Health care costs are not the problem. They have never been the problem. The problem is the money that the health insurance industry is sucking out of the system.
We, unlike many places that have 'socialized' medicine, actually have doctors and hospitals that operate in the free market system, which means, unlike government-run institutions, they have an incentive to reduce costs.
However, we have the most expensive 'health care' in the world. How can that possibly be correct? Free markets reduce costs. It really is true, it's not some made-up talking point.
It's because the money isn't disappearing in the health care industry. It's because we've invented a system and placed it between the health care industry and their customers. A system that makes more money the less health care people get, and operates as a gatekeeper to such a large percentage of health care purchases that they can manipulate prices.
Without the health insurance industry, prices will drop. No matter how such an industry goes away, either by total free market health care or by universal health care.
If car insurance companies were large enough and powerful enough that almost all car repair happened under their banner, letting them force repair shops into setting prices low for them and high for everyone else, you might have a point.
As it is, a very small percentage of the population actually has that sort of car insurance, and a tiny fraction of car repairs happen under it.
And, just as more importantly, car insurance payouts happen between a few consenting car insurance companies, and denying claims will cause other companies to deny their own claims back.
That said, there are plenty of us who think that mandatory insurance on cars is stupid too, and that mandatory insurance is inherently a scam...if they government wants to collect money from a group of people to cover large costs they might incur later, it should just collect the damn money and do it itself. (This would not stop companies from providing the optional insurance that banks require on new cars and whatnot.)
Yeah, I love the idea that poeple will use 'too much' health care if it's free.
People barely drag themselves to the doctor when actually sick, it doesn't matter how much it costs, people simply do not like to go. The best way of reducing health care costs in this country would be regular checkups, but people don't go to them even if they're free.
The only people who would 'abuse' the system are hypochondriacs, which are quickly recognized by doctors and ignored, and new parents, who already use 'too much' health care for their children anyway.
And considering the 'shortages' people are talking about are for surgery and MRIs and whatnot, none of which you can visit without a reason, it's not like those people will be using them up.
I like http://realclearpolitics.com/ which actually has a Republican bias in the articles, so you know they aren't exaggerating when they show Obama up by 6% in the popular.
Anyone who thinks this election is close is deluding themselves.
If turnout is demographically similar to previous elections, polls show it will be a very close election.
No, they don't. At all. Like I said, the media is lying. The polls quite clearly show that Obama is going to win a landslide electoral victory. There are no other ways to interpret it. It doesn't matter what the demographics are.
How much popular vote he gets is another matter, but this election is not going to be close with regard to who ends up in the White House.
Additionally, it was mainly Democrats in the late 90s who pushed for banks to give more risky loans, which is one of the major causes of the economic turmoil today (it's certainly not the only cause).
Not really. The Democrats pushed against 'redlining', the discriminatory practice of refusing to give loans in certain areas, by making banks have a certain percentage of their loans there.
However, this didn't require banks to give out risky subprime loans at all, and in actuality most of the subprime lenders were independent mortgage companies not covered by that legislation at all. Only about 30% of subprime loans were given out by banks that had to follow the CRA(1), and only a few percent of those loans were CRA loans.
Meanwhile, those loans actually have a slightly lower rate of failure than other loans at the same rating. Simply because banks actually are still someone discriminatory and inspect them harsher, looking for more (legit) reasons to deny them. Whereas, of course, they would often deliberately overlook legit reasons to deny loans for other people and give them loans they shouldn't have.
The CRA didn't cause this mess.
That is, of course, pretending that bad loans caused this mess. They didn't. The imaginary securities market that banks invented to trade these loans in did, and the criminally negligent rating industries that choose to give such securities AAA ratings did.
1) You'll find a different figure for this, but note what I said. There are actually a lot of 'joined' institutes that are partially required to follow the CRA. They can, in theory, make a single loan to a CRA-area, count it under the CRA, and make thousands of loans to non-CRA areas and simply not count those loans in that 'part' of their business, and, tada, 100% of their loans are in CRA areas.
They didn't do this, because CRA does not require making risky loans in the first place, and even places not regulated by the CRA at all would probably be okay under it. The CRA solved a problem that doesn't exist anymore and no bank would actually have changed their behavior if it disappeared five years ago.
