Whenever these people ask for more power in order to "stop/prevent crime", there should be a bot that replies a list of times when the police didn't act to stop crime, despite having full knowledge of the crime occuring and potential to stop it from happening.
EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report she was being kidnapped, every single time, the operators and the police officers spoke to her in an ironic and condescending tone. It took 19 hours to locate her, by which time, she was already dead. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Alexandra_M%C4%8...
Two years ago a woman in Greece phoned the police, begging for a patrol car because her ex was about to “kill her.” The officer mockingly replied, “Police cars aren’t taxis”. Seconds later she screamed, “He’s here! He’s going to kill me” (screams). She was murdered outside the police department moments later.
https://www.ertnews.gr/eidiseis/ellada/ag-anargyroi-plirofor...
Let me guess, dispatcher was NOT publicly prosecuted and jailed for life as accessory to murder?
Being bad at your job isn't the same as being an accessory.
But then again, doctors can be arrested for being bad at their job. As well as lawyers losing their license to practice. Maybe that's a standard we should hold to our supposed "public servants".
>Being bad at your job isn't the same as being an accessory.
Deliberately refusing to intervene when you have a duty to do so kind of is though, at least in a moral sense.
Although, reading the transcript in that article through a translator, it does not seem all that bad. The taxi comment is very early in the conversation, and the operator does immediately offer to send a patrol car to her home.
The operator also stays on the line, keeps collecting more information and does really not seem to do anything obviously wrong.
Even if they'd immediately acquiesced to her request to send a patrol car to drive her home, the car probably wouldn't have been there on time anyway.
yes
Even better, in the US, the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime (unless that person is in government custody). The courts have upheld this time and again.
Per the DOJ, there's also this:
>An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim's Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation.
>To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so.
Unfortunately the courts have repeated ruled that "aware of the Constitutional violation" means knowing that the exact action being observed had previously been ruled a violation of Constitutional rights. It's essentially impossible to prove, which is one of the reasons we don't see that offense prosecuted.
In the Chauvin case all three of the bystanders were sent to prison by federal courts specifically for civil rights violations stemming from their failure to intervene as Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in front of them.
Exception that proves that rule. It took national protests over months, during COVID, to drive that case through to conviction.
QI applies to civil cases. IIRC, Chauvin didn’t face a civil case and was not made to pay damages for violations of anybody’s rights. Nor did the other officers.
If a cop violates your rights, you just have to pray the DA will prosecute criminal charges. But you still won’t get an monetary damages from the cop. You might talk the state into settling.
> you just have to pray the DA will prosecute criminal charges.
Cynically this probably only happened in the Chauvin case because the state would have been burned to the ground otherwise.
Maybe folks need to get in the street more...
Who represents the government in these cases?
Generally speaking, the way it's supposed to work is the local prosecutors will start the process. That, unfortunately, isn't something they like to do because they have to work with police departments. If they fail to do their job, theoretically the next step is that the FBI gets involved. But, doesn't seem like today's FBI is doing much beyond prosecuting Trump's political enemies.
This is the reason why I've long believed we need a check both federal and local to police that is completely divorced from regular prosecution. We need lawyers/investigators whose sole purpose is investigating and prosecuting police at pretty much all levels of the government. The federal government theoretically has that with the office of inspectors general.
The government prosecutes the government and is judged by the government and a jury screened under voir dire by two government lawyers?
Kind of like when a robber comes to your house, you have him arrested, and when you go to court you look up and he is the one swinging the gavel.
Of course, interesting the cop has to know there is a constitution violation. Somehow ignorance of the law is always an excuse for the cops but the citizenry must know all 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000+ laws and by god if they forgot one they are fucked.
> the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime
This gets misrepresented on the Internet all the time. What this really means is that you can't sue the city for incompetent policemen, which is the case in basically every country. That only punishes the taxpayers after all. What is different about other countries is that they are much better at firing incompetent police.
In some (EU) countries, as a public officer/agent you can actually get prosecuted (civil or criminal proceedings per case), in cases of blatant or willful incompetence. (Think of the levels of gross wanton disregard/negligence.) (There is also the legal vehicle of insubordination.)
