Well I spit out my drink at "artisanal torch" so I hope you are happy lol. But I had the same response when I read the title before I opened it. I enjoyed guessed for a minute on how that was all connected.
While it's not exactly a novel technique (I've read similar stories since the early 2010s at least), I'm continuously surprises by how much people are able to glean from inferences and online sources. The saga of the "he will not divide us" flag is particularly impressive.
I'm not sure why 'def8cefe' is being voted down for pointing out the name of this process. OSINT is short for "open source intelligence" and the TL;DR is that only "open sources" (eg: not government/restricted datasets) are use to perform a digital investigation. Steve Rambam has given talks about digital investigations from the very beginning of the H.O.P.E. Conferences on this topic. In addition to law enforcement using this it's also used by private investigators or just amateur enthusiasts who team up to help solve missing children cases and track down info from other past cold cases or to even bust child trafficking rings. The skills natural to Hacker News readers makes me surprised there's not more general interest in OSINT here, especially defensive tactics to make sure we allow as little of our personal info to land in open datasets to feed OSINT investigations in the future.
There is interest in OSINT but my comment could be misconstrued as supportive of or normalizing LE practises so that upsets a very vocal interest group on the Internet.
I mean, I don't think even the internet nut-jobs support torching police cars...
Edit: Ouch, looks like quite a few people here do. Do y'all really think that's the best way to effect social and political change? A minority of Americans screaming louder and using terrorism to vent their spleens won't solve the issue. In a democracy, everyone must focus on getting more people to vote for different policies to effect change.
Oh they do. I'm from the Toronto area and I remember quite well the G20 riots of 2010. People were applauding the arson of TPS cruisers on the Internet. There are almost 7 billion people on this planet and at least a third of them have Internet access. Any fringe opinion a person could have has been expressed at least once.
Depending on the reason for protest, police cars and government buildings are some of the only things it makes sense to burn down IMO. With the recent protests against police and government racism, for example, I'd understand them burning things belonging to the people oppressing them rather than stores and businesses that provide jobs and services for people in the area.
I mean people are torching stuff in entirely different cities. It's not like they're torching chauvin's car then going home. Still illegal, but I guess I could understand the process behind that. Burning some cop car in Atlanta, what? That's just mob rage.
I think that dismisses the very real impact long term systemic racism has had. Additionally, a black man was just (allegedly, charges have been filed) murdered by the police after a a police officer shot him in the back and another stood on his shoulders while he was dying.
There is justifiable outrage. I do not condone wanton destruction and arson, but disruptive protests work in a way that peaceful ones alone do not.
I think if and when the time comes for civil unrest, if LEO continues to go Hong Kong in America, targets for destruction should be the tools of the enemy, not local business.
Many people who are not "internet nut-jobs" support violent protest when necessary. we've had many years of "voting to effect change" already, and it hasn't worked! Recall the four boxes of democracy: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. If you get to the ammo box, you can damn well bet there's going to be violence.
In this particular case, I do find some of the violence justified, and I think it has more effect than a simple non-violent protest would. We get to see exactly how police respond when a few thousand dollars worth of property is being damaged versus when they have someone's life in their hands. The police are digging themselves into a hole here, and it's glorious.
That said, we aren't at the point where violence against people is a legitimate form of protest. In self defense, sure, but protesters should not, at this point, be attacking people. Burn down all the Targets, police stations, and cop cars you want. Let it be the cops who do all the violence against people. That's what's actually going to get peoples' attention.
Something tells me you wouldn't support this were it your business being burned. They're gonna run into some roof Koreans, get shot, then more people will get mad even though it's completely justifiable to defend one's property with lethal force from an angry mob.
It's actually not justifiable to protect property with lethal force, and doing so is unlawful in many jurisdictions. Protecting the life of yourself and others is a justifiable reason to use lethal force.
I'm trying to be charitable here, so I will ask you to reflect on the reasons why you think protecting replaceable (or even irreplaceable) property is worth extinguishing a human life.
And, something tells me that if you and your family had been oppressed by the police for hundreds of years, you would support this. Moreover, businesses have insurance that covers these kinds of losses.
As I said, violence against people is simply not acceptable here. Showing how violence is often the first resort of police rather than a last resort is the entire point of these protests.
Ouch, looks like quite a few people here do. Do y'all really think that's the best way to effect social and political change?
If it makes you feel a little better about the world, I downvoted you because I thought you were wrong that no one supports this, not at all because I support burning police cars. I've definitely seen lots of support online that accepts the destruction of police (aka public) property as a legitimate (or at least expected) form of protest, and am surprised that you haven't. So yes, there are supporters, but possibly not quite as many as it would first appear.
However, I haven't really seen others support it, aside from the obvious lunatics on television (many of whom simply want to grab free stuff). I'm not sure which sites I'd have needed to frequent to see such support, but I'm always looking to expand my knowledge base, so would appreciate a few recommendations.
I'm reluctant to give my best recommendation, because it's a fragile community, but hopefully this thread is far enough along that it doesn't have a lot of traffic at this point.
Currently, the discussion at http://slatestarcodex.com is the best that I've found on the internet for hearing intelligent views from people I otherwise disagree with. The "open threads" are very long, and contain a lot (50%?) of dross, but there are also a lot of gems within them. Post-Floyd, I was surprised by how many people whose opinions I generally respect were at least conditionally supportive of burning the police precinct office in Minneapolis.
If you are interested in this question, you could pose it there. It would be considered "culture war", and thus only acceptable in the "fractional" open threads. That is, the ones that end with ".25", ".5", or ".75". To reduce visibility, these aren't officially listed on the front page, but are available from the Recent Posts or from the Archives link. Create an account, post the question there in as fair and open-ended a manner as you can, and I think you'd get good responses.
I’m gonna be the controversial voice who says anyone who misconstrues that specific previous comment as being supportive or normalizing unethical law enforcement practices probably is probably misconstruing willfully and intentionally.
For better or worse, those practices are already normalized. Average analyst at most FIs has good Google-fu skills and would likely be able to connect the dots as described in the article. I think you are right about HN bias in this area. Heavens know I don't like it the same way I don't like cop porn. That said, it is hard to argue with your point.
It's called OSINT and it's been around a lot longer than 2010.
I listened to a 1940's episode of Dragnet a couple of days ago, and it was pretty much the same thing. Burglar was identified by photographs, his job, and a tattoo.
This is just normal police work. People make a big deal out of it because it's "Cyber" this and "e" that.
Curiously, the term "cyber" originally referred not only to computing, but general issues of control and communication over large distances, particularly during wartime (encrypted radio messages and the like): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153954.The_Human_Use_of_...
Not really. This is easier than "normal police work," because almost everybody carries a camera and a tracking device with them at all times now, and people can't resist posting things like that online.
If you put in even a little effort to conceal your identity, it makes it very hard to find you.
But if you go around with your tattoos and face uncovered, and wearing uniquely identifiable clothing, any 4chan thread can find your identity in a few hours.
That's neither unique to internet sleuths nor to angry mobs. LE will also on occasion misidentify people, and they + DAs also don't always stop that quickly.
I'm shocked less by the fact the person was identified and more by the fact the person didn't feel the need to cover up an identifying tattoo or a limited-run t-shirt they left a review for while committing a felony. I'm starting to think criminals are stupid.
That is a really dangerous move and doesn't really line up with my experiences. This woman was pretty stupid. She's not a criminal though, she's a massage therapist.
