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Originally Posted by PKFFW
An interesting example but what is the alternative?
Should law enforcement kindly ask your permission to come quietly and check to see if you have any child porn? Maybe make an appointment for next week when the neighbours will be on holiday? Trusting that you would not clear out all evidence before their arrival. Or should they assume all credit card purchases of child porn are a mistake and simply not investigate the matter?
I grant you that some accusations will seem to stick regardless of the their truth. That is unfortunate. However, I still don't see how this example should be used to argue that law enforcement should not have the means to conduct lawful, court warranted surveillance.
In fact, if anything, this law would give law enforcement the ability to monitor your spending habits and internet browsing and communications privately. After such surveillance it would become obvious that there is some discrepency and that you have not participated in any such illegal activity since surveillance began. They could then investigate other possibilities such as credit card fraud as a possible explaination. All this without alerting your neighbours and thus protecting your privacy.(whether they would actually do so in reality is another matter but with this law the above scenario would become possible, which it currently isn't)
I'm all for careful vigilance when it comes to law and its application. Just to be clear and for the record I'm also against the misuse or abuse of law. I just don't see how this law is really any different to the laws enabling wiretapping and other forms of surveillance that are already in place. It simply applies to the internet.
Cheers,
PKFFW
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The alternatives? Plenty. All of which are available without recourse to continuing surveillance. For starters, investigating the allegations properly (did the person or persons accused actually buy child porn, for example. Are there any indications of hacking or other dodgy behaviour on the sites concerned, especially if a gateway site was used.). Not releasing the names into the public domain until trial (OK, that won't stop neighbours talking etc, but it will help a little). Full, honest communications - between the forces involved, and also between the forces and the defendants (so no implying that credit card fraud has been investigated and no evidence of it found when that is not the case).. Checking that the "indecent" images found on seized computers actually are child pornography and not legal adult images.
It bears repeating, all this could have been done without any form of surveillance in place.
All of the above would have helped. It would have cut down the number of accused, it would have cut down the number of children removed from their families, and it may even have cut down on the number of suicides that resulted. The example I gave was a summarised and somewhat editorialised version of actual events in the UK a few years back. I'm not using it as an example against surveillance, but in response to this response:
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No, because they can still only punish you for things that are illegal. Ok, that is not exactly true, but anything they did to you for something that was not illegal would, in itself, be illegal. And I don't think that were so far gone as a society that they could get away with that sort of thing for very long.
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I mentioned earlier one of the reasons why I am against this kind of surveillance - it seems to reverse the presumption of innocence until found otherwise.