Kamakazie Sith wrote:ShadowDragon8685 wrote:
If I take a baseball bat to your car's windshield, I've harmed you and the harm can be measured in financial quantifications; the price of replacing that windshield with the exact same windshield, plus labor, and (if my attourney is slick) lost time from working and such.
But if I torment you to the point that your life becomes a living hell and you freak out the moment you hear word of me, it's a much grayer area. True, most places have harassment laws on the books, but such laws very poorly keep up with times. Wasn't it ruled that those shitstains who drove some teenager to suicide over some social networking site hadn't actually commited a crime (at the time they had commited it; obviously they quickly wrote new hamhanded legislation to cover it)?
The problem with your argument here is that harassment can be shown to have damaging psychological effects, and it's pretty obvious the damage caused to Megan Meier.
That wasn't the point of my argument. I was most definately claiming that harm
had been done, but it's not mathematically
quantifiable.
If you break someone's knees, the court can order that you will pay all related medical expenses for the person until they get better,
if they get better. You've measurably harmed them, you've damaged their flesh, their bones, and a doctor can tell you without question when that person is healed.
But in the case of psychological harm, the court cannot assess that you've damaged the object of your attack to the tune of three points of Wisdom, and order you to pay the cost of the Cleric to cast the
Restore Attribute spell to fix it. Real life doesn't work that way, torment can't be quantified.
Even if a court does order that the defendant pay therapy bills, chances are that an appelate court will reverse the ruling or revise it into a straight monetary pay-out, owing to the imprecise and unquantifiable nature of psychology and psychiatry. Even if not, eventually chances are that the defendant will succeed in getting an appelate court somewhere to order the plaintiff to undergo psychiatric testing in order to determine if the 'harm' is still present or if he can stop paying for the therapy - completly missing the point that having their once-victimizer successfully use the power of the courts to compell the plaintiff to undergo testing would be a second victimization.
The point is that I feel that inflicting significant psychological trauma, and more importantly, violations of privacy this gross,
should be criminal infractions carrying charges, a perp walk, and if convicted, a nice all-expenses paid stay in a correctional facility.
In this case, the harm isn't measured in terms of dollars and cents. From a purely objectivist view, no harm has been commited whatsoever, but that's not a very good viewpoint. Clearly, there has been harm done; I'm 24, been out of high school for six years, been completely out of school for two and a half, and the idea of this still gives me the unholy willies.
I find that interesting. It would upset me, but I wouldn't have the unholy willies. I mean if some of the pictures got out onto the internet then yeah there would be hell to pay. However, that isn't the case here. You seem to be venturing into punishment for what could have happened rather than what did happen, and that's shaking ground.
I'm willing to bet you're a mite older than me. I still remember the faces of the administrators at the school I went to, and frankly the thought that one of them could have seen captured images of me masturbating in bed is terrifying. Hell, even the thought of them catching me flailing about on an intangible imaginary guitar is highly embaressing, to say nothing of anything occuring in any state of undress. The thought that perhaps they would have had the resolution to capture the titles of some potentially embaressing books is unnerving, or to gain some insight - any insight - into my private life, my private views.
Think about it - if you have, say, a copy of
Mein Kampf, or
Das Capital, or
The Communist Manifesto, or a poster of Che Gueverra, or any number of things which would mark you as undesirable in this country - for a teenager, it could be something like a death metal band's poster, or a gay band's poster, a nude artwork or something - do
you want to publicize the fact that you own it? No, you wouldn't, and
nobody has the right to compel you to reveal that you own it, or to search your home for evidence you own it - except, apparently, if you are under the age of eighteen; at least, that's the message that the LMSD seems to be sending.
I'm sure that the students and families/friends of students who've found their personal privacy grossly invaded feel rather more strongly about the situation. They have been harmed, their basic right to privacy has been grossly violated by those with no authority to do so, with no probable cause to do so. I'd hate to imagine the kind of emotional trauma that could result even simply knowing this sort of thing had or could have had happened to you, even if you were doing something boring like reading a book whilst fully clothed.
If there is established science behind the "emotional" trauma then I'd be happy to accept it, but realizing that you may have been recorded doesn't seem like a traumatic event. I'd be on your side if say some material made its way to the internet, but right now that hasn't happened.
That's not the point. The point is that those pictures were
taken. It doesn't matter if it's kept locked in an archive room in hard copy or if it goes straight onto facebook;
essential privacies in a place where a person has a court-established expectation of privacy - their own homes - has been violated.
The 'science' of psychology is an inexact art, to say the least. For the longest time, homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Frankly, it freaks me out in sympathy, and I'm six years older than the oldest student likely to have been effected; try and imagine what it would be like, KS, if the chief gave you a present, or gave you an object vital to your duties which you were expected to keep in your bedroom and otherwise on or near your person - like say, your service pistol - and
had that device fitted with audio and visual bugs that he could activate at will.
