www.CostaRicaTicas.com

OK, so here's more gasoline on the fire but a venue open to the public is a very different thing from a public venue. I believe this holds true even in Costa Rica. One is private venue that reserves the right to make rules not open for review (such as the right to reserve/ truncate/ deny service to anyone); the other is governmental/ quasi-governmental that has many more strictures on such rights. Illegal discrimination is of course a special case but we are talking here about what constitutes legal discrimination under what specific set of circumstances.

_________________
"A man accustomed to hear only the echo of his own sentiments, soon bars all the common avenues of delight, and has no part in the general gratification of mankind"--Dr. Johnson
"Amen, brother"-ED

Hi Safecracker,

How about a "Review" in the chica section on Alejandra (or whatever she goes by now), the little girl with the oversize monster rack at the end of the video. Was always curious. TIA

Holden

This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.


WTF?

I still have not seen the vid. Was it worth it? Was it that racy that youtube had to kill it?

did any body copy it?

anyways!

50

funny how they'll allow horrific violence on youtube but god forbid anyone see a booby!!

I also see an underlying trend here. I have noticed as of late that there are a LOT of capt-sav-a-ho types on this board who are head over heels in love with the chicas. Number one rule of mongering is: Don't fall in love.

I had missed this post. My apologies for not answering you before.

Your comments are much appreciated for their irony. Apparently you can dish it out but can't take it, eh?

When you have a chance, get back to us on that.

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mh

Costa Rica seems to attract the unknowledged, so it doesn't surprise me.
But yes I agree. That followed by alot of overly sensitive people.

Its good humor though.

I'm not a resident attorney, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night. So, at the risk of being attacked, I'll offer my 2 cents.

The specific post that ID was responding to and miamiheller included in his own posts was made by Express321 and his post did NOT specify casinos but referred to private property IN GENERAL (in the US). So from that perspective, I believe ID is absolutely right about what the issue was and what the answer was to it. You (as a guest on private property) do NOT have an expectation of privacy when you enter an establishment open to the general public EVEN if it is private property. I could cite NUMEROUS examples where you're definitely subject to being photographed or videotaped when you enter such properties, including banks, convenience stores and ESPECIALLY at casinos. Now, it MIGHT be that the owners of those properties are required to post some sort of disclaimer or legal notice that security cameras are being used and there are probably certain TYPES of areas (like bathroom stalls) where cameras are strictly forbidden, but there are definitely MANY other circumstances where your privacy is compromised even if you're not aware of it.

What about miamiheller's "special case" of casinos? From the perspective of the PARTICULAR video that STARTED this discussion, which was the main issue of the thread if not the particular post that ID was addressing, ID is still basically correct. What miamiheller is thinking about is really only whether the GUESTS at the casinos are allowed to take pictures. We've already established that the OWNERS of the casinos themselves can and DO use cameras. As for the guests, I'm willing to bet there is no LAW that says they can't use cameras. What they and other private property owners do have is the right to set their own "rules" forbidding whatever they want (subject to civil rights laws and such) on their own properties, e.g. "no shirt, no shoes, no service". Legally speaking they can't enforce those rules, beyond refusing you service and evicting you from their property (again subject to certain legal limitations).

In the case of casinos, THEY can aim cameras at just about anything they want on THEIR property. As for what the casino patrons do, the casinos probably wouldn't much care if they brought cameras in and took pictures of other guests but they don't want ANY cameras that aren't controlled by them being used on their property lest they somehow be used to cheat the casinos or otherwise compromise THEIR security. Any expectation that you as a casino guest have of privacy from being photographed or videotaped by other casino patrons is NOT a legal right and only comes as BYPRODUCT of the casinos not wanting THEIR operations captured on film or tape unless THEY'RE doing the filming or taping.

And all of this is looking at this from a purely LEGAL standpoint. From a PRACTICAL standpoint, one has even LESS expectation of privacy when in any place open to the public. Casinos probably can get away with lots of extra-legal activity. For example, I'm not sure if the days of taking you out and burying you in a hole in the desert are fully past, but they can certainly "accidentally" drop and smash your camera when they catch you with it and confiscate it. That might decrease the likelihood that you'll get captured by another patron's camera, but does NOTHING to change the likelihood you'll get caught by one of their cameras. It may not serve their interests to violate their customers confidentiality but that is ENTIRELY up to them. You probably couldn't sue them for it as long as it was taken in their public areas and not the room you rented. More to the point, going back to what Express321 posted, whether it is illegal or merely against privately set rules and guidelines, videocams have gotten tiny and more easily concealable and dualpurpose cameraphones have gotten ubiquitous. If you don't believe that then just ask Michael Phelps who got busted by a camera phone pic at a PRIVATE party. Add to this, the fact that there are lots of inconsiderate fools who think its a cool idea to post videos or photos of what goes on inside the HDR, even if it might have some other guy's picture who wouldn't want his image posted in one of the shots. So what, he says? Just let the guy complain about it after its been up a while (assuming he's fortunate to discover it before his wife does), and he'll be happy to take it down? Some guys will just never "get it" or understand the "what happens in vegas, stays in vegas" concept (sorry safecracker, just calling it as I see it).

