10 ms·

California law enforcement misused state databases more than 7k times in 2023

564 points by hn_acker 2y ago

xbar 2y ago
What say you, Rob Bonta?
- psunavy03 2y ago
  He will likely invoke the "but guns" exception to all California policies and ignore it.
Suppafly 2y ago
That seems like it's only data that's self reported by the agencies themselves, I suspect the real number is much, much higher.
- sbarre 2y ago
  The article also mentions this is only one of many databases, and the only one that has self-reporting requirements for abuse.
EA-3167 2y ago
Well it's no shock that the top of the list of offenders is the LA Sheriff Dept, they're a nightmare of abuse at pretty much every level.
- cge 2y ago
  It appears the LASD is not just at the top of the list, but essentially is the list: they account for 93% of the violations. Which, as you point out, is not surprising. The LASD is enough of a mess that I've heard other nearby police departments complain about them, not to mention their history of gangs, corruption, and conflicts with the Board of Supervisors and FBI.
  - wahern 2y ago
    In California it's generally the county sheriff who issues carry permits. Apparently sometime in the past few years municipal police were also given the authority to do this, but for decades I believe it was just the sheriff. And it was discretionary and highly political--urban sheriff's departments were invariably, "no", unless you were a high profile figure, whereas rural sheriff's departments were typically an easy, "yes", unless they had a reason (good or bad) not to. And sometimes there were jurisdictional fights where rural sheriff's departments would bend the rules and issue permits to residents of urban counties, (arguably) sometimes just to spite the cities. Like most jurisdictions in the US, sheriffs are an elected position, and very often crudely politicized, especially in states like California with strong urban/rural partisanship. In any event, it's likely most Californians still go straight to the sheriff's department when seeking a permit.
    - skyyler 2y ago
      >especially in states like California with strong urban/rural partisanship I haven't been to a state where there isn't strong urban/rural partisanship. Is that what Rhode Island is like?
      - wahern 2y ago
        Historically (as in past 100-150 years), the Deep South and West, though today probably only states like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc. Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia now have rural/urban divides that are stronger (more predictive) than, e.g., racial and class divides. Historically the West was rather homogenous politically, relatively speaking, but that's rapidly receding from memory. Though if you squint both Democratic and Republican West Coast politicians in some state (e.g. governor) and national offices (senator), but definitely not local offices, tend to still be a little more centrist than you'd expect as compared to their counterparts back east.
Redoubts 2y ago
Guess there’s no Delete Act for state databases
delichon 2y ago
In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data to find Americans’ communications. --https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/internal-documents-show-how-little-fbi-did-correct-misuse-section-702-databases So the story is that California isn't holding up their end of the police state? Compared to the FBI they're hardly trying.
- throawayonthe 2y ago
  [dead]
- datavirtue 2y ago
  I'm cool with this. The FBI purged my city and state of rampant corruption and they remove heinous violent criminals from the street every day, often before they can commit any other crimes. Most of the people who work there are tireless and thankless servants. And to all the haters, let's see how you feel when your daughter is abducted and taken over state lines or your local law enforcement becomes corrupt and starts working with criminals. The FBI showing up is a great feeling.
  - saikia81 2y ago
    I have no ball in this game, as I am non-US. but sounds like the same can be said. Just wait until the FBI starts harassing your family outside their lawful jurisdiction. Or an FBI agent abusing their family. But at least your children will be safe from the dangerous streets...
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      They get their guy at all costs and will trample innocent people to do it. Many times, even often and predictably, they will extort oranipulate people into putting themselves in harms way to obtain their objectives. I didn't say the FBI is all unicorns and rainbows.
  - mptest 2y ago
    I promise bad things still happen in your city. Do you think drugs stop getting sold when a dealer is picked up? Seems fairly naïve...
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
"Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits" Well that was a fuck-up! Not only is Los Angeles politically vulnerable right now, LASD went after gun owners. Bipartisan hell in 3, 2, 1...
snakeyjake 2y ago
7,000 times out of how many accesses? 7,636? 10 quadrillion? Does California law enforcement's rate of misuse of information systems exceed, equal, or fall short of my own misuse (usually unintentional, due to lack of clear policy/guidance) of various information systems?
- 9283409232 2y ago
  I don't think it matters.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > I don't think it matters Of course it does. It doesn't absolve anything if the rate is low. But the frequency is absolutely meaningful.
