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posted by
janrinok
on Friday February 03 2017, @10:52AM
from the you-have-no-privacy;-get-over-it dept.
from the you-have-no-privacy;-get-over-it dept.
Cory Doctorow reports via Boing Boing
Ross Compton, a 59-year-old homeowner in Middletown, Ohio called 911 in September 2016 to say that his house was on fire; there were many irregularities to the blaze that investigators found suspicious, such as contradictory statements from Compton and the way that the fire had started.
In the ensuing investigation, the police secured a warrant for the logs from his pacemaker, specifically, "Compton's heart rate, pacer demand, and cardiac rhythms before, during, and after the fire".
[...] The data from the pacemaker didn't correspond with Compton's version of what happened.
[...] [The cops] subsequently filed charges of felony aggravated arson and insurance fraud.
Cory links to coverage by Network World.
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Arsonist's Pacemaker Rats Him Out; Police Subpoenaed Logs
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Frankfort, Kentucky, makes it against the law to shoot off a policeman's tie.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday February 04 2017, @04:27AM
What would you say about police affixing a bomb to a robot, sending it in where a suspect is holed up and blowing it up, thereby deliberately killing said suspect?
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2, Troll) by aristarchus on Saturday February 04 2017, @05:53AM
Same thing. Neutralize, not kill. It is kind of like the same thing in the laws of armed conflict. You are not allowed to kill the enemy, only to either force them to surrender or render them incapable of resistance. Now some times, no doubt, the only way to get the enemy to cease resistance is to drop, oh, 2000 pound bombs on them. But this is only to get them to stop fighting, not to purposely kill them. These are two different aims. Of course, they most likely will perish. Unintended, but forseeable consequence. That is what "double effect" is.
So, let's take an example: you try to stop a threat, using potentially lethal force, say, live ammunition. As someone pointed out in the discussion of the Louvre attack, you do not mess around with just trying to wound or disarm the threat, but that is not because you want to necessarily kill them. It is just that aiming at anything other than center body mass is very likely to result in a miss and not neutralizing the threat. So say you do shoot, and by some lucky chance, the target is not killed, but only disabled. Well, if that was your intent, your job is done. (Not to get into the difficulties of making that call, just admit that there are cases where the call can be made.) If you go on to shoot the now non-threating former threat in order to kill them, you are a murder, and killing was your primary goal, no matter under what cover you commit this crime. Same for soldiers. If they can take prisoners, and instead they kill, we call that summary execution, extra-judicial killing, or to use plain words: murder. It is a war crime, and the same principles should apply to domestic use of lethal force.
So, Dallas? Did they have other options? Maybe, but this is no place for Monday morning quarterbacking. If the sniper survived the blast, and the police emptied their sidearms into him? I would have problems with that, as should any law abiding citizen on the planet.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Saturday February 04 2017, @08:12AM
Is there a specific reason why they couldn't equip the robot with anaesthetic gas to be released there, and then arresting the knocked-out suspect?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Jesus_666 on Saturday February 04 2017, @02:01PM
In practice, though, I'd say that the main reason for choosing remote bombs over remote gas canisters is that with the remote bomb the rugged protagonist gets to make a pithy remark just before pushing the button that causes a highly telegenic fireball to erupt from the target room's windows. Gas is usually not administered by means of gimmicky robot but would more likely be released into a conveniently accessible air vent from which it would then spread to incapacitate exactly all hostile people in the building exactly long enough for the quirky team of specialists to carry out a crucial part of their clever plan.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday February 04 2017, @06:04PM
It wasn't an entirely theoretical question : http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12129348/dallas-shooting-bomb-robot [theverge.com]
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.