The root of this investigation was the EFF. If you make tech money, you can toss $50 their way without any hesitation. https://supporters.eff.org/donate
You'll get some cool swag and, more importantly, ensure that they continue their excellent work.
I haven’t followed them enough but is it possible to support them without supporting other charitable causes of a political persuasion I don’t support? I fully support everything directly related to their cause but it gets me very upset when charities are supporting other various agendas around gender/immigration for example that are unrelated to their main goal.
Seems like the obvious answer is no. But if can see that they are doing important stuff, and you're letting your hangups over unrelated political issues keep you from donating to their awesome work, I'd say that's a mistake. They have a 4/5 from Charity Navigator for spending their money effectively.
If the EFF really wants my financial support, they can split their org into two; one that focuses exclusively on defending our digital rights (to whom I would gladly donate) and one that focuses on social justice.
This mentality of packaging the bad with the good is precisely what got the US where it is now.
MZLA used AI to generate wallpapers for Thunderbird that nobody asked for, somebody is in a salaried role doing it that's funded by donations. What a complete waste of money considering the AI isn't even FOSS, and they are promoting it on the Thunderbird blog. That's without even getting into the arrogance displayed by a big name from their camp on AI ethics. Did all kinds of mental gymnastics to say he was a very talented artist for typing text into Discord.
Open source email clients don't need marketing gimmicks, they need substance.
BTW, did you know the same person in that role is now introducing a Thunderbird podcast? Who asked for a podcast for a FOSS email client? Nobody.
Dude has proven once again that Mozilla should just focus on making great software as they close-to-zero credibility left after working with Meta and shambolic PR disaster after PR disaster.
FWIW, even though I'm a huge FOSS evangelist, I switched to Vivaldi and Gmail, because fuck that.
> This mentality of packaging the bad with the good is precisely what got the US where it is now.
Well this is inevitable. People just don't have time to be involved in every issue, so you find the parties / organizations / representatives that _most_ represent you, and that's what you get. There's never going to be an org or politician that perfectly represents you; you have to pick which people/orgs will most help shape the world to be the one you want to live in.
Also, if among free speech & digital rights supporters you're in a minority that doesn't like stuff like, iono, gender equality... well you can find other ways to express that point of view. I seriously doubt EFF's work is changing peoples' minds about that anyway; their involvement in some of those issues is more reflecting how most EFF constituents feel.
My problem with these unrelated political issues is that they directly collide with the rights the EFF traditionally tried to defend. Nobody is talking about net neutrality anymore and activists actively try to convince suppliers of net infrastructure to drop the target of the day. These political issues do not converge very well and old liberties are regularly undermined.
I know I am painting with a broad brush here, but I am at a point where I want it severed into something else.
This assumes "charitable causes" can be apolitical. I guess the ACLU might be closer to what you want then? They have a recent history of criticism for defending the far-right in the name of free speech while generally being thought of as "liberal".
The problem you're facing is that "fighting against power structures" is a political gradient starting short of authoritarianism and ending at anarchism (unless you're Stirner but egoism is a different topic for debate). Because this is a gradient and because most people's political positions evolve over time through lived experience and exposure to other people, it's impossible to pin down a fixed position on that spectrum without eventually veering in one direction or the other.
The EFF generally tries to use the ideal of individual privacy as a fixture for its politics but the recent US Supreme Court rulings have shown the implications of that as e.g. Roe v Wade and other decisions that used to cement various civil justice issues ranging from interracial marriage and the abolishment of anti-sodomy laws to legalizing abortion were apparently literally based on the "right to privacy", which the Supreme Court ruled doesn't exist.
So if the SCOTUS thinks "right to privacy" is intrinsically tied "various agendas around gender/immigration", it shouldn't surprise anyone that the EFF would think the same, no matter what your stance on those issues is.
It's almost like the Overton window has two natural endpoints but will frictionlessly slide in between them if you start pushing, so if you want to prevent it from moving further you have to exert force that will easily cause it to slide back the way you started at.
PS: On a complete tangent, I think this is an apt metaphor for how the Russian revolution overthrowing the monarchy turned into the authoritarian Soviet Union as the Bolsheviks tried to reel in the more anarchist revolutionaries and asserted dominance of the party, insisting on a central command bureaucracy instead of a federated direct democracy. But I digress.
