‘BlueLeaks’ Exposes Files from Hundreds of Police Departments
krebsonsecurity.com
krebsonsecurity.com
So they are spinning it as a user's fault? Not the fault of Netsential for allowing malicious content to be a problem...
That's what whistleblowing is all about though; purposefully breaking the law or a contract (like an NDA) to expose shit. Some countries will protect whistleblowers, others have to flee and seek asylum abroad.
So don't deny whether or not law and/or contract was broken, instead focus on whether the action was justified. Yes the system was broken and open for exploitation, but the attack was not accidental: they intentionally uploaded a malicious payload, intentionally extracted data, and intentionally uploaded it to the internets.
No attack is accidental. If a vendor fails to follow appropriate operational security, it is certainly the illegal actors fault. But it is also the fault of the vendor's negligence, and might also be the fault of whoever failed to properly vet the vendor. All three are potentially culpable.
Moreover, I took the parent comment to be referring more to customer flight rather than some judiciary judgement. 'I got mugged' is not what you want to hear from the person entrusted with your data security.
Netsential clearly had a massive security vulnerability in their system that allowed one user to access the data of all other users. That's very much on them.
Consider a company that provides physical storage units and advertises that they are secure and can only be accessed by their owner. Then it turns out that there was a back alleyway running behind all the units that allowed any owner who had access to one unit the ability to access any other unit, without a key. I don't think anyone would suggest that would be anything other than a massive security oversight by the storage company. Yes, what the thief did was illegal and should be dealt with. But you'd have a hard time convincing me that the company itself wasn't primarily at fault for such a huge oversight in the first place. And I certainly would never use them again.
I dont think anyone is saying it was not illegal are they? but just because it is illegal does not resolve the security issue at the service provider
If I leave my home unlocked it is still illegal for you to steal my TV but you can bet my insurance company is going to give me crap (if not deny my claim out right) due to my negligence for not securing my property
>>That's what whistleblowing is all about though; purposefully breaking the law or a contract (like an NDA) to expose shit.
It can, but not always, and in the case of true whistleblowing there are laws in place that would provide an affirmative defense to otherwise illegal acts (like breaking an NDA). This is akin to self defense. Murder is always illegal but self defense is an affirmative legal defense one can use to justify their action making them "not guilty" of the law under those special circumstances. Whistle blowing as a few of these affirmative defenses as well
That said, I do think PHP software should be distributed in such a way that the files are both locked for editing by the PHP process itself, and verified regularly. I've been using XenForo on my website for a while and it's giving me e-mail warnings that a file has changed (I did a customization), so it does exist.
But yeah, that particular category of error can be mitigated via config; disallow PHP execution in an upload folder, disallow PHP to add or edit files in the application folder, etc.
You can also run a ClamAV scan to catch very obvious threats.
The problem is all the legacy applications which are a mess of random PHP files and rely on the web server itself to dispatch requests based on the path of the file - in this case any PHP file can get executed if it happens to be in a location served by the web server. Rather than disallowing PHP execution in select folders, how about allowing PHP execution only for specific paths - those that you expect incoming requests to hit? That way no malicious code can run unless it manages to overwrite an existing file.
That means it'll work on anything. The old desktop PCs that sit around in public offices for decades will display it with no problems. Compare that to a beautiful, modern website from a rival that plain won't load let alone render on that ancient computer.
The one with the working website wins the contract.
Of course, you probably won't notice this unless you're using a dark mode extension like me, because under normal circumstances, those links are invisible, since they render white-on-white.
Also, tables play poorly with mobile and are usually the opposite of responsive.
Lots of things.
- Screen readers expect HTML tables to be tables. If there aren't things like a caption the screen reader can inform the user of a problem.
- In a lot of cases the table won't inline in to a logical structure for reading out. A screen reader will read cells out from left to right, which interleaves content from one column with content from another when that isn't the intent. CSS layout will usually read better.
- Table-based layouts use a lot more code than CSS layouts, which is more to download and more to parse.
- In the case of that website in particular, there's a ton of inline styling which is more unnecessary data to download.
- Using tables for layout makes it much harder to develop truly responsive layouts for mobile; doing things like hiding download/battery intensive page elements is much harder (especially if those things span several cells). That site does have some media queries for controlling styles, but it could be doing more.
I think that they won these contracts with more “who you know” advantages than technical.
You'll be amazed to see how is layout done here on HN.
But why? It seems like a waste of money.
This has everything to do with security. They are one click away from getting whole department pwned.
I honestly doubt that. Office is surprisingly much lighter when compared with any electron application.
Anyway, chances are that they are running more than one program at once. Plus they do not really need to use office.
> It's probably still the age of win7 there, might be 32bit as well
funfact: win10 also has a 32bit version, and it works just fine on computers with limited ram
> With ancient Acrobat reader as well
Should have used Zathura instead.
I clicked on the first link to get a description of features, but it leads to an empty page.
https://netsential.com/default.aspx?menuitemid=283&menugroup...
> Netsential, a web services company used by multiple fusion centers, law enforcement, and other government agencies across the United States
This kind of vendor lock-out is unfortunate as it effectively keeps startups out of the picture. The majority of contracts I've worked on in this space (barring defense, and that's because we worked in R&D) required similar attestations of experience.
Actually, this is yet another example of why defunding the police is so important---they don't even spend the budget they have well.
I once had a sysadmin (!) that said to me, "We're running SSL so aren't we secure?" I went on to explain things like SQL injection and XSS. I mentioned how simple authorization bugs can ruin your security. I think he got the picture... I hope.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/blueleaks-dat...
But then there was this: https://twitter.com/NatSecGeek/status/1273329710576152581
https://www.csis.org/analysis/rise-far-right-extremism-unite...
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/security/reports/201...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/world/white-e...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/homegrown-...
So right wing terrorism is a greater threat, unless you are worried about being killed.
(Nobody ever gave them credit for competence.)
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/right-wing-terro...
And who poses the greater threat to any community, the police (some of whom are brutal) or the local criminals, gangs and traffickers?
