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Comment by paulannesley | Hacker News Reader

“On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” — http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Then again; “Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, […]”

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I posted it because it's Sunday and there wasn't much going on. I wouldn't put it up as one of the finest HN submissions ever, but I think there's some value in "this could happen to you" and "this is what you should do if".

The piece itself was well written and relatively apolitical and non-threatening.

The "tech" aspect is the "fsck the police" part -- I think Nick is going to go into some ways to use technology to 1) help the police do what they should be doing, better 2) help the police not do what they shouldn't be doing 3) help users/clients/customers/victims of the police. And so should other HN people. Video recording seems like the lowest hanging fruit -- figuring out how to do that both safely and reliably is a good problem to solve. If I were GoPro, I'd donate $25mm or so to developing best practices for this, and then make another $5b selling GoPro-Police cameras over the next decade.

I didn't put it in the article precisely because I didn't want the shift in focus--but this incident made me think a lot harder about wearing my Google Glass again.

That being said, there's absolutely no reason that cops should not have a camera on them at all times. It's more for their benefit than ours.

As far as technologies that reliably work, the stop-and-frisk app is actually quite good, but requires practice like anything else.

I'd also be all for photographing cops out of habit. I stopped short of recommending that...but, hell, there's plenty of fodder here for a good month's worth of posts.

> That being said, there's absolutely no reason that cops should not have a camera on them at all times.

True. This would be a major positive change to our system.

> It's more for their benefit than ours.

False. Everything is already all the cops' way. They have nowhere to go but down. Their court testimony is legally privileged over yours (this really galls me in the face of the idea that "all are equal before the law"). They don't like being filmed because it hurts them. In this case, what we have is a case of "good for us because it's bad for the cops".

Oh, a Glass would actually be pretty useful. Make a photo every 10-30 seconds and automatically upload it to a secure server (offshore). Then, give the access credentials to your lawyer.

If you get arrested the lawyer can download the last photos.

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