7 ms·

Related but slightly off-topic: am I the only one that thinks more technology is not the answer to catching crooks? Can’t the police do good old fashioned poli

by ssss11 5y ago

Related but slightly off-topic: am I the only one that thinks more technology is not the answer to catching crooks? Can’t the police do good old fashioned police work to catch people doing these things? Why does EVERYONE need to be surveilled for the 0.01% (or less?) who don’t behave properly. To further this point: why do we need cameras on every street, facial recognition systems and 3-letter orgs storing huge data silos and maintaining lists etc etc… One thought: is it because over 10, 20, 30+ years the police have been de-funded everywhere and become useless for difficult cases and/or militarised to deal with peaceful protesters instead? Genuine questions.. I just don’t think this surveillance nightmare is the answer, and police could still catch crooks before the internet so what’s the problem.

pydry 5y ago
>One thought: is it because over 10, 20, 30+ years the police have been de-funded everywhere Police funding has shot up in America. It's everything else thats been cut. >what’s the problem. There's no problem. It's just a drawn out power grab with a weak pretext.
- adventured 5y ago
  > Police funding has shot up in America. It's everything else thats been cut. What else in America has been cut? I'd be interested in that very long list (since you're saying that everything else is seeing cuts; the understood meaning being that a very large number of major items are seeing their budgets slashed). The spending data I see year in year out, or across decades, is showing the opposite. Healthcare spending has skyrocketed over the last 20-30 years, including healthcare spending by the government (eg Medicaid, Medicare). They're not slashing Medicaid or Medicare, those programs have far outrun inflation and are drowning the US budget. Social Security hasn't been slashed. Even the leading Republicans no longer dare talk seriously about cutting Social Security (30-40 years ago they commonly did). Trump could hardly run away faster from that conversation, it's the third rail of US politics, absolutely nobody dares. Education spending has not been slashed. US teachers are among the best paid in the world and Americans spend more per capita on education at all levels than just about any other nation (while getting mediocre results for their epic investment, as with healthcare spending). Defense spending of course continues to rise. The US welfare state has continued to perpetually expand. US social welfare spending is larger as a share of GDP than it is in Canada; and it's closing in on Britain (the US will catch Britain on social welfare spending as a % of GDP this decade). The US social safety net has gotten larger, not smaller, over the decades. Programs like housing first didn't even exist 30 years ago; food security programs like SNAP continue to get bigger over the decades, they're not vanishing. US Government spending has continued to soar year by year. Typically 5-8% annual spending increases are normal (just look at the radical spending increases during the Bush and Obama years, or any of the recent budgets). Total government spending (Federal + State + Local) has continued to climb, it has not been slashed or reduced. Total US government spending is taking more out of the US economy than it ever has outside of WW2 - you have to go back to WW2 level spending to find something comparable. Total US government spending has increased by roughly 225% over the past two decades (more than triple the rate of inflation over that time). The soaring spending shows no sign of letting up. The major US Government agencies - such as NASA, NSA, FBI, DHS, VA, DoJ, etc - have not had their budgets slashed over the last few decades, they keep climbing year after year. The only big one I can think of is infrastructure spending, which has not kept up with inflation because both sides have refused to raise gasoline taxes. What kind of results do we have to show for the massive increase in government spending? Are our streets now lined with gold? Things are better than they have ever been, is that right? Is our quality of life equivalent to Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden? Because we now have their per capita government spending levels. The government systems of the US are spending the equivalent of 45% of the economy each year.
  - OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
    >Healthcare spending has skyrocketed over the last 20-30 years Aging populations with for profit healthcare will do that. >US teachers are among the best paid in the world It's still a comparatively low paying, thankless profession and consistently fails to attract talent because of low pay. Most Engineers, for example, have starting pay similar to a teacher's pay with 15 years of experience. Both jobs require the same level of training and degree (Bachelor's). >total US government spending is taking more out of the US economy than it ever has, Government spending is still economic activity. It doesn't 'take money out' of the economy, it contributes to it. It pays workers like any other employer that can then spend that money in the local economies. If your argument is 'government spending is bad' then that's a terrible argument.
- hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
  >There's no problem. It's just a drawn out power grab with a weak pretext. In 2018 tech companies reported over 45 million images of CSAM, which was double the amount that was reported the year before.[0] The next year the number of reports went up to 60 million.[1] I wouldn't expect everyone to agree on the proper response to the rapid growth of child-abuse imagery online, but I don't think the problem itself should be dismissed. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-... or https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.nytimes.com/interact... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/podcasts/the-daily/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/podcasts/the-daily/child-...
  - bradlys 5y ago
    I couldn't find anywhere in the NY article that described that these efforts these companies are doing is leading to less child porn being created. Is that true? Everything I read and searched for wanted to make it sound like child porn and sexual abuse of children was skyrocketing - nothing concrete about the number of victims per capita per year in the USA or what not. And - of course - it made it sound like this effort is deeply underfunded and needs tons more money behind it because it's exploding as an issue and your next door neighbor is clearly raping children... It felt a bit sensationalist.
    - noptd 5y ago
      Yeah, that article definitely reads like a thinly-veiled scare piece.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    There is literally no logic to what they are doing. the CP criminals will just work around it and the other billion or so of us are stuck with Apple acting like they're the police, and waiting for the government to send them the next "CSAM" database of political dissent hashes or pretty soon just scanning for anything that governments don't like on the device that YOU OWN. This is a joke, a very dangerous one. This will do nothing but put a slight dent in CP arrests and another huge body blow to democracy.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
We hire, and train, terrible cops in America. They are basically Reveune Collectors. I would like to see all cops under federal jurisdiction. Let the FBI train them. I know in my county of Marin we have way to many just looking for any slight moving violation. I have felt for awhile that we also need complete bans in certain kinds of tech. With the exception of always on cop cameras.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Exactly, there's a reason the FBI takes over real criminal cases when they occur - the police are just there to settle petty, inconsequential local disputes.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Inconsequential to you. Consequential to those people involved. Jesus Christ dude not everything revolves only around you or your concerns.
PartiallyTyped 5y ago
For what it's worth, police funding in US rivals and exceeds military funding of other countries.
- borski 5y ago
  Asking in earnest: are you speaking in absolute terms or relative terms? That is, does the percentage of funding (as compared to the rest of the budget) exceed most other countries’ military funding, or just the absolute amount?
  - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
    Absolute. Today, the U.S. collectively spends $100 billion a year on policing and a further $80 billion on incarceration. Just the spending on policing is larger than what other countries spend on military. Actually, the only country that spends more on military is China [1], after taking in incarceration costs, it is 2.5 times the military expenditure of India. [1] https://www.sipri.org/publications/2021/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2020 https://www.sipri.org/publications/2021/sipri-fact-sheets/tr...
    - Wameaw 5y ago
      Thanks for the link, but have you read it? "the only country that spends more on military is China" 1 1 United States 778 4.4 -10 3.7 4.8 39 2 2 China [252] 1.9 76 [1.7] [1.7] [13] 3 3 India 72.9 2.1 34 2.9 2.7 3.7 :facepalm:
      - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
        I compared US' __police__ spending of $100 billion, to the __military__ spending of other countries. I assume you missed that. The comparison is not between militaries, but US' police vs the military. :facepalm:
        Wameaw 5y ago
CSAECop 5y ago