Hey, moron, pretty much everyone's realized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae didn't have a whole lot to do with this crisis.
Or, you know, it would have been over when they were bailed out.
The trillions in bogus securities floating around, that are bringing down bank after bank and resulting in the lack of loans, have nothing to do with the GSEs at all. They have to do with an entirely unregulated imaginary market that the GSEs couldn't even participate in.
One that, yes, Republicans stopped from being regulated.
Yeah. People on the right say 'Marxist' because they don't want say 'communism' and assume they mean the same thing.
They don't. Communism is a form of government, one that uses Marx's theory as lip service for totalitarianism. And, no matter how good the aims are, always seems to end up that way.
But Marxism just requires the idea that there are various classes and that capitalism will exploit workers and etc. It's a philosophy, it's a historical theory, it's not a form of government.
It is entirely possible that Obama is 'Marxist', most populist Democrats are. In fact, a goodly proportion of the population is to some extent, even if they don't know it. Part of the success of the Republicans, in fact, was the attempt to place themselves on the proletariat side and the Democrats on the bourgeoisie, talking about 'liberal elites' and whatnot. And they alternate that with complaining about a 'class war', which is literally straight from Marx.
Note this is different than Marx's theory of history, which is, as far as we can tell, just flat out wrong. Socialism does not appear to always turn into communism. By which he meant a classless and stateless society, but it doesn't appear to turn into either his sort of communism or the actual communism that exists in the real world.
OTOH, looking at the rest of the world, and the US, the workers in a capitalist society do, eventually, stand up and demand at least some 'socialism', although it's not actually what he was talking about.
Incidentally, I'd like someone to, someday, make a graph without interest on the debt.
In other words, which president would have balanced the budget if no president before them had spent them into a hole they had to pay interest on.
I suspect the differences between Democratic and Republican presidents would be even more obvious.
Clinton barely managed to balance the budget, and only by using money that eventually we'll have to pay back to social security (Better than having to pay it back to other people.)...but he also was paying 238 billion, more than 10% of the budget, to pay for Reagan and Bush I's excesses, and without that, he could have more than balanced the budget in actuality.
No, it didn't. The graph has a stupid line, but that line is indicating the start of the Iraq war, not Clinton's term in office. Going by the colored dots, you can see it arch down and shoot up when Bush takes office.
The dots, however, are slightly off.
Clinton's term in office ended in 2001, whereas the dots marking it ended in 2000. You'd normally include the 2001 year when looking at a president's budget, because although he leaves office in January he had already set the budget.
...but in this case Bush got into office and immediately started handing out cash despite Clinton's budget. (Remember that?) Which caused a bump upward, but Bush really had to wait until the next year to start trashing the budget.
This is going to be a very close race, and he will have wound up being elected by just a slight majority of the fraction of the eligible voting population that bothered to actually vote.
Um, dude, I don't know how to tell this to you, but stop watch the news and start paying attention to the polls.
Obama is probably going to win this by over 100 electoral votes. Right now the polls say Obama 311 McCain 157 with 70 votes in the air. You need 270 to win.
As for popular votes, Obama is leading by 7%-8%, which is pretty decent for polling. 8% is around the winningness of Clinton in 1996 and Bush I in 1988, and all other elections since Bush I have been much closer. Even Reagan's first election was around there, the big conservative blowout election.
You can pretend it's not 'mandate' if you want, whatever that means, but in actuality Obama has managed to shift a lot of very conservatives areas into voting for him. Montana and Georgia are up in the air.
The media is pretending this race is close because the media is a bunch of morons.
Oh, I'm sorry, I assumed we were talking about actual criminal actions considering, and I quote, you said the kid could be 'charged' with it. In addition to trespass, I might point out.
'breaking and entering', the criminal action, is called 'burglary', and requires intent to commit a felony. Sometimes, very rarely, there is a separate offense called 'breaking and entering', and that will also require some other criminal intent.
I don't care what sort of nonsense 'law.com' says about it. The term 'breaking and entering' originates from the qualifications of the criminal action of burglary. More to the point, it's also where your 'force' qualification comes from...using 'force' while trespassing has nothing at all to do with trespassing. You can break though doors while trespassing all you want, and it's just vandalism.
