Boston Police use fake social media accounts to phish indie rock show info
slate.com
slate.com
Police officers follow what is known as "force continuum". This basically outlines how much force they should be using in any situation. Without deviating from the topic, this is where the public gets upset when an officer oversteps their bounds to use excessive force on someone. The first 'level' of all continuum protocols is simply 'presence'. Knowing a cop is around does stop a majority of people who would do illegal activity. Think about how you act next time a cop is behind you on the road. It's a passive power-play move; they need to keep up this presence to ensure the public knows they'll be a moment's notice away if something happens.
Moving cops to social media sounds perfectly logical to me. A lot of none-the-wiser people put this information on the internet, thinking its safe. By making an online presence known, they look to quell some people's actions.
You could argue people will just find other ways to circumvent the system, but I'm reminded of the constant rat race between White and Black Hat security specialists; each party trying to top the other.
(For those of you who don't know, the NYPD are... yeah.)
Wow. This set off a chain of fireworks in my brain. What kind of creature takes the role of someone big and strong, who keeps the peace through his presence and the implied possibility of force? What sort of being takes this role in primate behavioral biology? Police are basically the "alpha" primate proxies of the state.
However, if you examine how we deploy and present police officers, it's clear that society is still in denial about our primate origins and nature. What would happen if you took an alpha male chimpanzee, and by modifying various visual and other socially significant sensory markers, you made him seem to be a member of a different group? I'm sure the result wouldn't be harmonious. What's more, what if you did something analogous to sending a couple of policemen in a cruiser through some neighborhood? It would be analogous to a couple of strange young chimpanzee males invading another group's territory.
There is the concept of community policing, where officers are encouraged to be an integral part of the community they are policing. Still, it's clear that society is more interested in carrying forward traditions from the military origins of modern police forces than it is in acknowledging the primate origins of our psychology.
The police using email for this sort of thing actually seems like a step backwards somehow. It's been well known for a while that the B9 board gets frequented by law enforcement (both for gang and show related activities) so going the direct message route seems like an unnecessary step. You're never going to be able to adequately integrate, why even try?
There are never any address posted on it. Whenever someone emails staff@nbshows.org and asks for address's I am always careful about giving out info, I always google the email to make sure its not a throw-away.
I am really excited that this topic is on HN today, because I am working on a personal project that will be at http://diyshws.org. Basically it will be a site where people can create show calendars for the small city that they live in if there is no central way to find out about shows. (other than Facebook)
1) This is a key part of the "local problem." Not all of the relevant legal context is written down or documented.
2) The power of real social connections in many ways dwarfs the power of online connection. Networks of people who know each other well and trust one another are a potent force that can even threaten the establishment. The British know this well, from the POV of the state. YC is also proof of this.
On a side note, NYPD had an elaborate, illegal surveillance operation spying on Muslims in the NJ area that was outed when a building super inadvertently walked into the apartment being used as their base.
Also keep in mind many young punks are not exactly respectful of others. The word entitled comes to mind with a lot of their behaviour.
I say this as an aging punk who had a basement where we held 50+ shows with nationally touring bands playing. We never had a problem with being shut down.
> I remember being at a basement show in Allston when I was 18 that was broken up by the cops and thinking "This is so fucking cool". I mean, it's a pain in the ass and sucks for the bands. It can totally ruin your night, but for me it totally fanned the flames and made me love it even more.
> What this article doesn't mention is that the cop who was using the Lemmingtrail board to find out about house shows kept posting even after being outed, eventually being somewhat-ironically accepted into the community. I regularly saw him at shows after he'd been exposed and he was always friendly.
Just like all developers are 'evil hackers'.
If people realistically want the situation to get better, they need to embrace the 'good' police officers, rather than automatically ostracizing all police officers equally. Many still really do want to improve their communities.
There's always been a strong connection between punk subculture and anarchist thinking (which is specifically opposed to this type of "legitimate violence"), so its actually a somewhat reasonable thing to bring up.
