Articles covering freedom of the press, concentration of media ownership and investigative journalism are pretty popular on HN and often make the front page.
I feel that other than scientific or highly technical posts, the HN community interest in the press is one of the few things that still makes HN endearing.
For me, the Steve Jackson Games case of the early 1990s [1,2], where police seized computers in a raid later determined to be illegal, was what got me into the whole EFF/FSF/Linux world of computing rights, and from there into Slashdot and HN and other related communities. My guess is that’s pretty common with people of a certain age!
So much that’s wrong - a magistrate issuing non-constitutional orders, a “search” warrant that allows cops to basically confiscate your servers… it’s dystopian and it’s here.
> The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists.
Wow, unreal that she could approve such a warrant. Even in the absence of a federal statute it seems like a crazy step to take.
Not that surprising. Small Town Things. I'm sure there are backwoods places in the USA where the owner of the used car dealership, the mayor, the judge, and police chief are all immediate family. A thing is only illegal if it's enforced.
> [The paper] reported […] restaurant owner Kari Newell had kicked newspaper staff out of a public forum with [a politician…]. Newell responded […] with hostile comments on her personal Facebook page.
> A confidential source contacted the newspaper, [with] evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to [drive without a] license. [That] could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license[…].
> [The claim was confirmed but the paper] suspected the source was […] Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce. [The reporter didn’t publish that and] alerted police to the situation.
> Police notified Newell, who then complained […] that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true.
Wow. No kidding it’s a small town. Restaurant owner acts poorly, pissed off future ex(?) leaks damaging info to the paper, she runs to the cops to say the paper did something illegal despite not publishing it, and the entire department raided the little paper?
As a first generation immigrant to the US, the parent story struck a deep (dis) chord.
Your comment brought back memories of growing up in India.
The idea of a "Panchayat" was taught in schools as both an ancient form of local/self governance and a modern answer to effective governance in post partition India.
Even Gandhi promoted it as a pillar of India's self-rule.
Basically, village "elders" land up passing judgement on disputes. Most of these
people were "respected" but uneducated. Their world views were very narrow.
As can be expected, it wasn't uncommon for their biases to result in "justice"
that would be totally unacceptable when viewed through a broader lens.
After decades in the US, to discover that something like this can happen in
21st century USA is really unsettling. I'm having trouble explaining
(even to myself) the anguish I feel.
Except this is a procedural law, enforcement happens judicially in court. Cannabis is a law enforcement and prosecutor discretion thing. If prosecutors brought a cannabis case to court the judges would enforce the law. But the DOJ has opted to deprioritize cannabis enforcement unilaterally.
of course not, they would need 10x their current police force to even start to do something like that. But if it's obvious constitutional laws are broken in an egregious way and the locals are obviously ignoring it, the Feds have stepped in many many many times in the past.
The applicability of this particular statute (42 USC § 2000aa) - as with most of the Federal government's power - hinges on this clause: "...in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce..."
It seems plausible that the paper might report on things that relate to or impact neighboring states.
But like I said - even if the statute weren't there - what's wrong with calling them up and asking them to surrender whatever they're searching for under subpoena instead? Especially for the purported crime of "identity theft"?!
Besides precedent it's still more than that. At the least 14th amendment
> No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
And last clause says Congress has three power to enforce this
Right, but Congress passed a law which limited its own scope to interstate commerce. So while the 14th Amendment makes it eligible in general its specific applicability depends on it itself.
And sadly this perhaps qualifies as "due process" in Marion County.
Due process isn't county specific and the judiciary has already stated that wheat that could in theory be sold in another state is interstate commerce Wickard v. Filburn US supreme Court.
I'm not sure what isn't interstate commerce maybe your kids lemonade stand as long as it's more than 100 miles from the state line?
> Congress passed a law which limited its own scope to interstate commerce.
What law is that? I'm not familiar with such a law but can't imagine it would even be constitutional. Eg the law Jack Smith indicted trump with recently is about protecting federal/conditional rights.
Yes, the commerce clause is quite expansive and is interpreted expansively, but at the least this would be a first amendment issue and Congress can enforce that and does
That citation and the quoted bit limiting the law to interstate commerce is already in the first comment you replied to. I think you have misconstrued something.
> ... any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce...
The law we're all talking about prohibits a government employee from searching or seizing any product materials intended for use in production of communication materials that affect interstate commerce.
"in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce" was intentionally chosen, to ensure that the law falls under an allowed power of congress but also is exceptionally broad in applicability due to previous supreme court decisions.
E.g. Wickard v. Filburn, held that a farmer harvesting a small quantity of his own wheat and eating it affected interstate commerce, because the farmer did not consume other wheat available in interstate commerce.
Just about anything commercial affects interstate commerce by this definition.
Yes, regardless of that State law certainly applies:
Melissa Underwood, communications director of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, replied by email to a question about whether the KBI was involved in the case.
“At the request of the Marion Police Department, on Tuesday, Aug. 8, we began an investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing in Marion, Kansas. The investigation is ongoing,” Underwood said.
You don’t really want the bar to entry for the roll of magistrate to be too high.
The page you linked states a magistrate must be at least 21, have a Batchelor’s degree, undergo a training program within one year of commencing the roll, with restrictions on their abilities until that and other milestones are met.
This points to the idea that any reasonable adult, with a proven ability to pass at least a baccalaureate, ought be able to administer the law to at least a level of basic competency while they simultaneously commit to the career path by undergoing relevant training.
Magistrates who are licensed attorneys have fewer restrictions and can progress faster.
Is there some other set of rules you would prefer?
Should the average higher-education-qualify adult be prevented from participating in the judiciary?
That doesn’t seem like an argument a citizen of a democracy wound intentionally make.
> Should the average higher-education-qualify adult be prevented from participating in the judiciary?
This might be a bit spicy, but I don't think that a bachelors degree should count as higher education anymore. So, no, the average higher-education-qualify adult shouldn't be prevented from participating in the judiciary, but I think the bar for 'higher-education-qualify' should at least be a post-bachelors degree specific to the field.
I can't imagine they presented anything close to probable cause. The fact that they had personal information is grossly insufficient to suggest any kind of crime let alone identity theft. I hope that magistrate gets looked at very closely.
Doesn't surprise me, a lot of these elected judges got there via nepotism and "charisma" and barely passed the bar on their 5th try, -if- they even need a law degree depending on jurisdiction.
