Remember when people used to say, “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?” on the topic of whether there should be backdoors for law enforcement?
When I would get that response, I would ask for the person's unlocked phone, and said that I would be going through the browsing history, photos, and text messages on their phone.
Some people get it after that. Otherwise, I would see them makes some entertaining mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they still did not see the problem with electronic surveillance.
I tried something like this and they said that I was not an impartial trusted third party like a police officer.
To be perfectly fair to her, it is harder to become a police officer in the UK (3years of education), otherwise I would have applied at the local police station, some places in the USA have only 6 weeks of training.
> I tried something like this and they said that I was not an impartial trusted third party like a police officer.
Send her a link to this article. Highlight this part:
> "A former Louisville Metro Police Department officer used law enforcement technology as part of a scheme that involved hacking the Snapchat accounts of young women and using sexually explicit photos and videos they had taken to extort them, federal prosecutors said in court documents filed on Tuesday."
"some random stranger in a remote datacenter going through some spinning disks" is too hard to correlate for average people. This is an invisible threat to them. If I give the person in the example a name and face, e.g. "Officer John Smith living next door and you talk to him everyday", they usually immediately become more vigilant.
I imagine that if the covid droplets in the air are visible, we would have a much easier time convincing people to wear masks in the beginning of the pandemic.
This doesn't work with a lot of people. Namely, it doesn't work with someone who has never been part of an outgroup and lives a completely harmless, mainstream life - or feels they do. They truly don't feel like they have anything to hide. They may recognize that someone who is, say, into kink or LGBTQ might be more hesitant to do so, but they haven't lived it.
There are probably millions of Americans who would, without hesitation, hand their unlocked phone to their pastor or a police officer. Your "hand me your unlocked phone" exercise won't really work.
For a uniquely interesting spin on this, you might look at the case of Doug Jensen. After participating in the January 6th events, he willingly went for an interview with the FBI and then gave them his phone and his passwords so they could look.
To me, that seems emblematic of a person who has never in their life been in a outgroup.
The lack of awareness it would take to do that is astounding, but worth paying attention to; there are plenty of folks in the US who have never actually been on the receiving end of state power.
As such they have no way of discerning what that power looks like, much less an appreciation for the real effects of it's use on themselves.
For myself, I’d never been on the receiving end of state power until Covid. It does, without a doubt, change how you think about politics, government, etc.
You never had vaccination requirements in your life? If you were in the US, there were endless vaccination requirements. If you were wanting to do sports, you had to have a physical. You had to take a driver's license test to drive.
Since the 1970s in the us most people were not impacted by health challenges where they had to do anything, maybe with the exception of aids. I never had to think about getting a vaccination or a health issue that might affect me, I always got my shots for school, never thought about it.
I think the covid vaccination was the first time a lot of adults had to think about a vaccination and there was a lot of pressure to get it (I'm in that category, I never gave vaccination a second thought, got a flu shot every year for example). People in my family who were engineers, always been vaccinated, even in the 50s knew some people with polio got influenced by the anti-vaxer world on facebook and started talking about the dark conspiracy and secret payoffs of us govt health workers. That was very sad to see.
> If you were in the US, there were endless vaccination requirements
This isn't true, because I've lived here my whole life and experienced zero vaccine requirements since being so young I can't remember. Many that I or my parents chose to get, but those were by choice.
Yes to all. Only vaccine requirements were all stuff I’d had many years ago, and none of those were developed in the previous 18 months.
Though this is all somewhat irrelevant; the government didn’t mandate vaccines in most contexts. Coercion, yes, but not proper mandates. I’m thinking more of having my favorite businesses shut down, arbitrary restrictions that don’t make sense, government bodies ignoring clear law, etc. And I’m in a free state, compared to most others!
It's fascinating how this whole other brain architecture clicks on, especially for how it reveals the arguments people are willing to make when all the ideas are just hypothetical.
Who among us has never complained about a manager or some company C-suite. While there's NOTHING wrong with that, could you imagine those comments being shown to them? Could you imagine what might happen after that?
Just because I'm not building a bomb in my basement doesn't mean I want all my dirty laundry trotted out in front of the world.
My mother is an employment attorney. When a company gets sued over an employee matter those kinds of messages are surfaced in pretty much every case because people tend to send those kind of things over company owned tools. Kind of hilarious the things people say thinking their boss will never see it.
Some time ago someone commented here on HN about monitoring systems for employee communications that would scan all messages and notify the bosses whenever messages containing certain keywords were sent. Words like "champagne" or "congratulations" were immediately brought to their attention. This was coupled with company policy that attempting to evade this total surveillance system was grounds for being fired.
IMO there’s two solutions, both can be done at the same time:
- Technological solution. Implement end to end encryption, and encrypt data at rest. Use techniques to prevent third parties from gaining access to decryption keys.
- Human solution. Strengthen, and critically, enforce laws that protect the privacy of individuals. Severely punish and hold to account misuse of data & PII.
It’s not dumb luck that the first and second amendments of the US constitution both provide protections against an unjust government. I’m not a gun fan by any means, I just see the similarity between the soft and hard approaches to addressing an issue.
Clearly, the framers of the constitution could not have imagined the smart devices of today, but based on how they wrote the constitution on what they could imagine, I believe that data/privacy protection would have been it's own amendment. We try to lump everything into the 4th amendment, but their biggest concerns were invasion of one's domicile.
We should come together as a group to write a new amendment that protects one's digital life to propose to congress via a lobby group.
The US definitely needs iron clad data privacy laws.
The authors of the Constitution absolutely understood how critical privacy was with respect to personal information. "Papers" is the keyword here, the OG Americans were 100% harassed by the British Gov.
