36 ms·

Watched: Police are stockpiling databases with personal information

231 points by kogus 10y ago

simbalion 10y ago
Welcome to 1984.
HillaryBriss 10y ago
It's hard to put this into context. On one hand, we feel anxious if our government has more information about us than we believe they need. We feel that, in a truly free society, the government should keep its nose out of our day to day lives. On the other hand, we demand that our government somehow prevent crimes and catch criminals, ensure that people treat each other fairly in day to day life, business dealings, even personal relationships. And for-profit corporations have huge databases about our commercial (and other?) activities -- and we have few if any legal tools to force them to stop collecting data or to purge those databases.
- DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  Yes. I know how you feel. As a libertarian, I'm extremely upset at the police and security state we've created. This has to stop. At the same time, if a major crime occurs and there were indications it was going to happen, police are not supposed to be caught flat-footed. So I would expect any professional police force to have files on groups and people that they believe could cause major crimes. I also think they should have contingency plans for when major threats happen. The problem is that computers have taken away any definition of "reasonable" If J. Edgar Hoover wanted to detail a platoon of FBI agents to monitor MLK I feel that it was a waste of time. Hell, it was probably also a travesty of justice. Hoover should have been fired for it. But he could only do that so many times before he ran out of agents. The physicality of the system made it self-limiting. Now we're living in an era where those limits are gone. There is no limiting factor any more. In the U.S., we need constitutional guidance here -- some agreement on the limits we expect the government to observe. I thought we were clear enough about that the first time around, but the courts seem to think that the plain language of our Constitution and Bill of Rights has so many loopholes and odd provisions that it doesn't actually do any of the things it was supposed to do. That's gotta be fixed. I don't see a solution outside of that.
  - ChuckMcM 10y ago
    Perhaps the solution is bilateral surveillance which is to say a database of all the interactions of everyone who works in government which can be consulted by people outside of government when they suspect the government employee may be engaged in criminal activity. I mention that because there is mounting evidence that police wearing always on body cams really curbs complaints about police brutality and excessive force. Now some of that is clearly people who realize that if their behavior is shown they won't be able to sustain the argument that the police action was unwarranted. However, evidence is accumulating that police are less likely to engage in risky or borderline unethical behavior when they know they are being monitored. The bottom line is better governance with fewer complaints and that is a good thing for everyone involved.
    - hx87 10y ago
      It's a good proposal, and needs to be extended to government contractors (and subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors, ...) and all those who work for them, otherwise it would just provide another excuse to contract everything out.
  - talmand 10y ago
    Preventing crime is not a primary function of the police.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  That dilemma is as old as our republic. At its founding we decided it's better to let guilty people go free than to put innocent people behind bars. In the beginning we valued Liberty above all else, as the ultimate virtue of our country. It appears now we value security more, or else these types of things wouldn't be tolerated. History tells us this is a mistake but maybe we haven't yet learned the lesson.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    History isn't over, and I think it's worth considering the possibility that threat environments change, too. Perhaps there isn't a single, simple criterion that fits all cases.
  - fixermark 10y ago
    I agree with the overall assessment of goals, but I don't think I agree that the surveillance tools are at odds with them. > At its founding we decided it's better to let guilty people go free than to put innocent people behind bars Ubiquitous surveillance record makes it easier to discern the facts of an event. It makes it less likely that the innocent will be put behind bars (relative to the alternative solutions of faulty witness memory and after-the-fact narrative construction).
    - mindcrime 10y ago
      Ubiquitous surveillance record makes it easier to discern the facts of an event. It makes it less likely that the innocent will be put behind bars (relative to the alternative solutions of faulty witness memory and after-the-fact narrative construction). That might be true IF the "ubiquitous surveillance record" was gathered, maintained, and monitored by a truly neutral party. But it's not. It's maintained by the State, who are your adversary if you are charged with a crime (and possibly at other times, but that's a different topic). Anyway, if the State owns the surveillance and they decide to target you, do you expect that - as a defendant - you will be given full and unfettered access to an unaltered record of events? History suggests that this is not the case.
- hx87 10y ago
  There is a way out of this dilemma--sacrifice privacy in favor of freedom by making all surveillance feeds and all data mining resources and link to them public. If the average person can't have privacy, then no one should have privacy.
imroot 10y ago
