Just a smol with big opinions about AFVs and data science. The onlyfans link is a rickroll.
I’m through 2/3 of the article and I can’t seem to figure out what exactly they’re doing wrong besides working while kurdish and selling “illegal vapes”. Am I missing something, or is this just as blatant an attempt to stir up tensions over migrants as it seems?
I think we’re starting to loop around.
Yes, you can go out and look into people’s background. No, you can’t just go present that to a court and get it accepted. Depending on what it is it might be accepted in a civil suit, but it would be circumstantial at best and most likely you’d be censured for trying to submit hearsay.
Courts and even civil cases just do not work like you are envisioning. Vigilante fact checking isn’t a thing, and agencies of the executive are subject to judicial rules just the same as you are.
You don’t understand enough about trial law, civil law enforcement or investigatory standards to be justifiably this adamant about this idea. You can’t find a magic way to frame this that will let you harass people via the legal system but somehow not make you a cop. This is the reason SLAPP suits almost never win - they’re pathetically baseless lawsuits, they just abuse the appeals system to bully people into giving up. You could do that, if you had the money, but you couldn’t enforce anything beyond using that mechanism to get your own way.
It’s not that I don’t understand what you’re suggesting, it’s that your understanding of the realities surrounding this issue is flat-out wrong and what you’re proposing is largely illegal were you to ever act on it.
(Wait, do you mean the FBI and ICE aren’t cops? not nitpicking just genuine uncertainty)
Your investigation would also carry no legal weight and, unless you are extremely careful, would land you in various defamation and harassment lawsuits if you ever tried to act on it. If this hypothetical agency were to do similar, investigate people with no authority, it would invite all kinds of trouble. Not only would it likely be inadmissible in court as it would constitute gross violations of their civil rights, it would absolutely result in the kind of countersuit to which soverign immunity does not apply. This is how people get away with crimes “on a technicality”, because there were such gross procedural and jurisdictional errors that the investigation itself is suspect.
Because you intrinsically are. It would require more people with investigatory and enforcement powers to staff this hypothetical agency. Not smalltown pigfuckers, sure, but what you’re describing is structurally little different from the FBI or ICE. A massive new law enforcement agency like that will need people to do that and those people are called cops.
I’m curious what makes you say that? Investigation is a huge part of the process of policing.
Because in the US, criminal investigations have to be carried out by duly recognized officers of the law (or their designees), outside of some extremely specific exceptions like the UCMJ. This structure is so fundamental to the system that it can be traced back to English common law. There are a handful of outliers: some “government watchdog” groups have limited judicial powers (though I can’t actually think of any examples of this right now), the crew of aircraft or ships under US flag have (limited) law enforcement powers while underway and there’s the big nebulous complexity of the coastguard’s interaction with the civilian legal system.
(An aside: at and below the state level there’s some additional fuckery, like for example firefighters in some municipalities are endowed with policing powers while carrying out their duties, and some places have reciprocal LEO certifications for things like mental health first responders, but those are all extremely limited in scope and still rely on those people being considered officers of the peace (or some equivalent designation))
An agency to investigate things like this would require their own dedicated enforcement branch, just like the FDA, USDA, Post Office and even NASA all have (disappointingly the NASA police are just called the “protective services office” and not “space cops”. Tragic waste of a good opportunity there). We’d need more cops to staff this hypothetical new agency, and we can’t simply “borrow” cops from somewhere else - they’re already busier than they can handle, even setting aside jurisdictional complexities and expertise. This is how the system in the US is structured, and to deviate from it we’d have to rework that structure fundamentally.
The FDA Office of Criminal Investigations, the direct enforcement branch of the FDA, uses bonded LEOs to do the enforcement under their perview. While the majority of actions go through civil proceedings (lawsuits), any investigatory work for those lawsuits is done under the direction of the FDA’s federal law enforcement officers (or their contracted representatives). That’s how enforcement works in the US. If you want to avoid that, it would require a complete restructuring of the entire US legal system from the ground up.
And there is harm when people take misinformed medical advice from people claiming to know better.
Yes, but that harm is resolved in civil court unless the person in question is criminally liable, usually through gross negligence because they have something like a duty of care. The Alex Jones case, which you brought up as an example, is not in any way comparable to that.
(edit: for clarity, bonded LEOs are what you think of as a cop, instead of someone like a building inspector who is technically law enforcement but does not have the ability to do things like make an arrest or charge criminal proceedings.)
And there’s no agency for it? Then make one.
It doesn’t get much more “advocating for more cops as the solution” than saying we should make a new law enforcement agency to solve a lack of enforcement capability. What were you trying to say there, if it wasn’t “make a new agency to enforce this law”?
Why can it not be like what they did with Alex Jones
That was a defamation lawsuit - of which libel is a type. The ‘harm’ done in that case was to the parents of the sandyhook children’s reputation, not their physical wellbeing.