I don't care that everyone seems to assume simply 'breaking' and 'entering' requires 'breaking' and 'entering', or 'breaking' and 'trespass'. It does not. It requires, as you point out, 'force', plus trespass, plus the intent to commit a crime, and actually some other things. Sometimes, for example, you can only do it at night.
There is not, and has never been, a crime called breaking and entering that you can be charged with simply due to trespass plus entering a door, or even breaking down a wall and entering that way. That is called, tada, trespass. (Plus vandalism if you break things on the way in.)
Breaking and entering is only a crime if you intend to commit a felony within. Even breaking down a door with the intent of walking through a house and out the other side is not breaking and entering. (Although good luck demonstrating that intent in court.) Although it is, of course, vandalism and trespass.
Or, more realistically, people who break into abandoned buildings to squat are not guilty of breaking and entering. They did not break in with the intent to commit a felony.
This is the reason we now call that crime 'burglary' instead of 'breaking and entering'...the 'breaking and entering' term is confusing. Breaking and entering is a crime that cannot occur without another crime, or at least the intent to commit another crime.
Moreover, breaking and entering requires trespass. Opening an internal door of a building you are legitimately in, and have not been told not to open, does not and can not count, as that is not trespass.
To compare this kids' actions to breaking and entering, you have to demonstrate that he was:
a) Trespassing, which many people have pointed out that he wasn't...the computer equivalent of trespass is unauthorized access, and he had a password.
b) Intending to commit an additional felony (besides unauthorized computer access) once in.
You have absolutely no evidence this was a 'separate location'. As they were talking about permission problems, it is entirely possible he logged into a server that he was supposed to, and merely had access to directories that shouldn't have been available.
Which means, he was given a key to a locked area, and part of that area was supposed to be additionally locked by another door that he didn't have the key too...which was missing.
That sort of law varies from state-to-state, with various time limits on it.
Incidentally, evicting someone from their apartment requires calling the police in many jurisdictions, even if they aren't residing there anymore. You have to fill out forms and the police have to formally turn the abandoned property over to you and whatnot. You can't just call it abandoned and randomly sell it. There are procedures you have to follow, like trying to contact the person.
It really sounds like this landlord was operating in violation of the law. I don't really know what's happening, but the story, as told, seems to be glossing over the legal aspects of this.
Landlords have different 'possession' of renter's stuff than people others have loaned stuff to. Depending on the state, they can sometimes authorize searches, sometimes they can't, sometimes property left behind becomes theirs, but only after X days, etc.
Just because the landlord was legally holding the drive doesn't mean he could legally authorize a search of it. Or, possibly he could, but he couldn't legally give it away, which he did, and that person thus couldn't authorize a search.
It sounds like the police thought they needed a warrant, or they wouldn't have gone through the silliness of an 'MD5 search' to start with.
OTOH, I thought someone testifying to a judge 'I saw child porn on this computer' was enough for a warrant in the first place, regardless of the ownership rights. That's what happened here. I mean, it sounds like probable cause to me.
Incidentally, why did the judge slap it down? It's possible he did it because an MD5 search requires looking (via a computer program) at every byte of the file, and thus it's hard to see how it's different than a straight up comparison. It's possible he'd have been okay with a filename comparison.
Of course, as someone else pointed out, the chain of custody at this point is near nonsense. A friend of a friend of the landlord. They couldn't prove whose files those were anyway, especially as at least one of the people, the landlord, is plausibly hostile to the person who failed to pay his rent.
It's worth pointing out that literally 99.999999% of child porn is made by people who have legitimate possession of the children. Either actual guardians or people temporary watching them.
There is almost no instances of child porn being made with kidnapped children, and it extremely unlikely someone would kidnap children for that, as opposed to incidentally doing it to children they already kidnapped.
Hence, 'child porn' is not placing anyone's children in danger. Not people possessing it, and not even people making it.
The danger is child abuse. It is not child kidnapping, and it's certainly not the entirely hypothetical 'child kidnapping to make porn'.
Child abuse happens almost entirely by people who are entrusted with children, not random strangers.
Exactly. MD5 checks are damn stupid ways to do anything. The only reason the police were doing them is so they could claim it's not a search, and they don't need a search warrant.
When something matches, as it almost certainly will with such a large database of hashes, they then have probably cause and can get a warrant to actually look at files.
I don't know if fascists being honest is actually a plus.