I have a friend who is a sergeant in the LAPD. She was asking me a question and followed it up with something about trying to not seem stalkerish, and I made a joke about "isn't that what NCIC (National Crime Information Computer) is for?" She comes back a few minutes later and tells me that she finds much more information on the internet than she could ever find through NCIC.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- pc86 10y ago
  > National Crime Information Computer Center, not Computer
davidhariri 10y ago
"Over the next six years, police recorded over 1000 interactions with this man." With holidays, that's conservatively an average of one interaction every 2 days. How is that possible? Am I the only one who finds that shocking?
- 67726e 10y ago
  From the article, it sounds like they record every single innocuous interaction. The city portion of Charleston is fairly small, confined to a small peninsula. Given the small size and not-so-large population, there are actually quite a few well-known bums in the town that one would just run into every day or so walking to and from work, usually in one of the major areas of the city. So imagine if you've got cops working the streets, it's totally conceivable that one or more officers run into one of those guys several times a day.
- eternalban 10y ago
  Community policing. Beat cop. 1 a day is even possible. You should be alarmed if such cases stop being outliers and start approaching the mean i.e. papers please.
  - DanBC 10y ago
    We don't know how far down the long tail that one person is. How many people are having unwelcome weekly interaction with police?
    - eternalban 10y ago
      That was my point, exactly. [edit: to be clear, that a beat cop may have to deal with a handful of local louts, for exmple. But not the entire neighborhood.] Doesn't our Justice Department have people monitoring this sort of metric?
    - pc86 10y ago
      I would wager that most people who don't work in the criminal justice system and yet have weekly interactions with the police probably describe it as "unwelcome."
reconciliation 10y ago
At some point there will be a really massive fuck up, that will resist the usual cover ups and smear campaigns that have been used to silence the fuck ups that manage to boil to the surface these days. Only when that one really bad thing finally happens, and doesn't just go away; when it refuses to be swept under the carpet, only then will anything change. Either that, or it will break us, and usher in a new unstoppable tyrrany. Think about it like that.
srgseg 10y ago
If it's impossible to reverse the tide, what if this could become a database of innocence instead of a database of guilt? Instead of cops pulling over some poor innocent guy every few weeks because he has a suspicious looking beaten up car, instead the police computer would green flag the person. The records might show that: 1. CCTV shows the person has not been driving in the vicinity of any crime they might currently be looking for suspects in connection with 2. The person has been stopped before, but was not involved in any criminal activity. This prevents unintentional repeated harassment. 3. The person has no known associations with any people involved in criminal activity. Just like Uber, we'd be glad people were recording feedback about us because it helps people get a ride even in a high crime area where taxis would be otherwise afraid or unwilling to service.
- trendia 10y ago
  If we had a benevolent artificial intelligence and the data were locked away from any humans, I'd be OK with that. Unfortunately, humans ruin a lot of things that would otherwise be pretty good. For instance, this kind of data would also make it far easier to frame someone, since you'd be able to craft your story around the narrative of their actions.
  - fluxquanta 10y ago
    This sounds almost exactly like the plot of the anime "Psycho-Pass". The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the Psycho-Pass of every citizen in range. The sensors measure mental state, personality, and the probability that the citizen will commit crimes, alerting authorities when someone exceeds accepted norms. To enforce order, the officers of the Public Safety Bureau carry hand weapons called Dominators. The weapons themselves only activate if the intended target has a sufficiently high "crime coefficient", as dictated by a central AI. It's pretty interesting (if you can tolerate a pretty high level of graphic animated violence). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass
- packetized 10y ago
  Pulling someone over for having a 'suspicious looking beaten up car' is part of the problem. While I applaud you looking at this from a practical, real-world point of view (I've been the guy in that beaten up car, an '83 Cutlass Supreme), I believe that you might have forgotten about that whole "presumption of innocence" thing granted to residents of the US.
chewbacha 10y ago
Either I'm numb to all the "data" that's out there or I don't really understand the threat. But I'm feeling a bit "meh" about all of these reports. Don't get me wrong, the use of personal data for vendettas and retaliation is clearly wrong and should be prosecuted. So yea, I don't like misuse of data, but simply having data that they collected no longer seems bad to me. And if it was warrantless then it's inadmissible anyhow, right? If you don't want them "taking" your info, just don't speak to them. That's your right. And if you make the data publicly available on the internet, they scrap it, and you get upset, isn't that the same as distributing free pamphlets and getting annoyed at the police for taking a couple and photocopying them?
- splawn 10y ago
  This comment made my knee jerk very hard, but despite that I think I might have to agree with you, kudos.