Reminds me: when I was younger, I rear ended the car in front if me. When I recounted the story to my friend’s mom, I said I had a good following distance, to which she said I obviously didn’t. The proof is in the pudding. Same with the “Straight A Student” who insists they can’t have earned a B since they are a Straight A Student. Welp, you did earn the B, so...
There is a lack of accountability and people look for reasons to escape it, not embrace it.
It's the difference between premeditated and an act of passion. There are tons of people who aren't fighters that leave the house, get drunk then try to start a fight in the street.
There are at least three readings of hoorayimhelping's post:
1. This person is not a criminal in some particular all-encompassing sense of the word. I.e., some people commit one-off crimes of passion while others make a lifestyle/career out of crime. Presuming that the latter are stupid because the former are stupid is dangerous because organized criminals have learned good internet op-sec. That's interesting.
2. Thinking of people who commit crimes as "criminals" and making blanket assumptions about the criminal element is a mistake. That might be a well-trodden critique, but it's interesting enough that there have been some (quite influential) books written around the topic. This seems like the more likely intent. Thinking about how the social phenomena induced by the internet and social media interact with those 20th century ideas about identity and subjectivity might result in an interesting conversation. E.g., suppose torching a cop car was an act of passion and this person's name is now forever associated with a crime of passion. That seems... new and different... relative to 30 years ago. Back then, you could just move somewhere new where no one knew your past; as long as you didn't become a criminal in that new place, you could basically start over. What might be the societal implications of continuing to assign "criminal" as a dominant identity in the age of an internet that never forgets?
3. hoorayimhelping believes that there is no law in the US which prohibits the torching of cop cars.
The first two are charitable interpretations that might result in curiosity-driven conversation (in which you may or may not want to participate). The third.... isn't so charitable and is unlikely to go anywhere.
Whether someone "is a criminal" should have something to do with how much of a regular part of their life it is. Just like someone who smoked a joint once 20 years ago isn't considered a drug user, someone who committed a one-off crime isn't a criminal.
We are down pretty deep into pedantry at this point, but... Current definition is that someone who has committed a crime and been convicted is a criminal. If that crime is a felony, they are also a felon. Depending on the state of residence, felons may have voting rights suspended, may be disqualified from jobs, loans, educational grants, etc.
You are right to point out that we usually use the noun "criminal" more to refer to someone that makes a habit of crime or makes their living from crime.
And I'll also add that the word "criminal" is often used to imply someone is subhuman. Possibly subconsciously, but it's common to see people outraged by police brutality only if they think an innocent person is the victim. Things like "no innocent person should be treated that way." I think this is the primary objective of the ever-present ad-hominem attacks such as "well he was no angel."
I don't think this is "deep into pedantry". I think it's probably one aspect of the most important conversation we need to have about the effect that "organizing the world's information" has on society.
The extraordinary permanence of certain aspects of identity ("criminal", "felon", "rapist", "racist", etc.) in the information age is radically different from how identity has worked for the past 100 years or so. The possibility of "starting over" is gone.
She doesn't seem to have started the initial fires, so I'm much less shocked. It's not smart, but it was almost certainly a spontaneous act. emboldened by the crowd.
"various videos captured her wearing protective goggles and gloves, taking a flaming piece of wooden police barricade from the rear window of the sedan that was already on fire, and then shoving the flaming wood into the SUV that was not on fire."
I suspect ego and greed are responsible for catching a lot of people who have committed a crime. They just can’t seem to resist bragging about it and if they can resist bragging about it they can’t resist trying to get away with it again.
I know you you meant it tongue-in-cheek, but when I was investigating computer crimes in 2003/4/5, the criminals would often sign their work on the assumption that the police were stupid.
Maximum sentence is 10 years, she's unlikely to get that, but _minimum_ is 5 years IIRC. That's a _long_ time. And then you're a felon and you can't find a decent job. What was the calculus there, I wonder? Under what circumstances would a person rationally consider torching a police cruiser to be worth the risk of 5 years in the slammer?
Expected respondes: pass a law. Protest peacefully. Stand in front of city hall with assault rifles. Vote for (some centrist).
Just because you may not like how someone is dealing with the fact that they could be killed with no recourse by cops because of the color of their skin, doesn't mean their methods are invalid or even irrational.
The classic star wars question - is Luke Skywalker a rebel hero, or a terrorist threat to order? Before the Empire blew up an entire planet to make a point, it was a fairly valid question.
Please explain how a white woman torching a police cruiser advances _any_ goals other than increasing the dramatically underrepresented white female prison population. Please also mention which other types of crime you consider conducive to rectifying the situation in any meaningful way.
How would you feel if someone set your car on fire? Probably like someone doesn't appreciate you very much, right? Well this is how they want the city to feel about their police force.
It also demonstrates that by and large, police don't prevent chaos and property damage. Most of the time, people simply decide not to do this, and when they decide they want to, police are largely powerless to stop them. This should lead others to more broadly question whether police are capable of stopping other bad actors, rather than merely reacting to them.
Not a full study, but when people were kneeling to draw attention, it poled at about 30% for 60% against 10% undecided. When people burned down the police precinct in Minneapolis and documented the unwarranted police violence, it polled at about 60% for and 30% against.
I don't know why, but as a general rule with people, if it bleeds, it leads. And that's what's worked here.
The opposite side of the equation is how does the police slashing tires and breaking civilian property advance their goal beyond dramatically increasing the levels of anger towards them?
If she's going to jail for torching a car, then will the officers that committed similar property damage also be going to jail?
Luke Skywalker a rebel hero, or a terrorist threat to order
Given episodes 7-9, Luke is a terroristic threat to order. After destroying the existing order, he failed to establish anything better and it quickly devolved into what we see in 7. And he also failed to kill the main villain which meant that all the chaos and death that he was responsible for had no offsetting good.
In America right now there are ongoing protests and riots over the conduct of domestic police departments, specifically their proclivity toward extrajudicial execution and battery of black people in the streets. Damaging police property including their cars and precincts is a powerful (if legally risky) expression of that anger.
We are On 21st century, we know violence doesn’t stop violence, crime doesn’t stop crime. People should use modern tools to reduce racial issues. Like voting or social media’s, never burn a state property. Tax money could be used for better things But now the police department will buy 2 more cars.
The revolution may not be televised... but couldn’t it be streamed?
I want to see people use live streaming to debate first, but then organize so effectively to just swarm on the old systems to make change. People need to move faster.
We are On 21st century, we know violence doesn’t stop violence, crime doesn’t stop crime.
No, we don't know that.
Historically it has been violence that stopped violence, and crime (like toppling an unjust government, breaking segregation laws, etc) that stopped crime.
People should use modern tools to reduce racial issues. Like voting or social media’s, never burn a state property.
Yeah, they've tried blogging about it. There are also tons of books on the matter, vlogs, articles, etc. They voted Obama twice. Didn't work.
A few months of angry riots and a few burned down police departments though, could send a very clear message to politicians and police chiefs, and help change laws to restrict police abuse.
Idk, World War II ended a genocide, and the US civil war (mostly) ended slavery in the US. Both were pretty violent events if I'm remembering correctly. That being said, destroying property isn't violence, and "crime" is kind of a useless metric for morality. Slavery and genocide in the instances above were not legally crimes. Your opinion of police or nazis will color how much you view, say destroying a police car or a German tank as a morally wrong.