Not in the same way as you and me. They can be voted out of office (if elected,) impeached, or censured, but they enjoy judicial immunity[0] for their acts as a judge. They cannot be sued for acts they commit as a judge, no matter how egregious[1].
0 - this is as close to absolute immunity as exists in the law. In fact, you could, with a straight face and clean conscience call it absolute immunity.
Stump v. Sparkman, 435 U.S. 349 (1978), is the leading United States Supreme Court decision on judicial immunity. It involved an Indiana judge who was sued by a young woman who had been sterilized without her knowledge as a minor in accordance with the judge's order. The Supreme Court held that the judge was immune from being sued for issuing the order because it was issued as a judicial function. The case has been called one of the most controversial in recent Supreme Court history.
The most controversial case in recent Supreme Court history being from 45 years ago speaks directly to how rare this level of controversy is.
I’d love to see stats on what % of search warrants are NOT signed off by a judge (I’d bet hardly any), and how many search warrants later found to be inaccurate, end up with disciplinary action towards the police (I’d bet almost none).
The 4th amendment isn’t worth anything if judges will sign off on everything that crosses their desk.
Here's a taste - the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (often referred to as the FISA court) authorizes security agencies to spy on US citizens. The court proceedings are secret, and the party being surveilled is unable to participate and is not aware of any of the proceedings. In terms of warrants issued:
> From 1979 through 2012, the court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has rejected only 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance applications by the government
> "The FISA system is broken. At the point that a FISA judge can compel the disclosure of millions of phone records of U.S. citizens engaged in only domestic communications, unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence…there is no longer meaningful judicial review," Mr. Rotenberg said.
I've tried looking into this in Chicago. Fax records that would show how often a fax is made to the specific fax number aren't accessible because Chicago PD uses a third party service to send faxes, and they don't keep logs. They do it by having the third party company host a physical host at CPD's office, which the agency says they don't have access to.
When I tried to get records showing how often search warrants happen and what their details are, they give inconsistent amounts of records for identical time windows. First FOIA request gave 9k records, second was 11k, third was 18k. And colleagues were able to find more with requests for emails.
When I appealed to the IL AG office, they sided with CPD saying that a sufficient search was done, despite our proof showing that a marginally expanded search resulted in more records.
All made worse by the Judicial branch being un-FOIAable.
If there was a statistically relevant problem, we wouldn’t hear about this sort of malfeasance in the news.
The fact that there is almost always one or another incident making the news only indicates that rare events occur frequently at sufficiently large scale.
The overwhelming majority of search and arrest warrants are authorised because they should be, and, well, like any job role, mistakes shouldn’t be dealt with by disciplinary action that results in the work being ground to a halt.
Where serious wrong doing occurs we should expect disciplinary action, and we do see that occasionally as it makes the news.
There’s definitely an argument to be made that maybe some police are too prone to abuse their powers, but the answer isn’t perfect law enforcement, the answer is how much malfeasance and corruption is tolerable, because we’ll never have none, and the only thing worse than corruption is perfect law enforcement.
> like any job role, mistakes shouldn’t be dealt with by disciplinary action that results in the work being ground to a halt.
The judiciary and law enforcement absolutely must be held to a higher standard which does not accept mistakes. They are not 'any job role' -- these people have the authority to take away your livelihood, if not your life. The standard they must be held to should be perfection and nothing less. Any deviation from such should be treated as harshly as the worst criminals are.
> Where serious wrong doing occurs we should expect disciplinary action
_Any_ wrongdoing by law enforcement is serious.
> the answer is how much malfeasance and corruption is tolerable, because we’ll never have none
Just because we won't ever end up at 'none' doesn't mean we need to be accepting of anything less. Zero malfeasance, zero corruption. Anything but those should be burned out as a cancer, even if that burning out needs to be literal.
What do you mean by "conclusion of a case"? Obviously a case cannot go to trial with evidence still sealed, and in at least some states the affidavit cannot remain under seal past the defendant's arraignment. Plus, affidavits are not always sealed in the first place—and the warrant that's been published in this case makes no mention of the supporting affidavit being under seal.
>The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead.
This isn't true. It is legal to search and seize journalists, if the journalist are suspected of committing a crime.
Either the author doesn't know the law, or is being misleading, because the same article also says the local and state cops are investigating the local journalist.
> because the same article also says the local and state cops are investigating the local journalist.
The statement from the state police is a lot more vague than that:
> “At the request of the Marion Police Department, on Tuesday, Aug. 8, we began an investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing in Marion, Kansas. The investigation is ongoing”
And even the warrant only uses passive language indicating that crimes have been committed without identifying a suspect:
> Having evidence under oath before me from which I find there is probable cause to believe that an offense against the laws of the State of Kansas, including but not limited to violations of K.S.A. 21-6107 - Identity theft and K.S.A. 21-5839 - Unlawful acts concerning computers, has been committed
but the warrant does at least identify that it is believed computers at the paper were "involved in the identity theft". However, no person at the paper has yet been named as suspected of committing a crime.
the article offers a legal opinion that isn't a fact, just an opinion. Even between lawyers there will be differences of opinion on legal cases. Journalists and their opinions don't even enter the game here.
This isn't a case study, or an example from a textbook, its an ongoing situation. Conclusively saying that the raid was illegal isn't a fact, its just an opinion, and not even a credited one - it reads like the journalist's opinion.
So its one thing to report on a police raid, its another thing to offer a legal opinion and present it as fact without conditionals, or whose opinion it is.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has been applied to the States by the Federal Courts via the Incorporation Doctrine (i.e., via the Fourteenth Amendment).
> The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law* that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
Just look at marijuana and abortion laws for two different prime examples of how supposed federal law superseding "lower" law can play out in ways that circumvent the nature of that power structure.
The reality is law is reactionary. Just because a law exists doesn't mean there is actually anything tangible preventing you from performing an action, and if the courts are acting in ways counter to federal law AND/OR federal law isn't asserting/executing authority that it has to supercede local law, then it's implicitly allowing it to continue and perhaps even setting precedent or groundwork to dismantle that particular paradigm.
Remember, this is America. States Rights advocates aren't just numerous, but hold significant power in state and federal legislature and courts. While the Federal law should reign supreme, the reality on the ground is that even when it does, it's often playing catch up, so there's still a gulf between how things work in theory, and in reality, if for nothing else just due to the slow operation of federal government and law.