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      Isn’t it a little like Ted Bundy pointing out he hasn’t murdered the vast majority of Americans, though? At the very least, I wonder how many officers are responsible for the violations. 7000? 1? LASD only has 18k employees.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Isn’t it a little like Ted Bundy pointing out he hasn’t murdered the vast majority of Americans, though? No. It's like tracking the homicide rate. The rate going down or being low doesn't mean murder is fine.
      - snakeyjake 2y ago
        >Isn’t it a little like Ted Bundy pointing out he hasn’t murdered the vast majority of Americans, though? You expect there to be no murders. I expect murders to be low, and for murderers to be punished. I also expect the number of murderers in the police force to be only slightly better than that of the rest of society. There are background checks, but there are also other factors that may increase the rate, regardless: I expect from them what I expect from everyone. So-- 7,000 murders per year. For Iceland that's high. I think they had 3 last year. For the United States, that's fucking fantastic! I wish we had 7,000 murders per year! If we had 3 that would be awesome but I'm not delusional. It's all about the wider context. Especially in this case, 6,800 of the misuses were from the LA sheriff's department doing background checks for gun permits so that's almost certainly a policy and procedure problem that has been fixed. So that leaves around 200 cases. Is that good? No. But how bad is it? 200 misuses out of ten quadrillion accesses is pretty not bad, if you ask me. edit: and that's a sign that things are going well because I am not dumb enough to expect 0 misuses of anything by any group of individuals. I expect misuses to be low and for misuse to be punished.
rdtsc 2y ago
> The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits So for the concealed carry there is a background check involved, but it has to be done in a certain way, and the police instead were being more "thorough" and were digging through more databases than they were supposed to? I guess they do have access to those databases, but are only supposed to check them if they suspect a crime was committed. What's the personal motivation there? It seems like they were going out of their way to be more "thorough", wouldn't it save them time and grief not to check more than needed. Is some higher political figure asking them to be more "thorough". I don't quite get the whole picture. Of course, they broke the law, but just wondering about their motive.
- pc86 2y ago
  It is an ideologically driven belief that "dirty civilians" don't deserve firearms, and any reason to deny them access should be used.
  - lukan 2y ago
    This is not about the right to have firearms, but the right to carry them concealed, which is not exactly the same.
    - pc86 2y ago
      To "bear" means to carry. "You may have this firearm but you cannot carry it in a manner which is fit for purpose anywhere other than your own private property" is a pretty tough sell to anyone who believes in the second amendment.
      - sandworm101 2y ago
        But that would comport with the 2nd's militia concept: guns owned and kept for militia use in times of emergency, not everyday carry.
pc86 2y ago
As if anyone needed any more proof that LASD is just a criminal gang with a badge.
simonw 2y ago
> A Redding Police Department officer in 2021 was charged with six misdemeanors after being accused of accessing CLETS to set up a traffic stop for his fiancée's ex-husband, resulting in the man's car being towed and impounded, the local outlet A News Cafe reported. Court records show the officer was fired, but he was ultimately acquitted by a jury in the criminal case. He now works for a different police department 30 miles away. When people say "I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide" this is the exact kind of edge-case I always think about. The problem with a lot of these massive surveillance systems is that a lot of people end up with access to them, and some of those people may not be trustworthy. In this case, your ex-wife gets engaged to a cop and now they're abusing their access to databases to cause you harm. (That note that "he now works for a different police department 30 miles away" is such a toxic aspect of American policing: cops who get fired for stuff like this inevitably end up in the exact same job somewhere else.)
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  The biggest problem with police is it's the sort of job where the more a given person wants that job, the less they should probably have it. For their sake and others.
  - pc86 2y ago
    Another huge problem is that law allows union bargaining agreements to dictate what happens to disciplinary records, that officers are allowed to resign when there are investigations happening that effectively kills them, etc. Once an investigation starts you shouldn't be allowed to resign, or at the very least the investigation should still continue and you should still be able to be punished after. Any union contract requiring the deletion/obfuscation of any disciplinary records for any reason other than clerical error or pardon should be illegal.
    - aidenn0 2y ago