For instance, in Greece https://www.lawspot.gr/nomothesia/pk/arthro-259-poinikos-kod... (N.B. the bar of wilfulness in this section in the Greek criminal code is much lower than the corresponding notion of wilfulness in the U.S.)
The bar is high, of course, and yet people have historically managed to get prosecuted, lose their jobs, and go to prison.
I think the problem in the U.S. is, ironically, the power of police unions in a fragmented police force (city, territory, county, etc.) ecosystem, coupled with the lack of unified, express state and federal statutes to enforce a standard of care and competence.
Add to that that peace officer-specific state statutes (e.g., describing manslaughter while on duty) are written in such a way that, as a matter of law, it becomes a herculean task to tick all the boxes to successfully preserve a conviction on appeal. It is truly troubling. (I am hopeful, as this can be solved by the U.S. legislature, which I think we have a lot of reasons to demand to be done.)
The case in NY was police setup a sting on the subway to catch a serial stabber. Instead of stopping him they stood by and watched him attack several innocent bystanders.
They were sued for incompetence. For the failed sting.
The two police officers who stood and watched him get attacked were ruled to be immune because they had no duty to protect him.
Point being, if police see you getting attacked, they have no duty to /stop/ that from happening. Their only duty is to take a report once they feel safe enough to approach.
If you see two police on the corner and think "this is a safe area" you'd completely be operating on faith in their character.
And then chain that with the ridiculous "clearly established" bar for qualified immunity and it's nigh on impossible to hold police in the US accountable for what most citizens would recognize as clear malfeasance.
If you see two police on the corner and think...
Not to speak highly of the NYPD - but it is the character of most violent criminals to refrain from attacking you when police officers are standing close at hand.
There's a famous video of an apple store robbery and the thief walks past a cop on the way out. Police don't do anything anymore.
well the thing about robbing stores nowadays is that crime has been decriminalized. therefore people performing these non-criminal acts no longer have to suffer the stigma of being labeled "criminal" and become good citizens, or so the thinking goes
Depends on the violent crime. I've been nearly run over in crosswalks dozens of times in view of police, sometimes when they're in traffic as well and could easily pull over the perpetrator. It's never happened.
That only punishes the taxpayers after all.
I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers. We can jail negligent or reckless public officials, the financial costs of investigating and compensating people are an economic incentive to promulgate better standards in the first place.
> I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers.
I don't understand. This seems contradictory. If the problem is that we're trying to resolve too many grievances with currency, then doing so does nothing but hurt the taxpayer. Americans are already significantly more litigious against police, yet you get significantly more misconduct. The same goes for doctors, drivers, etc.
I believe they means, the consequence of the lawsuit can be the cop going to jail.
No. It literally means the police have no obligation to help anyone.
The can (and do) stand around with theirs thumbs a up their asses while bad shit happens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
See also uvalde schoool shooting where they did jack shit while kids were executed en mass.
See this:
THE SUPREME COURT: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE; Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
Which wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact they do have an obligation to stop anyone from protecting other people from crime (see Uvalde, where orders from above were to block parents from saving their children).
> (unless that person is in government custody)
Someone please correct me, but do they ever much bother to protect those in custody?
Their main method of "Protecting" people in custody has been deemed a form of torture called Solitary Confinement.
They certainly seem to be willing to spend a lot to keep Luigi Mangione safe.
That's tangential... they can be held liable if they fail to protect somebody that is in custody. They generally cannot be held liable for failure to protect a member of the public.
Generally speaking, yes. I have worked with the corrections side of law enforcement in the US and don't internationally for quite a few years at this point. The correction side is a different beast than the police side in many ways, so I definitely want to meet clear that my personal experience is limited in scope to that. However, generally speaking I have seen that the majority of corrections staff take protection very seriously. There are individual officers that can be scum, and ideally they should be bounced out of there. But realistically, it's a human problem. I've known plenty of software engineers that were cavalier with people's personal information in ways I think can be just as damaging. On the whole though, the majority of software engineers I know take protecting that information quite seriously.
Or a bot that lists out all the times police have been given these powers only for them to be abused.
Flock is a great example. Story after story in the local news (only there for some reason) about police officers being disciplined or fired because they stalked people using the flock system.
