[paulsutter]

Privacy and civil liberties are immensely important to the technology entrepreneur. We need to be aware of the legal pitfalls of technology, and be sensitive to the privacy risks we can create. I find this story very relevant to HN.

For example, if you are creating an app that records sound or images, you would want to be aware of the risks to camera users. Especially if that camera is less obvious than the camera used by the photographer in this story. The law seems to be on the side of the photographer but the realities are complex.

This is covered under the HN guidelines, as the intersection between technology, privacy, and civil liberties is definitely an interesting new and ongoing phenomenon.

[bluesnowmonkey]

There's no new technology intersection here. If someone got beaten up and jailed for refusing to disclose the password to an encrypted hard drive, that would be an example of what you're talking about. Full disk encryption is new. This is not. We've had photography and cops beating up photographers for a long time.

Let's be honest: this story is here because it makes people angry. It's the kind of story that you'd get as an email forward from your aunt. It gets attention and stirs up emotion. It does not gratify one's intellectual curiosity.

[nkurz]

I agree with you on the lack of technology focus, but I didn't vote it up out of anger. Instead, I was astonished to find that the photographer was able to offer an even-handed account of the difficulties of his job and the need for balance:

CJ: Do you feel your rights were violated?

RS: Of course, but you have to realize that each situation each different. Just because we have this constitutional right doesn’t give us a complete right to do whatever we feel like doing. This needs to be understood. You can’t just stand your ground, in the middle of a police scene, and say, “Its my right to shoot this.” You have to walk carefully every time you show up to a [police] scene. There’s a lot involved. These police officers are trying to do a job too. Everyone needs to understand that. I always try to respect that.

CJ: For the benefit of those photographers up in arms about your situation, can you explain what you mean by “respect”?

RS: You want to be respectful of the police officers space as well. We need to be conscious of our surroundings. Even as we’re protected by our constitutional rights – this is important [as photographers] to remember. However, in this case, there is no question that what I was doing was right. I’m never the one to say the picture is more important than everything else on the scene. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for “standing my ground”, and an officer is in the middle of doing his job and [because of interfering] and an officer gets injured as a result of what I chose to do. Just because I have the “right” do take photos. I would never do that. And that is kind of what the police are saying about me. That they have the “right” to charge me with obstruction of government administration. They are using that to say, ‘we can do whatever we want.’ It’s unfortunate because I’m the one who was totally abused.

I'm scared of slippery slopes of Mount Reddit as well, but this is an article worth reading.

[MartinCron]

I've been a fan of Chase Jarvis for years now. He's a level-headed professional guy and doesn't need to stir up anger to get page views.

This isn't "fuck the police", this is "be responsible, be respectful, be polite, know your rights"

[tptacek]

Every civil liberties story ever posted to HN has been accompanied by that justification, and, were it to be taken seriously, there would be nothing but social justice stories on HN, there being no dearth of important social justice stories to find on any given day.

[Cushman]

If we included every Rails internals article, that'd push everything else off the front page too. HN catches the highlights, and I like that that includes a lot of different stuff.

[Steko]

"were it to be taken seriously, there would be nothing but social justice stories"

Total non-sequitur. I'm not saying I think this is a good HN article to upvote but the idea that this is somehow going to exclude everything else is bizarre.

[tptacek]

I think you misread (or, equally likely, I wrote unclearly). I'm not saying "if you take the article seriously, we'll have nothing but social justice stories". I'm saying that if you take the premise that social justice is inherently interesting to hackers, then we'll end up with nothing but those stories.

Many people here, myself very much included, get their social justice stories in a different section of their RSS readers. It's not that those stories aren't interesting; it's that they simply aren't Hacker News, any more than updates about Girl Talk albums are Hacker News because hackers are so likely to listen to them.

[jcc80]

I completely understand you don't want this type of article on HN. But, you don't need to worry the site will only be articles on social justice if hackers find the topic "inherently interesting." Most people here are inherently interested in a variety of topics and that's why the community makes room for a few these "off-topic" stories.

[prodigal_erik]

Broken window theory. The rate of civil rights outrages worldwide is more than high enough to overwhelm the forum, so the number of completely off topic stories only remains low thanks to people visibly objecting to them.

[Confusion]

Acknowledging that social justice is inherently interesting does not imply that only social justice is interesting or that it is the most interesting. As such, the claim does not lead to 'nothing but those stories'. For that, additional premises are needed, none of which were posited.

[femto]

Or to take a purely commercial angle: Where there is change, there is opportunity. Startups don't make money by joining the herd, but by exploiting changing situations.

Change can come in many forms, including social. Such stories are a record of social change, and the pressures that drive it.

[eli]

My startup covers business news for the waste management industry, among others. But surely you don't want to hear about Virginia's new landfill and recycling restrictions even though they're tangentially connected to a startup and to technology?

[5partan]

Slamming a photographers camera in his face you call complex? i would call it stupid abuse of power, if the police officer felt threatened, he should act like a pofessional, not a bully from highschool.