> Just look at marijuana and abortion laws for two different prime examples of how supposed federal law superseding "lower" law can play out in ways that circumvent the nature of that power structure.
Neither of these are good examples.
Marijuana is because the Feds choose not to act; the DEA could raid every dispensary tomorrow if they wanted.
Abortion never got meaningfully protected at the Federal level. The Dems had sort of a chance at it, but chose the ACA to spend that political capital on instead.
> A person aggrieved by a search for or seizure of materials in violation of this chapter shall have a civil cause of action for damages for such search or seizure—
> (1) against the United States, against a State which has waived its sovereign immunity under the Constitution to a claim for damages resulting from a violation of this chapter, or against any other governmental unit, all of which shall be liable for violations of this chapter by their officers or employees while acting within the scope or under color of their office or employment; and [...]
> (c) “Any other governmental unit”, as used in this chapter, includes the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, any territory or possession of the United States, and any local government, unit of local government, or any unit of State government.
It can appear as a can of tomatoes being consumed by Andy Warhol himself. It doesn't change the fact there are no shield laws in Kansas or the US for journalists.
>...it shall be unlawful for a government officer or employee, in connection with the investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense, to search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication
... followed by a bunch of caveats about cases in which it is acceptable to seize documents. I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds to me like a federal law protecting journalists. Whether or not it was violated in this case remains to be seen.
You cut off the first and most important caveat. Police can search and size if they think the journalist committed a crime, just not for 3rd party investigations.
>this provision shall not impair or affect the ability of any government officer or employee, pursuant to otherwise applicable law, to search for or seize such materials, if—
(1)there is probable cause to believe that the person possessing such materials has committed or is committing the criminal offense to which the materials relate
This is obviously relevant as the police allege the journalist committed a crime, specifically identify theft.
Yea I believe that’s the case here upon reading the statute closer. However given the newspaper had publicly said the documents were received from a source I am surprised a judge allowed a warrant. I am curious what evidence was presented and how it could have been more compelling than the public disclosure of a source.
Evidence could be extremely obvious, for example an IP addresses logging into a victim's account. It happens all the time.
Or it could be a trumped up accusation and an unconstitutional warrant.
We simply don't have the information. An honest an intelligent article would have articulated this question as the Crux of the matter, opposed to obfuscating it and claiming the warrant was unconstitutional.
I'm personally very opposed to a police corruption and overreach, but also hate skewed articles that mislead. Real reform needs to come from a place of accuracy opposed to hype and misinformation.
"to which the materials relate" still is a problem if you seize everything that a newspaper has in response to one bit of reporting that you think might have violated a law.
This makes it hard for me to see this as anything other than a retaliatory overreach, especially given the context of the paper's track record of critical reporting on local government and law enforcement.
It's also worth noting that the article mentions a lawful source for the information in question (a tip from Newell's husband).
I believe you are correct. The article cites 42 USC 2000aa but that doesn't apply in cases of criminal investigation tied to those articles if my non-lawyer understanding is correct, since it's only necessary that the things seized are tied to a crime (whether they are tied to a real crime or just being awkward for someone in power is of course it's own fight in court).
The materials seized from journalists need to be tied to a crime committed by the journalists rather than a third party, and the crime cannot merely be one of having or receiving the materials/information:
> may not search for or seize such materials under the provisions of this paragraph if the offense to which the materials relate consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of such materials or the information contained therein
(followed by exceptions for national defense and child pornography)
It seems unlikely that the police presented evidence the journalists were perpetrating identity theft, or evidence that the journalists obtained their information through computer hacking rather than receiving it from their confidential source. If the suspect for those crimes was the confidential source rather than the journalists, then the journalists and their work products would be protected by this law.
Yeah I don't get it, the First Amendment doesn't set up journalists as some special class of citizen; all citizens are meant to have the rights and protections journalists have.
Good point. Besides, what's a journalist anyway? There are many independent creators that label themselves as journalists. If that's the case, how many readers or followers must one have to be considered a 'journalist'? If journalists get special protection, I hereby declare myself one.
> possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce;
"Journalist" is merely an informal summary of what the law actually states.
Thanks, Yes- I want to state that my purpose is to distribute a similar form of public communication across state lines. Forgive me if I got it wrong at first, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a journalist.
The problem is what does any of that mean? Am I a journalist right now because I'm disseminating my writings to the public using a means of interstate commerce, e.g. the Internet? I'm guessing probably not, but the law should give me all the protections and recognize all the rights that a journalist has. It shouldn't be the government's place to decide who is or isn't a journalist; everybody is a journalist and should be protected accordingly.
If everybody is a journalist, then there's no ambiguity. But if the law says that some people are journalists and some people aren't, now there are two classes of citizen and it isn't even clear which is which.
This one got noticed, but they usually get away. Small towns rally around this sort of thing and preserve criminals very effectively. Small states are the same. Poor rule of law.
Not a small town thing. There isn’t a town or city of any size in America that isn’t woefully deficient in rule of law. It’s just whatever artificial camp you get thrown into that decides which corruption you overlook.
Is there a lot of suppression corruption in big cities? I was under the impression that it's mostly embezzlement and theft. San Francisco, for instance, is solidly in the hands of unbelievably corrupt people (one of the supervisors here, Peskin, pulled off a bunch of shady shit - which makes me think the others are too), but I was under the impression 1A stuff was safe.
Still, I suppose there was all the stuff about Jeff Adachi and what the cops did to the journalists there, so I suppose your point is sound.
I'm not in Marion County but I am in the general vicinity. This is both surprising and unsurprising. And probably explains why my own county's newspaper sticks to stories about school board meetings and who had the winning hog at 4H. My county may be as corrupt as Marion, or it might be fine. All I can know is gossip and reading in between the lines of Facebook comments. There's no oversight beyond unverified hearsay.
What the Marion County Record is doing is incredibly vital for their community. I just went to their web page. They currently don't have a fundraiser yet, but I hope they'll start one.
Yeah. I used to live up in Chieftan and thought of Ocala as "the big city" when it was just a Methodist Church and a stop sign. We also lived near Ft. Walton for a couple years. My dad referred to the local politicos as "The dumbest people I've ever met. Vindictive, too." (The real quote isn't suitable for mixed company, but that's a close approximation.)
This being an "illegal" raid, and being "authorized" or "sanctioned" by a judge, SHE should be the one thrown in jail (or at least w/ the stiffest sentence) , it's her job to uphold the law. She should be held to the highest standard.