Yes. That's what law enforcement is by definition. Non compliance results in (eventual) violence, regardless of the severity of the crime.
P.S. Nice edit. Both "hacker" and "cop" carry some negative connotations without the qualifying "evil" in front of it.
So what you're basically saying is the price for having any policing is that we have to accept a morally and legally corrupt police force.
Yes.
Personally, I agree with Bastiat that the State should be more more than the collective extension to our own individual, inate right to self-defense, so any violence which goes beyond that, I consider improper.
But I've said too much already, HN really isn't the best place for these discussions...
There is something funny about that phrase though... it is not complete. The complete phrase is actually "A few bad apples will spoil the barrel". This is to say that if you do not take an aggressive stance towards weeding out all of the bad apples, the rot will spread like an infection (rotting apples will release ethylene gas which acts as a ripening agent, accelerating the rot of nearby apples) and corrupt all of the apples.
So if we trust our apples:cops metaphor then what we are really saying is that if we overlook the a few bad cops for any significant amount of time, before we know it, all cops will be bad. Obviously crooked cops don't release ethylene gas in significant quantities... instead the Blue Wall is the most commonly cited mechanism of transmission.
I like this idiom.
For anyone else who might not have heard of it (by name).
They don't even have to actually spoil the barrel. Since dramatic events stand out in the human mind, it's possible for a few bad actors to completely change people's perception of groups or their place in society.
This is part of the reason why it's so hard for privileged groups to understand how minorities see things and vice-versa. What's a dramatic, salient event for one group is not so much for the other.
Gordon: There's nothing wise in what you do, Flass.
Flass: Well, Jimbo, you don't take the taste... makes us guys nervous.
Gordon: I'm no rat! In a town this bent, who's there to rat to anyway?
That's the very definition of law enforcement.
>Just like all developers are 'evil hackers'.
No, because that's not the very definition of developer.
A cop is an agent of the state that (and is) ordered to arrest, take down, put in jail, etc people and is authorized to use force for that -- including his gun.
But taking a negative attitude so general as "all police officers are agents of state violence" has no positive outcome. You just decided every interaction you have with cops will turn out bad (or violent), so of course you're going to have issues! The rest of us try to treat each other fairly and as a result 99% of the time don't have problems with cops (unless we're breaking the law, wherein naturally problems do arise).
Also, your job isn't the only thing that may make one have personal problems with someone else. I tend to get pissed off at immature anarchopunks who think the world revolves around them. I guess it kind of goes both ways.
But in keeping with "act pragmatically" officers can live in their "own pretend society or [...] can deal with the one [they're] actually in right now", which includes folks who don't particularly like them solely based on the authority they represent.
Hint: How would a sting or other undercover operation work? Do the police lie during interrogations?
Of course police can lie about being police officers. Another person kind-of answered already, but this apparently needs to be stated unambiguously: A police officer can lie to you about being a police officer and get away with it.
Long story long, kids will always throw renegade events and police will always use whatever tools to stop these events. And, in response, kids will keep changing their tactics until they either find a line that police won't cross, or until they turn legal! :)
In USSR, independent bands had very hard time recording or playing on stage, but they could always gather on some flat and play music and nobody bothered them. (Don't know why, maybe it's actually illegal for police to enter your home, maybe it's just decency)
And now it's illegal in the USA.
All this does is destroying all the new music that isn't profitable/hot enough to afford real venues yet. Talk so much about innovation and garages.
Of course, kids should always be trying to throw them, and cops and narcs should always be trying to shut them down. It's the natural order of the world:)
That's exactly what's the "worse than USSR" part is about.
Even if you take the street, the workplace and the indoors away (by the means of tight and hostile control) your home is still your home. And if you gave up your home as a step one you will not have a place to fall back, a place to default to.
You can no longer say "Screw you guys I'm going home".
