Rasperry Pi hires former police surveillance officer as Maker in Residence | Hacker News Reader

Rasperry Pi hires former police surveillance officer as Maker in Residence

bladerunner.social

I've made friends with a few former police officers. And they usually tell me the job silently destroys you inside. The job makes you deal with the worst of the worst daily and after a few years, mentally you are fucked. If an officer wants to do something that is constructive rather than destructive of society, they should be commended.

The friends that have left the profession would rather work fastfood than anything even tangentially close to law enforcement, like security.

It would help if they clarified his role. So far all he's done is brag about his history of using his new employer's product to create surveillance devices. Absent any details, it's reasonable to assume he was hired for this experience in the lead up to seeking a goldmine many companies aim for: law enforcement contracts.

So is the concern that they are going to aid law enforcement in catching people who break the law? I'm having a difficult time realizing the outrage here.

No. The concern is they'll continue supporting the widespread abuses law enforcement is known for.

That doesn't seem paranoid to you at all?

Being concerned about a pattern of behavior is paranoia now?

By that same logic, should we be profiling criminals? Or is that problematic?

If "we" is you, go ahead! You're free to judge whomever you want.

This is a fairly simple issue - a community of people who are pro-privacy and anti-surveillance have concerns about a former surveillance officer working for an organization which creates small, portable, popular computing devices.

If you haven't heard about law enforcement abuses of surveillance, here are some helpful links:

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/fbi-nsa-mass-surveillanc...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/police-are-still-abusi...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-12-27/when-poli...

I agree to disagree with this community of 11 users. May they find solace in each other.

It can either feel paranoid or like common sense depending on place in the world in question.

In the West I would say it feels paranoid, but in certain east Asian or Middle-eastern countries (that will remain nameless) I wouldn't ask questions in the first place. Thankfully I'm in the former.

There are still some places in the general West where law enforcement's reputation isn't completely ruined yet, but it certainly isn't a rule.

Right, it's not perfect, but I know where I'd rather be.

You sound like you're not part of any marginalized, surveilled, or abused communities. Police in some places still arrest people for violating state level sodomy laws even though the SCOTUS ruling nullified them.

No, this is still very much a problem here in the West.

That's obviously not good and we should speak up when these things happen because that sounds unlawful. The point is that we have the freedom here to stand up and say that, and in other countries you wouldn't even have that much. It could be a lot worse.

They clearly could have made the announcement come off less like it was glorifying the type of surveillance work the former police officer did.

I would hazard a guess that a big part of the crowd who buy and use RaspberryPi products are privacy conscious. So it makes good business sense not to alienate that customer base and throw away all the goodwill the company has garnered over the years.

The concerns over this are justified, and could have been responded to in a calm manner.

Instead those in charge of that social media account decided to act up in an incredibly childish manner.

If the hiring of an ex surveillance specialist to a FOSS software & hardware company does not rub you the wrong way, then I would at least think the bad PR handling from a pure business standpoint would.

Yeah, I definitely think they could have handled it better. Mainly, what rubs me as intellectually dishonest to condemn this one person without knowing him because he used to be in law enforcement.

Braking the law doesn't mean doing anything wrong, and a lot of the people these people harass haven't even broken the law. These people infiltrate and destroy innocent people's lives.

Imagine meeting someone you love and having a child with them, just for them to disappear one day. Imagine finding out that they actually never existed and were actually a government agent who was assigned to infiltrate your life and possibly frame you for daring to speak against the state. Imagine being that child. Or anyone else in these peoples lives for that matter.

Or imagine finding yourself abandoned in a foreign country by your closest friends of several years who were actually government agents you met on a holiday you won in a fake competition created by the government, then find out that the company you worked for was also a fake company set up just to try to entrap you in some elaborate plan, so now you are unemployed, and everything you said in your own home or car in the last several years probably exists forever on a government server somewhere. Imagine then opening a newspaper and reading that the police claim to be underfunded...

Imaging what it does to a person to find out that their life for years has been a real life government conspiracy. That their friends, neighbours, co-workers, partner, etc. are not real and that they have had no privacy. It may not even be you they are after, but someone close to you.

These are both real cases, one from the UK where this cop is from and one from Sweden where I'm from, and they are far from unique.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/25/activist-dec...

https://www-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/nyheter/a/dwwdlO/p...

You don't think you're blowing this one instance out of proportion at all? This is just a one person who works at a hobby computer company.

My objection is not really that they hired him. I believe that people can change and no one is irredeemable, but I don't think they should advertise it like this. It's like hiring an ex-con who used to use your product to victimize others and then bragging about it and getting upset when people are unconformable with it.

If nothing else, I think they should show more respect for people who are victims of the police and state-sponsored surveillance.

What are the fact about this guy? What work did he do that's so objectionable?

