20 April 2010

This is why you don't give too much power to

Governments

Uh yeah. What exactly is this school doing with all those pictures? Why it appears to be having amusing bit of fun with them.

As it is said there, if this can happen on accident...., it reminds me of a question that should always come up when you want to apportion new powers to some authority: what is the worst possible person to wield that authority that I can imagine and what will they do with it? It may not always be instructive, it may not always give us pause when discussing power and its abuses, but when we give a little too much because we trust the people behind that power now, it should definitely give us some food for thought. Those people won't always be there to delegate that power in the way that you see fit (if you are a progressive of some sort, this would be Obama that you trust a little too much and Bush that was reviled, rightly in my opinion, if it was Bush you trusted, well then I don't know what to tell you, but you're probably a conservative).

But still, even with all that invasive behavior, and schools what with the random drug searches aren't big on all the privacy rights anyway, this is probably worse. It's one thing to be spied upon. It's another to be spied upon and then suspected and treated as a criminal. Naturally given the politics of the crime being investigated, and the era that it occurred, it's hard to say that this is unusual behavior for police and federal investigators.

The disturbing part is that it is more or less usual behavior anymore to treat people like criminals and violate due process or at least that police give every intention of acting this way and projecting themselves in that manner. When, of all people, Daryl Gates (the brainchild behind those "brilliant" DARE and SWAT programs. Plus an illegal investigative unit) is saying that you're not doing a very good job policing a crime, this is not a good sign.

2 comments:

Andrew Clunn said...

Just saying that it's too bad you're leaving Debate It Out. I enjoyed reading your input.

Sun Tzu said...

Maybe when they grow up and learn how to moderate a forum that input will be more useful. I hate seeing people who are already less informed and ranting on about something reduced to talking with their hands behind their backs in addition to that because the moderator has decided to bypass the 1st amendment for unspecified and unclear reasons.