- AlexandrB 10y ago
  > And if it was warrantless then it's inadmissible anyhow, right? This only matters if the government collecting the data continues to be relatively democratic and free. That can change nearly in an instant given the right circumstances (see the crackdown following the coup attempt in Turkey) and all that gathered information then becomes a great way to go fishing for "undesirables". The nonchalant attitude of many towards this proves George Santayana's adage true: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- gambiting 10y ago
  I come from a country where we had the secret police(Poland) and everyone knew that there was an archive somewhere where most citizens had a folder with whatever the police gathered on them. Any telephone conversation always started with the operator announcing "this conversation is monitored, this conversation is monitored". Letters would be opened randomly and read. And you know what - vast majority of people didn't care. They accepted this as reality they lived in and that was it. Well, almost 30 years on after fall of communism, these folders are still coming back and haunting people. People find facts about themselves or about others, that shouldn't have been collected in the first place. Not to mention the old story of completely innocent data that actually lead to people dying(governments before WW2 collected census information about religion, and that very information was used by the nazis to hunt and kill jews). My point is - even if right now it seems like collecting this data is harmless, you never know how it's going to be used in the future. Governments fall all the time, wars happen, people look where they shouldn't. The less data the government collects the better.
qrendel 10y ago
I was a bit shocked, though I probably shouldn't have been, to notice recently that police in the local airport all carry assault rifles now. Assault rifles. I'm not that knowledgeable about guns, so I'm not sure what kind exactly - maybe M-16s? A few years ago there was something about military personnel being stationed with unloaded rifles in airports as part of the War on Terror(TM). I now imagine that was to desensitize us to this future - everyday cops carrying loaded assault rifles in public all the time. The U.S. really has become a police state.
- 67726e 10y ago
  My office is in the same building as a police substation. Every day when I leave it's the officers' shift change, so I'm walking while a bunch of officers are milling about, holding M4s in the parking lot. I own and shoot firearms, but it's a bit fucking insane.
- knz 10y ago
  > The U.S. really has become a police state. Seeing heavily armed police (with actual assault rifles not AR-15's) and paramilitary members (the Carabinieri and Gendarmerie etc) is much more common in Europe than the US and been the case for decades.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Full automatic fire isn't really that interesting of a distinction. 30-40 shots spread over a few minutes is probably going to do more damage than 30-40 shots in a minute. And if you consider how a police officer acting in the public interest is going to use it, there isn't really any difference at all between automatic and semiautomatic fire.
    - pc86 10y ago
      The only benefit of automatic fire is for suppression. How often are police officers in situations requiring suppressive fire? There is no need for police officers to have automatic weapons during the course of their duties.
mindcrime 10y ago
I think it's time for the return of a "reverse intelligence agency", something like the old Government Information Awareness[1] idea. We need an intelligence agency for the people that monitors government agents of all sorts, and integrates all the open data databases, to make it easier for us to monitor the government. First, because transparency is the ultimate disinfectant, and two, because once they see how it feels to have the shoe on the other foot, it might change the way certain people feel about ubiquitous surveillance. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Information_Awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Information_Awarene...
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  The general term for this is Sousveillance.
  - mindcrime 10y ago
    Wow, I haven't heard that term in so long, I'd forgotten about it. You're 100% right though. And the Wikipedia article on the subject is quite interesting. One thing I didn't realize was that Steve Mann coined the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
  - notyourwork 10y ago
    Thanks, taught me a new word today.
  - throwaway7767 10y ago
    Sousveillance is much more broad. It doesn't just mean watching government officials, it's watching everyone. Essentially "democratising" spying. Watchdogs for government, absolutely, great idea that I support 100%. Sousveillance sounds like a horrible dystopia where your nosy judgemental neighbour down the street broadcasts your house guests on youtube to demonstrate the moral decay of society.
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
rb808 10y ago
Interesting how gun records are forbidden to be computerized. NRA knows how to avoid big brother. http://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns http://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-man... >> That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  Worth noting that records for people in Texas with a License To Carry are computerized - a cop will know it when they pull you over and run your plates. Not saying this is a bad thing, just worth noting.
  - hga 10y ago