But if asked "Are you more worried about right wing or islamist extremists?", my answer is "Yes".
Whereas something that is well known and homegrown in the USA (Timothy McVeigh, anyone?) has had a much lower level of concern assigned to it until very recently.
Who did he work with again?
- victim becomes a martyr despite being "no angel" (Weaver was a white supremacist, dealing in illegal firearms)
- initial involvement of law enforcement is entrapment (undercover ATF agents)
- lies by law enforcement ("the ATF filed the gun charges in June 1990. It claimed that Weaver was a bank robber with criminal convictions.[27] (Those claims were false: at that time Weaver had no criminal record. The 1995 Senate investigation found: "Weaver was not a suspect in any bank robberies.")
- basic cockups (court date mixup)
- absurdly long quasi-siege
- significantly lighter treatment and more investigation than similar fiascoes for nonwhite people (e.g. Breonna Taylor); the 2020 version of this would probably have just been to drive a MRAP through the shack and use the return fire as sufficient justification for the killings (see e.g. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/31/actor-steve... )
- they shot the dog. They always shoot the dog
- attempt to prosecute sniper is met with sovereign immunity, case is dropped
I think two "issues" are the relatively better protection against surveillance US citizens have (I wouldn't think it's an issue at all, hence the quotes) and the fact that they tend to be lone wolves more than Islamic terrorism, which often works through networks.
So it's not that easy to spot people like McVeigh, Kaczynski, or outside the US Breivik, before they act.
But we still should take efforts to reduce that, whether it's by building showers with textured floors and efforts to counteract terrorism...
https://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/Someone-drowns-in...
We don’t take terrorism or white supremacy seriously because it poses an imminent threat to everyone right now, we take it seriously because it has the potential to put hundreds of thousands to millions of lives at risk in the future if left unaddressed.
https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/terrorism2015/...
Also modern terrorism is bad but we forget that far-left and state sponsored terrorism was worse in the 80s (numbers as of 2017):
number of attacks over time: https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/terrorism2015/...
number of deaths: https://zbpublic.blob.core.windows.net/public/terrorism2015/...
And this is in the EU. In the US I am sure the numbers would be completely drown in the numbers for common crime.
(It's also worthwhile in discussions about "crime" to remember that it's a very loaded term. For example, wage theft numbers absolutely eclipse burglary, yet those are rarely what we think about when we hear "crime")
Police should worry a bit about it of course.
But both groups are definately conservative and hold some of the same ideas. They both want the world and power they or their grandfathers had 50-150 years ago.
I looked at the articles you linked to. The New York Times mentions white extremist suggesting racially motivated but also mentions international terrorism instead of domestic terrorism. Your first source attempts to define right-wing extremism as a political motivation. That said your point isn’t very clear.
If you are limiting your point to domestic US terrorism racially motivated terrorism greatly exceeds religiously motivated terrorism but the numbers are tiny either way. If you are talking internationally religiously motivated terrorism by far takes the lead when you consider that ISIS is a growing threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan and when you consider the various terrorist organizations in sub-Saharan Africa like Boko Haram.
"Right-wing extremism" was clearly intended to refer to the home-grown variety here.
And how "tiny" the numbers are is somewhat subjective. Terrorism works by terrorizing, meaning its intended to affect far more people than the immediate victims by instilling fear.
Just from the last few years, everyone will remember the Orlando nightclub shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue, the Q/MAGA-superfan mailing pipe bombs, or the Poway synagogue shooting. There are many more that you may have forgotten on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
I am clearly reading from the material provided. Perhaps we have a difference in reading comprehension.
> was clearly intended
It is defined or it isn’t. I don’t like subjectively inventing definitions to fit a poorly framed argument.
Watch them find something KKK-related in here.
If they really want to keep their means and methods secret, the way to do that would be by giving their internal complaints system enough teeth to never require leaking full documents in the first place.
Police departments, comparatively, are not that classified or secretive. It's definitely much more likely that there's evidence of undercover operations that were leaked by this, probably. Certainly much more likely than something KKK related, what makes you say that? I admittedly haven't looked to see how far back in time these files go, so something these days seems a little outlandish, at least from what I know right now.
So unless they are very bad at their job at gather intelligence and analyze outcomes, leaks don't cost lives unless they allow it. It like a pyromaniac telling the fire department the exact location (down to the meter) and exact time (down to the second), and what exact mechanism they intend to use to light a fire. The fire department will get annoyed and angry, and the police will likely show up, but the risk for someone to die in a fire is quite low.
Mistakes happen all the time, and that doesn't even get into poor redaction methods that can be reversed, ESPECIALLY since the groups being targeted are most likely able to put pieces together that journalists can't. The mysterious nine character name might be a total mystery to the interns at NYT, but if you're an insurgent with the context of the rest of the report and (most likely) a few good names to guess with it's far from real mystery.
To reiterate, the lives in question are likely still classified, and revealing even their deaths can come at significant cost. Telling terrorists that they have the right guy presents about zero benefit to anyone but them, so there's no reason it'd be public information.
Furthermore, lives are a pretty low bar. I don't think it should be controversial to say that the US government, for instance, should be a few steps ahead of violent extremists. Debating the specifics of how and what measures are appropriate is another very important and necessary conversation, but saying that redacted leaks are totally fine is like giving just the suits of your cards to your opponent. Nothing like this is harmless, that's just myopic.
There is however a lot of conditions for that to happen, which is why the general claim that a leak could endanger lives should be seen as rare, unlikely, while possible event.
To make a guesstimate, journalist and government official risked more life by the additional traveling by plane and car in order to discuss and publically address the leaked documents of Chelsea Manning than the risk exposed by the leaked documents themselves. The agencies involved was likely competent enough to eliminate all higher risks well before the publication date.
> Furthermore, lives are a pretty low bar
I don't think anyone object to that. Leaks should be seen as having a high risk of disrupting operations and increasing resource costs. I would expect that pulling out operatives, protecting collaborators, replacing operatives, and operations that fails are all very costly. The trade between an informed citizens and costs is something which should be more often discussed in politics. Journalists can sometimes reduce the costs with careful work, but it not a clear cut and sometimes they will make a mistake and sometimes its the government that goes to far in hiding too much information from its citizens.