FIRE is primarily funded by conservative and libertarian foundations and pg (much like most VCs) is libertarian. I'm not saying this to dunk on them, but it's unsurprising that pg would tend towards FIRE over ACLU, which is funded by slightly more progressive libertarian foundations (unless you consider George Soros a leftist).
You've seriously misread that paragraph. It's not saying those ideas are absurd, but that they are not civil liberties issues. This is spelled out in the very next sentence.
>Such reasoning expands the ACLU's mission to include pretty much any domestic policy issue.
I wish people wouldn't be so quick to rush to take potshots at political opponents. It lowers the quality of discussion for everyone and will eventually just turn this place into another Reddit.
The word "absurd" doesn't show in the article, that's your characterization.
What the referenced article is saying is that to the extent that these things are "civil rights" issues, everything is thus a civil rights issue, and thus a focus on civil rights is meaningless.
"If X is Y, then all Z are Y" is a kind of reduction to absurdity argument. The GP's characterization is correct, and nitpicking the fact that Reason doesn't actually use the word "absurd" doesn't meaningfully change the argumentative tack they use.
recent US Supreme Court rulings have shown the implications of that as e.g. Roe v Wade and other decisions that used to cement various civil justice issues ranging from interracial marriage and the abolishment of anti-sodomy laws to legalizing abortion were apparently literally based on the "right to privacy", which the Supreme Court ruled doesn't exist.
The SCOTUS decision in Loving (the anti-miscegenation laws, i.e., interracial marriage)[1] doesn't rest on right to privacy. This decision is built (approximately) on the equal protection clause. As such, the reversal or Roe doesn't put Loving on shaky ground at all. A good thing for me, since my wife and I are of different races.
Also Roe's reversal found that privacy implied in the 14th amendment doesn't imply a 3 trimester schedule of first, abortions legal, second states choice and third, illegal. That's it.
The right to privacy wasn't established by Roe so overturning Roe doesn't have any effect on it.
That was my point. Roe didn't establish a right to privacy but it was justified with a right to privacy. Roe was overturned because the SCOTUS now argues that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy so Roe was invalid.
>SCOTUS now argues that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy
That's not correct. They found that the right to privacy didn't cover abortion in the exact, specific and detailed manner that Roe set precedent for (see my previous comment about the specific rules for each trimester).
14th amendment "liberty" covers privacy covers abortion, only the abortion precedent was overturned privacy was not. Thomas took aim at privacy in his opinion but that's not supported by the rest of the court.
Stirner could defend literally any politics under his egoistic framework. There's a liberal reading of the unique and it's property buried under the "anarchism" he esposed that resulted from how shitty the 1840s German state was...
It seems en vogue for every organization to have a position on every topic du jour but the EFF has done well to avoid, at the very least, taking action outside of their scope. I don't keep an eye on any social media of theirs or anything so I can't speak to what they are out there _saying_ but I don't tend to read about them spending money on scope creep.
Independent of the FSF's contributions to FOSS, I don't think this is a good direct substitution: I can't think of the last time the FSF was a significant party to a privacy or law enforcement lawsuit.
From experience (not as a donor but as someone familiar with nonprofits) if you donate enough,you can get it to fund specific programs. But, I would just email them, I am sure if they hear enough they'll be happy to set up a dedicated "privacy" or "transparency" initiatives.
To say that agendas around "gender and immigration" are unrelated to the EFF's goals is missing the point.
You can guarantee that if society moves towards criminializing trans people, or further demonising immigrants, or tracking women's fertility for the purposes of further restricting access to abortion; surveillance technology will be at the forefront of that effort and the EFF's goals of technological privacy and free speech will be important to fight against it.
To support the EFF is, in my opinion, an inherently political act and to say you support their overall aims of online privacy and free speech but also "get upset" when they support groups that directly benefit from their causes is (IMO) a contradiction.
People don't realize that once they're done coming after "them" they're coming after you.
I think the EFFs efforts to support adjacent groups is awesome and completely inline with their goals.
Thanks for pointing this out.