Whether its in casinos or other "venues open to the public", the QUESTION of LEGAL expectations of privacy is NOT really the issue in EITHER case. UNFORTUNATELY PRACTICALLY speaking we can't really count on any privacy in such places whether its illegal, against the guidelines or not.

I just returned from Vegas and had absolutely no problem at all taking pictures in the casino, didn't matter which casino either. My wife is a camera/picture nut - 100 hundred pictures are never enough so she put Vegas to the test. No one said one word to her and she didn't hide, she used the flash, she drives people crazy with that damn camera!

Privacy in the USA, expect more of this, a lot more:

************************
Welcome to Tiburon.

Your presence has been noted.

The posh and picturesque town that juts into San Francisco Bay is poised to do something unprecedented: use cameras to record the license plate number of every vehicle that crosses city limits.

Some residents describe the plan as a commonsense way to thwart thieves, most of whom come from out of town. Others see an electronic border gate and worry that the project will only reinforce Tiburon's image of exclusivity and snootiness.

"I personally don't see too much harm in it, because I have nothing to hide," commodities broker Paul Lambert, 64, said after a trip to Boardwalk Market in downtown Tiburon on a recent afternoon.

"Yet," he said, "it still has the taint of Big Brother."

Tiburon's camera idea is a marriage of technology, policing and distinct geography.

Situated on a peninsula, Tiburon's hillside homes and waterfront shops are accessible by only two roads, allowing police to point the special cameras known as license plate readers at every lane that leads into and out of the town of 8,800.

The readers, which use character recognition software, can compare plates to databases of cars that have been stolen or linked to crimes, then immediately notify police of matches, said Police Chief Michael Cronin.

If someone burglarized a Tiburon home at 3 a.m. one morning, he said, detectives could consult the devices and find out who came to town in the hours before - and who rolled out soon after.
'Very low-key'

"It's very low-key," said Town Manager Peggy Curran. "The whole point of license plates is that people can be identified by them."

If the Town Council gives final approval, Curran said, officials hope to install the readers on Tiburon Boulevard and Paradise Drive by late fall.

Tiburon plans to spend grant funds on the project and ask two other governments that could benefit from it to contribute to an expected price tag of $100,000 - the city of Belvedere, a bump of land on the southeastern edge of Tiburon, and Marin County.

Cronin called it a sound investment. He pointed to a frustrating twist in Tiburon crime: Residents feel so safe that they don't lock their cars and homes.

In all of 2007 and 2008, Tiburon recorded 196 thefts, 37 burglaries and a dozen stolen cars. The chief said every alleged thief who was arrested in those years was from outside Tiburon.
Finding suspects

Once the street cameras are installed, Cronin said, hunting a burglary suspect could be easier. "We'll look for a plate that came and went," he said. "That's going to give us a very short list to work on."

Detectives could then check to see if any of the cars has been linked with crimes in the past. Between 300 and 400 cars use Tiburon Boulevard to travel in or out of the town from midnight to 6 a.m. on weekdays.

"It's much more efficient than having an officer sit on the boulevard, watch passing cars and guess who might be a burglar," Cronin said.

Nicole Ozer, who directs policy on technology for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, isn't as supportive. She called the cameras a "needle in a haystack" approach that may waste money, invade privacy and invite unfair profiling.

"To be under investigation simply because you entered or left Tiburon at a certain time is incredibly intrusive," Ozer said. "Innocent people should be able to go about their daily lives without being tracked and monitored."

City leaders promise to prevent abuses. Information on which cars enter and leave town will not be available to the public, they said, and will be erased within 60 days. Police officers will be granted access to the information only during an investigation.

License plate readers have exploded in popularity in recent years, but Tiburon would be one of the first to mount them at fixed locations - and perhaps the very first to record every car coming or going.

California Highway Patrol officials have put the readers on 18 cruisers and at four fixed locations. CHP officers have seen a huge increase in recoveries of stolen cars since the devices were installed starting in August 2005, the agency said.
Devices help CHP

Through December, officials said, the CHP had used the devices to recover 1,739 cars and arrest 675 people.