Communists have to pay lip service to ideas of equality and justice and stuff, and, more to the point, it actually happened to some extent at a lower level. Piss off the people high enough in the government, sure, you were toast, but piss off some lower-down people and if they came after you it was possible that they'd be the ones in trouble. Granted, it would be because someone else was worried about them, but there was, at the lowest level, a form of very corrupt and venal justice.
Whereas with fascists, a doctrine of raw power doesn't have to pay lip service to wish-washy ideas of justice and freedom and equality. Communism had show trials, fascism had no trials.
Also, in a more practical sense, fascism needs enemies to operate, and communism doesn't, at least not to same extent. Because communism is, in fact, pretending to be what is best for the people, whereas fascism is not. Fascism requires an 'other' to rail against, communism does not. It comes 'pre-railed', if you will, against 'the rich', and it can keep railing against them even when they are gone.
Hence fascism is a good deal more dangerous to subgroups that live within it, and neighboring countries. Fascism is a much more dangerous form of totalitarianism and authoritarianism to be near.
OTOH, under fascism, at least the economy tends to work.
The kid did them a favor; however, he should have reported the credentials were in the wild without actually doing his self-initiated penetration test. That's where he crossed the line.
We don't know that he did any sort of 'test', as people keep assuming.
Everyone here keeps acting like he 'hacked' his ways in or was extremely clever. I doubt it. He wasn't even smart enough to send an anonymous email, he thought making a new free email account would protect him.
The school was moving files to a new server. There's absolutely no evidence that his kid had any computer skills besides knowing how to look at 'My Network', see a new server, and type the password everyone knew in to look at this new server, just like he has to do on the other servers.
And then he wandered around look at files until he stumbled across a file with social security numbers in it, and realized, hey, this wasn't good.
Who knows how many students did that before him and didn't report it?
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I point out to everyone I know that under McCain's plan, I'd still have no health insurance. Why? Because they won't sell it to me.
Plus, I'd now be out whatever percentage of my taxes went towards providing tax deductions to everyone else who bought health insurance.
Health care costs are not the problem. They have never been the problem. The problem is the money that the health insurance industry is sucking out of the system.
We, unlike many places that have 'socialized' medicine, actually have doctors and hospitals that operate in the free market system, which means, unlike government-run institutions, they have an incentive to reduce costs.
However, we have the most expensive 'health care' in the world. How can that possibly be correct? Free markets reduce costs. It really is true, it's not some made-up talking point.
It's because the money isn't disappearing in the health care industry. It's because we've invented a system and placed it between the health care industry and their customers. A system that makes more money the less health care people get, and operates as a gatekeeper to such a large percentage of health care purchases that they can manipulate prices.
Without the health insurance industry, prices will drop. No matter how such an industry goes away, either by total free market health care or by universal health care.
If car insurance companies were large enough and powerful enough that almost all car repair happened under their banner, letting them force repair shops into setting prices low for them and high for everyone else, you might have a point.
As it is, a very small percentage of the population actually has that sort of car insurance, and a tiny fraction of car repairs happen under it.
And, just as more importantly, car insurance payouts happen between a few consenting car insurance companies, and denying claims will cause other companies to deny their own claims back.
That said, there are plenty of us who think that mandatory insurance on cars is stupid too, and that mandatory insurance is inherently a scam...if they government wants to collect money from a group of people to cover large costs they might incur later, it should just collect the damn money and do it itself. (This would not stop companies from providing the optional insurance that banks require on new cars and whatnot.)
Hrm, if only they had made a movie about that.
Oh, wait, they did. It's called Sicko.
but if you want to know someone who has 'problems' with insurance: I do. I cannot get any. They won't sell it to me.
Yeah, I love the idea that poeple will use 'too much' health care if it's free.
People barely drag themselves to the doctor when actually sick, it doesn't matter how much it costs, people simply do not like to go. The best way of reducing health care costs in this country would be regular checkups, but people don't go to them even if they're free.
The only people who would 'abuse' the system are hypochondriacs, which are quickly recognized by doctors and ignored, and new parents, who already use 'too much' health care for their children anyway.
And considering the 'shortages' people are talking about are for surgery and MRIs and whatnot, none of which you can visit without a reason, it's not like those people will be using them up.