> "Can’t the police do good old fashioned police work to catch people doing these things?" I'm a detective that works exclusively on online child sexual offences. The short answer to this is "no", although the question doesn't make much sense to me. Policing has always been near the forefront of technology. Perhaps you could expand more on what "good old fashioned police work" means, in this context?
- ssss11 5y ago
  Thanks for your reply - I meant that police caught criminals before the internet (I do not know the effectiveness and am unknowledgeable on this subject generally), however they did that, getting out there speaking to suspects and victims, and investigating with evidence I would guess
  - CSAECop 5y ago
    Well, police still investigate with evidence, but the potential scope of "evidence" is pretty much the whole physical universe. File hashes and TCP packet captures are evidence, DNA fragments are evidence, weather patterns are evidence, in the same way that people's memories are evidence. Through the decades, the respect shown to eyewitness testimony has generally declined, and crimes with no eyewitness evidence are still expected to be solved. For offences with a huge online aspect there is no prospect of "getting out there" until you work out where "there" is, because it could be anywhere in the world.
- lovemenot 5y ago
  Do you have any qualms? For you does the CP protection end justify any means? Where would you personally draw the line on mass surveillance by LE for the sake of your specific LE goals? CP aside, are there other crimes that you feel should be folded-in to a dragnet like this?
  - CSAECop 5y ago
    You probably don't realise it, because you're coming from a perspective that has been heavily influenced in a particular way, but some of these questions are kind of insulting and don't really assume good faith (or even basic decency) on my part. > "does the CP protection end justify any means?" Like, is this legitimately a question you think I might answer "yes" to? This is the equivalent of "do you support the rape of children?". I'll gladly comment on more specific points if you are genuinely struggling to understand how Apple could honestly implement this system in good faith.
lyaa 5y ago
American police has never been de-funded, and if you really think "good old fashioned" police work ever actually worked for most people, you are misinformed. Without even discussing policing across racial and poverty lines, one only needs to look at police failing to catch serial killers, rapists, and even just house burglars. The situation was much worst 10, 20, 30+ years ago. Nowadays police have some of their work done for them by technology and they are at least able to catch a few more criminals. Technology has also helped prevent false arrests in some cases. Apple's content scanning is problematic, for sure, but technology in general has been great for community safety.
- ssss11 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing your knowledge, yes I am fairly uninformed about police effectiveness which is why I wanted to find out more.
- CSAECop 5y ago
  I don't know why this is downvoted, you are absolutely right. Prosecutions based, essentially, on community suspicion are what lead to countless black men being wrongfully convicted of the rape of white women. Police embracing cutting edge science like DNA sequencing is what allows unreliable antiquated evidence like (gasp) eyewitness testimony to be given it's proper weight. Perhaps people consider DNA evidence to be "good old-fashioned policing" nowadays but it was within people's lifetimes that it was as new was quantum computing is today. The sooner the "good old fashioned policing" meme dies the better.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  I don't think us have thought criminal scanning on our devices is going to fix any of that. Cops don't need to be in my phone unless they have reason to suspect me and have a warrant to search it. Otherwise this is just a corporate proxy for the cops in warrant-less searches of what we're doing day to day on our own devices.
noobermin 5y ago
I don't think police has been defunded more than the funds have been put into unnecessary things like surplus military gear, settlements to defend the vast minority of bad cops, etc. That takes the oxygen out of everything including what most people consider fair police work.
csomar 5y ago
> Can’t the police do good old fashioned police work There is no "old fashioned" work. The police is a relatively new concept. And these issues (Child Porn) are really 21 century issues. > Why does EVERYONE need to be surveilled for the 0.01% (or less?) who don’t behave properly. Because you think they are surveilling people to catch the bad people. You have too much faith in the system.
komali2 5y ago
Where are you hearing that cops are getting defunded? The curious should look up the budget of the NYPD and LAPD looking mighty funded to me!
that_guy_iain 5y ago
Well what they’re searching for is done privately and the victims often don’t go the police. And good old fashion policing was to ignore these crimes.