It concerns me that this is such a contentious argument. _Everything_ is political. Censorship, free speech and data privacy are about as political as you get. If the EFF did not take a political stance on these things, there would be no point to their existance.
Grand-parent and most folks interested in EFF are typically concerned with unnecessary surveillance of innocents, rather than protecting "law breakers."
(Not all laws are legitimate of course; it's a factor but orthogonal.)
But you seem to have grand-parent's take backwards.
given that we're commenting on a thread about invasive police surveillance it's pretty funny to think there's no very obvious correlation to immigration. Which groups do you think are among the most targeted by law enforcement surveillance tech?
People who get hung up on this, what's the underlying mindset? "I love privacy for white dudes, but god forbid they accidentally help a Mexican woman in an iCE camp or an abortion clinic"? Marginalized are always the primary target of police force, and increasingly beta-test subjects of police tech[1], so the relationship should be quite obvious.
> The "shitty technology adoption curve" describes the arc of oppressive technology: when you have a manifestly terrible idea, you can't ram it down the throats of rich, powerful people who get to say no. You have to find people whose complaints no one will listen to.
>
> So our worst tech ideas start out with prisoners, asylum seekers and mental patients, spread to children and blue collar workers, and ascend the privilege gradient to the wealthy and powerful as they are normalized and have their roughest corners sanded down.
An ingroup that is protected by the law but not bound by it.
An outgroup that is bound by the law but not protected by it.
So maximum liberty for me and law and order for thee.
Another example:
Best defense against a "bad guy with a gun" (outgroup) is a "good guy with a gun" (ingroup).
See also Rhodesia, Jim Crow South, apartheid South Africa, and Western Expansion under the Homesteading acts.
This is how some people can claim they want both maximum freedom but also, maximum autocracy and arbitrary authority entrusted in deputies.
It's how the same people can have cruel hot takes when there's a minority killed by police but pull their hair out if one of their religious or political leaders is taken to court.
It's not inconsistent. There's different systems applied to groups that get different labels. Could be based on the geographic coordinates of where they were born, perceived skin color, what religion they may vaguely be associated with, ethnic identity, personal wealth, the gender they sleep with or identify as, political identity, citizenship status, whatever. One group doesn't have the right to have rights. That's the crucial part. How to get there is somewhat arbitrary.
It's best if it's just a tiny bit porous so there's a token instance where the classification is broken so it can be pointed to in order to deny the system exists. See antisemitic organizations with an ethnic Jewish person involved, white supremacist organizations run by a non-white person, anti-feminist organizations run by a woman, etc. They play an important role in perpetuating such systems
The 'bad guy' is whoever is the aggressor. Everyone has a right to life; if someone starts shooting at you, or swinging a bat at you, you have the right to defend yourself, and if you kill the aggressor in self-defence, so be it.
I've heard from an internet lawyer that it's possible in principle for two people attacking each other to both have grounds for self-defence, too, if both were in reasonable fear for their lives. Whether A kills B, or B kills A, either may be able to argue self-defence given the right (wrong) circumstances. But that's just some internet theorycrafting I heard.
It's a cognitive trick used to assign a label. All you need is a frame of mind, a professed sincere belief and it's done.
Most wars of aggression were sold as self defense.
Jonathan Swift even poked fun of this in the 1700s. It's a really old trick.
The problem is some people get extended the credulity of self defense and others aren't.
Could I declare self defense against a police officer?
Why not?
Aren't they just another human susceptible to the same emotions and aggressions?
They are always given the benefit, a priori, regardless of circumstances, carte blanche, every time. Even in a mere theoretical framing, police are immediately assigned the "self defense" role. It could be over the death of a child playing in the front yard or a family dog, doesn't manner, apparently justified self defense every time.
That's exactly this dynamic at play again. It gets used in the writings of gruesome mass shooters. They were forced to kill all those people to defend some amorphous idea, the country or the race or some thing.
Self defense is a valid physical construct but it's what everyone claims. Do you expect someone to twirl their mustache, furl their cape, guffaw in laughter and snark on how much of an evildoer they are?
Everyone wants to think they were in the right. It's almost as if the theoretical is immaterial.
