California law enforcement misused state databases more than 7k times in 2023
eff.org
eff.org
When people say "I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide" this is the exact kind of edge-case I always think about.
The problem with a lot of these massive surveillance systems is that a lot of people end up with access to them, and some of those people may not be trustworthy.
In this case, your ex-wife gets engaged to a cop and now they're abusing their access to databases to cause you harm.
(That note that "he now works for a different police department 30 miles away" is such a toxic aspect of American policing: cops who get fired for stuff like this inevitably end up in the exact same job somewhere else.)
I don't think requires any union pressure; the department is happy to be both rid of a problem officer and not have to put it in the public record just how bad the problem officer was.
I have a friend who is a cop in Indiana (a "right to work" state), and after talking with him, I've realized that the department, as an organization, can largely be modeled as an entity that takes action to minimize its liability (individual officers are mostly shielded from civil liability, but the department is much less so). Apropos to this subject:
- They want to minimize the number of apparent past bad actors that will be revealed during discover because a lot of past bad actors could be presented as a pattern of poor hiring and/or training. Allowing officers to resign to kill an investigation is golden).
- When something bad happens and it makes it into a courtroom with sufficient evidence that it happened, they want every officer in the department to testify that the action in question is definitely not common practice and completely contrary to training. Such testimony would be greatly undermined by a subpoena that revealed several investigations finding officers to have engaged in such behavior in the past. Again anything that stops the investigation before it can find anything material could potentially save the department millions of dollars in future liability.
...have you not seen the extents that LE agencies and the FOP will go to make sure these folk aren't fired? There's a reason LE have FOP cards in their wallets that include a statement to be read verbatim into a transcript for disciplinary meetings.
- When something bad happens and it makes it into a courtroom with sufficient evidence that it happened, they want every officer in the department to testify that the action in question is definitely not common practice and completely contrary to training. Such testimony would be greatly undermined by a subpoena that revealed several investigations finding officers to have engaged in such behavior in the past. Again anything that stops the investigation before it can find anything material could potentially save the department millions of dollars in future liability.
I recommend reading: https://chicagoreader.com/news/police-misconduct-brady/ (disclaimer: I'm one of the authors)
It's national security related, Was Snowden a traitor or a whistleblower and pokes the bear on whistleblowers and duty to disclose poor and outright illegal behaviour.
Not sure if that's your beat or interest as a reporer .. but it goes to a core issue wt public institutions.
related: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard...
In Chicago there are two means of holding individuals accountable to this sort of thing. The first is the local records act, which carries a misdemeanor for intentionally violating the act (ie, destroying documents). The other is the city's ethics policy which includes something similar to what you've said -- in that there's a legal obligation to report any observed illegal/fraudulent activity.
From conversations I've had, neither have been used for the sort of corruption you're referring to. Partially because the definitions in these things are intentionally vague. Another part because the local records act misdemeanor I mentioned would have to go through criminal court rather than civil court.
It might be interesting (not say challenging with a real risk of pushback into your RealLife) to get off the record comment about police ranks closing and reacting to anybody that threatened to or actually did spill beans about questionable activity.
The challenge to keeping a clean house is having an open and easy (and anonymous) path to acceptably highlighting the dirt.
For your general curiousity; from my part of the world (there are many stories, this is the bare surface of just one)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quigley_(politician)
* Quigley was the lawyer for the Western Australian Police Union for 25 years. In 1983, he represented officers at the inquest into the death of John Pat, a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy. He became an honorary life member of the union in 2000 before entering state parliament in 2001.
Lawyer defends police who openly and racially kerb stomped a kid to death in a rough outback town. Police love him and draw him into the fold.
* In 2007, his life membership of the Western Australian Police Union was withdrawn after his parliamentary attack on police involved with the Andrew Mallard case, where he named a former undercover policeman who had a role in Mallard's unjust conviction. He planned to melt down his life membership badge, have it made into a tiepin with the words Veritas Vincit— "Truth Conquers", the motto of the school he attended—and present it to Mallard.
Eventually the daily exposure to defending corrupt police weighs heavy and a heart starts to beat.
* In 2011, he was accused of bringing the legal profession into disrepute, a charge stemming from his campaign to expose the wrongful jailing of Andrew Mallard for murder, to which he replied "...if you take on corrupt police you will be pursued and they will try and destroy you."
* He became the [ State ] Attorney-General on 16 March 2017.
- GP was talking about a dynamic of officers resigning to avoid disciplinary actions on their record and working elsewhere.
- GP suggests this is due to union pressure.
- Indiana has much less strong police unions compared to Chicago
- My point is that there is still an incentive for departments to allow problem officers to retire before any investigation can confirm allegations of wrongdoing.
- I am more than willing to believe that lots of wrongdoing is enabled by the actions of unions, I just think that a policy allowing problem officers to resign with a clean record rather than be investigated is not solely motivated by union pressure.
All politics is local, and the creative expression of discretion is a source of power for many different stakeholders.
The reality is that giving a mulligan to some jackass cop who fucks up has benefits to many stakeholders. Investigations involve looking at things, and sometimes you see things when you bother to look.
This type of behavior is typical in close groups of people with power… see corporate boards, Catholic Church, etc.
Thanks; that paragraph sums up a lot of what I was trying to say.
https://cpdp.co is a good site to review these sorts of questions for. Disclaimer again, though - I'm a contributor to the project.