I like http://realclearpolitics.com/ which actually has a Republican bias in the articles, so you know they aren't exaggerating when they show Obama up by 6% in the popular.
Anyone who thinks this election is close is deluding themselves.
If turnout is demographically similar to previous elections, polls show it will be a very close election.
No, they don't. At all. Like I said, the media is lying. The polls quite clearly show that Obama is going to win a landslide electoral victory. There are no other ways to interpret it. It doesn't matter what the demographics are.
How much popular vote he gets is another matter, but this election is not going to be close with regard to who ends up in the White House.
Additionally, it was mainly Democrats in the late 90s who pushed for banks to give more risky loans, which is one of the major causes of the economic turmoil today (it's certainly not the only cause).
Not really. The Democrats pushed against 'redlining', the discriminatory practice of refusing to give loans in certain areas, by making banks have a certain percentage of their loans there.
However, this didn't require banks to give out risky subprime loans at all, and in actuality most of the subprime lenders were independent mortgage companies not covered by that legislation at all. Only about 30% of subprime loans were given out by banks that had to follow the CRA(1), and only a few percent of those loans were CRA loans.
Meanwhile, those loans actually have a slightly lower rate of failure than other loans at the same rating. Simply because banks actually are still someone discriminatory and inspect them harsher, looking for more (legit) reasons to deny them. Whereas, of course, they would often deliberately overlook legit reasons to deny loans for other people and give them loans they shouldn't have.
The CRA didn't cause this mess.
That is, of course, pretending that bad loans caused this mess. They didn't. The imaginary securities market that banks invented to trade these loans in did, and the criminally negligent rating industries that choose to give such securities AAA ratings did.
1) You'll find a different figure for this, but note what I said. There are actually a lot of 'joined' institutes that are partially required to follow the CRA. They can, in theory, make a single loan to a CRA-area, count it under the CRA, and make thousands of loans to non-CRA areas and simply not count those loans in that 'part' of their business, and, tada, 100% of their loans are in CRA areas.
They didn't do this, because CRA does not require making risky loans in the first place, and even places not regulated by the CRA at all would probably be okay under it. The CRA solved a problem that doesn't exist anymore and no bank would actually have changed their behavior if it disappeared five years ago.
I believe the choices this election are actually Coke vs. flat warm Diet Mountain Dew.
Hey, moron, pretty much everyone's realized Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae didn't have a whole lot to do with this crisis.
Or, you know, it would have been over when they were bailed out.
The trillions in bogus securities floating around, that are bringing down bank after bank and resulting in the lack of loans, have nothing to do with the GSEs at all. They have to do with an entirely unregulated imaginary market that the GSEs couldn't even participate in.
One that, yes, Republicans stopped from being regulated.
Yeah. People on the right say 'Marxist' because they don't want say 'communism' and assume they mean the same thing.
They don't. Communism is a form of government, one that uses Marx's theory as lip service for totalitarianism. And, no matter how good the aims are, always seems to end up that way.
But Marxism just requires the idea that there are various classes and that capitalism will exploit workers and etc. It's a philosophy, it's a historical theory, it's not a form of government.
It is entirely possible that Obama is 'Marxist', most populist Democrats are. In fact, a goodly proportion of the population is to some extent, even if they don't know it. Part of the success of the Republicans, in fact, was the attempt to place themselves on the proletariat side and the Democrats on the bourgeoisie, talking about 'liberal elites' and whatnot. And they alternate that with complaining about a 'class war', which is literally straight from Marx.
Note this is different than Marx's theory of history, which is, as far as we can tell, just flat out wrong. Socialism does not appear to always turn into communism. By which he meant a classless and stateless society, but it doesn't appear to turn into either his sort of communism or the actual communism that exists in the real world.
OTOH, looking at the rest of the world, and the US, the workers in a capitalist society do, eventually, stand up and demand at least some 'socialism', although it's not actually what he was talking about.
Incidentally, I'd like someone to, someday, make a graph without interest on the debt.
In other words, which president would have balanced the budget if no president before them had spent them into a hole they had to pay interest on.
I suspect the differences between Democratic and Republican presidents would be even more obvious.
Clinton barely managed to balance the budget, and only by using money that eventually we'll have to pay back to social security (Better than having to pay it back to other people.)...but he also was paying 238 billion, more than 10% of the budget, to pay for Reagan and Bush I's excesses, and without that, he could have more than balanced the budget in actuality.
