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jacknews

The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do.

https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the...

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The whole "let's turn this into a libertarian political-philosophical discussion" angle is a misdirection.

(And an increasingly common one, eg., cf. crypto).

The guy installed spyware on laptops in a commercial store and then publicly displayed the data collected. It's an open-and-shut case.

Almost any person who went to that store, and any store owner, would be furious. It is these people the law here protects(, and damn right too) -- the interests of the artist aren't "the little guy's" and more than a burglar is the underdog.

A burglar claiming the police are corrupt for protecting property owners is as meglomanical as this guy. This isn't some middle-aged academic wishing he were in a mythical past, he's a guy breaking into computers, stealing data, and using it to boost his own career.

> It's an open-and-shut case.

Why was it dropped then?

Little public interest in the secret service pursing a 25yo megalomaniac moron, who thinks installing spyware makes him the hero against the forces of institutional evil.

I imagine apple contacted the secret service in the first place because they weren't sure what else he'd done, other than, installing spyware across NY's apple stores.

Once they realised it was just an art project, I imagine they backed off to be kind, not because he couldnt be prosecuted. He clearly violated the CFAA

So you have it all figured out, including motivations not expressed in the piece.

Of course they're not expressed. I did however go and read articles from 2011, which give a clear account consistent with my interpretation.

Your descriptions of a mustache-twirling villain are overstated to say the least.

my impression was that apple initiated contact based on an assumption that i was running a keylogger or other information that could be used for identity theft. they quickly learned it was an art project but decided to apply force via the secret service to keep it from gaining too much publicity. after that caused a bit of a streisand effect, they decided not pursue a civil case. i would guess that the judge decided not to pursue a criminal case because it would have been an obvious waste of resources.

The illegality of it might be clear cut, but the immorality of it is not.

And why should the store owner be furious, and not amused, or embarrassed? It's just things, nobody got hurt. It is a very libertarian idea that violence against property is morally the same as violence against a person.

Right... but who's interest should the law here represent? There is no single common interest: this guy wants to install spyware and hijack pictures of customers for his own ends; apple doenst want that; customers dont want that (or even, of course, know about it!).

So "immorality"-wise, who here are you empathising with?

I, as a customer entering a store, do NOT want any burden to go and google whether that store has been hijacked by spyware and my data shared, etc.

I want ZERO such burden. And i would expect the police to seriously deter any such "stunts".

This guy has a sob story in which he's the hero... are you just going to take his framing?

Empathise with the random guy in the store.

A better question to start with is "where does the law fit into this?"

What is the material consequence of this action? How does this affect people's lives? Why is that something that needs legislation?

I'm not implying that there are no consequences, I'm curious how you interpret the issue.

> What is the material consequence of this action

Almost none. Which is why there was no further prosecution.

> Why is that something that needs legislation

Because this is very similar to other acts that could have worse consequences. Consider instead of "installed funny spyware on apple laptops" was replaced with "installed funny spyware on ATMs".

Lots of things "could" happen...

It is literal truth that the first police in the US were slave hunters and the first police station in the world was to protect from theft at the Wapping docks

There were constables in England in the Middle Ages. There have been local volunteer watchman and paid constables in the United States since the early colonial days. There was also "hue and cry", whereby someone witnessed a crime and then shouted out and all men were supposed to help catch the criminal. This, as can be imagined, was sometimes quite the shit-show.

What will you do if I rob you? Who will you report this to? What stops me from burglary?

Also, city guards have existed in Europe and China since before tge US existed. They didn't use the word "police" obviously.

I wish "cops = nazis" people would explain what they would have instead.

The idea that you can’t criticise the failings and nature of something you also use are so tiring. Crime happens for so many reasons, some of which force maybe required to stop or hold people accountable, and many of the reasons are endemic to the system we live in. Other things could be prevented by provisioning elsewhere.

When did I say you can’t criticise the failings and nature of something? I stated that your assertion was wrong, and asked questions that need answering by "defund the police" people. You never explicitly stated you want to dedund the police, but this is the argument those people make for it's removal. I read an article in the magazine of a major newspaper that said to remove prison and the police entirely, and this was before Floyd. I never said you support this position, and I never gave you any instruction. I asked you relevant questions and examined your statement.