4th Amendment:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
I'm sure there are people who say this, but there seem to be infinitely many more people who will smugly repeat this quote instead. It's getting a little tired and, in the context of HN, is definitely preaching to the choir. We're almost all on the same page about the importance of privacy.
You're going to keep hearing it as long as those back doors exist. You know what I'm a little tired of? Politicians using the same old "won't someone think of the children!" arguments every time they erode our privacy even further.
The issue is that I don't think it is the most effective argument for influencing others to change their mind.
Why? Because people assume that it is highly unlikely that they will be the target of such a search, assume that a warrant would be needed, and in the bigger scheme of things, a backdoor is worth having in case someone who has committed a crime or is reasonably suspected of having committed a crime can be pursued.
So there's a principles / practicality tradeoff that I think people are making.
Further, telling people that the government might spy on you with the purpose of locking you up or fining you comes across as overly paranoid. Again, not saying this hasn't happened in the past or in other regimes, but this just isn't a sizable number of people's experience (in the US or Canada for example).
>people assume that it is highly unlikely that they will be the target of such a search
Rather than directly handing someone an unlocked phone, I like to think of it more like the residents of high-rise buildings who leave their curtains open no matter WHAT they're doing in the apartment. They figure the chances that someone is looking in THEIR window is miniscule even though the technology to do so is cheap and easy to obtain. The thing is, I bet a LOT of high rise residents, especially on higher floors, do leave curtains open all the time.
Well no. You need to THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Take the case of primary school teacher Gladys. She beats children when she's drunk to much at school. If a kid makes trouble on the playground sometimes she even kicks them until they stop asking for her attention. She doesn't have any children of her own and you can actually see her skin crawl when yet another parent makes the suggestion she might want one. What a headache. Well, the headache might be yesterday's booze, but you get the point.
You see, every year there's one or two toddlers in her class that realize that either they can hit back, or take revenge by stealing those plastic cards in her purse she finds so important. And the other gets the idea they might get some support from their parents if they steal her emergency Jack Daniels bottle and take it to their parents.
With privacy HOW WILL THE POLICE FIND REASONS TO THROW THOSE CHILDREN INTO RE-EDUCATION CENTERS? Without constant surveillance of yet more aspects of those children's lives (OUTSIDE of school or anything perfect, I mean government related, of course). I mean unless every hairdresser tells Youth Services that these are bad parents.
With privacy how will youth services find reasons to throw children of parents who've committed heinous crimes into youth services? Heinous crimes such as abortions or same sex marriages or even ... gone to a protest for those unmentionable rights, or legalizing Satan-juice and Belzebub-smoke? Those parents could even be Jesus-killers, sorry, Jews is the PC term isn't it? Or terro...Muslims. We can't use that as a reason, but obviously children can't be trusted to those parents, so we'll trust them to youth services, you know, where half the girls grow up to be prostitutes, and most boys have more drugrunning arrests than points on their final exams. I mean the ones that actually do their final exams at all. Ahhhhh ... God bless good old American government style child upbringing!
Think of the children! Think of Gladys! Think of the heinous crimes some children might be confronted with! DO YOU WANT BABY JESUS TO DIE?
In other words privacy is bad if and only if the government is near-perfect. If the government is no better (and in fact significantly worse) than the society it serves ... then privacy protects you.
Politicians can implement whatever draconian policy they want and with zero resistance by simply telling right-wing people that it's stopping the bajillion pedophiles that are around every corner in society, and telling left-wing people that it's stopping the bajillion neo-nazis that are around every corner in society.
Personally, as someone who is very passionate about privacy HN is not a safe-harbor for pro-privacy talks.
Anti-privacy people come in a lot of shades.
Some of them like to think of themselves as "good people" who never need to be protected from the law because they believe they always follow the law, therefore, the law is always on their side.
Some of them are holdouts of a bygone age where people championed an open internet coupled with an open society and open government.
There's probably more categories than that, but those are the two I encounter most often on this website. Unfortubately, if you read into what they're sayinf, they hold moral positions on the issue so it's next to impossible to have discourse with them.
What does a "safe harbor" mean to you? If you're looking for uncritical acceptance, you aren't going to find that anywhere (well, you will, but those places are not going to be interesting, conversationally).
I'm pro-privacy: I think we have a fundamental (natural) right to privacy, and I support legislation that practically strengthens that right. But that doesn't mean that I agree with you on everything, and it's unreasonable to expect that.
Solid question and thanks for the callout. I'm never looking for uncritical acceptance. I am looking for a non-hostile environment though; ideologies which would be willing to explore the nuance and reasonings of the privacy movements and debate them with me are more than welcome.
Safe harbor was probably not the right word; I'm talking about people you can't even have basic privacy conversations with because their worldview is just so baseline different. It's next to impossible to have conversations about privacy with a person who believes you should be able to view all sensitive information about a person because of their belief that a transparent society is analogous to bleach. The people who believe they and their friends are the last bastion of good people on Earth and that they have nothing to hide cannot be reasoned with either.
These are people who won't even say, "privacy is important".
i came to this thread to see if someone commented this. when the apple fbi whole thing was in the news, it was interesting hearing normal people saying that phrase. As someone in security, I knew that “backdooring” encryption was effectively giving everyone in the world a chance to read your message. Abuse of power can’t be kept in check without cryptographically sound encryption, authorization controls protecting your data is meaningless if it’s data you really care about.
My strawman is that the backdoor is added by one or more engineers, and stored somewhere that is accessible by one or more DBAs, transmitted to the cops via infrastructure administered by one or more BOFHs, and maintained on the law enforcement end, by one or more personnel.
One day, one of these people suddenly quits, moves to Dubai, and buys a Bugatti.