Meanwhile not a single story where a major case was cracked by, and could only have been cracked by, the flock camera system.
Does anyone even compile these into a site?
All the technology and clearance rates are the same as they ever were.
In some parts of the world it's well known if you actually want the police to show up, just claim there are lots of drugs or cash at the location. That will actually get the police excited since they stand to gain from it. It's not clear why the police would care someone is being raped/murdered since they cannot profit from that. Although at 15 I would not expect someone to be wise enough to the world to figure that out.
From my memory this case can actually be used to support spyware, I remember all the media complaining "how is it possible that the police or the secret service can't instantly locate a phone very precisely" , same when that airplane crashed and the people were calling for help but the authorities could not get the coordinates and searched for hours , the media was demanding that the police or other services have the technical ability to locate any person in distress.
It is rather jarring to be stuck in the woods with Google Maps offering turn-by-turn navigation back home while the emergency room only gets a vague triangulated position (which might be wrong entirely if the signal gets reflected off of something).
Of course these days such a system has been added. Bonus feature of the (at least American) feature: the system can be activated remotely, even if you're not actually calling in an emergency. The European ETSI spec is pretty funny, it basically comes down to sending an SMS to a Secret Number with a Secret Format containing your coordinates to prevent abuse (both can be found very easily); at least that supposedly only activates when you dial the emergency services.
Of course it would've been spun that way, and maybe it would've worked had it not been for the police mocking the victim in the phone logs
There’s a massive lack of gardai (the Irish word for police) in Ireland, and you’ll be waiting for the better part of an hour if you call them. But by all means, let’s forget about the types of basic “safety in your own home” type of policing and focus on creating a cyberpolice force instead.
I know you want to think, or have been told to think that the reason this happens is because they need more cops.
Brother let me assure you, more cops will not help. I have lived in cities with more than twice as many cops per 10k. Both times I actually needed one it took over 3 hours.
They were never intended to provide basic safety to you in your home. That's your job. Their job is to deal with what comes after that.
You've missed the sarcasm in the OP.
On a side note, the suggestion that police numbers don't affect crime is obviously false. We've seen what an arbitrarily large police presence does to Washington DC this year with the national guard deployment.
> They were never intended to provide basic safety to you in your home.
Uh actually i do think police presence has a deterrent effect on crime. In fact, number of police on the street is one of the strongest measures for reducing crime!
What is strange is that this happens in several countries at the same time.
I never found out why this is the case, because there can be many explanations. In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy. This is functional erosion of rights. I don't know of many states that counter that trend.
Sounds more like a lobby thing. Once a government finds a new "recipe" to be worked out with global vendors, meaning, a new way to allocate budget with a strong social justification (e.g. protect children, fight terrorism etc.), governments from other nations jump into the matter and literally copy/paste it locally. In short, whoever comes up with a creative idea to allocate public budget will serve as the basis for others to copy.
Every Western government is receiving the same briefings from its intelligence and counterintelligence agencies: these powers are needed in case the third world war starts.
I think western governments want these tools just to maintain order, they used to rely a lot on their ability to manufacture consent among their populous but the Internet allows people to discover inconvenient truths that threaten the old order. Everyone used to be pretty happy with the appearance of freedom and democracy in the western world because they didn't know any better and mainstream media was tightly controlled so they couldn't find out either, now they're learning they're neither free nor have any say in their governance from alternative media so here come the crackdowns on free speech and any form of protest or dissent.
They've been pushing for this stuff for ever, at least 20 years ago.
Different countries have made on-and-off efforts over the decades, but I'm explaining why they're all doing it right now.
Intelligence agencies have seen the writing on the wall with allowing hostile countries unfettered access to their own citizens minds on social media for a while, I would imagine
You actually mean you want to abolish freedom of speech. Sure. But then we lose the moral high ground of going to wars because we have democracy.
I don't want to do anything. I think it's a problem with no moral solution. When Elon turned on location data in Twitter and everyone saw all the homegrown American Maga influencer accounts were foreign it should have opened eyes but Noone really cared. You have a choice between closing the internet or letting them brain rot your populace in the open. It's not a theoretical power, nato and the US European led world order is on the cliff of dissolving and none of our adverseries had to fire a single shot at us.