      > Another huge problem is that law allows union bargaining agreements to dictate what happens to disciplinary records, that officers are allowed to resign when there are investigations happening that effectively kills them, etc. Once an investigation starts you shouldn't be allowed to resign, or at the very least the investigation should still continue and you should still be able to be punished after. I don't think requires any union pressure; the department is happy to be both rid of a problem officer and not have to put it in the public record just how bad the problem officer was. I have a friend who is a cop in Indiana (a "right to work" state), and after talking with him, I've realized that the department, as an organization, can largely be modeled as an entity that takes action to minimize its liability (individual officers are mostly shielded from civil liability, but the department is much less so). Apropos to this subject: - They want to minimize the number of apparent past bad actors that will be revealed during discover because a lot of past bad actors could be presented as a pattern of poor hiring and/or training. Allowing officers to resign to kill an investigation is golden). - When something bad happens and it makes it into a courtroom with sufficient evidence that it happened, they want every officer in the department to testify that the action in question is definitely not common practice and completely contrary to training. Such testimony would be greatly undermined by a subpoena that revealed several investigations finding officers to have engaged in such behavior in the past. Again anything that stops the investigation before it can find anything material could potentially save the department millions of dollars in future liability.
ty6853 2y ago
Remember when CA 'accidently' released the names and addresses of ALL CCW holders? They weaponize the mere fact they have potential to release these databases.
mjcohen 2y ago
Only 7k? They are slipping.
nashashmi 2y ago
Typically the tactics and abuses are shared among other staff to help them in their cases. The 7k number should be higher in 2024. Exponentially higher.
throawayonthe 2y ago
[dead]
phkahler 2y ago
Database use can NOT be limited by policy. If the data is there, people with access to it WILL use it for whatever they want, even if that's simply because nobody told them what the restrictions are. The best way to prevent misuse of data is not to have it. The second best way is to only allow access through technical means with proper access control at the query level and never access to the raw data.
- Loughla 2y ago
  The problem is that if someone has access to query at all, they can abuse it. How do you limit to specific search strings? Is that a thing?
  - phkahler 2y ago
    An interface that accepts only certain things - not raw SQL - and only returns whats needed for the task at hand. Logging of who asked for what is good too but is not preventative.
    - liontwist 2y ago
      Database roles are a thing
      - throwawayqqq11 2y ago
        But DB roles arent case specific. Someone with access to personal records should only be able to query relevant and legal information about the current case at hand. This requires oversight.
        liontwist 2y ago
        Yes. Ultimately I agree this is a social and legal construct, and technology cannot feasibly be configured to enforce it
        rbanffy 2y ago
southernplaces7 2y ago
The same law enforcement constellation that includes the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, famous for being a paragon of respect for civil rights, detainee rights and never having been repeatedly accused of beating arrestees, profiling aggressively or forming its own literal internal gang with which to intimidate whistle blowers and suspects? Color me surprised that they'd ever abuse state databases on people of interest!
LinuxBender 2y ago
I'm surprised that with all the leaks of sensitive databases there isn't a public copy of every government database running on Tor in some distributed anti-take-down configuration by this point.
steezeburger 2y ago
How do I join the effort for running these kinds of analyses?
tzury 2y ago
That’s about every 30 minutes, every day of the week, including weekends, during their day shift.
cratermoon 2y ago
How many times have Meta, Google, Amazon, Twitter, et all misused databases full of personal private information and no one has raised the slightest fuss? I'm tired of the "gubmint bad, Free Market™ Good" tropes.
darig 2y ago
[dead]
rbanffy 2y ago
I bet that, if we look closely right now, there is a lot of data abuse being done for immigration enforcement.
diogenes_atx 2y ago
There is an excellent academic study about the (mis)use of surveillance data in the criminal justice system: Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Policing/dp/0190684097?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.o9LFaH8f4dwyemJCP8nrCQ.OOAytx_Z-Ou7cPoNwmDQ-0t-hxf4A0WK_dstNW_iGsQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=Predict+and+Surveil%3A+Data%2C+Discretion%2C+and+the+Future+of+Policing&qid=1738332135&s=books&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol... Based on field work conducted with officers and IT personnel in the Los Angeles Police Department, the author convincingly shows that law enforcement generally follow an "institutional data imperative," i.e., a mandate to collect as much information as possible, in part by securing routine access to a wide range of data on everyday activities from non-police databases. Data originally collected for one purpose is used for another (p. 53).
ForOldHack 2y ago
FYI 7,0000 times in 365 days is almost 20 times a day.
josefritzishere 2y ago
That sounds like a crime. Maybe someone should be chaerged with one. Too bad there's no police around.
mtnGoat 2y ago
Law enforcement in America has an uncanny ability to either blatantly ignore or conveniently misunderstand laws. I’m happy to know they are tracking this and acting on it. I know in health care you get fired on the spot for looking at stuff you shouldn’t, same should apply here at a minimum.
classified 2y ago
So what's the difference between cops and other criminals? Cops get protection for their crimes.

