Police use new tool to source crowds for evidence | Hacker News Reader

Police use new tool to source crowds for evidence

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25 pointsa_olt20 comments

"Designers say users can post anonymously and should strip metadata from files they send."

Talk about poor design. Instead of automatically stripping metadata, they rely on users to do so. On a mobile phone.

Would you trust them if they auto-stripped the metadata for you?

I think I would strip the metadata, but also want them to auto-strip.

They should prompt the user. Let the user decide what metadata to include and review it before submission. Personally, I would probably leave all the metadata intact and leave contact information if I were submitting pictures of a riot.

I don't agree with Nate Cardozo. If you're in public then you may be photographed and those photos may be shared with other parties, including law enforcement. More concerning is access to the database of photos. Anyone who is accused must have full access. It wouldn't be right if prosecutors were able to withhold exculpatory evidence.

That's something which could, at least in theory, be tested through an audit.

I live in Santa Barbara (neighboring Isla Vista). At least judging by portrayal in local media, there has been a lot of locals sympathetic to the police; the general feeling I get is that those living in IV blame all the out-of-towners for the various parties getting out of control (Including Floatopia/Deltopia and Haloween).

With similar party-turned-riots at the college I went to, the majority involved were students, so I think something like this would get less assistance.

Anyone who remembers the complete fiasco of Reddit trying to catch the Boston Marathon bombers can tell you one scenario in which this technology can go horribly, horribly wrong.

My startup automatically collects photos & videos that are shared (Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Flickr, Youtube) that were taken at events (geotag, hashtag, contextual analysis). It can consequently be used for this purpose as well.

Example event: http://wesawit.com/events/bruce-springsteen-and-the-e-street...

>And since it uses remote database servers that police access online, floods of data won't cause system crashes or be expensive to store. Most agencies, Edson said, "don't have lots of bandwidth lying around."

I dont really get what they mean here. Are they saying since the DB is in the cloud/remote it isnt subject to crashing?

They're saying that most individual police departments don't have the IT resource to scale a crowdsourcing system, and that by centralizing both the resources and software development they expect the system to be able to scale.

In reality they're just exposing themselves to a single point of failure, but hoping their single point of failure is more robust by virtue of shared learning.

So basically shifting the blame onto a 3rd party instead of an internal team. I believe it said they moved to AWS hopefully they wont have a zone go down during a riot.

I read it as this: the police are outsourcing the crowd-sourcing to a "valued partner" who may or may not have ties with the commissioners, legislators or city officials that have decision making power.

ie, it's yet another public-private partnership that is ripe for crony capitalism. Also absent is any discussions of ramifications on misuse (what happens when this turns into a snitch-line?)

What is the difference between a "snitch-line" and the specific purpose for which this was designed? What is wrong with a "snitch-line"?

It promotes "snitch culture." Which you might pattern-match with gang talk about "no snitching" until you realize that the ultimate snitch culture was the Soviet Union and satellites.

What's wrong with a snitch line is that everyone has something to hide, and that everyone also does things that look unsavory at times. Nobody wants to live looking over their shoulder every minute of the day. Nobody wants to live thinking that their being in an unusual place at an unusual time will lead to someone "saying something."

That's not even going into malicious use.

This link doesn't work for me. I'm taken to AP's "pick where you live" page :/

Same here. At first, I though selecting any state would lead me to the article, but it just opened a drop-down menu, and clicking it does nothing.

Very frustrating. Any ideas, anyone?

Looks like the querystring was cut off : http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CROWDSOURCING_EVID... takes me to the story.

ap.org sets a cookie once you pick a location & news partner. Go back and click the original link a second time.

a bunch. The first one is google cache. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U3QEEvL...

Oops. That was probably my mistake. Please stand by.

Edit: does it work now? We changed the url from [1], which pointed to this more original source.

1. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/cops-embracing-io...

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