I'm more worried about the Police than any other class of criminals.
The problem with this view is that there are a lot of high profile cases that are examples of people abusing their power.
I am happy to believe that “most cops” see it that way.
I am less familiar with those police officers supporting reforms that would either expose or suppress the bad behavior of the minority.
The problem is a higher portion of people who just want to power trip apply to these positions, even if they are not the majority of the police force. Basically, it is the dream job for a bully.
It seems there should be severe penalties for "power tripping" (aka misuse of authority and databases for special purposes); slap of the wrist fine, suspended paychecks and internal investigations will not deter this group of people. I don't see how these crimes are considered less than drug dealing.
Specifically the punishment should include mandatory jail time and permanent ban from jobs where they have any form of authority over others including management, teaching, and all government positions.
I wonder if the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be used against them in these cases. I'm not a law expert, but it seems to be used for similar "unauthorized access" cases.
You might argue that hey, he has adrenaline flowing and so maybe he was a bit over the line. But they are professionals supposedly trained in effective deescalation techniques. Those techniques aren't just because it is humane, it is because it results in better outcomes. But the ego trippers put all that aside because they enjoy being the punisher.
Both of my grandfathers (and an uncle and a brother in law) were career cops. One of my grandfathers said: the power given to you as a cop either brings out the best in you or the worst.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/13/uber-empl...
I'm not advocating for the company, but the statement in the comment is shallow. I was a̶b̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ assaulted while employed there, which is why I left, but my comment stands.
That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument. An I am a gun rights advocate yet am against Palantir's product usage on US citizens. Good food for thought.
The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? If you had perfect enforcement then it would obviously be the latter, because you'd arrest the murderers without harassing people who buy guns for hunting or self defense etc.
But law enforcement isn't perfect, so there is going to be some spillover where some murderers wouldn't have been caught. Then you have to get into debatable questions like, if it was illegal for them to buy a gun, would they have just bought a gun illegally, or used some other kind of weapon? If there are a lot of murders happening, how many of them could be prevented by using more resources to catch them or e.g. legalizing drugs to reduce gang activity, without banning guns? The pro-gun argument is that the positives outweigh the negatives and/or we're better off doing the other things to prevent murders instead.
You can ask similar questions about Palantir and mass surveillance, but that doesn't mean you have to come to the same conclusion, because it has different positives and negatives and ability to be mitigated if you do it.
In particular, preventing abuses by governments is much harder because you'd be relying on the government to prosecute itself, which is notoriously ineffective, especially with programs that are insulated from public accountability through secrecy. Meanwhile the negatives are much more dangerous because of the speed, scale and severity at which an already-existent mass surveillance system can be converted into a tool of mass oppression when there is a change in administrations. And the positives are muted because the legitimate goals of mass surveillance can also be achieved -- often at lower expense, given how much it costs to sift through a firehose of >99% false positives and innocent behavior -- using traditional targeted investigative methods.
I disagree with your framing. The bill of rights specifically guarantees both the right to bear arms and the right to not be unreasonably searched.
Suppose you have a private mass surveillance system, where people "voluntarily" (i.e. because the market is consolidated and every company is doing it) give up their data to a private company that keeps a big database. Then the company "voluntarily" informs on citizens to the government (because the company wants to be on the government's good side), or imposes penalties for crimethink all on its own. Is that okay then? Should we be satisfied with it because it's not the government? Nope. Still a big problem.
The reason isn't that it's the government, it's that it's a bad trade off.
Suppose you're the "good guys" and trying to catch terrorists. There are 330 million people and 50 terrorists. If you have a mass surveillance system with only a 0.1% false positive rate, the system is totally useless. You have 330,000 false positives and investigating all those dead ends would be a huge waste of resources that would be better spent using traditional investigative methods on traditional leads.
Now suppose you're the bad guys trying to catch resistance fighters, with the same mass surveillance system. 0.1% false positive rate? Okay, round up the 330,000 people and execute them all without trial. Way cheaper than having to sift through them. Very effective system when you don't have to care about that guilt or innocence stuff.
And that's what makes the system so dangerous. It's only useful in proportion to how little you care about innocent people, and the extent to which an entity does is a thing that can change over time, so it's massively dangerous to leave a system like that sitting around without vigorous efforts to dismantle it.
Palantir for example works directly with the government on State and Federal levels, and know damn well what they are doing, what their tools are used for, and answer directly to the requests of the government in regards to contracted work (all at the cost of the taxpayer mind you). These are mass surveillance tools, they have one purpose.
I also don't think its insignificant to recognize the backroom deals here that have created this vicious cycle of:
working as a govt official and giving kickbacks and heavily inflated contracts to contractors, and forming laws favorable to those contractors -> then getting a consulting job at those same defense contractors or lobbying groups -> and then moving back into politics
we can't just strip away the context here, a database has a purpose, what purpose does mass surveillance tools have? I'd argue that there is no proper use case for these tools against Americans, other than authoritarianism.
Sure, if PostgreSQL were specifically selling their tools to organizations known to commit those sort of abuses.
The name of the company itself is another dead giveaway.
1. Or carbon monoxide mask, if the distress of asphyxiation is throwing you off the from point I'm trying to make
Potato potato. Palantir explicitly provides tools for data analysis and operations for government and enforcement agencies. Postgres is a database used for virtually anything that needs a database. The two aren't the same.