    I'm sure that's true in any state with a CCW licensing regime, I know it is in Missouri, which has a system cutely named MULES. But those are set up to deter fishing expeditions, for they contain a lot of sensitive information, such as arrest records as well as charges, convictions, outstanding warrants, etc. More infamously, some states share that info, Florida with Maryland, where travelers have been pulled over and hassled about whether they've got a gun, which due to the FOPA of '86 safe passage protections, probably doesn't even apply when they're just passing through the state (in the case mentioned below, the gun owner has no legal way to possesses it in NJ, so left it behind in his safe). See e.g. http://www.tbo.com/list/columns-tjackson/jackson-gun-owner-unarmed-unwelcome-in-maryland-20140112/ http://www.tbo.com/list/columns-tjackson/jackson-gun-owner-u... which is what a police state looks like.
- knz 10y ago
  Do we still trust that these types of rules are being followed (particularly in the context of mass surveillance)? If I recall correctly, the public has been told on many occasions that the NSA/FBI/local police were not doing something only to be told years later that this was not the case. Laws such as this just highlight how asinine gun policy can be. Allowing a paper trail but not allowing digital records doesn't really benefit gun owners (Completing a 4473 would be a lot easier if they could verify that you are already a responsible gun owner) or make policing gun laws any safer (straw purchases would be easier to track if the records were digitized).
dmfdmf 10y ago
As the article mentioned, these field contact cards have been around for a long time. A few were even filed on me in my youth ;-). The problem is when it was a simple card system there was an inherent time limit on the usefulness of the info. The police officer had to recall filling out a card that might tie someone to a crime. And I doubt that cards were kept in perpetuity since the value of the info (for criminal investigations) fell rather quickly over months or a year. In a major case, such as a murder, investigators might do a blind search of all the cards filed in some area around the time of the murder to find leads, suspects or potential witnesses so the card system was a valuable tool for legitimate police action. Now that everything is computerized there is no longer any time limit on the data and the potential for abuse is now becoming clear. So the time limit on the collected data that was implicit has to be made explicit as a matter of policy instead of tacitly due the limits of the system for the collection and use of the info. The real problem is that explicitly drawing that line is forcing us to clearly define the nature of government and what "freedom" actually means.
pweissbrod 10y ago
QUESTION for Americans: If you approach a police officer and ask for directions (or any context where youre not a suspect) and the police officer asks for your ID can you legally refuse to comply? *Edit: This has happened to me before. After politely asking 'why do you need my ID?' things escalated. I complied out of fear of being detained.
- johndubchak 10y ago
  Yes, of course. You are under no obligation to share that information in such an encounter.
  - pweissbrod 10y ago
    Thanks. The police officer made it seem quite to the contrary. It's a shame that one of the police officer's core duties _isnt_ clarifying finer points of laws even when it works in criminal's favor.
    - pc86 10y ago
      The ELI5 is that the police officer's duty is to enforce the law, not explain it. The slightly (but not much) more nuanced explanation is that 99% of police officers do not know the finer points of laws because they don't need to. They know just enough to get an idea of whether or not a person has broken a law. Once they get enough information to arrest someone, it's up to the DA if a law was actually broken and if they want to pursue charges. It's not generally relevant to the police officer's day-to-day interactions with the public to have enough knowledge about the law to clarify the finer points of it to a layman, as they're mostly laymen themselves. Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not saying this is the ideal, just that this is how it is currently in the US. The police pack the pipeline to the DA and the DA decides which cases to pursue (press charges) and which to ignore (release).
  - runako 10y ago
    Based on the details of the encounter, I would disagree. The police repeatedly (apparently) asked for his ID and escalated the encounter. Based on those facts, I would not assume that I was not being detained and was free to go. The Supreme Court has held that even if the police have a flawed understanding of the laws and rules they are enforcing, their flawed interpretation governs the interaction on the street. So what the office believed matters, and that in turn guides his/her behavior. If you're in the right, you can usually be vindicated after a brief trip through the criminal justice system (arrest, jail, court). But it's guaranteed to ruin your day. Safest bet would have been to ask "Am I free to go?" to find out.
joesmo 10y ago
So, basically, don't ever talk to the police, don't even say 'hi'. There's no such thing as a casual conversation with the police. They should be avoided at all costs. Isn't this common sense? That's the first thing I'd teach my children.
- criddell 10y ago
  Good lord, I'd hate to live in your world.
strathmeyer 10y ago
Our University required the police to collect and write down the names of everyone they ever spoke to... so they could prove they weren't being racially biased?
chadlavi 10y ago
> A person can end up in one of these databases by doing nothing more than sitting on a public park bench or chatting with an officer on the street. So does this mean that public park benches are under constant video surveillance?