564 points by hn_acker 2y ago

xbar 2y ago

What say you, Rob Bonta?

psunavy03 2y ago
He will likely invoke the "but guns" exception to all California policies and ignore it.

Suppafly 2y ago

That seems like it's only data that's self reported by the agencies themselves, I suspect the real number is much, much higher.

sbarre 2y ago
The article also mentions this is only one of many databases, and the only one that has self-reporting requirements for abuse.

EA-3167 2y ago

Well it's no shock that the top of the list of offenders is the LA Sheriff Dept, they're a nightmare of abuse at pretty much every level.

cge 2y ago
It appears the LASD is not just at the top of the list, but essentially is the list: they account for 93% of the violations. Which, as you point out, is not surprising. The LASD is enough of a mess that I've heard other nearby police departments complain about them, not to mention their history of gangs, corruption, and conflicts with the Board of Supervisors and FBI.
- wahern 2y ago
  In California it's generally the county sheriff who issues carry permits. Apparently sometime in the past few years municipal police were also given the authority to do this, but for decades I believe it was just the sheriff. And it was discretionary and highly political--urban sheriff's departments were invariably, "no", unless you were a high profile figure, whereas rural sheriff's departments were typically an easy, "yes", unless they had a reason (good or bad) not to. And sometimes there were jurisdictional fights where rural sheriff's departments would bend the rules and issue permits to residents of urban counties, (arguably) sometimes just to spite the cities. Like most jurisdictions in the US, sheriffs are an elected position, and very often crudely politicized, especially in states like California with strong urban/rural partisanship. In any event, it's likely most Californians still go straight to the sheriff's department when seeking a permit.
  - skyyler 2y ago
    >especially in states like California with strong urban/rural partisanship I haven't been to a state where there isn't strong urban/rural partisanship. Is that what Rhode Island is like?
    - wahern 2y ago
      Historically (as in past 100-150 years), the Deep South and West, though today probably only states like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc. Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia now have rural/urban divides that are stronger (more predictive) than, e.g., racial and class divides. Historically the West was rather homogenous politically, relatively speaking, but that's rapidly receding from memory. Though if you squint both Democratic and Republican West Coast politicians in some state (e.g. governor) and national offices (senator), but definitely not local offices, tend to still be a little more centrist than you'd expect as compared to their counterparts back east.

Redoubts 2y ago

Guess there’s no Delete Act for state databases

delichon 2y ago

In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data to find Americans’ communications. --https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/internal-documents-show-how-little-fbi-did-correct-misuse-section-702-databases So the story is that California isn't holding up their end of the police state? Compared to the FBI they're hardly trying.

throawayonthe 2y ago
[dead]
datavirtue 2y ago
I'm cool with this. The FBI purged my city and state of rampant corruption and they remove heinous violent criminals from the street every day, often before they can commit any other crimes. Most of the people who work there are tireless and thankless servants. And to all the haters, let's see how you feel when your daughter is abducted and taken over state lines or your local law enforcement becomes corrupt and starts working with criminals. The FBI showing up is a great feeling.
- saikia81 2y ago
  I have no ball in this game, as I am non-US. but sounds like the same can be said. Just wait until the FBI starts harassing your family outside their lawful jurisdiction. Or an FBI agent abusing their family. But at least your children will be safe from the dangerous streets...
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    They get their guy at all costs and will trample innocent people to do it. Many times, even often and predictably, they will extort oranipulate people into putting themselves in harms way to obtain their objectives. I didn't say the FBI is all unicorns and rainbows.
- mptest 2y ago
  I promise bad things still happen in your city. Do you think drugs stop getting sold when a dealer is picked up? Seems fairly naïve...

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

"Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits" Well that was a fuck-up! Not only is Los Angeles politically vulnerable right now, LASD went after gun owners. Bipartisan hell in 3, 2, 1...

snakeyjake 2y ago

7,000 times out of how many accesses? 7,636? 10 quadrillion? Does California law enforcement's rate of misuse of information systems exceed, equal, or fall short of my own misuse (usually unintentional, due to lack of clear policy/guidance) of various information systems?