Black people in the US constantly fear being killed or harassed by police. Yeah, burning a car doesn't solve anything, but keeping quiet and playing ball since the civil rights movement hasn't really moved the needle. Policing and constant surveillance of black communities has gotten worse since then, and protections for police, both legally and politically, have increased. Sometimes you have to burn a car or break some glass for the nation to pay attention.
Also I would say that the initial reaction of rioting is what drove people to organize and peacefully protest, and in a lot of US cities and states, the combination of these has already resulted in policy change. I'm sure most of these people are also posting on social media and planning to vote as well.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying that torching a car is small potatoes compared to government sanctioned murder and oppression, and this kind of thing is forcing people to pay attention and have conversations about this stuff.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." Martin Luther King Jr.
World War II and the US civil war didn't ended the violence, it just changed the way that violence manifests. If you look in many groups on Facebook, 9gag or redit , you will see Violence in protests are being used to create more hate in people who hates. I really believe that the society was improved by ideas not wars.
Tax money could be used for better things But now the police department will buy 2 more cars.
Police departments around the country are being downsized, kicked out of their unions, and in some cases defunded entirely. That's good news! The money will be used for better things.
It's not the sort of thing HN likes to hear but the techniques used in these protests are pretty much working as expected.
The police are not perfect. We need to hold them accountable to some reasonable standards of behavior. But if you defund them entirely, then what do you expect is going to happen? Peace and harmony?
No, what's going to happen is that criminals will still be criminals, and perhaps bolder and more blatant criminals. Drug addicts will continue to be drug addicts, and will do crazy things while they're high, and crazy things in order to get money to get high. Such people will continue to interact with non-criminal non-addict people, who will feel threatened. But now the police won't be there. Now what?
In a country with an armed population, the police probably reduce the number of misbehaving people who are killed, because (for all their flaws) they are still less trigger-happy than a frightened gun-owner who feels threatened by an encounter with some strange-acting person.
Drug addicts will continue to be drug addicts, and will do crazy things while they're high, and crazy things in order to get money to get high. Such people will continue to interact with non-criminal non-addict people, who will feel threatened. But now the police won't be there. Now what?
As someone who has had many of these encounters, I've never had the police help. At best they'll show up a half hour later and take a report. The police were never "there" in any meaningful sense.
because (for all their flaws) they are still less trigger-happy than a frightened gun-owner who feels threatened by an encounter with some strange-acting person
Time after time, this has proven to not be true. When a frightened gun-owner reaches for his weapon, he knows he is risking all his money and probably his freedom if he's found to have fired it when it wasn't necessary. And so they tend to use some discretion. Cops do not risk the same, and so they shoot people all the time when their life isn't threatened.
So? Some people consider police bad, either at specific instances (some policemen/departments at some times doing bad things) or inherently (the police as an institution in general), and have been fighting against them for centuries...
Some people think police should pay for the abuses that they regularly and without punishment do.
Some others think police should stop existing in general, or exist only in a very limited capacity, or be replaced by citizen patrols, and several other varieties...
So, that morality and cause... Doesn't have to agree with yours to be a morality, and even less so to be a cause...
Their beliefs are irrelevant. You don't get to break laws and due process just because of your beliefs and anger. How many mass shootings have we seen from people with "beliefs". Stop trying to justify people burning cars just because they don't get one they want right away.
Their beliefs are irrelevant. You don't get to break laws and due process just because of your beliefs and anger.
Yes you do. You might not get away with it, but that's not really pertinent.
In fact historically most change happened through people breaking laws because of their beliefs and anger.
And in every past society, like ours, most thought its laws are the apex of law-making, and should never be challenged or broken in anger, nor its law agents assaulted etc. Only history doesn't work that way.
Yes, you do get to break the law after working inside the system fails. You know this country was founded by people breaking the laws of England, right?
I doubt many non-lawyers know precisely what the penalty for arson is. However I do think it's general knowledge that arson is considered a serious crime with serious penalties. Arson in the general case is easily the worst sort of property crime since it often goes hand-in-hand with murder. Granted, murder wasn't really a plausible outcome in this particular cause, but the general association between arson and murder is nevertheless commonly understood and arson is consequently understood to be a very serious matter, even when nobody gets hurt.
Apparently she picked up an already burning piece of wood and threw it in. So it's less likely that she left the house that morning with the intent of torching cars.
In the moment, with everyone and everthing going on around her, I doubt she was thinking rationally or even knew that torching a car would be a long prison sentence. (if someone asked me before reading this article, I would have assumed a large fine + some community service maybe; then again I am not American so I have no idea how sentences compare).
In the moment, with everyone and everthing going on around her, I doubt she was thinking rationally or even knew that torching a car would be a long prison sentence
"Everyone else was doing it" didn't fly with my mom, and probably won't get a pass from Judge Wapner, either.
It's much more likely you will be made the example, because you were the only person caught torching two police cars. I realize these things are symbolic and all but anybody who's actually been to a prison would never recklessly endanger their freedom wasting it on burning taxpayer money which is infinite in supply. Those cars will be replaced tomorrow while you go to prison for years. If you want to bring down the system get a majority of people to stop paying taxes then you get the Bernie Madoff club fed don't arson a cruiser you're just playing into the state's hands and getting a violent offender custody status now you have to fend for yourself against experienced violent criminals constantly trying to steal your commissary or provoke you into doing more time. It's not just that you go to prison, it's that you get more time added as a 'normal' non career criminal who now has to deal with prof criminals daily or getting crossed out from work assignments by guards who are constantly on your ass and decide to increase your time or worse send you to a more high security prison where you are almost guaranteed to do more time.
Anybody thinking of going outside and playing anarchist should know what they're getting themselves into, wait until your cellmate tells you that they're getting out in 2 months and you have to hold their contraband and weapons or the guards decide to put you in a high security yard because you're in there for something ridiculous like 'terroristic threats and arson'. You don't ever get out on schedule
No. The reasoning is to protect police from frivolous lawsuits and financial liability in cases where they acted in good faith in unclear situations. If you want to get rid of it, get rid of it for all government employees, including elected officials.
Hey that defense worked in the Rodney King case. But she's not a cop, and was destroying police property, not a human being. So yeah, she'll probably get charged.
Meanwhile, if the police destroy your car, they don't even get charged. See the video of them slashing tires in Minneapolis. One law for them, another for us.
huh, because you almost never see the cops caught committing crimes with their own dash cams. Seems to always be off when they commit a crime in front of their car.
Think that's pretty much why people are torching cop cars. You'd have to get up pretty early to prove that person is a danger to society, but now their whole life is fucked which doesn't help anyone. We could however use a few hours a week to pickup park trash to better society and the lesson would probably be learned.
That's true. Now take the value of a free trash picker and compare that against what we pay for incarceration for 5 years + the cost of the car. One is way more expensive. I'm not even against someone having to pay for the car a few dollars for the rest of their life. But you're not getting repayment for the car while someone is in prison.
Is it though? I’m willing to bet she put zero thought into the consequences of her actions before she (allegedly) picked up the burning piece of wood and stuck it in the back of a cop car.
Very unlikely tbh, but let her work an pay it of would certainly also have that effect if it gets a bit media attention.
I don't live in the US but I know someone who spray painted trains at night for a few year. That eventually did cost him a decent car. Obviously not as much as he caused damage over the years but enough to make some teens think twice whether a nice car or temporary colored train are their short term goals.