It is a distinction without a difference.
A good month is one without gun shots.
I've been mugged coming out my front door by kids with knives.
An elderly woman was tortured to death during a home invasion.
A fight breaks out, police break it up and leave without arresting anyone, only for the fight to occur again 10 minutes later this time with gunshots. Police show up the next morning and pick up casings and then leave. Little kids were right in the middle of that 30 person brawl too.
Non-stop fireworks to cover up gun shots.
Mom moves into her new boyfriend's place, then break up and leave the kid. So you have kids growing up in a home with zero parents.
Garbage everywhere.
The attitude of always wanting to fight even when they mess up big time. Hitting a car, going through the garbage. Good things stay hidden. Vulgar violent things stare you down because they like getting grounded up.
When something really bad happens, like a home fire, they turn into panicked cowards. All that thug life goes right away on the slightest adversity.
Attorneys and corporate leaders have abandoned the people who got them here just to win at all costs. A vet who fought so they don't have to kills themselves every day. That's not going to last. WTC going down in a fireball should have taught them all something. Can't escape it, no matter how rich you are.
The leaders really are out of touch. They see the violence as like how mechanical bolts preload. People are killing each other. I don't feel it. That's good! It means I'm that far removed.
How can you help people when they don't help themselves. Police just keep a cap on it all so it doesn't take us all down.
Those are really hard things to tackle, and even talk about. So most people don't.
I understand there is an issue in internalizing the 2 main versions (Southern spin vs Northern spin) of 'whitewashed history' in the US. An objective viewer would consider them very sanitized, misleading, and often propagandized versions of history that are somewhat benign to people of European descent but toxic to non-white people that mainline it. It leads to a misunderstanding of how the world really works, came to be, and minimizes the role criminality played in the whole exercise, especially due its exclusion of unbiased economic history.
I think certain populations in the US have the unfortunate experience of being miseducated about who they are and why they are where they are, then spend the rest of their lives (if curious) unlearning/re-educating themselves about how the world really works and filling the gaps that were conveniently excluded from our prevailing historical narratives.
The mistrust of the information in some areas of study is based on intuition that isn't completely wrong.
"Miseducation of the Negro" touches on some of these topics though it is not an exhaustive exploration. We've learned a lot more about the layers of misinformation since 1933 (publish date), it would be interesting to read an updated version.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mis-Education_of_the_Neg...
1. It's not a priority area to be fixed. (Police aren't doing much to address the crimes that have been commited)
2. The police aren't getting a lot of cooperation from witnesses ("don't snitch" which benefits gangs and gang retailiation.. again supporting the cycle of crime)
3. Is it the police are being held back from the region (that would be a corruption issue)
---
Anyways, police can fix the problem behavior instantly. Murders don't view their behavior as concerning. They tend not to have a lot of things stopping them on lessor crimes either. Programs take years to be fully affective. (If not decades)
The people reading your post here are not the ones you need to tell this to. You need to tell it to the criminals in many areas of the US who do indeed think that all their conflicts and problems can be resolved with violence. And then get them to believe it. Good luck.
Say you're the kid left at mom's boyfriend's place. Who's gonna take you in and be your role model? The kid with a knife, who will teach you to mug people on their doorsteps.
Alternatively, we could take funding from the admittedly ineffective police, and put those resources into service work. Fund support structures, and provide better role models to the neighborhoods that need them so badly. They're probably there already, but they keep their heads down and act tough when needed, because that's a survival tactic.
It's not that people want to live a life of crime, but when it's all you've ever known, it's nigh impossible to break that cycle on their own.
This whole comment seems to ignore how ghettoization of a population can be purposely done by the state through regular economic attacks amongst other things.
There is plenty US history that explains why that environment you are describing ended up the way it did but it is quite painful to see what % of the voting population is ignorant of it.
Edit: "populations" -> "groups of people"
Precisely the same mentality is present in many of the most crime ridden neighborhoods in the US.[1]
Are you able to think objectively for a moment, and see how your reaction to police doing that, is similar the police's reaction to criminals doing that?
EDIT: The commented post was edited after I wrote my original above comment. Now it’s more like victim-blaming.
Often times in intense situations, maintaining objective emotional detachment rather than being overwhelmed by emotional knee jerk reactions can mean the difference between life and death, or a positive outcome and a negative one.
By only pointing a finger to the other side, you strongly hinted that the behavior of citizens was not only the cause of the behavior of police, you implied that it was also the solution to the problem of the behavior of police. This causal link may or may not be partially true, but nobody really cares about the cause, unless it helps with providing a solution to the problem. By only pointing to the cause, you imply that the solution to the problem lies there too, which, in this case, is both very questionable, and classic victim-blaming.
You must have missed the very first thing I said in this comment chain: "I too dislike hyper aggressive militarized police who act above the law"
>nobody really cares about the cause, unless it helps with providing a solution to the problem. By only pointing to the cause, you imply that the solution to the problem lies there too, which, in this case, is both very questionable, and classic victim-blaming.
I'm startled to see so many people on a technical forum such as HN speaking as if they have no technical problem solving experience.
Imagine there was a critical bug in some software you are responsible for, causing massive distress for millions of users, even killing some. The first step in debugging an issue is to identify the cause(s), right? Imagine if your non technical boss had the gall to scold you for trying to identify the cause(s), saying "nobody really cares about the cause..by only pointing to the cause, you imply that the solution to the problem lies there too".
And, yes, nobody cares about any cause of a problem unless it helps coming up with a solution. If a system is complex enough, it is not logical to insist on analyzing it exhaustively to find all the root causes; it is more expedient to fix the problem some other way. And this is not even what you were doing; you pointed out one external factor and highlighted it, implying that the blame and the problem must be fixed there.
> anti-scientific ideologue, or just an idiot
Since you have now proceeded to name-calling, I think I will refrain from engaging further.
Cheering on indiscriminate hacking/doxxing of any/all police as an attempt to solve the problem is infantile, though, and demonstrates a naive ignorance of the root causes.
