Unmarked no-fly zones at unannounced times and locations are a remarkable innovation. Hopefully they will tell you when and where you shouldn't have been when they charge you for it, but that may be classified.
Ambiguous laws (which in this case are by definition impossible to comply with) which are capriciously enforced are a hallmark of authoritarian and fascist regimes. Sadly ironic, the US government used to highlight this fact:
Of note, the article seems to mention 3 things:
1) Vague laws
2) Arbitrary Enforcement
3) Lack of due process
All three seem to be important facts for an Authoritarian Regieme
I point this out, because I believe the US has long had vague laws, and our Due Process helps kick out arbitrary enforcement. I also believe that our Checks and Balance system (part of Due Process) is currently broken
There was a recent high profile of a case where a woman in Tennessee was accused of a crime in North Dakota. She spent months in jail, where she lost her car, home, and her dog. She was not even in the right state, and her life was destroyed.
I'm at the point where I think that these things are just getting called racist as an easily defeated strawman.
"See look, our terrible law that gives the government arbitrary power to levy ruinous fines treats all races equally, therefore it is not racist, therefore it is fine."
It might actually be racist sometimes but that's beside the point. The whole premise of much of this crap is flawed.
If laws are ambiguous, governments run the risk folks will conclude they'll get in trouble no matter how diligently they try to suss out the spirit of said laws.
When combined with a comical inability to secure government systems, it's honestly super cute that any federal agency thinks engaging in such dark patterns is in any way, shape, or form going to achieve their goals.
> If laws are ambiguous, governments run the risk folks will conclude they'll get in trouble no matter how diligently they try to suss out the spirit of said laws
Well, yeah, but that's the goal. People will correctly conclude that their ability to act unmolested is entirely contingent upon remaining in the good graces of local and remote authority figures. This produces extreme chilling on dissent or disagreement and promotes deals, bribes, and bootlicking. The law is transformed into a transparent legitimization mechanism for what the powerful wanted to do anyway, applied and ignored according to the real power structure adjacent to the legal bureaucracy. This is the default state of human civilization when the rule of law is not proactively defended.
But to "chill dissent", you must be capable of tracking it down before it hangs you from a gas station. I don't think you're fully grasping how sudden and forceful change could come if just small number of folks decided to stop giving a fuck about the spirit of the law and do whatever they feel they can get away with.
In my experience, folks from a legal/court context who think they can get cute playing the "you can't prove I broke the rules" game will literally void their bowels in fear when the same is done to them by just one skilled hacker, let alone a group of them all focused on a singular task.
Heck if they do tell you, ICE swaps plates and tries to hide in various ways.
The evidence could be just some regular looking vehicle you can't find anything about and it's just "trust me bro those were feds" and you're out of luck.
Against all that it seems miserly to complain about the costs of destroyed, seized, lost drones, equipment, gates, doors et al that will never be reimbursed.
It's not miserly, rather it's recognizing the exact line the government steps over when causing harm and then refusing to compensate its victims. This is the longstanding perverse incentive that has led to this specific development, the murders of Pretti/Good/Taylor (et al), "can't beat the ride", forced plea bargaining, and so on. The very idea of sovereign immunity for executive/administrative actions needs to be wholly repudiated.
Before you know it, they'll be detaining people without legal representation, shipping them to overseas black sites, and murdering citizens in the street. Oh, wait that's been the entirety of this treasonous administration.
> Oh, wait that's been the entirety of this treasonous administration.
That's been the case for at least 25 years. Still bad, but not new or unique to Trump. I'm too young to have a good idea of what the pre-Patriot Act American military/intelligence/secret police was like, but the historical stuff that comes to light from time to time doesn't lend much confidence that they were all that much better - they just did it illegally and ashamedly whereas now it's quasi-legal and fully acceptable.
No, he's right; there's a continuous line of accepting worse and worse that runs through Guantanamo Bay. After all, if you can detain one person extra-legally in a special prison constructed to be immune from human rights, why not a million?
I'd prefer you join us in condemning it rather than tacitly helping to normalize it. Describing it as some inevitable trend diminishes the focus on those responsible for the latest escalations.