231 points by kogus 10y ago

Welcome to 1984.

It's hard to put this into context. On one hand, we feel anxious if our government has more information about us than we believe they need. We feel that, in a truly free society, the government should keep its nose out of our day to day lives. On the other hand, we demand that our government somehow prevent crimes and catch criminals, ensure that people treat each other fairly in day to day life, business dealings, even personal relationships. And for-profit corporations have huge databases about our commercial (and other?) activities -- and we have few if any legal tools to force them to stop collecting data or to purge those databases.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Yes. I know how you feel. As a libertarian, I'm extremely upset at the police and security state we've created. This has to stop. At the same time, if a major crime occurs and there were indications it was going to happen, police are not supposed to be caught flat-footed. So I would expect any professional police force to have files on groups and people that they believe could cause major crimes. I also think they should have contingency plans for when major threats happen. The problem is that computers have taken away any definition of "reasonable" If J. Edgar Hoover wanted to detail a platoon of FBI agents to monitor MLK I feel that it was a waste of time. Hell, it was probably also a travesty of justice. Hoover should have been fired for it. But he could only do that so many times before he ran out of agents. The physicality of the system made it self-limiting. Now we're living in an era where those limits are gone. There is no limiting factor any more. In the U.S., we need constitutional guidance here -- some agreement on the limits we expect the government to observe. I thought we were clear enough about that the first time around, but the courts seem to think that the plain language of our Constitution and Bill of Rights has so many loopholes and odd provisions that it doesn't actually do any of the things it was supposed to do. That's gotta be fixed. I don't see a solution outside of that.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Perhaps the solution is bilateral surveillance which is to say a database of all the interactions of everyone who works in government which can be consulted by people outside of government when they suspect the government employee may be engaged in criminal activity. I mention that because there is mounting evidence that police wearing always on body cams really curbs complaints about police brutality and excessive force. Now some of that is clearly people who realize that if their behavior is shown they won't be able to sustain the argument that the police action was unwarranted. However, evidence is accumulating that police are less likely to engage in risky or borderline unethical behavior when they know they are being monitored. The bottom line is better governance with fewer complaints and that is a good thing for everyone involved.
  - hx87 10y ago
    It's a good proposal, and needs to be extended to government contractors (and subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors, ...) and all those who work for them, otherwise it would just provide another excuse to contract everything out.
- talmand 10y ago
  Preventing crime is not a primary function of the police.
matt_wulfeck 10y ago
That dilemma is as old as our republic. At its founding we decided it's better to let guilty people go free than to put innocent people behind bars. In the beginning we valued Liberty above all else, as the ultimate virtue of our country. It appears now we value security more, or else these types of things wouldn't be tolerated. History tells us this is a mistake but maybe we haven't yet learned the lesson.
- throwanem 10y ago
  History isn't over, and I think it's worth considering the possibility that threat environments change, too. Perhaps there isn't a single, simple criterion that fits all cases.
- fixermark 10y ago
  I agree with the overall assessment of goals, but I don't think I agree that the surveillance tools are at odds with them. > At its founding we decided it's better to let guilty people go free than to put innocent people behind bars Ubiquitous surveillance record makes it easier to discern the facts of an event. It makes it less likely that the innocent will be put behind bars (relative to the alternative solutions of faulty witness memory and after-the-fact narrative construction).
  - mindcrime 10y ago
    Ubiquitous surveillance record makes it easier to discern the facts of an event. It makes it less likely that the innocent will be put behind bars (relative to the alternative solutions of faulty witness memory and after-the-fact narrative construction). That might be true IF the "ubiquitous surveillance record" was gathered, maintained, and monitored by a truly neutral party. But it's not. It's maintained by the State, who are your adversary if you are charged with a crime (and possibly at other times, but that's a different topic). Anyway, if the State owns the surveillance and they decide to target you, do you expect that - as a defendant - you will be given full and unfettered access to an unaltered record of events? History suggests that this is not the case.
hx87 10y ago
There is a way out of this dilemma--sacrifice privacy in favor of freedom by making all surveillance feeds and all data mining resources and link to them public. If the average person can't have privacy, then no one should have privacy.

imroot 10y ago

I have a friend who is a sergeant in the LAPD. She was asking me a question and followed it up with something about trying to not seem stalkerish, and I made a joke about "isn't that what NCIC (National Crime Information Computer) is for?" She comes back a few minutes later and tells me that she finds much more information on the internet than she could ever find through NCIC.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pc86 10y ago
> National Crime Information Computer Center, not Computer

davidhariri 10y ago

"Over the next six years, police recorded over 1000 interactions with this man." With holidays, that's conservatively an average of one interaction every 2 days. How is that possible? Am I the only one who finds that shocking?