San Francisco gave the devices to police as well as parking control officers, allowing them to track cars parked for too long in one spot. Some cities use the cameras to assess anti-congestion tolls on motorists, while casino bosses get an alert when a high roller - or a cheater - pulls in.

Outside Tiburon's Boardwalk Market, where a flyer in the window offered a $2,000 reward for the return of a stolen Pomeranian, residents seemed split on the plan.

Robin Pryor, 66, of Belvedere said the most important issue was whether the cameras made people safer.

"It's just like locking your door," Pryor said. "If they have reason for it to bother them, they shouldn't be coming in."

But Fred Mayo, 62, who lives in Tiburon and owns a travel agency in Mill Valley, said the cameras would invade privacy. "Where does it end?" Mayo asked.

He referred to the crime blotter in the local newspaper, which listed two incidents recently of K*ds tossing water balloons at cars, and noted, "It's not like Tiburon's a high-crime area."

I'm not a resident attorney, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.[/quote]
HILARIOUS

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Livin' & Lovin' in Key Largo....oh....And the one in The Keys, too!

DO they have a chica fee?

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"Guess what?! I've got a fever, and the only prescription... is more cowbell!"
Christopher Walken

Srlim,
You're right that most of us DO have SOMETHING to hide. In our case, it is committing acts between consenting adults that harm no one else but which, despite that, might be illegal or at the very least severely socially frowned upon. Having friends or family find out what we do in CR could be very embarassing and diminish our reputations amongst our more conservative colleagues even though what we do in our personal lives is really none of their business.

HOWEVER, there are very important differences between the various cases that have been mentioned here.

What we do in the HDR might be very personally embarassing to us if it were known back home, but it IS in a public place AND it is NOT illegal. Theoretically, a suspicious wife could fly to CR herself (or hire a certain detective who works both sides of the street) and see for herself what her husband is doing in those PUBLIC places. Because that seems unlikely or the possibility that we'll get caught on some unthinking fool like Safecracker's Youtube video and that video will be seen by someone we know seems equally small, we don't worry too much about it. But we should know because it is being committed by private individuals that it exists regardless of whatever rules "Big Brother" sets up.

The case of the license plate reading technology in that article was done by the authorities to catch people committing serious CRIMES. It was not being set-up to monitor say when some straying husband was sneaking home late. Even if your license plate was videoed coming into that community, it would not get flagged for human review unless some more serious crime had occurred at the same time. If you lived in that community and therefore had business being there, your driving in would not get flagged either. If you were from outside the area, your records might get checked but it would probably go no further than that if you had no criminal history. If you were there at the time of a crime, had no other reason for being there (such as living there) AND had a criminal history, well then there is your probable cause for the detectives to take a closer look at what you were doing there. But I seriously doubt they'd bother to keep the records of everyone else's comings and goings for any other nefarious purpose, though conspiracy buffs might think otherwise.

Letting someone into your vehicle trunk or home when they DON'T have probable cause is a whole other matter. Unfortunately, and again I'm not an attorney, but some cops and aggressive DA's MIGHT argue that your mere refusal constitutes probable cause because of the "what do you have to hide" rationale. It probably doesn't, but how are you going to so easily argue with a cop on the side of the road when he could probably make something else up later to justify his actions. "Your honor, it looked like he was getting ready to go for his gun (which was really that throwdown weapon I always carry with me in my ankle holster)" Okay, maybe I watch too much TV. My point is that maybe, if you really don't have anything to hide (like bales of marijuana or a cut-up dead body in the trunk), then your wisest course of action is to just cooperate rather than get confrontational about your privacy rights, as you're likely just to create more problems than you'd prevent. Now if you really DO have something like drugs or unregistered firearms lying around, then yes, you ARE best off refusing the search and hoping the evidence gets thrown out later if they proceed without your permission (or warrant).

What this guy said FULLY was: "I personally don't see too much harm in it, because I have nothing to hide.... Yet, it still has the taint of Big Brother." There is always going to be a certain trade-off between security and privacy. We need to evaluate EACH case individually to determine whether it enhances our security enough to justify any negative impact on our privacy and EACH of us will probably assess THAT a little differently. Some people can't countenance ANY infringement of personal privacy (even cameras in already public areas). They often will use the "slippery slope" argument. I hear THAT reasoning all the time, and I cannot stand THAT logic. All that the "slippery slope" means is that we need to be very careful about where we draw the line and see we don't go over it. In the case of Tiburon, I think the impact on personal privacy was minimal compared to the potential impact on personal security.