According to the paper's recent reporting, a prominent local businessperson, Kari Newell, had been driving while her licence was suspended for drunk driving, with the knowledge of local police.
There's also a headline from their last week's issue, "Media ejected from open forum" that seems likely to be related. Google's cache of the article is at: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3... so I'll give a relevant quote for when that expires:
> Two representatives of the news media were ordered by Marion police chief Gideon Cody to leave a public reception Tuesday for U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner.
> Cody’s directions came at the behest of Kari Newell, proprietor of Chef’s Plate in Marion’s Historic Elgin Hotel and its coffee shop across the street, Kari’s Kitchen, where the event was taking place.
> Cody said that Newell asked that Record publisher Eric Meyer and Record reporter Phyllis Zorn be evicted before LaTurner arrived.
> Moments before Cody ordered Meyer and Zorn to leave, Newell had told Zorn: “I will not have members of the media in my establishment. You have to leave.”
> Kari Newell, proprietor of Chef’s Plate in Marion’s Historic Elgin Hotel and its coffee shop across the street, Kari’s Kitchen, where the event was taking place.
The person owning the Doughnuts, owns the Police. /s
If it wasn't public before about her driving with a suspended license, it is now. Barbara Streisand effect hits again. It's probably reaching a much larger audience too, than it ever would have without this stunt.
> The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
Two things occur to me about this story, exposed in this quote, that I often think when seeing stories of this nature:
1. Many businesses that rely on computers don't have a disaster recovery plan, and thus, can't spin up again for a while, sometimes at all.
2. Good security (i.e. enough to frustrate aggressive criminal gangs, like the police) is often not in place, for a number of understandable reasons, but they also tend to include less understandable ones (as in (1)).
People like our good selves, the readers of HN, might think about how we can offer our services a bit more widely to help some of the smaller fish out there stand up to bullying and attacks.
Note that if you advertise a service like this you will almost certainly face charges of obstructing justice. I'm not qualified to say if you could defend against them but your legal bills would be potentially infinite.
Well, if your attack vector is local law enforcement, then in a different jurisdiction would be a good start. Working your way further and further toward whatever makes it most annoying for them to get to.
One would have to think about it and investigate. Say, they might confiscate your laptop with thunderbird and your mail archive but they probably wont delete your webmail account or forbid you from using it. At least I imagine if the point is to gather information it doesn't include deleting it or taking control of it? If they really want to delete your things I imagine one could create an append only webservice.
Preserving some things (without hiding anything) is better than nothing.
I recommend to parties I work with that are at risk from these sorts of events to keep their BCDR (business continuity disaster recovery) data corpus at risk in European datacenters owned by European companies. Can be as simple as rsyncs or blob storage backups, or active infra always running, depending on budget and organizational needs and maturity.
So, my comment was flagged for simply stating the fact that not all police are bad people. Great, we'll done HN.
As someone who lived in Baltimore City for 20 years, and was forced out due to uncontrollable crime, I can say from first hand experience that good police officers exist and they are heros.
After:
1. My house was robbed. Police responded and worked to connect my incident with others in the area to find the peeps and hold them accountable.
2. My neighbor was mugged/beaten while getting into his car in front of his house. Police responded within a minute and took care (even though the perps got away).
3. A woman a block away from my house was mugged (face fully "punched in," purse snatched). After hearing blood curtling screams I ran out, saw the perps run around the corner, I ran out in my bare feet to take chase, turned two corners (2 city blocks) and the police already had the perp on the ground in cuffs.
Say and flag what you want if it makes you feel better about yourself, but know that when you live in a city overrun by crime, and good people (who are actually our fellow citizens) who protect others daily - you realize how important and brave those folks are.
Not all are good (as evidenced in the OP). Not all are bad. Yes, the system is broken and needs to evolve. But I recommend you put your life on the line in the street, protecting strangers for meager pay, before sitting in your gaming chair and make sweeping claims about good people who are actually trying to improve society.
Call out bad police. Fix the system. Absolutely, but broad generalizations (effectively using lazy heuristics) are at the root of hate and discontent in the world.
> Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog, Armstrong Economics, last week.
> Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion.
When a teacher is accused of a crime, the teacher's union does not jump to hide it and protect them. When a firefighter is accused of a crime, you don't see the others covering for them. The police, nation-wide, have a history of shielding criminal actors among their own and of intimidating, threatening, punishing, and in multiple cases killing those who call them out on it. The whole system is rotten - the "good cops" aren't stopping the bad ones.
It's fine to say that the "U.S. policing system" is broken and rife with corruption that needs a complete overhaul that's fine. But implying that all police officers are "bad", breeds hate and leads to hate crimes. People use heuristics to simplify things their brains can't quickly wrap their head around.
I suppose some folks don't have the mental capacity to distinguish individuals from general behaviors of larger associations, and instead rely on these heuristics that their minds can handle, like racists, sexists, and political/religious extremists. It's much easier just to speak in generalities.
However, these are human beings, our literal neighbors, they have families and some police officers work everyday from within a corrupt system - in the streets to try and make a change for the better. But here, we sit in our comfy chairs, relatively safe, and have the nerve to not even acknowledge they exist. Instead, we just lump them together with all of the bad actors. It's laziness-induced hate and it's a true shame it lives on here in HN of all places.
Again, any "good cops" aren't stopping the bad ones. In fact, when people protested and made the simple demand that police stop killing black people - or proposed that perhaps if officers don't want to provide social support the funds for those purposes should be given to agencies who would do so - they have in multiple cities such as Seattle thrown hissy fits and refused to do any portion of their job while somehow still getting paid. Where are the "good cops" speaking out against that?
If you care to look, they're a.) simple google search away (1), or b.) a step away outside your front door - just approach a cop on the beat and get their opinion.
There a MANY non-criminal police officers who care and strive, in an extremely hostile/volatile environment, to do the right thing.
I'm wondering about the (not necessarily financial) ROI. I don't know many small businesses that could afford it and I think the the load on the tech volunteers would be too large.
It seems fascinating for a judge to order the confiscation of legal notices. From what I understand (witch isn't much) the whole point is to have it published by a 3rd party independent of government or its trustees
My sibling lives in Marion county KS. As always, there's two sides to the story. Apparently the Marion County paper blatantly omits and twists facts and has shut down several businesses in Marion by posting stories about the owner's personal lives. My sibling says false reporting is rampant and is often damaging to the community. Doesn't affect the legality of this raid, of course.