Let's take the horrible crime of rape for example. Some teenagers are quite a bit larger than adults and we can theoretically imagine a child offending an adult but we've decided that's so unusual that we defined a presumed relationship (of the child being the victim).
This is completely reasonable because the conceit of agreeing with the mental exercise doesn't dissuade us from the historical and practiced reality of sexual crime against children being so dominant that it's presumed unless extraordinary evidence is presented otherwise. I'm sure a quick Google search will reveal these unusual exceptions because it's a "man bites dog" kind of story for journalists. The fact they can be itemized as individual stories instead of presented as a statistic is evidence of its rarity.
Self defense might be similar. Perhaps the relationship is mostly aggression and antagonism. There's an occasional zebra of a true self defense where someone jumps out of the inky shadows to subdue an innocent damsel but perhaps we need to set the bar in the court of public opinion far higher (in the legal court I believe it's already quite a gambit but IANAL)
Surveillance and what's illegal don't have to go together. Look at it this way. CSAM is bad and I want it to remain illegal, but I'm opposed to Apple and Google scanning everyone's private photos to try to detect it.
> it doesn't depend on the fraction of the budget you're contributing. Money is fungible even if it is only $0.01
Practice versus theory. If I'm donating 50% of an organization's budget, I get to say what my 50% does as well as the other 50%. That's power. (If they don't comply, I pull my funding. Assuming the other half is diffuse.)
I always shop at Amazon after clicking their affiliate link. Not sure if this is bad form on HN to paste it directly but it's available on their website. You have to visit it before adding items to cart.
I believe I am not the only one here whose blood boils at such a news story. Thank you EFF for investigating this.
My question is, what can we do to fight such oppressive surveillance mechanisms as individuals? Beyond the standard donation to EFF and such. In my rage I want to see the Fog Data Science people prosecuted and the police depts which unquestioningly used their product stripped of their post, but what power do we have as a collection of individuals to work against these nefarious machinations?
Save your blood and accept the simple fact that "the police" are a actually a set of more-or-less independent small government departments who get to beat people up and get away with it. And then arrest the beaten up person putting them in jail indefinitely before trial, and creating an immediate huge financial and social burden on that person. Mostly the public is unaware of this because the frog has boiled in fits and starts, the last big temp increases happened because of 9/11 under Bush and Obama and the distro of military gear to PDs. Tell me: what about this situation implies "self-restraint" is a key virtue of PDs?
I'll tell you what the problem is. It's the justice system itself. It's extremely slow and expensive. Defense lawyers have perverse incentives -- delays make money. Prosecution have perverse incentives -- they just want easy wins. The courts have perverse incentives -- they don't want to decide cases. So you get a system rooted in all-powerful patrolmen who effectively serve as judge, jury and executioner, with the rest of it serving as a willing, very highly paid window dressing. So why would a PD ever say no to getting any legal advantage?
The solution must be to rethink justice from top to bottom, such that excesses like this are punished meaningfully. I'm uncharacteristically optimistic about the possibility, mainly because of computers and the internet. Justice is about making sound decisions informed by reality after applying agreed upon rules (laws), and it requires a judge/jury. Computers can help with each of these elements in ways barely explored by modern-day courts. They can help with information gathering and jury selection/operation. If we wanted, we could have same day trials of higher quality than the months or years long things we have today.
For people aware of these problems, the only solutions they hear involve fixing the justice with new legislation or by electing the right sheriff, mayor, police chief, or if a higher level of government steps in (like the FBI or federal courts). Or even worse that odious pablum "just vote" - if you've been served shit for dinner it won't taste better if you push it 'round your plate.
(If someone with infinite money (and with open-minded connections with judges in various courts, and supportive politicians) wants to fund a serious effort in this area, please reach out to me, because this need is critical.)
As you wrote, redress in the courts is expensive and unlikely to succeed against the government. The USSC made-up doctrine of government immunity should be removed. BLM got side-tracked into ineffectiveness by avoiding this underlying problem.
It's simply because the courts are not in the habit of doing their jobs anymore. They are expected to hold the LEO accountable to the law just as much as the citizen, but the de facto system aligns the executive and judicial completely, such that neither is willing to take action against the other. If the courts were faster, more flexible, they would have more experience holding the executive accountable, and issues like leveraging surveillance capitalism in investigations and prosecutions, or the unjustified murder of unarmed citizens, of any race, would routinely result in speedy, accurate application of the law to everyone involved.
