Quote Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name View Post
Okay, ACIN's open mind time. This is related to the Anwar thread, and after going over the conversation we had there I am still not getting it exactly. Even if such stories about blatant abuse of the law are hyperbole and lies, where exactly do you the line between "it's ok to give this power (warrantless wiretapping or what have you), because realistically nothing like that will ever happen" and "this is way too much power, and shouldn't be given to x person/position/official" is this a pragmatic view you are drawing, where intelligence communities don't really care about average civilians inane chatter, so warrantless wiretapping should be fine? Sorry if this conversation tires you.

It's not even particularly pragmatic*. If you approach privacy vs wiretapping with the emotional mindset where privacy is kind of sacred value, then the seriousness of any violation of that value becomes inflated. On the other hand, if you say, "I have two things I want. Privacy and the crime stopping ability of wiretapping" then you work out a balance that seems best. You accept that murderers who might have been caught with more lax standards won't be, and that people will be unjustly eavesdropped on who wouldn't with stricter standards. You accept it because they are conflicting desires and there is no magical way to have a perfect system. We're talking about accepting as in accepting the way the system works, not in a dismissing the cases where it goes wrong. Like we accept that people are going to die in car accidents and don't have a thread where news stories about deaths on the highway are posted every couple days. Now, poorly made cars that catch on fire or police trying to stop people filming them, that's an actual issue.

There are certainly many cases where there is obviously too much power and it's open for abuse, but for some reason the wacky ones tend to get posted here. This bit that I posted:

1) require the federal government to prove that seized property is related to a crime; (2) create an "innocent owner" defense, to allow property owners who are unaware of the criminal activity associated with their property to recover their assets; (3) provide indigent defendants with appointed counsel; and (4) eliminate the cost bond required of owners to contest the seizure in court.
Is a revision to the law--correcting what I would say was a bad law before that. Perhaps the current formulation needs fixing as well, but the "institute for justice" doesn't have anything intelligent to say about it

*or maybe it is, having a brain freeze on how to say what's pragmatic and what isn't