Throwaway to protect my sibling's identity (very very small town).
> Doesn't affect the legality of this raid, of course.
Do you see how the second statement undermines the first? "Yeah, but some people don't like the paper" isn't really an opposing side to the story, just sour grapes.
I would say there's likely more than one issue at play, not that one issue undermines another.
The raid might be legal or illegal. The people running the paper might be behaving unethically/illegally or ethically/legally. And if the people running the paper are committing crimes, that IS relevant to the legality of the raid. Not just sour grapes.
And perhaps those of us that live nearby have more information and perspective than random commenters on HN?
Can't you see how a article that waxes poetic about freedom of the press and ignores potential illegal/immoral behavior of the specific reporters might result in internet outrage that doesn't address the scope of the community's issues?
If you actually have more information, especially empirical evidence supporting your assertions, please post it. Your assertion -- that "the Marion County paper blatantly omits and twists facts and has shut down several businesses in Marion by posting stories about the owner's personal lives" -- warrants substantiating evidence. Where is it? You provided none.
Instead, you wrote, "And perhaps those of us that live nearby have more information and perspective than random commenters on HN?" That statement is nearly an appeal to authority, like a cable news-watching boomer saying, "Trust me, kid, I know what I'm talking about."
> And perhaps those of us that live nearby have more information and perspective than random commenters on HN?
Doesn't seem likely, given what you've posted so far. Do you have anything of substance to contribute aside from the completely unsurprising information that the paper has enemies? Perhaps you could link to any of the unethical hit pieces you say the paper makes a habit of publishing. Or provide a plausible hypothesis for how identity theft and computer hacking could be crimes the paper's involved in committing. Because so far, it's pretty hard to construe this affair as the journalists being the bad guys and the cops being in the right, even if we account for the journalists in question being muckrakers.
So an article from a Topeka paper, 1.5 hours away from Marion, is given more benefit of the doubt than locals on the ground?
I have no motivation to provide evidence to the internet so they can test my sibling's claims - I just wanted to share that the one sided outrage may potentially be unfounded.
Much of HN values hearing from those personally involved in our stories. In this instance, I'm somewhat involved, so I shared some context. I don't know anything beyond what I've shared.
> So an article from a Topeka paper, 1.5 hours away from Marion, is given more benefit of the doubt than locals on the ground?
Yes, of course an established newspaper is more credible than an anonymous online user.
But it's also not just about who gets the benefit of the doubt. The facts available so far do not fit easily into a plausible story that would justify the police actions: we would need explanations for why the paper would be committing identity theft and computer hacking crimes to report on matters of public record, why the paper would claim to have reached out to police rather than publish damaging information, why the paper was raided but nobody was arrested or charged with any crimes.
On the other hand, the available facts do fit easily into a plausible story of cronyism and incompetence. It's a lot easier to believe that the local officials were being overzealous in pursuit of someone they perceived to be trying to damage the reputation of someone politically connected. The unanswered questions here are more about which plausible explanation is correct: are the police trying to build a case against the paper, or against the paper's confidential source?
I'm sure not many are still reading the comments on this post, but for those few who are left, here's the statement from the Marion Police. Says nothing and says everything:
The Marion Kansas Police Department has has several inquiries regarding an ongoing investigation.
As much as I would like to give everyone details on a criminal investigation I cannot. I believe when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated.
I appreciate all the assistance from all the State and Local investigators along with the entire judicial process thus far.
Speaking in generalities, the federal Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000aa-2000aa-12, does protect journalists from most searches of newsrooms by federal and state law enforcement officials. It is true that in most cases, it requires police to use subpoenas, rather than search warrants, to search the premises of journalists unless they themselves are suspects in the offense that is the subject of the search.
The Act requires criminal investigators to get a subpoena instead of a search warrant when seeking “work product materials” and “documentary materials” from the press, except in circumstances, including: (1) when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.
The Marion Kansas Police Department believes it is the fundamental duty of the police is to ensure the safety, security, and well-being of all members of the public. This commitment must remain steadfast and unbiased, unaffected by political or media influences, in order to uphold the principles of justice, equal protection, and the rule of law for everyone in the community. The victim asks that we do all the law allows to ensure justice is served. The Marion Kansas Police Department will nothing less.
149 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadI feel that other than scientific or highly technical posts, the HN community interest in the press is one of the few things that still makes HN endearing.
Intersects heavily with data security people who work on encryption, availability, digital privacy, civil rights, etc
[1] http://www.sjgames.com/SS/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._U...
A Woman Behind Borges
The history and context of Aleksandr Afanasev’s obscene Russian folktales
Study: Half of all people to get mental illness in their lifetime
Feral desert donkeys are digging wells, giving water to parched wildlife
Wow, unreal that she could approve such a warrant. Even in the absence of a federal statute it seems like a crazy step to take.
> A confidential source contacted the newspaper, [with] evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to [drive without a] license. [That] could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license[…].
> [The claim was confirmed but the paper] suspected the source was […] Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce. [The reporter didn’t publish that and] alerted police to the situation.
> Police notified Newell, who then complained […] that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true.
Wow. No kidding it’s a small town. Restaurant owner acts poorly, pissed off future ex(?) leaks damaging info to the paper, she runs to the cops to say the paper did something illegal despite not publishing it, and the entire department raided the little paper?
Yeesh.
Your comment brought back memories of growing up in India.
The idea of a "Panchayat" was taught in schools as both an ancient form of local/self governance and a modern answer to effective governance in post partition India. Even Gandhi promoted it as a pillar of India's self-rule.
Basically, village "elders" land up passing judgement on disputes. Most of these people were "respected" but uneducated. Their world views were very narrow.
As can be expected, it wasn't uncommon for their biases to result in "justice" that would be totally unacceptable when viewed through a broader lens.
After decades in the US, to discover that something like this can happen in 21st century USA is really unsettling. I'm having trouble explaining (even to myself) the anguish I feel.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj
Federal >> state >> local
It seems plausible that the paper might report on things that relate to or impact neighboring states.
But like I said - even if the statute weren't there - what's wrong with calling them up and asking them to surrender whatever they're searching for under subpoena instead? Especially for the purported crime of "identity theft"?!
And last clause says Congress has three power to enforce this
And sadly this perhaps qualifies as "due process" in Marion County.