67726e 10y ago
From the article, it sounds like they record every single innocuous interaction. The city portion of Charleston is fairly small, confined to a small peninsula. Given the small size and not-so-large population, there are actually quite a few well-known bums in the town that one would just run into every day or so walking to and from work, usually in one of the major areas of the city. So imagine if you've got cops working the streets, it's totally conceivable that one or more officers run into one of those guys several times a day.
eternalban 10y ago
Community policing. Beat cop. 1 a day is even possible. You should be alarmed if such cases stop being outliers and start approaching the mean i.e. papers please.
- DanBC 10y ago
  We don't know how far down the long tail that one person is. How many people are having unwelcome weekly interaction with police?
  - eternalban 10y ago
    That was my point, exactly. [edit: to be clear, that a beat cop may have to deal with a handful of local louts, for exmple. But not the entire neighborhood.] Doesn't our Justice Department have people monitoring this sort of metric?
  - pc86 10y ago
    I would wager that most people who don't work in the criminal justice system and yet have weekly interactions with the police probably describe it as "unwelcome."

reconciliation 10y ago

At some point there will be a really massive fuck up, that will resist the usual cover ups and smear campaigns that have been used to silence the fuck ups that manage to boil to the surface these days. Only when that one really bad thing finally happens, and doesn't just go away; when it refuses to be swept under the carpet, only then will anything change. Either that, or it will break us, and usher in a new unstoppable tyrrany. Think about it like that.

srgseg 10y ago

If it's impossible to reverse the tide, what if this could become a database of innocence instead of a database of guilt? Instead of cops pulling over some poor innocent guy every few weeks because he has a suspicious looking beaten up car, instead the police computer would green flag the person. The records might show that: 1. CCTV shows the person has not been driving in the vicinity of any crime they might currently be looking for suspects in connection with 2. The person has been stopped before, but was not involved in any criminal activity. This prevents unintentional repeated harassment. 3. The person has no known associations with any people involved in criminal activity. Just like Uber, we'd be glad people were recording feedback about us because it helps people get a ride even in a high crime area where taxis would be otherwise afraid or unwilling to service.

trendia 10y ago
If we had a benevolent artificial intelligence and the data were locked away from any humans, I'd be OK with that. Unfortunately, humans ruin a lot of things that would otherwise be pretty good. For instance, this kind of data would also make it far easier to frame someone, since you'd be able to craft your story around the narrative of their actions.
- fluxquanta 10y ago
  This sounds almost exactly like the plot of the anime "Psycho-Pass". The story takes place in an authoritarian future dystopia, where omnipresent public sensors continuously scan the Psycho-Pass of every citizen in range. The sensors measure mental state, personality, and the probability that the citizen will commit crimes, alerting authorities when someone exceeds accepted norms. To enforce order, the officers of the Public Safety Bureau carry hand weapons called Dominators. The weapons themselves only activate if the intended target has a sufficiently high "crime coefficient", as dictated by a central AI. It's pretty interesting (if you can tolerate a pretty high level of graphic animated violence). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass
packetized 10y ago
Pulling someone over for having a 'suspicious looking beaten up car' is part of the problem. While I applaud you looking at this from a practical, real-world point of view (I've been the guy in that beaten up car, an '83 Cutlass Supreme), I believe that you might have forgotten about that whole "presumption of innocence" thing granted to residents of the US.

chewbacha 10y ago

Either I'm numb to all the "data" that's out there or I don't really understand the threat. But I'm feeling a bit "meh" about all of these reports. Don't get me wrong, the use of personal data for vendettas and retaliation is clearly wrong and should be prosecuted. So yea, I don't like misuse of data, but simply having data that they collected no longer seems bad to me. And if it was warrantless then it's inadmissible anyhow, right? If you don't want them "taking" your info, just don't speak to them. That's your right. And if you make the data publicly available on the internet, they scrap it, and you get upset, isn't that the same as distributing free pamphlets and getting annoyed at the police for taking a couple and photocopying them?