No, it didn't. The graph has a stupid line, but that line is indicating the start of the Iraq war, not Clinton's term in office. Going by the colored dots, you can see it arch down and shoot up when Bush takes office.
The dots, however, are slightly off.
Clinton's term in office ended in 2001, whereas the dots marking it ended in 2000. You'd normally include the 2001 year when looking at a president's budget, because although he leaves office in January he had already set the budget.
This is going to be a very close race, and he will have wound up being elected by just a slight majority of the fraction of the eligible voting population that bothered to actually vote.
Um, dude, I don't know how to tell this to you, but stop watch the news and start paying attention to the polls.
Obama is probably going to win this by over 100 electoral votes. Right now the polls say Obama 311 McCain 157 with 70 votes in the air. You need 270 to win.
As for popular votes, Obama is leading by 7%-8%, which is pretty decent for polling. 8% is around the winningness of Clinton in 1996 and Bush I in 1988, and all other elections since Bush I have been much closer. Even Reagan's first election was around there, the big conservative blowout election.
You can pretend it's not 'mandate' if you want, whatever that means, but in actuality Obama has managed to shift a lot of very conservatives areas into voting for him. Montana and Georgia are up in the air.
The media is pretending this race is close because the media is a bunch of morons.
Oh, I'm sorry, I assumed we were talking about actual criminal actions considering, and I quote, you said the kid could be 'charged' with it. In addition to trespass, I might point out.
'breaking and entering', the criminal action, is called 'burglary', and requires intent to commit a felony. Sometimes, very rarely, there is a separate offense called 'breaking and entering', and that will also require some other criminal intent.
I don't care what sort of nonsense 'law.com' says about it. The term 'breaking and entering' originates from the qualifications of the criminal action of burglary. More to the point, it's also where your 'force' qualification comes from...using 'force' while trespassing has nothing at all to do with trespassing. You can break though doors while trespassing all you want, and it's just vandalism.
I don't care that everyone seems to assume simply 'breaking' and 'entering' requires 'breaking' and 'entering', or 'breaking' and 'trespass'. It does not. It requires, as you point out, 'force', plus trespass, plus the intent to commit a crime, and actually some other things. Sometimes, for example, you can only do it at night.
There is not, and has never been, a crime called breaking and entering that you can be charged with simply due to trespass plus entering a door, or even breaking down a wall and entering that way. That is called, tada, trespass. (Plus vandalism if you break things on the way in.)
Um, you're just wrong.
Breaking and entering is only a crime if you intend to commit a felony within. Even breaking down a door with the intent of walking through a house and out the other side is not breaking and entering. (Although good luck demonstrating that intent in court.) Although it is, of course, vandalism and trespass.
Or, more realistically, people who break into abandoned buildings to squat are not guilty of breaking and entering. They did not break in with the intent to commit a felony.
This is the reason we now call that crime 'burglary' instead of 'breaking and entering'...the 'breaking and entering' term is confusing. Breaking and entering is a crime that cannot occur without another crime, or at least the intent to commit another crime.
Moreover, breaking and entering requires trespass. Opening an internal door of a building you are legitimately in, and have not been told not to open, does not and can not count, as that is not trespass.
To compare this kids' actions to breaking and entering, you have to demonstrate that he was:
a) Trespassing, which many people have pointed out that he wasn't...the computer equivalent of trespass is unauthorized access, and he had a password.
b) Intending to commit an additional felony (besides unauthorized computer access) once in.
You have absolutely no evidence this was a 'separate location'. As they were talking about permission problems, it is entirely possible he logged into a server that he was supposed to, and merely had access to directories that shouldn't have been available.
Which means, he was given a key to a locked area, and part of that area was supposed to be additionally locked by another door that he didn't have the key too...which was missing.
I can still buy toilet paper, so we're doing better than the Soviets. :)
Anyway, the fact that Bush can screw up fascism is not that amazing. The man can't even eat pretzels.
That sort of law varies from state-to-state, with various time limits on it.
Incidentally, evicting someone from their apartment requires calling the police in many jurisdictions, even if they aren't residing there anymore. You have to fill out forms and the police have to formally turn the abandoned property over to you and whatnot. You can't just call it abandoned and randomly sell it. There are procedures you have to follow, like trying to contact the person.
