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Good morning, everybody. I was on with Jim Polito and we discussed Facebook's 180 on Censorship and Can police legally ask you to unlock your phone? Here we go with Jim.

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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] Craig Peterson: Yeah, I argued that it violated his fifth amendment rights, which is kind of did here. And the Supreme court sided with Hubble. Now let's move forward 20 years to today where we have smartphones and all of these laws about privacy. And of course, things like the fifth amendment are a lot older than our smartphone.

This almost felt like an Abbott and Costello routine this morning. There there's is no good answer. When it comes to the laws right now on whether I think to enforce you to open your cell phones. Anyhow, that was me, Craig Peterson on with Mr. Jim Pollito this morning, covering central and Western mass. Here we go.

Jim Polito: It is the Eve of Canada day. Canada day that that's like 4th of July in Canada, you know, Canada has copy everything we do joining us now, the [00:01:00] man formerly of Canada now of the United States, our good friend and tech talk guru. Craig Peterson. Good morning, Craig.

Craig Peterson: Hey, good morning, Jim.

Jim Polito: Craig, this is great to have you on a Canada day Eve, a very important day, very meaningful day for, Canadians like you.

Yeah, but it's also meaningful to have you have, you want a day when we've got so much stuff in the news that relates to your area of expertise. And that's why I want to dive right into this whole Facebook thing. Which is, as the president would say is YUGE.

Craig Peterson: Yeah,

Jim Polito: I want to get into that. And then I want to talk about the police and the law, the privacy laws regarding my smartphone and having to unlock it under orders of police.

But let's start with Facebook. Woof, Mark Zuckerberg, taking a hit financially. Huh.

Craig Peterson: This is interesting. I had mentioned this to people here, by the way, for those that aren't aware of it, Canada didn't even have any sort of a Constitution until 1967. 

[00:02:00] So they got a really nice socialist one up there. It's now illegal to offend someone in Canada.

Jim Polito: Laughing

Craig Peterson: Just in case you're wondering.

Jim Polito: I know, it's crazy. Ah, it is. And who as, as, as a justice Scalia would say, who decides, you know, his question always is who decides, so who decides what's offensive and what's not, that's what I want to know.

Exactly. And if someone tells you that you must call them the Royal Highness, the toilet throne, you must do that.

Craig Peterson: Or you will go to jail. But anyways, next, Peterson, by the way, Professor in Toronto is just, he's amazing. But anyway, back to this Facebook, I was talking with my wife, [00:03:00] not more than two weeks ago, about how I was shocked and impressed by what Mark Zuckerberg was doing. You see your head, everybody out.

It's out there. Right? Twitter was running around. Google was running around and they were all, Oh my gosh, the president's tweets here. We need somebody that hates something to quote fact check him. Again, a redefinition of a word, right. It's just so 1984, where fact-checking doesn't mean that they're checking the fact. Fact-checking means that they're checking to see whether or not it meets left-wing dogma and here we had Mark Zuckerberg there saying, "Hey, listen, I'm not going to do this." We need to have free speech. We need to have open forums. We need everyone to understand what's going on.

And then this happened. We had a bunch of left-wing companies. Now, now remember this. Okay. All of these major tech companies are [00:04:00] extremely left-wing and I'm talking about left-wing by the American standard.

In other words, they're very, very socialist in what they want to do and how they want to do it. Many of them are Marxists. You know, they're, they're hard over there. But, what we're seeing is all of a sudden, all of these companies decided that. You know, free speech is not a good thing. Very a very Marxist tendency.

You've talked about it before and the very fascist, which is the same thing. People don't understand. There are two sides of the same coin, but they had over a hundred different advertisers, including the North face, Ben and Jerry's and Verizon. Boycotting advertising on Facebook because Facebook would not censor people who had a speech that was maybe libertarian or conservative, or frankly, anything the President might say.

Jim Polito: Yeah. Right. You got to [00:05:00] censor him. Anything that comes out of his mouth. You've got a censor.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, exactly. So you look at the biggest advertisers in the world. You know, Unilever is one of the biggest ones and they spent eight-point $2 billion on marketing last year. And Unilever said, Hey, we're stopping advertising on Facebook until you start.

I'm not paraphrasing here. I'm just interpreting. We're going to stop advertising on Facebook. That eight-point $2 billion. None of us. Can I go to Facebook until you stop the president from speaking freely and Facebook shares closed down 8.3%?

Jim Polito: And that's big. I mean, even, well, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, it's not like he's a, he's going to have to buy from the dollar menu for the rest of the year.

You know, he lost billions in value and his value. But, the point is he's kind of doing the right thing by saying, I'm not going to censor it, [00:06:00] unfortunately in this free market, you know, that comes with a cost.

Craig Peterson: Yeah it really does.

Jim Polito: With all the "Woke" corporations.

Craig Peterson: Oh, my gosh. It's so true. Now his statement was that Facebook would remove content, no matter if a politician or government official says it. If we determine it may lead to violence or deprive people of the right to vote. So his statement was rather narrow. And that gives me a little bit of hope here that maybe he has kind of turned a bit of a corner.

Now, there is another social media platform out there that I'm on called parlay or Parler, and it is a direct competitor of Twitter and has been. Have you seen the numbers over the last week? 1.1, or excuse me, my Parler had about 1 million people on its platform a little more than a week ago. It now has one and a half [00:07:00] million people on it.

Half a million people that have left Twitter and gone to Parler because of this sort of thing that's happening. And Parler is saying, Hey, listen here we're like all conservative voices now on Parler. And the CEO, founder of Parler has offered $20,000 reward for a left-wing shul to move over to Parler and followers from Twitter.