splawn 10y ago
This comment made my knee jerk very hard, but despite that I think I might have to agree with you, kudos.
AlexandrB 10y ago
> And if it was warrantless then it's inadmissible anyhow, right? This only matters if the government collecting the data continues to be relatively democratic and free. That can change nearly in an instant given the right circumstances (see the crackdown following the coup attempt in Turkey) and all that gathered information then becomes a great way to go fishing for "undesirables". The nonchalant attitude of many towards this proves George Santayana's adage true: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
gambiting 10y ago
I come from a country where we had the secret police(Poland) and everyone knew that there was an archive somewhere where most citizens had a folder with whatever the police gathered on them. Any telephone conversation always started with the operator announcing "this conversation is monitored, this conversation is monitored". Letters would be opened randomly and read. And you know what - vast majority of people didn't care. They accepted this as reality they lived in and that was it. Well, almost 30 years on after fall of communism, these folders are still coming back and haunting people. People find facts about themselves or about others, that shouldn't have been collected in the first place. Not to mention the old story of completely innocent data that actually lead to people dying(governments before WW2 collected census information about religion, and that very information was used by the nazis to hunt and kill jews). My point is - even if right now it seems like collecting this data is harmless, you never know how it's going to be used in the future. Governments fall all the time, wars happen, people look where they shouldn't. The less data the government collects the better.

qrendel 10y ago

I was a bit shocked, though I probably shouldn't have been, to notice recently that police in the local airport all carry assault rifles now. Assault rifles. I'm not that knowledgeable about guns, so I'm not sure what kind exactly - maybe M-16s? A few years ago there was something about military personnel being stationed with unloaded rifles in airports as part of the War on Terror(TM). I now imagine that was to desensitize us to this future - everyday cops carrying loaded assault rifles in public all the time. The U.S. really has become a police state.

67726e 10y ago
My office is in the same building as a police substation. Every day when I leave it's the officers' shift change, so I'm walking while a bunch of officers are milling about, holding M4s in the parking lot. I own and shoot firearms, but it's a bit fucking insane.
knz 10y ago
> The U.S. really has become a police state. Seeing heavily armed police (with actual assault rifles not AR-15's) and paramilitary members (the Carabinieri and Gendarmerie etc) is much more common in Europe than the US and been the case for decades.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Full automatic fire isn't really that interesting of a distinction. 30-40 shots spread over a few minutes is probably going to do more damage than 30-40 shots in a minute. And if you consider how a police officer acting in the public interest is going to use it, there isn't really any difference at all between automatic and semiautomatic fire.
  - pc86 10y ago
    The only benefit of automatic fire is for suppression. How often are police officers in situations requiring suppressive fire? There is no need for police officers to have automatic weapons during the course of their duties.

mindcrime 10y ago

I think it's time for the return of a "reverse intelligence agency", something like the old Government Information Awareness[1] idea. We need an intelligence agency for the people that monitors government agents of all sorts, and integrates all the open data databases, to make it easier for us to monitor the government. First, because transparency is the ultimate disinfectant, and two, because once they see how it feels to have the shoe on the other foot, it might change the way certain people feel about ubiquitous surveillance. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Information_Awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Information_Awarene...

pavel_lishin 10y ago
The general term for this is Sousveillance.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  Wow, I haven't heard that term in so long, I'd forgotten about it. You're 100% right though. And the Wikipedia article on the subject is quite interesting. One thing I didn't realize was that Steve Mann coined the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
- notyourwork 10y ago
  Thanks, taught me a new word today.
- throwaway7767 10y ago
  Sousveillance is much more broad. It doesn't just mean watching government officials, it's watching everyone. Essentially "democratising" spying. Watchdogs for government, absolutely, great idea that I support 100%. Sousveillance sounds like a horrible dystopia where your nosy judgemental neighbour down the street broadcasts your house guests on youtube to demonstrate the moral decay of society.
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago

rb808 10y ago

Interesting how gun records are forbidden to be computerized. NRA knows how to avoid big brother. http://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns http://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-man... >> That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.