You can't see me but i rolled my eyes.
OK, what's your solution? Continue to let every foreign power spew propaganda unhindered? Do you find the dissolution of nato by an extremist foreign sponsored American party less serious than I do? The mere concept of America openly threatening invasion on nato would have been completely unthinkable a year ago.
It's not strange. They can read technology news like anyone else, and vendors of security tools do sales campaigns like any other industry. Media says 'cybercriminals are getting away with it using this one weird trick,' people grumble about the police being useless, police say they can't stop the cybercriminals without spyware, media runs story about sympathetic pensioners losing everything to scammers because police are letting them run free, voters demand politicians do something etc etc. etc.
Also, y'all need to recognize that unbreakable personal security/ privacy/ paranoia is just not the default social position in most societies. There isn't a big conspiracy, it's a reflection of social mores we disagree with, either ideologically or through recognition that policing is often ineffective and corrupt.
Why is that strange? Technology's proliferation decentralizes political power nexuses, making it a near-existential threat to tyrants^Wgovernments everywhere.
conversely
>Technology's proliferation centralizes political power nexuses
Closed-source propriety systems certainly have this effect (subjugation), but this is not the Free technology I am talking about.
Data and code are not the same thing. "Free technology" is just as free to enslave you as closed technology is.
> Data and code are not the same thing.
feels a stir in the sea. The Lisp and Haskell people died a little inside
> What is strange is that this happens in several countries at the same time.
Probably a coincidence that it all happens just before the World Economic Forum summit in Davos. It could be they sent the new agenda a bit earlier to allow governments to prepare themselves.
People really overestimate the WEF's influence. It's basically a fairly boring corporate conference that consists of side means and some side parties. There might be some shenanigans happening, but that happens at "nerdy" GDC as well. Years ago, we had to "invite" Register, DarkReading, SDxCentral, etc "reporters" to free booze sessions during RSA to keep them happy in the era before Nikesh Arora called out conferences like RSA for their bullshit and their ecosystem of PR leaches like The Register (notice how they've reduced their snark about HPE becuase they have a partner content relationship now).
Finally, most police forces and interior ministries have had access to offensive security tools (often called "spyware") for over a decade now.
In a network diagram the WEF is a hyperconnected node.
Dafuq? Within Davos you have additonal segmentation based on badge and sponsor type - not all Davos attendees are equals.
The whole point of davos is networking. It's not just principals there but also their staff.
I mean, because the world is connected via a large global network with instant communication.
It's kind of like asking "Why did the world kind of destabilize politically during the 1910s". Massive technological change swept the world and fast travel changed the dynamics of the world.
Our world has changed from one of bulky analog data (paperwork, pictures, remote places) to one where any information can be digitized and sent anywhere in the past 2 decades. This data can be stored pretty much forever. This is as much of a change as what occurred in WWI and WWII. The political dynamics of the world are completely different in the data regime. He who controls the data controls the world.
This is a very difficult trend to counter, just because you decide not to control said data, doesn't mean that others aren't capturing that same data and using it against you, in which they'll take power.
There is a distinct possibility that rights and ever growing capabilities of technology are fundamentally incompatible. This is going to present a growing problem for human societies.
I believe the main reason is the current "situation" with the US. European agencies and law enforcement have relied heavily on NSA signal intelligence via low-level intelligence exchange and it has become more and more clear that this is a dangerous dependence. In a sense, the turn towards codifying and legalizing surveillance had already started with the Snowden revelations because at that time many people realized that the usual practices were basically illegal and wanted more legal certainty. At the same time, companies like Apple have increased device security a lot over the past decade.
That's my take on it. I'd love to hear other explanations. It's indeed curious why so many EU countries are pushing for increased surveillance so heavily.
> . In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy.
You found out why.
Feels like we're headed back towards governments attempting to control the sharing and usage of cryptographic algorithms again.
always has been
So, it is always going to be a cat and mouse game. As long as the rules are clear let the game begin. Just dont try to tilt the game in your favor by using legal threats (ie Chat control and alike).
Anyone can try to break encryption, why can't the police force? But dont say others arent allowed to use malware/Spyware - or malware/spyware countermeasures - if you are using it yourself.
