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Surveillance tools used by the Minneapolis Police Department
- andarleen 6y agoShocking to see how in the US entire groups of people are discriminated against at such a scale. Sure its not as bad as in India or China, but it is appalling. In a way I understand these violent protesters - for years peaceful voices have raised the plight of african americans and native americans, yet nothing changed. For us in Europe this and the many other things we see going on in the US make us question wether the US is a first world country or not. The HN commentariat will downvote this to oblivion. Because just like in any country there are those who dont mind it as long as it doesnt happen to them - it’s just the “bad guys”.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoYou'll be downvoted to oblivion because you're turning a national tragedy into a dishonest shit-flinging contest. You can't seriously believe that racial discrimination isn't a problem in Europe.
- andarleen 6y agoIt is, but not to the point where people are killed by the police or denied voting rights. The fact that you are trying to make things look good by saying it happens in other places too shows ignorance.
- yardie 6y agoOh don't be naive. There were and still are plenty of protests in Europe. Maybe watch a programme or ten where the banlieues of Paris burned for days because a teenager was accidentally killed by the police. And the protests in the UK, where the reasons were many (racism, austerity, corruption). Europeans saying, "this could never happen here," is as daft as an American saying it.
- andarleen 6y agoThe keyword is "accidentally killed". But whatever suits your agenda for downplaying what's happening in the US. "And the protests in the UK, where the reasons were many (racism, austerity, corruption)." - Absolutely not comparable to what is happening in the US. The UK had riots few years back and absolutely no leader issued statements that they will get shot, and hounds released on them. It was a big deal even whey they wanted to use water cannons. But hey, what do we European communists know.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoOur great-grandchildren will rightfully despise us for not rolling back their surveillance state when we had the chance.
- andarleen 6y agoIt will just become the new normal sadly and people will be more docile by then. The vast majority already is.
- t-writescode 6y agoI was going to comment the exact same thing. What's worse than them complaining about what we have done in the past is them questioning why we didn't do it sooner.
- bobthepanda 6y agoYou can't change the past but you can sure as hell try and change the present. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago and the second best time to do it is now.
- t-writescode 6y agoNo, sorry, what I was trying to say is the future generations are going to wonder why we didn't add all these protections in long before we did. The world was a wild west! ( of course, they'll never understand that things weren't actually dangerous in general and that they've lost tons and tons and tons of freedoms )
- scollet 6y agoYou are being the docile person you speak of.
- andarleen 6y agoOf course I am and so are you. But I live in Europe and I dont really worry about getting killed by the police nor do I have to watch out for drones or the army getting deployed when I protest against the discrimination of entire groups of people. We have closet racists but they rarely murder people while dressed as police officers.
- softwaredoug 6y agoPost US Civil war, we encoded a set of rules that on their face did not discriminate on race. But their effect was basically to prevent black people from voting and enjoying their civil liberties. Now we are encoding these biases into models built with mass surveillance. Many of us upper middle class white folks turn a blind eye. Subconsciously we know that’s not really targeting us. “We have nothing to hide” is the battle cry of the apathetic middle class person... when you trace the origin not just to law and order but the “war on terrorism” the relationship to race is even more depressing. Maybe when we examine deeper we see those using the tools of mass surveillance look like us (heck are from this industry!). This same people working in the surveillance industry only imagine getting the “bad guys” not people that look like them! On their face this has nothing to do with race. Examine deeper and you see, it’s far easier to take away civil liberties when it’s the “other” it’s being taken away from. Where the in group can blissfully rationalize what’s happening to get on with their day
- ikeyany 6y agoAs long as it's only happening to "thugs", why should we stick our necks out on the line and make noise? I mean I'll grumble on social media, but taking time out of my day to protest is inconceivable.
- colechristensen 6y agoFive to ten years ago (I really forget exactly when) I had my car towed from the street in front of my house in Minneapolis because I had forgotten to pay a few parking tickets – something which only could have happened with either an extremely bored officer manually entering license plate numbers to check... or with an automatic reader which searched every plate it saw.