Jim Polito: Yeah. you know, I joined it because I knew about it and I finally decided to join it, and get my name on it. So I could have the name, Jim Pollito, like I do on all the other platforms. And, I I've just started looking at it. I haven't done, put it, put out any posts on it yet, but I have watched it.

But if you go to the mainstream media now, they'll tell you that parler is, Is, is racist, antisemitic, whatever. They'll tell you that it's a home for racism and antisemitism. And that's just the mainstream media is saying, [00:08:00] Hey, we don't like somebody coming up. And being a conservative, we don't like that.

They won't admit that they've got Marxists, Leninists, fascists, you know, operating on their platforms, but they'll point right at this little upstart and say, Oh, it's antisemitic.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and we'll see what happens. And when the filtering really starts happening over there at Facebook, but it's, this is going to be a problem.

So, Hey, look, let's talk about the cops and forcing the unlocked phones here, Jim. Do you remember Webster Hubbell? He's getting pulled into this too. Web Hubbell, isn't Web Hubbell dead now, too. I thought he passed. He was part of the whole whitewater deal? And he had a mouth like a, he actually looked to me like a large mouth bass with all, you know, apologies to large mouth basses.

Jim Polito: He had a really big mouth. Web Hubbell. He was a strange-looking guy.

Craig Peterson: He really was. Well, there was a 2000 Supreme court opinion in the prosecution of Webb Hubbell, who was a Bill Clinton associate gotten snared whitewater investigation. 

[00:09:00]  You're absolutely right. And prosecutors asked Hubbell to produce documents in 11 broad categories.

And what did they do? They come through the documents, Hubbell provided and they found evidence to charge him with mail, fraud, and tax evasion. It sounds kind of familiar doesn't it that they are doing it again.

Jim Polito: Yes, it does.

Craig Peterson: That violated his fifth amendment rights, which it kinda did here and the Supreme court. Sided with Hubbell. Now let's move forward 20 years to today where we have smartphones and all of these laws about privacy. And of course, things like the fifth amendment are a lot older than our smartphones. And we've got courts now, Indiana Supreme court

[00:10:00] rule that the fifth amendment allows a woman accused of stalking to refuse to unlock her phone.

We've got other cases out there like in Philadelphia, a man was released from jail after four years. I've been held in contempt in connection with a child pornography case. Cause he wouldn't unlock it. The federal appeals court rejected his argument that the fifth amendment gave him the right to refuse to unlock it.

A Vermont federal court reached the same conclusion as did our Colorado courts, Virginia state court. And. The Massachusetts Supreme judicial court in 2014. In other words, kind of, depending on what the police know, they can order you to unlock your phone. And there's a great analogy. Yeah. ARS Technica used. Let's say you have documents that are stored in a wall safe.

[00:11:00] You may know those documents may belong to you. They may not belong to you. You may know, or not know what's in the safe and you may know, or not know the combination to the safe. So the bottom line is if the government cannot show that the suspect knows the combination, then the courts unanimously agree that forcing the suspect to try to open it would be unconstitutional because of the act of opening the safe functions as an admission.

That the suspect owns the safe and the documents inside of it. Okay. So that's step number one. But if the government can show the suspect knows both passwords and which documents are in this safe, that's not protected because what the courts have been saying is the fifth amendment is a right against self-incriminating testimony, not the production of an incriminating document.

Jim Polito: Right?

Craig Peterson: States are split on this whole [00:12:00] thing right now. you know, there's one theory that holds the opening of the safe is a testimonial. Once it's open, it has whatever it contains, right? This is a confusing world right now.

Jim Polito:  Right?

Craig Peterson: And of course the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court basically says.

Yeah, we can force you to open that if we know it's yours and we know that, you know, what's in that device. And we'll see what happens here going forward because it's easy enough now with these phones that unlocked themselves with just seeing your face. They don't have to force your thumb to a thumbprint reader.

They just have to point the phone at your face. That's really going to throw that wrench into this because yeah, it's just taking a picture.

Jim Polito: So let's just say it's uncharted territory, frankly, because. In [00:13:00] Massachusetts, you're saying the Supreme judicial court is saying, yeah, if you know, what's in there, like if it's a safe and you know, what's in there, you have to allow us, you have to open it for us.

Craig Peterson: Yeah, you're absolutely right. It gets very, very complicated.

Jim Polito: And that's not that's right. That's not standing on the street corner and the cop walks up, suspects you of a crime, and says open up that phone. It's once you're in the judicial system and it's a court that says you have to open up that phone.

Yeah, because the court believes that you do have this information in your safe, in your phone, the police officers have a reasonable cause action you know, what's on that phone and we want access to it. So this is getting more complicated by the day.

And I only play a lawyer on TV, not the radio. So we'll kind [00:14:00] of have to leave it to that. It's getting more confusing all of the time. All right.

Let's folks the way that they can get more information from you as these issues unfold. you text my name, Jim, to this number.

Craig Peterson: Eight five-five, three eight, five 55 53. Just text Jim to eight-five five three eight five 55 53. And if you have trouble with that, you can always just email me M [email protected].

Jim Polito: Craig peterson.com and of course, standard data and text rates apply. My name Craig, an excellent segment, happy Canada Day and we'll catch up with you next week.

Craig Peterson: All right, take care. Bye-bye.

Bye. Bye. Alright, don't go anywhere. Final word. When we return, you're listening to the Jim Polito show your safe space.

 

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