The badge should never have meant protection from the law, but these perverse incentives have conspired to make it so, and the solution is NOT legislation about cops, as much as it seems like it should be, but rather legislation about courts.
Government prosecutes criminal law. There are various reasons, including politics or career progression, that government prosecutors overlook some crimes. Individuals don't successfully charge others with criminal violations.
Individuals prosecute civil law. If civil law penalties continue to be unavailable because 'government immunity', then bad actors in government will not be restrained through the courts.
I'm uncertain what court legislation you would propose, other than removal of USSC doctrine of government immunity.
Legislation, as far as I understand it, determines the composition, operation and funding of the court system in addition to the law itself. It will probably require significant legislation to, for example, allow justices to run a jury trial entirely online and have the outcome binding. But I'm not a lawyer; perhaps the courts actually have great leeway with how they conduct trials, which would actually be a very good thing for the kinds of reforms I have in mind.
The root problem here is the commercial exploitation of personal data. How can you deny law enforcement access to data that is, for all practical purposes, available to anyone?
The solution to this particular problem is political. The USA needs federal privacy laws.
Another approach, which can be quickly implemented on the personal level, is to turn off phone GPS location, reset the advertising ID, uninstall apps, and set remaining apps to be restricted when in the background. In other words, don't voluntarily give so much away. Some of this is a choice.
I doubt the people who are literally responsible for deciding who to drone strike with meta data from things like this are going to suddenly turn around and decide "well, we definitely don't want that for our citizens".
This is all according to plan. The best part it's totally politically ambiguous. Republicans are war hawks and "the party of the people" (Democrats) have been responsible for thousands of extrajudicial killings overseas. Both major parties LOVE this idea. Who wouldn't want to be able to manufacture a crime against your alleged political adversaries?
“How can you deny..” I mean you just can right? A lot of lines are arbitrarily drawn, and drawing a line there is better than none. The categorical difference in power is one justification for the line being there. (Not saying there aren’t also justifications for more privacy still)
> what power do we have as a collection of individuals to work
This is the right question to ask!
First of all analyze where does power need to be applied to change this practice. State/Fed lawmakers? Courts? Apple/Google? The data brokers? DoJ/State Attorneys General? The FTC? Police Depts themselves? All of the above?
Next, for each of these analyze what would make them change course. For example, via courts a relevant legal challenge and adequately funded counsel is obviously one element, but in truth Judges pay attention to factors outside the courtroom like public opinion, re-election campaigns (for elected judges). Not only that but in the long term which judges are sitting is something that can be influenced either by elections or the appointer.
Then consider how do we build organizations that get the power to apply that influence. For example funding the EFF, ACLU et al is great for the "a relevant legal challenge and adequately funded counsel" part, but they do a bad job with public opinion and don't even attempt the other parts. So you can seek out or start organizations that do those elements.
Or alternatively imagine you want the US DoJ to step in. Well, ultimately high level DoJ serves the political needs of the current administration, so pressure needs to be applied there. Sadly in the US this is a very difficult angle but it's possible (see: tea party!). For other issues I might suggest joining DSA or something like that, but I don't think that's relevant here. Possibly making a stink within the Democratic party would be effective.
As you can probably see, this fans out to a large number of different organizations with different strategies along the way. You can join and support multiple of them, but it's not really practical to do everything so you have to pick a bit. This is why you need to think through what you believe is a viable strategy and find organizations you think are effective.
> My question is, what can we do to fight such oppressive surveillance mechanisms as individuals? Beyond the standard donation to EFF and such.
I don't think there is much beyond that to be honest. Those people are the experts and, honestly, a big difference between this country and those that we would not like to become is that we are able to make such a donation without repercussion.
In a lot of other places, such activism would have severe consequences.
It has been done and many of us are using it although we are a small minority. Most people are unable to make the changes needed as the implants are too embedded in them to remove. Try getting someone to switch to degoogled Android from Iphone to see the difficulty.
