[Gllug] Editors

[bredroll]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2001, William Palfreman wrote:

> Major rant coming...
> 
> I can.  That data is mine, and the government has no right to it.  We used
> to have this funny principle of innocent till proven guilty, and they had
> to prove you had done something actually harmful to someone else before
> you got banged up.  Now groups of people (The home secretary, the chief
> commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, his fifteen year old son, anyone
> in the government who takes a dislike to me (and I sure as hell have taken
> a dislike to them)) can, on demand, force me to reveal data that may or
> may not be used against me - so people can be forced to incriminate
> themselves (or go to jail), which is against every principle of justice
> going.  

Think about a non computing equivalent, a killer owns a locked box
only he can open. for his crime he has no motive, and the only thing
that will prove him guilty is the murder weapon if his prints are on it.
in the box is a blood stained knife with prints he used to kill the
victim. he has the only key in the world that can open it,

would it be unreasonable to force him to open the box?

refusal to open it or provide the means to open it will obstruct the
investigation. such powers to 'circumvent' individual rites are there for
use in the rare occasions where the guilty hide behind their socalled
rites.

> Just because they haven't started locking programmers and
> sysadmins up yet doesn't mean they won't, and if the powers the RIP act
> gives them are anything to go by they're going to start using it - why
> else bother passing it?  

these people cannot lock you up for zero reason, 

suspects to a crime can be remanded in custody if it is suspected that
they may either be in danger or may be able to destroy any evidence that
is involved with an investigation.

evidence can be such things as 'the plans to the nuke are on this disk,
which the suspect/witness was required to show us' or 'the plans to the
nuke are not on the disk, the suspect/witness sufficiantly proved this'

we will continue to be outraged by violations of our privacy because
people fear what they do not know, and they tend to fear it alot more if
they are not allowed to know,

society needs to grow up before it can produce laws that protect us all
for everything, until this happens society and law are bound to mess up in
a big fashion.

please one of us write a law that protects us in this situation without
putting in barriers that potentially prevent the guilty from being caught.

> With a steganographic file system my private
> stuff can be hidden in things like mp3s or jpegs, and they can't prove
> anything.  Its not just paranoia, there are some very hostile people
> running around these days, giving themselves important titles and doing
> things like www.gateway.gov.uk.

the big question should be who polices the police? it should be the
public. or should it?
 
> I mean, they just locked up a guy for being weird, reading Soldier of
> Fortune, liking Princess Diana, and having the misfortune to have coat
> stored by the police in a room used to test fire a pistol two weeks
> earlier.  There's plenty of stuff to be paranoid about in a country like
> that.

i doubt it was just for being wierd, but i agree 100% accurate justice is
an impossible ideal in todays prejudice world.

bredroll

p.s. phew that was long


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