I mean, it’s a valid point and also Warren Buffet’s model for ethics. The overall answer to “is google a trusted friend” was no, and advice to be cautious. The article didn’t contain much context so I assume it’s clickbaity hit piece.
> I mean, it’s a valid point and also Warren Buffet’s model for ethics.
It's not a valid point and has nothing to do with ethics. If you're a gay person, there's nothing unethical about that. But if you happen to live in the Middle East, there's a good chance that your government wants to murder you because of that. Keeping it private is not unethical and doesn't point to you doing anything bad. And it's now impossible to live most of your life without some of it leaking out onto the web, even if you aren't the one actively putting it there yourself. Companies collecting data, people posting stuff about you, etc. If you live any part of your life, it's likely it will end up on the internet without you doing anything.
The most famous person to say this was a billionaire who made his wealth selling peoples' personal data.[1] He's famous for having given a $90m golden parachute to a person as his punishment for accusations of sexually harassing Google employees.[2]
I suppose it still holds true. Explicit photos are only something to keep hidden because there is a perception that they are wrong.
If the photos were of a pet dog playing the park instead, nobody would be concerned except maybe around realizing that the tech could also be used to expose wrongful material in the same way.
> I suppose it still holds true. Explicit photos are only something to keep hidden because there is a perception that they are wrong.
Is that why? We all shower and change clothes on a regular basis(I assume), there's nothing wrong with it. Yet, I'm sure most of us do that in private perhaps only in front of a romantic partner. Something doesn't have to be taboo to be personal or private.
> We all shower and change clothes on a regular basis(I assume), there's nothing wrong with it.
Au contraire. Step outside to let the world see you doing those things and see how well you fare. You are going to realize quickly just how wrong those things are. Humans aren't rational. Just because we all do it doesn't mean it isn't deemed wrong.
Of course, as with any wrongful act, you can get away with it as long as you aren't caught.
Yes, the change in context is that you are greatly increasing your chances of getting caught.
If you want to flip things around, there is absolutely nothing that you can do that is wrong if nobody else not party to the act knows about it. Fundamentally, wrongness can only be judged when third parties are aware of an act.
The acts of which we speak are wrong, but you can get away with it so long as you aren't caught.
Though I've heard people say this exactly I want to extend this to the wider pool of users of FAANG services as well which implies exactly this sentiment.
I'll take any wins, but the stakes here are so high that it is a little depressing if things like this change people's minds.
Speaking English doesn't confer magic powers. The same people who made up the the communist/nazi secret police are in every government, the only question is if they are in the ascendant. The stakes are very high, and we've seen in the 20th century that the situation can turn sharply and without warning that most people will accept to the point where some violent idiot is running the show.
In some senses, a constant string of leaked nudes out of police departments is the best case. At least that will keep people asking how to preserve privacy. I'd rather have this Wilson bloke looking at people rather than the return of Lavrentiy Beria. Mr. Wilson is on the heroic end of the spectrum compared to what will happen with these spy networks, which are most effective when wielded politically.
That doesn't apply here because they did do something wrong. Taking explicit photos of themselves. That's something they want to hide. If you doesn't want to hide them who cares.
(Mostly because this sort of story is quite rare. It should happen zero times, but plenty of people are very happy with the status-quo tradeoff. I mean, we're talking about folks that the public trusts to carry lethal weapons openly, in spite of the damage they do with them; access to espionage tools are way down the security-and-safety-concern ladder from the Glock Gen 5s on the officers' hips).
A slight clarification: It's rare that it is caught and prosecuted. It's common enough within authority spies and enforcers that they have a word for it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
That still makes it rare, since the vast, vast bulk of the citizenry isn't married to / dating spies and enforcers.
I'm not implying this should just be a "cost of doing business," but I am implying that most of the citizenry has implicitly accepted it as such, so we can't expect democracy to fix this issue.
Common enough in groups of people regularly exposed to (unreliable but scary) polygraph tests and consequences for their actions. In local and state police who don't face oversight or consequences it is way, way, more common.
What I mean is even if each of the US's 600,000 domestic law enforcement and law-enforcement-adjacent officers were grossly violating the privileges of their authority to surveil their spouses and SOs in a way that grossly violates their fifth amendment rights... That's a problem directly impacting 0.2% of the population.
It's real, real hard to get the polity at the national level to care about a 0.2%-of-the-population issue. I don't think we can expect a democratic solution to this issue.
The unfortunate thing about backdoors is its hard to really know how many times it happened. Kind of like the unreported crime thing, but far more believable that a good portion is never detected, particularly for read-only access.
I kinda doubt this guy would have got caught if he wasn't blackmailing the women.
How does that matter? It's not whether someone get stigmatized or not, it's whether they want to share explicit pictures or not. Even in a world without stigma, people could reasonably want pictures of them to stay private, and the choice should be theirs.
We should always have the ability to consent to naked photos of ourselves being available. I'm about as sex positive as it gets - it's not about puritanism, it's about consent.
The nudity is the least-relevant part of the story. The target could’ve been the victims’ private love letters or recordings of singing practice and the violation would’ve been the same.
We shouldn't be such a puritanical society that stigmatizes sex. We also shouldn't be a society that denies people their right to privacy. Both of these unrelated statements are true.
Puritanism isn't about being wholesome or having integrity, it's about punishing other people for their "sins". Frequently the sins in question are perfectly moral and private activities.
Basically, beyond the general ethics that should restrain individuals from non-consensual distribution of intimate imagery, and the policies on social networks and other institutional environments banning this kind of activity, lies the domain of law enforcement... and if they have the ability to access people's phones like this then they have an obligation to be scrupulous about their behavior
Jobs with power attract people who like exploiting such power.