Where did you get the impression I don't condemn it? Acknowledging that it exists and getting worse isn't admitting defeat, unless you're unable to hold ideals with less-than-optimistic prospects. The inevitability of trends is a trick of the mind, not the person pointing out that trends exists. Pretending as if this is something Trump started and that will end with him is much more dangerous, IMO. That ignores the bipartisan consensus among political elites that the common people are to be herded and managed and that liberty and human rights are out-of-date. The problem didn't start with Trump, and it won't end with him if you approach it as a Trump problem.
Well you didn't condemn it in your comment. I do understand that you were making a normative rather than a positive statement, yes. But I see the same exact kind of normative description from people who then go on to normalize or support Trumpism.
> Pretending as if this is something Trump started and that will end with him is much more dangerous ... The problem didn't start with Trump, and it won't end with him if you approach it as a Trump problem.
I completely agree with this.
> That ignores the bipartisan consensus among political elites that the common people are to be herded and managed and that liberty and human rights are out-of-date
While I agree with this as well, I often see similar things from Trump supporters who then use it as license to support accelerationism / nihilism / oppression of others they enjoy / etc. That's what I have a problem with - this shameless tyrant has been channeling widespread frustration with many longstanding problems unacknowledged by the political establishment ("a breath of fresh air!"), but it's only a marketing trick and those exact problematic dynamics are being cranked up to 11. He's certainly honed in on many varied things that are rotting in our society, but rather than doing constructive things to address any of them he's just accelerating the rot while setting himself up as a speedbump to line his own pockets.
For reference here I'm a libertarian who was both-sidesing up until 2020 or so. But a critical assumption of both-sidesism is that both parties are similarly bad in magnitude, just with different focuses. And Trumpism is a marked escalation in the blatantly shameless anti-liberty stance of the government.
[I'm too young to have a good idea of what the pre-Patriot Act American military/intelligence/secret police was like,]
pre patriot bad things happened
people were not even allowed to know the charges against them, not allowed discovery of evidence, compelled to allocute under duress, and court proceedings in total darkness, as in knowledge of the place, procedures, and persons involved could not be allowed.
..and then there was the really bad stuff, when the patriot act became a thing. when the text of law could not even be divulged, when people where interrogated by dog, locked in a cage and fed "leaks" of total defeat, and humiliation and death.
Congratulations you found the key to fascism: Create vague laws that could apply to anyone, then you can pick the people who broke it. Of course you try to only pick your enemies.
Only: the person in charge of that decision is the meanest, most stupid idiot you have ever met and they envy you for your wife and want to live in your house once you have been dispossessed.
The brother of my grandfather was in jail in Germany during WWII because he offended the original Nazis. He said what roughly translates to: "Nazis are all just dumb plebs." And the thing is, he was right.
Couldn't it be used to identify/track the ICE vehicles? Observe where drones suddenly become enclosed in a no-fly zone (do I understand correctly that operators get notification that they should land immediately)?
Are you suggesting that the system is efficient enough, and the users of it are competent enough, that a live moving no-fly zone would be placed somewhere that a drone in the immediate vicinity would be informed and be disabled?
I have my doubts. I would guess one "popping up" would at least be delayed such that it's pretty pointless by the time the drones are notified. Annoying indeed, useful (even to the ne'er-do-wells trying to enforce this crazy stuff) not so much.
DJI has (or, at least, had, a few years ago) a no-fly system that was updated via the Internet. Maybe it's not live, but then what would be the point of these no-fly zones? Just so ICE agents can shoot your drone down with impunity? If they didn't need license to execute people in the streets, I don't see why they'd need license to shoot down a drone.
> the order extended no-fly zones to ground vehicles belonging to the Department of Homeland Security. Even while the vehicles were in motion. Even if they were unmarked. And even if their routes had not been announced.
I want to know the genius who wrote this, and the mastermind who approved it.
Not really. The FAA revised the rule, but that was their choice, not the result of a ruling or even the reasoned application of a general principle.