"A problem adequately stated is a problem solved theoretically and immediately, and therefore subsequently to be solved, realistically." -Buckminster Fuller
Anyone with any programming experience knows this.
In this specific case, the problem of police behavior can partially be said to be caused by people behaving inappropriately towards police. Should therefore the solution be that people behave better towards police? How would you go about making that happen? This “solution” is impractical.
The solution to a problem is sometimes unrelated to its cause.
If this is the best example you can come up with to support your point, it's now safe to say your argument does not hold up to even basic scrutiny.
It seems like your argument boils down to this: dumb ideologues aren't good at analyzing the nuances of causes and effects because they are blinded by their doctrines, so we shouldn't bother doing it ourselves.
Only religious fundamentalists believe that the solution to unwanted pregnancies is abstinence. Intelligent scientists realized the world is nuanced, and complex, and thus created birth control pills, which has helped prevent untold amounts of human suffering.
>In this specific case, the problem of police behavior can partially be said to be caused by people behaving inappropriately towards police. Should therefore the solution be that people behave better towards police? How would you go about making that happen? This “solution” is impractical.
Learning how to get arrested peacefully and without struggle can obviously help decrease your chances of being harmed while be arrested. As you said, it's only at best a minor partial cause, so you're jumping to silly conclusions by suggesting that anyone is asserting that should be the singular solution to police brutality and militarization.
>The solution to a problem is sometimes unrelated to its cause.
Still waiting on a good example from you to support this seemingly facile hypothesis.
> Still waiting on a good example from you to support this seemingly facile hypothesis.
If your home is burglarized, the source of the problem is the burglar, but the solution might be better social policy. If you break a bone, the cause might be you being careless, but the solution is to see a doctor, who will fix the bone regardless of the cause. If there is a wide-spread narcotics addict problem, the problem is ultimately caused by addicts not having willpower to abstain, but the solution cannot be fixed by making them have more willpower, since we don’t know how to do that; the solution must be sought elsewhere.
Likewise, the problem of police behavior might or might not be entirely caused by citizens, but we can’t affect the behavior of citizens, and therefore we must fix the problem some other way.
There’s an expression which summarizes it: “Fix the problem, not the blame.” Expounded upon, for instance, here:
http://www.holliseaster.com/p/fix-the-problem-not-the-blame/
When you generalize about a population of people, you're unfairly attributing characteristics to them which weren't decided upon by them (and likely doesn't apply to all of them).
When you generalize about police, you're fairly generalizing about a group of people who have decided to be a part of that institution, have decided to behave in such a way that would not get them kicked out of the institution (ie. they haven't agitated for any significant change in almost every case), and have decided not to leave it with full knowledge and in spite of its abuses.
If these people were really "just bad apples", this wouldn't be a problem anymore, as there have been literal decades to solve this.
See how that's different from a group defined by things you cannot control, like skin color?
I can't blame one person of a certain hue for the actions of a person of that same hue, because they don't share anything in common other than the hue.
Whereas police departments are 100% accountable for the actions of their members.
Today you learned, huh?
You dont think communities of people have the ability to enforce or influence behavior of the people in their community? If you watched the video I posted, or knew anything about psychology, you'd know that to be plainly false.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/outrageo...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/hsbc-s-1-9b-money-launderin...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-18880269
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-ba...
Edit: Rolling Stone did take a credibility hit after Sabrina Rubin Erdley came clean about manufacturing parts of her college campus rape story, but that’s the only thing that comes to mind when I think about RS and journalistic credibility.
I’m not one of those people either, that had to be embarrassing for them and I’m assuming they changed their editorial practices to avoid such things in the future.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/rolling-sto...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/coomer...
Does anyone under 80 think that?
I was travelling a few years ago, and hanging out in the hotel bar in Portland, Maine, and I listened in on a heated conversation between some guy and a lady whose husband is a cop. They were discussing police brutality and the protests at the time (Baltimore maybe?), and the lady's point was basically "do whatever you want with regulating police behaviour, but I will take my husband coming home at the end of the night over anything else"
It's possible with the falling rates of crime, this may just solve itself (though increasing police training and standards is a good thing regardless).
- https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/09/30/new-fbi-data-v... - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about...
The latter indicates that, depending on which data you use, the violent crime rate dropped 50–75% between 1993 and 2018 (the larger drop is from BJS, which has some methodology for estimating unreported crimes). The property crime rate dropped at 50–70% over the same time period.
Various actors in society—police gangs (sorry, “unions”), public prosecutors, for-profit prison operators, and straight up fascists—have been stoking fears of Americans for decades such that there are people who genuinely believe that America (as a whole) has more crime even when the numbers completely put a lie to that.
I’m certain that the leaks from this will reinforce what we should already know: America is increasingly a surveillance state of its police against its people, that the police rarely end up doing the jobs that they are nominally hired for (solving crimes), and that there has been an overall reduction in crime but an increase in policing outsized compared to the value police forces provide.
Don’t believe the bollocks.
If you compare a rich suburb to Europe's average then yeah, it's probably comparable. But any sort of apples to apples comparison will show that the U.S. has a much higher violent crime rate.
Nope. As a poster elsewhere in this thread noted, it's less than the top 100 cities in the US. There are a lot more than 100 "decent sized" cities in the US.
>certain areas of the US (parts of certain large cities)
So unless we're counting Boise at 220k and ~100 others like it as "parts of certain large cities" then your statement isn't accurate.
Yes. There are a lot more than 100 cities in the US, and a lot of places where people are that aren't cities. My point is that citing one single "crime rate" for the US misrepresents what's actually going on; there are basically two crime rates, the "cities" one (or however you want to label it) and the "everywhere else" one, and only the former is significantly larger than other developed countries.
Come on. And those are aggregate numbers. There is variability between different states, and rural vs urban crime. For example, I just looked up the homicide rate in Atlanta Georgia (17 per 100k), vs Oslo, Norway (0.5 per 100k). That's crazy big.