by ssss11 5y ago

pydry 5y ago

>One thought: is it because over 10, 20, 30+ years the police have been de-funded everywhere Police funding has shot up in America. It's everything else thats been cut. >what’s the problem. There's no problem. It's just a drawn out power grab with a weak pretext.

adventured 5y ago
> Police funding has shot up in America. It's everything else thats been cut. What else in America has been cut? I'd be interested in that very long list (since you're saying that everything else is seeing cuts; the understood meaning being that a very large number of major items are seeing their budgets slashed). The spending data I see year in year out, or across decades, is showing the opposite. Healthcare spending has skyrocketed over the last 20-30 years, including healthcare spending by the government (eg Medicaid, Medicare). They're not slashing Medicaid or Medicare, those programs have far outrun inflation and are drowning the US budget. Social Security hasn't been slashed. Even the leading Republicans no longer dare talk seriously about cutting Social Security (30-40 years ago they commonly did). Trump could hardly run away faster from that conversation, it's the third rail of US politics, absolutely nobody dares. Education spending has not been slashed. US teachers are among the best paid in the world and Americans spend more per capita on education at all levels than just about any other nation (while getting mediocre results for their epic investment, as with healthcare spending). Defense spending of course continues to rise. The US welfare state has continued to perpetually expand. US social welfare spending is larger as a share of GDP than it is in Canada; and it's closing in on Britain (the US will catch Britain on social welfare spending as a % of GDP this decade). The US social safety net has gotten larger, not smaller, over the decades. Programs like housing first didn't even exist 30 years ago; food security programs like SNAP continue to get bigger over the decades, they're not vanishing. US Government spending has continued to soar year by year. Typically 5-8% annual spending increases are normal (just look at the radical spending increases during the Bush and Obama years, or any of the recent budgets). Total government spending (Federal + State + Local) has continued to climb, it has not been slashed or reduced. Total US government spending is taking more out of the US economy than it ever has outside of WW2 - you have to go back to WW2 level spending to find something comparable. Total US government spending has increased by roughly 225% over the past two decades (more than triple the rate of inflation over that time). The soaring spending shows no sign of letting up. The major US Government agencies - such as NASA, NSA, FBI, DHS, VA, DoJ, etc - have not had their budgets slashed over the last few decades, they keep climbing year after year. The only big one I can think of is infrastructure spending, which has not kept up with inflation because both sides have refused to raise gasoline taxes. What kind of results do we have to show for the massive increase in government spending? Are our streets now lined with gold? Things are better than they have ever been, is that right? Is our quality of life equivalent to Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden? Because we now have their per capita government spending levels. The government systems of the US are spending the equivalent of 45% of the economy each year.
- OldTimeCoffee 5y ago
  >Healthcare spending has skyrocketed over the last 20-30 years Aging populations with for profit healthcare will do that. >US teachers are among the best paid in the world It's still a comparatively low paying, thankless profession and consistently fails to attract talent because of low pay. Most Engineers, for example, have starting pay similar to a teacher's pay with 15 years of experience. Both jobs require the same level of training and degree (Bachelor's). >total US government spending is taking more out of the US economy than it ever has, Government spending is still economic activity. It doesn't 'take money out' of the economy, it contributes to it. It pays workers like any other employer that can then spend that money in the local economies. If your argument is 'government spending is bad' then that's a terrible argument.
hoppyhoppy2 5y ago
>There's no problem. It's just a drawn out power grab with a weak pretext. In 2018 tech companies reported over 45 million images of CSAM, which was double the amount that was reported the year before.[0] The next year the number of reports went up to 60 million.[1] I wouldn't expect everyone to agree on the proper response to the rapid growth of child-abuse imagery online, but I don't think the problem itself should be dismissed. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-... or https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.nytimes.com/interact... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/podcasts/the-daily/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/podcasts/the-daily/child-...
- bradlys 5y ago
  I couldn't find anywhere in the NY article that described that these efforts these companies are doing is leading to less child porn being created. Is that true? Everything I read and searched for wanted to make it sound like child porn and sexual abuse of children was skyrocketing - nothing concrete about the number of victims per capita per year in the USA or what not. And - of course - it made it sound like this effort is deeply underfunded and needs tons more money behind it because it's exploding as an issue and your next door neighbor is clearly raping children... It felt a bit sensationalist.
  - noptd 5y ago
    Yeah, that article definitely reads like a thinly-veiled scare piece.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  There is literally no logic to what they are doing. the CP criminals will just work around it and the other billion or so of us are stuck with Apple acting like they're the police, and waiting for the government to send them the next "CSAM" database of political dissent hashes or pretty soon just scanning for anything that governments don't like on the device that YOU OWN. This is a joke, a very dangerous one. This will do nothing but put a slight dent in CP arrests and another huge body blow to democracy.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

We hire, and train, terrible cops in America. They are basically Reveune Collectors. I would like to see all cops under federal jurisdiction. Let the FBI train them. I know in my county of Marin we have way to many just looking for any slight moving violation. I have felt for awhile that we also need complete bans in certain kinds of tech. With the exception of always on cop cameras.

judge2020 5y ago
Exactly, there's a reason the FBI takes over real criminal cases when they occur - the police are just there to settle petty, inconsequential local disputes.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Inconsequential to you. Consequential to those people involved. Jesus Christ dude not everything revolves only around you or your concerns.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago

For what it's worth, police funding in US rivals and exceeds military funding of other countries.

borski 5y ago
Asking in earnest: are you speaking in absolute terms or relative terms? That is, does the percentage of funding (as compared to the rest of the budget) exceed most other countries’ military funding, or just the absolute amount?
- PartiallyTyped 5y ago
  Absolute. Today, the U.S. collectively spends $100 billion a year on policing and a further $80 billion on incarceration. Just the spending on policing is larger than what other countries spend on military. Actually, the only country that spends more on military is China [1], after taking in incarceration costs, it is 2.5 times the military expenditure of India. [1] https://www.sipri.org/publications/2021/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-world-military-expenditure-2020 https://www.sipri.org/publications/2021/sipri-fact-sheets/tr...
  - Wameaw 5y ago
    Thanks for the link, but have you read it? "the only country that spends more on military is China" 1 1 United States 778 4.4 -10 3.7 4.8 39 2 2 China [252] 1.9 76 [1.7] [1.7] [13] 3 3 India 72.9 2.1 34 2.9 2.7 3.7 :facepalm:
    - PartiallyTyped 5y ago
      I compared US' __police__ spending of $100 billion, to the __military__ spending of other countries. I assume you missed that. The comparison is not between militaries, but US' police vs the military. :facepalm:
      - Wameaw 5y ago