For the record - Palantir isn't 100% culpable of a government resource abusing its capabilities, but it sure unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities that were either too expensive or too difficult to do previously (for example, storing records in an RDMS).
> Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.
ACLs require humans to configure them. Uber also has a robust ACL. It doesn't stop someone in the org from using and abusing its God-mode.
Actually there are us who would consider what impacts our employers have. E.g. I avoid working for adtech, and sure as hell would not want to work for a company providing government surveillance software.
For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. Your job at the children’s charity could be scamming old ladies.
This only happens because companies need to adhere to regulations, not because they're doing it out of respect for people.
And by simply not working in adtech, I don't need to go through some mental gymnastics to justify what I spend 40 hours a week building. The beauty of being a programmer is there's a bunch of work out there that doesn't involve crappifying the internet.
Nobody involved in that decision is motivated by respect? You're sounding pretty pessimistic for such a big emphasis on morals.
Go ahead and share what industry you work in then. I guarantee it is not unambiguously good.
“And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?”
You are not a moral person for working at an elementary school instead of a car manufacturer. The question is actually what you do, what talents you have, and how that affects other people.
Computer ads aren’t evil, surveillance, spam, and scams are evil.
I honestly don't have a clue how what I said could be interpreted as arguing that all buying and selling is immoral, so I wouldn't even know how to begin addressing that line of thinking.
Yes, absolutely. I think it's very common for people to make ethical decisions in how they make their money and how they spend their money.
If you're asking if every citizen living in Germany from 1933-1945 did only evil things, the answer is obviously no. If you're asking if every person who was ever in the nazi party was a uniquely evil human being, also no.
I am not. Palantir not only brands themselves as providing data analysis for governments but they also actually sell those tools too.
Do you call your gas company to make sure they didn’t buy from OPEC?
The impact is exactly what is pointed out in the article - someone in the local police department could use it against me.
> Do you call your gas company to make sure they didn’t buy from OPEC?
No, because that doesn't affect me.
See, you keep clinging to some morality claim, and I am explicitly not. I am saying that there is potentially a direct impact on abuse against me personally.
“Moral” in quotes is a tell, too. You’re arguing that morality is illegitimate unless someone has done a full “utilitarian” breakdown of everything they do in their lives. And of course you will only accept that breakdown if you deem it sufficient.
This shallow label analysis (oil bad, palantir bad, non profit good) is not “morality”, it’s politics.
Most people espouse a utilitarian ethics, but rely on media and social cues rather than harm to determine their choices.
If your job is to pour barrels of oil into the ocean, I think that’s worth evaluating. If your job is to do accounting for the oil company, I’m not sure you’re causing harm relative to other accounting employment.
It’s also valid to decide image is important to you, but don’t tell me it’s because you are a Good Samaritan.
In the US we just use people who didn't think about it too deeply.
If I had to choose to be surveilled 24/7, but my data stuck, unlabeled in there, or 20% of my actions randomly sampled, but fed to a tool that can interpret it, I choose the first, hands down
On top of that I get super frustrated when people want to do austerity measures like cutting funding to libraries, cancer research, public health etc... but refuse to even acknowledge that the police takes up the majority of a states public funding by orders of magnitude, and often receive "surplus" military weaponry.
If anyone actually cared about govt spending, it would be extremely clear that military and police funding would come first and foremost. The reality is that these two things are heavily intertwined, and the ways in which they are corrupt are the same... but one should ask themselves why does the US police force need to be more powerful than nearly every countries military? Who is it that they are fighting and who are they fighting for?
Well, either you pay for healthcare (especially mental health care) and social security programs such as affordable housing... or you'll pay police to deal with the fallout.
Unfortunately, unlike in Europe, "government handouts" for the poor aren't something to score political points with, but authoritarian police is...
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G160091A027NBEA
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Citation needed, cuz that’s just absolutely untrue.
I think Zuck likes the riches, but not the supposed responsibility of being the boss of it all. Very typical for management actually. Very few ever stand up and say: "It was my mistake! I should have managed this better! I should have placed better safeguards.". Instead Zucky goes in front of the court and acts all stupic uninformed android. Basically, a master class in denial and lying. Not a shred of taking responsibility for what happened.
I do interact a lot so maybe people click to see if I also look touched? Either way I have a unique enough name that I'd notice if anyone was viewing my profile via that side-channel.
Every large company ends up with these types of situations.
The Snowden dumps showed a widespread culture of the NSA doing this on girlfriends, ex’s, and ‘potential love interests’. Among many other things.
Why do you think he got hunted to the ends of the earth?
Because of what the guys at the top were doing.
If it had just been the LOVEINT stuff, I think the NSA would've said "oh, right, yes that's not meant to happen, few bad apples, nothing to see here".
But showing a large systemic attitude, lying to congress… and specifically that America works with foreign partners to circumvent constitutional rights everywhere, that will have upset the people in charge.
Plus getting most big tech to use E2E encryption for chat so wiretapping their servers stopped being useful.
Big corp doesn’t get to do that (generally), hence actually having to (eventually) stop it.
This is a great take . . . if you're a liberal arts major in undergrad. It is literally sophomoric. Abuses in the intelligence community do not obviate the legitimate reasons why the government collects intelligence.