>have been stoking fears of Americans for decades such that there are people who genuinely believe that America (as a whole) has more crime even when the numbers completely put a lie to that.
Things were really bad in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The downtown cores of most major cities were dangerous. Don't pretend it was OK before. Things like the 90s 'crime bill' didn't just come out of nowhere. It was bad. Things only started changing the late 90s and early 2000s when cities went through resistance and yes, crime started falling.
You’re right that the 90s `crime bills` didn’t come out of nowhere. But they didn’t come out of a “we need to make our communities safer” perspective (that was merely the sales pitch)—because they increased criminal penalties on acts that generally affect low-income and minority “criminals”. They _built_ the problems we have today. The whole idea of a “super predator” was as much a racist invention as Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens in Cadillacs”.
Civil Forfeiture and RICO sounded like a great idea when it was to be used against white-collar beneficiaries of criminal enterprises. Except that’s not how it got used, and so cops in all jurisdictions started rolling up money from regular citizens just like a regular protection racket, except without the protection. It was _meant_ to be used against the cartels, but instead it got used as an income booster.
What made communities safer? It _wasn’t_ giving cops and prosecutors more powers. Reinvestment in those communities. Education. Treatment for trauma. Those things _all_ made far more difference in making communities safer than any single power given to cops since the 90s. Those things just destroyed some of the communities even more. Cities are _safer_ when you have people spending money in them and living there. Suburbs and exurbs and white flight made downtowns more dangerous by taking all of the money out of the cities and leaving people in desperate straits. Reurbanization and gentrification reversed the trends (although gentrification has its own problems).
Related to the use of aggregate numbers, read the Pew link. It talks about the rural/urban variability and about local perception of crime (people believe that there’s more crime across America, but most do not believe that there’s more crime in _their_ area).
Gun controls are not incompatible with the second amendment—at least they weren’t until conservative judicial activists bought long-discredited and ahistorical views of gun ownership in the ~40s and ~50s with the foot on the gas pedal ever since (except, of course, for the utter silence of the NRA on the banning of “assault weapons” when the Black Panthers carried them…).
Guns were rare, expensive, and often owned by the _militia_ to which the citizen belonged until about 1865. They were then more readily available, but cities and towns (especially the so-called “Wild West”) had fairly strict rules on how/when/who could carry (for reasons both good and bad, especially in the Reconstruction South).
Everyone wants to forget the first clause of the Second Amendment: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”. It’s not clear what it means, and I happen to think that Scalia was wrong, but I’ll admit that Stevens may have been wrong, too.
In modern terms, I would argue that the amendment absolutely permits strict licensure of gun owners as a precondition of gun ownership.
Color me skeptical. Does banning certain drugs prevent drug-related crime? These kinds of indirect proposals (e.g. ban guns), that purport to solve complicated social problems (e.g. crime-rate) never pan out, but they are attractive because it FEELS like they are the answer - especially if you already have an ideology that underpins that belief.
> But they didn’t come out of a “we need to make our communities safer” perspective (that was merely the sales pitch)
Of course it did. That's exactly why that bill was passed.
>because they increased criminal penalties on acts that generally affect low-income and minority “criminals”.
Because those companies are the most impacted by crime, petty or otherwise. Gated rich communities were perfectly fine.
>Reinvestment in those communities. Education. Treatment for trauma. Those things _all_ made far more difference in making communities safer than any single power given to cops since the 90s. Those things just destroyed some of the communities even more.
None of the things you present as explanations are actually supported by anything. You're putting out explanations that you FEEL are correct based on your own ideology and biases. City, State and Federal governments spend an inordinate amount of money already. Maybe they should spend more, but I don't see evidence that that will lead to outcomes you think it will.
>It talks about the rural/urban variability and about local perception of crime (people believe that there’s more crime across America, but most do not believe that there’s more crime in _their_ area).
Don't gas-light. Pull up the crime and homicide rates of a few American cities and compare to Europe. Clearly, America is an outlier.
Your assertion that the reason crime bills were passed is “we need to make our communities safer” is nonsense. It’s the reason that was sold to terrified Americans—and most of the terror was provided by the news, not the reality. (IIRC, the crime rates were _already dropping_.) The reasons that they were passed is a) racism, b) profit, c) power, and d) racism.
And yes, America’s an outlier. But mostly because it also has the widest wealth gap in the developed world (_mostly_ predicated on race, but not exclusively).
I’m not gaslighting anyone—I’m telling you straight up that America’s crime problems—such as they exist are:
1. Incorrect, usually radicalized, reporting in a way that supports the _fear_ that there is more crime than there is; 2. Overpolicing and overprosecution, especially of minority persons; 3. the effects of extended systemic racism and the casual acceptance of white supremacy in policing; and 4. poverty and the criminalization of being poor or otherwise disadvantaged.
If people have no hope, what do you expect?
You have no basis for anything of those things.
>2. Overpolicing and overprosecution
America has an over-sentencing problem. American prison sentences are higher than anywhere in the world. The people who are actually in prison, are guilty of the crimes they are accused of being guilty, the difference is that in Europe a rapist may get probation, while here (e.g. Weinstein) gets 23 years.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/weekly-nyc-shootings-s...
But the state of the police and its militarization is due to policies of the last decade, meaning that deescalation wasn't tried at all. The former terrorism has become domestic terrorism, something early critics predicted (wasn't even hard). The loudest voices we hear from seem to not be able to hold a thought, because the other side needs to be silenced first.
Ultimately I believe many cops will quit due to lacking support of their governors or president. But I doubt we will see significant changes. Private security will become an even more booming market. Police departments will lack funding but will be sold expensive riot gear.
Neither do the protestors, which is why they aren't out chanting “increase police funding for additional deescalation training and increased standards”.
Dismantle/defund/abolish isn't about incremental training and increased standards, it's about radical reorganization of basic services and rethinking the role of armed law enforcement within that spectrum.
You observe an outlier but fail to put it into context. The police in the US aren't comparable to police in other western countries. As a result, comparing crime rates is disingenuous.