whamlastxmas 10y ago
Worth noting that records for people in Texas with a License To Carry are computerized - a cop will know it when they pull you over and run your plates. Not saying this is a bad thing, just worth noting.
- hga 10y ago
  I'm sure that's true in any state with a CCW licensing regime, I know it is in Missouri, which has a system cutely named MULES. But those are set up to deter fishing expeditions, for they contain a lot of sensitive information, such as arrest records as well as charges, convictions, outstanding warrants, etc. More infamously, some states share that info, Florida with Maryland, where travelers have been pulled over and hassled about whether they've got a gun, which due to the FOPA of '86 safe passage protections, probably doesn't even apply when they're just passing through the state (in the case mentioned below, the gun owner has no legal way to possesses it in NJ, so left it behind in his safe). See e.g. http://www.tbo.com/list/columns-tjackson/jackson-gun-owner-unarmed-unwelcome-in-maryland-20140112/ http://www.tbo.com/list/columns-tjackson/jackson-gun-owner-u... which is what a police state looks like.
knz 10y ago
Do we still trust that these types of rules are being followed (particularly in the context of mass surveillance)? If I recall correctly, the public has been told on many occasions that the NSA/FBI/local police were not doing something only to be told years later that this was not the case. Laws such as this just highlight how asinine gun policy can be. Allowing a paper trail but not allowing digital records doesn't really benefit gun owners (Completing a 4473 would be a lot easier if they could verify that you are already a responsible gun owner) or make policing gun laws any safer (straw purchases would be easier to track if the records were digitized).

dmfdmf 10y ago

As the article mentioned, these field contact cards have been around for a long time. A few were even filed on me in my youth ;-). The problem is when it was a simple card system there was an inherent time limit on the usefulness of the info. The police officer had to recall filling out a card that might tie someone to a crime. And I doubt that cards were kept in perpetuity since the value of the info (for criminal investigations) fell rather quickly over months or a year. In a major case, such as a murder, investigators might do a blind search of all the cards filed in some area around the time of the murder to find leads, suspects or potential witnesses so the card system was a valuable tool for legitimate police action. Now that everything is computerized there is no longer any time limit on the data and the potential for abuse is now becoming clear. So the time limit on the collected data that was implicit has to be made explicit as a matter of policy instead of tacitly due the limits of the system for the collection and use of the info. The real problem is that explicitly drawing that line is forcing us to clearly define the nature of government and what "freedom" actually means.

pweissbrod 10y ago

QUESTION for Americans: If you approach a police officer and ask for directions (or any context where youre not a suspect) and the police officer asks for your ID can you legally refuse to comply? *Edit: This has happened to me before. After politely asking 'why do you need my ID?' things escalated. I complied out of fear of being detained.

johndubchak 10y ago
Yes, of course. You are under no obligation to share that information in such an encounter.
- pweissbrod 10y ago
  Thanks. The police officer made it seem quite to the contrary. It's a shame that one of the police officer's core duties _isnt_ clarifying finer points of laws even when it works in criminal's favor.
  - pc86 10y ago
    The ELI5 is that the police officer's duty is to enforce the law, not explain it. The slightly (but not much) more nuanced explanation is that 99% of police officers do not know the finer points of laws because they don't need to. They know just enough to get an idea of whether or not a person has broken a law. Once they get enough information to arrest someone, it's up to the DA if a law was actually broken and if they want to pursue charges. It's not generally relevant to the police officer's day-to-day interactions with the public to have enough knowledge about the law to clarify the finer points of it to a layman, as they're mostly laymen themselves. Edit: Just to clarify, I'm not saying this is the ideal, just that this is how it is currently in the US. The police pack the pipeline to the DA and the DA decides which cases to pursue (press charges) and which to ignore (release).
- runako 10y ago
  Based on the details of the encounter, I would disagree. The police repeatedly (apparently) asked for his ID and escalated the encounter. Based on those facts, I would not assume that I was not being detained and was free to go. The Supreme Court has held that even if the police have a flawed understanding of the laws and rules they are enforcing, their flawed interpretation governs the interaction on the street. So what the office believed matters, and that in turn guides his/her behavior. If you're in the right, you can usually be vindicated after a brief trip through the criminal justice system (arrest, jail, court). But it's guaranteed to ruin your day. Safest bet would have been to ask "Am I free to go?" to find out.

joesmo 10y ago

So, basically, don't ever talk to the police, don't even say 'hi'. There's no such thing as a casual conversation with the police. They should be avoided at all costs. Isn't this common sense? That's the first thing I'd teach my children.

criddell 10y ago
Good lord, I'd hate to live in your world.

strathmeyer 10y ago

Our University required the police to collect and write down the names of everyone they ever spoke to... so they could prove they weren't being racially biased?

chadlavi 10y ago

> A person can end up in one of these databases by doing nothing more than sitting on a public park bench or chatting with an officer on the street. So does this mean that public park benches are under constant video surveillance?