I treat my cell phone like a land line. It just sits next to my desk, even when I leave. For the last several years, I don't carry it with me anymore. I lived just fine before they existed and to me the convenience isn't worth the potential ramifications. It's not only whoever is currently in power today and what they deem acceptable...it's also the potential future use of the data by future "leaders" because it's all recorded. Just don't give them anything to record, or as little as humanly possible in this day and age. I know most won't do that, unfortunately. There's rarely anything important enough to actually need instant communication for most people. I bring this up all the time to family and friends: imagine if Hitler, Stalin or Mao didn't have to rely on a network of snitches and spy's (manpower) to get their info on gays, jews, capitalists, dissidents, etc., and just had to keyword search a database and instantly get a list of anyone who used certain words, phrases or ideas, or visited certain establishments via gps records at anytime in the past
So how does that work? I install some app that "needs" location data to function and in the EULA I "consent" to that data being sold. Police then buys this data via several proxies. So far so "told you so years ago". But how does police use that data? How do they associate account IDs from all these apps to real persons? Is that data collected and sold as well, e.g., via the payment processing? Do they use the email address as key?
Yes, but this data is held by the cell phone companies. Based on the article, this is using "data from apps in accordance with their legal agreements" so that doesn't seem to be the source.
I hope cell phone companies require warrants for the data (they should per Carpenter v. United States) although I don't really trust them.
In addition to the boring “99% of people are uniquely identified by where they spend the most time at 2am and 2pm,” the linked EFF dive [1] says that they let federal agencies look up each device’s advertiser ID and other device info that makes it easy to look up a specific phone they have or have had physical access to. And if they still have no clue, they can use the cellular IP address to get the cell companies to identify the person paying the bills.
(Anyway, you have an address the phone lives at. Finding out who lives at an address is some of the basics of investigating, starting with a query of DMV databases, followed by credit reporting databases.)
Location is account id. If you have the locations a person has visited, you have their home and their work/education/etc place.
This is why any and all claims of anonymization are gaslighting. You can't know something and not know it. The entire concept is incoherent and anyone who claims ad tracking and privacy are in any way compatible is lying to your face.
I find it less concerning that the police have this info, than the fact that it's just a random company providing it and presumably anybody with the cash to buy access could buy the same or equivalent system.
Yep, not long before any disgruntled ex, or any other bad actor could look up anyone and find out their everything. In fact, such an app might be what's needed to blow the lid off the whole thing.
> "Local law enforcement is at the front lines of trafficking and missing persons cases, yet these departments are often behind in technology adoption," Broderick told AP. "We fill a gap for underfunded and understaffed departments."
So if they had a near-unlimited budget, they would have even scarier tools. Obviously law enforcement isn't the NSA, but that part made me think. Just how far does LE want to go with technology if money is not an object?
This is why "defund the police" became a slogan: operational control against abuse just doesn't work, so the blunt instrument of reducing the amount of money for toys is the only one left.
But it's exactly the same mistake as the supposed "starve the beast" policy.
If someone really doesn't trust the government to spend money on the right programs, then they shouldn't expect that reducing tax revenue will make the government prioritize the same things they would. Besides, governments can produce very bad outcomes with almost no budget at all, since some of the worst things in life are free.
If cops like spending money on toys rather than doing the hard work of solving or preventing crimes, then giving them less money won't suddenly make them stop brutalizing vulnerable people (and potentially might make them more likely to do so, out of boredom or revenge).
This speaks to my ongoing crusade to try inject pragmatism into the political conversation. There are far too many unintended consequences to this sloganeering that is used to stir up the populace.
We need to get away from focusing on intent of a change and look at the practical effects of the change.
I could get behind it, but would add a wrinkle that full random sortition from the populace should be used for the elected representatives. I kind of feel like an elected government service notice should be viewed the same way as a jury summons—an understanding that it is a serious and important duty, but one that comes with an “oh crap” attitude.
For me, with our current political system in the US, every candidate disqualifies themselves be simply having the level of narcissism needed to believe that they belong in office because they are the most qualified person for that office. Especially at the level of POTUS.
