"A criminal trial or proceding is NOT between two parties of equal power, the Government is always much more powerfull than the individual."
Exactly. This was part of my point. Because the government is already the more powerful entity, it should not be allowed to abuse that power by extorting guilty pleas out of people.
If they have a case, let them make it, then win or lose on the merits. That is the way our legal system is intended to work.
"You have a poor understanding of the evolution of rights in the AngloAmerican tradition. As "rights" developed in England, they came about merely as rules to be followed IN COURT. Judges had no control or power to limit the behavior of the King's agents. They could only vindicate rights (however derived--ecclesiastical history, common law, etc) by imposing rules of process. The singular power courts had over the King was that the King had to prosecute in his courts--this was the power of the Magna Carta, i.e. Due Process of Law. His courts, though nominally controlled by him by appointment and by law making, were nonetheless an independent institution whose rules of process were largely beyond direct manipulation. Indeed, this was a source of the King's legitimacy."
Again, nonsense. Your history may be accurate, but it is also completely irrelevant. OUR "5th Amendment" says what it says, for the reasons I gave. The Constitutional Convention debates and State debates prior to ratification make that very clear. You see, I am a student of history, too.
Regardless of the history prior to the creation of the Bill of Rights, the Bill of Rights made its own modifications of those traditions, and did so for good reasons.
"This is false and revisionist. The original right is that one cannot be compelled to give testimony against himself. _Testimony_. You only give testimony in a court of law as a witness."
Completely false.
What the 5th Amendment actually says is "No person shall... be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."
That's WITNESS. It has nothing to do with "testimony", except as an incidental side effect.
You cannot be forced to be a witness against yourself. Therefore, if anything you say could incriminate you, you have the right to remain silent.
"You want a recent example of the American judicial hypocritical 'Circus'? Look at George Zimmerman."
Why do you say the Zimmerman trial was a "circus"? While Martin was young, he was bigger than Zimmerman. The sole witness said he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, not the other way around.
He had a trial by his peers, who heard more details about it than you did on the news. They found him "not guilty". End of story.
"he premise for the witness is that there is no motivation for why they should remain silent. They've committed no crime, and presumably face no negative repercussions if they tell the truth in court. Therefore, they don't have a right to remain silent, and can be charged with contempt if they do."
This is false on its face. Innocent comments can lead to conviction. The whole idea of "if you're innocent you have nothing to fear" is a huge pile of bullshit. Innocent people have EVERYTHING to fear... the more so BECAUSE they're innocent.
Your "no 5th Amendment" idea is predicated on a wise, benevolent government that will never abuse its powers. But we know, from centuries of painful experience, that such does not exist, anywhere. It's a fantasy.
"A significant number of modern elephants get routine nutrition by pulling up grasses with their trunk, dusting off the soil against their feet, then eating it."
Good point. I hadn't considered that. I was thinking only that their necks and heads do not appear to be conducive to grazing; I hadn't considered their trunks.
"Bad logic that is favorable to your agenda is still bad logic.
Twisting logic is what I get mad at the "other guy" for. Don't tolerate it."
It isn't bad logic if you understand what this is about.
Privacy laws are generally based on "intent", and "reasonable expectation of privacy". Sometimes those things intersect, sometimes they are at odds.
The LOCATION of a wifi router is pretty much accepted as public information. Here is a router. It transmits. It sends out its MAC address.
The CONTENT of the data it sends, however, is a different matter.
For many years, a large percentage of the population -- possibly even the majority -- did not know or care enough about the details of WiFi communication to secure their routers. Because that was true of so many people, it can be argued that it was "reasonable" for them to expect that their communications were private.
If their communications were intended to be private (i.e., it wasn't intended to be an open access point with a name like "Come Get Me, I'm Free!", and there was a "reasonable expectation of privacy" (again reasonable being inferred from the simple fact that it was true of so many people), THEN Google was illegally intercepting private communications.
You and I might think that not bothering to learn enough about it to know you should secure your router is not reasonable. But that's not the way the law works. If an "average" person commonly does it, it's considered reasonable.
"Remember Clipper. Never forget Clipper. They've already proven they can't be trusted with the citizenship's security. We must assume they will not change until they prove otherwise."
Clipper is not such a good example. Except for the trustworthiness part.
The problem with Skipjack + Clipper was not that it was "backdoored" per se, but that the keys would be (openly) in government possession at all times. The promise from Government was that they would be "escrowed", and only used for legitimate, court-authorized law enforcement purposes. Of course, nobody believed them.
The reason industry professionals opposed it was because they simply didn't trust government to keep the keys locked away. The concern -- by now justified many times over -- was that instead it would use the keys willy-nilly for its own purposes.