Obviating or not, when the abuses see no real consequences, at what point do you say the abuses are just… part of the story too?
Frankly, saying otherwise is the Sophomoric take, isn’t it?
Even though I strongly dislike the abuses I learn of in the intelligence community, I don't see how these abuses "obviate the legitimate reasons why the government collects intelligence", nor do I see how you could go from that to the much stronger claim "extrajudicially destroying people for threatening the system is basically the entire reason for the national security apparatus."
Do they extrajudicially destroy people for threatening the system? I have every reason to assume so. Is that the "entire reason" for them? No. Each agency in each nation also has the completely lawful purpose of protecting their own citizens from the agencies of other nations.
The FSB, if they are acting against the US, is certainly not acting lawfully in the US. Just like if the CIA is not operating lawfully against, say, the FSB in Russia.
Literally the entire point of a foreign intelligence service is to operate outside the rules, or they wouldn’t be secret agencies. The ‘secret’ part is there, so they can do what they want without getting in trouble. Otherwise they’d be like NASA and publish everything they do.
And people operating on behalf of those agencies are of course people - who will be targetted, and if found, destroyed by competing agencies. That is literally their job. And it’s done extrajudically, because they are targetting people outside of their home country in most cases, hence no applicable judiciary. The CIA isn’t going to take anyone to court, because there is nowhere they are allowed to operate legally (per US standards) which wouldn’t want to throw them in jail for existing (by foreign standards). Hence extra-judicial.
And if you think, once they become accustomed to operating outside the rules, and have extensive mechanisms for maintaining secrecy, and finding and then destroying ‘enemies’, they will be ‘scouts honor’ following the rules in their home country, then that just isn’t how this clearly all works. As shown by numerous examples, a few I linked to earlier. And when those examples are found, nothing bad happens to those agencies, near as I can tell.
And ‘a threat to the system’ is called a threat to National Security. What else do you think it means?
I said the abuses of the system fell within the types of actions that were the purpose of the system. Presumably there are also non-abusive ways to destroy people who are threats to national security, and those are included in their toolbox too.
The national security apparatus’s purpose is to destroy people (and organizations) which are a threat to ‘the nation’.
The national security apparatus itself is considered part of the nation, and somewhat plausibly important for national security, so a threat to it is a threat to national security eh?
Hence any threat to the national security apparatus is a threat to national security, and fair game to be destroyed by it.
Just because you or I consider that abusive doesn’t mean they do, and they’re the ones with the tools - and the apparent ability to- to get away with it.
Them using the same tools for stuff like LOVEINT is abusive to others of course, and outside their remit as those people were (usually) not plausibly threats to national security, but anyone who noticed they were doing it all the sudden became fair game because they were a threat to the system eh?
After all, taking away those tools would remove their ability to do the same thing to someone like a FSB agent who had dirt on someone at the Company, or who was trying to get close to someone at the NSA by dating them.
And the people acting on that have seen no consequences for doing so, eh?
Is it fucked up and corrupt? Yes. Is it self perpetuating? Yes. Is it inherent to the nature of the system and what they are doing? Yes.
But very higher level employees and Zuck himself? I would have to see actual proof of very secure lockout and segregation policies and procedures with zero exceptions or higher level administration access across the entire company to even have a chance to believe it. And that is way more effort and organizationally burdensome and costly than just trusting a few people to not be morons and be available when needed because you pay them enough money to not blab or give out access to others.
I admit, in one of my very first jobs, I accessed the company DB, to find out about celebrities. I almost got fired, and learned a hard (and early) lesson about the importance of privacy and being careful about admin dashboards.
Overpowered admin dashboards are a problem. I tend to spend a lot of time on backends, locking down permissions.
These days, I am so anal about privacy and security, that it pisses people off. I just know that there’s plenty of knuckleheads like me, out there.
"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be."
-Lyndon B. Johnson
- FB found restricting access was difficult because engineers do sometimes bump into incidental user data while doing their job
- And engineers, being sufficiently motivated, can find a way around security measures
- So instead of reducing productivity with ineffective security measures, FB logs all access to private user info, and a separate team will request a reason, and if you don't have a 100% legitimate work related reason to be viewing it, you're terminated immediately
- And it does occasionally happen
- And best practice if you might incidentally see private user data is to do it on an FB profile of a dev friend also working at FB
I miss when “influencer” wasn’t anybody’s career goal.
After meeting some of those people at a meditation group, they began being creepy by making obtuse, but oddly specific comments on things that I was doing online to suggest they were. I got creeped out and stopped going to that class. I began meeting friends or friends of their friends at different places.
Ultimately, it escalated to the point that an employee at Apple was leaving poisoned treats outside of my door and then listening me dealing with my dog being sick.
You cannot talk about any of this because its really easy for the stalkers to deny its happening. There are no laws in this area yet. If you try to complain or get anyone's attention, guess who is watching your every move. The exact same people that are committing the crimes.
People will look back at today at the political or social strife, and they will wonder how we never connected the dots.
I think you're overly generous in calling this an "edge case". I do not think it uncommon at all, what we hear about are those who are too stupid to remain uncaught.
The public might want to defend their privacy vs. corporations, and/because the media will spin privacy to target companies, while government and public servants escape accountability for their actions.
