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"It's possible" because a functional society requires trust in the case of extremity and extreme situations are difficult to adequately plan for, difficult to t

"It's possible" because a functional society requires trust in the case of extremity and extreme situations are difficult to adequately plan for, difficult to test, and once set in their ways difficult to change for next time due to significant institutional inertia. (Which, before one starts, is not evil, it is inevitable, and part of management and problem-solving is understanding this.) You can certainly be concerned about the procedures followed and whether they are wise or followed correctly. And should they be looked at and changed? Probably! Almost certainly! But somehow I doubt that the people who you are low-key castigating for their reaction towards the person breaking that societal trust are forgetting this. Most people are, after all, able to care about more than one thing at once. But the proximate cause is that broken trust, and that the safety measures have not succeeded does not reduce the magnitude of that broken trust. That breaking of that trust is primarily alarming to people is not a particularly humane reason to adjust one's pince-nez and hrm at them.

ryandrake 5y ago
We have door locks and passwords because you cannot blindly trust people. My bank asks for ID when opening an account because (in addition to KYC) it's not just going to trust me, a random customer. When I get pulled over, the cops ask for my license--they aren't just going to accept "I have a license. Trust me, bro". Imagine if everything worked on the honor system! Society would fall apart within hours. Trust-by-default just makes you vulnerable to being exploited by bad actors. It's pretty scary that an unauthenticated, anonymous phone call from an unknown location is enough to cause an armed police response. Do a little investigation first to try to corroborate the claim before treating it seriously!
- xd 5y ago
  "Do a little investigation first to try to corroborate the claim before treating it seriously!" If the police don't act swiftly enough and harm was to come to anyone they'd be criticised for not taking it seriously. Police can't win either way. If you were the person in need would you want an immediate response or a little investigation first?
- tptacek 5y ago
  The authentication system you're appealing to does not exist.
- eropple 5y ago
  Door locks do not exist to stop people who try to subvert them. There is an argument that most passwords don't, either.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  Neither of those things requires immediate response (in order of minutes), or lives are lost. I’m as disgusted with this story as most seem to be, but I don’t think running KYC and asking for documentation of the emergency is a good idea for 999 calls.
  - soco 5y ago
    In the age of the AI profiling a face in the crowd, it's very difficult to believe that some system to look up the caller ID cannot be brought to work.
    - lm28469 5y ago
      AI is still dog shit for 99.9% of applications, we're not playing chess here. It would add an insane amount of complexity and points of failure for an edge case. If it even fucks up once it would need to be retired. I know HN loves to think raw tech will save the world but come on... this is a societal problem, not a tech problem
    - therealEleix 5y ago
      Even if caller id had been used in this situation, he could have easily spoofed the number to appear to be coming from the neighbors house since they would have already had all the information necessary to do so. The Caller ID system you're thinking of simply does not exist. The current system is much to easy too spoof. Anyone with $15 and a VoIP number can do it.
    - rich_sasha 5y ago
      Notably, the caller was identified, it seems. The problem wasn't identifying the caller, rather taking his accusation at face value.
  - anyonecancode 5y ago
    Maybe a better analogy -- when I'm on call and get paged, my first response is not to immediately restart the servers. The immediate response should be to assess the situation, not jump straight to the most extreme approach. Now you may quite reasonably point out that a page on a software system is seldom of the same weight as an emergency call to the police (true in my case -- money, not lives, have always been at stake in the systems I work on), but this ignores the reality that the "swarming with guns" approach _also_ can, and has, cost lives. So if anything, the higher stakes involved for police involvement is an even _stronger_ argument to take the extra time to properly assess the proportional response.
ramblerman 5y ago
If that were true then why is this mainly a us phenomenon

ryandrake 5y ago

We have door locks and passwords because you cannot blindly trust people. My bank asks for ID when opening an account because (in addition to KYC) it's not just going to trust me, a random customer. When I get pulled over, the cops ask for my license--they aren't just going to accept "I have a license. Trust me, bro". Imagine if everything worked on the honor system! Society would fall apart within hours. Trust-by-default just makes you vulnerable to being exploited by bad actors. It's pretty scary that an unauthenticated, anonymous phone call from an unknown location is enough to cause an armed police response. Do a little investigation first to try to corroborate the claim before treating it seriously!

xd 5y ago
"Do a little investigation first to try to corroborate the claim before treating it seriously!" If the police don't act swiftly enough and harm was to come to anyone they'd be criticised for not taking it seriously. Police can't win either way. If you were the person in need would you want an immediate response or a little investigation first?
tptacek 5y ago
The authentication system you're appealing to does not exist.
eropple 5y ago
Door locks do not exist to stop people who try to subvert them. There is an argument that most passwords don't, either.
rich_sasha 5y ago
Neither of those things requires immediate response (in order of minutes), or lives are lost. I’m as disgusted with this story as most seem to be, but I don’t think running KYC and asking for documentation of the emergency is a good idea for 999 calls.
- soco 5y ago
  In the age of the AI profiling a face in the crowd, it's very difficult to believe that some system to look up the caller ID cannot be brought to work.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    AI is still dog shit for 99.9% of applications, we're not playing chess here. It would add an insane amount of complexity and points of failure for an edge case. If it even fucks up once it would need to be retired. I know HN loves to think raw tech will save the world but come on... this is a societal problem, not a tech problem
  - therealEleix 5y ago
    Even if caller id had been used in this situation, he could have easily spoofed the number to appear to be coming from the neighbors house since they would have already had all the information necessary to do so. The Caller ID system you're thinking of simply does not exist. The current system is much to easy too spoof. Anyone with $15 and a VoIP number can do it.
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    Notably, the caller was identified, it seems. The problem wasn't identifying the caller, rather taking his accusation at face value.
- anyonecancode 5y ago
  Maybe a better analogy -- when I'm on call and get paged, my first response is not to immediately restart the servers. The immediate response should be to assess the situation, not jump straight to the most extreme approach. Now you may quite reasonably point out that a page on a software system is seldom of the same weight as an emergency call to the police (true in my case -- money, not lives, have always been at stake in the systems I work on), but this ignores the reality that the "swarming with guns" approach _also_ can, and has, cost lives. So if anything, the higher stakes involved for police involvement is an even _stronger_ argument to take the extra time to properly assess the proportional response.

ramblerman 5y ago

If that were true then why is this mainly a us phenomenon