- xcskier56 6y agoI had this same thing happen to me a couple months ago. Parked legally, came back from a short trip... no car
- 3131s 6y agoI'm also from Minneapolis and had my car towed twice under really questionable circumstances. My roommate got it worse though. He was towed for parking within 5 feet of driveway, yet the driveway was invisible because it had been completely covered by the 4-5 feet of snowed piled up on the side of the road.
- colechristensen 6y agoI was towed for parking in a "driveway" in Minneapolis, except the "driveway" was a sidewalk cutout in front of what had at one point been a garage-type door in the side of a building right up against the sidewalk. Except the garage door had been bricked up so there was literally nothing anybody could do with the "driveway". It was my secret spot to park because it was generally avoided, logically, there was no reason to prevent parking there. It worked for a while then I got towed. and "NO PARKING" was sprayed on the pavement shortly after. Sometimes you make a mark on the world.
- sjg007 6y agoOr they get a list of the day from a computer that lists the cars registered address.
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- colechristensen 6y agoIn any other time, masked protesters might spark laws about facial coverings, so there's one silver lining about the current situation.
- ineedasername 6y agoI don't know, the masks may have increased police fear, or served to dehumanize the appearance of the protesters, and contributed to the use of tear gas and rubber bullets in one of the protests.
- ceejayoz 6y agoCops were perfectly willing to use those methods pre-COVID.
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- ineedasername 6y agoSure, but I'm talking about probabilities of using them: The chance of surveillance of protesters ticking over into fear, and the lack of visible human faces making it even less personal. My guess is that if every protest nationwide for any issue at all began always wearing masks, with no other change in behavior, use of force against them would increase.
- megameter 6y agoThe factors are multiple in nature with the virus around; masking itself is not directly causal(after all, Asian countries have accepted it for decades), but there are certain other things that the virus did that make This Time Different: 1. Lots of people staying at home. 2. Lots of people out of work. 3. A challenge to the authority of the police to conduct society(the virus is more threatening than they are, and populations are resisting the return to business as usual narratives) 4. A lack of targets for police harassment to "let loose on" (because nobody is out and about) These factors all build up to make a tinderbox where the officers who are looking for trouble(and they are always present and hungry for action) go out of their way to stir it up through provacateur tactics, and the population responds with quite a lot more force than usual since they are out of work and stuck at home and have nothing else to do. And it only escalates from there, because, again, you have police officers that are really dead set on the idea of "go get 'em", and see this as a role-playing opportunity. I should discuss the role-play in some more detail. In the decades of collective memory, protests served as media flashpoints where the action is molded to the narrative. Everyone involved does a little bit of role-play, gets their fill of the narrative they want to see, and then goes home, with a few arrests and a bit of violence along the way, and a media product is subsequently served on the news afterwards, shaped to fit the tastes of the audience. Career activists would develop personal brands around the appropriation of protest groups towards news narrative, and the police were eager to play along and be the "other side". This dynamic of protest-as-product made protests seem unable to address legitimate concerns, since neither group was "going for the throat", as it may. The dynamic has gradually shifted, at first slowly with protests like '99 Seattle WTO, and then faster as you get into the 2010's and live streaming takes off; coverage is getting much closer and more personal, and this runs in tandem with the rise of surveillance and police militarization creating pervasive cynicism about large institutions of all kinds. Branding of all kinds - from CNN to the blue check mark Twitter account - is mistrusted. Direct action is increasingly tolerated by the population, who can now easily hear the case for such without an intermediary. The virus has accelerated those trends, and so there's a sense of nobody holding back anymore. Which, of course, makes it easier for the police to dehumanize the protestors.
- sneak 6y agoThe CBP is also flying a federal Predator surveillance drone in Minneapolis: https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/1266399916978507779 https://twitter.com/jason_paladino/status/126639991697850777... You can be reasonably sure it is collecting facial biometrics and perhaps IMEIs. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dzbe3/customs-and-border-protection-predator-drone-minneapolis-george-floyd https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dzbe3/customs-and-border...
