*thank god

Also, one of the amazing things is the price of a saddle. They seem so mundane yet are actually hard to make.

I suspect nothing I say will convince you now that I have broken the cardinal rule of actually questioning an idealogical party line. Oh no, we lefties are not allowed to debate, look at both sides of an issue or think for ourselves. Everything was written in stone by Marx years ago and all we have to do is turn up at civil disobedience events and follow the leader.

It’s pretty disturbing that such a simple question of where do you draw the line gets me accused of being a right-winger playing dumb to start an argument. Even if someone did that, I would say fine, bring it, I’m up for a debate and can defend my position. If you feel strongly enough about your views then no right-wing baiter is going to bother you.

Domster made a good point, that it comes down to the checks and balances and it can be a force for good. But this leads to the question of what is good. We all have our own ideas about that. When people like the above idiots and pedophiles get caught through their IPs we are cool with that, but in other cases e.g. if someone got caught arranging a drug deal, say selling weed, over the net, and they were caught by tracing their IP address, I think I and a lot of others who think weed should be legal, would not feel so easy about it. We would probably be up in arms saying tracing IP addresses is a breach of civil liberties. Wouldn’t we? Or not?

What if the net was around in the time of McCarthy and he was using IPs to trace communist activity?

…Amazing that such products of selective inbreeding could have come up with such a scam. Wonder if the bad guys had a black horse to put that stolen saddle on?”

Nah, the horse likely is the product of selective inbreeding. There is nothing selective in the breeding of trailer trash.

Boing Boing folks are usually emphatically against surveillance, civil liberty/privacy violations of any kind.

And yet when idiots like this get caught thanks to a traceable IP address, does this bother you? Or is it okay because they’re idiots?

I’m just curious about where people draw the line ethically. Is surveillance/privacy invasion empirically bad, or does it depend on the circumstances?

And I’m not sure what you’re asking, because something being empirically bad would imply it would depend on the circumstances. (Because the consequences – what you’d be studying empirically – certainly do depend on the circumstances.) So, your question doesn’t pose a dilemma.

I suspect you meant to ask if we think they’re intrinsically bad.

Personally, I don’t think they are. I think that, provided checks and balances are met, warrants are requested, granted on the basis of evidence, etc. etc., then surveillance can often be a force for good. There are plenty of organised crime trials that show exactly that.

And the very fact that surveillance _can_ be good automatically means it’s not intrinsically bad.

What am I saying? My IP address is recorded in teh server logs! I have to create an account to post to BoingBoing! Oh noes! Teh internets are run by teh Man!

I’m curious about where people play dumb, I mean, curious in the attempt to frame some stupid right-wing talking point. Is intelligence and nuance only reserved for your enemies, or does it depend on the circumstances?

Either way, this is not surveillance, it’s “you robbed a house and left foot-prints all the way back to your place”. I posted in the previous thread that I hoped the people responsible did it from their home comp, and wahoo! I was correct in my assumption of human stupidity.

If they are given the chance to make things right and do so, then I think it can be considered a (marginally) honest mistake. But, seeing as how the original story said that when some of the opportunists were told the truth they refused to return the goods, at that point they become thieves or at the very least recipients of stolen property and should be charged.

I don’t think that tracing an IP address is an invasion of privacy or an encroachment on a civil liberty. The same could be said of police searches of garbage cans on the curb. They’re put out in a public space, they’re publicly searchable. These people did a crime and they left forensic evidence on the internet.

They were not being placed under surveillance to wait for them to maybe commit a crime, the crime was already committed. The police were looking for the people who did it, regardless of their identities.

I suspect you’re correct in your evaluation of them, but I must interject that if you’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of being thrown in jail, you understand that they can pretty much make anyone look like a hardened criminal and/or bad specimen of humanity by the time they get around to taking your mugshot.

And again, do not assume you would not have acted in a similar manner if you were in the same situation. You may have a different perspective from where you sit, and being able to look at this in hindsight.

It’s a sad situation in any regard. I hope the guy gets his stuff back and I hope the two people arrested are the ones charged with the theft of everything that was taken since their actions caused the greed-storm.

Your Group categorically holds beliefs X, Y, Z to be true.

Yet Bad Person was thwarted in contradiction to X, Y, and Z. Does X, Y, and Z apply to you but not Bad Person?

Do you support X, Y and Z for Bad Person, or are you hypocrites?

The polite response is that you are constructing a false dichotomy, and to answer it on those terms would only serve to undermine people’s respect for civil liberties. There is no conflict between the law and your rights because “due process” is supposed to ensure they are respected. (Yeah, only in an ideal world, but it was a philosophical question.) We should not need to gut our civil liberties to catch the “bad guys”.

In the drug example, it is the law that is unjust, not the technique used to find and punish those who break it. How would it be any different than if they used a credit card, and so the police get the name of the account holder?

The problem with blanket surveillance is that it is a violation of privacy (the innocent are subjected to the same scrutiny as the criminal) and that it lends itself to the abuse of the law as a form of political intimidation and retribution. Getting specific personal information on a known lawbreaker is not surveillance.

Civil liberties are not boundaries to the law, they are part of the law. They are boundaries to those who enforce it (to prevent abuse), and to those who create it (to prevent laws which contradict our rights).

If I had gone out walking and seen a sign plunked in somebody’s yard saying “Free – everything must go!” I would not take a thing unless I could verify that the offer was valid.

It doesn’t take computer savvy to determine when something is too good to be true. Frankly, this kind of greed informed by willing blindness is what also gave us the mortgage crisis.

On another note – “Mr. Herbert was lodged in lieu of $30,000 bail”! How kind of the cops to provide “lodging”! Love it.

Is there even a name for a crime of this type?

Getting “List Rolled?”

Dum-DUM!