Police officers and school officials are trained to extract information from unwilling victims and students. Police in particular interrogate suspects a dozen times a day, and get fairly good at it. When you are the suspect, you probably have not been through the experience more than a few times, spread over many years. So they have a training advantage.
Also, at least in the US, police are free to lie to suspects without penalty, while suspects who lie to police are committing a crime. This level of legal idiocy requires suspects to be very careful, to avoid committing multiple crimes in front of the officer (as well as revealing possible past crimes). Cops can lie about what the laws and rules are, what the constitution says, what the cop saw, what other people told the cop, etc, etc, etc. If you as the suspect do not KNOW your rights before you ever saw the cop, you are very unlikely to succeed at resisting interrogation. Most people get their information on rights and police encounters from television shows, which are not only fictional, but which also tend to glorify cops and show them with more power than they have. Court decisions periodically change the rules for police encounters. A recent idiotic Supreme Court decision (Berghuis v. Thompkins) now requires you to speak up in order to effectively remain silent; a suspect who merely said nothing for three hours while being interrogated was found by the courts to have given up his right to remain silent. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_silence) On the other hand, another recent decision (Arizona v. Gant) restored suspects' constitutional right to avoid having their car searched anytime they are arrested near it for any reason. The fundamental strategy is to assert the few rights that you have and that you need to assert, then to shut up. Do not answer their questions. Say, "I do not consent to any search. I want to speak with my lawyer. Am I free to go? I want to remain silent." And then shut up. If you are tempted to run your mouth (and they *will* tempt you), say the same thing over again. If they ask you questions, and you absolutely must open your mouth, answer with a question, like "Am I free to go?". This is quite hard to do, which is why it takes training. If you do this, they will recognize that you've been trained. They will try ten or fifteen tricks on you, and eventually give up. If they have no actual reason to arrest you, they'll let you go. If they do arrest you, whether you're innocent or guilty, keep following the same drill. While in a cell, don't talk to the other prisoners about your crime, your day, your life, or anything else besides the weather and the sports scores. Not only are the cells monitored and recorded, but some of the "prisoners" are cops, and others are happy to betray you to the cops in return for more lenient treatment for themselves. Following this path will not only help you avoid arrest, but will give your lawyer powerful tools to prevent you from being convicted later in court. Various nonprofits and activist organizations do train people in how to survive police interrogation. FlexYourRights.org has produced two excellent DVD videos (Busted; and 10 Rules for Dealing with Police) which are also available on Youtube. They also blog about citizen/police encounters. The book "Beat the Heat" by Katya Komisaruk (http://openlibrary.org/works/OL6042047W/Beat_the_Heat) is an excellent guide to how to handle encounters with law enforcement, in a perfectbound comic-book format. An excellent video is "Don't Talk to Police", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc, by a law professor and a career policeman, giving dozens of examples of people who went to jail because they wouldn't shut up (in many cases despite their innocence - like Martha Stewart). AmericansForSafeAccess.org runs periodic "raid trainings" for people involved in the medical marijuana movement in the US. These trainings involve actual physical interrogation by a police-uniformed actor, and give you a chance to go back and do it again until you do it right. Unfortunately, one of the many problems with government-run schools is that they are unlikely to train students about what their actual rights are, nor about how to effectively assert them during an interrogation. FreedomBox could and probably should offer CC-licensed training materials, either as copies directly in the software installation, or as links to external sites. If we don't train our users to assert the rights that their peers and ancestors fought to gain and retain, there is little that our software can do to protect our users from coercive tactics on the part of police. If you voluntarily give the cops or the school the password to your FreedomBox, they'll have the same access to it that you do. You have to politely or silently decline to give them that information; you have the right to do so, no matter what they say or do. Virtually every warrant I have seen includes within the scope of the search "all electronic media, computers, answering machines, video and audio tapes", etc. Cops come to the door prepared to pick up entire computers and take them to a police station. They have tricky portable-power gadgets that let them pull the power cord partway out of the wall, clamp a device to it that provides power, and then pull the cord all the way out, keeping the computer powered-up so that it won't even notice that it's been unplugged. See http://www.wiebetech.com/products/HotPlug.php and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erq4TO_a3z8&feature=channel . A web search for "computer forensics" will turn up all sorts of specialized computer search and seizure devices that your tax dollars will be used to purchase and turn against you. Knowing your rights, and asserting them during the crunch, is the only way to protect yourself. John Gilmore Electronic Frontier Foundation _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss
