
Rubbish (2002) - kyleblarson
http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-1616-rubbish.html-2
======
fortythirteen
There is a long standing constitutional interpretation that your garbage, once
put on the street, is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

~~~
koenigdavidmj
The state constitution and precedent based on it may provide additional
protections that the federal one does not. (It does in Washington, for
instance, as the city of Seattle learned when they tried to inspect people’s
garbage and fine them for not recycling or composting.) I’m not familiar with
the nature of the situation in Oregon.

~~~
goialoq
FTFA:

> The U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Constitution gives you no privacy
> rights over your garbage, but individual state constitutions can offer more
> stringent privacy rights. Warrantless trash searches by police are not legal
> in Vermont and New Jersey.

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romaniv
When someone says they don't mind surveillance and have "nothing to hide", ask
them for the password to their primary email. Most people simply don't think
through the practical implications of their information being sifted through.

~~~
goialoq
Indeed, this is exactly the topic of the OP article.

They mean _you_ have nothing to hide _form them_. They still insiste upon
their own privacy:

> "Things inside your house are to be guarded," [Police Chief Kroeker] told
> WW. "Those that are in the trash are open for trash men and pickers and--and
> police. And so it's not a matter of privacy anymore."

> Hours later, the chief issued a press release complaining that WW had gone
> through "my personal garbage at my home." KATU promptly took to the airwaves
> declaring, "Kroeker wants Willamette Week to stay out of his garbage."

> A few moments later, [the mayor's] office issued a prepared statement. "I
> consider Willamette Week's actions in this matter to be potentially illegal
> and absolutely unscrupulous and reprehensible," it read. "I will consider
> all my legal options in response to their actions."

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tritium
What will the freegans do if we outlaw trash picking? Not to mention, I've
found some awesome working computer parts (1000W ATX power units, with cool
looking internal cables, fuck yeah!) and completely reasonable, non-branded,
desktop chassis on the side of the road.

Surprising as it is that a blood test for drug use gleaned from one's bio-
waste is slightly rotten, maybe it's the vice laws that should be thrown some
shade. Fourth amendment, sure, but I think it's worth noting that it's still
the burden of the individual to render their discarded waste non-
incriminating.

What this means for genetic privacy, finger prints and other powerful personal
identifiers (the _what-you-are_ authentication factors), I simply don't have a
good answer for.

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vlod
I shred my screwed up tax returns and anything with SSN.

I'm generally not a tin-foil hat wearer, but is it prudent to shred register
receipts? Anything else?

~~~
mschuster91
> but is it prudent to shred register receipts?

I'd say so. First, it makes life more difficult for an attacker who does want
to recover sensitive documents (simply: there's a lot more noise from the
receipt shreds), and purchase patterns tell a lot about you - in 2012, for
example, Target got flak for finding out a girl was pregnant before the girl
herself did ([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all))... for example while you may decide to
take all your whiskey bottles to the recycler, when I see weekly purchases of
a dozen Jack Daniels bottles I can assume either you are a heavy drinker, or
your family likes to heavily drink. Both stuff I could use as extortion
leverage.

I prefer to drop the receipts in the store as I leave the property unless
there's something on the receipt on which I might want/need warranty worth
more than 50€ - it's not tied to me, the store and anyone present at the
property can see what I bought anyway and as I like to pay cash for most
things now I don't leave any data in big-data analysis companies which match
purchases with my DC account data...

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jlangenauer
I'm reminded of George Orwell's quote:

“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything
else is public relations.”

~~~
dragonwriter
Orwell is wrong, because most of public relations (and propaganda more
generally) is printing what _someone_ else does not want printed, too.

~~~
bazzargh
Orwell isn't wrong in this case... because the quote wasn't Orwell. Who
actually came up with it is lost to the mists of time
[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/20/news-
suppress/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/20/news-suppress/)

Orwell did state a similar notion, "If liberty means anything at all, it means
the right to tell people what they do not want to hear", in the preface to
Animal Farm.

~~~
goialoq
The liberty quote means something quite different, and quite controversial.
Contrast against "Freedom of speech does require anyone to listen"

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mcguire
Note: this was posted under the much-more-useful subtitle, "Portland's top
brass said it was OK to swipe your garbage--so we grabbed theirs".

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nsnick
Please put a 2002 tag on this.

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wand3r
Published December 23, 2002 Updated December 11, 2017

~~~
ReverseCold
Might have missed it while reading the article, but what was updated?

~~~
cdubzzz
I diff'd the text with a Wayback archive and it appears to be nothing more
than minor formatting and sentence structure changes. Nothing of substance.

~~~
virgilp
They updated the update date (see also: autometalogolex).

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yipopov
>We set it down next to the rest of our haul from District Attorney Mike
Schrunk's trash--the remains of Thanksgiving turkey, the mounting stack of his
granddaughter's diapers

If they really wanted to make his skin crawl they should have donated them to
"Pamperchu" and his friends.

~~~
krallja
Encyclopedia Dramatica informs me Pamperchu has only been around since 2008,
six years after this article was published.