CSAECop 5y ago

> "Can’t the police do good old fashioned police work to catch people doing these things?" I'm a detective that works exclusively on online child sexual offences. The short answer to this is "no", although the question doesn't make much sense to me. Policing has always been near the forefront of technology. Perhaps you could expand more on what "good old fashioned police work" means, in this context?

ssss11 5y ago
Thanks for your reply - I meant that police caught criminals before the internet (I do not know the effectiveness and am unknowledgeable on this subject generally), however they did that, getting out there speaking to suspects and victims, and investigating with evidence I would guess
- CSAECop 5y ago
  Well, police still investigate with evidence, but the potential scope of "evidence" is pretty much the whole physical universe. File hashes and TCP packet captures are evidence, DNA fragments are evidence, weather patterns are evidence, in the same way that people's memories are evidence. Through the decades, the respect shown to eyewitness testimony has generally declined, and crimes with no eyewitness evidence are still expected to be solved. For offences with a huge online aspect there is no prospect of "getting out there" until you work out where "there" is, because it could be anywhere in the world.
lovemenot 5y ago
Do you have any qualms? For you does the CP protection end justify any means? Where would you personally draw the line on mass surveillance by LE for the sake of your specific LE goals? CP aside, are there other crimes that you feel should be folded-in to a dragnet like this?
- CSAECop 5y ago
  You probably don't realise it, because you're coming from a perspective that has been heavily influenced in a particular way, but some of these questions are kind of insulting and don't really assume good faith (or even basic decency) on my part. > "does the CP protection end justify any means?" Like, is this legitimately a question you think I might answer "yes" to? This is the equivalent of "do you support the rape of children?". I'll gladly comment on more specific points if you are genuinely struggling to understand how Apple could honestly implement this system in good faith.

lyaa 5y ago

American police has never been de-funded, and if you really think "good old fashioned" police work ever actually worked for most people, you are misinformed. Without even discussing policing across racial and poverty lines, one only needs to look at police failing to catch serial killers, rapists, and even just house burglars. The situation was much worst 10, 20, 30+ years ago. Nowadays police have some of their work done for them by technology and they are at least able to catch a few more criminals. Technology has also helped prevent false arrests in some cases. Apple's content scanning is problematic, for sure, but technology in general has been great for community safety.

ssss11 5y ago
Thanks for sharing your knowledge, yes I am fairly uninformed about police effectiveness which is why I wanted to find out more.
CSAECop 5y ago
I don't know why this is downvoted, you are absolutely right. Prosecutions based, essentially, on community suspicion are what lead to countless black men being wrongfully convicted of the rape of white women. Police embracing cutting edge science like DNA sequencing is what allows unreliable antiquated evidence like (gasp) eyewitness testimony to be given it's proper weight. Perhaps people consider DNA evidence to be "good old-fashioned policing" nowadays but it was within people's lifetimes that it was as new was quantum computing is today. The sooner the "good old fashioned policing" meme dies the better.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I don't think us have thought criminal scanning on our devices is going to fix any of that. Cops don't need to be in my phone unless they have reason to suspect me and have a warrant to search it. Otherwise this is just a corporate proxy for the cops in warrant-less searches of what we're doing day to day on our own devices.

noobermin 5y ago

I don't think police has been defunded more than the funds have been put into unnecessary things like surplus military gear, settlements to defend the vast minority of bad cops, etc. That takes the oxygen out of everything including what most people consider fair police work.

csomar 5y ago

> Can’t the police do good old fashioned police work There is no "old fashioned" work. The police is a relatively new concept. And these issues (Child Porn) are really 21 century issues. > Why does EVERYONE need to be surveilled for the 0.01% (or less?) who don’t behave properly. Because you think they are surveilling people to catch the bad people. You have too much faith in the system.

komali2 5y ago

Where are you hearing that cops are getting defunded? The curious should look up the budget of the NYPD and LAPD looking mighty funded to me!

that_guy_iain 5y ago

Well what they’re searching for is done privately and the victims often don’t go the police. And good old fashion policing was to ignore these crimes.