I'm not sure what isn't interstate commerce maybe your kids lemonade stand as long as it's more than 100 miles from the state line?
What law is that? I'm not familiar with such a law but can't imagine it would even be constitutional. Eg the law Jack Smith indicted trump with recently is about protecting federal/conditional rights.
Yes, the commerce clause is quite expansive and is interpreted expansively, but at the least this would be a first amendment issue and Congress can enforce that and does
That citation and the quoted bit limiting the law to interstate commerce is already in the first comment you replied to. I think you have misconstrued something.
The law we're all talking about prohibits a government employee from searching or seizing any product materials intended for use in production of communication materials that affect interstate commerce.
E.g. Wickard v. Filburn, held that a farmer harvesting a small quantity of his own wheat and eating it affected interstate commerce, because the farmer did not consume other wheat available in interstate commerce.
Just about anything commercial affects interstate commerce by this definition.
https://www.sccourts.org/summaryCourtBenchBook/HTML/GeneralB....
https://caniuse.com/url-scroll-to-text-fragment
You don’t really want the bar to entry for the roll of magistrate to be too high.
The page you linked states a magistrate must be at least 21, have a Batchelor’s degree, undergo a training program within one year of commencing the roll, with restrictions on their abilities until that and other milestones are met.
This points to the idea that any reasonable adult, with a proven ability to pass at least a baccalaureate, ought be able to administer the law to at least a level of basic competency while they simultaneously commit to the career path by undergoing relevant training.
Magistrates who are licensed attorneys have fewer restrictions and can progress faster.
Is there some other set of rules you would prefer?
Should the average higher-education-qualify adult be prevented from participating in the judiciary?
That doesn’t seem like an argument a citizen of a democracy wound intentionally make.
They are rubber stamping warrant requests without any consideration of the Constitution, how is what I'm proposing anti-democratic?
This might be a bit spicy, but I don't think that a bachelors degree should count as higher education anymore. So, no, the average higher-education-qualify adult shouldn't be prevented from participating in the judiciary, but I think the bar for 'higher-education-qualify' should at least be a post-bachelors degree specific to the field.
0 - this is as close to absolute immunity as exists in the law. In fact, you could, with a straight face and clean conscience call it absolute immunity.
1 - no, seriously. They can, for instance order an underage girl to be sterilized in an ex-parte hearing and face no consequences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stump_v._Sparkman
Stump v. Sparkman, 435 U.S. 349 (1978), is the leading United States Supreme Court decision on judicial immunity. It involved an Indiana judge who was sued by a young woman who had been sterilized without her knowledge as a minor in accordance with the judge's order. The Supreme Court held that the judge was immune from being sued for issuing the order because it was issued as a judicial function. The case has been called one of the most controversial in recent Supreme Court history.
The most controversial case in recent Supreme Court history being from 45 years ago speaks directly to how rare this level of controversy is.
Maybe you should be more riled up.
The point is it happened and there were no consequences or accountability for the judge involved.
If you think more minor “controversies” don’t happen every single day, enabled by this sort or legal reasoning, I cannot help you.
The 4th amendment isn’t worth anything if judges will sign off on everything that crosses their desk.
> From 1979 through 2012, the court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has rejected only 11 of the more than 33,900 surveillance applications by the government
> "The FISA system is broken. At the point that a FISA judge can compel the disclosure of millions of phone records of U.S. citizens engaged in only domestic communications, unrelated to the collection of foreign intelligence…there is no longer meaningful judicial review," Mr. Rotenberg said.
Story by the Wall Street Journal https://archive.ph/lafXz
When I tried to get records showing how often search warrants happen and what their details are, they give inconsistent amounts of records for identical time windows. First FOIA request gave 9k records, second was 11k, third was 18k. And colleagues were able to find more with requests for emails.
When I appealed to the IL AG office, they sided with CPD saying that a sufficient search was done, despite our proof showing that a marginally expanded search resulted in more records.
All made worse by the Judicial branch being un-FOIAable.
It's all pretty fucked.
If there was a statistically relevant problem, we wouldn’t hear about this sort of malfeasance in the news.
The fact that there is almost always one or another incident making the news only indicates that rare events occur frequently at sufficiently large scale.
The overwhelming majority of search and arrest warrants are authorised because they should be, and, well, like any job role, mistakes shouldn’t be dealt with by disciplinary action that results in the work being ground to a halt.
Where serious wrong doing occurs we should expect disciplinary action, and we do see that occasionally as it makes the news.
There’s definitely an argument to be made that maybe some police are too prone to abuse their powers, but the answer isn’t perfect law enforcement, the answer is how much malfeasance and corruption is tolerable, because we’ll never have none, and the only thing worse than corruption is perfect law enforcement.
The judiciary and law enforcement absolutely must be held to a higher standard which does not accept mistakes. They are not 'any job role' -- these people have the authority to take away your livelihood, if not your life. The standard they must be held to should be perfection and nothing less. Any deviation from such should be treated as harshly as the worst criminals are.
> Where serious wrong doing occurs we should expect disciplinary action
_Any_ wrongdoing by law enforcement is serious.
> the answer is how much malfeasance and corruption is tolerable, because we’ll never have none
Just because we won't ever end up at 'none' doesn't mean we need to be accepting of anything less. Zero malfeasance, zero corruption. Anything but those should be burned out as a cancer, even if that burning out needs to be literal.
Journalists are not above all criminal investigation, so it heavily depends on the alleged crimes.
Searching journalists is completely legal depending on the reason
[0]: https://www.propublica.org/article/these-judges-can-have-les...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_Stat...
"There is no federal shield law and state shield laws vary in scope."
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1241/shield-law...
"There is no federal shield law"
Not even former or sitting presidents are protected.
The thing is the article didn’t say anything about shield laws, which is what the comment I was responding to was talking about.
>The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead.
This isn't true. It is legal to search and seize journalists, if the journalist are suspected of committing a crime.
Either the author doesn't know the law, or is being misleading, because the same article also says the local and state cops are investigating the local journalist.
