The “collection of resource data constitutes the protected creation of speech.”
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Ag-gag law gets taken to the slaughterhouse
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Its always refreshing when rent-seeking is out in the open and completely shameless.
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Are there any other examples of a situation where potential illegalities in the collection of data taint the data itself no matter what?
The only one I can think of is the (oft-circumvented and not terribly well defended) 'fruit of the poisonous tree' stuff, introduced specifically because there appeared to be no other way to keep cops from doing especially illegal things while building cases; but that's the only one; and it only exists because it applies to people entrusted by the state with atypically abusable tools that can be turned to particularly dangerous ends.
Am I just poorly informed; or is it indeed extremely rare; and quite serious, to deem the data obtained by an action to be tainted, no matter what, by what was done to obtain it?
The only one I can think of is the (oft-circumvented and not terribly well defended) 'fruit of the poisonous tree' stuff, introduced specifically because there appeared to be no other way to keep cops from doing especially illegal things while building cases; but that's the only one; and it only exists because it applies to people entrusted by the state with atypically abusable tools that can be turned to particularly dangerous ends.
Am I just poorly informed; or is it indeed extremely rare; and quite serious, to deem the data obtained by an action to be tainted, no matter what, by what was done to obtain it?
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Unfortunately, it's slightly less refreshing when the rent-seeker owns the local sheriff, probably contracts with some super creepy neo-Pinkerton private security outfit; and definitely owns enough isolated land and heavy excavation equipment(or pigs, or both) that nobody will ever have to know...
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I have vague memorizes of 60 Minutes stories about those meat packing plants in the 90s and the blow back against McDonalds. What a strange chain of events that this is the outcome decades later
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I imagine security researchers collecting data about vulnerabilities may run afoul of their data being unusable because of 'hacking', whether due to CFAA or DMCA ...
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I know a lot of these laws are in response to vegetarian activists, but as an avid carnivore, I'm totally on board with it. I want cameras and testing covering every aspect of our food supply: farms, slaughterhouses, packaging, shipping, you name it.
I don't just want people to be *allowed* to do this testing; I want it mandated. I want to open a browser and see how the pigs and cows I eat are slaughtered. I want to see extensive documentation on the feed & chemicals given to the chickens I eat, and the pesticides that were used on my broccoli.
It's crazy to me that companies are allowed to have any secrets at all about the food that we all rely on to live.
I don't just want people to be *allowed* to do this testing; I want it mandated. I want to open a browser and see how the pigs and cows I eat are slaughtered. I want to see extensive documentation on the feed & chemicals given to the chickens I eat, and the pesticides that were used on my broccoli.
It's crazy to me that companies are allowed to have any secrets at all about the food that we all rely on to live.
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I can imagine that the people pushing for these laws find it cheaper to grease a few elbows than cleaning up their operations.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
Unauthorized security researchers run the very real risk of being taken to court by the company they were investigating, but I've never heard of a case where data about a security vulnerability was intentionally ignored by the government because the the way it was discovered. Of course, these are very different circumstances. You don't need to be a highly trained expert in the field to discover and collect evidence of illegal farming-related activity, and trespassing is a pretty low bar compared to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (In other words, no one who knows what they're doing is going to intentionally try to gain access to another company's infrastructure without authorization and then go around talking publicly about what they found.)
To be clear, I'm firmly of the position that trespassing laws should be left to defend against trespassing, and while I don't have a problem with someone being taken to court for their illegal activity while outing someone else's, I do have a problem with evidence of illegal activity on public lands being ignored because someone happened to cross private property on the way there. Things do get a little more murky when it comes to private property, though protection for whistleblowers is absolutely important to prevent private operations on private land from using legally-binding agreements to gain immunity from the law.
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I agree, some may call me a conservative, but I agree, I want every bit of possible scrutiny of every step of our food supply!!! And basically the powerful have not come to grips with the fact that now EVERY ONE HAS the ability to film just about anything anywhere, and PUBLISH it for all to see. The genie is not going back in the bottle. If you're doing something screwed up, something that most of society finds negative, you can be publicly shamed and financially ruined. That's the way it should be.
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The 'fruit of the poisonous tree' part of this is the most disturbing.. Let the person who trespassed be guilty of trespassing and the person who did whatever illegal stuff was discovered be responsible for that illegal stuff..
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I guess collecting everything about private individuals (and not being held accountable when that information is leaked) is fair game but god forbid somebody take pictures of agribusiness' foul practices.
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I can't believe this is a thing. Google is OK. NSA is OK. ISPs without rules are OK. Yet Blood Red Wyoming doesn't like normal people collecting obvious information.
gag me.
gag me.
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While I am glad that it seems more likely to get overturn now, I can't help but be disgusted by how many hoops we had to go through to get here.