The lady in your anecdote is also painfully disingenuous. Being a police officer isn't really dangerous. The death rate is much higher for landscapers, bartenders, taxi drivers, etc.. Roofers have a mortality rate of 4x the police. Even then, most police officers die in traffic accidents, not homicide [0].
[0]: https://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-...
One issue is that there is no single entity pushing a single policy. You have a lot of people saying a lot of things.
>The argument is not that the police doesn't solve crime, it's that they cause it.
Yeah. That's insanity. Is that backed up by any study? What does that even mean? There is no country on earth without a police department.
>The police in the US aren't comparable to police in other western countries.
I agree with that, and one big reason is that the American crime-rate is an outlier compared to other western countries.
>he death rate is much higher for landscapers, bartenders, taxi drivers, etc.. Roofers have a mortality rate of 4x the police.
Sure - but there is a different level of stress that comes around when your death can be caused by another human versus accidents and negligence. The death-rate of soldiers in Iraq wasn't very high by percentage either and yet it resulted in a lot of PTSD in soldiers that weren't even casualties. The stresses that cops experience are closer to active military servicemen rather than landscapers - wouldn't you say?
I remember watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi3Ndh3n-g which shows you how quickly things can escalate especially when you're dealing with tense situations. That's what cops have in the back of their mind, for good or bad. And if you're working in a high-crime area, it's going to affect you.
Unlike roofers and landscapers, the police are also dealing with the ugliest sides of humanity. They are called in to deal with murder and rape and abuse all the time.
Having said that, this is a good argument for INCREASED investment in police departments, namely the increasing and continual training for police officers in dealing with high-stress situations and de-escalation tactics. For example, each month, each police officer should take 2 or 3 days just for this kind of training. You can also raise standards for admissions. Those are all good policies, and though expensive still, cheaper than social strife.
Sure it is. In general this kind of data is hard to acquire because the police rarely stop working. When they do though, the results are fairly clear [0]. This study was made after a "strike" by the police. The study attempts to account for under-reporting due to this fact.
Please note that just because _some_ crime is caused by police doesn't mean _all_ is.
> There is no country on earth without a police department.
Something about appeal to tradition. Anyway, as you might know police departments are a very new thing. Policing, in its current form, has existed for <200 years, founded under what is known as the Peelian principles [1]. Principles my previous paragraph demonstrates to have been violated by the police departments.
> PTSD in soldiers that weren't even casualties
The two of us are obviously coming from two very different perspectives. I have a hard time having sympathy for the soldiers who fought in Iraq and I think I'll have a hard time convincing you to feel otherwise.
[0]: Sullivan, C.M., O’Keeffe, Z.P. _Evidence that curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime_. Nat Hum Behav 1, 730–737 (2017).
It's not clear at all. This was a singular event and it wasn't even a police 'strike'. It was a work-to-rule action. Police were still there. To counter your conclusions, we've seen evidence of crime spikes in Baltimore, and even Chicago in areas that are ostensibly police free. Hell, we've seen two shooting and three casualties (and one death) in the Marxist utopia of CHOP, just in the last 48 hours without police presence - so much so that the idiot mayor of Seattle is now having the police coming back to restore order. So no, a single study isn't indicative of anything, and certainly not of what society looks like without a police department. It certainly isn't indicative that destroying a system that works well in every free nation in the world, and replacing it with something else, will lead to better outcomes.
Urgh, the entire thing is so juvenile and idiotic that is boggles the mind. Are you just a disaffected teenager or early-20 something that has you literally believing that dismantling police is the right way to go.
>Something about appeal to tradition
Similarity you don't get a free pass in just claiming that after you destroy the current system, which statistically works very well (the number of people killed by cops is minuscule at the population level), you'll be able to rebuild in an improved way - without even citing one example of where your methodology actually worked.
>Please note that just because _some_ crime is caused by police doesn't mean _all_ is.
Noted.
>Policing, in its current form, has existed for <200 years,
Just around the time Democracy was becoming a thing. Maybe we should give up on this Democratic thing too. Just because policing is new is not an argument for whatever it is you're proposing. It's just a statement of fact not supporting evidence for whatever it is you're proposing. But even with that, policing has, in fact, changed. Let's take your 200 years at face value, that means we have 200 years of incremental improvements based on societal needs that you would be throwing those away.
>I have a hard time having sympathy for the soldiers who fought in Iraq
I never asked for you to show sympathy towards another human being. Thank you for sharing you have none to give.
The point wasn't sympathy, it was that these military servicemen came back with PTSD even though statistically, the death rate was low (and probably similar to working on an oil rig). So the overall death rate is not necessarily correlated with the stresses of the job. But let me try again because you clearly cannot show empathize with a entire group of people you hate ... suicide was (is) prevalent among Japanese office workers. I'm going to go on a limb and assume that working at an office in Japan doesn't run you a high risk of death, but the stress incurred by those workers manifests in depression and suicide.
Do you understand now? And look, you didn't even have to show empathy towards an entire group of young people (and military service is, by and large, a young person's profession).
My reasons in this case are your 1) purposeful misinterpretations, 2) unequal demands in needed evidence for claims, 3) insults about my person and 4) misunderstanding of the topic at hand.
Don't expect me to reply further.
Those Baltimore riots were sparked because a man who was in custody suffered injuries that could not have been caused any other way except by the police who held him, and all of them were acquitted. When people see that the system is intent on protecting the police, that means a lot of people aren't going to care whether that woman's husband makes it home or not.
Crime has been falling at the same time as police misconduct (not just the actual abuses, but the protection around them) has become more visible. Somebody needs to de-escalate it, and that would be a great place to start.
You mean, humanity?
>Yes, we all want our loved ones coming home at the end of the day. But when you go out with the assumption that everybody is trying to kill you
Exactly true - but that's why the crime rate being so high rises the stress levels and enforces these views. Patrolling a Oslo, Norway, which has a murder rate of 0.5 per 100k, is different than patroling Atlanta, Georgia with a murder rate of 17 per 100k. Right?
>Crime has been falling at the same time as police misconduct (not just the actual abuses, but the protection around them) has become more visible.