Now all your life depends on others (authorities) agreeing to let you do whatever you are doing, because you don't have one place where you are that authority.
Because no one really cares about the noise?
And - fires happen fast. Between the moment a fire starts and the moment when people start dying, there generally isn't time for a neighbor to call the police and complain.
This isn't a noise issue; it's a fire hazard issue.
However, while there may be some similarities I don't see it as the same situation as the Station any more than enforcing the fire code for any other gathering. if I remember correctly it was a valid nightclub and the permits they did not have involved the pyrotechnics not the show or venue. Doors were locked when they shouldn't have been, place was beyond capacity, etc ... a horrific tragedy.
if this is really a purely motivated by enforcing occupancy laws (and therefore fire codes) they should be cracking down on family reunions and Superbowl parties posted on social networks too.
Beyond that, the crackdown has been felt the most in the shutting down of art and show spaces in Allston warehouses which are zoned appropriately. Granted, the proprietors of these spots don't bother with permits from the city / following fire code, and often encourage or engage in illegal activity beyond simply hosting loud music, but these venues are definitely NOT disturbing neighbors (the neighbors in this case are generally rehearsal spaces for punk bands and other similar performance spaces).
The fire code is no joke. People used to die in batches of hundreds all of the time before those laws and reforms were put in place.
You can use the same argument when you see a police officer working burglary instead of homicide, or homicide instead of rape, or vice-versa.
The police, like the military, is a tool used to implement the policy of others; in this case, the policy is chosen by the jurisdiction's legislature, which is composed of people chosen by that jurisdiction's population. The police can (and should) prioritize which policy they implement most avidly, but if some things are going entirely undone that's something that needs to be handled at the legislative level, possibly by repealing or modifying the laws the police are charged with implementing.
And then there's the wars. Big, heavy duty crime hasn't "fallen" by any means, it's soaring from peak to peak more like.
Also, all this planning ahead and resources, why instead don't they just create one or two halls per area that are soundproof etc and let people rock out?
Is the state really that stupid?
I suppose if you are into conspiracy stuff maybe they just make themselves look stupid so that you won't catch onto the real plans...
Because these neighbors complained so loud that they passed a city-wide law on the matter.
> Also, all this planning ahead and resources, why instead don't they just create one or two halls per area that are soundproof etc and let people rock out?
You should itemize the budgets for both of these plans and compare them. I'm willing to bet that setting up "one or two halls per area" costs an order of magnitude more than what they're doing.
Also, taxes on tickets and stuff or other promotions or rent for the night could very much turn into a big profit.
About the law, I don't have anything against the law, just that I can't understand why would they be so obsessed with preemptive action instead of on-the-spot
"The dudes" might be okay with it, but the city would own that venue and not only do they have to obey their own law on how it's maintained and regulated, but they'd be liable for anything that happened inside it. Further, if the city owns it, they're going to use it for more than just "the dudes", and those people may have different requirements.
> Also, taxes on tickets and stuff or other promotions or rent for the night could very much turn into a big profit.
You're assuming that (1) anyone will rent the space and (2) anyone will come if they do. These aren't minor assumptions.
> About the law, I don't have anything against the law, just that I can't understand why would they be so obsessed with preemptive action instead of on-the-spot
How much effort have you even bothered putting into stepping into their shoes rather than tyrannically deciding that your solution fixes all possible ills and should stand in for any agency on their part?
Drugs? Too loud?
Cities can police nuisances, sure, but they cannot craft statutes abrogating first amendment rights that are not narrowly tailored to the perceived harm.
There were a few laws against public dancing in the late 1800s that got struck down under this sort of reasoning.
I'm not sure what the current state of constitutional limits on nuisance laws are, but the Boston statute does seem very broad.
What we need is machine learning systems to help us identify the astroturfers who run dummy accounts to influence the group discussion.
The question is, who is going to build it?
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2013/0...
It wouldn't be fun if the cops approved, would it?