The statement from the state police is a lot more vague than that:
> “At the request of the Marion Police Department, on Tuesday, Aug. 8, we began an investigation into allegations of criminal wrongdoing in Marion, Kansas. The investigation is ongoing”
And even the warrant only uses passive language indicating that crimes have been committed without identifying a suspect:
> Having evidence under oath before me from which I find there is probable cause to believe that an offense against the laws of the State of Kansas, including but not limited to violations of K.S.A. 21-6107 - Identity theft and K.S.A. 21-5839 - Unlawful acts concerning computers, has been committed
but the warrant does at least identify that it is believed computers at the paper were "involved in the identity theft". However, no person at the paper has yet been named as suspected of committing a crime.
This isn't a case study, or an example from a textbook, its an ongoing situation. Conclusively saying that the raid was illegal isn't a fact, its just an opinion, and not even a credited one - it reads like the journalist's opinion.
So its one thing to report on a police raid, its another thing to offer a legal opinion and present it as fact without conditionals, or whose opinion it is.
What if they're wrong?
https://www.rcfp.org/privilege-compendium/kansas/#:~:text=Th....
> The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law* that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
* https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000aa
In practice, no.
Just look at marijuana and abortion laws for two different prime examples of how supposed federal law superseding "lower" law can play out in ways that circumvent the nature of that power structure.
The reality is law is reactionary. Just because a law exists doesn't mean there is actually anything tangible preventing you from performing an action, and if the courts are acting in ways counter to federal law AND/OR federal law isn't asserting/executing authority that it has to supercede local law, then it's implicitly allowing it to continue and perhaps even setting precedent or groundwork to dismantle that particular paradigm.
Remember, this is America. States Rights advocates aren't just numerous, but hold significant power in state and federal legislature and courts. While the Federal law should reign supreme, the reality on the ground is that even when it does, it's often playing catch up, so there's still a gulf between how things work in theory, and in reality, if for nothing else just due to the slow operation of federal government and law.
Neither of these are good examples.
Marijuana is because the Feds choose not to act; the DEA could raid every dispensary tomorrow if they wanted.
Abortion never got meaningfully protected at the Federal level. The Dems had sort of a chance at it, but chose the ACA to spend that political capital on instead.
> (a) Right of action
> A person aggrieved by a search for or seizure of materials in violation of this chapter shall have a civil cause of action for damages for such search or seizure—
> (1) against the United States, against a State which has waived its sovereign immunity under the Constitution to a claim for damages resulting from a violation of this chapter, or against any other governmental unit, all of which shall be liable for violations of this chapter by their officers or employees while acting within the scope or under color of their office or employment; and [...]
And https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/2000aa-7
> (c) “Any other governmental unit”, as used in this chapter, includes the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, any territory or possession of the United States, and any local government, unit of local government, or any unit of State government.
It can appear as a can of tomatoes being consumed by Andy Warhol himself. It doesn't change the fact there are no shield laws in Kansas or the US for journalists.
>...it shall be unlawful for a government officer or employee, in connection with the investigation or prosecution of a criminal offense, to search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication
... followed by a bunch of caveats about cases in which it is acceptable to seize documents. I'm not a lawyer, but that sounds to me like a federal law protecting journalists. Whether or not it was violated in this case remains to be seen.
>this provision shall not impair or affect the ability of any government officer or employee, pursuant to otherwise applicable law, to search for or seize such materials, if— (1)there is probable cause to believe that the person possessing such materials has committed or is committing the criminal offense to which the materials relate
This is obviously relevant as the police allege the journalist committed a crime, specifically identify theft.
Or it could be a trumped up accusation and an unconstitutional warrant.
We simply don't have the information. An honest an intelligent article would have articulated this question as the Crux of the matter, opposed to obfuscating it and claiming the warrant was unconstitutional.
I'm personally very opposed to a police corruption and overreach, but also hate skewed articles that mislead. Real reform needs to come from a place of accuracy opposed to hype and misinformation.
This makes it hard for me to see this as anything other than a retaliatory overreach, especially given the context of the paper's track record of critical reporting on local government and law enforcement.
It's also worth noting that the article mentions a lawful source for the information in question (a tip from Newell's husband).
This is an incomplete summary of the laws
> may not search for or seize such materials under the provisions of this paragraph if the offense to which the materials relate consists of the receipt, possession, communication, or withholding of such materials or the information contained therein
(followed by exceptions for national defense and child pornography)
It seems unlikely that the police presented evidence the journalists were perpetrating identity theft, or evidence that the journalists obtained their information through computer hacking rather than receiving it from their confidential source. If the suspect for those crimes was the confidential source rather than the journalists, then the journalists and their work products would be protected by this law.
> possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper, book, broadcast, or other similar form of public communication, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce;
"Journalist" is merely an informal summary of what the law actually states.
If everybody is a journalist, then there's no ambiguity. But if the law says that some people are journalists and some people aren't, now there are two classes of citizen and it isn't even clear which is which.
Still, I suppose there was all the stuff about Jeff Adachi and what the cops did to the journalists there, so I suppose your point is sound.
What the Marion County Record is doing is incredibly vital for their community. I just went to their web page. They currently don't have a fundraiser yet, but I hope they'll start one.
http://marionrecord.com/
So... way to stay on brand, Florida.
It'll never happen probably, but it should.
http://marionrecord.com/dispatch/police_raid_newspaper_offic...
Previously she had accused the newspaper of obtaining the information illegally.
http://marionrecord.com/dispatch/restaurateur_accuses_paper_...
There's also a headline from their last week's issue, "Media ejected from open forum" that seems likely to be related. Google's cache of the article is at: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3... so I'll give a relevant quote for when that expires:
> Two representatives of the news media were ordered by Marion police chief Gideon Cody to leave a public reception Tuesday for U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner.
> Cody’s directions came at the behest of Kari Newell, proprietor of Chef’s Plate in Marion’s Historic Elgin Hotel and its coffee shop across the street, Kari’s Kitchen, where the event was taking place.
> Cody said that Newell asked that Record publisher Eric Meyer and Record reporter Phyllis Zorn be evicted before LaTurner arrived.
> Moments before Cody ordered Meyer and Zorn to leave, Newell had told Zorn: “I will not have members of the media in my establishment. You have to leave.”
The person owning the Doughnuts, owns the Police. /s
Two things occur to me about this story, exposed in this quote, that I often think when seeing stories of this nature:
1. Many businesses that rely on computers don't have a disaster recovery plan, and thus, can't spin up again for a while, sometimes at all.
2. Good security (i.e. enough to frustrate aggressive criminal gangs, like the police) is often not in place, for a number of understandable reasons, but they also tend to include less understandable ones (as in (1)).