And it's a particular character flaw that makes them think they'd get away with it, even though they tell others. That's also a reason why police officers like to make inappropriate racist or sexist jokes: It's relatively harmless but by the reaction they can evaluate which colleagues would back them up.
I seem to recall that law enforcement has a higher rate of sociopathy than the average. Let me find a reference/double check myself.
I found this[0] which on a cursory reading doesn't seem to support the above. There was also a pop-sci book[1] which seems to argue the above, but I don't know how much weight I put behind it (and I'm not curious enough to get the book and look for references.)
Does anyone know of any data or research to support or refute the claim "law enforcement has a higher rate of sociopathy than the general population"?
I kind of wonder if any job that has a constant collision with "reality" will wear down more mainstream moral values and reactions.
For example, doctors meet people all day long with unhealthy lifestyles, and how many persist in saying "you have to change your diet, lose weight and exercise" to each one?
Police officers deal with lawbreakers all. day. long.
Lot's of doctors have the same problem so I guess it should have gotten through to most of them that it isn't that easy. It has been shown in studies that giving the advice "change diet, lose weight and exercise" simply doesn't work. Doctors then blame the patient for not following the advise. Then other studies showed that "eat less and exercise more" doesn't work even if compliance was monitored...
So what ? But still he managed to expose the massive levels of spearheaded snooping and spying done by the American government. I would've still smoked the pipe dream of having privacy and security in my country when in reality you can be tracked all the time without your consent in the name of "National Security"
There's no real evidence Snowden was a Russian spy. The best people can come up with is that he's in Russia, ignoring that he was stopped there en route to Ecuador.
Unironically they will point to the fact that he's in Russia, not counting the fact that he was travelling to Ecuador and had his passport revoked while enroute and the US was intercepting planes coming out of Russia (even of diplomats).
Anon account because I don't want this connected to my real name that I use on HN for fear of backlash.
The LMPD is horrible, you can see plenty of their failings outlined on the /r/Louisville subreddit.
I live in KY and have worked with the LMPD directly and indirectly though a past employer. I have been in the "back room" and heard them speak surrounded by people they felt safe around. It's pretty much everything you can imagine: sexism, homophobia, racism, misogyny, and the list goes on. They way they talked about the people they ostensively "serve" was absolutely disgusting, literally made me sick to my stomach, they had complete distain for citizens. This specific visit happened in 2018 IIRC. My eyes should have been opened after 2013/BLM but they weren't, what I saw/heard was shocking and completely altered my perception of the police, my mind was fertile ground for when 2020 rolled around.
At of mid-2020 I was in full support of police reform but resisted "ACAB". At this point no sane people could support the police and I fervently believe ACAB, the is no reform for this horribly broken system. It must be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up (without using the same ~~people~~ bullies).
Anyone who wants the job of a cop, for the pay that it offers, should immediately be suspect.
I have held this belief my adult life and see it proven time and time again. The only motivation to do that job with that level of stress is either seeking power/authority or very rarely some altruistic motivation. Which of those things do we hear about more?
I served in the Marines (infantry) and got out about 10 years ago. A handful of guys I served with became cops or US Marshalls or prison guards. Because that was the best job they could get with their skill sets. Lots of police departments, at least back then, were actively recruiting people leaving the service.
And as a civilian I'm old enough now to have interacted with many police officers in many different contexts in many different places across the US. One or two of them were power tripping psycopaths for sure. But the VAST majority were just men and women doing a job like anyone else.
The pay is decent if you get promoted once or twice, however the pension is often incredible. Retire at 48-53, receive 80-90% of your top-grossing years for the rest of your life, with all the overtime/holidays you can accrue factored into the calculation, meanwhile as a 25-year veteran you can easily get hired as some company's head of security for 6-figures all while collecting that pension and gold-plated health benefits.
Could you explain your thinking here? Cops are, at least near me, paid quite well, have good perks, get paid a ridiculous amount of overtime, and have pensions. This, plus the power of the position, seems obviously attractive.
All cops are bastards. A belief that the institution of policing as we’ve built it is completely broken, and can’t be fixed by better training or weeding out bad apples.
It stands for "All Cops Are Bastards". It was popular among left-wing people a couple of years ago during the George Floyd protests. The expression has now fallen out of favor for mostly everyone, other than the far-left.
Point still stands: there was no good reason to make the statements because those are obvious. You said nothing of any value: "bad people who do the thing which we as a society have deemed bad are bad!"
The headline is bad but the story is somehow worse, he then used them to extort them.
FFS.
> Prosecutors recommended that Wilson receive “a sentence at the lowest end of the applicable sentencing guidelines” as a result of his guilty plea to both the “Slushygate” charge and the cyberstalking charge.
> "a series of incidents in which Wilson and other officers assaulted pedestrians by throwing beverages out of unmarked patrol vehicles, sometimes filming their exploits"
Why put all that time and energy to get naked photos of women just to extort them not for money or sex, but for more photos? Is the Internet running out of porn? This seems like a high risk low reward crime.
It is, of course, a power thing. Yes, there's an endless supply of porn, but the "real thing," especially if gathered without consent or explicitly agains their will, is "more satisfying." To be clear, not advocating for this.
Maybe it's time to reevaluate the role of police in our society. As an institution we've given them too many tools to exploit people, steal from people, do violence to people, and lie under oath.
When I read stories like this, of which there are many, or see studies that say 40% of police admit to commiting domestic violence, it sure makes me believe we've hired exactly the wrong set of people to hold power.