The BP Oil Spill class action?
The Anderson Family class action against GM?
The VW emissions scandal?
Enron Securities fraud case?
WorldCom accounting fraud case?
Fen-Phen diet drug settlement?
Bank of America Countrywide Mortgage fraud case?
Tobacco litigation ($23.6B)
BP oil spill ($20.8B)
VW emissions scandal ($38B)
Enron/WorldCom financial fraud ($9.55B combined)
Pharmaceutical/auto/mortgage cases ($16.15B combined)
Then see for yourself who's the parrot with no sources.
Do you remember of any agency having any kind of trouble after leaking private data? It's always the hackers that are to blame when there's a data leak in a government agency.
But when there's a hack at a company? the blame seems to go 100% on the company.
What usually happens in cases of government agencies getting hacked (in my non-US experience) is that an inspector investigates what went wrong, proposes improvements to security systems and processes, then monitors the agency to make sure they carry them out.
I can recall one or two exceptional cases,and the fines were relatively small, amounting to a slap on the wrist. For example for the 2017 Equifax breach, after 2 years, the total cost of the settlement included $300 million to a fund for victim compensation, $175 million to the states and territories in the agreement, and $100 million to the CFPB in fines. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority imposed a financial penalty of £11,164,400[1]
Equifax's revenue in 2017 was $3.362B. In 2019, after Equifax agreed to the above settlement, revenue was up to $3.508B. Equifax revenue for the twelve months ending September 30, 2024 was $5.588B, a 8.79% increase year-over-year.[2]
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach#Litig...
2. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EFX/equifax/revenu...
Anyone who says this should then be just fine with putting a webcam in their shower.
Does not jibe with
> he was ultimately acquitted
If he was acquitted then he has to be treated as innocent, lest our justice system becomes an avenue for the exact type of crime you’re decrying.
Guess which group cops belong to?
If the argument is “we can’t give powers to police because they can be misused” this is an argument for disarming them entirely. To me that is just giving up. Instead, we need to fix systems to hold them accountable.
> When people say "I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide" this is the exact kind of edge-case I always think about.
These cases are far and between. I suggest to think instead of something like pre-WWII Germany. Once you get everyone's say religion on file it's only a matter of accessing it if you want to prosecute any group at scale. Fun thing there will be no criminal cases at all because it will be fully legal
He was fired because he was beating his wife, who worked in the court and took a restraining order out against him.
He did in fact end up working for the department the next town over.
You are exactly right, "Nothing to hide" is also an invalid argument - because a valid suspicion of criminality will be authorised for subpoena by a judge.
Without such oversight we immediately and repeatedly see abuse of these systems: here's just a tiny list of cases where the "good guys" abused their access to systems to stalk ex-lovers and people they found attractive.
This underlines why the "good guys" argument is both invalid, but deliberately misleading. We don't plan systems and security around good guys, we plan them around bad guys.
USA:
N.J. cop used police databases to stalk ex-girlfriend, investigators say
https://www.nj.com/monmouth/2023/01/nj-cop-used-police-datab...
Officer Fired for Allegedly Using Police Database to Stalk, Harass Women
https://www.newsweek.com/officer-fired-allegedly-using-polic...
Australia:
Former policeman accused of using force database to stalk ex-wife and girlfriend
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/former-policeman...
Former federal police officer faces new charges over stalking of ex-girlfriend
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6138318/former-federa...
(Note the two above articles are not the same person)
UK: Met police officer 'used CCTV cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend after telling her to take up sex work to pay her bills'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11868575/Met-police...
Creepy cop saw attractive woman on the road and 'looked up her license plate number so he could stalk her on Facebook'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178556/Officer-Jef...
anywhere you have a brotherhood that is more loyal to members than the public they're meant to serve is not going to produce good results imho.
These people fail to follow and resolve the indirect links that threaten their future. Privacy is their future. Without privacy, you have no future, because you are vulnerable to attack by unknown third-parties.
Information is the first thing required for a successful attack on your persons, or family. You can even torture people today and the bar is so incredibly high to prove vexatious acts that there's not much one can do except in some very egregious situations where they step over the line.
In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data to find Americans’ communications. --https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/internal-documents-show-how-little-fbi-did-correct-misuse-section-702-databases
And to all the haters, let's see how you feel when your daughter is abducted and taken over state lines or your local law enforcement becomes corrupt and starts working with criminals. The FBI showing up is a great feeling.
Well, if it’s any comfort, the person most likely by far to abduct your daughter is you. Stranger abduction is exceedingly rare.
LA Sheriff in particular is known to have several criminal gangs within their ranks.
That's all nice until they finish the job and start looking for ways to stay employed.
The best way to prevent misuse of data is not to have it. The second best way is to only allow access through technical means with proper access control at the query level and never access to the raw data.
How do you limit to specific search strings? Is that a thing?
In the end, it feels like nobody (and nothing) can see the whole dataset.
I have hope that the culture around policing will change if people finally realize that the crime rates have dropped. But with fear of crime being a great lever with which to control people's vote, I don't see it happening anytime soon. The population is too vast, outliers too common, and ignorance of statistics too widespread. It will always be easy to convince people that some place they know nothing about is a Mad Max hellscape and that it's coming for them.