People like our good selves, the readers of HN, might think about how we can offer our services a bit more widely to help some of the smaller fish out there stand up to bullying and attacks.
https://www.uschamber.com/co/run/technology/3-2-1-backup-rul...
Does a small-town newspaper expect to be raided by law enforcement and build a disaster recovery plan around that, or a tornado?
They don't call it "The Long Arm of the Law" for no reason.
Preserving some things (without hiding anything) is better than nothing.
As someone who lived in Baltimore City for 20 years, and was forced out due to uncontrollable crime, I can say from first hand experience that good police officers exist and they are heros.
After: 1. My house was robbed. Police responded and worked to connect my incident with others in the area to find the peeps and hold them accountable.
2. My neighbor was mugged/beaten while getting into his car in front of his house. Police responded within a minute and took care (even though the perps got away).
3. A woman a block away from my house was mugged (face fully "punched in," purse snatched). After hearing blood curtling screams I ran out, saw the perps run around the corner, I ran out in my bare feet to take chase, turned two corners (2 city blocks) and the police already had the perp on the ground in cuffs.
Say and flag what you want if it makes you feel better about yourself, but know that when you live in a city overrun by crime, and good people (who are actually our fellow citizens) who protect others daily - you realize how important and brave those folks are.
Not all are good (as evidenced in the OP). Not all are bad. Yes, the system is broken and needs to evolve. But I recommend you put your life on the line in the street, protecting strangers for meager pay, before sitting in your gaming chair and make sweeping claims about good people who are actually trying to improve society.
Call out bad police. Fix the system. Absolutely, but broad generalizations (effectively using lazy heuristics) are at the root of hate and discontent in the world.
> Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog, Armstrong Economics, last week.
> Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion.
It's fine to say that the "U.S. policing system" is broken and rife with corruption that needs a complete overhaul that's fine. But implying that all police officers are "bad", breeds hate and leads to hate crimes. People use heuristics to simplify things their brains can't quickly wrap their head around.
I suppose some folks don't have the mental capacity to distinguish individuals from general behaviors of larger associations, and instead rely on these heuristics that their minds can handle, like racists, sexists, and political/religious extremists. It's much easier just to speak in generalities.
However, these are human beings, our literal neighbors, they have families and some police officers work everyday from within a corrupt system - in the streets to try and make a change for the better. But here, we sit in our comfy chairs, relatively safe, and have the nerve to not even acknowledge they exist. Instead, we just lump them together with all of the bad actors. It's laziness-induced hate and it's a true shame it lives on here in HN of all places.
There a MANY non-criminal police officers who care and strive, in an extremely hostile/volatile environment, to do the right thing.
1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/05/29/george...
I'm wondering about the (not necessarily financial) ROI. I don't know many small businesses that could afford it and I think the the load on the tech volunteers would be too large.
Happy to be proved wrong, though.
Lord, what fools these morons be.
Throwaway to protect my sibling's identity (very very small town).
> Doesn't affect the legality of this raid, of course.
Do you see how the second statement undermines the first? "Yeah, but some people don't like the paper" isn't really an opposing side to the story, just sour grapes.
The raid might be legal or illegal. The people running the paper might be behaving unethically/illegally or ethically/legally. And if the people running the paper are committing crimes, that IS relevant to the legality of the raid. Not just sour grapes.
And perhaps those of us that live nearby have more information and perspective than random commenters on HN?
Can't you see how a article that waxes poetic about freedom of the press and ignores potential illegal/immoral behavior of the specific reporters might result in internet outrage that doesn't address the scope of the community's issues?
Instead, you wrote, "And perhaps those of us that live nearby have more information and perspective than random commenters on HN?" That statement is nearly an appeal to authority, like a cable news-watching boomer saying, "Trust me, kid, I know what I'm talking about."
Doesn't seem likely, given what you've posted so far. Do you have anything of substance to contribute aside from the completely unsurprising information that the paper has enemies? Perhaps you could link to any of the unethical hit pieces you say the paper makes a habit of publishing. Or provide a plausible hypothesis for how identity theft and computer hacking could be crimes the paper's involved in committing. Because so far, it's pretty hard to construe this affair as the journalists being the bad guys and the cops being in the right, even if we account for the journalists in question being muckrakers.
I have no motivation to provide evidence to the internet so they can test my sibling's claims - I just wanted to share that the one sided outrage may potentially be unfounded.
Much of HN values hearing from those personally involved in our stories. In this instance, I'm somewhat involved, so I shared some context. I don't know anything beyond what I've shared.
Yes, of course an established newspaper is more credible than an anonymous online user.
But it's also not just about who gets the benefit of the doubt. The facts available so far do not fit easily into a plausible story that would justify the police actions: we would need explanations for why the paper would be committing identity theft and computer hacking crimes to report on matters of public record, why the paper would claim to have reached out to police rather than publish damaging information, why the paper was raided but nobody was arrested or charged with any crimes.
On the other hand, the available facts do fit easily into a plausible story of cronyism and incompetence. It's a lot easier to believe that the local officials were being overzealous in pursuit of someone they perceived to be trying to damage the reputation of someone politically connected. The unanswered questions here are more about which plausible explanation is correct: are the police trying to build a case against the paper, or against the paper's confidential source?
The Marion Kansas Police Department has has several inquiries regarding an ongoing investigation.
As much as I would like to give everyone details on a criminal investigation I cannot. I believe when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated.
I appreciate all the assistance from all the State and Local investigators along with the entire judicial process thus far.
Speaking in generalities, the federal Privacy Protection Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000aa-2000aa-12, does protect journalists from most searches of newsrooms by federal and state law enforcement officials. It is true that in most cases, it requires police to use subpoenas, rather than search warrants, to search the premises of journalists unless they themselves are suspects in the offense that is the subject of the search.
The Act requires criminal investigators to get a subpoena instead of a search warrant when seeking “work product materials” and “documentary materials” from the press, except in circumstances, including: (1) when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing.
The Marion Kansas Police Department believes it is the fundamental duty of the police is to ensure the safety, security, and well-being of all members of the public. This commitment must remain steadfast and unbiased, unaffected by political or media influences, in order to uphold the principles of justice, equal protection, and the rule of law for everyone in the community. The victim asks that we do all the law allows to ensure justice is served. The Marion Kansas Police Department will nothing less.
https://www.facebook.com/marionpoliceks/posts/pfbid0cch8ULTS...