The mere fact that someone would even have the audacity to propose that rule, let alone pass it and worse, get it through any stage of the courts is just so disheartening. If this world was remotely sane, this would have never even passed the smell test before being widely panned and anyone who even tried to help it would soon be under investigation for ethics violations.
The mere fact that someone would even have the audacity to propose that rule, let alone pass it and worse, get it through any stage of the courts is just so disheartening. If this world was remotely sane, this would have never even passed the smell test before being widely panned and anyone who even tried to help it would soon be under investigation for ethics violations.
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That's part of the problem when the penalty is less than fixing things? You may find that greasing also costs less, especially when 'the competition is doing it too'?
I don't have data to prove this, but there is likely to be financial reason to not clean up their act. There may also be a certain level of arrogance if you can grease for sport?
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I agree with the Michael Wall on this. It's hard to see how a court will determine that stopping trespassing on open lands is a more compelling government interest than protecting citizens' free speech.
Keep in mind the part I italicized. This particular law has nothing to do with breaking into buildings or jumping the fence into someone's back yard. This is about someone walking/driving across open (yet privately owned) rangelands. No one's peeping at the rancher's wife, in these instances. No one's stealing his credit card numbers or social security number. They're typically not going to be within sight of an actual building in most cases. They are traveling across miles of open rangeland to see if he's violating animal welfare, water quality and other such laws.
Keep in mind the part I italicized. This particular law has nothing to do with breaking into buildings or jumping the fence into someone's back yard. This is about someone walking/driving across open (yet privately owned) rangelands. No one's peeping at the rancher's wife, in these instances. No one's stealing his credit card numbers or social security number. They're typically not going to be within sight of an actual building in most cases. They are traveling across miles of open rangeland to see if he's violating animal welfare, water quality and other such laws.
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One other thing to note is that these laws are not always necessarily the result of palm greasing. The communities in which these laws are passed are highly dependent on the agricultural businesses these laws apply to. Everyone in these communities gets concerned about the possibility that the local meat packing plant or ranch might go out of business. Add to that a libertarian tendency in rural America, and the result is that the community is often fully behind the laws to keep those out-of-town liberals away from the plant/ranch, rather than simply supporting the government's interest in regulating the business.
I'm not saying no business-friendly law is ever the result of things like a politician worrying about where their campaign contributions will come from. But these ag-gag laws tend to be very popular among the constituents.
I'm not saying no business-friendly law is ever the result of things like a politician worrying about where their campaign contributions will come from. But these ag-gag laws tend to be very popular among the constituents.
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Not to mention the cops get exceptions to that all the time if it was "unintentional" illegal collection. If they trespass, cite them for that. No reason to ignore evidence of a law being broken simply because the data was gathered while trespassing. And the "crossing private land to reach public land" makes even less sense.
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You should keep in mind that, in general, these are lands where people are crossing them all the time. If the local kid crosses the land to get to the good fishing hole, I'll bet close to 100% that the ranch owner says "how was the fishing" and not "get off my land or I'll shoot you in the back with this shotgun".
These laws are 100% about protecting bad acts, not about protecting private property rights.
BTW, no one is claiming that trespassers wouldn't/couldn't be arrested for trespassing in these cases. The problem is that there is extra penalty if you are trespassing for the purpose of gathering information and the state regulators are barred from utilizing the gathered information.
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Happens to us all the time - we live next door to a park and people think our yard is open to just strolling through to get to the park. We've even had people (start to) borrow our hose or ask to plug in an extension cord.
In the ranchland west, it can be a patchwork of land, with public land being inaccessible except by crossing privately owned land.
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It's not giving permission to trespass. And if anybody makes public any video or data they gathered on your land, they are basically handing you the keys to a successful trespass lawsuit against them.
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Trespassing is still against the law, with varying degrees of punishment depending on the type of transgression. You can still seek damages from anyone who does trespass and it is still possible for those people to go to jail.
All this does is prevent those companies that are doing the illegal/unethical things from using a completely separate law to try and stifle reporting on their actions. No activist, journalist, or other investigator are going to opt for the trespassing method if an alternative method is available, but people shouldn't be immune from reporting because their company exists on or is surrounded by privately owned property.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
Seems like an access problem that could be easily solved. If you have private property blocking all access to public land with no reasonable rights of way to provide access, don't be surprised when people start walking across your proverbial back yard to get there.
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I am concerned with this line of thinking. The right of private property and preventing trespassing is one which primarily benefits the population, NOT the government. So, any court decisions which are weighed to only consider the interests of the government seem to ignore the right of the people. "A greater governmental interest" IMO should not be a valid legal test on its own. Establishment of the interest and rights of citizens is fundamental to our constitution.
Disallowing reporters to plant cameras on/in your house also restricts the reporter's speech by not allowing that data collection, and it may be in the government's greater interest to allow placement of these cameras, because it gives them data on activities around and within your home, but it absolutely should stay illegal.