The very broad power of administrative rulemaking held by that agency is unchanged -- and the power of agencies generally, to make law without legislating, without accountability to the electorate, actually has nothing to do with this administration, does it? It actually has nothing to do with any of them. It's something the legislature has allowed to grow and grow over successive administrations, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.
I am not sure what is a better alternative. Laws can set the broad guidelines, but the people in those administrative roles have to make explicit decisions when gray areas inevitably arise. The legislature is free to codify the exact rules it wants when they disagree with the current setup.
They are free to do it but don't. That's exactly the problem. They also don't respond to overreach in rulemaking by revising the grants they have made, so it has been a cumulative process.
Interesting points, glad to have started this conversation.
Re this being the FAA's choice, I was reacting to this line in the reporting: "On April 10, Levine and his lawyers pressed ahead by filing an emergency motion [... which... ] may have expedited the government’s next move [to replace] the sweeping flight restrictions with a “national security advisory” [and dropping] all mentions of flight restrictions and criminal charges." Maybe Ars is being too rosy-viewed about the causality there, idk. I have no partic feeling one way or the other though I do want to take whatever comfort I can in the notion that the "system of checks and balances" is working. I'd rather go to bed thinking it is, than tell myself cynically that this was just another whim of an agency, with no real principled attitude.
I believe that the Trump administration in particular - not Republicans as opposed to Democrats - has abused agency independence in a manner unprecedented in recent American politics. I think agencies SHOULD act autonomously to determine specifics just like this one - what vehicles/devices, with what capabilities, can fly where and in what manner, and that we SHOULD value "expert advice" in such situations instead of using that phrase as invective. I think the American people should celebrate that we grant such freedoms because it lets us all benefit from expertise - but they should also understand that there is a price to pay in vigilance, of having to challenge the legality of agency actions if the particular implementation of regulations infringes on constitutional rights. But it's not just litigation that will prevent abuse - the first line of defense against it should be the expectation that administrations will consider themselves beholden to certain social norms of cautious use of power. Do you believe that there is no daylight between this administration and previous ones in terms of how they view what norms they ought to consider themselves bound by? That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical one - if you don't believe that, I am curious to know more.
I don't think legislatures can possibly identify a priori all the ways in which rights could possibly be infringed and make their grants so granular that agencies can't possibly find abusive interpretations. Those can only be determined in specific, real, cases, when fallible individuals attempt to meet the legislated objectives by taking concrete action. I don't understand this idea that federal agencies have become "unaccountable" merely because they issue intepretations every day as and when they encounter real-world situations. The Chevron doctrine seemed a perfectly fine compromise to me - how this court thinks the legislative body can magically divine all the future possibilities and encode them into the acts that govern the agencies is just beyond me.
Unmarked no-fly zones at unannounced times and locations are a remarkable innovation. Hopefully they will tell you when and where you shouldn't have been when they charge you for it, but that may be classified.
Ambiguous laws (which in this case are by definition impossible to comply with) which are capriciously enforced are a hallmark of authoritarian and fascist regimes. Sadly ironic, the US government used to highlight this fact:
"Authoritarian regimes’ unclear laws make anyone a suspect" - https://ge.usembassy.gov/authoritarian-regimes-unclear-laws-...
And everyone’s a full-time suspect now in the US.
“For my friends everything, for my enemies the law.” ― Oscar R. Benavides, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides
Of note, the article seems to mention 3 things: 1) Vague laws 2) Arbitrary Enforcement 3) Lack of due process
All three seem to be important facts for an Authoritarian Regieme
I point this out, because I believe the US has long had vague laws, and our Due Process helps kick out arbitrary enforcement. I also believe that our Checks and Balance system (part of Due Process) is currently broken
Given the astronomically high legal cost to individuals, the sheer presence of arbitrary enforcement can already cause a lot of fear and damage.
There was a recent high profile of a case where a woman in Tennessee was accused of a crime in North Dakota. She spent months in jail, where she lost her car, home, and her dog. She was not even in the right state, and her life was destroyed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47563384
Vague laws were/are a hallmark of racist American law enforcement. It's what the US has always done.
I'm at the point where I think that these things are just getting called racist as an easily defeated strawman.