And the rest access records they aren't supposed to: https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-training-survey/
But how are you going to put an access control in that can tell you if an officer is searching a drunk driver's plate or an ex's? They need access to data quickly. They're already logging who accesses what, which is how they know who abused it and can punish such people, but some things are hard to fix with a technical solution.
So for the concealed carry there is a background check involved, but it has to be done in a certain way, and the police instead were being more "thorough" and were digging through more databases than they were supposed to? I guess they do have access to those databases, but are only supposed to check them if they suspect a crime was committed.
What's the personal motivation there? It seems like they were going out of their way to be more "thorough", wouldn't it save them time and grief not to check more than needed. Is some higher political figure asking them to be more "thorough". I don't quite get the whole picture. Of course, they broke the law, but just wondering about their motive.
Militia is the people - it's everyone, individually. Well-regulated means well-functioning, fit for purpose. In order for individual people to be fit for militia/defensive service, they cannot be deprived of their right to make, purchase, own, use, and/or carry firearms.
My favorite quote related to this:
"I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people." - George Mason, address to Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788
That's also true for the definition of arms.
You can define "militia" as "all the of-age white males" if we get to define "arms" as "muskets". Fair trade!
"Arms" meant (means) state-of-the-art, military-level hardware. The muskets that civilians had in their homes were as good or better than what you'd be issued by the burgeoning American military, to the extent that you were issue anything and weren't just expected to bring your own. Throughout all of American history, perhaps with the exception of nuclear arms and vehicles like tanks and submarines, firearms research and development has occurred in private industry and made its way into the military later.
Probably not cannons and grapeshot, though.
But the specifics are irrelevant, the spirit is clear.
"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." - Sam Adams, address to Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788
Finding an article that says, essentially, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and then goes on to talk about government licensed privateers - akin to the modern setup of a security guard licensed to carry in a state that doesn't otherwise permit it. Is there evidence outside of that of personal home ownership of cannons? (Let alone of a widespread nature?)
Do we think Sam Adams would advocate personal ownership of nuclear bombs, or do we think he'd perhaps see such things as a category slightly different than the muskets of his time?
The start of this little digression was private citizens carrying their personally owned handguns outside of their home as is plainly meant by the word "bear" in 2A. So rather than moving the goalposts to Sam Adams's opinion on private ownership of nuclear weapons or whatever other bad faith things you want to bring up, I'd rather focus on that.
"Nothing like machine guns exist, let alone in private hands, let alone widely so" is part of that historical context, yes.
> We don't have private ownership of nuclear arms now...
As the apocryphal Churchill quote about whores goes, "We've already established that [some arms don't fall under the 2nd]; we're merely haggling over [which]..."
If your argument is that machine guns didn't exist in the late 1700s therefore they're not covered by the second amendment, then surely the internet isn't covered by the first amendment and you should be able to be arrested for any online comments you make, right?
> its operation does not match the modern use of the term... It was never used during any combat operation or war... Production was highly limited and may have been as few as two guns...
I'm not sure this works any better than the privateers example.
> If your argument is that machine guns didn't exist in the late 1700s therefore they're not covered by the second amendment, then surely the internet isn't covered by the first amendment and you should be able to be arrested for any online comments you make, right?
It has exactly the same sorts of widely-supported exceptions. I can't exercise my freedom of speech via threats, fraudulent claims, false advertising, lying to a FBI agent, etc. I can, and should be, arrested for such things.
(I also like to think modern social media and its societal impact would give the Founders some pause.)
You're saying since MGs didn't exist, they shouldn't be covered - or at least presenting that as a valid argument? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
If that argument holds truth, than the entire internet should be exempt from 1A protections, shouldn't it?
Frankly, I think if the Founders had anticipated its rise, they'd have put a few more qualifications on the First. I think we're in the fuck-around-find-out phase of the technology outpacing the societal capacity to cope with it.
We absolutely agree on this!
Are we arguing we just start ignoring laws when we don't like them. The Constitution has a very clear means for changing it, which we've done dozens of times in the past. If we want to change it we can, nobody is holding onto it for the sake of it. We're following the law.
My argument is that it's old, doesn't really apply well to the modern world. You say you can simply change it if you want to but your system doesn't really allow for that anymore. You have multiple 9/11 in dead schoolchildren and you still don't care.
What it does is putting guns in everyday situations, a road rage incident that ends in deaths rather than some bruises. Since there's no room for any exceptions to this right state lawmakers cannot make any laws that excludes people that should not be able to buy guns either.
Is there evidence of a law against the personal ownership of cannons?
The Founding Fathers existed in a time where gun control was “they are big, heavy, and don’t shoot very fast”. That they did not anticipate a Glock with a 100 round drum is fairly understandable.
Ah yes, the argument that was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court as "bordering on the frivolous."
I suppose the First Amendment is also limited to quill pens, parchment, and yelling to passersby from a literal soapbox?
> I suppose the First Amendment is also limited to quill pens and parchment?
The First Amendment, as the Second, was fully intended to have common-sense exceptions.
Shit, John Adams himself signed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts into law.
This is why I find "but the Founding Fathers wanted everyone to be able to own an AR-15" uncompelling. It's fairly clear evidence they thought the First was way less comprehensive than we currently interpret it, yet people interpret the Second the opposite way.
