4 ms·

A fraction of a percent of US citizens are wrongly incarcerated. I'm not sure what relative numbers even mean here. 19,000 people under scrutiny is still scary

• adventured 13y ago
  Unfortunately it's not a fraction of a percent. 2.2 million people in prison in the US at the moment. That's probably about 1.5 million that are "wrongly" incarcerated (extrapolating based on the number of people in prison before the war on drugs began, and what it should be today based on population growth). They're political prisoners. This graphic nicely sums up the obviousness of that: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/US_incar...
  • jlgreco 13y ago
    Technically 2.2 million is something around 7/10ths of a percent.
  • dmazin 13y ago
    Well that's my whole point; half a percent of the population, which is what I also calculated when writing my original comment and consider a fraction, being wrongly incarcerated is an atrocity so Facebook's "fraction of a percent" means nothing to me.
• travisp 13y ago
  It's scrutiny beyond national security and secret requests. Facebook gives some good examples of requests that aren't NSA or FISA based, e.g. "a federal marshal tracking a fugitive". Given the appropriate legal paperwork, should it be scary for a federal marshal to request access to a fugitive's facebook data to check things like last login time and IP address, or private messages? To really decide how "scary" it is, we need to know what proportion of the requests are related to what kind of thing, and of what scope are the requests. Unfortunately, Facebook has still not been permitted to release any of this data.