4 ms·

Why should they do it? What’s it got to do with police reform?

vmception 5y ago
Basically more American people will see more evidence that Officer Friendly on their side of town is Judge Dredd on the other side of town and that there is a chronic abuse of low accountability which can be corrected in more holistic ways
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  It's far too easy to drown out coverage of police misconduct with "third informant killed after police leak." Ideally, they'd release the information to a wikileaks like organization that could redact the potentially dangerous records.
  - vmception 5y ago
    Then the agency should pay the ransom Its not that hard of an equation
    - Thorrez 5y ago
      Paying the ransom creates a financial incentive to keep doing ransomware attacks which could hurt more people in the future.
      - 1_person 5y ago
        The proportion of the population that will pay a ransom with a positive expected valuation will never be 0 unless you can guarantee that it is impossible to make a ransom offer which yields a positive expected valuation to the victim. In effect this means that refusing to pay a ransom with a positive expected valuation subsidizes outcomes for those that do pay the ransom.
        1_person 5y ago
        or, really, what I mean to say is, there is no way to stop everyone from paying ransoms when we assume they are rational or even pseudo-rational actors, except by making it impossible for them to be presented with the choice of paying a ransom which makes sense to them to pay from their perspective for example, if someone is going to die based on the information, then we would have to be ready to kill that person anyway to make a point, and apparently have perfect information about everything except how to stop this tragedy from happening, in any case the person being ransomed is essentially morally bound to pay the ransom, with the only difference in the vindictive justice case being the tangentially but not necessarily meaningfully involved party is guaranteed to die, and that doesn't seem like the outcome we're looking for here really
        Thorrez 5y ago
        >there is no way to stop everyone from paying ransoms when we assume they are rational or even pseudo-rational actors I guess it depends on what the definition of rational is. Is it rational to give money to charity? People do that all the time because they feel it's the morally right thing to do. >except by making it impossible for them to be presented with the choice of paying a ransom which makes sense to them to pay from their perspective Yep, making it illegal to pay the ransom is a good way to stop people from having that choice. If police themselves are paying a ransom, that might make it hard to make it illegal. >The proportion of the population that will pay a ransom with a positive expected valuation will never be 0 unless... You don't need to get the proportion to 0 to help people. Reducing the proportion is helpful. If you reduce the amount of people paying (say you convince half the population that it's immoral to pay), the ransomware gangs will be less profitable, and will invest less money in ransomware and thus less people will be attacked. Some fraction of every ransom paid is reinvested into making better ransomware and attacking more people.
        1_person 5y ago
        > Yep, making it illegal to pay the ransom is a good way to stop people from having that choice. If police themselves are paying a ransom, that might make it hard to make it illegal. Ransoming itself is already illegal and yet people still have the choice to do it. Why would making paying the ransom illegal remove the choice to do it? > You don't need to get the proportion to 0 to help people. Reducing the proportion is helpful. If you reduce the amount of people paying (say you convince half the population that it's immoral to pay), the ransomware gangs will be less profitable, and will invest less money in ransomware and thus less people will be attacked. It's something that's trivial to automate which produces positive cash flow, which makes it something approaching a thermodynamic impossibility to prevent from happening. We made spamming illegal. Most of what is spammed is already illegal. So there's no spam anymore, right? The policy suggested produces obviously absurd outcomes when applied to plausible scenarios. It does more harm than good, and is an emotional knee jerk which does not survive rational analysis.
    - salawat 5y ago
      You've clearly not thought through all the variables. Life has a habit of being more complicated than it appears at first blush.
      - vmception 5y ago
        Then don't pay the ransom and get info leaked You think they’re bluffing? Hm what’s going to happen, so complicated

Basically more American people will see more evidence that Officer Friendly on their side of town is Judge Dredd on the other side of town and that there is a chronic abuse of low accountability which can be corrected in more holistic ways

boomboomsubban 5y ago
It's far too easy to drown out coverage of police misconduct with "third informant killed after police leak." Ideally, they'd release the information to a wikileaks like organization that could redact the potentially dangerous records.
- vmception 5y ago
  Then the agency should pay the ransom Its not that hard of an equation
  - Thorrez 5y ago
    Paying the ransom creates a financial incentive to keep doing ransomware attacks which could hurt more people in the future.
    - 1_person 5y ago
      The proportion of the population that will pay a ransom with a positive expected valuation will never be 0 unless you can guarantee that it is impossible to make a ransom offer which yields a positive expected valuation to the victim. In effect this means that refusing to pay a ransom with a positive expected valuation subsidizes outcomes for those that do pay the ransom.
      - 1_person 5y ago
        or, really, what I mean to say is, there is no way to stop everyone from paying ransoms when we assume they are rational or even pseudo-rational actors, except by making it impossible for them to be presented with the choice of paying a ransom which makes sense to them to pay from their perspective for example, if someone is going to die based on the information, then we would have to be ready to kill that person anyway to make a point, and apparently have perfect information about everything except how to stop this tragedy from happening, in any case the person being ransomed is essentially morally bound to pay the ransom, with the only difference in the vindictive justice case being the tangentially but not necessarily meaningfully involved party is guaranteed to die, and that doesn't seem like the outcome we're looking for here really
        Thorrez 5y ago
        >there is no way to stop everyone from paying ransoms when we assume they are rational or even pseudo-rational actors I guess it depends on what the definition of rational is. Is it rational to give money to charity? People do that all the time because they feel it's the morally right thing to do. >except by making it impossible for them to be presented with the choice of paying a ransom which makes sense to them to pay from their perspective Yep, making it illegal to pay the ransom is a good way to stop people from having that choice. If police themselves are paying a ransom, that might make it hard to make it illegal. >The proportion of the population that will pay a ransom with a positive expected valuation will never be 0 unless... You don't need to get the proportion to 0 to help people. Reducing the proportion is helpful. If you reduce the amount of people paying (say you convince half the population that it's immoral to pay), the ransomware gangs will be less profitable, and will invest less money in ransomware and thus less people will be attacked. Some fraction of every ransom paid is reinvested into making better ransomware and attacking more people.
        1_person 5y ago
        > Yep, making it illegal to pay the ransom is a good way to stop people from having that choice. If police themselves are paying a ransom, that might make it hard to make it illegal. Ransoming itself is already illegal and yet people still have the choice to do it. Why would making paying the ransom illegal remove the choice to do it? > You don't need to get the proportion to 0 to help people. Reducing the proportion is helpful. If you reduce the amount of people paying (say you convince half the population that it's immoral to pay), the ransomware gangs will be less profitable, and will invest less money in ransomware and thus less people will be attacked. It's something that's trivial to automate which produces positive cash flow, which makes it something approaching a thermodynamic impossibility to prevent from happening. We made spamming illegal. Most of what is spammed is already illegal. So there's no spam anymore, right? The policy suggested produces obviously absurd outcomes when applied to plausible scenarios. It does more harm than good, and is an emotional knee jerk which does not survive rational analysis.
  - salawat 5y ago
    You've clearly not thought through all the variables. Life has a habit of being more complicated than it appears at first blush.
    - vmception 5y ago
      Then don't pay the ransom and get info leaked You think they’re bluffing? Hm what’s going to happen, so complicated