Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

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So law enforcement shouldn't surveille?

Law enforcement shouldn't keep information about people unless they've been convicted of a crime?

Pray tell how do you propose a system of law enforcement can work without both these things. Or do you think that law enforcement is an unnecessary evil?

>I've read about this happening //

This being 'someone asked about their whereabouts'? Really. This is too much of an invasion of your liberty to simply confirm that you were indeed the person in a particular place?

Perhaps he bought something on ebay from a person financially linked to terrorist operations abroad the week before he went visiting a natural gas storage facility .. we don't know. The outcome for him was to answer a couple of phone questions; I find it really hard to see anything in this story that shows the SAR program has failed.

I imagine they get a few folks taking pictures. Photogs tend to take lots-and-lots of pictures, and want to get in places where other people don't, get close-ups and such. TBH that this might look suspicious doesn't seem especially unreasonable. The security guards don't know he's a professional photog.

> Law enforcement shouldn't keep information about people unless they've been convicted of a crime?

"Law enforcement" has no job until a crime has been committed. There is no point in attempting to foil a terrorist plot that doesn't even exist. We could do without all of this pre-crime BS.

The FBI can't prevent terrorism. That's not how terrorism works. Any idiot can kill a bunch of random people on the street and there is literally nothing you can do about it. And notwithstanding that, it still doesn't happen often enough to be worth spending half the resources on it that we do.

But the real issue in this context is that the people in charge of the pre-crime BS are the same people in charge of putting you in prison for violating the law. Such people are extremely dangerous to normal people because they can so easily ruin your life with a pencil, which is why good upstanding citizens legitimately take such exception to encountering them in these types of situations.

It's the chilling effects problem. If something like taking pictures of things causes a visit from LEOs then you're liable to stop taking pictures of things, or advancing your political views in public, or associating with certain people. Which is a totally unacceptable reaction for LEOs to be causing in upstanding citizens who are doing nothing wrong.

> "Law enforcement" has no job until a crime has been committed

Does this mean you don't think there should be beat cops or patrol cars?

Response time?

There's different kinds of information that law enforcement can store.

Looking at extremes: keeping a record of which people have killed someone in the past seems like a very reasonable thing to do. On the other hand, keeping a record of how long each person brushes their teeth on average, seems like an invasion of privacy (and pointless when it comes to anti-terrorism).

Taking photos of an already well-photographed public landmark seems to fall in the latter category.

The argument, if you have approached it correctly is then "what level of pre-crime do you want?" Ideally it would be none, because there would be none, because the world is awesome. Reality tends to fall somewhere in the middle.

I think you might find China more hospitable to your views.

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