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This ruling affects far more than just Catholics though. And proving that someone else protected the victimizer by interfering with the criminal justice system or intimidated the victim is still separately illegal by making one an accessory and not impacted by this ruling.
That is not in conflict with this ruling. Prove it in court, go straight to PMitA Prison (unless you’re wealthy), same as always.
While the individual who did the heinous act may feel religious absolution, that doesn’t immunize them from the legal repercussions of the crime though, so that absolution is legally meaningless, so there is no offset of balance in a legal standpoint.
It also doesn’t allow the clergy member to intimidate or otherwise attack the victim or destroy evidence in the service of a coverup. It just says that one specific kind of communication can’t be compelled as evidence.
I suspect this is spinning this case for the meme.
Even as an atheist I’m torn on this. The clergy privilege is a long standing one like attorney-client privilege. And acknowledging that certain specific groups cannot be forced to divulge the contents of private conversations, is a slippery slope to any sort of ends justifying the means actions.
“I didn’t know how important something was until it negatively affected me and people I know,” Wes Virdell, probably.
You can pry my em dashes — which I use regularly in writing because I love them — from my cold dead hands (To be fair, I really like parenthetical statements too, could be an ADHD thing).
From what I’ve been reading on this lately (since this started) on iOS a method exists for a service to send out a list of locations, or references list that exists on device (this can work with date/time triggers as well) that would trigger a notification and the local device itself handles notification of the user so the developer has no idea who has been notified for all they know they just shouted locations out into the void and the on-device location services handles the rest.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/unlocationnotificationtrigger
The developer put up more specific details: https://www.iceblock.app/android
The post is up: https://www.iceblock.app/android
Turns out it’s about the notifications not the location, though it still indirectly is about location since the notifications are geographically specific.
TechCrunch did a traffic analysis: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/01/iceblock-an-app-for-anonymously-reporting-ice-sightings-goes-viral-overnight-after-bondi-criticism/
But if the user doesn’t create an account and the deviceID rotates frequently, is there any way to tie those coordinates at a specific time to a specific person in a large enough geographical area and provide notifications (also provided via on device only services)? That’s what it seems like the developer has said Apple facilitates better.
The also said they will have a more detailed post up July 2nd about android on their site.
“Apple keeps most of your location history on your device: the bits of information stored in the cloud are either end-to-end encrypted, meaning only you can decipher them, or anonymized. As such, the risk of having your location history compromised by a data breach, or by a request from law enforcement to Apple for this data, is greatly reduced.”
In this case they are anonymized. The service can tell what device is where but not what user that deviceID matches and those identifiers are rotated to make it harder to match that data up.
At this point my understanding from other sources is that they can’t distribute via the android App Store in a way that uses location tracking and notifications but is still anonymous where they can with iOS because location services is device side only.
What the fuck is this shit?
This is beginning to feel like the Swedish penis pump scene in Austin Powers