The exceptions to freedom of speech are extremely specific, aren’t trivially described and have not been expanded in more than a century. You can’t simply dismiss that constraint because things like libel and active incitement are conditionally established exceptions. This would, under current laws, inarguably be unconstitutional - perhaps an amendment could be passed, but the best route for this would be through the extant libel laws and the civil court.
And there’s no agency for it? Then make one.
Sure, more cops is clearly a great solution! But that’s not what China is doing, which was the initial premise.
The issues that instantly come to mind: That’s fundementally unconstitutional, there is no mechanism for enforcement, there is no agency tasked with that and US LEAs are already beyond the workload they could ever hope to address, very rarely is “more cops” a solution, how do you address people that say things like “wink wink this is not medical advice”. This is simply not a problem that can be solved in a single paragraph response. It could possibly be done, but it would be spectacularly non-trivial to implement, even if we were in an environment where giving that kind of authority to fhe current administration seemed like a good idea.
I do not think the concept itself is bad (verifying credentials for people presenting information on social media), and something like it could theoretically be implemented in the US. This system specifically though, as it appears to be being implemented by china, would be utterly unworkable in the US. There’s absolutely no infrastructure in place to allow for that sort of broad centralized verification, and constructing some centralized system for credential verification across all US states would be an absolute field day for identity theft.
It’s currently unclear how China anticipates handling that requirement too, FWIW. As far as I can find, that centralized resource also does not exist for chinese credentials (possibly one exists for degrees from major universities, but since this is not restricted to just university degrees, it’s still an open-ended question). I’ve got no idea how they plan on verifying claims, and I suspect neither do any major service providers in China right now.
Well like, yeah, it is in fact censorship. I don’t think it’s a fundamentally bad idea by any stretch, but if it were implemented here in the US it would be instantly abused to dictate the political narrative. Given that’s the basis pretty much all american commentators are basing their reactions from, and that chinese citizens are restricted from sharing their impression with the broad internet, it’s understandable why the narrative on this topic is that way. The opposing viewpoints are all contained within a country that is extremely ideologically isolationist.
For what it’s worth, China isn’t particularly better on the issue of abusing policy to dictate the political narrative either. As examples of some of the concerns I’ve seen expressed by my chinese colleagues about this: nobody is clear (neither on english-language sites or on what chinese news sites said colleagues can access) about what these rules would actually entail - Will they then require university educated people (or certified or etc.) to present broadly accepted established scientific claims? Will those claims be restricted to their relevant field (that seems reasonable, but impossible to police) or is anyone with a university degree allowed to comment? What about people with university degrees, but politically inconvenient opinions about, say, Covid? We’re not very far out from a Chinese government that advocated for TCM and Barefoot Doctors, so while it’s good the government is working to combat medical disinformation, they also have been historically a source for some of the most damaging misinformation that’s still extant in chinese society today.
It’s fine to cheer this decision on the face, but dunking on youtubers is easy and by association dismisses the very credible concerns people are raising over this policy.
Genuinely curious what your perspective is that lets you see this as good news - it’s just bleakly depressing to me, but I’m a bit of a downer.
Oh, so today the coin flip came up “Support Ukraine”? Neat! Wonder what it’ll be tomorrow.
tf are the families going to do with a note that just reads “I O U 500 barrels crude oil -P”
Nah that’s 100% right, it’s just that that’s not a good thing. They’re putting the children’s privacy in jeopardy, then trying to intimidate the company into protecting that privacy by threatening to release it (to great fanfare) if they don’t pay up. No heroics involved. And on top of that it’s just a really boneheaded strategy, that company just does not give a fuck about children, why would they ever pay out when they can point to all this coverage of the evil evil hackers to deflect from their doubtlessly rampant security failures.
(Lol ty, I doubted it had been you)
whitewash these criminals as heroes
Okay I’m being genuine here - how was that your takeaway from my comment? I don’t know if there’s a way to sound sincere over text, but I promise I’m not even being slightly snarky, 100% sincere: what?
The stolen information on the children includes medical records, incident reports and the allocation of drugs and medicine given to the children.
They’re trying to intimidate the group into protecting the privacy of the children - while there’s other ways to get the information, those other ways aren’t actively threatening to release the information publicly. It’s a decent enough move I suppose, though I doubt it will work since this company doesn’t care about the children and their reputation is going to be fine given how widely reported the hacking is. They’d have had a much better chance of getting a payout by going after the parents of kids with medical conditions or any other compromising information. How much could you have blackmailed the parents of an intersex kid for, given the current political climate, for example? Or one with an inheritable STD?
The internet never forgets, but only for those things the internet wants to remember.
Forreal though, the internet isn’t so centralized that records could be purged like this. Made less easily publicly accessible? Sure. But I doubt rumble or bitleaks or the thousand other sites that popped up and mirrored LiveLeaks after it shut down are going to all cooperate with that idea.