In the US we need to recognize what the police has become first. An unconstitutional Paramilitary organization that has grown far far far beyond the remit of a peace keeping professional organization charged with keeping an ordered society
This is primarily a result of the War on Drugs, and expanded with the War on Terror. War's are fought by a military, not a police force.
While I agree that the weapons, armor, and technology generally given to police is not appropriate (especially at small town levels, vs county sheriff, swat.. etc), trying to label them as a paramilitary organization is only going to result in eyes rolling. "Recognizing" them as such is probably not the right place to start, if you're serious in trying to convince a larger swath of the population they need to be fixed.
It is more than just the equipment that makes them paramilitary, many dept mirror their organization structure after that of a military, down to the ranks, and uniforms including Service ribbons...
I don't disagree with your premise, but if something like half the country doesn't agree that the cops are fundamentally flawed, labeling them effectively as an extremist group will only further entrench their stance that "you're crazy, we're right."
Edit: for example, I think that your other post with the five bullet points could hold up to reasonable scrutiny when presented to the pro-cop crowd, but would likely fall on deaf ears with them if you lead off with the paramilitary framing.
In a non-corrupt civil society, the solution to this problem would have to have a much stricter and more punishing criminal code for law enforcement officers - if they get special rights and protections, they should be held especially accountable, in uniform, and out of it.
Given adequate pay there should be an infinite supply of honest people that want a career in law enforcement. Raise the pay until you get what you need. I'm sure it would still cost less than the lawsuits & other overheads of having to clean up after corrupt cops.
Then remove prosecutors. Make it so anyone can prosecute or trigger the sequence of events that follow within reason. At least remove the ability for prosecutors to take funding (wtf? who thought of this as a good idea?) and take away their ability to reduce sentences or negotiate which crimes are charged. The "crimes" should be part of the trial process and agreed by a judge or the jury or whatever mechanism you can think of.
Do a bunch of the above and I would argue that would satisfy both sides of the spectrum.
The current systems definitely have problems. There are parallels with content moderation and government in general. How do you attract the right people to do the job, limit the damage from the wrong ones, and reform the system to be better for everyone?
1. Demilitarize the police force. Stop with a Ranks, and organization structure that mirrors that of a military
2. Bring back sheriff;s instead of having police forces report to a mayor or other executives, the head of the police force should be an elected position accountable to the people
3. Expand open records laws to include policy manuals for every police force, and create a Citizen Review Board that can have no more than 1 retired or former police officer, judge or prosecutor on it. Today many "Citizen" review boards are filled with insiders of the force, retired cops, family members, prosecutors,etc
4. Mandatory body camera's for all public interactions with at most a 3 strike policy where if the officer fails to record an interaction more than 3 times they are terminated
My impression (from a number of sources, over time) is that, in American small town police departments, the standard for new-officer hires is usually little more than "he's been a cop, has no serious criminal convictions on record, and seems like our kinda guy". And that serious investigation into "problematic" officers often shows a pattern of job-hopping.
A Really Basic police reform step might be to institute minimum standards for hiring police. And assign the "background checks" job to a carefully monitored central specialty office.
Eliminate the job all together and refocus the money and effort into actually improving peoples lives instead of forcing them to live in fear of incarnation/death by state employees.
At least the military has rules of engagement, which are taken seriously. A friend of mine is a combat veteran. He had utmost contempt for Special Forces and contractors because they were above the law.
I'm not sure what you're talking about... but I can tell you that 99.9% of veterans and active duty have stories plural about extreme punishment to themselves or those they served with.
Every conflict has publicised atrocities that go completely unpunished or barely punished.
The list from just the last few decades is very long.
How do you square that with your view that there are consequences for bad behaviour?
I’m sure there are lots of petty power games and actual enforcement of rules back at base most of the time, but armies have a record of behaviour that is probably worse than any other profession.
Even your description of ‘extreme punishment’ sounds like it may be crossing into something that isn’t acceptable or legal. Hazing and such like isn’t discipline or rule enforcement.
>armies have a record of behaviour that is probably worse than any other profession
I believe we were talking about current affairs not "war bad". Cops on average have significantly worse behavior than military personnel and it's not even close. When we're talking about the military that also doesn't just mean FOB's in the Middle East.
>Even your description of ‘extreme punishment’ sounds like it may be crossing into something that isn’t acceptable or legal. Hazing and such like isn’t discipline or rule enforcement.
I appreciate your altruistic tone—legality is different while serving unfortunately. You are legally not considered a citizen or protected by laws that consider citizens. That being said this, the punishment I'm talking about is not hazing. It's more of what you would consider an overly severe sentence by a Judge.
I was going to challenge the idea that any military were stipplers for rules of engagement, but you’ve challenged it in your own comment.
Some are more professional than others, but giving young guys guns and sending them into challenging situations is going to result in people getting shot.
We could fund civilian organizations to perform many of the functions of police, and do so without weapons and oppressive technology. Then reduce our police forces.
For the record, the police are a civilian organization, the fact that they like to gear up in military equipment and pretend they're in a war is part of the problem
Im going to guess we disagree about the state of policing, a couple of things you should consider though:
The Oregonian has a pretty obvious slant and bias in related reporting.
Another thing worth considering is “who’s benefiting” from all the reporting about “dirty” “homeless filled” “unsafe” Portland, as generally it’s conservative and pro police organizations that pull it out as a scare tactic to all the people in the suburbs or even more rural areas of the state.
The capital class will never allow for the elimination of police.
If they do, the result will be worse, because it will have been because they realized they could hire private security for cheaper than funding public protection.
If you don't like the unaccountability of cops, look forward to the accountability of Pinkerton private investigators.
The capital class are the folks who will be able to hire bodyguards or pay subscriptions to private police forces if we do away with public police.