You didn't respond to any of it

> What will you do if I rob you? Who will you report this to? What stops me from burglary?

In yesterday’s discussion about getting mugged in San Fran, virtually every comment said “the police did not help”.

> The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system'

If that is the case, why is civil asset forfeiture a thing? It seems to undermine property rights and is a glaring failure in the system.

No policing system is perfect, in any complicated enough system there will always be rules that undermine that system slightly. It's like asking "why is cancer a thing, it undermines living organisms".

Not your property, the aristocracy's property. Cops don't work for peasants.

The "aristocracy" has their property seized all the time, for unpaid taxes and a litany of other crimes.

Those aren't the true aristocracy.

Nor true Scotsman, apparently.

I mean the definition of aristocracy is basically the people who get to make the rules. It’s the core point.

Without making a falsifiable claim about who this “aristocracy” is whose assets are the only assets protected by the police, it’s hard to test your statement or see how it provides value.

They’re the ones the police don’t fuck with.

Do you live in the US? It’s pretty trivial to figure out who is and isn’t allowed to drive around with large sums of money, or carry a loaded weapon, as an actual practical matter.

A good way of thinking about this is to understand that there’s an in-group that the law protects but does not bind. And an out-group that the law binds but does not protect.

It’s a dark vision of the world but there are many in the in-group who seek to preserve it.

"No true Scotsman is not Scottish" seems true, definitionally. Same applies for aristocracy: they are the ones who are served by special interests, by definition.

> Same applies for aristocracy: they are the ones who are served by special interests, by definition

I'm not sure I follow. Homeless military veterans are served by extremely well funded special interests, but are not aristocrats.

Clearly they are not being served. That is the difference.

replace "Aristocracy" with "political class"

In the US, they don't work for aristocrats, ether. Sometimes, it's really unclear who the boss is, but it is clear that they get paid by the public.

> The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do.

I think it's rather naive to consider otherwise. Somewhere along the way we were fed this childish mythology about the importance of the individual, which is definitely captivating, stirring one's imagination with sparks of creativity, but the truth is that institutions and 'the system' are the bedrock of civilization and thus society. Fanciful thoughts of some anarcho-libertarian ideal state are cute, but much farther down the list of priorities than the continued function of the machinery of civilization, on which everything depends. And the enforcement required so that state continues is liberally allotted to almost every government agency.

Except government can't stop growing, so that eventually doesn't end well.

In these discussions, there's always an implicit assumption of certain intentions being the "real" ones. Statements like "police were created to..." first imply that there was a creator whose intentions define the police through incarnations, a kind of "god of police," and, more likely, if it was not a single individual, it is a "pantheon of police" composed of its creators and sustainers. And then we have the image of the state as a composite entity which exerts control over the pantheon without being corporeal itself, maybe as the composite will of a class of people.

To me, this idea of the personification of state power into an all-powerful driving force seems more mythological than the importance of individual decisions being made by those who carry out the work of the state. An individual officer may have a similar belief in the intentions of the state, but their actions are ultimately their own.

It seems ironic that the more we tend to be critical of state power, the more we tend to mythologize it into a kind of personification. You might not fall into this trap, but many do. But why should the intentions of the composite pseudo-entity matter more than the intentions of the real individuals who carry out the work? Isn't each police officer a person who has different goals and ideas about who they are and who they serve? Is this really so insignificant, or is it so overwhelmed by institutional goals that it becomes irellevant? Or could the real people and not their abstractions be the real bedrock of civilization?

What is to make of the overlap between institutional goals and those of individuals?

We live in a time where people are developing institutional abstractions as their civil bedrock. How can we reasonably differentiate institutions that are fundamentally man-made from the men who are the means of the institution’s goals?

My answer would be that individual intentions are ultimately the only thing that matters, but they are shaped by cultures which use abstractions to communicate and connect. Social control means learning which abstractions will stick, like finding a catchy tune, but the most memorable ideas aren't always the best. When an internalized abstraction leads to negative consequences, people tend to rebel against it and find another one.

The goals of abstract institutions are abstractions of intentions. They exist in both the minds of those who write them down and those who carry them out, and a perfect translation between those two groups will never happen. If we want to get down reality, we have to talk about the intentions of the actual people involved.