Once the government finally gave up completely on the project (several years after Congress told them to back off), and they made the inner workings public, researchers quickly found vulnerabilities in the system. The major vulnerability being one that would allow a hacker to make the government-held key useless.
So, other than the key problem, it wasn't so much the government wanting to put a "back door" into the crypto, as it was just plain ineptitude on the part of government when it came to the implementation.
"The very law that defines an extended border explicitly requires probable cause. The judge is just upholding exactly what the law says. This is the same law the ACLU cited in justification of their constitution-free-zone claim."
I only put it that way because someone else already had. I was referring to the "extended border" concept. But as for it being "invention", I'd be a bit cautious in reaching that conclusion, since a number of Federal judges seem to have been interpreting it pretty loosely.
The NAME, I grant, is an invention. But the idea that our "normal" Constitutional rights may be lessened within 100 miles from the border is anything but fantasy, according to several rulings in the last decade. Granted, other judges have ruled otherwise, but that hasn't seemed to stop some of them.
But what REALLY amuses me, sock puppet or not, is that you have taken three things I wrote about in the past that have never been successfully refuted, and tried to use those to make me somehow... what? Embarrassed? Feeling stupid?
Haha. Neither.
If you want to make an argument that will impress me even a little, then refute one or more of those things, soundly, with valid scienctific or technical arguments. If you can't, you're just blowing hot air like those others.
"... people will continue to give up their rights until we reach that ever lovable point of no return (which I honestly believe we have already passed)."
Very recently, a Federal judge ruled that the government must show probable cause in order to search or seize, even at the border or in the so-called "constitution-free zone".
" If I see "Barack Hussein Obama" and "Kenya,", I don't need to see the word "birth" to know the person making the post is a birther. If I see a rambling post about Israel, the melting temperature of steel, and the patterns of building collapse, I don't have to see the word "truth" to know the person making the post is a 9/11 truther. Etc."
B.S.
My comment was about the likelihood of getting modded down on Slashdot if you dare to challenge the AGW religion. Which is a truth based on simple (and often-repeated) observation of OTHER PEOPLE'S posts.
I wrote nothing against it myself. Until just now.
So your protests are in vain. You called me a "denialist" for making a comment about Slashdot. The proof is right here in black and white.
"Plea bargains? There are much better examples of government coercion to get a confession than plea bargains. Sleep denial, limiting food and water, and just out right nasty lying are common and perfectly legal tactics."
Sure there are better examples. You missed my point, which was: even something as seemingly innocuous as plea bargains end up being a coercive method of convicting innocent people.
"Plea bargains have save the need for an insane number of pointless trials of clearly guilty people."
And you missed the second point, which was in the sig.
Then please explain to me what "cosmonaut" in this context is deliberately trying to convey. Because I admit that if it was something coherent and relevant, it went way over my head.
"The reason that the defendants right to remain silent is protected is because his testimony is worthless anyhow."
Not even.
The purpose of the Fifth Amendment was to remove any motivation for government coercion of the accused.
WE KNOW what damage coercion can do. The result of coercion is invariably a huge increase in the number of innocents getting convicted. Historical records of this are very clear... even our own. The percentage of innocents convicted when confessions were coerced or forced by overzealous law enforcement is quite high.
We even see it in cases of prosecutorial overzealousness in the form of "plea bargains". Plea bargains have been used to jail more innocents than perhaps any other legal tool. (Which is why I say we need to dump the whole concept of plea bargains, altogether. It is a societal ill, not a good.)
--- ""That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785.
Slashdot Mirror
"A criminal trial or proceding is NOT between two parties of equal power, the Government is always much more powerfull than the individual."
Exactly. This was part of my point. Because the government is already the more powerful entity, it should not be allowed to abuse that power by extorting guilty pleas out of people.
If they have a case, let them make it, then win or lose on the merits. That is the way our legal system is intended to work.
"You have a poor understanding of the evolution of rights in the AngloAmerican tradition. As "rights" developed in England, they came about merely as rules to be followed IN COURT. Judges had no control or power to limit the behavior of the King's agents. They could only vindicate rights (however derived--ecclesiastical history, common law, etc) by imposing rules of process. The singular power courts had over the King was that the King had to prosecute in his courts--this was the power of the Magna Carta, i.e. Due Process of Law. His courts, though nominally controlled by him by appointment and by law making, were nonetheless an independent institution whose rules of process were largely beyond direct manipulation. Indeed, this was a source of the King's legitimacy."
Again, nonsense. Your history may be accurate, but it is also completely irrelevant. OUR "5th Amendment" says what it says, for the reasons I gave. The Constitutional Convention debates and State debates prior to ratification make that very clear. You see, I am a student of history, too.
