Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages
theregister.com
theregister.com
EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report she was being kidnapped, every single time, the operators and the police officers spoke to her in an ironic and condescending tone. It took 19 hours to locate her, by which time, she was already dead. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Alexandra_M%C4%8...
Someone please correct me, but do they ever much bother to protect those in custody?
>An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim's Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation.
>To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so.
Kind of like when a robber comes to your house, you have him arrested, and when you go to court you look up and he is the one swinging the gavel.
Of course, interesting the cop has to know there is a constitution violation. Somehow ignorance of the law is always an excuse for the cops but the citizenry must know all 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000+ laws and by god if they forgot one they are fucked.
This is the reason why I've long believed we need a check both federal and local to police that is completely divorced from regular prosecution. We need lawyers/investigators whose sole purpose is investigating and prosecuting police at pretty much all levels of the government. The federal government theoretically has that with the office of inspectors general.
If a cop violates your rights, you just have to pray the DA will prosecute criminal charges. But you still won’t get an monetary damages from the cop. You might talk the state into settling.
Cynically this probably only happened in the Chauvin case because the state would have been burned to the ground otherwise.
Maybe folks need to get in the street more...
This gets misrepresented on the Internet all the time. What this really means is that you can't sue the city for incompetent policemen, which is the case in basically every country. That only punishes the taxpayers after all. What is different about other countries is that they are much better at firing incompetent police.
For instance, in Greece https://www.lawspot.gr/nomothesia/pk/arthro-259-poinikos-kod... (N.B. the bar of wilfulness in this section in the Greek criminal code is much lower than the corresponding notion of wilfulness in the U.S.)
The bar is high, of course, and yet people have historically managed to get prosecuted, lose their jobs, and go to prison.
I think the problem in the U.S. is, ironically, the power of police unions in a fragmented police force (city, territory, county, etc.) ecosystem, coupled with the lack of unified, express state and federal statutes to enforce a standard of care and competence.
Add to that that peace officer-specific state statutes (e.g., describing manslaughter while on duty) are written in such a way that, as a matter of law, it becomes a herculean task to tick all the boxes to successfully preserve a conviction on appeal. It is truly troubling. (I am hopeful, as this can be solved by the U.S. legislature, which I think we have a lot of reasons to demand to be done.)
They were sued for incompetence. For the failed sting.
The two police officers who stood and watched him get attacked were ruled to be immune because they had no duty to protect him.
Point being, if police see you getting attacked, they have no duty to /stop/ that from happening. Their only duty is to take a report once they feel safe enough to approach.
If you see two police on the corner and think "this is a safe area" you'd completely be operating on faith in their character.
Not to speak highly of the NYPD - but it is the character of most violent criminals to refrain from attacking you when police officers are standing close at hand.
This is false and a gross oversimplification based on one specific thing, which is that petty theft in particular has taken a backseat in many areas as it's not a felony and is usually a waste of time and money to persue, especially when the thief just gets turned loose with no big consequences.
I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers. We can jail negligent or reckless public officials, the financial costs of investigating and compensating people are an economic incentive to promulgate better standards in the first place.
I don't understand. This seems contradictory. If the problem is that we're trying to resolve too many grievances with currency, then doing so does nothing but hurt the taxpayer. Americans are already significantly more litigious against police, yet you get significantly more misconduct. The same goes for doctors, drivers, etc.
THE SUPREME COURT: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE; Justices Rule Police Do Not Have a Constitutional Duty to Protect Someone
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
The can (and do) stand around with theirs thumbs a up their asses while bad shit happens.
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-po...
See also uvalde schoool shooting where they did jack shit while kids were executed en mass.
Of course these days such a system has been added. Bonus feature of the (at least American) feature: the system can be activated remotely, even if you're not actually calling in an emergency. The European ETSI spec is pretty funny, it basically comes down to sending an SMS to a Secret Number with a Secret Format containing your coordinates to prevent abuse (both can be found very easily); at least that supposedly only activates when you dial the emergency services.
https://www.ertnews.gr/eidiseis/ellada/ag-anargyroi-plirofor...
But then again, doctors can be arrested for being bad at their job. As well as lawyers losing their license to practice. Maybe that's a standard we should hold to our supposed "public servants".
Deliberately refusing to intervene when you have a duty to do so kind of is though, at least in a moral sense.
Although, reading the transcript in that article through a translator, it does not seem all that bad. The taxi comment is very early in the conversation, and the operator does immediately offer to send a patrol car to her home.
The operator also stays on the line, keeps collecting more information and does really not seem to do anything obviously wrong.