Who decides when the “tune” of an abstraction becomes stale? The people, but which people? And how is it determined that an institution is yielding negative or positive results?

Every individual makes this judgment all the time. When people notice a problem with their ideologies, sometimes they will just ignore the issues, and other times they will decide to rebel. When enough people make that choice not to follow the tune, there's a revolution. That's why power is so precarious. It's hard to get people to dance to the same tune forever.

Do you get upset when people say "evolution does X"?

It's the same thing, it doesn't really matter if the process is clean or tumultuous, it's a reasonable heuristic to understand the status quo.

I'm not upset in either case, but that's another good example of the problems in attributing personified intelligence to an abstraction. Especially in the early days, people tended to substitute "God" with "evolution" and shoehorn evolutionary processes into areas where they didn't apply because they used to attribute them to God. This still happens! Sometimes, it's just "the universe."

This was usually based on the further misunderstanding that evolution represents a progression from lower to higher life forms. For example, Engels was especially influenced by the idea that political processes followed Darwinian principles and that societies inevitably move from lower to higher forms, leading toward perfection in communism. In the U.S.S.R., science fiction assumed that aliens would all be Marxists because it was a fundamental law of the universe.

Even in the case of evolution, there are minds with intentions. Our ancestors wanted certain things, and the ones who were able to get them passed on their programming to the next generations.

Put another way, society and culture are things that are essentially imaginary. They take place in the mind, and I doubt society or culture could organize itself without some shared imaginary space strewn with personifications and myths. Take that away and society and culture become impossible.

Your unease is more warranted for things like evolution, which does not depend on a shared imaginary space.

>Put another way, society and culture are things that are essentially imaginary.

Where did you get that from GP's post? They're simplying saying not to anthropomorphise societal systems.

I meant that the qualms he was enumerating could simply be restated this way, and my only addition here is that these societal/cultural things all are essentially imaginary (and depend on anthropomorphism and metaphor), unlike something like evolution. Apologies for my phrasing.

I like this explanation, but I might say abstractions are mutually translatable in a society. People having similar ideas is convenient but not necessary. I could imagine a society where everyone thought differently but used AI as a universal translator to make their ideas and personalities compatible.

Maybe you wouldn’t consider it a real society if they depended on machine translation, but we’re partially there already. It would still be a collection of minds with their own identities and intentions coordinating through an abstraction.

Evolution depends on multiple minds coordinating. A virus’ fate will be decided by thinking people eventually. It’s not fair to talk about something as broad as evolution if you only focus on the early period where determinism is easy to represent with math. The process involves intentions as much as anything.

Who said anything about personified intelligence?

"X does Y" implies nothing of the sort.

If I say "The River Flows" am I arguing that the river is intelligent?

No, absolutely not, you've setup a strawman from the very beginning.

"The police are only there for ... " does not imply there's some overlord with a power point document with a bullet point outlining what the police are there for.

I’m talking about how the framing makes people think and how we can drift toward abstraction over reality. When we talk about the police or the state being created to do something, we’re implying that the intention involved in its creation might be the most important thing about it. At least it still expresses the will of it’s creator. For something involving as many people as police or states, I think this undervalues the importance of individual intentions over abstract insitutional goals.

For specific examples here like, “the police are not there to help you, only the rich,” you can easily find counterexamples, but let’s be a little more generous and imagine it means that the individual intentions of officers are negated by something else. That something else is more likely to be the interests of real living people and not abstract institutional purposes for which the police were created. The institution might provide them an opportunity to pursue their goals because of the power it presents, but any misalignment of goals with public interest is because of the intentions of people in the system, not the will of the system itself.

Maybe that seems too obvious, but I think it’s established that people tend to anthropomorphize things, and when we talk about the will of the police or the state or a corporation, it’s easy to slip into thinking of an abstract entity as a person with thoughts and desires, which only hides the problem.

The term is "reification".

Personification is a special case of reification, but it is the underlying issue. We reify signifiers based on memories.

Pretty much like HR in companies

If HR isn't there to protect a company, who would? Or is the argument that it isn't needed?

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