innocent should do the same thing, scream as loud as they could when wronged.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
@ushering05401: "Blah blah blah blah..."
Huh? What the hell does that statement have to do with anything important???? If the facts presented here on /. are correct, this move by the Phoenix PD is CLEARLY UNCONSTITUTIONAL. Why aren't you in as much shock as I am?
Clearly, the nation is slowly moving towards a state fear-based govmt. It should be the opposite. WHY ISN'T ANYONE ALARMED AT THIS CRAP?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Does anyone deserve to be menaced by a gun?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
County? Isn't that a misspelling? Shouldn't that be country? In the next few years this incident will become just one of thousands.
Using the office to put future generations into debt beyond reckoning should result in jail. Using the office to write laws to deprive them of their property (to include cash) for merely punitive matters should result in jail time.
I don't know why so many don't see their money being taken as a violation of their rights. It is the profit of your labor yet so many turn a blind eye to its taking and outright abusive spending.
Why should locals care? We let Congress run amok all the time so its not like the locals won't get their air of aristocracy about themselves as well. Don't worry, you will get to pay for their golden retirements too. Too many locals when booted for any reason from office hold on to their cherry pensions.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
True, we don't know anything with certainty. However, it sure is mighty suspicious when authority raids the home of someone critical of said authority.
It is incoherent to simultaneously assume someone not guilty and not believe them when they say they are, in fact, not guilty.
Do you have some statistics to back that claim?
Why would a child porn ring need a "front"? What could the blog possibly offer their operations? And if this hypothetical criminal organization needed a front, why choose one that was bound to attract police attention?
If you're going to go making wild accusations with no basis whatsoever, at least make them somewhat plausible.
So why read this forum? Go back to 4chan and learn to troll properly. Or did they ban you from there already? Or just laugh you out?
Here in Finland we shoot man-eating beasts as threats to public safety rather than give them a badge and a gun. But I guess that in Capitalist America, the beast shoots you !-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
He's fortunate to not have been beaten half to death while they were at it. It's very easy for the police to claim he "assaulted" them.
Most people still have more to fear from rubber-hose cryptanalysis techniques than they do from divulging their data. Deniable cryptography either equals or will be equal to guilt in $YOUR_COUNTRY.
They're the ones with the power. Always assume they're "lying corrupt mofos" until proved otherwise.
When my word carries the same weight as a cop's in court, then maybe I'll change my mind on that one.
Maybe.
Same goes for politicians.
Just like any other sort of job, there will be different cultures in different offices. To say that all police departments are equally corrupt is either incredibly naive or intellectually dishonest.
Any profession that deals with controlling people will have it's problems, but seeing corruption as a boolean is simply a childish view of the world.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Face it, the guys collecting "evidence" probably don't know what a cable modem is, they just grabbed anything that looks computerish. And if they did know, they'd probably take it anyway just to make it harder for him to get back online and post about their activities. My first impression of this is that those cops are dicks, but it'll be up to the courts to make that official.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.