I live in a city that's been defunded by economic circumstance. There are simply not enough blue bodies to harass people over the petty stuff. The cops focus on violent crime and drug trafficking because staffing levels are low enough that there is a sufficient amount of "resume enhancing" crime like that to satisfy the needs of the department. Playing with MRAPs, harassing the citizenry on a hunch and perving through people's location data for no good reason is what departments that are well staffed enough to have idle hours do. Make no mistake, this is not a great environment to be a cop. You look at the department demographics and it's basically the young guys who will be up and out and being managed by a few old guys who are fresh out of fucks to give. I'm sure for people wrongly targeted by them there is little recourse but it doesn't seem like they spend a lot of time going off on people who've done little wrong.
The caveat is that you are on your own for securing your property and the department basically laughs at the "standards of polite behavior and endangering the public" crimes that the HN crowd tend to take very seriously.
Overall I'd give it a 9/10. I'm very happy with my department's performance so far as I can see it.
The point isn't to make cops work better by giving them less money, the point is to take that money and spend it on things like affordable housing, vocational programs, cheaper college classes, grief counseling,drug prevention programs, daycare vouchers, etc.
Things that are outside of the purview of police forces.
What people often forget about "defund the police" is where it came from, or in what context it was originally framed. It didn't mean simply paying the police less, or reprioritizing funding away from guns and violence, it meant defunding and dismantling the justice system entirely, and then rebuilding it around explicitly antiracist principles, if at all.
Read the list of demands from the Seattle protestors who created CHAZ[0] in the midst of the BLM riots. Their very first point was not to "starve the beast" in small government terms, but abolition of the police in its entirety. That's what "defund the police" is supposed to be. Not a reasonable compromise but a revolutionary ideal. Obviously what defund became after white liberals appropriated it, watered it down and used it for clout wouldn't work because the teeth were taken out of the concept so that it couldn't actually pose a threat to the status quo.
It may not be a particularly good lever, but it's the one we have. Police departments will ignore all oversight, but they still can't spend money that doesn't exist. They will absolutely spend their crumbs on the most aggressive and vengeful policing strategies and tech they can find, and that will be an improvement over where we are today, where they spend a vast majority of their budget on that anyway.
There is a simple way to avoid this. You do not have to carry a cell phone/tracker at all times. Stop taking your tracker transmitter with you everywhere. Or simply turn it off/remove the battery.
I know a lot of people will say that cell phones are too useful to turn them off. And that's fine and reasonable. Just be aware they literally are tracking devices and it is your choice. There will be no legislative solution for this. The government spying ratchet only goes one way.
Most phones do not actually turn off. You need to put them in a faraday sleeve. The other options more difficult for many is to use phones with alternative OS such as Graphene, Calyx, Lineage, Linux.. with only safe FOSS apps installed. SIM card mitigations are to switch number to VOIP and only occasionally use burner SIM's or https://invisv.com/pgpp/.
Can you elaborate? It is possible to power cycle a phone which implies that it's capable of powering off. Are you saying a powered-off phone still communicates with the network?
In a word, yes. Some relatively rare phones such as Pinephone and Librem have actual power switches, and maybe some others actually go off. The vast majority of consumer phones appear off but are still calling home to the mother ship. Many diagnostic test have been done and published to prove this. If you really need it, I could probably go find them for you.
Thanks. I'm guessing this is when happened when hardware vendors stopped making phones with removable batteries then? I would be really interested in any links you might have yes. I did a cursory search but came up with little more than a stackexchange question.
Both Ithings and Google devices have a find my phone feature that works even when the phone is off. That is something you can test yourself if you have one. Obviously for this to work, the phone is sending its location even when it is supposedly off. It seems that the company in this reporting is not getting data from Goopple yet, but those who are really concerned about not being followed are careful with this and use different operating systems. https://www.xda-developers.com/iphone-findable-turned-off/
The latest iphones even can be tracked while off through apples find my network (Bluetooth based). It can be switched off. But it poses some interesting questions.
Once something like this leaks, we need to realize corporations and intelligence agencies have been surveilling us in an unholy alliance for profit and power for a long time. Some people may have been placated by the Snowden leaks and thinking something must have been done about that, but it has only gotten much worse. There are solutions that individuals and communities can adopt, but experience tells me that few are willing or able to rewire themselves.