"See look, our terrible law that gives the government arbitrary power to levy ruinous fines treats all races equally, therefore it is not racist, therefore it is fine."
It might actually be racist sometimes but that's beside the point. The whole premise of much of this crap is flawed.
>Of note, the article seems to mention 3 things: 1) Vague laws 2) Arbitrary Enforcement 3) Lack of due process
<opens up zoning code>
AreWeTheBaddies.jpeg
Reminds me of this:
"They devise laws that are broad and vague, but then they apply them like a scapel against those that they deem a threat" - William Dobson
If laws are ambiguous, governments run the risk folks will conclude they'll get in trouble no matter how diligently they try to suss out the spirit of said laws.
When combined with a comical inability to secure government systems, it's honestly super cute that any federal agency thinks engaging in such dark patterns is in any way, shape, or form going to achieve their goals.
If the goal is chilling dissent, then it sounds like it would be working perfectly.
Your point only holds if the government is trying to act fairly on behalf of the people and actively uphold justice.
> If laws are ambiguous, governments run the risk folks will conclude they'll get in trouble no matter how diligently they try to suss out the spirit of said laws
Well, yeah, but that's the goal. People will correctly conclude that their ability to act unmolested is entirely contingent upon remaining in the good graces of local and remote authority figures. This produces extreme chilling on dissent or disagreement and promotes deals, bribes, and bootlicking. The law is transformed into a transparent legitimization mechanism for what the powerful wanted to do anyway, applied and ignored according to the real power structure adjacent to the legal bureaucracy. This is the default state of human civilization when the rule of law is not proactively defended.
But to "chill dissent", you must be capable of tracking it down before it hangs you from a gas station. I don't think you're fully grasping how sudden and forceful change could come if just small number of folks decided to stop giving a fuck about the spirit of the law and do whatever they feel they can get away with.
In my experience, folks from a legal/court context who think they can get cute playing the "you can't prove I broke the rules" game will literally void their bowels in fear when the same is done to them by just one skilled hacker, let alone a group of them all focused on a singular task.
being specific is the essence of lawmaking and the whole difference between having a Congress and having a mom
~ P. J. O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores"
Heck if they do tell you, ICE swaps plates and tries to hide in various ways.
The evidence could be just some regular looking vehicle you can't find anything about and it's just "trust me bro those were feds" and you're out of luck.
For whatever it’s worth, I don’t think these rules would stand under the APA. Which means any criminal convictions would be thrown out.
Losing your licence and many fines are FAA administrative processes so they don’t care. No courts involved.
> Which means any criminal convictions would be thrown out.
and in the meantime people rot in jail but i guess no harm no foul :shrug:
Not to mention the monetary costs of defense
Against all that it seems miserly to complain about the costs of destroyed, seized, lost drones, equipment, gates, doors et al that will never be reimbursed.
It's not miserly, rather it's recognizing the exact line the government steps over when causing harm and then refusing to compensate its victims. This is the longstanding perverse incentive that has led to this specific development, the murders of Pretti/Good/Taylor (et al), "can't beat the ride", forced plea bargaining, and so on. The very idea of sovereign immunity for executive/administrative actions needs to be wholly repudiated.
> in the meantime people rot in jail but i guess no harm no foul
Nobody claimed no foul. Constraining a problem isn't the same as saying it's not one.
What exactly have you constrained it to?
Up next, secret interpretations of laws to do things with zero accountability or public overaight. Oh wait we already have that.
And have had that for a while.
Before you know it, they'll be detaining people without legal representation, shipping them to overseas black sites, and murdering citizens in the street. Oh, wait that's been the entirety of this treasonous administration.
> Oh, wait that's been the entirety of this treasonous administration.
That's been the case for at least 25 years. Still bad, but not new or unique to Trump. I'm too young to have a good idea of what the pre-Patriot Act American military/intelligence/secret police was like, but the historical stuff that comes to light from time to time doesn't lend much confidence that they were all that much better - they just did it illegally and ashamedly whereas now it's quasi-legal and fully acceptable.
"The authoritarianism is getting worse and more accepted" is not a great response here.