It really sounds like this landlord was operating in violation of the law. I don't really know what's happening, but the story, as told, seems to be glossing over the legal aspects of this.
It is, indeed, probable cause, and enough to get a warrant.
Of course, then the police have to actually go before a judge and get the warrant.
Landlords have different 'possession' of renter's stuff than people others have loaned stuff to. Depending on the state, they can sometimes authorize searches, sometimes they can't, sometimes property left behind becomes theirs, but only after X days, etc.
Just because the landlord was legally holding the drive doesn't mean he could legally authorize a search of it. Or, possibly he could, but he couldn't legally give it away, which he did, and that person thus couldn't authorize a search.
It sounds like the police thought they needed a warrant, or they wouldn't have gone through the silliness of an 'MD5 search' to start with.
OTOH, I thought someone testifying to a judge 'I saw child porn on this computer' was enough for a warrant in the first place, regardless of the ownership rights. That's what happened here. I mean, it sounds like probable cause to me.
Incidentally, why did the judge slap it down? It's possible he did it because an MD5 search requires looking (via a computer program) at every byte of the file, and thus it's hard to see how it's different than a straight up comparison. It's possible he'd have been okay with a filename comparison.
Of course, as someone else pointed out, the chain of custody at this point is near nonsense. A friend of a friend of the landlord. They couldn't prove whose files those were anyway, especially as at least one of the people, the landlord, is plausibly hostile to the person who failed to pay his rent.
It's worth pointing out that literally 99.999999% of child porn is made by people who have legitimate possession of the children. Either actual guardians or people temporary watching them.
There is almost no instances of child porn being made with kidnapped children, and it extremely unlikely someone would kidnap children for that, as opposed to incidentally doing it to children they already kidnapped.
Hence, 'child porn' is not placing anyone's children in danger. Not people possessing it, and not even people making it.
The danger is child abuse. It is not child kidnapping, and it's certainly not the entirely hypothetical 'child kidnapping to make porn'.
Child abuse happens almost entirely by people who are entrusted with children, not random strangers.
Exactly. MD5 checks are damn stupid ways to do anything. The only reason the police were doing them is so they could claim it's not a search, and they don't need a search warrant.
When something matches, as it almost certainly will with such a large database of hashes, they then have probably cause and can get a warrant to actually look at files.
I don't know if fascists being honest is actually a plus.
Communists have to pay lip service to ideas of equality and justice and stuff, and, more to the point, it actually happened to some extent at a lower level. Piss off the people high enough in the government, sure, you were toast, but piss off some lower-down people and if they came after you it was possible that they'd be the ones in trouble. Granted, it would be because someone else was worried about them, but there was, at the lowest level, a form of very corrupt and venal justice.
Whereas with fascists, a doctrine of raw power doesn't have to pay lip service to wish-washy ideas of justice and freedom and equality. Communism had show trials, fascism had no trials.
Also, in a more practical sense, fascism needs enemies to operate, and communism doesn't, at least not to same extent. Because communism is, in fact, pretending to be what is best for the people, whereas fascism is not. Fascism requires an 'other' to rail against, communism does not. It comes 'pre-railed', if you will, against 'the rich', and it can keep railing against them even when they are gone.
Hence fascism is a good deal more dangerous to subgroups that live within it, and neighboring countries. Fascism is a much more dangerous form of totalitarianism and authoritarianism to be near.
OTOH, under fascism, at least the economy tends to work.
The kid did them a favor; however, he should have reported the credentials were in the wild without actually doing his self-initiated penetration test. That's where he crossed the line.
We don't know that he did any sort of 'test', as people keep assuming.
Everyone here keeps acting like he 'hacked' his ways in or was extremely clever. I doubt it. He wasn't even smart enough to send an anonymous email, he thought making a new free email account would protect him.
The school was moving files to a new server. There's absolutely no evidence that his kid had any computer skills besides knowing how to look at 'My Network', see a new server, and type the password everyone knew in to look at this new server, just like he has to do on the other servers.
And then he wandered around look at files until he stumbled across a file with social security numbers in it, and realized, hey, this wasn't good.
Who knows how many students did that before him and didn't report it?