9283409232 2y ago
I don't think it matters.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > I don't think it matters Of course it does. It doesn't absolve anything if the rate is low. But the frequency is absolutely meaningful.
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    Isn’t it a little like Ted Bundy pointing out he hasn’t murdered the vast majority of Americans, though? At the very least, I wonder how many officers are responsible for the violations. 7000? 1? LASD only has 18k employees.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Isn’t it a little like Ted Bundy pointing out he hasn’t murdered the vast majority of Americans, though? No. It's like tracking the homicide rate. The rate going down or being low doesn't mean murder is fine.
    - snakeyjake 2y ago
      >Isn’t it a little like Ted Bundy pointing out he hasn’t murdered the vast majority of Americans, though? You expect there to be no murders. I expect murders to be low, and for murderers to be punished. I also expect the number of murderers in the police force to be only slightly better than that of the rest of society. There are background checks, but there are also other factors that may increase the rate, regardless: I expect from them what I expect from everyone. So-- 7,000 murders per year. For Iceland that's high. I think they had 3 last year. For the United States, that's fucking fantastic! I wish we had 7,000 murders per year! If we had 3 that would be awesome but I'm not delusional. It's all about the wider context. Especially in this case, 6,800 of the misuses were from the LA sheriff's department doing background checks for gun permits so that's almost certainly a policy and procedure problem that has been fixed. So that leaves around 200 cases. Is that good? No. But how bad is it? 200 misuses out of ten quadrillion accesses is pretty not bad, if you ask me. edit: and that's a sign that things are going well because I am not dumb enough to expect 0 misuses of anything by any group of individuals. I expect misuses to be low and for misuse to be punished.

rdtsc 2y ago

> The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits So for the concealed carry there is a background check involved, but it has to be done in a certain way, and the police instead were being more "thorough" and were digging through more databases than they were supposed to? I guess they do have access to those databases, but are only supposed to check them if they suspect a crime was committed. What's the personal motivation there? It seems like they were going out of their way to be more "thorough", wouldn't it save them time and grief not to check more than needed. Is some higher political figure asking them to be more "thorough". I don't quite get the whole picture. Of course, they broke the law, but just wondering about their motive.

pc86 2y ago
It is an ideologically driven belief that "dirty civilians" don't deserve firearms, and any reason to deny them access should be used.
- lukan 2y ago
  This is not about the right to have firearms, but the right to carry them concealed, which is not exactly the same.
  - pc86 2y ago
    To "bear" means to carry. "You may have this firearm but you cannot carry it in a manner which is fit for purpose anywhere other than your own private property" is a pretty tough sell to anyone who believes in the second amendment.
    - sandworm101 2y ago
      But that would comport with the 2nd's militia concept: guns owned and kept for militia use in times of emergency, not everyday carry.

pc86 2y ago

As if anyone needed any more proof that LASD is just a criminal gang with a badge.

simonw 2y ago

> A Redding Police Department officer in 2021 was charged with six misdemeanors after being accused of accessing CLETS to set up a traffic stop for his fiancée's ex-husband, resulting in the man's car being towed and impounded, the local outlet A News Cafe reported. Court records show the officer was fired, but he was ultimately acquitted by a jury in the criminal case. He now works for a different police department 30 miles away. When people say "I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide" this is the exact kind of edge-case I always think about. The problem with a lot of these massive surveillance systems is that a lot of people end up with access to them, and some of those people may not be trustworthy. In this case, your ex-wife gets engaged to a cop and now they're abusing their access to databases to cause you harm. (That note that "he now works for a different police department 30 miles away" is such a toxic aspect of American policing: cops who get fired for stuff like this inevitably end up in the exact same job somewhere else.)

ToucanLoucan 2y ago
The biggest problem with police is it's the sort of job where the more a given person wants that job, the less they should probably have it. For their sake and others.
- pc86 2y ago
  Another huge problem is that law allows union bargaining agreements to dictate what happens to disciplinary records, that officers are allowed to resign when there are investigations happening that effectively kills them, etc. Once an investigation starts you shouldn't be allowed to resign, or at the very least the investigation should still continue and you should still be able to be punished after. Any union contract requiring the deletion/obfuscation of any disciplinary records for any reason other than clerical error or pardon should be illegal.
  - aidenn0 2y ago
    > Another huge problem is that law allows union bargaining agreements to dictate what happens to disciplinary records, that officers are allowed to resign when there are investigations happening that effectively kills them, etc. Once an investigation starts you shouldn't be allowed to resign, or at the very least the investigation should still continue and you should still be able to be punished after. I don't think requires any union pressure; the department is happy to be both rid of a problem officer and not have to put it in the public record just how bad the problem officer was. I have a friend who is a cop in Indiana (a "right to work" state), and after talking with him, I've realized that the department, as an organization, can largely be modeled as an entity that takes action to minimize its liability (individual officers are mostly shielded from civil liability, but the department is much less so). Apropos to this subject: - They want to minimize the number of apparent past bad actors that will be revealed during discover because a lot of past bad actors could be presented as a pattern of poor hiring and/or training. Allowing officers to resign to kill an investigation is golden). - When something bad happens and it makes it into a courtroom with sufficient evidence that it happened, they want every officer in the department to testify that the action in question is definitely not common practice and completely contrary to training. Such testimony would be greatly undermined by a subpoena that revealed several investigations finding officers to have engaged in such behavior in the past. Again anything that stops the investigation before it can find anything material could potentially save the department millions of dollars in future liability.

