Right. And if they can force you to dispose of your trash in a way that allows them to collect involuntarily discarded DNA, what does that right amount to? It’s like they break into your house by threatening you at gunpoint, and when you object to the courts, they say that it’s not persuasive, “you could have just worn body armor then refused (and by the way body armor is illegal).”
I think it is a problem for everyone. Someone earlier mentioned the democratic sheriff going after republican council members. It’s easy to forget that the whole reason the constitution exists is because of this kind of shit being regularly abused by the police. It may seem like these aren’t needed, because our police are broadly honest people, but that’s exactly why they are needed: so that dishonest people don’t get into positions of authority and then abuse them and there’s nothing we can do about it.
And then they’ll just compel you to turn over your key or password. But what happens when there’s too much chlorine in landfills from people doing this, and it is interfering with the breakdown of biodegradables or something, and they outlaw that, too? I mean, surely the position cannot be, it’s cool, because things aren’t bad enough yet. That’s not a “right” I consider well-protected.
It seems to me you don’t have a problem with the collection of the evidence, it’s the information contained in the evidence you are concerned about. Would that be accurate?
Assumes facts not in evidence. The SCOTUS dissent aside, the prohibition on homeowner incinerators is not equivalent to forcing anyone to dispose of trash using the municipal service. Nor does it prohibit anyone from destroying DNA evidence (via bleaching) before disposing of trash.
Certainly it’s less convenient and more costly to hire a secure disposal company, or bleach all your garbage, but that’s only in comparison to the extraordinary convenience provided by municipal garbage pickup.
Not really. I don’t think the cops’ hands should be tied just because you want to throw out your used needles or blood rags from a murder without fear. But I also don’t want to be included in some database “just in case” and have DNA collected at addresses added there, to ease law enforcement’s burden. (Obviously a hypothetical.) So I have a problem with a set of laws which, taken together, prohibit a person from exercising their right to hide their perfectly unincriminating DNA from the FBI because it is none of the FBI’s business whether I have a genetic disorder or long-lost cousin in a federal penitentiary.
Personally, I’m not going to buy an incinerator, because personally, I don’t think the cops are jackbooted thugs. But I don’t want “good guys are good” to be what stands between me an a police state.
Martin, that hypothetical analogy I gave in my last response to you was utterly ridiculous and not worthy of your attention. If you happen to see this first, please god ignore it. I will try to come up with one more appropriate in the meantime.
Cheesesteak, it does not yet prohibit people treating their trash with bleach. But for this to be substantive to me, I’d like to know that they actually cannot pass a local regulation stopping me from treating all my trash with bleach. This seems well within their right and I can probably come up with two or three reasons they might even want to, if things head that direction. The same goes with dumping grease: hey, we sort the trash and that makes it hard. Who am I to say that cities should be prohibited from sorting and recycling?
Once they get to the point where they prohibit you from giving your personal property to another person (i.e. giving your trash to a secure disposal agency) they’ve opened up a humongous can of worms. My father used to take our trash, put it in the trunk of the car, and drive away with it, to dispose of it in his office dumpster*. Can a town pass a regulation making that illegal?
Even the bleach thing is hard to justify. We use bleach to sanitize water for drinking and cleaning cutting boards, it’s not a hideous pollutant in modest quantities, and it breaks down into rather safe chemicals.
No town is going to open up the personal property can of worms that these types of laws would represent, just to do an end around with the 1 guy in town who bleaches his garbage.
*We lived in a town with no municipal garbage, and it was his shop, so why not use the dumpster he’s paying for?
Today, when police aren’t abusing the blank check they’ve been handed. But if we assume that police won’t abuse their blank checks, there’s no need for any recognition of our rights. It is therefore no comfort to me today that it’s too expensive to impose the police state by creating a DNA/Address database. It’s no comfort that this hasn’t been abused yet, because now that the check’s been signed and the dollar field is blank, we won’t know until the abuse is real bad.
While that’s a fair point, the root of the problem here is that you’re leaving the trash for the garbage man to take away. Once he takes possession, he can freely give that trash bag to the policemen waiting next to his truck. You can have all the rights in the world while the trash is in your garbage can, but those rights vanish the instant you grant possession of it to someone else.
The other aspect of this is that, in an municipal garbage situation, you are leaving the trash for the town to take away. You have given them ownership of your trash. Do you have the right to demand that a particular employee take your trash, or can any town employee take the trash, with approval of appropriate town management? If the town decides to let a police officer take your trash away, do you have a right to complain? If the town decides to analyze your trash prior to final disposal, do you have a right to complain? It’s their trash.
So, even with the most generous property rights, your choices are to sanitize it yourself before disposal, or giving it someone trustworthy to sanitize and dispose of it for you.
More than one criminal has been brought down by an SO/roommate who discovered incriminating evidence linking their housemate to a crime, and brought it to the police’s attention. Not to mention cases where a roommate gives permission for cops enter a suspect’s home and conduct a search. In both of these cases, your DNA could be gathered and submitted for comparison without your permission. So obtaining your permission to gather your DNA is apparently not a prerequisite.
I have not once objected to the idea that trash is actually trash. I do have an expectation that trash gets smashed in the compactor and mixed with other trash at the dump. We all know what kind of stuff gets thrown away under that expectation because people engaging in things like identity theft rely on it. I think it is pretty crazy to then turn around and say that identity thieves shouldn’t be frowned upon for taking items from the trash because it is trash. This doesn’t reveal we have awesome property rights over our own garbage but it does reveal that we do have an expectation that our trash won’t be gone over with a fine tooth comb for identifying or otherwise incriminating information.
