> And they're also lazy so go for people who have already done the legwork (journos). I don't think they should be able to strip-mine journalists for informati

> And they're also lazy so go for people who have already done the legwork (journos). I don't think they should be able to strip-mine journalists for information, but "laziness" that makes things get done faster is usually called "efficiency". You could also say they're being lazy by taking cars/busses/trains instead of walking everywhere, or searching criminal databases instead of manually leafing through mountains of criminal dossiers. We shouldn't fault police officers for attempting to do their jobs as efficiently as possible. However, there's an unavoidable conflict of interest in asking those officers to also support the weaknesses we've intentionally built into the system. We need a separate group of people within the government constantly putting them in check, but that doesn't make the police officers bad people, even those who are pushing the boundaries we've established. History has shown that healthy democracy is a fragile metastable state, prone to devolving into autocracy and/or oligarchy. Also, historically, certain weaknesses in the state security apparatus are the only way we know of to create a healthy democracy from an autocracy/oligarchy. As an insurance mechanism against this once-every-few-hundred-years-millenium tail risk, we build these weaknesses into our state security apparatuses in the hopes that the autocracy/oligarchy that captures the state security apparatus won't be able to fix the weaknesses fast enough to prevent a democratic revolution. I know many people know this, but I wish we were more explicit in explaining that we're sowing the seeds of the democratic revolution that will bring down the government that topples/captures our current democracy. Yes, that does increase the crime rate and we need to be careful about that, but it seems some crime is the unavoidable cost of that long-tail insurance. It's good that some police officers are pushing to bring down the cost of that insurance, we just need to make sure there are powerful people ensuring the officers don't go too far.