The headline: UK Drug Dealer Feeling Bleu After Cheese Photo Leads To Arrest
The article: Police cracked encryption on a privacy-focused phone service provider and ran fingerprint analysis on photos posted by users.
Like I get that law enforcement does things like this, that’s literally what it exists for, I’m just really upset by the cutesy framing.
Also. Like. Don’t organize shit online or over the phone. Law enforcement has been pressuring tech companies to put backdoors into encrypted services for years, this whole crackdown happened because of a device-level attack, and you never know who’s listening.
And yeah. If you’re setting up an anonymous ID online for any reason do not, under any circumstances, post or share any identifying information under that ID or with devices associated with that account.
Just don’t break the law.
The Criminalization of Private Debt.
The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the US.
How Every Part of American Life Became a Police Matter.
No Right to Rest: Police Enforcement Patterns and Quality of Life Consequences of the Criminalization of Homelessness.
The Criminalization of Poverty.
The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States.
From “brute” to “thug:” the demonization and criminalization of unarmed Black male victims in America.
“Forced into Breaking the Law”The Criminalization of Homelessness in Connecticut.
American Cities and the Creeping Criminalization of Walking.
The Unfair Criminalization of Gay and Transgender Youth.
Mass criminalization is a root cause of racial inequality within the U.S.
Illegality of Unions.
“Just don’t break the law.”
He’s a fucking piece of shit drug dealer. He’s not a victim of racial inequality, or being in a union or being homeless..
Fucking anti cop assholes will read about a baby rapist and be like “omg they used a online post and facial recognition to catch this poor victim who raped 2 year old cops are so horrible! Justice for him!
HOW ABOUT DONT FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES!?
The cops who use facial recognition and an online post to catch a baby rapist are the same cops who will use facial recognition and an online post to track down asylum seekers to send them to concentration camps.
You and the baby rapist have the same rights. An infringement on the baby rapist’s right to privacy is an infringement on your right to privacy. You should be able to use encrypted communication networks, this is true whether you are committing no crimes, whether you are a ‘fucking piece of shit drug dealer,’ or whether you are seeking an abortion in Texas. Cops compromising encrypted communication is a threat to you the same way it is a threat to drug dealers.
“DON’T FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES?!” Is not a useful or actionable admonition because “crime” is a constructed category that makes “forgetting to fill out a form 10 years ago” “assisting your child in seeking an abortion” “having the wrong tattoos” “having a blanket” all equally good reasons to unperson you.
“DON’T FUCKING COMMIT CRIMES?!” and “Just don’t break the law.” are things that are said by people who are entirely too comfortable with the idea that they are never going to be targeted by law enforcement considering that we live in a society in which so much is criminalized.
The fact that he is “a fucking piece of shit drug dealer” is why the original article is comfortable making a joke of his arrest. The contemptible nature of his crime means that it’s okay to pair his face with cheese puns, and it’s why that article was widely circulated - as opposed to this article by an investigative journalist and encrochat user whose home was raided as part of the same nationwide sting.
The reason that you (and everyone else who makes this argument) reach for “baby rapist” as your criminal of choice when making your criticisms is because it doesn’t sound as righteous when you say “she’s a piece of shit abortionist, DON’T COMMIT CRIMES” or “that fucking piece of shit was sleeping on a cardboard box, it’s not hard to keep away from the cops if you just don’t break the law.”
You are attempting to frame the conversation as though the only people subject to this kind of surveillance are people who are easy to hate - drug dealers, rapists, murderers, etc.
The rate of violent crime has been falling for decades. People are less likely to harm one another now than they were at any point since we started tracking those numbers. In spite of that, our population is more criminalized than ever.
In the four years since I made this original post we have seen these types of surveillance being used to track protesters and asylum seekers. The murder/rape case clearance rate isn’t up since these types of stings started becoming more common, but it is now illegal to fall asleep with a blanket on a bench in Oregon and to provide a D&C to a person having a miscarriage in Texas.
“Crime” has expanded in the the last four years, and none of that expansion has done anything to make you safer.
So, completely aside from the fact that I don’t think it should be illegal to sell drugs, the point of this post isn’t that this poor woobie drug dealer got caught, it is that:
We are all subject to a horrifying level of surveillance and
We can all be dehumanized by the state at an time because “crime” is malleable and there are very likely things you have done in your life that could make you subject to the same kind of state violence that a “fucking piece of shit drug dealer” is - and you can be subject to that same level of state violence even if you haven’t done anything to “provoke” it.
This is also the same thing as the “Well why do terrorists/migrants/whatever deserve due process? They’re criminals!” is bullshit. Because the law is supposed to protect everyone the same.
And the law does protect everyone the same, in the way that the average citizen is just as vulnerable to these kinds of violations as anyone else is. They can (and do) use these to harass people for being accused of breaking the law. Which anyone can be, right?
To cite H.L. Mencken:
With the caveat that he did not fucking say scoundrels, he said sons of bitches, and I hate that if you search “hl mencken fighting for human freedom” then you will get SO MANY pages and images that say scoundrels, and very very few that quote it accurately.
But that’s another goddamn discussion.
“Well why do terrorists/migrants/whatever deserve due process? They’re criminals!”
