Category: Rights, Justice, & Judgement

Every law is violent. We try not to think about this, but we should. … This is by no means an argument against having laws. It is an argument for a degree of humility as we choose which of the many things we may not like to make illegal. Behind every exercise of law stands the sheriff – or the SWAT team – or if necessary the National Guard.

in recent decades, agencies in the federal bureaucracy that few members of the public would associate with law enforcement have assembled SWAT units that carry out paramilitary raids, often against unarmed citizens engaged in nonviolent transgressions.

Source: Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent

Source: The Role of Civil Liberties in the Fight Against Terror – The Atlantic

Politicians who want to violate civil rights to combat terror miss a vital point—if they strip them away, they’ll be equally defenseless.

A congressional investigative body springing from the impulse to consider members of major religions suspect because of words in their sacred texts ought to terrify folks on the religious right

America’s terrorist watch list is an opaque abomination. … It is already a scandal that a list like this can prevent a person from flying, as if moving about the country is a privilege, not a right. And now, Democrats are proposing that being on a secret, due-process free list should strip people of a constitutional right.

Although America can doubtless improve its approach to counterterrorism, its citizens, particularly its political leaders and television personalities, should take much greater care to avoid responses that are counterproductive or that infringe on civil liberties, because imprudent reactions to terrorism can cause far greater harm to the United States than lone-wolf jihadists.

Digital thieves’ most crucial adaptation in recent years has little to do with their technical tools and everything to do with their business model.

“In the physical world, you have law enforcement coming out against paying ransom for hostages, but in this case we’ve seen law-enforcement agencies not only recommend it but actually paying it themselves,” Alperovitch says, referring to incidents in which police departments have paid bitcoin ransoms to recover control of their systems. “The problem you have here is that literally everyone is experiencing this problem. No one is immune. Luckily, hostage-taking is a pretty rare activity in our society, so it’s easy to recommend not paying a ransom when they know they’re not likely to experience that issue themselves.”

Source: Ransomware and the New Economics of Cybercrime – The Atlantic

Source: The muzzle grows tighter

Freedom of speech is in retreat

From the mosques of Cairo to the classrooms at Yale, all sorts of people and groups are claiming a right not to be offended. This is quite different from believing that people should, in general, be polite. A right not to be offended implies a power to police other people’s speech.

Such laws are handy tools for those in power to harass their enemies. And far from promoting harmony between different groups, they encourage them to file charges against each other. This is especially dangerous when cynical politicians get involved. Those who rely on votes from a certain group often find it useful to demand the punishment of someone who has allegedly insulted its members, especially just before an election.

Source: Louisiana Refuses to Budget for Public Defenders – The Atlantic

The right to legal counsel has long been the gold standard of American justice under the Constitution. But what happens when a state refuses to budget for public defenders? Louisiana is finding out.

$10 per case

The Louisiana Public Defender Board, which oversees every district office, has predicted “systemic failure in the public-defense system” by this summer [2016].

Until recently in New Orleans, public defenders assigned to misdemeanor courts each had upward of 19,000 cases per year, affording them an average of seven minutes for every client.

the 2017 annual budget, approved by the legislature, slashes public-defender funding by an additional 62 percent