I tend to think the same stands for this private property data collection.
Once exception may be if one can fly over private property and land on public land to collect data, in this way no law is violated.
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STRANGE?
Where have you been Mr. Van Winkle?
There's a shit-ton of money involved in maintaining a status quo that if not breaks the laws outright then bends them to the breaking point to exploit animals in order to feed the profit margins.
Given that situation, it's inevitable and SOP. This is just a touch more overt than usual, when the usual is binding arbitration that prevents people from talking about the bad shit that happened to them. And there are people who not only still trust corporations these days, they loyally follow them around.
I just don't get that mentality, but this isn't anything new or strange at all.
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I AGREE that the purpose of those laws are most likely to protect bad acts - or just as likely, to protect acts that MAY NOT BE illegal but are ugly and would likely offend sensibilities of the urban left. Not my point - as I said, police and enforce.
BUT - unintended consequences - you're not going to end up not with some kid going to a fishing hole (which wouldn't actually be trespassing since the owner very likely knows the kid from down the lane and has given tacit permission to use the swimming hole), but rather with a bunch of activists cutting through land - possibly pissing off a bull (been there, done that, glad I had a steel door between us, and it still ended up with a hole in it) and getting hurt and blaming the land owner - or doing whatever.
That's why I'm NOT saying to keep those ag-gag laws in place, but rather to find a workable solution that does not involve losing land rights (which is guaranteed Constitutional) in favor of freedom of speech rights (which is guaranteed Constitutional)
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It's more difficult, oftentimes, than you might think.
And with us, yes, we could build fences around everything. Which is stupid - why can people just not trespass through our yard, trampling our flowers, and leaving trash on our property?
Which is exactly the same argument - why can we not come up with a GOOD way to police and enforce against bad practices that does not trample on property rights.
Everyone knows that trespassing is a MINOR misdemeanor that isn't going to get more than a slap on the wrist. C'mon, man! If an activist organization can get some spectacularly ugly video footage (no matter what the context, whether it's actually morally, ethically and legally wrong, or if it's just ugly but legal, moral and ethically fine) then a minor misdemeanor is a small inconvenience. We all know that.
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Any act of trespassing should be prosecuted as such. If the trespasser did additional damage (left the gate open, etc), there's additional items to prosecute. If the found some smoking gun of horrible animal cruelty, etc., then there's no reason that the documentation couldn't be used to initiate a thorough investigation by the appropriate agency.
Couple that investigation with public disclosure laws that allow the public review of the investigation practices of the agency and it should work itself out. Of course, it doesn't give the Wildlife Defense Fund or similar groups the "red meat" to get donations flowing in...
I wonder how big a deal this trespass thing is anyway. At least in the west, most public lands that are surrounded by private lands have easements into them.
(edited for a wrong word)
Couple that investigation with public disclosure laws that allow the public review of the investigation practices of the agency and it should work itself out. Of course, it doesn't give the Wildlife Defense Fund or similar groups the "red meat" to get donations flowing in...
I wonder how big a deal this trespass thing is anyway. At least in the west, most public lands that are surrounded by private lands have easements into them.
(edited for a wrong word)
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I have a funny idea, Stop breaking the law and that includes bribing the local law enforcement and the state legislature.
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There was a beautiful independent movie where some college guys bought some mustangs, tamed and trained them, then rode from the border of Mexico to the border of Canada. Stunning visuals.
They ran into this problem several times. They COULD have gotten through on public lands, but that would have required levitation. . . LOL and several times had to backtrack a LONG way around. . .
It happens. I've seen it both in the PNW (where I was raised - on the Olympic Peninsula and in the Cascades) and in Montana (where I worked for a while) - it's absolutely not the ordered grid that we're used to in the urban cities (unless you're in Bellingham and then. . .well, what's a straight line there??? LOL)
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Scott Adams is going to be mad at me, but when I see a picture of a cow, I do think of steak, and I do get hungry.
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Agreed. One has to open this up to all possible interpretations. I certainly don't want someone roaming my property with a camera in the name of 'Free Speech'. Kinda takes the fun out of skinny dipping in the hot tub (no, it's not beside the house). But then again, the paparazzi have been doing this for years. The issue is that this particular law is too tailored to the meat industry in order to tame any negative light. It was only a matter of time before every activist started taking shots at the law. They should have just created an upcharge to trespassing while using a recording device and made it a felony with mandatory jail time and a huge fine. Require signs be posted every so many feet to people can't say they didn't see it as a balance of rights versus responsibility. If it is still that important for your message to be heard that you will go bankrupt and spend a significant amount of time in jail, then I think everyone should hear your message. Just don't expect sympathy for breaking the law. The end does not justify the means.
