5 ms·

Why are EDR's from LE even a thing? If it's really such a matter of life and death, they should have a judge on call (i.e. a judge-type judge, with a robe and

Why are EDR's from LE even a thing? If it's really such a matter of life and death, they should have a judge on call (i.e. a judge-type judge, with a robe and a gavel) to issue an emergency court order. So it's a real court order and not some simulation from a police department. Of course that can also be forged so this question is only about why judges are removed from the loop. If it's really a matter of life and death, wake up the damn judge. If that's too big a deal, you are doing too many of these "emergency" requests.

throwawaygh 5y ago
Our courts and legislative bodies have not grown in size linearly with the population, but the modus operandi of these institutions has also not changed. The distortion of too many people per representative without a change in how representation functions explains a lot of our issues.
- mescaline 5y ago
  A 100 more million people since I was in high school has ruined things around here, traffic mostly.
dataflow 5y ago
> If it's really a matter of life and death, wake up the damn judge. This really isn't a reasonable expectation. There are only so many judges, and being on-call 24/7 for all emergencies is not part of their job description, and it probably should not be, either. They need clarity of mind when they're making decisions, not to be in a sleepy mood. Moreover, you seem to be proposing a solution in search of a problem. There isn't widespread abuse of this by cops in the US (that I've heard of, anyway) to justify upending an otherwise effective procedure.
- chimeracoder 5y ago
  > There isn't widespread abuse of this by cops in the US (that I've heard of, anyway) to justify upending an otherwise effective procedure. There's massive abuse of police power to get access to data that would normally require a warrant. The only reason EDRs aren't abused more often is because it's often easier for cops to use more "straightforward" approaches like threatening the person/organization they want to get the data from, or lying (or misrepresenting) in order to get the other party to "voluntarily" give up the information.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    > There's massive abuse of police power to get access to data that would normally require a warrant. The only reason EDRs aren't abused more often is because it's often easier for cops to use more "straightforward" approaches like threatening the person/organization they want to get the data from Nobody said anything about "police power" in the general case. The discussion here is about EDRs, which you yourself acknowledge aren't abused frequently. Therefore it follows that making EDRs harder would not really solve that problem. You'd need to make other avenues for getting people's data more difficult before you contemplate changing this one.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      Actually nobody is in a position to say they aren't abused frequently so that is a completely unreasonable position to take given the centuries of corrupt behavior.
      - pooper 5y ago
        I wouldn't even know about the corruption if they were not so completely sure to be untouchable. One anecdote: a friend moved into a new neighborhood, a gated community. One evening when walking the dogs, a neighbor who is a cop greeted her by her full legal name. She said she never uses her middle name anywhere. As far as we know, there is no way the cop could know her middle name without looking her up. Who in any social situation greets someone by their full legal name (and that too without ever being introduced)? As far as she can tell this was their way of telling her that the officer knows who she is, knows where she lives, and is watching her. Who does that?
        sidewndr46 5y ago
        Why would this be difficult to find out? I can just check property tax records in my area. As to "who does that"...police officers. Always.
        InitialLastName 5y ago
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  My state has hundreds of judges. I daresay they could convince some of these to run an oncall rotation for a slight compensation bump. It's not like the police are filing these EDRs every day.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    > It's not like the police are filing these EDRs every day. Do you have a source for this? I just went to check T-Mobile for example and their site says they got 164k of them in 2020. [1] That's about 450/day, and it's just one company. [1] https://www.t-mobile.com/news/_admin/uploads/2021/07/2020-Transparency-Report.pdf#page=5 https://www.t-mobile.com/news/_admin/uploads/2021/07/2020-Tr...