No, he's right; there's a continuous line of accepting worse and worse that runs through Guantanamo Bay. After all, if you can detain one person extra-legally in a special prison constructed to be immune from human rights, why not a million?
It's the truth. Would you prefer I lie and tell you everything will be okay after Trump?
I'd prefer you join us in condemning it rather than tacitly helping to normalize it. Describing it as some inevitable trend diminishes the focus on those responsible for the latest escalations.
Where did you get the impression I don't condemn it? Acknowledging that it exists and getting worse isn't admitting defeat, unless you're unable to hold ideals with less-than-optimistic prospects. The inevitability of trends is a trick of the mind, not the person pointing out that trends exists. Pretending as if this is something Trump started and that will end with him is much more dangerous, IMO. That ignores the bipartisan consensus among political elites that the common people are to be herded and managed and that liberty and human rights are out-of-date. The problem didn't start with Trump, and it won't end with him if you approach it as a Trump problem.
Well you didn't condemn it in your comment. I do understand that you were making a normative rather than a positive statement, yes. But I see the same exact kind of normative description from people who then go on to normalize or support Trumpism.
> Pretending as if this is something Trump started and that will end with him is much more dangerous ... The problem didn't start with Trump, and it won't end with him if you approach it as a Trump problem.
I completely agree with this.
> That ignores the bipartisan consensus among political elites that the common people are to be herded and managed and that liberty and human rights are out-of-date
While I agree with this as well, I often see similar things from Trump supporters who then use it as license to support accelerationism / nihilism / oppression of others they enjoy / etc. That's what I have a problem with - this shameless tyrant has been channeling widespread frustration with many longstanding problems unacknowledged by the political establishment ("a breath of fresh air!"), but it's only a marketing trick and those exact problematic dynamics are being cranked up to 11. He's certainly honed in on many varied things that are rotting in our society, but rather than doing constructive things to address any of them he's just accelerating the rot while setting himself up as a speedbump to line his own pockets.
For reference here I'm a libertarian who was both-sidesing up until 2020 or so. But a critical assumption of both-sidesism is that both parties are similarly bad in magnitude, just with different focuses. And Trumpism is a marked escalation in the blatantly shameless anti-liberty stance of the government.
[I'm too young to have a good idea of what the pre-Patriot Act American military/intelligence/secret police was like,]
pre patriot bad things happened people were not even allowed to know the charges against them, not allowed discovery of evidence, compelled to allocute under duress, and court proceedings in total darkness, as in knowledge of the place, procedures, and persons involved could not be allowed.
..and then there was the really bad stuff, when the patriot act became a thing. when the text of law could not even be divulged, when people where interrogated by dog, locked in a cage and fed "leaks" of total defeat, and humiliation and death.
Congratulations you found the key to fascism: Create vague laws that could apply to anyone, then you can pick the people who broke it. Of course you try to only pick your enemies.
Only: the person in charge of that decision is the meanest, most stupid idiot you have ever met and they envy you for your wife and want to live in your house once you have been dispossessed.
The brother of my grandfather was in jail in Germany during WWII because he offended the original Nazis. He said what roughly translates to: "Nazis are all just dumb plebs." And the thing is, he was right.
Couldn't it be used to identify/track the ICE vehicles? Observe where drones suddenly become enclosed in a no-fly zone (do I understand correctly that operators get notification that they should land immediately)?
The problem (which I've had happen) is that a no-fly zone suddenly popping up might prevent your drone from coming back to you.
Not that a government that just pops up no-fly zones would care about your drone, but just saying.
Are you suggesting that the system is efficient enough, and the users of it are competent enough, that a live moving no-fly zone would be placed somewhere that a drone in the immediate vicinity would be informed and be disabled?
I have my doubts. I would guess one "popping up" would at least be delayed such that it's pretty pointless by the time the drones are notified. Annoying indeed, useful (even to the ne'er-do-wells trying to enforce this crazy stuff) not so much.
DJI has (or, at least, had, a few years ago) a no-fly system that was updated via the Internet. Maybe it's not live, but then what would be the point of these no-fly zones? Just so ICE agents can shoot your drone down with impunity? If they didn't need license to execute people in the streets, I don't see why they'd need license to shoot down a drone.