I don't know anything about him besides him having been a "Surveillance Officer" for 15 years. I feel the same about that as I feel about someone who has been a member of a crime gang or terrorist organization for that long. As long as the individual joined voluntarily and had the option to leave, I don't think it's unreasonable to judge them for the actions of the organization (or even organization type) without knowing what that individual specifically did.

I don’t think we’re going to agree on this.

I’d believe this, and almost want to commend the ones you know for leaving.

I’m not quite jaded enough (barely) that I still believe that people can grow up in decent environments, somewhat sheltered from the world, thinking they can go into policing or politics and “do some good”. I don’t know that I still believe that they actually can do any good… but if they started off naively optimistic and then realized what it was like, and left? That takes a degree of character, and some guts knowing you’re leaving a profession. There’s opportunity cost.

Now… this particular guy at RPi and 15 years to figure it out? Eh. And generally unsure why this is being flagged, except for “drama” maybe. It’s a bad look from an organization that lots of people know about and respect(ed).

Police depts have a plenty of departments that aren't public facing. I imagine you can spend 15 years in building surveillance devices and not suffer the mental breaking point of a beat cop or CSAM investigator.

If you can turn a side hobby into a second career, why not go for it?

The RPi's social media poster definitely needs retraining. There is no need to be this passive aggressive on a commercial account.

Can someone explain what is the news here? I'm struggling to follow.

1. Is raspberry.social the Mastodon server by the actual Raspberry people?

2. They hired an ex police person? What is the context here that makes this so dramatic?

3. What is #fediblock? Is this a Mastodon wide block? That terrifies me, that's king of against the whole nature of a decentralised network right? Are we introducing "centralised" behaviour into the decentralised network?

1. raspberrypi.social is the official raspberrypi mastodon instance.

2. Raspberry pi hired an ex police person, I guess the concern is that he is a maker who previously made surveillance gadgets.

3. #fediblock is an announcement of defederation. As a server admin, you can jump in on #fediblocks. Or, you may want to stay federated with the instance. Originally they were used to announce defederation with pedophilia/gore/spam/harassment instances and other things you don't want your community getting polluted with. They are still used for that, but there's a lot of activism in #fediblock also.

The issue was that Raspberry pi responded badly, and any criticism or concern was met with "Unfollow us or we can block you" responses from them.

#fediblock isn't a requirement for any instance to take part in.

The problem was made worse because the Raspberry pi team wouldn't engage with other instances to try and resolve the issue.

Yes there are going to be issues with the #fediblock, bigger instances will always have more power to silence others.

I want to give them the benefit of doubt. A person that knows how the system works in practice can actually steer the company in a less dystopian direction. That said, I cannot say that I don't feel a level of discomfort, because it is not made clear what his actual function is going to be there.

edit: added dont

This guy was a UK spy cop. These men broke the law and infiltrated orgs for a living.

And what is wrong with this exactly? Are you concerned that this guy is going to survey people without anyone's knowledge? Are you that paranoid?

Some people do not support law enforcement and a large number of people using Mastodon are pro-privacy and anti-surveillance. RPI's cavalier response to their concerns about a former surveillance officer being hired by a company that creates computers is a cause for concern.

It just seems paranoid to me, but what do I know.

The person running their Mastodon account needs schooling. https://bladerunner.social/@stevelord/109478020652552209

I'm shocked they are responding like that in public, really feels like a jab at the community.

I feel like they haven't really been about "the community" since they started selling most Pis to companies who use them in their products instead of to regular people, and then calling it "supply chain issues".

Having had business dealing with RPi Foundation in the past, this doesn't surprise me in the least. The way they talked about underserved communities was disgusting.

How safe is bladerunner.social? Do we know who runs it, what their privacy policy is, where the data is housed, etc.?

If I clicked that link, and bladerunner.social served me malware, where is the "throat to choke"?

I really don't understand your point. How is it different from every other URL you don't know?

And if you get malware from facebook.com, who do you think you're going to "choke"? You think you're going to get something from facebook?

If I was served malware by Facebook, I could definitely contact Facebook for assistance, and even sue them if necessary.

And the point about "URLs I dont know" is exactly my point - the move towards hosting content on websites of dubious operational security is a net negative for internet security. Sites like Facebook may not be perfect, but at least we know who runs them, that they've got skin in the game and incentives to adhere to their stated policies as well as laws and regulations, and where our data is located.

Steve Lord is the same dope who accused the 9front people of being nazis over a single image that was taken out of context. He couldn't have been more wrong but stood by his convictions and refused to budge and has not backtracked to this day. I would take anything said by this Cardinal Richelieu wannabe loudmouth with a grain of salt.

The point was the screenshots of the replies from Rasperry Pi, the medium is not the message here.

Upton is just as bad.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspb...

He's there to help us protect our rights, right?

He's there to help us protect our rights... right...?

https://www.thepoke.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/anakin-...

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