If she knew what the cost was, I'd guess she wouldn't make the same mistake. In the same way we don't punish people for the crimes of their parents, should we then punish people for crimes yet to be committed?
She's kinda fucked either way. Even a misdemeanor would be annoying to have to explain every time she wanted a job, a felony would just about guarantee she'd only ever be able to be an entrepreneur. But otherwise I agree, skip jail, just hit her with a treasury offset for the cost of the car along with a suitable extra for penalty. She'll get the message for a long time.
But otherwise I agree, skip jail, just hit her with a treasury offset for the cost of the car along with a suitable extra for penalty.
Then if someone can't pay it back, you either have to 1) not penalize them, making poverty equal immunity, or 2) jail them, making it jail for the poor and a fine for the rich. Neither seems fair.
You can garnish wages at 1-2 percent. The goal isn't getting repayment, and when you factor against the cost of incarceration, not sending someone to prison for five years is a wash. From what I've read, the average cost of incarceration costs about 70k. Probably enough to pay for the car in one year. So the minimum sentence of 5 years is going to run 1.2 mil while the inmate can't pay because best case they make $1-2 an hour.
It's far more costly to incarcerate than to get repayment for almost everything. It's still more costly to incarcerate than to just forgive the debt and make it painful enough to not repeat.
Maybe, you can put a dollar value on community service. If someone is unemployed, they probably have lots of time. Not always the case, and unemployment has a lot of causes.
In 2015, according to [0], the average was about half that.
minimum sentence of 5 years is going to run 1.2 mil
How do you get from 70K (presumably per year) to $1.2M over five years? On average it should be more like $135K, with some cheaper states spending about half that.
These numbers are quite a bit lower, I was reading the CA LAO numbers from 18-19 the other day and didn't really factor in cheaper states.
Even at 135k, the cost to society is 135k + the cost of the car + lost productivity of the individual and the economic drag that has on the immediate community, family/roomates/partners and such. At that price, getting community service is a major cost savings and getting repayment is even better.
True, a financial penalty isn't enforceable if the criminal never again has income. That seems like it would be a fairly narrow niche case, though. Perhaps some form of community service could be useful in that situation.
In the moment, with everyone and everthing going on around her, I doubt she was thinking rationally
That phenomena is why I don't participate in this sort of events. The best way to avoid getting swept up in a mob mentality is to avoid the mob in the first place.
My reaction to those numbers is different. 5 years seems absurdly large to me for a spontaneous act of vandalism that cost the tax payers max $100,000.
I don't know what the actual charges are, I can't seem to find a copy of the criminal complaint. But the DOJ press release included:
"If convicted, the defendant faces a maximum possible sentence of eighty years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $500,000."
She might be charged with terrorism crimes, but either way it looks bad for her. At least a felony - even without prison time that will sting.
I'm surprised that the people charged with investigating her clicked on every single link in google and read every review. That shirt is all over the internet. Seems like a needle in a haystack.
Parallel construction, I'm glad you beat me to it. This isn't quite "we correlated historic cellular records and the RFID tags in her shoes, but gave credit to a psychic medium," but it's pretty close.
Yikes. That good faith exception example is particularly troubling. I think the only way that should be construed as constitutional is if, when the illegal search was uncovered, it resulted in serious consequences for the offender. But I highly doubt that happens. System is broken.
I'm also suspicious that the article keeps emphasizing "amateur photos given to authorities" as if they are deliberately steering away from the term "police surveillance footage" or perhaps "images obtained by scanning social media".
While I have no issue with police investigating lawbreakers, the public should know what the police are doing and how, so they can be confident that police are correctly following the law while executing their duty.
But perhaps I'm reading too much into that wording, and in fact some protesters who took photos thought the arson was over-reach, so they supplied the photos to the police.
That thread suddenly disappeared, and one which is claimed to be a "reconstructed" copy in another profile has disappeared too, it's so weird. It's not like the original PDF isn't online still.
I think the more plausable explaination is a FBI agent watched a few videos online. Ran a cellphone location/time query. Looked through the results and referenced owners drivers license photos. Then tried to find some way to explain it without tipping off rioters to not carry their phones with them.
In that explanation, this purported investigative chain would still require just as much work to create. That's a lot of effort just to deflect from cell phone surveillance, especially for a cop - an aggro type personality would just rely on downplaying the cell angle in the media, rather than spending time coming up with a plausible excuse.
If there's an obfuscation of the actual investigation here, I'd guess it's more a hiding of highly automated tools that process open source intelligence, probably by policy of the federal agency with the tool. Imagine a FBI/DEA/NSA tool that links and summarizes social media activity based on identities. So facial recognition + cell database -> trail of pictures to craft a link-narrative, without the work of having to dig much or do automated facial recognition. Tangentially I wouldn't be surprised if declaring "antifa" a "terrorist" organization is actually an internal dog whistle that blesses the use of XKEYSCORE etc against American citizens.
It's still a finite number of sites, and a finite number of comments. Could probably do a CTRL+F for Philadelphia across all of them relatively quickly. Or have tools to automate the search
I wonder if when they found someone who set a police car on fire, will he be charged to pay for it or whill they put him in prison and feed him with tax (or printer goes brrrrr) money?
You're getting downvoted but you're probably 1/2 right. It probably wasn't a "hive mind" but it probably was a 3rd party that is an expert in computer forensics. It's pretty common for the government to hire 3rd party contractors for this type of thing.
I'm curious if you really think that it is ok to set fire to a police car? If so, what's the logic? Because my understanding of the first amendment (i.e. the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances) does not protect you if you commit crimes.
If the police are indiscriminately killing members of my race simply because they're afraid of people from my race, I don't think a little property damage to draw attention to that fact is really an equivalent response. So yeah, I'm OK with setting fire to a police car in this circumstance.
But the bigger question is, did they really find the person doing the work they claimed or did they use parallel construction to hide illegal use of surveillance tools?
Based on the metrics I have seen, police are not indiscriminately killing any particular race - deaths from police are not too far off of the crime rates by race. Police killings is a problem, but does not seem to be a problem targeted at any particular race.
Do you think that when police wrongly kill people, they don't also assume the victim is guilty and file it as justified? When they kill a black person during a minor, not violent crime, do you think it's ok because of the correlation with a crime?
Also, since police are notorious for hiding and protecting such metrics, care to provide any sources?
I don't think it is OK to kill anyone during a minor non-violent crime, I just think that if there were a significant number of police killing black people due to their race you would see it in the numbers.
If you are looking at black people in particular, they make up ~23% of the people shot by police while making up ~13% of the population of the US. They commit ~50% of the homicides, and more than 23% of violent crimes such as robbery, assault, and burglary so to me this shows that the police do not have a significant bias towards killing black people, as if there was no discrimination at all you would expect the number of police killings to match the violent crime rates (since violent crimes generally lead to justified police shootings).
The root cause of black people being so over-represented in violent crimes may be discrimination. However, the reality is that right now black people commit a significant portion of the violent crimes in the US, and as a result you would expect them to be over-represented in the number of people being killed by police, even without any discrimination by the police. This does not show that police never discriminate against black people, or that police brutality is not a problem, it just shows that when it comes to police killings, it does not seem to be an issue caused by police targeting black people.
Personally, I think that the biggest issue is that in the US there seems to be a number of dense areas of significant poverty and violence, which are predominantly black. If you grow up in one of these areas, there is a good chance you will be pulled into this violence and continue the cycle. Discrimination and over-policing of minor crimes just makes this problem worse, as black people in these areas are kept in poverty and with limited options to get out, and people who have the means to move get out of the area just leaving behind the people with no other options.