Because the alternative to public policing isn't no police; it's rich folk paying the interior-territorial arm of PMCs to march around their property with body armor and high-powered rifles, while the rest of the populace sorts things out themselves. We didn't always have public policing, and one can look at history to see what the prior alternatives were.
That's an assumption. I have my concealed carry card. I can/ do/ and would continue protect myself. Other people can do the same without resorting to hiring.
There's also a long history of self protection without the use of hired goons.
> Other people can do the same without resorting to hiring
Not nearly as many as are currently protected by public police. I'm sure we can find a better alternative to the status quo than "Tell grandma she needs a license and some monthly range time." Better make sure we gift her a firearm with low kickback for Christmas; her wrist bones have been so frail these past few years...
I'm doubtful counting on the police in real time to help grandma if she's in trouble, they normally show up well after the damage is done. But you're right some people are not able to protect themselves but I'm still not convinced they would be worse off.
You are probably not part of the capital class, even if you have a lot of money. You're invested in doing your own security and don't publicly advertise whatever financial power you have in a way that might make you a target.
But realistically, you could have John Wick levels of combat skill and you would still have yawning holes in your security. You have to sleep and you can only be in one place at once, so there is only so much physical property you can fully protect. Wealthy capitalists outsource their security and mitigate their paranoia by dividing full awareness of their security surface between compartmentalized vendors, each of whom has to assume they're under surveillance by one of the others. If you are personally wealthy, congratulations, but I'm gonna guess you live somewhere with high public safety and never worry about your lawyers or accountants taking up with kidnappers or extortionists.
The capital class is not just about having a lot of money, but being able to leverage it in the acquisition of political and social power. If you have to conceal your power, do you really have it?
I don't think I would trust hired security, unless you are literally the richest person there could always be a higher bidder. The mercs could turn double at any time and you gave them the keys.
And not showcasing power, concealing or misdirecting the perception of your power or lack thereof, has been identified as an important strategy from Sun Tzu to Teddy Roosevelt.
One of the main roles of police is enforcing laws. Are you proposing to eliminate the enforcement of laws? If not, what is the group chartered with enforcing laws going to be called and how will it be different from police?
The article this comment is under is about police "breaking" the law, not enforcing it, so you can see I'm already skeptical of what you posit their role in society is. For not so important people like me the "enforcement" is non-existant, they show up after a crime has been committed, write a report, and do nothing. Not very different from no police force. The only time they actually do an investigation is when a bank is robbed or someone rich and influential is hurt. I'd rather just stop paying for the non-service I don't receive.
"In June, the DOJ announced that Wilson, 36 at the time, had pleaded guilty to a cyberstalking charge as well as to a charge related to what LMPD has called “Slushygate,” a series of incidents in which Wilson and other officers assaulted pedestrians by throwing beverages out of unmarked patrol vehicles, sometimes filming their exploits."
Me thinks there are other problems within that particular police department.
I have to say this is one area that I actually support the defund the police narrative. Privacy and security should be a sort of digital human right, and rather than have a perverse incentive to not disclose holes (even if it's simply weak handling of an indviduals own data), police should "Serve and protect" by suggesting or even helping secure an individual's privacy and security.
What might that look like? Perhaps every time Accurint is used against a target they should be emailed/mailed/delivered a report that details all the findings? That would help someone be better protected from malicious actors.
The law just needs to catch up with meat-space laws.
An example, I don't know of a Western style democracy, where it is legal for a cop to walk by your house, notice an open window, and crawl through it...
And then start searching your house, afterwards claiming "It wasn't breaking and entering! And all this stuff was just laying around!"
The law should be 100% the same for digital "stuff", in that, there needs to always, always, always be a justifiable reason, a warrant as well, before even the thought of a search can occur.
No back door usage, no "cyber tools", even if the phone is unlocked, on desk, nope! An open port(al), eg a window, doesn't give any reason for the search to be valid.
In terms of legalized back doors, and in encryption, that is 100% counter to all of the above. Case in point, if you want to know the content of someone's phone?
You can lock them up until they provide access -- after a court order requiring them to. EG, contempt of court, or some such.
(Even if the above doesn't jive in your legal locale, there are ways to enable the same. New tech, new laws, to enable the same concepts, and freedoms, and security, and privacy, our societies have known for centuries...)
> An example, I don't know of a Western style democracy, where it is legal for a cop to walk by your house, notice an open window, and crawl through it...
Police can generally use open doors (and windows?) as “probable cause” to enter in the US.
> I have to say this is one area that I actually support the defund the police narrative
"Defund the Police" makes a lot of sense when one actually looks beyond the tagline. It means taking the money from the police state to empower other social services to do their jobs. This helps police, too–most officers are ill equipped to work with the mentally ill, and this sometimes leads to shootings that should've never happened. Nobody wants that.
In a lot of the cases I think defund the police is only the right answer when treated as a zero sum scenario, and there may actually be a bunch of cases where it makes economic sense to do _both_ . (ie the outputs are of greater value than the inputs and progressively increase the pie over time) .
Yes, but what I'm pointing out is that with a fiat currency there is always the choice to fund *both* . I actually believe that in some places there will be a net benefit to funding both Social services and policing well because of the increase in asset prices (homes and businesses) . Cities should study this effect and consider increasing taxes to create a communal positive win:win:win (for city, residents, asset holders)
Funding is not binary though. The police are still funded if you allocate some of their budget to something that is not the police. Most police budgets increase every year.
Instead every year, we pass laws moving further and further away from this: "Privacy and security should be a sort of digital human right".
The government does not want you to maintain any privacy.
