Category: Rights, Justice, & Judgement

You might not think of the Fourth Amendment while you’re using Facebook and other online tools, but you probably should.

What we do in this realm will have an impact on our lives as citizens. Norms of privacy we establish for convenience or to up our friend counts will be the norms of privacy that are applied on much weightier issues.

Source: How Frictionless Sharing Could Undermine Your Legal Right to Privacy – The Atlantic

 

Without a reasonable expectation of privacy, there will be no warrant requirement for law enforcement to obtain that information. This analysis is troubling; sharing information with your friends should not mean that you expect it to be shared with law enforcement.

— Margot Kaminski, executive director of Yale’s Information Society Project

Pepper spray, tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets — these “non-lethal” weapons are being used by more and more local police forces, as well as military forces brought in to control civilian crowds and other situations. Despite their name, non-lethal weapons have been known to cause deaths … and as Stephen Coleman suggests, there are other, more insidious hazards as well. He explores the complex ethics — and the unexpected consequences — of using non-lethal weapons to control civilians.

Source: Stephen Coleman: Non-lethal weapons, a moral hazard? | TED Talk | TED.com

The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation” and “waterboarding” all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.

The Bush Administration’s threshold for where an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop.

Source: Torturer’s Apprentice – The Atlantic

Why do we lock so many people up?

Source: The Caging of America – The New Yorker

building legal precedent on superficial similarities just because it’s easier for some people to grasp is no way to build the future

Source: Federal Judge Rules You May Be Forced To Provide Decryption Password | TechCrunch