You people are totally obscene. "Hey, we didn't actually shoot the messenger, we only stole nine years of his life. See, we didn't like the message he was bringing!"
If the guy defrauded people, convict him for that. There are plenty of honest ways to sell people something useless for $40 without fraud; Microsoft and preachers both have it down.
Convicting him for sending email is a direct First Amendment violation. He communicated, you didn't like the communication, so off to jail he goes. The spam mail wasn't even anonymous -- there was SOME way to contact him, otherwise all the morons wouldn't have had any way to send him their $39.95. Is it really worth 9 years in prison because his contact info was in the message body rather than in the header? And what happened to the Slashdotters who love anonymous wireless Internet and anonymous P2P and anonymous untraceable web access? Do your principles stop at port 25? Or do you just not have any principles?
If society is lucky, this accused emailer will have stashed away some of his alleged millions, to pay some lawyers to uphold fundamental rights for all of us (and himself). If society is unlucky, then somebody like EFF or ACLU will have to spend your contributions to uphold all of our rights, with him as the test case. If society is really unlucky, then nobody will challenge it, and we'll have mob rule, where merely pissing off a few million people is enough to get you thrown behind bars. And that won't make it a friendly country for somebody like me (who tells off both the government and the citizens when they deserve it) to live in.
In a case such as this - where someone has called the police and reported a potential crime - the police have the right to ask everyone present for ID.
Yes, and the people who they "ask" are not required to respond. As Shakespeare said in Henry IV:
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
You are confusing a request with a demand. A cop is free to request anything at any point, with a few exceptions. (And people who have never had good advice from a lawyer are likely to do as they request -- to the peoples' own detriment.) But what a cop can demand is limited by the Constitution. A "request" followed by an arrest if you do not comply is a "demand".
The California law that claimed to require people to produce ID was declared unconstitutional by both the Ninth Circuit and by the Supreme Court. That case was Kolender v. Lawson. Edward Lawson is a black man in dreadlocks who was stopped and/or arrested more than 20 times for walking around in neighborhoods where the cops didn't like to see black guys. Eventually he filed cases against these cops and won. The cops appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. The Ninth Circuit said it violated his Fourth Amendment rights and was too vague. The Supremes merely said it was too vague, and didn't inquire further -- which is why they needed to take the Hiibel case.
EFF filed a brief because they believe in privacy and anonymity.
(Also, working with me has educated them on some issues around ubiquitous ID demands. Turns out that most of these ID demands are backed by big databases; the ID is used as a key to search them. E.g., a cop radios in your license number and they tell him things about you from the NCIC database. Or the cop uses the multi-state MATRIX web access from the laptop in the police car. Or the TSA's CAPPS-2 looks up your credit records to suspect you if you don't have any credit -- and cross-checks them against your ID when you show up at the airport.)
Cato Institute's amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Hiibel v. Nevada. They point out that even if the cops have a warrant, they not only can't make you answer questions, but they are required to warn you that you have a right to remain silent. You are free to be silent at every other stage of an investigation or prosecution, from casual conversation with cops all the way through sentencing.
Cato also discovered that more than 20 states have laws like this on the books (it's in the appendix of their brief).
You can read any or all of the briefs in the case (including my own, which goes into airport ID issues) at the EPIC web page on Hiibel.
From the transcript on the video page, you can see that Deputy Dove was demanding papers: "I need to see some identification", then "I just need to see some identification", then "Show me your identification".
Not "Who are you?". But "Show me your papers!".
The standard advice from ANY lawyer is to not say anything when accosted by cops. Not even your name. And the mass of court decisions, e.g. Kolender v. Lawson, concurring opinion of Brennan state that nobody has to answer ANY of the questions a cop asks of them -- even IF the cop suspects them of a crime:
"... States may not authorize the arrest and criminal prosecution of an individual for failing to produce identification or further information on demand by a police officer."
Here's another one, Terry v. Ohio, concurring opinion by White: "[T]he person may be briefly detained against his will while pertinent questions are directed to him. Of course, the person stopped is not obliged to answer, answers may not be compelled, and refusal to answer furnishes no basis for an arrest, although it may alert the officer to the need for continued observation." 88 S.Ct., at 1886 (White, J., concurring).
The team decided that since we'd never had a "1.0"-quality release, it was more important to polish the working code we had, and ship it so people can use it, than to destabilize it for months by porting it to 2.2.x. The 2.0.x code interfaces to the IP layers through the routing code, which produces a number of user-visible problems. In 2.2.x we'll use "ipchains" which I've never looked at personally. But I hear it will make the integration much smoother, allow us to catch and reject cleartext packets that oughta be encrypted, notice packets going out and try to negotiate a tunnel to put 'em in, eliminate screwiness about whether packets created ON the gateway will go through the tunnels, etc. We're guessing it's about 2-3 months of work for our kernel guy (Richard Guy Briggs). We'd be very glad if some folks (outside the US) who understand ipchains would guide us through the design phase and through the usual few inscrutable bugs and such. Volunteers can send mail to linux-ipsec@clinet.fi (anyone can post; it's a majordomo list if you want to join).