I looked into it a few years ago. Because it's also about structural racism, you need to compare rastes and numbers with comparable international figures, as there are biases stacked upon biases if you only look at domestic relative rates. Those crime statistics you cited, try to compare them to some other first world countries. Look at incarceration rates, convication rates, ratio of jury trials, and percentages of subpopulations in prison at any one time, and as long as you are willing to accept it, you'll soon start to see a very clear pattern. You'll see that US crimes statistics over ethnicity and income doesn't look like anything, or anywhere else at all. It's bizarrely skewed, not subtle at all.
Crime statistics are definitely skewed, and discrimination is a huge part of that. But the question is not whether black people are being killed at a higher rate due to discrimination, the question is whether black people are being killed at a higher rate because the police are targeting them due to their race. The answer to the former is definitely yes - due to a variety of factors including discrimination black people commit more violent crimes and as a result are killed by the police more frequently. I think the answer to the latter is no, there is not strong evidence that police officers are more likely to kill black people over white people in the same situation.
You might want to cross-reference those deaths with the rate of wrongful arrest (don't have it in front of me, but high ~48% black), and a clearer picture will form: it is clear that black people are simply policed more and often for exceptionally petty charges. It turns out the rate of criminals in a place is directly related to the amount of police in a location that are motivated to arrest people. The number is highly misleading, purposefully so. And of those alleged "criminals" how many really deserved to die? So, yes, there is definitely a racial element to this.
Yes, under certain conditions, setting a police car on fire seems like an ethical action. Welcome to the US. If the police are unaccountable, they're thugs and not police. It's fine to burn the cars of thugs and those that prey upon us.
Those cars that are burning don't belong to the thugs. They belong to American citizens. They were purchased with your tax dollars. They will have to be purchased again with your tax dollars. It's also a crime.
I'm all for major changes to policing in the US. Our police departments are far to aggressive. But...seems like we are hurting each other.
Ironically, doesn't this partially disprove one of the major complaints against the abolish police movement that we need police to solve crimes? Preventing and solving crime usually doesn't require a gun. It may be time to specialize and have less generic police and more non-violent investigators, social workers, mental health experts, crisis workers, etc.
I think most countries most cops don't carry guns. Even in the US most security guards don't. My preference would be ban handguns and have far less armed police. And much higher vetting for cops that do carry.
All rifles combined -- including "assault rifles" -- are involved in fewer murders than knives. Also involved in fewer murders than hands/fists. This is true even in states where laws for obtaining them are very lax:
Big problem is the Supreme Court said states can't ban handguns. Which is sort of insane because they allow states to ban 'assault weapons' and sawed off shotguns.
The US isn't most countries, there are 300+ million guns and the cops have to do 10 million arrests a year. They have to be armed for their own safety.
LinkedIn has become basically a requirement for applying for many jobs making it one of the hardest public profiles for the privacy conscious to hide from Google. I have a pretty common name, which is normally a good anonymity cloak, but if you also know my profession then my Linkedin profile pops up as the first Google result revealing many accurate personal details about me.
Is it really that popular nowadays? I remember it feeling like it was an antiquated platform 6 or 7 years ago before my latest job, and in my head I now imagine it as a MySpace-like dinosaur website. Has it made a resurgence? I might just be ignorant.
It's hard for me to remember a software dev candidate I've interviewed in the past three or four years who didn't have a LinkedIn profile. Like one out of several dozens, maybe.
This could point at an earlier step in the pipeline - e.g. the recruiters at those companies may have been using LinkedIn as a primary search tool - but that's a signal of its own.
You're missing out on a lot of opportunities by not giving LI consideration. A lot of good companies use it, GitHub is also important for developers.
However, you can double your income by thinking differently about LI. If that doesn't speak to its value as a network, I might need to reassess what network value means.
1. Never did spend more than a few minutes at a time, but have recruiters reaching out on the regular.
2. This is not a LinkedIn skill. I speak at industry conferences regularly through relationships I've built entirely outside of LinkedIn.
3. Conference speaking does this for me.
4. This isn't even tangentially relayed to LinkedIn.
My first job out of college was from a bunch of cold applications. Since then, I've gotten all my roles by reaching out to people (outside of LinkedIn) to connect, and through my network. The skills you highlight as important are not exclusive to, or necessarily learnable on LinkedIn.
My current compensation is more than 4x what it was at my first job out of college 14 years ago. It would have been difficult to pull that off without getting in touch with recruiters at major tech companies on LinkedIn.
I did not have an expert write my profile and in fact I’ve hardly touched it in years.
My most recent job search consisted entirely of friendly intros (most by colleagues at the hiring manager level) at a mix of startups and major tech companies. I have met these people through the normal course of business and life, and never through LinkedIn.
Maybe I'm special, because I've spent my career in tech consulting, so I got to network that way, but this is hardly a unique career path.
Github is great at showing your individual ability, on projects that you're working on yourself and/or ones that you want to showcase.
What happens when you have do code features that you won't want to do? No one puts their dogshit, get-it-done-before-the-weekend code on github.
And it's useless for telling me how well you'll do on a team, how you'll interact with other stakeholders, if you're sketchy and will run off with our IP (or just sell creds on the darknet), and if you'll be able to handle high powered office/project politics and their pressures.
Linkedin may not be a perfect (or even good) signal for that, but it's a start. Long work histories but no contacts on Linkedin? Okay, not a dealbreaker, but may be worthy of an explanation.
The reason employers love LinkedIn is that it makes it a lot harder to lie about your work history since it links all your companies and coworkers. In a way it serves a similar function to credit reporting bureaus in providing an accurate background check. This is also why cops love it.
I only ever got cold-calls for shitty jobs that I obviously wouldn't be interested in. Every interesting cold call I've gotten has come from elsewhere (e.g. my blog).
Not having a linkedin has, I think, never impeded my ability to get an interview or a job offer.
If your resume is otherwise very weak it might be somewhat useful, but honestly if someone is relying heavily on linkedin in their resume, I'd view that as a pretty bad sign.
LinkedIn is a must-have if you are an independent consultant, author or product owner. This is a primary platform to promote your product/book/blog and create the community around it. However, regular employee also can benefit from well-composed cv and creating connections. I use it on a daily basis as my only social network
Interesting. I have a product which is basically a blog + YT channel full of Elixir tutorials and I recently decided to delete my LinkedIn profile.
I could reverse that, though since they put a 45 day waiting period on deleting it. How would I use LI as a "primary platform" to promote my service or build a community around it?
As a student its one of those things that you can't risk not having on your résumé. There's always one recruiter or one document-scraping application portal that could reject it. Plus every career counselor I've seen has suggested it.
I personally think that for software dev at least, making connections via Twitter or via friends is a better way to go for the first internship, but everyone has different paths to success :)
FWIW, I've seen quite a few resumes of software engineers at this point and I would say less than half have LinkedIn on it.
"Can't risk" is interesting, you could say that about anything you could put on your resume if there's a chance it helps, but something like LinkedIn seems just redundant with your resume's content.
When you are desperate looking for your first job or internship you probably don’t have a great grasp of the hiring process because of conflicting voices on how to get a job. Even if technical forums say don’t bother, career counselors and hr folks seem to place importance on LinkedIn, leading to the “can’t risk” attitude, especially if you don’t have a foot in the door.