Regardless of the history prior to the creation of the Bill of Rights, the Bill of Rights made its own modifications of those traditions, and did so for good reasons.
"This is false and revisionist. The original right is that one cannot be compelled to give testimony against himself. _Testimony_. You only give testimony in a court of law as a witness."
Completely false.
What the 5th Amendment actually says is "No person shall... be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself..."
That's WITNESS. It has nothing to do with "testimony", except as an incidental side effect.
You cannot be forced to be a witness against yourself. Therefore, if anything you say could incriminate you, you have the right to remain silent.
Period.
"You want a recent example of the American judicial hypocritical 'Circus'? Look at George Zimmerman."
Why do you say the Zimmerman trial was a "circus"? While Martin was young, he was bigger than Zimmerman. The sole witness said he saw Martin on top of Zimmerman, not the other way around.
He had a trial by his peers, who heard more details about it than you did on the news. They found him "not guilty". End of story.
"he premise for the witness is that there is no motivation for why they should remain silent. They've committed no crime, and presumably face no negative repercussions if they tell the truth in court. Therefore, they don't have a right to remain silent, and can be charged with contempt if they do."
This is false on its face. Innocent comments can lead to conviction. The whole idea of "if you're innocent you have nothing to fear" is a huge pile of bullshit. Innocent people have EVERYTHING to fear... the more so BECAUSE they're innocent.
Your "no 5th Amendment" idea is predicated on a wise, benevolent government that will never abuse its powers. But we know, from centuries of painful experience, that such does not exist, anywhere. It's a fantasy.
Watch that video and learn something.
"A significant number of modern elephants get routine nutrition by pulling up grasses with their trunk, dusting off the soil against their feet, then eating it."
Good point. I hadn't considered that. I was thinking only that their necks and heads do not appear to be conducive to grazing; I hadn't considered their trunks.
"Please read this comment below: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4197311&cid=44819341 basically a previous ruling that police can intercept a wireless phone without a warrant would break your line of thought on intent"
I am familiar with the ruling, but it flies in the face of precedent.
Bad rulings happen. That was one of them.
"The vast majority of the government consists of unelected bureaucrats."
True, but it doesn't matter because they WORK FOR the elected bureaucrats.
I think they grow by eating quantum popcorn, while watching the quantum movies.
Their quantum mother slaps them when they try to chew on the quantum foam.
"They were ALL on the Paleo/Primal diet thing..."
Speaking of diet... TFA has me puzzled.
Elephants -- close relatives of the mammoth -- are not grass grazers. They eat trees.
A mammoth sure doesn't seem to be constructed in a way that is conducive to grazing.
"Bad logic that is favorable to your agenda is still bad logic.
Twisting logic is what I get mad at the "other guy" for. Don't tolerate it."
It isn't bad logic if you understand what this is about.
Privacy laws are generally based on "intent", and "reasonable expectation of privacy". Sometimes those things intersect, sometimes they are at odds.
The LOCATION of a wifi router is pretty much accepted as public information. Here is a router. It transmits. It sends out its MAC address.
The CONTENT of the data it sends, however, is a different matter.
For many years, a large percentage of the population -- possibly even the majority -- did not know or care enough about the details of WiFi communication to secure their routers. Because that was true of so many people, it can be argued that it was "reasonable" for them to expect that their communications were private.
If their communications were intended to be private (i.e., it wasn't intended to be an open access point with a name like "Come Get Me, I'm Free!", and there was a "reasonable expectation of privacy" (again reasonable being inferred from the simple fact that it was true of so many people), THEN Google was illegally intercepting private communications.
You and I might think that not bothering to learn enough about it to know you should secure your router is not reasonable. But that's not the way the law works. If an "average" person commonly does it, it's considered reasonable.
"Government is Americans so your whole post it idiocy unless you feel that way about America as a whole."
No it isn't. Government is elected officials. We live in a Republic, not a Democracy.
Very obviously, we've been electing the wrong officials. The people elected have been too much politician, not enough actual leader.
"You have no evidence for such a thing."
I do have evidence. But I didn't say it was strong evidence, much less proof. That's why I said I "suspected". I'm not accusing.
Having said that, I know of someone else who HAS been doing it, and the evidence there is very strong, indeed.
So apologies if it isn't you. But I make such statements based on evidence. I don't just pull them out of my ass.
"Remember Clipper. Never forget Clipper. They've already proven they can't be trusted with the citizenship's security. We must assume they will not change until they prove otherwise."
Clipper is not such a good example. Except for the trustworthiness part.