    - RandomBK 5y ago
      All the more reason to get some oversight into the system. The CDC reported 24.5K homocides in 2020 [0], so one company's EDRs represented 6X this figure. I find it difficult to believe that each and every one of those 164K represented a true life/death scenario that would necessitate a breach of privacy by a government agent without any due process. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
      - dataflow 5y ago
        "Emergency" does not imply "life or death".
        RandomBK 5y ago
        I was basing it on this line in the article: > any police jurisdiction can use an EDR to request immediate access to data without a warrant, provided the law enforcement entity attests that the request is related to an urgent matter of life and death.
        dataflow 5y ago
- gjs278 5y ago
rosndo 5y ago
Of course, judges can be easily faked too. How do you know it’s the real judge on the phone? I guess you could always send someone to the courthouse in person, but that seems prohibitively expensive. And anyway, how much money can we expect e.g. Google to spend verifying court orders targeting users on free plans?
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  > how much money can we expect e.g. Google to spend verifying court orders targeting users on free plans? You don't pay money to enter Walmart but they are required to spend as much money as it takes to ensure you don't die in a fire while giving them zero dollars. Likewise food safety standards required by law aren't a sliding scale based on income. The relevant factor isn't how much money you made off the mark its how much harm your behavior can cause to that person. If you put yourself in possession where your failure causes them greater harm you bought yourself a potentially expensive obligation that you wouldn't have for example if you just served search engine results based on search query or ads served without knowing the persons life story and the contents of their diary since the 3rd grade. The actual answer is however much it takes to do a reasonable job or we ought to just fine you so much per screw up that you are forced to go sell shoes instead of search engine results. The government can and should help make this procedure reasonable as it is 99% of the problem. Such orders ought to be cryptographic signed by hardware tokens that are physically in the judges possession on a device that isn't online THEN emailed to google. This relies purely on 1970s technology and probably should have been implemented about 20 years ago if we weren't collectively complete morons. While this is implemented just coming from judges official government emails as opposed to their personal emails or a billion idiot cops would be substantially more secure.
- michaelt 5y ago
  > Of course, judges can be easily faked too. Part of the problem is, because any cop can send an emergency request, in California there are 93,000 cop e-mail accounts, every one of which has to be protected from hacking. By creating a bottleneck of, say, 10 judges per state who can issue emergency warrants (generously paid to staff a 24/7 rota) there are only 10 people whose e-mail accounts have to be kept 100% secure.
LorenPechtel 5y ago
A simple illustration of how it could be useful: Search and rescue teams. Somebody notices my car parked there with the whiteboard laying on the dash saying "Griffith Shadow 3/24". Any responsible hiker seeing that is going to call it in. The search and rescue team will look at that whiteboard and note the label tape at the bottom with various bits of information. It should be obvious that I'm inviting search and rescue to use the information printed there, why should a judge be involved? (And the S&R guys will know it's probably serious--from reading that board they know I should have been able to call for help.)
- zardo 5y ago
  Here's another use. I'm a cop and I want to know where my ex-wife is.
- atoav 5y ago
  > It should be obvious that I'm inviting search and rescue to use the information printed there, why should a judge be involved? For the same reason you still need to enter a sudo password when you use sudo for a trivial self-evident thing: It is not the trivial self evident thing we want to prevent, but the difference between a cop tracking the ex they are stalking and that missing person is literally just their no own judgement. Trusting cops not to abuse a certain power is bad when you can just implement a little systemic friction that prevents large scale abuse.