I don't list my LinkedIn profile on my resume, but I have one and it's under the name used on my resume. Every time I've applied for a job, LI shows n people from $place_I_applied_to has viewed your profile recently.
So people definitely use it, even if it isn't on your resume.
I graduated 4 years ago, and I never put my linkedin on my resume (actually deleted it a few years ago) and was never asked about it (nor was I ever turned down from an interview).
Plus every career counselor I've seen has suggested it.
They're probably right, if your goal is to get a job as a career counselor.
Have you ever felt like you were missing anything? I also deleted mine a long time ago and the only thing I miss is an easy way to contact people that I don't follow on Twitter (I also don't have Facebook).
I've used LI to get a few interviews, but not a job. I'm not in 'tech' per se (bio stuff), so for me it's a mixed bag.
If you are going to use it for a job hunt, then use it aggressively. Message/cold-call people that you want to work for, send them a cover letter and CV, ask to talk off LI and on the phone/over-coffee asap. Cold-emailing people from a company directory is kinda the same thing here. The 'rules' for Tinder aren't that far off for LI, sad as that is.
Outside of a job hunt that you're preforming, yeah, it's mostly recruiter spam. The feed is practically useless in my experience, but I am not a power user.
All that said, networking is that key to getting hired.
Which details are you concerned about? I'm in much the same situation with a common name, but I don't see anything I'm concerned about the whole world knowing on there. You get the schools I went to, the jobs I've had, and my general physical location, but not much else. I'd be leaking as much or more information if I just put a resume up on a personal website.
It's the same information, but if you put it on your personal site, it would be less likely to be included in mass data sharing/scraping with people you might not want the info shared with.
You can adjust your public profile to only expose the minimal details and have the recruiter connect to you for anything more. I agree it would be great if LinkedIn had a way to have a purely private profile that is only shared on demand, viewable with a key or something for a restricted period.
But yeah, it does not solve the problem of social pressure where you could be considered as less reliable or trustworthy if you don't have a public profile with many details.
LinkedIn has become basically a requirement for applying for many jobs making it one of the hardest public profiles for the privacy conscious to hide from Google.
Isn't it pretty easy to hide from Google? It's had settings like "don't let search engines index my profile" and "only show to people with an n-degree relationship" for a long time.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, it's a good joke - this is one of the two standards (along with "necessary and proper") that courts have used to justify ~every federal law as constitutional.
Fun fact: the federal law that bans firearms in schools is based on "interstate commerce".
the firearm in question "has moved in or otherwise affects interstate commerce."[3] As nearly all firearms have moved in interstate commerce at some point in their existence, critics assert this was merely a legislative tactic to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling.[2]
I don't have a copy of the indictment, but in other police car cases they've used the fact that the car itself was imported, therefore destroying it affects international commerce.
No, but it would have to violate federal laws. Most crimes are crimes under state law. For example murder is illegal under state laws[1], it only falls under federal jurisdiction under certain circumstances, like if it is on federal property of involves from federal employees.
Sometimes when states fail to prosecute, or fail to get a conviction, the Feds will prosecute. But the original crime might not be a federal crime, so they prosecute under something else (there are ~3000 federal laws to choose from).
For example, sometimes when police kill citizens, and DAs don't prosecute, the Feds will. But the murder isn't in federal jurisdiction, so they charge them with "color of law"[2][3], which is a federal crime.
Another interesting note - nation wide looting and destruction for BLM. Yet not a single protest from these righteous folks regarding Chinese government for releasing virus and ruining the economy.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Jesus. A 33 year old massage therapist with a peace tattoo. This is getting surreal. I feel a little sorry for her, not because she got caught (the crime, if she did it, is what it is) but because over and above that, she is about to become the target of a torrent of pent-up rage and counteragression from the right, who now have a perfect symbol to direct it at. (I feel the same way for the targets from the left too. My sympathies are with witches, not witch hunters.)
Under normal circumstances, society gets pretty angry at arsonists irrespective of their political beliefs. Do you also feel bad for the guy who mailed CNN pipe bombs?
I don't expect to see this kind of childish logic on HN. You really think burning an abandoned police car is the same as mailing explosives to a news team?
Is this some sick joke? Do you really not see how arson and explosives are absolutely comparable crimes? The arson which accompanied looting in Philadelphia caused a massive fire in downtown Philly which could have easily killed people. Your apologism for serious crimes because I guess it suits your political biases is not OK.
I honestly can't tell if this is satire, but if nit, this comment is the laziest kind of strawman argument I've ever seen...
Burning down an occupied home, and burning an unoccupied car are both arson, do you think they're comparable crimes?
Actually let me answer that for you, because maybe this is just the legendary HN contrarian who does not let common sense stand in the way of making a point...
They're not. Sending pipe bombs to CNN is intentionally trying to kill people. Burning a police car is intentionally trying to destroy property. Sure someone could be hurt by both, but you'd have to throw out any semblance of common sense to pretend that they're comparable in malice...
Thanks for that last paragraph. Could you please post more that way and less (for example) like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23559623? I realize that these topics are extremely emotional, and rightly so, but it makes a huge difference in the threads, and—at least here—is a more effective way to advance your views.
Are you claiming that fire from an unoccupied police car somehow spreads over non-flammable cement/asphalt? If so, you may have some misconceptions about the nature of fire.
I think it's fairly clear that this fire was not intended to spread and had little chance of spreading.
To be clear, I'm not saying what she did was right--but I am saying that if we look at intentions and what was likely to happen, this clearly was not done with the intent of destroying anything but property.
And to be clear, if you look at the George Floyd murder and protests, and your biggest concern is the torching of two unoccupied police cars, you aren't concerned about justice or public safety.
Cars are usually filled with gasoline that can spill and spread. Sparks and flames can blow quite some distance and start secondary fires. Police cars probably have ammo inside too, that can ignite. Toxic fumes can blow quite some distance, even into people's homes.
I'm sure that wasn't her intention, but serious fires are started by people who didn't intend to do anything more than have a campfire or fireplace. It's reckless, and it's counter-productive, turning people against the protests.
And just to be clear, it's entirely possible to be concerned about both police brutality and arson.
Of course society gets pretty angry at arsonists but my point is that she's also going to get targeted with a whole other level of attack as well, over and above the normal level of anger, for entirely political reasons.
The only reason I would feel sorry for her is that she got fooled by hate and rage on social media. People need to realize that the main purpose of social media rage machine is atrracting clicks. No one really cares about your feelings when they post more and more horrific videos on twitter, they just care about themselves. Mainstream media is not much better.
lol, no. they just looked at the t-shirt she was wearing in the videos, found where the t-shirt was sold, saw a review which said they were in philadelphia, googled the username of the reviewer, and eventually found the place they worked
actually investigative work
no subpoena's, no user profile aggregators
its the most acceptable use of public resources and is hardly news in 2020 but its nice to read that public servants will do some basic stuff like this.
basic human investigative work that anyone could do just like we pay them to do, or this high tech unnecessary other thing for someone on film with identifying information.
Would finding this path through parallel construction be easier than finding it through forward construction? The forward construction just seems more logical to me.
yeah 2013 called and wants its controversial revelations back, everyone knows what parallel construction is.
and really the only reason thats an interesting public service announcement is by thinking this kind of googling in this article was complicated at all.
the "forward construction" is so easy that you should just assume anyone in any agency is competent enough to do this.
anybody that has looked up a friend from high school, or a potential date, or needed a way to contact someone, should have been inspired enough to do this before. and if you weren't, now you are.
