Australian Cops Say Their Unreliable Drug Dogs Will Decide Who Gets To Attend Music Festivals
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The New South Wales Police think they've figured out this whole drugs-and-music thing. To slow the entry of drugs (and drug users) to events where drugs (and drug users) might be found, they're going to station their most unreliable officers at the entrance and have them point out the people who should be forbidden from entering. From the NSW Police Facebook post:Police are warning patrons attending the ‘Above and Beyond’ music festival at Sydney this weekend that drug detection dogs will be at the venue.The event will run from 6pm until midnight on Saturday (9 June 2018), at the Sydney Showground.Police warn that drug detection dogs will patrol the venue and can detect the presence of prohibited drugs or someone who has recently had drugs on them. If a dog makes an indication you will be denied entry.[...]Police will exclude any person from the venue that the drug dog indicates has or who has recently had drugs on them, regardless of whether drugs are located. This is great news for all those pro-Drug War types who think the innocent are just as guilty as the guilty until proven otherwise. Drug dogs are much better at detecting handler cues than detecting drugs, so it's inevitable this deployment of K-9 units will result in paying customers being screwed out of their money by four-legged animals.Drug dogs have outrageous failure rates, considering law enforcement (and some courts) hold them up to be "probable cause on four legs." It's quite possibly even worse in Australia.Last year, of the 15,779 searches conducted after police-dog identification, no drugs were found in 11,694 cases. Drugs were found in 4085 cases, resulting in a ''false positive'' rate of 74 per cent, said the Greens MP David Shoebridge, who obtained the figures Those stats are from 2010. There's every reason to believe accuracy has improv...A record 80 per cent of sniffer dog searches for drugs resulted in ''false positives'' this year, figures show.The figures obtained from the state government in response to parliamentary questions on notice show 14,102 searches were conducted after a dog sat next to a person, indicating they might be carrying drugs. But, in 11,248 cases, no drugs were found. So, there's an 80% chance festival goers who get booted by a dog won't have any drugs on them, or near them, or only in residue form. And the determination can't be challenged by showing officers you're not carrying any drugs. If a dog says you're not allowed to enjoy the music festival, despite having shelled out at least $128, the dog's call is final.This is a very police state-ish thing to do. It allows police to arbitrarily boot people from venues, depriving them of both their freedom and their money. And it's a coward's way out. Rather than put their own reputations on the line, NSW police are simply going to shrug people express their anger at being kicked out of a concert for drugs they don't have and say a dog told them to do it.
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posted at: 12:08am on 12-Jun-2018
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More Bad Facts Making More Bad Law, This Time In Wisconsin
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A few weeks ago we, and others, filed an amicus brief in support of Airbnb and Homeaway at the Ninth Circuit. The basic point we made there is that Section 230 applies to all sorts of platforms hosting all sorts of user expression, including transactional content offering to rent or sell something, and local jurisdictions don't get to try to impose liability on them anyway just because they don't like the effects of those transactions. It's a point that is often forgotten in Section 230 litigation, and so last week the Copia Institute, joined by EFF, filed an amicus brief at the Wisconsin Supreme Court reminding them of the statute's broad application and why that breadth so important for the preservation of online free speech.The problem is that in Daniels v. Armslist, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals had ignored twenty-plus years of prior precedent affirming this principle in deciding otherwise. We therefore filed this brief to support Armslist in urging the Wisconsin Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals decision.As in so many cases involving Section 230 the case in question followed an awful tragedy: someone barred from owning a gun bought one through the online marketplace run by Armslist and then shot his estranged partner. The partner's estate sued Armslist for negligence in having constructed a site where dangerous people could buy guns. As we acknowledged up front:Tragic events like the one at the heart of this case often challenge the proper adjudication of litigation brought against Internet platforms. Justice would seem to call for a remedy, and if it appears that some twenty-year old federal statute is all that prevents a worthy plaintiff from obtaining one, it is tempting for courts to ignore it in order to find a way to give them that remedy. Nonetheless, there was more at stake than just the plaintiff's interest. This case might look like a gun policy case, or a negligence case, but, like with Airbnb/Homeaway, this case was really a speech case, and laws like Section 230 that help protect speech are ignored at our peril because doing so imperils all the important expression they exist to protect.The reason it was a speech case is that, as in the Airbnb/Homeaway case where someone was using the platform to say, "I have a home to rent," here someone had used the Armslist platform to say, "I have a gun to sell." Because these platforms only facilitate these narrow topics of expression it's easy to lose sight of what's getting expressed and instead focus on the consequences of the expression. But that's the problem with these cases: someone is trying to hold an Internet platform liable for the consequences of what someone said, and that's exactly what Section 230 forbids.Tempting though it may be to try to find exceptions to that critical statutory protection, it is important to hold the line because Section 230 only works when it can always work. It wouldn't accomplish anything if platforms were only protected from certain forms of liability but still had to monitor all their users' content anyway. Congress recognized that such monitoring would be an impossible task and crippling to platforms' ability to remain available to facilitate users' speech. A major reason Section 230 exists is to protect speech from the corrosive effects these monitoring burdens would have on it. It is also why Section 230 does not let state and local jurisdictions impose their own monitoring burdens through the threat of liability, as the Wisconsin appeals court decision would do.
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