throwawaygh 5y ago

Our courts and legislative bodies have not grown in size linearly with the population, but the modus operandi of these institutions has also not changed. The distortion of too many people per representative without a change in how representation functions explains a lot of our issues.

mescaline 5y ago
A 100 more million people since I was in high school has ruined things around here, traffic mostly.

dataflow 5y ago

> If it's really a matter of life and death, wake up the damn judge. This really isn't a reasonable expectation. There are only so many judges, and being on-call 24/7 for all emergencies is not part of their job description, and it probably should not be, either. They need clarity of mind when they're making decisions, not to be in a sleepy mood. Moreover, you seem to be proposing a solution in search of a problem. There isn't widespread abuse of this by cops in the US (that I've heard of, anyway) to justify upending an otherwise effective procedure.

chimeracoder 5y ago
> There isn't widespread abuse of this by cops in the US (that I've heard of, anyway) to justify upending an otherwise effective procedure. There's massive abuse of police power to get access to data that would normally require a warrant. The only reason EDRs aren't abused more often is because it's often easier for cops to use more "straightforward" approaches like threatening the person/organization they want to get the data from, or lying (or misrepresenting) in order to get the other party to "voluntarily" give up the information.
- dataflow 5y ago
  > There's massive abuse of police power to get access to data that would normally require a warrant. The only reason EDRs aren't abused more often is because it's often easier for cops to use more "straightforward" approaches like threatening the person/organization they want to get the data from Nobody said anything about "police power" in the general case. The discussion here is about EDRs, which you yourself acknowledge aren't abused frequently. Therefore it follows that making EDRs harder would not really solve that problem. You'd need to make other avenues for getting people's data more difficult before you contemplate changing this one.
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    Actually nobody is in a position to say they aren't abused frequently so that is a completely unreasonable position to take given the centuries of corrupt behavior.
    - pooper 5y ago
      I wouldn't even know about the corruption if they were not so completely sure to be untouchable. One anecdote: a friend moved into a new neighborhood, a gated community. One evening when walking the dogs, a neighbor who is a cop greeted her by her full legal name. She said she never uses her middle name anywhere. As far as we know, there is no way the cop could know her middle name without looking her up. Who in any social situation greets someone by their full legal name (and that too without ever being introduced)? As far as she can tell this was their way of telling her that the officer knows who she is, knows where she lives, and is watching her. Who does that?
      - sidewndr46 5y ago
        Why would this be difficult to find out? I can just check property tax records in my area. As to "who does that"...police officers. Always.
      - InitialLastName 5y ago
asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
My state has hundreds of judges. I daresay they could convince some of these to run an oncall rotation for a slight compensation bump. It's not like the police are filing these EDRs every day.
- dataflow 5y ago
  > It's not like the police are filing these EDRs every day. Do you have a source for this? I just went to check T-Mobile for example and their site says they got 164k of them in 2020. [1] That's about 450/day, and it's just one company. [1] https://www.t-mobile.com/news/_admin/uploads/2021/07/2020-Transparency-Report.pdf#page=5 https://www.t-mobile.com/news/_admin/uploads/2021/07/2020-Tr...
  - RandomBK 5y ago
    All the more reason to get some oversight into the system. The CDC reported 24.5K homocides in 2020 [0], so one company's EDRs represented 6X this figure. I find it difficult to believe that each and every one of those 164K represented a true life/death scenario that would necessitate a breach of privacy by a government agent without any due process. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
    - dataflow 5y ago
      "Emergency" does not imply "life or death".
      - RandomBK 5y ago
        I was basing it on this line in the article: > any police jurisdiction can use an EDR to request immediate access to data without a warrant, provided the law enforcement entity attests that the request is related to an urgent matter of life and death.
        dataflow 5y ago
gjs278 5y ago

rosndo 5y ago

Of course, judges can be easily faked too. How do you know it’s the real judge on the phone? I guess you could always send someone to the courthouse in person, but that seems prohibitively expensive. And anyway, how much money can we expect e.g. Google to spend verifying court orders targeting users on free plans?

michaelmrose 5y ago
> how much money can we expect e.g. Google to spend verifying court orders targeting users on free plans? You don't pay money to enter Walmart but they are required to spend as much money as it takes to ensure you don't die in a fire while giving them zero dollars. Likewise food safety standards required by law aren't a sliding scale based on income. The relevant factor isn't how much money you made off the mark its how much harm your behavior can cause to that person. If you put yourself in possession where your failure causes them greater harm you bought yourself a potentially expensive obligation that you wouldn't have for example if you just served search engine results based on search query or ads served without knowing the persons life story and the contents of their diary since the 3rd grade. The actual answer is however much it takes to do a reasonable job or we ought to just fine you so much per screw up that you are forced to go sell shoes instead of search engine results. The government can and should help make this procedure reasonable as it is 99% of the problem. Such orders ought to be cryptographic signed by hardware tokens that are physically in the judges possession on a device that isn't online THEN emailed to google. This relies purely on 1970s technology and probably should have been implemented about 20 years ago if we weren't collectively complete morons. While this is implemented just coming from judges official government emails as opposed to their personal emails or a billion idiot cops would be substantially more secure.
michaelt 5y ago
> Of course, judges can be easily faked too. Part of the problem is, because any cop can send an emergency request, in California there are 93,000 cop e-mail accounts, every one of which has to be protected from hacking. By creating a bottleneck of, say, 10 judges per state who can issue emergency warrants (generously paid to staff a 24/7 rota) there are only 10 people whose e-mail accounts have to be kept 100% secure.

LorenPechtel 5y ago

A simple illustration of how it could be useful: Search and rescue teams. Somebody notices my car parked there with the whiteboard laying on the dash saying "Griffith Shadow 3/24". Any responsible hiker seeing that is going to call it in. The search and rescue team will look at that whiteboard and note the label tape at the bottom with various bits of information. It should be obvious that I'm inviting search and rescue to use the information printed there, why should a judge be involved? (And the S&R guys will know it's probably serious--from reading that board they know I should have been able to call for help.)

zardo 5y ago
Here's another use. I'm a cop and I want to know where my ex-wife is.
atoav 5y ago
> It should be obvious that I'm inviting search and rescue to use the information printed there, why should a judge be involved? For the same reason you still need to enter a sudo password when you use sudo for a trivial self-evident thing: It is not the trivial self evident thing we want to prevent, but the difference between a cop tracking the ex they are stalking and that missing person is literally just their no own judgement. Trusting cops not to abuse a certain power is bad when you can just implement a little systemic friction that prevents large scale abuse.