It if were parallel construction, the intent would be for the forward construction to seem more logical to you.
Yeah I agree that when parallel construction happens they make the parallel case a logical one. But that involves making a parallel case. You're saying that the shirt -> Etsy -> Poshmark -> Linkedin chain was not created in that order and was created in some other order. I don't see how it's logical that it could be created in some other order, even with illegal evidence.
I don't know what happened and haven't looked closely enough to have an opinion. I was only noting in response to your comment that in the hypothetical case of parallel construction, the parallel case would seem logical.
Beyond this specific case, I think the point of parallel construction is an interesting one because it makes it really difficult to know the "truth" where law enforcement have significant control over the flow of information.
Sometimes traditional or other media can help with the information asymmetry but sometimes, perhaps, not.
Yeah, I think I agree. My main original point wasn't simply that the accused parallel case was logical, but that it was more logical than any other case even if we assume illegal evidence was involved.
This is as opposed to say a police officer pulling over a drug dealer's car full drugs for failing to use a turn signal. If we assume illegal evidence was involved there, it's most logical the police were given some heads-up that there would be a drug dealer with a car full of drugs in the area to pull over, and the failing to signal on a turn was just used as a convenient excuse.
It's almost like the investigators actually just went through the trouble to do the leg work. Perhaps because they are a consummate professional in their work, or perhaps in this case they felt a personal stake in catching the criminal.
ya'll never done this before? it doesn't take training. find someone's username and then google their username to see what other services they use, find an email address and check haveibeenpwned to see what other services that has been on, cross link, cross reference, and ideally find some erotic photos from their modeling days and then ask the photographer if there were any more because its attractive
That's the maximum with all sentencing enhancements and such. It would be very rare for someone to get the maximum, there's a whole stack of formulas on how actual sentences get calculated, and most of them don't add up to something like that.
Sentences in press releases and articles are usually greatly overstated. See "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS" [1] for an explanation.
No, it doesn't. As far as I'm concerned, violence or shit like this should draw life. The law-abiding public doesn't need to be exposed to people like this.
You're advocating for arbitrarily cruel punishment that is out of line with sentencing guidelines in the US and international human rights conventions more broadly.
Given that, I'm asking where you draw the line when it comes to "violence" and if you'd be satified to see significantly more people imprisoned for life.
At least in the US, far more people should be removed from society, yes. Even a brief search will turn up large numbers of rapists and murderers (for example) that are sentenced and released over and over again. This is indeed arbitrarily cruel to law-abiding citizens.
As far as it goes, I think conditions in prisons should be far nicer than they are now. In these days of videoconferencing, it needn't be very different than lockdown. I don't believe in punishment; I believe in permanent removal from society.
Arson laws were designed around the idea that fires sometimes go out of control and cause huge amounts of damage, and potentially loss of life.
Laws are also designed around intent rather than outcome. So there are harsh punishments for intending to start/spread any kind of fire, even if it looks unlikely to go out of control in this particular case.
Also, it's unlikely that she'll really get 10 years without someone being hurt in the process.
If I were to highlight excessive penalties, I'd probably point to drug crimes rather than arson. I don't think lighting fires should be a part of the protest landscape.
Fun fact: the Philadelphia Police Department also likes starting fires. 35 years ago, they used plastic explosives to blow up the house of the MOVE group, killing most of the people inside (including five children). Instead of putting out the fires, the city allowed a good chunk of the predominantly black working class neighborhood to burn to the ground. The city did get sued in 2005 in a civil trial for burning down the houses, but no one from the city government has been criminally charged for the attack. That seems like the kind of terrorist act that the FBI would investigate, but I guess they have different priorities.
Specifically - "Although firefighters had earlier drenched the building prior to the bombing, after the fire broke out, officials said they feared that MOVE would shoot at the firefighters, so held them back.
Goode later testified at a 1996 trial that he had ordered the fire to be put out after the bunker had burned. Sambor said he received the order, but the fire commissioner testified that he did not receive the order. Ramona Africa, one of the two MOVE survivors from the house, said that police fired at those trying to escape"
From the links, 60 neighboring homes burned down from it, no fire department presence. So...regardless of the reason, "the fire was allowed to burn".
That you can't estimate how current processors will match your expectations based on how 42 years ago processor matched expectations of people living at the time.
If 42 years ago Intel sold a processor that burned my house down, I might not be the biggest fan of Intel even 42 years later. This isn't about expectations, it's about reputation. Not everyone has a goldfish memory.
Just saying, certain people are very very happy to point out the violence of the oppressed, yet throw a hissy fit when people point out the violence of the oppressor.
No, just trying to highlight the double standard when it comes to how law enforcement are treated compared to everyone else.
I also wouldn't classify destroying the car of a government organization as violence. It's destruction, but fairly mild compared to burning people's homes to the ground. And even then, I wouldn't think to compare property damage to actual violence, like murder.
There was an armed standoff with police,[6] who lobbed tear gas canisters at the building. The MOVE members fired at them, and a gunfight with semi-automatic and automatic firearms ensued.[33] Police used more than ten thousand rounds of ammunition before Commissioner Sambor ordered that the compound be bombed.
Seems like the bombing was perhaps not an unreasonable response? I mean, in this case an armed militia fortified itself in a bunker-like property and fired at the police. What were they expecting?
Yes, it’s telling that even mentioning the full context will upset people. Hence your downvotes. People really want to believe that the Philly PD was firebombing black neighborhoods for fun.
The MOVE members fired at them, and a gunfight with semi-automatic and automatic firearms ensued.
This language is so evasive that it could accurately describe "MOVE shot at police once with a muzzle-loader, and police returned fire with semi-automatic and automatic weapons."
Words like "compound" and "bunker" don't have a particular meaning either--they are just there to sound cult-y and scary.
If this is actually a justified situation, why not tell the story straight? Why not say that MOVE used semi-automatic and automatic weapons if that's what happened?
Yep, definitely the important details are not present in this picture. However, firing even one shot at the police who's trying to arrest you justifies use of whatever force necessary to subdue the attacker.
Move was a group who's guidelines looked like cult material and who's members had a lot of criminal convictions. A cop got shot up and the mayor asked them to disband.
Keep in mind, this is a country where you are innocent until prooven guily. The cops don't get to legally go form hit squads and go shooting people they don't like. This isn't the 1800's.
I can certainly agree overwhelming force is not in general a good answer because it emphasizes and strengthens the belief the police are not to be trusted. Would you come out of a building someone was actively firing into? Surrounding the compound at Waco and firing into it was just dumb when dealing with a doomsday cult because it's just going to reinforce their beliefs.
The correct way to look at this tragedy is many police officers were previously soldiers, so keep in mind when they see a cult, their mindset is to kill or capture or dispense with extreme force and what you get is a whole lot of stupidity as compromise.
This is precisely why black bloc tactics [1] are employed: cover tattoos, wear generic clothes and everybody looks basically the same. I'm sure it's far less effective today but avoiding this kind of thing was the original point.
Well, when we discuss arson in the abstract, that will be a relevant thing to bring up, but we're not talking about how arson is generally considered, we're talking about how this arson should be considered. This arson was the burning of two police cars which didn't spread and clearly wasn't intended to.