Would
you want someone in a position of authority over you having such power of perception?
The prospect for personal shame and horror that could result if the photographs got into the wild would be tremendous. It could, potentially, by ruinous to someone's life - if, say, you're a boy who attends that school and you get caught by the unfeeling camera in the act of having sex with another boy, or even a girl, or hell, just masturbating, with or without sex aids. Ditto for girls - being outed as gay, simply having one's relationships revealed... It could open huge kettles of fish, could (in theory) be used to allocate charges of statuatory rape (does PA have a romeo and juliette law? What about romeo and romeo or juliette and juliette?), could be used to harass students with unpopular pollitical views...
Yes, and potentially the world could implode due to these events. However, wiser people have realized that charging people for things that could have happened due to their bad decisions is simply going too far. None of those things you listed have happened, and frankly are likely to happen in this situation. Therefore, the punishment staying civil in nature is probably the course of action that is most fair.
Please try not to use inflated hyperbole on me. There's no plausable way these events could cause the destruction of the planet Earth; however, it is
highly plausable that they could result in the absolute wrecking of several people's lives.
I
don't feel that mere civil proceedings are sufficient. I feel that a violation of privacy, of this magnitude and with the aggrevating factor of flagrant abuse of power and authority, should be punished as a criminal felony.
The mind boggles at the sheer amount of harm, emotional and potential, this could cause, and nobody is criminally responsible?!
I agree with the fact that nobody is being held criminally responsible in this situation. I think being held civilly liable is more than adequate, in this situation. Think if you were to apply your logic of potential harm to other crimes, mistakes, or poor decisions. You'd end up doing far more harm than good.
This wasn't a mistake, and it's far, far more than a simple failure of judgement. Whether through recklessness or maliciousness, an invasion of privacy of this magnitude cannot be compensated for at all. It's not simply a matter of potential harm - if you lose control of your vehicle in powder by misjudging the amount of power you could give the rear wheels going into a turn and do a 180 spin, the
potential harm is enormous, up to and including someone's death if you bludgeon them with a spinning 2/3rd ton SUV. However, if you wind up doing no harm whatsoever - come to a smooth stop without striking anything - you just go about your business.
That's not the case here. This goes far beyond a minor misjudgement. This took a willful act to do - it would be tatamount to accelerating to 60Mph before cutting one's wheel hard on a patch you know to be black ice in order to achieve a 'sick' spin-out. Even if you do no harm (highly unlikely,) I think you'd agree that any officer of the peace witnessing the event would be obliged to nail the person for reckless driving.
The magnitude of this offense is immense, and the heinousness of it goes
far beyond a moving violation. This was a flagrant violation of civil rights, undertaken with the purpose to do just that, for the reason of establishing even more draconian authority over the students of the LMSD. I think that
must be punished, and punished
criminally - at the very least, the adminstrators who had authority over the IT department and the IT pukes who set it up should be hauled out in handcuffs on whatever peeping tom laws they can remotely apply, and go from there.
That is reprehensible. Heads should be rolling, this kind of thing should defintely be a jail term offense.
In this case the affected families should be compensated, and the persons responsible should be punished or preferably told to resign.[/quote]
Compensation? What kind of money can compensate, say, a teenaged boy for knowing that somewhere, someone could have seen him sticking a dildo in his anus? What kind of money can compensate a teenaged girl for knowing that someone somewhere might have seen her vigorously muff-diving her BFF?
Nothing can. That kind of emotional infliction can't be assauged by any sum of money. It's going to haunt them the rest of their days. It's not illegal, it's not
wrong, but it's not something you want others to
know.
As for resignation, being told to resign or even dismissed is insufficient. The idea that those responsible for this might get off with nothing but a
disciplinary hearing or action is
sickening.
These people deserve a criminal case. They deserve to be hauled out and taken on a perp walk. The public
needs to see that those who would flagrently and willfully violate our privacy, especially those in a position of ostensible authority and power,
will be dealt with harshly and severely. The crime itself was heinous and deliberate, and I am firmly of the belief that criminal charges and treatment are justified.
And then worse, you get laws which limit te maximum amounts on jury-awarded punitive damages, you get appelate courts which bring down the amount assessed, and then you get courts which simply don't even bother to enforce the ruling. Hasn't Exxon basically said "fuck it" to the Exxon Valdez settlement and not paid jack?
Indeed. There are serious problems with that system. I'm no fan of the american civil system...it is broken in many ways.
Many, many ways.
I'd call any situation which allows the administrators of teaching establishments to get away from an horrific abuse of privacy and power like this without facing criminal charges to be one of those ways.
