Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 1
In reality the income tax is only applicable to what is called 'profit' and it only applies to corporations, and the salary is not a profit, there can be no tax on it, so the entire idea of taxing personal income is a ruse, it's completely illegal.
Income tax applies to income. That is why they call it the income tax. It is authorized by section 8 clause 1 of the constitution. It has nothing to do with profit. There is a separate corporate tax which applies to the profits of corporations.
Beyond that, the income taxes are collected 'voluntarily'
The income tax is not voluntary. But most people pay them voluntarily. If you refuse to pay them, the federal government can sue you and your wages may be garnished in order to collect them. It happens all the time, and is completely legal. I've never heard of any court ruling that a private citizen is not bound by the internal revenue code, apart from Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co., 157 U.S. 429, 555 (1895) which as mentioned above was the reason for the passage of the 16th amendment.
but you have the right not to incriminate against yourself, but try and not file your income taxes, you will be prosecuted by IRS as if you had to incriminate against yourself.
According to the 5th amendment:
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Do you see the problem? Your tax return is not being requested as part of a criminal case. It's just a form that everyone is required to file.
Anyway, all income taxes, payroll taxes, corporate taxes, wealth taxes, capitation taxes, capital gains taxes, all of it needs to go the way of a Dodo bird
I have not sought to defend the merits of taxation, nor would I. But this ignorance you're spewing about the history and legality of the internal revenue code is not worth the paper it's printed on (and it is not printed on paper). It does not appear you have done even basic research into the matter. If you do not pay the income tax, you will be brought to court and compelled to pay and that's the end of it. There's not a court in the country that will rule otherwise.
This is wrong and it should should not listen to it. Income taxes were not prohibited in the constitution. Go and read it for yourselves. Don't just believe some ransom shit you read on the Internet.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
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· Score: 3, Informative
You are wrong. The income tax is not a direct tax, so is not prohibited by section 9 clause 4. Taxes are specifically allowed in section 8 clause 1.
The 16th does not allow direct taxation, so it doesn't overturn s9c4 completely. But it does allow the income tax to be applied any source of income.
But don't take my word for it. Look up "direct tax" yourself. Don't just believe everything you read on the Internet.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 4, Informative
No, they didn't. But they prohibited federal taxes apportioned by person (a poll tax) or by land. A landowner at one point successfully argued that taxing the income he received from charging rent on his property violated this prohibition. So they said in the 16th that they could tax income from "whatever source derived." so there's no question the income tax was legal before, just that it wasn't applicable to all sources of income.
Do you have any suggestions? I keep finding case after case that upholds the notion that this woman can be compelled to decrypt the hard drive. There is even a relevant (but not identical) supreme court ruling on whether a person can be compelled to produce documents:
a person can invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against the production of documents only where the very act of producing the documents is incriminating in itself
It seems pretty clear cut, and I have yet to find a case that has not upheld this interpretation of the law.
The problem is that the names themselves can be incriminating. And in any case, initials are not names, so you aren't decrypting anything, you are asking them to recall information which is not contained in the date book. That's not a fair comparison.
If on they other hand, the names in the date book were encrypted somehow, and you could prove that, then yes I believe you could compel them to turn over the cypher. Good luck with that though, you can't actually hold someone in contempt indefinitely (I think the record is 14 years) and if they hand coded their date book they were probably covering up some pretty gnarly shit. It's also likely it could be broken in a reasonable time frame, so they would simply continue the trial once they could decode it.
They are in bankruptcy right now. They're betting on this to save them. Bail them out essentially. Apple already bought the trademark from them (under another name), so I'm not even sure how they could have possibly lost this lawsuit.
In that case, the entire contents of the hard drive would be testimony.
That's absurd. The hard drive is physical evidence.
The court cannot order a defendent to produce the murder weapon.
Sure they can. But if they knew he had it, they'd probably know where it is, so there'd be no need ask him for it. So that's a really bad analogy.
A better analogy would be if the prosecution had a pane of glass with DNA which they suspect belongs to the defendant. If the defendant refused to give out a sample of her blood for comparison, she would be held in contempt. The DNA is not self incriminating. It's only incriminating if it matches the DNA on the glass. It's the same for her password. There's nothing inherently incriminating about it. It's the data on the hard drive that's incriminating.
But after the fact, it's like taking phone records and compelling the accused to say what was transmitted over the wires, when that was never recorded nor was there a warrant to do so.
It's nothing like that. The data still exists on the hard drive. The lady is simply preventing the court from accessing it.
Suppose the hard drive could be unlocked using her fingerprint. Would her fifth amendment rights allow her to refuse to submit to fingerprinting? And yet it would be just as incriminating (that is to say, her fingerprint by itself is not at all incriminating and never could be). The password is not significantly different in any way. If she refused to be fingerprinted, she would be held in contempt of court just the same. There is absolutely no difference, and no court will ever find that there is.
It may be black and white to you, but this is a very grey area and unlikely to be settled in the near future.
Nope. It unlikely that any court is ever going to rule that the judge can not hold someone in contempt of court for this. This is exactly why courts are allowed to hold people in contempt.