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OK...star down voting me.
First, I agree that this ag-gag law is terrible and should be thrown out. Most are. I can't speak to every one because I don't know the specifics. But I believe this first reared it's head in 1990 in regards to the use of the plant growth regulator Alar.
It ended up being pulled from the market (as it should have been) but not before a crap-ton of apple orchardists lost pretty much everything.
Look, the chemical never should have been approved, but it was. Orchardists used it based on what they were told by their usual channels. Why would they question it?
So when 60 minutes ran an 'expose" on the use of Alar on most apples produced in the US, most consumers stopped buying apples. And orchards went under.
And the folks the ag community blamed was 60 Minutes. You saw the first beginnings of ag-gag laws after that.
So yes, the farm community maybe should have blamed Uniroyal...and state extension services which indicated the chemical was safe. But those parties pretty much skated clear and it was the orchardists that were left holding the bag. And back in the 70's, that was a lot of family-owned orchards. There was is still is a lot of bitterness.
Again, not defending ag-gag, but real lives can be impacted in a hugely negative fashion. And I'm not saying ag doesn't need to change, often in substantial ways.
But or the most part, rural ag concerns are NOT trying to cause harm to the environment, they are not trying to pump Americans full of harmful chemicals. Their industry is changing and change can be hard and expensive.
Why did I write all this down? Because I grew up in a rural ag community, I've seen the pain that has been given to the American farmer. and a few of the comments here just rubbed me the wrong way. I think we can all give a little more respect to the people that put food on our tables.
That said, public lands are PUBLIC lands and I oppose any attempt to restrict that.
First, I agree that this ag-gag law is terrible and should be thrown out. Most are. I can't speak to every one because I don't know the specifics. But I believe this first reared it's head in 1990 in regards to the use of the plant growth regulator Alar.
It ended up being pulled from the market (as it should have been) but not before a crap-ton of apple orchardists lost pretty much everything.
Look, the chemical never should have been approved, but it was. Orchardists used it based on what they were told by their usual channels. Why would they question it?
So when 60 minutes ran an 'expose" on the use of Alar on most apples produced in the US, most consumers stopped buying apples. And orchards went under.
And the folks the ag community blamed was 60 Minutes. You saw the first beginnings of ag-gag laws after that.
So yes, the farm community maybe should have blamed Uniroyal...and state extension services which indicated the chemical was safe. But those parties pretty much skated clear and it was the orchardists that were left holding the bag. And back in the 70's, that was a lot of family-owned orchards. There was is still is a lot of bitterness.
Again, not defending ag-gag, but real lives can be impacted in a hugely negative fashion. And I'm not saying ag doesn't need to change, often in substantial ways.
But or the most part, rural ag concerns are NOT trying to cause harm to the environment, they are not trying to pump Americans full of harmful chemicals. Their industry is changing and change can be hard and expensive.
Why did I write all this down? Because I grew up in a rural ag community, I've seen the pain that has been given to the American farmer. and a few of the comments here just rubbed me the wrong way. I think we can all give a little more respect to the people that put food on our tables.
That said, public lands are PUBLIC lands and I oppose any attempt to restrict that.
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These. Evil. F**ks. Positions of power must really self-select for people with psychotic tendencies , because there's no other way they could look themselves in the mirror each day otherwise.
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You have the underfunded FDA to do that for you (FDA is funded with tax dollars). USDA might have some inspections too, I don't know.
FDA focuses on drug facility inspections (rather than food) because it's seen as higher risk for the public. They do both kinds of inspections. But there are more food facilities and fewer resources allocated, so it necessarily means that food facilities are inspected less often.
The focus of FDA inspections is food and drug safety. There's rules for manufacturers to follow to ensure safety called GMP; it's FDA's job to identify which rules if any are not being followed and require manufacturers to correct their operations accordingly.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
I don't know what your situation is, but there must be more to it. Why do people want to get to the public land next to your house so badly, and why do they think that your house is the best place to do it?
It's possible this is just a few people behaving badly, which is what trespassing laws are for, but from the sound of it you're lucky enough to be right up against a nice park or open space, and no one planned for access in your vicinity. I feel for you. It's not your problem, precisely. But at the same time, I don't for a moment believe that your or anyone else's property rights should trump access to such an area, even if no one's willing to make accommodations and — strictly speaking — access would require trespassing on private property. (I'm reminded of a local hill which is primarily open space, connecting to a great system of trails and fire roads, but where the only access road is lined by private property and local land owners have managed to close the one public parking lot, even getting the road expanded so there's no room to park on the side. It's truly a shame.)
Have you considered getting together with your neighbors and/or working with your local government to make sure people can get to whatever area your property is up against? Clearly they're getting there one way or another, so why not make it convenient, and provide an alternative to trampling your flower beds?
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