It's quite possible he had either a public defender or a poor attorney. I am friends with an attorney who works with the poor, indigent, and people otherwise unable to fight for themselves. I help him out for free when he has questions related to technology and IT. I really need to read up on Tor because there might come a time when I'll need to assist my friend in a similar matter. It's quite chilling that the state could potentially punish a business owner for providing a free service like WiFi. I have another friend who runs a the neighborhood sports bar and she offers WiFi to her customers. I think I need to implement some content filtration for her so as to prevent her from potentially getting blamed for a crime she did not commit.
Police protect both monetary and political capital. They're dogs licking the boots of their masters. Caveat: I am ex-cop. I was fired because I refused to arrest someone for smoking pot peacefully and not bothering anybody. This was in the late 90s.
I haven't knowingly done anything wrong. At the time I was charged with a misdemeanor I did not realize that providing food and water for the homeless was a criminal statute. I will say there is a difference between a law enforcement officer and a peace officer. A peace officer is one who is public safety minded and not one who is looking/itching to trip somebody up. It sounds like those in your circle might actually be peace officers instead.
This is why I won't do anything of the sort. With the increasingly authoritarian state that Amurica is turning into, I will tread very carefully. Including using VPN. I don't know much about Tor and perhaps I should learn more but my understanding is the traffic is largely plain text and not encrypted. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I've used it and it works well. I did file an issue with the author to suggest allowing a per-site restriction option because some sites, one may want to see such material. That much aside, it is a good plugin. I like it very much.
I have heard of this happening. It is why I have a healthy distrust and dislike of law enforcement. Law enforcement serves the wealthy, powerful, and the interests of the state itself. It is almost like the wealthy have their own paramilitary to do their bidding for them.
Unfortunately, this is the internet and assholes abound. I don't like it either but at least the fediverse has a lot less of the asshole behaviors because the community is really quick to shut this kind of behavior down. Do what you feel you need to do. Personally, I don't like getting involved with law enforcement because I don't want to risk inadvertently incriminating myself. You have to remember that police are agents of the state, and in many cases, they act on behalf of the wealthy as well. Unless you are in a position of power or money, interactions with the police are fraught with risk. I should know first hand because it happened to me. I was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor for providing food for the homeless in a park.
Apparently, the city was really trying to get rid of the homeless people in the park so they set punishment as 30 days in jail. Thankfully, the judge saw the utter disconnect of being punished for providing a humanitarian services and dropped the charges. Furthermore, she did me a solid by ordering that my arrest record be court sealed so it would not come up in a background search.
The only thing I can guess is that you have been doxxed. That usually happens when your data can be linked to you through either searching or analysis of the metadata of what you're sending. I am sorry this happened to you because it is quite frightening. Despite our best efforts, the general rule of thumb is that anything you post is going to be very public and traceable. I am hoping that true end-to-end encryption to include metadata becomes a common solution soon.
To my thinking, it's time to get folks on a federated platform. Here is a graphic of the various fediverse platforms. I know off of the top of my head about PeerTube. I just learned about the others.
While generally I want to see these companies sued to knock them back a few rungs on the hubris ladder, I couldn't help but seeing one really important argument made against suing.
The board voted 3-2 to join the litigation, over the opposition of board members who said that the lawsuit deflected responsibility from parents and that the district was overstepping its role.
Parents are not absolved from the responsibility of educating their children on the internet. In fact, in the interest of keeping censorship out of the legal purview, it's best for parents to take an active role in educating their children and even censoring the material themselves. By pushing the responsibility for censorship on to government, you create a real and tangible risk to free speech because we know how the authorities love to overreach their power.
It's quite possible he had either a public defender or a poor attorney. I am friends with an attorney who works with the poor, indigent, and people otherwise unable to fight for themselves. I help him out for free when he has questions related to technology and IT. I really need to read up on Tor because there might come a time when I'll need to assist my friend in a similar matter. It's quite chilling that the state could potentially punish a business owner for providing a free service like WiFi. I have another friend who runs a the neighborhood sports bar and she offers WiFi to her customers. I think I need to implement some content filtration for her so as to prevent her from potentially getting blamed for a crime she did not commit.