If one is to cite what the Founding Fathers intended as justification for an absolute individual right to bear arms, one must confront the fact that they clearly didn't consider the fairly simply written First Amendment to be absolute. That points to an attitude of "well obviously we're not gonna be stupid about it" for other amendments introduced at the same time... like the Second.
If they felt the Alien and Sedition Acts complied with the First Amendment, I think it's reasonable to believe they'd consider the assault weapons ban to comply with the Second.
"I do not know who was the particular wretch alluded to: but I discharged every person under punishment or prosecution under the Sedition law, because I considered & now consider that law to be a nullity as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image; and that it was as much my duty to arrest it’s execution in every stage, as it would have been to have rescued from the fiery furnace those who should have been cast into it for refusing to worship their image."
Seems the Founders did not all support that viewpoint.
That’s fair! But also a challenge for guessing their intents with the Second.
(Notably, one of them is still on the books. Jefferson didn’t repeal. He had a personal dislike of Adams for quite some time.)
What they’d think of today’s weaponry would probably vary somewhat. The Scalias, Alitos, and Thomases of the Court would rather not confront that. They seem certain of their crystal balls.
If you read Scalia's book, he goes into great detail about this but it boils down to a) you can't read minds as a judge and b) different people voted to pass the law for different reasons, so which ones are valid?
> If that paper on the table gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor; but they may be confined to the lower and middle classes of the people, granting exclusion to the higher classes of the people. If we should ever see that day, the most ignominious punishments and heavy fines may be expected.
He very clearly believed that the federal government under the Constitution would have the power to determine who did and did not belong to the Militia which is one of many reasons he voted against ratification. He also clearly believes that the federal government has the task of regulating it given the talk of punishments and fines, though he seems fine with that as long as they are reasonable. That it was ratified in that form makes your referenced quote an argument against your reading of the second amendment.
That quote in context [1] clearly is about who the members of the militia are drawn from, not the implicit militia-ness of all citizens. He even states this explicitly later in the same argument: "Under the present government, all ranks of people are subject to militia duty".
In the end, they wrote what they wrote and they ratified what they ratified -- "the right of the people" and not the right of the "several states" or the "militia of the several states" as is used elsewhere in the document. So it's a right of the people, period, and "keep and bear" has a plain meaning (Scalia wrote something to the effect of "you cannot interpret 'he filled and kicked the bucket' to mean 'he filled the bucket and died').
Some state constitutions (contemporaneous and known to the authors of the constitution) carved out an explicit self-defense or individual right to arms, but this language was not encoded into the second amendment.
Whenever I encounter quotes from the constitutional ratification debates that purport to claim an individual right to keep and bear arms, on closer inspection in context, they are arguing about states vs. federal authority, not an individual right. If you choose to respond by offering other supporting quotes, please give a link to the full context and due consideration of it, because I have yet to see an actual quote that holds up.
[1] https://constitution.org/1-Constitution/rc/rat_va_13.htm
Basically the same situation as when you read "gay" in a historical context.
I've read every single word that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin ever wrote that survived to be collected into the various volumes of their collected writings.
Regulated has always meant "controlled".
The pressure regulator schtick sounds like some BS the NRA came up with after snorting some coke through the pile of rubles Putin gave them to poison the minds of Americans.
Here's the full text of the Federalist Papers: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1404/1404-h/1404-h.htm
"regulated" appears 26 times, often in a military context, and it always means what everyone thinks it means and is never used the way you propose.
>Elections in Ireland, till of late, were regulated entirely by the discretion of the crown, and were seldom repeated, except on the accession of a new prince, or some other contingent event.
Do you have any historical examples that support your usage of the word?
Regulated technical parameters like pressure and voltage are not subject to regulations (unless we construe the simple feedback mechanism to be a couple of rules).
It is blatant word semantic equivocation to conflate government regulation and pressure regulation.
The word "controlled" doesn't help much; it can be similarly equivocated as a near synonym of "regulated". Regulated pressure is controlled. A regulated industry is controlled.
I don't like guns, but I think the masses right to own arms is more constitutional than the standing army.
The bill of rights is a list of things the federal government cannot do (and through case law, individual states). It is entirely restrictions on the government, not restrictions on citizens. It's a stretch to assume that the one word "regulated" in 2A actually mean restrictions on citizens when no other word in the first ten amendments restricts any citizens' rights.
> In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a "shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length" at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is *not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment*, or that its use *could contribute to the common defense*.
If you point to Miller, it becomes clear that military weapons were more acceptable for personal ownership under their interpretation of the 2A than a sawed-off shotgun, which was considered only useful for crimes when the NFA was passed (similar to other "concealable" arms). Consequently, the common refrain that "well-regulated militia" now implies something like the National Guard, would thus also imply that in fact it's more reasonable to privately own a tank or fighter jet than a suppressor.
I don't think that most anti-2A advocates really understand that our current legislative limits on gun ownership are about as restrictive as they can be. Amend the 2A if you like (and it probably should be, even if only for clarity), but don't try to amend history.
There is no textual interpretation of the 2A that would not allow for private firearm ownership. Every state constitution that directly preceded the Federal US constitution had a section that said some variation of:
> "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power."
That specific quote came from Pennsylvania's constitution (Article 13), which was a Quaker colony at the time, that was much less friendly to firearms than other states, but even they explicitly spelled out the right to arms for personal defense. Heller (2008) reaffirmed this. That we have the largest standing army on Earth now would be horrifying to the founders, because they knew exactly the kind of Imperialism and Authoritarianism that follows, as opposed to a muster-able militia.