ty6853 2y ago

Remember when CA 'accidently' released the names and addresses of ALL CCW holders? They weaponize the mere fact they have potential to release these databases.

mjcohen 2y ago

Only 7k? They are slipping.

nashashmi 2y ago

Typically the tactics and abuses are shared among other staff to help them in their cases. The 7k number should be higher in 2024. Exponentially higher.

throawayonthe 2y ago

[dead]

phkahler 2y ago

Database use can NOT be limited by policy. If the data is there, people with access to it WILL use it for whatever they want, even if that's simply because nobody told them what the restrictions are. The best way to prevent misuse of data is not to have it. The second best way is to only allow access through technical means with proper access control at the query level and never access to the raw data.

Loughla 2y ago
The problem is that if someone has access to query at all, they can abuse it. How do you limit to specific search strings? Is that a thing?
- phkahler 2y ago
  An interface that accepts only certain things - not raw SQL - and only returns whats needed for the task at hand. Logging of who asked for what is good too but is not preventative.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Database roles are a thing
    - throwawayqqq11 2y ago
      But DB roles arent case specific. Someone with access to personal records should only be able to query relevant and legal information about the current case at hand. This requires oversight.
      - liontwist 2y ago
        Yes. Ultimately I agree this is a social and legal construct, and technology cannot feasibly be configured to enforce it
      - rbanffy 2y ago

southernplaces7 2y ago

The same law enforcement constellation that includes the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, famous for being a paragon of respect for civil rights, detainee rights and never having been repeatedly accused of beating arrestees, profiling aggressively or forming its own literal internal gang with which to intimidate whistle blowers and suspects? Color me surprised that they'd ever abuse state databases on people of interest!

LinuxBender 2y ago

I'm surprised that with all the leaks of sensitive databases there isn't a public copy of every government database running on Tor in some distributed anti-take-down configuration by this point.

steezeburger 2y ago

How do I join the effort for running these kinds of analyses?

tzury 2y ago

That’s about every 30 minutes, every day of the week, including weekends, during their day shift.

cratermoon 2y ago

How many times have Meta, Google, Amazon, Twitter, et all misused databases full of personal private information and no one has raised the slightest fuss? I'm tired of the "gubmint bad, Free Market™ Good" tropes.

darig 2y ago

[dead]

rbanffy 2y ago

I bet that, if we look closely right now, there is a lot of data abuse being done for immigration enforcement.

diogenes_atx 2y ago

There is an excellent academic study about the (mis)use of surveillance data in the criminal justice system: Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Policing/dp/0190684097?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.o9LFaH8f4dwyemJCP8nrCQ.OOAytx_Z-Ou7cPoNwmDQ-0t-hxf4A0WK_dstNW_iGsQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=Predict+and+Surveil%3A+Data%2C+Discretion%2C+and+the+Future+of+Policing&qid=1738332135&s=books&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol... Based on field work conducted with officers and IT personnel in the Los Angeles Police Department, the author convincingly shows that law enforcement generally follow an "institutional data imperative," i.e., a mandate to collect as much information as possible, in part by securing routine access to a wide range of data on everyday activities from non-police databases. Data originally collected for one purpose is used for another (p. 53).

ForOldHack 2y ago

FYI 7,0000 times in 365 days is almost 20 times a day.

josefritzishere 2y ago

That sounds like a crime. Maybe someone should be chaerged with one. Too bad there's no police around.

mtnGoat 2y ago

Law enforcement in America has an uncanny ability to either blatantly ignore or conveniently misunderstand laws. I’m happy to know they are tracking this and acting on it. I know in health care you get fired on the spot for looking at stuff you shouldn’t, same should apply here at a minimum.

classified 2y ago

So what's the difference between cops and other criminals? Cops get protection for their crimes.