The problem with Skipjack + Clipper was not that it was "backdoored" per se, but that the keys would be (openly) in government possession at all times. The promise from Government was that they would be "escrowed", and only used for legitimate, court-authorized law enforcement purposes. Of course, nobody believed them.
The reason industry professionals opposed it was because they simply didn't trust government to keep the keys locked away. The concern -- by now justified many times over -- was that instead it would use the keys willy-nilly for its own purposes.
Once the government finally gave up completely on the project (several years after Congress told them to back off), and they made the inner workings public, researchers quickly found vulnerabilities in the system. The major vulnerability being one that would allow a hacker to make the government-held key useless.
So, other than the key problem, it wasn't so much the government wanting to put a "back door" into the crypto, as it was just plain ineptitude on the part of government when it came to the implementation.
"The very law that defines an extended border explicitly requires probable cause. The judge is just upholding exactly what the law says. This is the same law the ACLU cited in justification of their constitution-free-zone claim."
I only put it that way because someone else already had. I was referring to the "extended border" concept. But as for it being "invention", I'd be a bit cautious in reaching that conclusion, since a number of Federal judges seem to have been interpreting it pretty loosely.
The NAME, I grant, is an invention. But the idea that our "normal" Constitutional rights may be lessened within 100 miles from the border is anything but fantasy, according to several rulings in the last decade. Granted, other judges have ruled otherwise, but that hasn't seemed to stop some of them.
I guess that's what appeals are for.
"No, the proof is right here."
But what REALLY amuses me, sock puppet or not, is that you have taken three things I wrote about in the past that have never been successfully refuted, and tried to use those to make me somehow... what? Embarrassed? Feeling stupid?
Haha. Neither.
If you want to make an argument that will impress me even a little, then refute one or more of those things, soundly, with valid scienctific or technical arguments. If you can't, you're just blowing hot air like those others.
"No, the proof is right here."
Nonsense. Those things had nothing at all to do with my comment. Repeat: my comment was about Slashdot. Not about me. Not about AGW.
And Holy Crap... you're REALLY going to go back 5 years and more as though it had any relevance to today?
By the way: your sock-puppet outfit doesn't fit you very well, and I can see you through it.
"... people will continue to give up their rights until we reach that ever lovable point of no return (which I honestly believe we have already passed)."
Very recently, a Federal judge ruled that the government must show probable cause in order to search or seize, even at the border or in the so-called "constitution-free zone".
How far this ruling will go remains to be seen.
"This experiment is performed over and over again on Slashdot, on every story on the subject, and the results are plain to see."
The results ARE plain to see. Funny that you don't seem to see them.
" If I see "Barack Hussein Obama" and "Kenya,", I don't need to see the word "birth" to know the person making the post is a birther. If I see a rambling post about Israel, the melting temperature of steel, and the patterns of building collapse, I don't have to see the word "truth" to know the person making the post is a 9/11 truther. Etc."
B.S.
My comment was about the likelihood of getting modded down on Slashdot if you dare to challenge the AGW religion. Which is a truth based on simple (and often-repeated) observation of OTHER PEOPLE'S posts.
I wrote nothing against it myself. Until just now.
So your protests are in vain. You called me a "denialist" for making a comment about Slashdot. The proof is right here in black and white.
I'm all for "Keeping Data Secret, Even From Apes That Use It"
Um... wait. Never mind.
Just in case it wasn't clear, the point of the quote in the sig is, in part:
Convenience for the prosecution is never an excuse for convicting the innocent. Ever.
"Plea bargains? There are much better examples of government coercion to get a confession than plea bargains. Sleep denial, limiting food and water, and just out right nasty lying are common and perfectly legal tactics."
Sure there are better examples. You missed my point, which was: even something as seemingly innocuous as plea bargains end up being a coercive method of convicting innocent people.
"Plea bargains have save the need for an insane number of pointless trials of clearly guilty people."
And you missed the second point, which was in the sig.
Then please explain to me what "cosmonaut" in this context is deliberately trying to convey. Because I admit that if it was something coherent and relevant, it went way over my head.
"The reason that the defendants right to remain silent is protected is because his testimony is worthless anyhow."
Not even.
The purpose of the Fifth Amendment was to remove any motivation for government coercion of the accused.
WE KNOW what damage coercion can do. The result of coercion is invariably a huge increase in the number of innocents getting convicted. Historical records of this are very clear... even our own. The percentage of innocents convicted when confessions were coerced or forced by overzealous law enforcement is quite high.
We even see it in cases of prosecutorial overzealousness in the form of "plea bargains". Plea bargains have been used to jail more innocents than perhaps any other legal tool. (Which is why I say we need to dump the whole concept of plea bargains, altogether. It is a societal ill, not a good.)
---
""That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved." -- Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785.