But, suppose I am just a single radical with such an interpretation. I look around tomorrow and suddenly realize everyone is using see-through garbage bags and writing their name and address on them. I have this single unreasonable interpretation of trash. Fine! I’ll just go burn it. Ooops, can’t. I’ll just treat it with chemicals, until they ban that. I’ll just dump grease on it, until they ban that. And each ban I would say is within their rights and serves the public interest and I wouldn’t resist it. But that is inconsistent with the right to refuse to give a DNA sample. An inconsistency doesn’t say what the problem is; it doesn’t say one aspect or the other must be mistaken; it only says that, together, there’s a problem. And that’s what I’m saying is the case: it’s a problem.
I’ve now learned that the dissenting justices saw it that way, too, which is just cold comfort.
I hope this power isn’t abused, but I don’t know how we’d ever know it was.
If a dude drives by and steals my lawnmower from my yard, he has committed theft. If a dude picks up the same lawnmower that is sitting with the trash on garbage night, he has not committed theft. Because in the latter case, I have clearly abandoned the lawn mower, and can longer assert my right of ownership over it.
No it’s not. You can still refuse to give a blood or saliva sample without a warrant. There just happens to be more than one way to acquire DNA. And DNA tests can be used to exclude suspects as easily as they can be used to pinpoint them.
The trouble is that you’re a bit stuck. If you want to get rid of your trash, unless you manage your own landfill (or live somewhere you can run a personal incinerator), you’re going to need to turn over responsibility for your trash to a third party. Once you give the trash to them, it’s their property. They are responsible for properly disposing of it, and they now have the right to turn it over to the police for an investigation. There is no way around that. Even if I offered you 100% protection of your trash cans from police interference, that protection goes away the instant your bag hits the garbage truck.
What you want is the convenience of giving your garbage to a third party to deal with, without giving up your property rights. While that third party can agree to secure your privacy, there is no reason to obligate them to do so.
That’s not totally true. There are some secure data destruction companies out there. If someone signs a contract with you to maintain the security of your trash until it has been incinerated, you would presumably have legal recourse if they then handed it over to the police absent a warrant. Now, the companies that I know of only handle paper disposal, but who knows what the spirit of entrepreneurship could fire up?
Show me a company whose use agreement doesn’t basically say, “We buckle like a belt and fold like a sheet under the slightest tiny little bit of any law enforcement pressure at all.”
Here’s the thing, it’s not an open game, and a locksmith/lock company has no reason whatsoever to turn over their master keys to the police, and many many reasons not to. They are hired specifically for security reasons, and likely have contractual obligations to keep their keys secure unless the police provide a warrant. If the police can get a warrant, they can open your house anyway.
Garbage haulers have nothing resembling a contractual obligation to secure your trash, you have likely never asked for it, and they likely wouldn’t agree to it if you did ask.
As for companies buckling under for law enforcement, let’s start and end that debate with your lawyer. Any lawyer who will buckle under and turn in his client over law enforcement pressure (sans warrant) is not going to remain in the business. There is no more reason for a secure garbage hauler to let cops root through their garbage truck for evidence against their client.
Do we need joke tags or something? I thought smilies and colloquialisms were usually sufficient.
I know something between “contract” and “wild wild west of trash” was expected because society was a little appalled by the rise of identity theft from documents obtained through places like trash.
How did we go from police legally collecting DNA to criminals gathering personal information?
When it comes to the police, you lose because you’re giving your garbage to the garbage company, and they have no contractual reason to say “no” to the police, and a good reason to say “yes”. Namely, saying yes will make the police go away, and saying no will make them stick around arguing with you, when you still have 10 tons of garbage to pick up.
When it comes to criminals, you lose because you’re leaving your personal information in an open trash can on the side of the road. I don’t care what kind of laws we pass to protect your precious garbage, these guys are already planning to commit fraud, they’re going to balk at “garbage interference”?
You only have two choices to secure your garbage. You can securitize it in your own home, shred and bleach and whatever, before leaving it curbside. You can hire a secure disposal company to take your trash from your locked holding area, and securely dispose of it, maintaining your security via a contractual arrangement.
I believe the activity is called “picking identifying information out of the trash.”
Can we pretend for a moment that I have, at four separate times, specifically said that the law regarding trash is not a problem? I think it’s a strange interpretation of human behaviors, I think there’s evidence that they decided it wrongly, but I did not start the thread to dispute it and I have tried several times to re-emphasize that point. Since we seem totally unable to keep it in mind, let’s just diverge totally. Do you think there is ever a possibility where two laws, each reasonable on their own, could constitute a constitutional violation? Can you come up with any examples, even hypothetical, and propose some kind of solution? You don’t agree that this constitutes one—fine, I yield. I yield. The county can compel me to throw things away, the state can then pick through it for use against me, and there’s nothing I can do about it until the market steps up. This is not an example of a set of laws which taken together should be unconstitutional, in spite of current rulings. And you are under no compulsion to respond with your own hypothetical situation just to keep my thread going. But if you can think of one, I’d love to hear it. This seemed to me like a good example.
If your trash is shared, it wouldn’t be a problem. No one would be able to tell which DNA was yours and which was your neighbors’. You also wouldn’t have control over it, anyway. You can also take your trash to the dump yourself, by the way.
I bet if you explained it to Thomas Jefferson, he’s probably say, “Oh shit” about twenty times.
But what happens when there’s too much chlorine in landfills from people doing this, and it is interfering with the breakdown of biodegradables or something, and they outlaw that, too? I mean, surely the position cannot be, it’s cool, because things aren’t bad enough yet. That’s not a “right” I consider well-protected.