Slashdot Mirror
You people are totally obscene. "Hey, we didn't actually shoot the messenger, we only stole nine years of his life. See, we didn't like the message he was bringing!"
If the guy defrauded people, convict him for that. There are plenty of honest ways to sell people something useless for $40 without fraud; Microsoft and preachers both have it down.
Convicting him for sending email is a direct First Amendment violation. He communicated, you didn't like the communication, so off to jail he goes. The spam mail wasn't even anonymous -- there was SOME way to contact him, otherwise all the morons wouldn't have had any way to send him their $39.95. Is it really worth 9 years in prison because his contact info was in the message body rather than in the header? And what happened to the Slashdotters who love anonymous wireless Internet and anonymous P2P and anonymous untraceable web access? Do your principles stop at port 25? Or do you just not have any principles?
If society is lucky, this accused emailer will have stashed away some of his alleged millions, to pay some lawyers to uphold fundamental rights for all of us (and himself). If society is unlucky, then somebody like EFF or ACLU will have to spend your contributions to uphold all of our rights, with him as the test case. If society is really unlucky, then nobody will challenge it, and we'll have mob rule, where merely pissing off a few million people is enough to get you thrown behind bars. And that won't make it a friendly country for somebody like me (who tells off both the government and the citizens when they deserve it) to live in.
Yes, and the people who they "ask" are not required to respond. As Shakespeare said in Henry IV:
You are confusing a request with a demand. A cop is free to request anything at any point, with a few exceptions. (And people who have never had good advice from a lawyer are likely to do as they request -- to the peoples' own detriment.) But what a cop can demand is limited by the Constitution. A "request" followed by an arrest if you do not comply is a "demand".
The California law that claimed to require people to produce ID was declared unconstitutional by both the Ninth Circuit and by the Supreme Court. That case was Kolender v. Lawson. Edward Lawson is a black man in dreadlocks who was stopped and/or arrested more than 20 times for walking around in neighborhoods where the cops didn't like to see black guys. Eventually he filed cases against these cops and won. The cops appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. The Ninth Circuit said it violated his Fourth Amendment rights and was too vague. The Supremes merely said it was too vague, and didn't inquire further -- which is why they needed to take the Hiibel case.
EFF filed a brief because they believe in privacy and anonymity.
(Also, working with me has educated them on some issues around ubiquitous ID demands. Turns out that most of these ID demands are backed by big databases; the ID is used as a key to search them. E.g., a cop radios in your license number and they tell him things about you from the NCIC database. Or the cop uses the multi-state MATRIX web access from the laptop in the police car. Or the TSA's CAPPS-2 looks up your credit records to suspect you if you don't have any credit -- and cross-checks them against your ID when you show up at the airport.)
Cato Institute's amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Hiibel v. Nevada. They point out that even if the cops have a warrant, they not only can't make you answer questions, but they are required to warn you that you have a right to remain silent. You are free to be silent at every other stage of an investigation or prosecution, from casual conversation with cops all the way through sentencing.
Cato also discovered that more than 20 states have laws like this on the books (it's in the appendix of their brief).
You can read any or all of the briefs in the case (including my own, which goes into airport ID issues) at the EPIC web page on Hiibel.
From the transcript on the video page, you can see that Deputy Dove was demanding papers: "I need to see some identification", then "I just need to see some identification", then "Show me your identification".
Not "Who are you?". But "Show me your papers!".
The standard advice from ANY lawyer is to not say anything when accosted by cops. Not even your name. And the mass of court decisions, e.g. Kolender v. Lawson, concurring opinion of Brennan state that nobody has to answer ANY of the questions a cop asks of them -- even IF the cop suspects them of a crime:
"... States may not authorize the arrest and criminal prosecution of an individual for failing to produce identification or further information on demand by a police officer."
Here's another one, Terry v. Ohio, concurring opinion by White: "[T]he person may be briefly detained against his will while pertinent questions are directed to him. Of course, the person stopped is not obliged to answer, answers may not be compelled, and refusal to answer furnishes no basis for an arrest, although it may alert the officer to the need for continued observation." 88 S.Ct., at 1886 (White, J., concurring).
The team decided that since we'd never had a "1.0"-quality release, it was more important to polish the working code we had, and ship it so people can use it, than to destabilize it for months by porting it to 2.2.x. The 2.0.x code interfaces to the IP layers through the routing code, which produces a number of user-visible problems. In 2.2.x we'll use "ipchains" which I've never looked at personally. But I hear it will make the integration much smoother, allow us to catch and reject cleartext packets that oughta be encrypted, notice packets going out and try to negotiate a tunnel to put 'em in, eliminate screwiness about whether packets created ON the gateway will go through the tunnels, etc. We're guessing it's about 2-3 months of work for our kernel guy (Richard Guy Briggs). We'd be very glad if some folks (outside the US) who understand ipchains would guide us through the design phase and through the usual few inscrutable bugs and such. Volunteers can send mail to linux-ipsec@clinet.fi (anyone can post; it's a majordomo list if you want to join).