> the order extended no-fly zones to ground vehicles belonging to the Department of Homeland Security. Even while the vehicles were in motion. Even if they were unmarked. And even if their routes had not been announced.
I want to know the genius who wrote this, and the mastermind who approved it.
Whoever it was knew exactly what they were doing, and it was intentional.
Or in other words: the cruelty is the point.
This is exactly how corrupt, authoritarian governments have always operated.
Do no-fly zones extend indefinitely upwards? If so, can you build a no-fly wall out of cars?
The federal government doesn't need a row of cars to make a no-fly wall.
As we learned in El Paso in February, if the federal government wants a no fly zone, it can just create one.
But if the no-fly zones are arbitrarily mobile, the drivers can create a no-fly wall without intervention from the federal government.
The article states 1,000 vertical feet. Obviously this is targeting small drones and not commercial aircraft or even general aviation.
Someone who doesn't get that we're supposed to have a representative government with enumerated powers in this country.
Or maybe they do get that, but find it incredibly inconvenient to their own aspirations.
Slowly clawing back liberties against this fascist administration.
Not really. The FAA revised the rule, but that was their choice, not the result of a ruling or even the reasoned application of a general principle.
The very broad power of administrative rulemaking held by that agency is unchanged -- and the power of agencies generally, to make law without legislating, without accountability to the electorate, actually has nothing to do with this administration, does it? It actually has nothing to do with any of them. It's something the legislature has allowed to grow and grow over successive administrations, whether Democrats or Republicans are in power.
I am not sure what is a better alternative. Laws can set the broad guidelines, but the people in those administrative roles have to make explicit decisions when gray areas inevitably arise. The legislature is free to codify the exact rules it wants when they disagree with the current setup.
They are free to do it but don't. That's exactly the problem. They also don't respond to overreach in rulemaking by revising the grants they have made, so it has been a cumulative process.
Interesting points, glad to have started this conversation.
Re this being the FAA's choice, I was reacting to this line in the reporting: "On April 10, Levine and his lawyers pressed ahead by filing an emergency motion [... which... ] may have expedited the government’s next move [to replace] the sweeping flight restrictions with a “national security advisory” [and dropping] all mentions of flight restrictions and criminal charges." Maybe Ars is being too rosy-viewed about the causality there, idk. I have no partic feeling one way or the other though I do want to take whatever comfort I can in the notion that the "system of checks and balances" is working. I'd rather go to bed thinking it is, than tell myself cynically that this was just another whim of an agency, with no real principled attitude.
I believe that the Trump administration in particular - not Republicans as opposed to Democrats - has abused agency independence in a manner unprecedented in recent American politics. I think agencies SHOULD act autonomously to determine specifics just like this one - what vehicles/devices, with what capabilities, can fly where and in what manner, and that we SHOULD value "expert advice" in such situations instead of using that phrase as invective. I think the American people should celebrate that we grant such freedoms because it lets us all benefit from expertise - but they should also understand that there is a price to pay in vigilance, of having to challenge the legality of agency actions if the particular implementation of regulations infringes on constitutional rights. But it's not just litigation that will prevent abuse - the first line of defense against it should be the expectation that administrations will consider themselves beholden to certain social norms of cautious use of power. Do you believe that there is no daylight between this administration and previous ones in terms of how they view what norms they ought to consider themselves bound by? That's a genuine question, not a rhetorical one - if you don't believe that, I am curious to know more.
I don't think legislatures can possibly identify a priori all the ways in which rights could possibly be infringed and make their grants so granular that agencies can't possibly find abusive interpretations. Those can only be determined in specific, real, cases, when fallible individuals attempt to meet the legislated objectives by taking concrete action. I don't understand this idea that federal agencies have become "unaccountable" merely because they issue intepretations every day as and when they encounter real-world situations. The Chevron doctrine seemed a perfectly fine compromise to me - how this court thinks the legislative body can magically divine all the future possibilities and encode them into the acts that govern the agencies is just beyond me.
Now they are allowed to shoot them down at will.