Probably a more valid problem would be whether this technology would really lead to arrests and would be cost-effective in acheiving that. We had facial-recognition software and cameras set up in Tampa at GREAT expense and I'm not sure that it wound up leading to that many arrests.

And bringing this discussion back to the original topic. The "invasion or privacy" at the HDR/BM (or at least the violation of the traditional casino "what happens here, stays here" rule), was not done for anything as noble as improved security for all involved but rather solely for someone's personal amusement and ego-gratification. In that case, I think the ends definitely DON'T justify the means.

Call me a civil-liberties extremist if you will, but you expand the core, the middle of what's an allowable activity by constantly pushing at and looking to expand the margins. Conversely, there is great pressure from those who want to know all about you all the time or at a particular time to decrease the margins and collapse the core. It's a constant struggle but must be waged. You know that Officialdom will keep pressing in so we constantly have to keep pressing out. I'm old enough to remember the time when "stop-and-frisk" was being judicially debated, when the ability of the police to stop a vehicle for no particular reason and search it was the hot topic. Now the police or agents essentially can do so with a variety of legal theories and accompanying ruses at any time (not talking about "profiling" here but a insert a factor of randomness and "Katie, bar the door").
The point is, this time I have nothing to hide so it's OK--next time I have something to hide but I've "given away the store" so how can I resist the intrusion? "No consent ever" should be the rule even if or especially if it causes me some degree of discomfort--I'm not just protecting MY rights but YOURS too. Do you think that cop would so easily give consent were the situation reversed? I think not.
None of the above has anything to do with vids made in the HDR.
Brother Prolijo--I think you're forgetting about the tittilation factor by those with access to those license plate vids. They may not be used officially to prosecute crimes but gossip abounds, especially in smaller communities. Plus there are Websites that specialize in the snarky stuff caught on security cams-could we expect any less, any better behavior from those monitoring official cams? You might say, "...But they are only watching license plates!" I say,"...Yes but that is only the benign beginning to abuse. What's the possible/probable end point, because we're on this slippery slope?"

_________________
"A man accustomed to hear only the echo of his own sentiments, soon bars all the common avenues of delight, and has no part in the general gratification of mankind"--Dr. Johnson
"Amen, brother"-ED

Yes, but would you have let him look in your trunk if you had dirty socks and empty diet coke cans littering it? BTW, that's about all I have to "hide" in my house as well. Well that and my old porn stash stuffed in the back of my closet . Obviously, you understand that there ARE sometimes trade-offs between personal privacy and security. In this case, you were willing to sacrifice your own personal privacy because you felt the larger cause of helping the cops catch the real crooks (by ruling you out as a suspect) was more important. I still have to wonder if the cop would have been as "respectful" if you had continued to stand up for "rights".

BTW, I like your comment "I don't know about legality, I'm speaking morally." That really sums it up in one line. I've been discussing all the various legal aspects of these cases, but when you get down to it that is all just so much hoohaw. EVEN IF what safecracker did was perfectly legal is was thoughtless at best and immoral at worst because it showed blatant disregard for all the people on the other side of the lens who probably wouldn't have wanted their images posted on the internet if they had known it would be. I think the golden rule is nearly always the ultimate and only necessary moral test out there. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If you wouldn't want your own image posted on-line, why would you go ahead and post someone else's?

I should leave it there but I'd like to add 2 more comments to what I just said:

1) Just because you may not care at all if someone else posts your image, that still doesn't mean you should be free to post their s. You should also ask yourself questions like "would I still be so carefree about having my image posted if I were married or worked for a conservative boss?" And if I can imagine reasons why someone might not want their image posted should I still post it? Obviously not, unless you're posting it for some other reason than just kicks. For example, posting a pic of a chica who rips off gringos.

2) Comment 2 about the golden rule of posting other peoples' images. A lot of guys here get really charged up about the idea of someone else posting identifiable images of themselves or other 3rd party gringos, but how many of them don't see the parallels when it comes to posting readily identifiable images of chicas (probably more often than not without their direct knowledge or direct permission). If you wouldn't want your own image posted, why would you think it would be okay to post a chicas with out her permission? Because she's "just a dumb whore who should have known better"? I always get a particular charge when I see someone posting a pic with their own face obscurred but with the chica readily identifiable. Talk about hypocrisy. IMHO, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. But I'm sure all you chica photo fans will come up with rationales why that is "completely different".

That's not a LEFT wing utopia that you describe. That's a LIBERTARIAN utopia. Libertarianism vs. Statism is an entirely different political dimension than Liberal vs. Conservatism. As I'm sure you know, a lot of very left wing people are very statist and FOR big government and a lot of very right wing people fear big government and would argue the very same arguments that you just attributed to the supposedly left-winger.