Comments on: Little girl missing

By: virgil xenophon

virgil xenophon — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:53:31 +0000

If I remember correctly there is a Supreme Court case that found that if one puts one’s garbage out on a public sidewalk or in a public alley-way one does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy as regards the contents of the garbage can. (This was a paparazzi case of rifling for scandal, I believe) I would think this case might bear tangentially on the issue insofar as expectations of privacy are concerned.

By: KM

KM — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:18:45 +0000

Sometimes, when debating large issues, it’s easy to lose site of the smaller details. I think the comments in this thread can be divided into two categories: those who are debating the large-scale social/constitutional issues; and, those who are concerned with the specific hows and whys of the case at hand. We are united in our outrage that a child’s life was needlessly lost, presumably under tortured circumstances.
With that in mind, Brooke, we mourn the loss of your light from the world. As a society, we failed you.
As for why librarians should cheer their “victory” when a child’s death lies at the center of it? Why anyone should gloat over scoring a “point” in an ideological victory when human suffering is/has been involved or invoked…that, I’m afraid, is the basis for a much longer discussion: one that involves a much larger population than just librarians.

By: Grumpy

Grumpy — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:47:45 +0000

Controversial, you bet. We can all rip each other’s hearts out, but how does that solve the problem? We can look at this as a “best lessons learned process”. MajHarvey made an accurate statement about the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “It guarantees people the right to be ’secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects.’” Now, would somebody please define the word, “effects” in the time and the culture, of when it was written? Let’s do the same thing with the same word, only for today. I would submit the following, as our culture changed as did our technology. Now, in my lifetime, I’ve seen the wired telephone be assumed as in every home. As time progressed, our laws caught up with our technology. When law-enforcement wanted to tap a phone, they had to show probable cause to get a search warrant. As times progressed, we went to wireless phones, but there was a problem. They found that some of the older police radio scanners owned by members of the general public could hear the calls. The public was told to tune out those frequencies by the F.C.C.. The reason was this, no matter where they were calling from or to, they had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

In situations like this, any evidence would have been thrown out of court. I don’t like it, but I believe the best thing would have been to get a search warrant. States should have a rotating on-call judge for the issuance of search warrants telephonically.

By: Bou

Bou — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:12:51 +0000

There appears to be enough blame to go all around on this one. Whether she was right or wrong, I think I’m most appalled by the fact the Librarians are cheering her on, making this an us vs. them/Authority… all after the fact that a child did die. Whether she was right or wrong, there should be no cheering of any kind. A child is dead.

By: stormy03bravo

stormy03bravo — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:21:30 +0000

First, I have to agree with the KM as to why the uncle wasn’t immediately checked out…isn’t that part of why we keep track of sex offenders? Second, there seems to be some other parts of the story missing – did the police attempt to contact MySpace for assistance? It’s easy to sit back and do post-mortem on this, but if 5 state police detectives came to retrieve the computers (that probably 1 or 2 detectives could have retrieved, freeing up the other detectives to conduct the missing persons search), couldn’t one of these detectives have been assigned to obtain the search warrant as quickly as possible rather than driving to the library? Besides, in the age of telephonic warrants this shouldn’t have taken any time (especially considering that the state police were involved as opposed to the local department). It’d be interesting to see why the warrant took so long to obtain. As I mentioned, 5 detectives (not officers, but detectives) to retreive public access computers that need to be taken to the forensic analysts seems like a bigger time waste in a time sensitive situation than the time delay over the warrant.

By: b2

b2 — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:29:03 +0000

What a hero by today’s popular standards! Does she get the ACLU Medal of Honor?

Seriously, Vermont ain’t a safe place for kids..Recommend all parents with children move out. The dinks will die out and the gay marriages will produce ZPG. In a generation normal folks can repopulate…

BTW, I have another plan for Bagdad-on-the-Bay.