And there is your conundrum. The password has apparently never been reduced to tangible form. It is only available through testimony. Testimony that may prove incriminating.
This is nonsense. A password in and of itself could never be incriminating. The data on the hard drive could be incriminating evidence, but you do not ever have a right to withhold evidence from the court. This is not a legal gray area at all.
For example, if your patent is used in an industry standard, the standards boards require that licensing be available to everyone at a reasonable price. Courts have generally upheld the requirement if patent infringement cases go to trial where a company was simply trying to implement the standard. So yes, it's not a legal requirement that I'm aware of, but it's not unprecedented either.
The password is not incriminating testimony. They could keep it completely secret from the court, and the jury, and the prosecution and it would have no bearing on the case. They could lock her in a private room with the computer and she could enter her password with no one looking, and no one else would ever know what it was, and it would have no bearing on the case whatsoever. The data is what is incriminating. That data is evidence, not testimony, and by withholding it she is interfering with a court order that she produce it.
Protection from self-incrimination exists to prevent cohered confessions and things of that nature. The same principle can't possibly be applied to the hard drive, as the contents of the hard drive came into existence before there was any criminal investigation. The contents of the hard drive are evidence, not testimony.
They have the contents of the hard drive. They want a transform of the contents of her hard drive based on a function in her brain.
You are thinking about it from a literal technical perspective that is improperly applied in this context.
The prosecution is not required to presume innocence (that is absurd!) only the court is. The court has an obligation to pursue all evidence requested by the prosecutor. There's a big difference between withholding evidence and withholding testimony. You are not allowed to withhold evidence under any circumstances. She can be held in contempt for doing so, and if she continues to refuse she can be brought up on charges specifically for impeding the investigation.
But that data isn't in her brain, it's on her hard drive. They couldn't care less what her password itself is. They're asking her to produce the contents of the hard drive.
Revealing a password is more akin to being forced to write a confession, sign it, and then turn it over.
That's only if you assume the person on trial is guilty. We assume the person is innocent, so there's no reason to believe that the contents of a personal hard drive would be incriminating.
If she used a highly random password, which she had written down, you wouldn't expect her to remember it. This is often the case. And if she's lost the paper she wrote it on (good idea in this case) there's no way she'd ever be able to recall it. Even if she used it every day.
No, if they could prove that you knew the password, you could be held in contempt. When you are in court, you are required to present requested evidence. For example, if they know you have the body, you can be compelled to present it. Of course, if they knew you had it, that'd mean they knew where it was, so they wouldn't need to ask for it.
A better analogy would be legal documents which were lost. They knew you had them at one time, but how can they really prove you still have them? Obviously, you can't produce something if you are no longer in possession of it, and they can't hold you in contempt for that.
You are required to turn over documents, and can be held in contempt for refusing. But, of course, the prosecution has to prove you actually have the documents. If you say you lost them, and they can't prove you didn't, they can't hold you in contempt. To my thinking, the same should apply to decryption passwords. I know I'd hate to have my freedom hang on my ability to remember a password.
Slashdot Mirror
Income tax applies to income. That is why they call it the income tax. It is authorized by section 8 clause 1 of the constitution. It has nothing to do with profit. There is a separate corporate tax which applies to the profits of corporations.
The income tax is not voluntary. But most people pay them voluntarily. If you refuse to pay them, the federal government can sue you and your wages may be garnished in order to collect them. It happens all the time, and is completely legal. I've never heard of any court ruling that a private citizen is not bound by the internal revenue code, apart from Pollock v. Farmers Loan & Trust Co., 157 U.S. 429, 555 (1895) which as mentioned above was the reason for the passage of the 16th amendment.
According to the 5th amendment:
Do you see the problem? Your tax return is not being requested as part of a criminal case. It's just a form that everyone is required to file.
I have not sought to defend the merits of taxation, nor would I. But this ignorance you're spewing about the history and legality of the internal revenue code is not worth the paper it's printed on (and it is not printed on paper). It does not appear you have done even basic research into the matter. If you do not pay the income tax, you will be brought to court and compelled to pay and that's the end of it. There's not a court in the country that will rule otherwise.
ugh
This is wrong and it should should not listen to it. Income taxes were not prohibited in the constitution. Go and read it for yourselves. Don't just believe some ransom shit you read on the Internet.
You are wrong. The income tax is not a direct tax, so is not prohibited by section 9 clause 4. Taxes are specifically allowed in section 8 clause 1.
The 16th does not allow direct taxation, so it doesn't overturn s9c4 completely. But it does allow the income tax to be applied any source of income.
But don't take my word for it. Look up "direct tax" yourself. Don't just believe everything you read on the Internet.
No, they didn't. But they prohibited federal taxes apportioned by person (a poll tax) or by land. A landowner at one point successfully argued that taxing the income he received from charging rent on his property violated this prohibition. So they said in the 16th that they could tax income from "whatever source derived." so there's no question the income tax was legal before, just that it wasn't applicable to all sources of income.
The could still compel you to decrypt the hard drive, without divulging the password.
The supreme court has held that "a person can invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against the production of documents only where the very act of producing the documents is incriminating in itself." So they seem to agree with me that you do not have a right under the fifth amendment to withhold documents from the court.