As Huey Newton noted: "Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment."
> So can we safely assume that in 2007 you were steadfastly in support of the constitutionality of regulating weapons that fall outside of reasonable use in a Militia
Yes, absolutely. I don't think that, for instance, anyone should own chemical weapons, or weapons like cluster munitions. Generally, any weapon that you would not deploy defensively in a conflict should not be in the hands of a defensive force (the citizenry/ militia). I don't think anyone should have nukes, period, but that's a different discussion.
Nitpick: The standing army the founders were worried about was professional state (like government, not like US state vs local vs federal) law enforcement as that was the capacity in which the jackboot of the occupying British army was being used.
Which we also already have, and which our military can become at any given moment with the right legal wrangling (or disregard for legality). It's the concentration of force that is the problem, not the particular structure of the institution.
https://x.com/2aHistory/status/1712209761171612093 https://x.com/MorosKostas/status/1645290263299117056
Maybe nothing but perhaps very interesting.
Where this touches on abuse are people who are not convicted of any particular criminal offense related to firearms, or people that have had negative contact with the LACSD.
So on the "positive" side this might allow them to prevent a person who they strongly believe is a gang leader but has not been convicted of any offense from obtaining a permit.
On the "negative" side this might be people like defense attorneys, anti-police activists, or private investigators who have a tendencious relationship with the police from obtaining such a permit. Or in some cases maybe even people who have simply had a negative interaction -- filing reports critical of officers, etc., who are being spitefully targetted.
The law attempts to strike a balance between the concerns and law enforcement overreach and exists for a reason.
State law doesn’t allow this kind of non-conviction information to be used in CCP decisions, so this was an overreach. (previously you had to be of "good moral character" and have "good cause" to get a CCP, but these have been replaced with objective criteria)
You could argue that having more information might lead to better decisions on who gets a permit, but that’s not what the law allows—and letting police pull extra data whenever they feel like it creates obvious risks of abuse.
They've also tried to implement strong arm policies like "We will notify your employer you have a license" knowing most large employers in California are fairly liberal and anti-gun and might look at that negatively to try to dissuade people from even exercising the right.
A $200k annual pension is worth about $3m.
Which, as you point out, is not surprising. The LASD is enough of a mess that I've heard other nearby police departments complain about them, not to mention their history of gangs, corruption, and conflicts with the Board of Supervisors and FBI.
In any event, it's likely most Californians still go straight to the sheriff's department when seeking a permit.
I haven't been to a state where there isn't strong urban/rural partisanship. Is that what Rhode Island is like?
Well that was a fuck-up! Not only is Los Angeles politically vulnerable right now, LASD went after gun owners. Bipartisan hell in 3, 2, 1...
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...
Based on field work conducted with officers and IT personnel in the Los Angeles Police Department, the author convincingly shows that law enforcement generally follow an "institutional data imperative," i.e., a mandate to collect as much information as possible, in part by securing routine access to a wide range of data on everyday activities from non-police databases. Data originally collected for one purpose is used for another (p. 53).
I'm tired of the "gubmint bad, Free Market™ Good" tropes.
7,636?
10 quadrillion?
Does California law enforcement's rate of misuse of information systems exceed, equal, or fall short of my own misuse (usually unintentional, due to lack of clear policy/guidance) of various information systems?
Of course it does. It doesn't absolve anything if the rate is low. But the frequency is absolutely meaningful.
At the very least, I wonder how many officers are responsible for the violations. 7000? 1? LASD only has 18k employees.
No. It's like tracking the homicide rate. The rate going down or being low doesn't mean murder is fine.
You expect there to be no murders.
I expect murders to be low, and for murderers to be punished.
I also expect the number of murderers in the police force to be only slightly better than that of the rest of society. There are background checks, but there are also other factors that may increase the rate, regardless: I expect from them what I expect from everyone.
So-- 7,000 murders per year.
For Iceland that's high. I think they had 3 last year.
For the United States, that's fucking fantastic! I wish we had 7,000 murders per year! If we had 3 that would be awesome but I'm not delusional.
It's all about the wider context.
Especially in this case, 6,800 of the misuses were from the LA sheriff's department doing background checks for gun permits so that's almost certainly a policy and procedure problem that has been fixed.
So that leaves around 200 cases.
Is that good? No.
But how bad is it? 200 misuses out of ten quadrillion accesses is pretty not bad, if you ask me. edit: and that's a sign that things are going well because I am not dumb enough to expect 0 misuses of anything by any group of individuals. I expect misuses to be low and for misuse to be punished.
"""The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) sheriff’s department’s 6,789 abuses made up a majority of the record 7,275 violations across California that were reported to the state Department of Justice (CADOJ) in 2023 regarding the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS). """
Does misuse of the databases lead to tangible consequences? Maybe yes: "Across California between 2019 and 2023, there have been:
"" 761 investigations of CLETS misuse, resulting in findings of at least 7,635 individual violations of the system’s rules 55 officer suspensions, 50 resignations, and 42 firings related to CLETS misuse six misdemeanor convictions and one felony conviction related to CLETS misuse ""
Color me surprised that they'd ever abuse state databases on people of interest!