You already have (theoretical) access to state resources. You dont need more help
European governments see their future survival absolutely requiring a draconian level of surveillance and repression.
This isn't about European governments particularly. Cops everywhere are like this, it's a personality type. Of course they want to use tools that will make their job easier, so would you if you were a cop.
Cops might push it. The governments wouldn't otherwise go along with but for the lebanonization happening in western Europe.
Lol it's not about making their job easier.
How very... British of them.
Poor trolling attempt.
2/10 Must try harder.
ouch...
I'm so tired of these...
Is there really no way we can make it technologically impossible for them to exfiltrate user data?
You can make it technologically impossible, but they can also come and arrest you just for using such technology. So its not really a technical problem, its a social/political one.
Sure, but then they need to send a physical person, which is expensive and impossible to scale. Making it extremely expensive is probably good enough.
(Feels like we have this same discussion over and over on HN.)
I don't understand this take. There is no real way in which a private person can make law enforcement "more expensive". The government can always find means as long as it is supported by a sufficiently big fraction of its people.
1 person using encryption vs 1 million people using encryption.
Sure, they won't go out and arrest all one million, but from an individual perspective it's basically security by obscurity.
Once that's the case, otherwise legal activities (e.g. protesting, or making political statements) run the risk of making you a target. Law enforcement can then punish you for your legal activity by selectively enforcing this other law.
The resulting situation is one where everyone knows to some extent "you better shut up if you know what's good for you", and puts a chilling effect on otherwise legal forms of civic engagement.
You might point out that there are already laws on the books that let them do this, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind another.
It needs to be done on both fronts.
Privacy-conscious apps and communications tools need to be developed, and we need to build the consensus that privacy is important.
edit: Anyone know why Briar doesn't have the feature for known contacts to be a "courier" for other contacts?
Background: Briar is the encrypted messaging app that works over tor, local wifi and bluetooth. If Alice sends a message to Charles but she isn't connected, the app will hold it until it detects Alice and Charles are in proximity.
My desired feature: If Bob is a verified contact with both Alice and Charles, Briar should be able to hand the message from Alice to Bob, and then deliver it to Charles.
I don't think there's a way with a phone that people would actually be willing to use. At some point it has to be decrypted to be displayed to the user and there's always the chance there's a flaw somewhere in the stack from hardware to OS to app etc that will have a gap to exfiltrate the data.
Avoiding centralised services is generally a good start. You could also do something like encrypt any messages through PGP even if the service you're using is already "e2e encrypted" like iMessage or signal
There are no technical solutions to human problems. This has been explained over and over again, most famously in Randall Munro's XKCD comic where the secret police resort to hitting someone with a $5 wrench until they give up the password.
If you're in a repressive state and you're worried about your data being exfiltrated the best security practice of all is not to create records of illegal activity. If you have to store such material, don't keep it on a communications device, put it on an external storage device, hide it somewhere outside your home, and don't tell anyone about it.
The problem is they'll legislate for the providers to insert back doors, negating cryptographic hardness.
They have to make custom software illegal at some point.
They don't have to make it illegal. They can just create all kinds of barriers like only allowing government approved OSes for essential services, and then using custom software can become grounds for suspicion and subject you to searches, etc.
I'm certain this is the direction we are all heading, unfortunately.
Governments will sanction the major proprietary OSes and compel Apple, Google, Microsoft to participate in their surveillance programs, and those will have remote integrity attestation and will be the only hardware and software you will be able to use to access essential services and the internet as whole, most likely.
The usage of alternative software won't be outright illegal, but will get you on a watchlist. Like you said, they don't need to make other software illegal, just make circumventing the blocks illegal.
They can't arrest everyone, but, it's one more gray area thing that can and will be used against you should the government ever decide they have a bone to pick with you specifically so you can get away with it for a long time, until suddenly you don't.
Given how many of these stories have been coming out, I'm sure they're considering it.
https://xkcd.com/538/ User data can only be as safe as the user.
Ireland wants to turn their police into the CIA.
s/CIA/NSA/g (probably)
That's terrible, people really gonna stand for this??
That's terrible, people really gonna lie down for this??
Oh look, it's the copy of the UK acting up again!