THEY ARE NOT.
The point of due process is to determine guilt. Innocent until proven guilty literally means somebody is not a criminal until they have been convicted. And furthermore, a conviction is only valid if the accused either doesn’t appeal, or the appeal is upheld, if need be all the way up to the highest court.
When the police say “he’s a drug dealer”, that means nothing.
When the police say “we found him with a car full of drugs”, that means nothing.
When the police say"we found him with a car full of drugs, he was snorting coke when we got there, we have him on camera taking money and handing out coke, and he said ‘hell yeah I’m a drug dealer’“, that means nothing.
When a judge or a jury says, I accept that this is incontrovertible evidence of his guilt and he either doesn’t appeal or his appeal is rejected, that means he’s a criminal.
(And even then, convictions get overturned all the time, convicted people are exonerated by new evidence all the time, confessions are coerced, witnesses coached, and evidence tampered with or falsified all the time. But we’re talking about the legal definition of criminal here.)
There is nothing that can guarantee that you, you! won’t one day have the police at your home with an arrest warrant for something you didn’t do. Could be as simple as a hit and run and a witness who misread the licence plate, could be as complicated as being wrongfully accused of a murder-rape you didn’t do.
NOBODY IS A "CRIMINAL” UNTIL A COURT RENDERS A VALID, INCONTESTABLE GUILTY VERDICT.
Because you know what happens without due process?
The police come to your door, they say “you killed this guy”, so you’re a murderer now, so you don’t deserve due process because you’re a criminal, so off the prison or the electric chair we go.
THE POINT OF DUE PROCESS IS TO DETERMINE WHETHER SOMEONE IS GUILTY.
(edit: previous post should say "if the appeal is rejected" or "if the conviction is upheld". my bad)
Don't believe me? Let's do a little hypothetical scenario.
Here's how you – YOU! – can get falsely convicted of a rape and murder.
Say you're a student. And say you have a classmate, let's call her Susan because it's a nice name.
The police come knocking on your door one morning. They ask, hey, do you know Susan?
Now Susan was at your place last night because you were working on homework. She left late and didn't text you when she got home.
So you say, "oh my god, something happened to her, didn't it?"
The cops look at you funny, but you don't notice it.
They ask you about Susan. Who are her friends, what does she do, does she have any enemies. They don't tell you what, if anything, happened to Susan. They speak present tense. And you answer, truthfully, until one of the cops asks if they can take a look around. At that point, you get suspicious and stop talking.
They come back with a warrant the next day. They take a look around your room, they take your prints. They find some of Susan's hair, some of her fingerprints in your apartment. Nothing unusual; she was here to study after all. They tell you, we might have questions for you later, don't leave town.
Now, what you read in the paper later is, Susan was ambushed on her way home. Someone followed her, forced their way into her home, beat her to death with a baseball bat, tore off her clothes, ran a steak knife through her breasts and pushed her phone into her vagina and a beer bottle down her throat.
As it turns out, when they come to arrest you and you finally get a lawyer, is some of Susan's friends said, oh yeah that guy she was paired with for the assignment? Total creep. I always thought there was something wrong with him.
And one of your classmates says, yeah that guy? He obviously had such a big crush on her. Everyone could see it, he was always staring at her, but she didn't give him the time of day.
And your fingerprints were found on her clothes, because you took her coat and hung it up when she came over. There was a few of your hairs on her neck, because you both bent down over the same textbook and brushed against each other.
And you don't have an alibi for where you were last night, because you were sleeping. But your message history shows she sent you her address, because you were going back and forth at whose place you should have the studying session.
You didn't do it, of course. Some stranger did it.
But you had the opportunity, you knew where she lived, you had a motive because everyone's sure you had an unrequited crush on her, and your DNA is all over her, and hers over your place.
(Oh and if, god forbid, you actually had a crush and you confessed it via text message and she let you down via text message, then questions of "why are the police allowed to read our messages" are suddenly very important.)
In the courtroom, the prosecutor is going to say, "Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the accused clearly knew of the victim's murder before it was in the newspapers, because he immediately talked about something happening to poor Susan when our officers just asked him if he knew her."
You, my friend, are going to prison.
And you didn't do it.
But the headlines will say "rapist-murderer convicted" and people online will say, "well he's a rapist and a murderer, he doesn't deserve a fair process. I don't get why they don't just execute people like that".
Even though you didn't do it.
And that, dear readers, is why due process exists.
Because it's much easier to say "rapist arrested" than "man accused of raping, innocent until proven guilty, arrested". Because people love saying "we should kill rapists" and hate saying "he's innocent until proven guilty and that's a lot of circumstantial evidence". Because it looks like you obviously did it, everyone can see that, it's just common sense.
Because common sense is called that because it's common, not because it makes sense, and the police can just accuse anyone of anything if they can make it look plausible.
Due process is what's giving YOU the chance to escape THAT.
And if you think, wow, Tumblr user bulletstapes, that's a stretch. I mean, that's a lot of bad coincidences. Why should I believe a stranger with a Star Trek avatar on the internet?
Here is one of America's foremost constitutional and criminal lawyers telling you the same thing. People have been convicted for far less.
James Duane: Don't Talk to the Police