Do you have any suggestions? I keep finding case after case that upholds the notion that this woman can be compelled to decrypt the hard drive. There is even a relevant (but not identical) supreme court ruling on whether a person can be compelled to produce documents:
It seems pretty clear cut, and I have yet to find a case that has not upheld this interpretation of the law.
The problem is that the names themselves can be incriminating. And in any case, initials are not names, so you aren't decrypting anything, you are asking them to recall information which is not contained in the date book. That's not a fair comparison.
If on they other hand, the names in the date book were encrypted somehow, and you could prove that, then yes I believe you could compel them to turn over the cypher. Good luck with that though, you can't actually hold someone in contempt indefinitely (I think the record is 14 years) and if they hand coded their date book they were probably covering up some pretty gnarly shit. It's also likely it could be broken in a reasonable time frame, so they would simply continue the trial once they could decode it.
They are in bankruptcy right now. They're betting on this to save them. Bail them out essentially. Apple already bought the trademark from them (under another name), so I'm not even sure how they could have possibly lost this lawsuit.
That's absurd. The hard drive is physical evidence.
Sure they can. But if they knew he had it, they'd probably know where it is, so there'd be no need ask him for it. So that's a really bad analogy.
A better analogy would be if the prosecution had a pane of glass with DNA which they suspect belongs to the defendant. If the defendant refused to give out a sample of her blood for comparison, she would be held in contempt. The DNA is not self incriminating. It's only incriminating if it matches the DNA on the glass. It's the same for her password. There's nothing inherently incriminating about it. It's the data on the hard drive that's incriminating.
It's nothing like that. The data still exists on the hard drive. The lady is simply preventing the court from accessing it.
Suppose the hard drive could be unlocked using her fingerprint. Would her fifth amendment rights allow her to refuse to submit to fingerprinting? And yet it would be just as incriminating (that is to say, her fingerprint by itself is not at all incriminating and never could be). The password is not significantly different in any way. If she refused to be fingerprinted, she would be held in contempt of court just the same. There is absolutely no difference, and no court will ever find that there is.
Nope. It unlikely that any court is ever going to rule that the judge can not hold someone in contempt of court for this. This is exactly why courts are allowed to hold people in contempt.
This is nonsense. A password in and of itself could never be incriminating. The data on the hard drive could be incriminating evidence, but you do not ever have a right to withhold evidence from the court. This is not a legal gray area at all.
For example, if your patent is used in an industry standard, the standards boards require that licensing be available to everyone at a reasonable price. Courts have generally upheld the requirement if patent infringement cases go to trial where a company was simply trying to implement the standard. So yes, it's not a legal requirement that I'm aware of, but it's not unprecedented either.
The password is not incriminating testimony. They could keep it completely secret from the court, and the jury, and the prosecution and it would have no bearing on the case. They could lock her in a private room with the computer and she could enter her password with no one looking, and no one else would ever know what it was, and it would have no bearing on the case whatsoever. The data is what is incriminating. That data is evidence, not testimony, and by withholding it she is interfering with a court order that she produce it.
Protection from self-incrimination exists to prevent cohered confessions and things of that nature. The same principle can't possibly be applied to the hard drive, as the contents of the hard drive came into existence before there was any criminal investigation. The contents of the hard drive are evidence, not testimony.
You are thinking about it from a literal technical perspective that is improperly applied in this context.
The prosecution is not required to presume innocence (that is absurd!) only the court is. The court has an obligation to pursue all evidence requested by the prosecutor. There's a big difference between withholding evidence and withholding testimony. You are not allowed to withhold evidence under any circumstances. She can be held in contempt for doing so, and if she continues to refuse she can be brought up on charges specifically for impeding the investigation.
But that data isn't in her brain, it's on her hard drive. They couldn't care less what her password itself is. They're asking her to produce the contents of the hard drive.
That's only if you assume the person on trial is guilty. We assume the person is innocent, so there's no reason to believe that the contents of a personal hard drive would be incriminating.
If she used a highly random password, which she had written down, you wouldn't expect her to remember it. This is often the case. And if she's lost the paper she wrote it on (good idea in this case) there's no way she'd ever be able to recall it. Even if she used it every day.
No, if they could prove that you knew the password, you could be held in contempt. When you are in court, you are required to present requested evidence. For example, if they know you have the body, you can be compelled to present it. Of course, if they knew you had it, that'd mean they knew where it was, so they wouldn't need to ask for it.
A better analogy would be legal documents which were lost. They knew you had them at one time, but how can they really prove you still have them? Obviously, you can't produce something if you are no longer in possession of it, and they can't hold you in contempt for that.
You are required to turn over documents, and can be held in contempt for refusing. But, of course, the prosecution has to prove you actually have the documents. If you say you lost them, and they can't prove you didn't, they can't hold you in contempt. To my thinking, the same should apply to decryption passwords. I know I'd hate to have my freedom hang on my ability to remember a password.
[sarcasm] The constitution is a living document. These things were never meant to be taken literally. [/sarcasm]
It will be added to the list. There's always more room for more needlessly vilified social habits.