Last year the Biden White House and the Democratic Congress passed laws lowering reporting requirements of digital transactions to $600 - down from $20,000. So now if you receive >$600 of payments in Paypal/Venmo/etc., they will report it to the IRS. Also, they will demand your SSN because they need it to report to the IRS.
I've been exposed to the world of law enforcement a few times in my career. They're mostly good people, with a few bad apples. They're granted extraordinary authority by society and should be subjected to scrutiny from outside agencies and third parties. Defunding the police seems more likely to hurt than help the most at-risk communities. If anything, they should get more funding, and it should be used to raise hiring standards and increase in-service training time particularly around mental health awareness, civil rights (first and fourth amendment law), appropriate use of force, and de-escalation tactics. They're subjected to a lot of job related PTSD but receive almost no mental health counseling or support.
I'd also separate privacy and security (especially privacy) from the debate over funding or defunding the police. The solution to abuses like the Accurint breach is to dramatically reverse the proliferation of sensitive personal data held in the digital ecosystem. If it's not there, it can't be found and exploited.
> Defunding the police is more likely to hurt than help the most at-risk communities.
Citation needed. Policing has been tremendous, irreparable harm to disadvantaged groups. You're completely missing the point of defunding - you're almost there when you say there should be more funding. There needs to be funding around non-police community work.
Also the "few bad apples" phrase doesn't work as you're using it. The point is that a few bad apples spoils the bunch - it makes them all rotten. Which is very true even though you weren't intending it that way. Even if most cops wouldn't directly do something awful, most cops will stand aside and say nothing when they see a fellow cop do something awful. Which is literally how George Floyd died.
to be fair I believe you're also missing a citation showing better than isolated data of defunding creating better long term outcomes for sufficient stakeholders without unacceptable negative outcomes for others.
Two issues I see with your line: 1. we've been increasing funding consistently for … forever. It hasn't resulted in improved outcomes. 2. cops don't want better hiring standards (sounds like you want to fire some cops? they don't want that), better use of force standards (sounds like you want to give non-cops more ways to prosecute cops if they break a couple too many noses? nope) 3. de-escalation?? sounds like you want to put cops in the line of fire without proper tools. Nope.
Cops will always and forever defend their right to fuck shit up and not suffer the consequences. Cops will NEVER go for the ideas you suggest, and any money you send them for "training" will only turn into luxe contracts for ex-cops and extra overtime for everyone.
Cops love being cops because of what the institution is now, today. The toxicity, the freedom to do shit without consequences, the lucrative overtime, all of it. And cops are incredibly good at agitating when they are threatened – oh you want to make it so we can't shoot people? Okay we're not going to do any work at all for months. Or maybe we send someone's cousin around the way to scare you – you think that's a problem … call the cops!
The problem imo with the "mostly good people" line is that it ignores the fact that in a harmful institution most "good people" will just go along with whatever is happening. Any "good cop" who speaks up against a fellow cop gets their face bashed in (see the current case in SF where they straight up killed another cop in a training exercise …). Good people in shitty situations can make harmful choices and generally don't do the (very difficult and dangerous) work of speaking up to change things.
Sidenote: how come when a police officer does something and gets fired for it, the headlines always state 'ex police officer?' The headline reads to me as if he was not a police officer at the time of the offense but the article reads as if he was. It feels confusing on purpose.
The media loves to protect the institution of the police. If they can downplay the idea that maybe this is indicative of a broader problem with policing by saying "former" police officer, they'll jump at the chance.
The media is complicit in making police appear to be passive bystanders when whey kill people. The most egregious example is "OIS". Instead of "A police officer shot and killed a 22-year-old man on Friday," news articles will say:
* "22-year-old man dead after an officer-involved shooting on Friday."
* Or even more mangled: "An officer-involved shooting involving a 22-year-old man occurred on Friday."
This happens because cops have trained the media to do it. Cops have an informational advantage over journalists and use it.
A huge chunk, just by volume, of news comes from the local crime beat. That means journalists need to be on friendly terms with cops, because they usually have a near-monopoly on this information and can choose to give it to someone more pliant.
So that's why you get tortured headlines like 'Bystander killed by bullet in officer-involved shooting' - maybe the editor is a lawn-order authoritarian, maybe not, but they definitely don't want their sources to dry up.
Well, as the second sentence of the article says, it seems relevant here because he was able to use the application… with his law enforcement credentials.
Agreed. If the offense happens while the person was an police officer, it should read "Police officer used..." and the article should explain that they got fired for it.
Personally the ex-officer is what I believe to be the most interesting part.
On the face of it, the guy is just a random psychopath hacking women Snapchat accounts and using their explicit pictures to blackmail them.
It’s disgusting but it wouldn’t be extraordinary if he didn’t also manage to become part of the police. You have to wonder how someone with this particular psychological profile actually got hired.
The title is a bit clickbaity and misleading. The tech he used gave him information on his targets, which he then provided to a hacker. There are no details about what the hacker did, but he probably used social engineering and/or guessed passwords to gain access to the target Snapchat accounts.
The law enforcement tech in question (Accurint) was not directly used in the hacks.
It's intuitively clear that your rebuttal is a poor one made in bad faith, but we might as well get into why:
I could use an "oil-refinery" to run over someone. I have equal access to cars and gas stations to the police.
However, I couldn't use Accurint as part of a chain of tools to extract explicit photos of someone. Access to Accurint is a privilege of the police.
Without this person's abuse of the elevated societal privilege that police get, he wouldn't have been able to extort his victims. He'd still be a shitty person, with all the same motives and lack of morals, but without the power his police network gave him, he would have been impotent to achieve his goals.
Doubt. You don't need access to Accurint to pay some hacker to hack an account. What that access gave him as quicker access to information you'd otherwise need more time (and money, presumably) to obtain.