And like all things, it flows from the intelligence agencies, to the military, to the police so that it can be used on citizens. This is about as close to minority report level precognition as we can attain in this century.
I can imagine a scenario: A dumb-box is put in a squad car that can run queries specific to a person. You get pulled over, give the cop some lip for harassing you over your license plate expiration (the new sticker is in the mail). The cop goes back and uses the dumb-box to pull up 10 mile areas around a major crime and you happened to be in one of them. Now you're in the back of the squad car to be "interviewed" (read: assaulted) over an alleged association with a crime. Doesn't matter if within that 10 miles is a grocery store and a bank.
It doesn't end with the police though. This is enabled because we willfully carry tracking devices everywhere we go. It's the greatest slight of hand ever pulled by the CIA and FBI. So great in fact I doubt the legend of corruption Hoover could imagine it. Some of us avoid the obvious traps like social media and some of us even have hardware switches on our phones. The vast, vast majority of Americans are beacons brighter than the sun with Tiktok (CCP intelligence app), Facebook (US intelligence app), etc.
Privacy advocates have been shouting from the rooftops for two decades now about the future of spying and we gave up privacy for convenience and even paid for it. In some sense, we deserve exactly what we paid for.
Google and Apple need to fix this by not allowing apps to start up by themselves, by not letting them run in the background without permission, and giving user control for killing apps.
Even so, being able to disable background processes still would be helpful, possibly to save power and/or RAM.
What else would be needed is possibility to provide fake data (for location, sensors, contacts, etc), including fake error codes (which is also possible to test program working in case of errors).
Data aggregation and retainment of such data is the problem. There isn’t a reasonable need for anybody to log such data and such data should also be copyrighted to the entity creating it. Laws should require express written authorization for use from each individual. The generation and retaining should be hard to prevent the data being used for unnecessary uses.
The opportunity for abuse is huge. This gives law enforcement the ability to select a person and go search for a crime in their history. That isn’t how the criminal Justice system is supposed to work. They are supposed to look for perpetrators of established crimes.
If this is based on "legal consent" by phone owners ... what's to prevent them from selling this same data, live, to jealous ex-boyfriends? Are we to suppose consent in that case to.
(and of course, some jealous ex-boyfriends work at the police office, so they already do a bit of that)
The great Chinese firewall is far more effective than the GDPR. They outright ban US corporations such as Google or Facebook from operating in their country or retain control over the data and networks of companies such as Apple.
I am not sure how IP theft has any relevance to how they setup their networks. Yes in the western media we hear much about the censorship and surveillance in China. We do not hear as much about their need for data sovereignty and defense against US controlled networks which I think is their higher motivation.
In the autocratic state, you do what you are told. In the free west we do what we want, but coincidentally what we want aligns with what the powerful want us to do. We may have more options to opt out in the west once we learn how we have been tricked into things.
> "Local law enforcement is at the front lines of trafficking and missing persons cases, yet these departments are often behind in technology adoption," Broderick told AP. "We fill a gap for underfunded and understaffed departments."
This is why stop and frisk is rarer when you don't need to stop people to see their ID's. Cops can just pull up their screen and know each of those guys standing on the corner. We all get frisked many times a day and don't even know it.
Something I don't really understand. In my country, it is not even legal to sell/provide a piece of equipement/a service which enable people to communicate ... which cannot be spied on.
And what you don't understand is how it got so bad in your country? Pervasive, always-on, and presumed surveillance that cannot be opted out of is not a healthy environment for anyone.
These spying capabilities generally only require to work once a valid warrant has been provided. The US has those as well, but what's being discussed is warrantless mass-surveillance to anyone who's happy to pay for it.
yep, as far as I know, there are no laws about mass surveillance. At the same time, I don't think there are laws to forbid big data owners to use their global access to this data in order to get an unfair advantage, for instance linkedin.
The cops have way too much money, too much power, and are basically immune from responsibility. Plus there is a ton of evidence to show police don't reduce crime. You reduce crime by improving quality of life, which seems like the antithesis for capitalists these days. The people in charge only want to "help" the poor insofar as it helps move the money into their own pockets.
You'll get some cool swag and, more importantly, ensure that they continue their excellent work.