I'm having a very difficult time comprehending how plant lights could even remotely be construed as "probable cause" -- don't the courts have any idea of the millions of little old ladies (and whoever) who use plant lights for their house plants? Or of the multitudes who use them to jump start gardens every Spring, or the many who actually grow veggies hydroponically in their basement? -- Harmon Seaver, MLIS Systems Librarian Arrowhead Library System Virginia, MN (218) 741-3840 hseaver@arrowhead.lib.mn.us http://harmon.arrowhead.lib.mn.us

On Thu, 28 Sep 2000, Tim May wrote:

At 3:10 PM -0400 9/28/00, Harmon Seaver wrote:

...

I'm having a very difficult time comprehending how plant lights could even remotely be construed as "probable cause" -- don't the courts have any idea of the millions of little old ladies (and whoever) who use plant lights for their house plants? Or of the multitudes who use them to jump start gardens every Spring, or the many who actually grow veggies hydroponically in their basement?

Beside the point, from their point of view.

"Probable cause" is a an excuse, not a requirement to act. Meaning, if they subpoena the records of Alice's Hydroponics or Bob's Lamp Shop and discover that the purchases were made by a little old lady, they don't _have_ to launch a S.W.A.T. raid and call in the napalm strikes.

It has not stopped them in the past. Here in Oregon, the local LEAs were caught using illegal wiretaps to listen in on the local hydroponics dealer. (I never heard what became of that case. probably swept under the carpet like so many others around here.) Of course, this is the city that was sending information about undesirables to the JDL. [snip]

(Apparently no shoot outs with the narcs, as these were mostly hippy-dippy potheads, no doubt afraid of having babyklling assault weapons.)

They go after pot growers because few of them shoot back. (Unlike dealers in harder substances.) With the seizure laws, these raids become a high income - low risk form of fund raising for the department.

By the way, imagine what Big Bro will be able to do by further cross-correlating these lists with lists of rifle owners (courtesy of our new gun registration laws), and with other records. No wonder Oracle is selling so much software to LEAs.

Of course, if you look at Oracle's license fees, they are going to be lucky if they can buy bullets after Oracle's sales people get done with them... alan@ctrl-alt-del.com | Note to AOL users: for a quick shortcut to reply Alan Olsen | to my mail, just hit the ctrl, alt and del keys. "In the future, everything will have its 15 minutes of blame."

On Thu, 28 Sep 2000, Harmon Seaver wrote:

I'm having a very difficult time comprehending how plant lights could even remotely be construed as "probable cause" -- don't the courts have any idea of the millions of little old ladies (and whoever) who use plant lights for their house plants? Or of the multitudes who use them to jump start gardens every Spring, or the many who actually grow veggies hydroponically in their basement?

Well, considering that race seems to constitute probable cause, too... Sampo Syreeni , aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university