The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder how a court could authorize that.
The next one, which I didn’t fully understand, but appeared to be in response to a swatting incident where the culprit is believed to have watched a specific camera livestream and the police provided a lot of narrowing details (time period, certain other characteristics, etc) appears far more legitimate.
They asked for information about a video watched 30k times. Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one. I believe Blackstone has something to say about this[0]. Literally 30x Blackstone's ratio, who heavily influenced the founding fathers.
I don't think any of this appears legitimate.
Edit: Ops [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
So not sure where you got the impression he's okay with up to 100 people being disturbed so we can catch one bad guy.
But then, he wasn't really talking about that was he? Better the guilty go free than the innocent suffer what? He was, essentially, talking about the principle of innocent until proven guilty; that innocent people shouldn't suffer by being punished for a crime unjustly.
2999 innocent people, in your formulation, though, are not being punished for a crime. They're not even being accused of a crime.
They are, however, being harmed.
It's easier to use historical examples because they're not afflicted with modern politics.
The FBI was known to investigate and harass civil rights leaders during the civil rights movement. Suppose they want to do that today.
Step one, come up with some pretext for why they should get a list of all the people who watched some video. It only has to be strong enough to get the list, not result in a conviction, because the point is only to get the list. Meanwhile the system is designed to punish them for a thin pretext by excluding the evidence when they go to charge someone and their lawyer provides context and an adversarial voice, but since their goal here isn't to gather evidence for a particular investigation, that's no deterrent.
Step two, now that they have the list of people interested in this type of content they can go on a fishing expedition looking for ways to harass them or charge them with unrelated crimes. This harms them, they're innocent people, therefore this should be prevented. Ideally by never recording this type of information to begin with.
There is a reason good librarians are wary about keeping a history of who borrowed a particular book.
I very much agree that (some, probably minimal) harm is being done to these people. Pretending that they "suffer" in the sense Blackstone was using the word is disingenuous.
Not at all. I would say that it's usually (not always!) small in the particulars but adds up in aggregate, and that we should be a lot more careful with how much surveillance we allow.
I just would also say that the kinds or amounts of harm being done there are manifestly not what Blackstone was talking about in his "formulation" as it leads immediately to absurd conclusions that go very well past the present case.
I will not here that "there is a concern here analogous to Blackstone's ratio" is a different thing than, paraphrasing what was up thread, "this is substantially more extreme than Blackstone's ratio should forbid".
And in case I haven't said it in thread anywhere, I share concerns about surveillance. I just think if we are enlisting support from historical figures, we should find a quote where they're talking about the question or acknowledge the distance, rather than pretending the quote means something it didn't - that will only turn off those who might be persuaded.
I agree with this. What's happening here is different than the scenario in the original ratio, even though it's a similar concern.
> I just would also say that the kinds or amounts of harm being done there are manifestly not what Blackstone was talking about in his "formulation" as it leads immediately to absurd conclusions that go very well past the present case.
If we direct ourselves to the case at hand, I'm not sure that a general rule that the government can't compel innocent bystanders to assist an investigation against their will would even be a net negative, much less cause serious problems. When a crime is committed people will generally be inclined to help bring the perpetrators to justice, because who wants thieves and murderers and so on going unpunished? Whereas if someone is disinclined to help, we might consider that they could have a reason, e.g. because the law being enforced is unjust or they believe the investigation is not being conducted in good faith, or they simply don't trust the government with the information, at which point the ability to refuse acts as a reasonable check on government power.
> I just think if we are enlisting support from historical figures, we should find a quote where they're talking about the question or acknowledge the distance, rather than pretending the quote means something it didn't - that will only turn off those who might be persuaded.
I feel like historical quotes tend to detract from discussions in general, because they're effectively an appeal to authority and then the discussion turns to exactly where we are now, debating whether the current situation can be distinguished from the original, which is a separate matter from whether what's happening in the modern case is reasonable or satisfactory in its own right.