4 ms·

It's intuitively clear that your rebuttal is a poor one made in bad faith, but we might as well get into why: I could use an "oil-refinery" to run over someone

It's intuitively clear that your rebuttal is a poor one made in bad faith, but we might as well get into why: I could use an "oil-refinery" to run over someone. I have equal access to cars and gas stations to the police. However, I couldn't use Accurint as part of a chain of tools to extract explicit photos of someone. Access to Accurint is a privilege of the police. Without this person's abuse of the elevated societal privilege that police get, he wouldn't have been able to extort his victims. He'd still be a shitty person, with all the same motives and lack of morals, but without the power his police network gave him, he would have been impotent to achieve his goals.

luckylion 4y ago
Doubt. You don't need access to Accurint to pay some hacker to hack an account. What that access gave him as quicker access to information you'd otherwise need more time (and money, presumably) to obtain. From the Accurint website: "Find out why more than 400,000 public and private organizations of all sizes rely on powerful, industry leading LexisNexis Accurint® to support their business goals.", mentioning Collections, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Law Enforcement, Legal, Private Investigations. It very much sounds like a generic database that millions of Americans have access to. Are they all just one bad day away from hacking everything and everyone with all that access to this super advanced hacking technology? Probably not. The website continues: "Accurint® for Law Enforcement is a cutting-edge investigative technology that can expedite the identification of people and their assets, addresses, relatives and business associates by providing instant access to a comprehensive database of public records that would ordinarily take days to collect."
- smoldesu 4y ago
  All of this is fairly redundant from a "point of failure" perspective. It's fun to wax philisophical about the true capabilities of the police, but they have dozens of ways to get your personal information. If they can get their hands on your phone, many police offices own Greykeys that will smash it's way through Android and Apple security alike. Or maybe you escalate a certain "sensitive case" and ask for warrantless iCloud/Google Drive snooping permissions. Or maybe you intercept the nudes by MITMing their LTE signal. Or maybe you go to their ISP for a copy, the list is endless. You're right that Accurint plays a fairly negligible role here, but only because the officer didn't even begin to tap the tools at their disposal. Whether that was a mistake, stupidity, or fear of retribution, the fact remains that there are many, many ways to get your personal data as a cop. Palantir/Accurint are very much the tip of this iceberg.

luckylion 4y ago

Doubt. You don't need access to Accurint to pay some hacker to hack an account. What that access gave him as quicker access to information you'd otherwise need more time (and money, presumably) to obtain. From the Accurint website: "Find out why more than 400,000 public and private organizations of all sizes rely on powerful, industry leading LexisNexis Accurint® to support their business goals.", mentioning Collections, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Law Enforcement, Legal, Private Investigations. It very much sounds like a generic database that millions of Americans have access to. Are they all just one bad day away from hacking everything and everyone with all that access to this super advanced hacking technology? Probably not. The website continues: "Accurint® for Law Enforcement is a cutting-edge investigative technology that can expedite the identification of people and their assets, addresses, relatives and business associates by providing instant access to a comprehensive database of public records that would ordinarily take days to collect."

smoldesu 4y ago
All of this is fairly redundant from a "point of failure" perspective. It's fun to wax philisophical about the true capabilities of the police, but they have dozens of ways to get your personal information. If they can get their hands on your phone, many police offices own Greykeys that will smash it's way through Android and Apple security alike. Or maybe you escalate a certain "sensitive case" and ask for warrantless iCloud/Google Drive snooping permissions. Or maybe you intercept the nudes by MITMing their LTE signal. Or maybe you go to their ISP for a copy, the list is endless. You're right that Accurint plays a fairly negligible role here, but only because the officer didn't even begin to tap the tools at their disposal. Whether that was a mistake, stupidity, or fear of retribution, the fact remains that there are many, many ways to get your personal data as a cop. Palantir/Accurint are very much the tip of this iceberg.