I think I saw some stats that showed police misconduct has been falling as well - but as you said, visibility has been increased. Maybe this is all being solved, it just takes time.
Having said that, I do think police standards should be high, including admittance, and continual training on de-escalation drills and handling of high-stress situations. That should be simple to implement, and all it costs is taxes (and I think, given the current situation, that cost is worth it)
US Police is above the law.
They can and do break most any law at will, without consequence.
Any "Law & Order" fan will tell you crime needs to not pay for people to behave civilized. For US Police, crime does pay.
I can think of one reason ... high incarceration rates lead to lower crime.
I'm being facetious, but I suspect that has something to do with it. There are other factors no doubt. Freakonomics claims abortion was partially responsible, I read somewhere video games are partially responsible (i.e. incentive to stay home instead of going out). I've also read that higher lead levels in air and water in the past may be responsible for higher crime rates, etc.
I'm sure there are a lot of factors that explain the lower crime-rate.
The problem for you is that cops aren't responsible for the crime rate. They are called to deal with it.
>Plus with how fucked up the prison system is in the US.
You don't actually think the vast majority of people in State or Federal prisons are actually innocent do you? (Because they aren't). Another myth is that there is some huge proportion of inmates serving time for non-violent drug offences and drug possession - that's not true either. Almost nobody goes to prison for simple drug possession or low-level drug offences (prisons are too full for that). Those chargers are usually pleaded down from more serious violent charges.
Having said that, US prison sentences are also an outlier, but that's a double-edged sword too. Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison for sexual assault and rape (third degree). Having spent time abroad and having family all over the place, in most jurisdictions, he would not get any prison term or would be paroled within a short amount of time.
I see this dichotomy in American thinking all the time. There are calls to lower prison sentences, while at the same time accused individuals (who are usually unlikable - like Weinstein) have the same people calling for maximum sentences so those individuals spend years behind bars. Reducing prison sentences does necessarily imply murderers, rapists, child molesters, would be out in relatively short amount of time (10-15 years typically, if you compare to prison terms in countries like Canada for comparable offenses) - are you OK with that?
>You don't actually think the vast majority of people in State or Federal prisons are actually innocent do you?
No, I don't. But the system is still horrible and brutal. I think think prison in the US should focus much more rehabilitation over punishment. In Germany and Scandinavia being removed from society is the punishment. Norway has a recidivism rate of only 20%. I don't know the other countries, it's higher in Germany at 35% but still less than half of the US which is a total failure. You treat people prisoners like animals and you are surprised when they act like animals.
>I see this dichotomy in American thinking all the time. There are calls to lower prison sentences, while at the same time accused individuals (who are usually unlikable - like Weinstein) have the same people calling for maximum sentences so those individuals spend years behind bars.
So I think prison sentences should be reduced generally in the US. I'd get rid of mandatory minimums. But I'm not sure how I would fix it, but I would have charged the bankers, and people involved wit that in jail. I would change background checks too. Norway, and as far as I know, Denmark does this too, but if you're applying for a job, nobody will find out about your crime, just if you're available to work somewhere. For example, if you apply at a bank but you were guilty of financial crimes, they would tell the bank you cannot work there.
Step 1: deny jobs and education
Step 2: leverage racist biases among police
Step 3: criminalize drugs
“Look at all this crime! America is so unsafe. We need military equipment and chokeholds so we can go crush skulls.”
Two examples of many:
Evidence suggests that teachers are less likely to identify bright minority students for placement in accelerated programs. Evidence suggests that teachers are more likely to treat minority students who "act out" as problem students and place them in remedial programs rather than finding solutions.
1. There wasn't an 8:46 video showing Noor murder her (no video publicly released until trial?).
2. The PM of Australia immediately denounced it and called for action.
3. BLM protested the shooting and failure to immediately charge Noor in the streets of Minneapolis.
4. The police chief resigned almost immediately.
I don't think that's actually true. I'll have to find the stats, but IIRC the number of raw crimes is comparable between Western Europe and the US, but in the US the crime is WAY deadlier due to all of the guns. Canada is somewhere in the middle.
It’s hotspots. Take out Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC and maybe New Orleans then even gun crime in the US is no worse than Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/30/new-yo...
First, you're only looking at cities. Lots of the US population does not live in cities.
Second, even just looking at cities, do you know how many cities there are in the US? (A lot more than 96.)
All this is telling you is that, as far as crime rates go, the US is basically two countries: certain large cities (high crime rate) and everywhere else (low crime rate).
Where do you think these police abuses (and subsequent protests) are coming from? Pretty much exclusively from cities.
Yes, that's what we're doing. There are a lot more than 80 cities in the US, and a lot of places where people are that aren't cities.
>but in the US the crime is WAY deadlier due to all of the guns. Canada is somewhere in the middle.
That doesn't matter. Cops don't set gun policy. They have to deal with it. Just as cops don't cause vagrancy in cities like LA and San Fran (which usually results from mental illness and/or drug addiction), but they still have to deal with it (because those cities and states won't).
Their server seems to be dead right now.
People have been expressing the exact same sentiment you are for years and years.
https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2012-09-12/ron-pa...
But if you did, there's a link at the bottom to the report they're citing, so let's check that: http://www.austinchronicle.com/documents/fusioncenterreport.... This one isn't original reporting either. It's a 38-page think tank whitepaper from "The Constitution Project" on the subject of Fusion Centers in general.
And IT only mentions Ron Paul in one sentence too, where it mixes it in with two other items in the same bullet point: "A Missouri-based fusion center issued a February 2009 report describing support for the presidential campaigns of Ron Paul or third party candidates, possession of the iconic “Don’t Tread on Me” "ag and anti-abortion activism as signs of membership in domestic terrorist groups" So now we've gone from your 8 year old link to a point three years farther in the past. And the source for that attention grabbing headling is still nowhere to be found.
But that bullet point was footnoted, so let's check that. It's... another news story! Actually the URL in the footnote is stale and broken, but I found the story by headline using Google: https://www.columbiatribune.com/article/20090314/News/303149...