- mkl 6y agoYour links say it was flying at 20,000ft. I would be pretty surprised if it was collecting facial biometrics.
- fencepost 6y agoI'm curious what the response would be if someone started advertising up there that they wanted all available protestor-shot high definition footage that showed police officers' faces (particularly when a nametag or readable badge number was also visible) for the stated purpose of training a facial recognition system. Somehow I think it would be roundly condemned by every law enforcement agency with any presence or interest in the area.
- mjayhn 6y agoThis country disgusts me more and more everyday. It's unfathomable. All of us lucky tech workers owe our help to whats going on right now. Do NOT be silent. Get out there tonight and tomorrow. CIS, white, whatever, allies need to be on the streets this weekend, you're valued. This is a tipping point but we need allies, especially people who know tech. There are grass roots protest organizations popping up everywhere that need serious pro bono tech help. If you work on distributed systems or production networks this stuff is stupid simple to you. Split your work between fast & impermeable systems to our democracy.
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- 0x8BADF00D 6y agoThe United States never was, nor will ever be, a democracy. It is a republic.
- ahelwer 6y agoThis distinction means literally nothing and its utterance has never once contributed positively to a discussion.
- 0x8BADF00D 6y agoIn your mind, sure. Anything is possible.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoIt’s as much a democracy as we want it to be. We have to force leaders to listen to the people sometimes.
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- Scoundreller 6y agoAnd a bunch of choppers: https://mobile.twitter.com/SkyCirclesMPLS https://mobile.twitter.com/SkyCirclesMPLS
- Synaesthesia 6y agoLet’s not forget the agents provocateurs https://twitter.com/rexchapman/status/1266146369905070080?s=21 https://twitter.com/rexchapman/status/1266146369905070080?s=...
- papeda 6y agoI click on your link and the video looks suspicious, but I also have no clue who made it or who all those people are. Rex Chapman has a checkmark next to his name, but so do plenty of vacuous trolls. Inserting violent actors seems like a good way to discredit a protest, but "makes sense" isn't evidence. So I typically end up just waiting a week or two for ostensibly fact-checked coverage and being out of the loop because there's so much uncertainty around developing events. But it feels like choosing feckless over reckless, so it's not a totally satisfying route.
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- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoAre people here seriously upset by technology used to identify rioters? I'm glad it exists and hope it helps to remove dangerous criminals from society. I'm noticing a dangerous pattern emerging in the left where people are siding with rioting. You know nothing about what riots do to cities. It destroys them. This is the moment where Trump wins the re-election because of a growing movement that is sympathetic to destroying the great city of Minneapolis over criminal conduct of a police officer.
- diggan 6y agoRiots don't happen over one bad police officer. It might finally boil over and explode over one situation, but the situation has been brewing for so long, that no one can even remember the start of it anymore. The actions of a riot might be that entities within areas gets destroyed, but that's hardly the goal. It's similar to when kids mindlessly destroy public properties in the night in smaller cities. It's not because they just like to smash stuff, but because there is nothing else to do. Rioting tends to be the last possible action you have in your pocket, until a civil war appears. When people are feeling that no one is listening to them, they try to find other ways of getting heard. And as history has shown us time and time again, riots sometimes work. I wish people didn't have to resolve to violence, but as an outsider who been watching the police brutality in the US for as long as I can remember, it doesn't surprise me that people has had enough.
- Veen 6y agoYes, if we learn anything from history it should be that stealing TVs and sneakers from stores owned by immigrants is the solution to social deprivation.
- charlesu 6y agoIt’s not the criminal conduct of an officer. Police brutality is a recurring pattern in these communities. It’s large injustices like murder and small ones like unjustified traffic stops and fines. It’s continual and oppressive. People are mad about it and rightfully so. There are plenty of examples peaceful protest against police brutality but nothing has changed. What can we expect? Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.