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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> Also quite shocking that only 0.2% of people stopped are arrested and non-compliance == arrest. That's a lot of people just handing over data and passwords without a fight.

No, you've misunderstood that. The article mentions that he's been stopped previously, and asked for his passwords, and has declined before without being arrested.

So maybe that low arrest rate is a glimmer of hope: they could be arresting many more people.

It still sucks, and it clearly needs reform which is unlikely under current or future governments.

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True, hard to draw a firm conclusion because of that point. Based on the 'leaflet' they provide when you are detained refusing to hand over passwords can lead to arrest so I drew the conclusion based on that. If we look at it the other way though (based on your point) it's also scary as if they are detaining people who then refuse to give passwords and they don't arrest them (which they have the right to do) why are those people being detained at all? Again, the correct answer if we don't know but it could speak to some degree of racial profiling or simply very poor/incompetent screening that's catching and inconveniencing a lot of people.

Yes, the powers are really scary, and it seems obvious to me that they're being misused.

The UK is weirdly comfortable with massive levels of surveillance.

I think most voters don't understand the issues, or feel defeated

Maybe, I mean I don't know about "most voters" to be honest. I certainly feel like we're defeated and will be walked all over for the rest of our sad existence

Selective enforcement is worse than enforcement by-the-book.

It works with traffic citations and with tax enforcement. I mean if from a behavioral perspective you're looking for a given result with minimized work, selective enforcement is a decent option.

Except for the disproportionate racial bias, which we see with both airport security and traffic citations

What exactly is working about traffic citations? As far as I can see, compliance with traffic regulations hovers around 0%, and traffic citations serve no purpose other than as an arbitrary tax falling on unlucky people.

This probably highly depends on the country and cultural attitudes.

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