From the Accurint website: "Find out why more than 400,000 public and private organizations of all sizes rely on powerful, industry leading LexisNexis Accurint® to support their business goals.", mentioning Collections, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Law Enforcement, Legal, Private Investigations.
It very much sounds like a generic database that millions of Americans have access to. Are they all just one bad day away from hacking everything and everyone with all that access to this super advanced hacking technology? Probably not.
The website continues: "Accurint® for Law Enforcement is a cutting-edge investigative technology that can expedite the identification of people and their assets, addresses, relatives and business associates by providing instant access to a comprehensive database of public records that would ordinarily take days to collect."
All of this is fairly redundant from a "point of failure" perspective. It's fun to wax philisophical about the true capabilities of the police, but they have dozens of ways to get your personal information. If they can get their hands on your phone, many police offices own Greykeys that will smash it's way through Android and Apple security alike. Or maybe you escalate a certain "sensitive case" and ask for warrantless iCloud/Google Drive snooping permissions. Or maybe you intercept the nudes by MITMing their LTE signal. Or maybe you go to their ISP for a copy, the list is endless.
You're right that Accurint plays a fairly negligible role here, but only because the officer didn't even begin to tap the tools at their disposal. Whether that was a mistake, stupidity, or fear of retribution, the fact remains that there are many, many ways to get your personal data as a cop. Palantir/Accurint are very much the tip of this iceberg.
Of course, it's meant to show the problem in that argument. It's all part of the chain.
A more accurate headline could be "Ex cop paid hacker to hack women", but that doesn't sound quite as good. If there's a complete list of passwords for every citizen at Accurint and the hacker was just a middle man because the "ex cop" doesn't want to touch a computer but he gives them the username + password, then yes, he "used law enforcement tech to hack them". But it doesn't sound like that's what happened.
I would love to see more headlines like this. Tech isn't value neutral. Oil and ICE cars inherently, by their very nature, create the conditions for a more aggressive and dehumanizing society.
Did you read the article? Sounds to me like that "meta-data" is all accessible and the tool speeds up the process of collecting that data. I recall tools being posted to Hacker News that help a person find all social media accounts linked to a name. Doesn't sound too different.
> Accurint, a product of data brokerage firm LexisNexis Risk Solutions, is advertised to law enforcement agencies as a tool that can quicken investigations and “discover non-obvious connections between people that might not otherwise be known.” Combining databases of public and non-public information, Accurint can provide detailed information about a person, including their phone numbers, relatives and associates, employers and social media profiles associated with their email account.
And the comment thread were in is in reference to the title being clickbaity and misleading.
And trained to use this tool? It doesn't take training to type a person's name into a textfield. Try going to Google and typing in a full name and city. Chances are you'll find the address, past addresses, phone numbers and roommates and family members. Probably not for yourself because most people on this site understand tech, but try it for some of your less tech/privacy aware friends.
Not only is this dude a sleazebag, he also sounds pretty stupid. He basically announced, to lots of people, that he was committing felonies, and did it in a way which leaves a large electronic paper trail, and then brags about it to yet more people. Then, he did other stuff ("Slushygate") which draws attention to himself and his department as a source of trouble, and then presumably is surprised when he gets discovered.
But part of me is somewhat happy that the dude in question is NOT so intelligent...because i sure don't want smarter criminals, and worse yet, don't want smarter criminal cops! I want criminals and criminal cops easier to catch! (Of course, i also feel, that we as a society need to figure out how to best ensure criminals and criminal cops don't get created in the first place...or at least minimize such creation as much as possible.)
You can basically guarantee there are smarter criminal cops out there, using the same methods as this guy to steal nudes and sell them to other blackmailers rather than doing it themselves. This guy is obviously too dumb to be the first one to come up with schemes like this.
I wished someone leaked current NSA projects like Snowden did back then... We would probably be very disappointed to see how little changed and how worst it is.
* I sent a letter to Duckworth stating my concern. She copied and pasted a fear mongering response that "but bad people may use it and lindsay graham is perfectly capible of sorting through all of this".
Also, if you know better than I do.. please follow up with more resources of private data being abused by the government. (i.e. loveint, etc )
Very curious as to how this develops. Does Snapchat have a police backdoor for account access? Does LexisNexis store password leaks and sell them to the police? There are many things not being said.
I'm sure he was only able to access their data with a WARRANT. Just kidding, we all know that the protections for government to get access to our private data aren't in place. We must have WARRANTs required (with technical confirmation) before they can get access to private data.
The usual account takeover playbook involves mining socials etc for the answers to password reset questions, and given the LexisNexis mentions in the article I would guess that’s what happened.
There have been a couple episodes of Darknet Diaries that have talked about this, I think “The Pizza Problem” and “Dirty Comms” maybe? He covers some SIM swapping stuff as well, and the arms race between companies security teams and the quickly professionalizing account takeover market.
It’s a bit annoying to Google for obvious reasons, but there was a huge leak of celebrity photos in the early aughts that was similar; iCloud passwords reset because celebs used their actual pets names as their password questions etc.
I thought so too, but someone needs to set that in the message which perhaps they forget. The problem with Snapchat is that it is not E2EE (End to end encrypted). Snapchat seems to sit in a strange place of being a little more private than Facebook and other big tech messengers but not as private as E2EE messengers such as Matrix, XMPP, Briar, Signal.. I suppose it is because they revenue is ad based and they need some data for ad targeting. Their future seems very tenuous to me.
That's also why I'll never keep nude photos of myself or other people on my devices. I even refused to accept such material from girlfriends. Even if it isn't me who gets hacked, I might get blamed... I don't even want to come close to such an allegation.