So this tells us all about the Ron Paul thing, right? Nope. It, too, mentions Ron Paul in only one sentence: "Red flags outlined in the document include political bumper stickers such as those for U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, talk of conspiracy theories such as the plan for a mega-highway from Canada to Mexico and possession of subversive literature.". So that's dilluted STILL FURTHER in a bunch of other items, most of which sound... not too terribly off to me.
And the source for this report? They have a link, but not to the report: https://www.infowars.com/secret-state-police-report-ron-paul...
Yup, four hops and we're at Infowars. And the report they cite? Not public. They're apparently the only one who have seen it.
You got fooled by "media laundering" into regurgitating partisan agitprop. I can't prove your "fact" is wrong, but the support for it is VERY thin.
The Missouri Highway Patrol retracted the report from the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC) in 2009. They removed the mentions for Ron Paul and Campaign for Liberty.
The Highway Patrol launched an investigation into the origin of the report. The Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder called for the suspension of the Director of Public Safety “until those responsible have been identified”.
We personally investigated the story in 2009. I have seen the report. I served as a national Ron Paul campaign person and currently work within the IC and international law enforcement.
The Fusion of Paranoia and Bad Policy - Center for Democracy and Technology 4/1/2009
https://cdt.org/insights/the-fusion-of-paranoia-and-bad-poli...
[OK, you found an original scan, thanks.] That new link is still broken. Where is the report? Don't give me partisan think tanks or your personal experience on the Paul campaign, give me a source.
OK, now can we take this seriously? What's the language in that report that says that the center was associating Ron Paul support with domestic terrorism or whatever? All I see is that it says militia membership correlates with right wing violence (seems reasonable). I STILL can't find anything significant about Ron Paul. It's certainly not a major point. Please point me to it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100108060904/media.kspr.com/do...
And I still can't find it. This report isn't about domestic terrorism, it's about the militia movement (which correlates, but it's not the same thing). And it's absolutely not about Ron Paul, I can't even find where it mentions that fact in passing.
You're spinning like crazy here, about a 12 year old report saying (apparently) unflattering things about a 16 year old presidential campaign. No one is being called a domestic terrorist anywhere in these links.
Report, top of page 7: "Militia members most commonly associate with 3rd party political groups. It is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitutional Party, Campaign for Liberty, or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential Candidate: Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr."
Honestly, I'm sympathetic to many of the ideologies and ideas that are described in this report, but I actually think the document is important as an internal document for police. They need to be informed about radicals within these ideologies, and knowing who they might vote for for president is very relevant for helping to understand or empathize with them, especially for conflict deescalation.
Say you're in a hostage negotiation with a sovereign-citizen type who's worried you're going to disappear them to some black-ops prison. If you knew enough about the movement to abolish the Fed, about FEMA camps, or about the NWO, and said you're a Ron Paul supporter, you might be able to establish trust. Ron Paul isn't strictly someone involved with the latter two conspiracies, but there is a heavy correlation between the three, and he's the highest profile figure supporting the first.
These documents aren't political, they're tactical information for real-life police work. Police have to deal with the radicals, even if they're a fringe minority.
(this is a mental exercise in principled reasoning. I'm not racist).
"Racial profiling" isn't bad because it's based on the (correct, though specious -- they're poorer) observation that young black men commit more per-capita crimes, it's bad because it leads to law enforcement behavior that causes young black men to be stopped, frisked, detained, prosecuted and incarcerated at rates MUCH HIGHER than their per-capita crime statistics would indicate.
Basically: the idea that "black kids are criminals" leads police to disproportionately enforce the laws against black kids while letting "non-criminal" demographics off the hook.
But no one argues we should censor reports that detail youth crime statistics by race, which is what's happening here.
Just this week a bodycam from NYC officer shows him planting drugs over 2 years ago. The person who's involved took a plea deal because they didn't want to risk going to jail for many years. The cop still has his job and this wasn't the first time.
Try getting a job in the US with a criminal record.
This is a misnomer.
Cops are not actually "to protect and serve", and this has been proven in court.
Their function is to uphold the law. That's it.
And if they do end up going to court: " the court held that California police who stand accused of stealing $225,000 cannot be sued because they never were told specifically that stealing money from people’s homes violates the Constitution"
https://www.ocregister.com/2020/05/14/high-court-to-decide-i...
Fusion centers seem to be shared databases of threats that federal, state, and local agencies all contribute to.
Given the scale, it’s likely more of the focus is on organizations, not individuals.
Given the nature of internal misconduct, I think it’s safe to assume that wouldn’t be shared period, let alone in venues such as these.
In cases where it does need to be shared, e.g. covered up NYPD misconduct affects FBI case, I’d assume they have alternative means to this sort of spreadsheet-broadcast impression I’m getting of the centers.
Could be totally off, either way I suppose we’ll find out now.
Overall I agree though. This is the same baseless defense used against leaking of info on war crimes.
I doubt planting evidence is common, but it will nevertheless be interesting to dig through that. If it is true the cop is still serving, it should be a huge scandal. These practices need to be stomped out immediately.
Who cares if it’s a huge scandal? I remember reading about the “scandal” years ago. The cop is still has his job and was never charged with a crime.
The cop broke the law multiple times on video, an innocent person suffered physical and mental harm. The cop caused harm to all of society by reducing the trust between members of society. Yet he has a job, one with power over others where his word matters more than others.
Hence the protests.
One of the reasons that the protests in the US are so widespread right now is that, fundamentally, this is the issue: that cop still serving isn't a scandal at all. The police look out for their own, and internal accountability for violating procedure is an absolute farce.
Still, a worthwhile read.
As I am no longer a member of the military, I am a civilian. My neighbors are civilians. And regardless of a badge or uniform or firearm or SWAT teams or Pentagon-surplus armored vehicles, cops are civilians.
Feeling otherwise merely reinforces the "us-versus-them" mentality that leads to the current crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian
So sworn police officers are not normally considered civilians, while non-sworn personel are:
https://www.discoverpolicing.org/explore-the-field/types-of-...
https://www.discoverpolicing.org/explore-the-field/civilian-...
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...