Even if they'd immediately acquiesced to her request to send a patrol car to drive her home, the car probably wouldn't have been there on time anyway.
Flock is a great example. Story after story in the local news (only there for some reason) about police officers being disciplined or fired because they stalked people using the flock system.
Meanwhile not a single story where a major case was cracked by, and could only have been cracked by, the flock camera system.
Brother let me assure you, more cops will not help. I have lived in cities with more than twice as many cops per 10k. Both times I actually needed one it took over 3 hours.
They were never intended to provide basic safety to you in your home. That's your job. Their job is to deal with what comes after that.
On a side note, the suggestion that police numbers don't affect crime is obviously false. We've seen what an arbitrarily large police presence does to Washington DC this year with the national guard deployment.
Uh actually i do think police presence has a deterrent effect on crime. In fact, number of police on the street is one of the strongest measures for reducing crime!
I never found out why this is the case, because there can be many explanations. In general the global tendency is that the more and more digital data is there, the more and more states want to surveil people and invade onto their privacy. This is functional erosion of rights. I don't know of many states that counter that trend.
>Technology's proliferation centralizes political power nexuses
feels a stir in the sea. The Lisp and Haskell people died a little inside
It's kind of like asking "Why did the world kind of destabilize politically during the 1910s". Massive technological change swept the world and fast travel changed the dynamics of the world.
Our world has changed from one of bulky analog data (paperwork, pictures, remote places) to one where any information can be digitized and sent anywhere in the past 2 decades. This data can be stored pretty much forever. This is as much of a change as what occurred in WWI and WWII. The political dynamics of the world are completely different in the data regime. He who controls the data controls the world.
This is a very difficult trend to counter, just because you decide not to control said data, doesn't mean that others aren't capturing that same data and using it against you, in which they'll take power.
There is a distinct possibility that rights and ever growing capabilities of technology are fundamentally incompatible. This is going to present a growing problem for human societies.
You found out why.
That's my take on it. I'd love to hear other explanations. It's indeed curious why so many EU countries are pushing for increased surveillance so heavily.
Probably a coincidence that it all happens just before the World Economic Forum summit in Davos. It could be they sent the new agenda a bit earlier to allow governments to prepare themselves.
Finally, most police forces and interior ministries have had access to offensive security tools (often called "spyware") for over a decade now.
Also, y'all need to recognize that unbreakable personal security/ privacy/ paranoia is just not the default social position in most societies. There isn't a big conspiracy, it's a reflection of social mores we disagree with, either ideologically or through recognition that policing is often ineffective and corrupt.
Anyone can try to break encryption, why can't the police force? But dont say others arent allowed to use malware/Spyware - or malware/spyware countermeasures - if you are using it yourself.
You already have (theoretical) access to state resources. You dont need more help
Is there really no way we can make it technologically impossible for them to exfiltrate user data?
Governments will sanction the major proprietary OSes and compel Apple, Google, Microsoft to participate in their surveillance programs, and those will have remote integrity attestation and will be the only hardware and software you will be able to use to access essential services and the internet as whole, most likely.
The usage of alternative software won't be outright illegal, but will get you on a watchlist. Like you said, they don't need to make other software illegal, just make circumventing the blocks illegal.
They can't arrest everyone, but, it's one more gray area thing that can and will be used against you should the government ever decide they have a bone to pick with you specifically so you can get away with it for a long time, until suddenly you don't.
(Feels like we have this same discussion over and over on HN.)
Once that's the case, otherwise legal activities (e.g. protesting, or making political statements) run the risk of making you a target. Law enforcement can then punish you for your legal activity by selectively enforcing this other law.
The resulting situation is one where everyone knows to some extent "you better shut up if you know what's good for you", and puts a chilling effect on otherwise legal forms of civic engagement.
You might point out that there are already laws on the books that let them do this, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind another.
Privacy-conscious apps and communications tools need to be developed, and we need to build the consensus that privacy is important.
edit: Anyone know why Briar doesn't have the feature for known contacts to be a "courier" for other contacts?
Background: Briar is the encrypted messaging app that works over tor, local wifi and bluetooth. If Alice sends a message to Charles but she isn't connected, the app will hold it until it detects Alice and Charles are in proximity.
My desired feature: If Bob is a verified contact with both Alice and Charles, Briar should be able to hand the message from Alice to Bob, and then deliver it to Charles.
If you're in a repressive state and you're worried about your data being exfiltrated the best security practice of all is not to create records of illegal activity. If you have to store such material, don't keep it on a communications device, put it on an external storage device, hide it somewhere outside your home, and don't tell anyone about it.
2/10 Must try harder.