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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."
Which is exactly why I've stuck a flash drive in mine that I can run a USB cable to when I want to do some "backups to my modem".
Wink wink.
This guy's obviously already been in court. ACLU time, and even up to the supreme court. The Phoenix police department is about to get a federal raping.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.
How long before people understand the Streisand Effect??
This just seems like bullying(who started it and why is something else). Do cops not know of internet cafe's? freedom of speech? or are people just willfully ignorant of reality around them. Like the town that tossed out google streetview. If I close my eyes the bad people can't see me cause i can't see them?
one day I hope humanity grows up? unfortunately I will have been long since dead.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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
Orwell got everything right except the year. The Thought Police are now a reality, at least in Phoenix.
...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.
I don't live in a police sta%%%CARRIER DISCONNECT%%%
IBM doesn't play chess with the Universe.
Second, this appears to be a simple domestic dispute. Guy gets a divorce and wife starts accusing him of what he says are false claims. Judge, probably just seeing that this couple can't stand each other, and probably does not want to waste time sorting out the truth, just drops the charges. Who knows who is telling the truth in such cases. I know people who have been accused of cutting other peoples phones off to harass them. I know for a fact that they didn't do it how can you prove it one way or another?
So what does this guy do. Start collecting 'tips' from persons inside the department and posting these accusations online. OK, that makes sense, you get slandered by unsubstantiated charges, so you go out and do the same? This is a good way to make friends with the police. Tell the world that one of them is a child molester, even though it may or may not be true. I telling you this is what I live for. Trying to do my job by helping two people that are too immature and uncivilized to get along with each other, I mean the police are required to investigate any reasonable charge, and then what do I get. My face plastered on the internet as a child molester. Oh yeah, that brightens my day.
Predictably this guy goes too far and gets himself in trouble and the police uses the excuse to take out a problem. Again, overkill, but so is calling a soon-to-be cop a child molester on the internet is not the way to go, especially when all the documentation is apparently yet to be delivered.
Arizona seems to have it's share of messed up policing, but there must be a better way to go about this than ranting on the internet with unsubstantiated claims.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gr4RsI2V6Y
Check out the video. Some college kids from the UofO are out in the "Ken Kezzie Free Speech" plaza in Eugene protesting the spraying of pesticides and get harassed by the cops and the taserd.
I mean look at the kids out there, 18 or 19, doing one of the great things about this country and that is letting you're thoughts be voiced.
This is crazy!
Something tells me he hasn't heard of the mysterious black smoke.
Phoenix? Minneapolis? It looks like its really all the same.
Greek names?
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
The guy was, at best, running an ongoing campaign of character assassination against certain Phoenix police officers. No crime there, although what he said may have been libelous. But if he was accusing police officers of breaking the law, then it is his duty as a citizen to present his evidence to whatever the local equivalent of the Internal Affairs Department is. If he was withholding that evidence, he was obstructing justice.
Bloggers aren't journalists. They don't have to live up to any standards of ethical journalism, and so they don't get protection for their sources. If that's what he's claiming, he's going to get a rude shock.
Bottom line is, we don't have all the facts. Phoenix isn't some podunk town. It's hard for me to imagine that both the cops and a judge in a large metropolitan area would do something this egregious.
I piss off bigots.
Didn't Gandhi get killed, thus losing in the end?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
What do you want to bet his wife was right about the harassement to begin with ?
"Many of the reports she filed accused him of doing things when he was out of town....When he went to trial in May 2008, his charges were immediately dismissed because of lack of evidence"
Anyone worth their salt knows nothing is stored in the cable modem.
I don't know about the USA, but in France, all major ISPs provide their customers with "boxes" that can not only act as a modem/router/wireless access point, but also provide phone service over IP, IPTV, and sometimes include a hard drive for PVR functionality; mine can even act as a FTP server (that's an advertised functionality), with either the included hard drive or even a USB flash drive plugged into the box.
Anyone worth their salt knows that, right? Anyway, I don't expect the police to be fully aware of the latest advances in consumer hardware, so I don't think it's completely illegitimate for them to seize anything that looks related to computing equipement.
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
So if you read the article with any sense of fairness rather than biasing yourself against the police
You mean, if you read the article biasing yourself in favor of the police...
# ... he harassed SEVERAL city officials, and then expects them to side with him and understand that he's not doing the SAME THING to his wife.
# He responds by not following the proper course of action and filing a police report, he instead, in his words:
So he began filing complaints with everybody from Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon down to Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris to no avail. He was eventually indicted for harassing his ex-wife.
# Read that again
In what way is "filing complaints" harassment? If you're getting ignored through one venue, why not try bringing your plight to someone else with power? What exactly would you suggest someone do who is actually being ignored by the police?
I also have no doubt that this guy is a douche bag who probably deserves more than he's going to get
You know what? You're a douche bag. That doesn't mean you deserve to have your possessions confiscated by the police. Advocating the abuse of police power because someone is a "douche bag" is way, way out of line.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
http://badphoenixcops.blogspot.com/
Obviously the AZ police didn't like what this guy was publishing. I figure the more exposure it gets, the better.
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.
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."