Compare to when arsonists burned down 61 West Philadelphia homes, killing 5 children. That's a threat to public safety, but the arsonists were never charged, because the arsonists were police. That's a threat to public safety.
Compare to systemic racism, repeated kidnapping and harassment, and over and over again, cops straight-up murdering black people. That's a threat to public safety.
Let's be clear here, you aren't concerned about justice or removing threats to public safety if your biggest concern here is the torching of two unoccupied police cars.
During the violence that began around City Hall following peaceful protests, Blumenthal allegedly set fire to both vehicles.
I love how the msm feels the need to specify that the protests that resulted in Police cars bring burned, stores bring looted and cops being shot were "peaceful protests" up until the incident. Imagine if they talked about the Charlottesville rally as largely peaceful until the deadly car attack.
That sounds sort of like the reverse-halo effect fallacy. Believe it or not terrible people don't necessarily do terrible things every time they do somethings. For example, Fidel Castro caused Cuba to have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. That is true no matter how many people he imprisoned, tortured or killed. Similarly people can peacefully protest even if they are white supremacy, fascism, or _neo_ nazis (pet peeve of mine, but I wouldn't call someone a literal nazi unless they were literally a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party between 1920 and 1945).
It’s sort of implied nowadays, few are alive who were. But in the 80s I was pretty annoyed when people were described as neonazis when in fact they were of the old guard.
When people are wearing swastikas on their arm and giving Hitler salutes, I'ma call them a literal nazi regardless of it no longer being 1945.
I'm also not really concerned what 'positives' their agenda might include, given the violence that is explicitly part of the ideology they are identifying with.
Even for those who aren't literally wearing symbols of the Nazi party, white supremacy isn't a non-violent ideology. It fundamentally seeks to supress, remove, or otherwise contain non-whites. Putting non-whites in camps is still violent. Expelling them from the country they were born into and lived in their entire lives is still violent. Etc. And if there's a "nice" white supremacist, who is "well, I think whites are better, but you know, live and let live, right?" I'm pretty sure they're not out marching.
I didn't say anything about the right to protest. I said a protest isn't peaceful when the protest is literally people saying "We hate (group)". You can't have an ideology of hatred that is also an ideology of peace.
The peacefulness of a protest has nothing to do with the political message. Not every concept is about your political bottom line. Friend and foe alike can engage in peaceful and violent protests.
A "violent protest" is a clear concept that means something. You can very easily imagine a peaceful protester with the most awful things written on their sign. And you can imagine the most violent rioters being inspired by the greatest message.
A sign with "Kill All The Jews" is a violent protest, even if they're doing nothing but standing there. Advocating violence is not peaceful, even if the individual is only saying it.
Perhaps because Nazism and white supremacy are inherently violent ideologies which revolve around openly wish to oppress and murder people in the name of racial supremacy, whereas BLM, whilst violent, is about stoppping violence towards black people?
There's no way the evidence listed is sufficient to pursue prosecution. A peace tattoo and an etsy t-shirt? I certainly wouldn't allow that to go to trial if I were on a grand jury.
She'll likely plead out, so we'll never know what they actually have on her.
Not just any peace tattoo, but a particular peace tattoo. A particular color, position, size, etc. There are plenty of bits of information encoded in such a thing, I think you're understating it a bit.
That particular evidence leads to a very small number of individuals. From there it's probably trivial to figure out from other records (phone, credit card, etc.) and testimonies if the person they have was the one shown on one of the 1829291 pictures posted on social media.
Part of me wants to argue if this is even newsworthy. "Person arrested for arson was identified through investigation of publicly available information" is not a novel headline, but the moment you mention that the information was online is the moment Jo Public thinks the police hacked the internet. People in this thread have already mentioned Open Source INTelligence, or OSINT, so I don't think I need to say that Google search is not the same as cracking accounts.
TL;DR the suspect wore a T-shirt sold by an etsy shop where they left a review.
Reading the title, I was wondering whether an artisanal torch was used on the police car.
https://youtu.be/TBb9O-aW4zI
Keep some of this on hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUv7NQelex0
Well I spit out my drink at "artisanal torch" so I hope you are happy lol. But I had the same response when I read the title before I opened it. I enjoyed guessed for a minute on how that was all connected.
While it's not exactly a novel technique (I've read similar stories since the early 2010s at least), I'm continuously surprises by how much people are able to glean from inferences and online sources. The saga of the "he will not divide us" flag is particularly impressive.
It's called OSINT and it's been around a lot longer than 2010.
I'm not sure why 'def8cefe' is being voted down for pointing out the name of this process. OSINT is short for "open source intelligence" and the TL;DR is that only "open sources" (eg: not government/restricted datasets) are use to perform a digital investigation. Steve Rambam has given talks about digital investigations from the very beginning of the H.O.P.E. Conferences on this topic. In addition to law enforcement using this it's also used by private investigators or just amateur enthusiasts who team up to help solve missing children cases and track down info from other past cold cases or to even bust child trafficking rings. The skills natural to Hacker News readers makes me surprised there's not more general interest in OSINT here, especially defensive tactics to make sure we allow as little of our personal info to land in open datasets to feed OSINT investigations in the future.
There is interest in OSINT but my comment could be misconstrued as supportive of or normalizing LE practises so that upsets a very vocal interest group on the Internet.
I mean, I don't think even the internet nut-jobs support torching police cars...
Edit: Ouch, looks like quite a few people here do. Do y'all really think that's the best way to effect social and political change? A minority of Americans screaming louder and using terrorism to vent their spleens won't solve the issue. In a democracy, everyone must focus on getting more people to vote for different policies to effect change.
Oh they do. I'm from the Toronto area and I remember quite well the G20 riots of 2010. People were applauding the arson of TPS cruisers on the Internet. There are almost 7 billion people on this planet and at least a third of them have Internet access. Any fringe opinion a person could have has been expressed at least once.
Depending on the reason for protest, police cars and government buildings are some of the only things it makes sense to burn down IMO. With the recent protests against police and government racism, for example, I'd understand them burning things belonging to the people oppressing them rather than stores and businesses that provide jobs and services for people in the area.
I mean people are torching stuff in entirely different cities. It's not like they're torching chauvin's car then going home. Still illegal, but I guess I could understand the process behind that. Burning some cop car in Atlanta, what? That's just mob rage.
I think that dismisses the very real impact long term systemic racism has had. Additionally, a black man was just (allegedly, charges have been filed) murdered by the police after a a police officer shot him in the back and another stood on his shoulders while he was dying.
There is justifiable outrage. I do not condone wanton destruction and arson, but disruptive protests work in a way that peaceful ones alone do not.
No, but they _are_ shooting LEOs https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-17/far-righ...
We've seen quite a few police shot, some of them killed, in just the last couple weeks. Mostly premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder.
Oh hell I personally know people who openly and in in-person conversations support torching police cars.
I think if and when the time comes for civil unrest, if LEO continues to go Hong Kong in America, targets for destruction should be the tools of the enemy, not local business.
Many people who are not "internet nut-jobs" support violent protest when necessary. we've had many years of "voting to effect change" already, and it hasn't worked! Recall the four boxes of democracy: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. If you get to the ammo box, you can damn well bet there's going to be violence.
In this particular case, I do find some of the violence justified, and I think it has more effect than a simple non-violent protest would. We get to see exactly how police respond when a few thousand dollars worth of property is being damaged versus when they have someone's life in their hands. The police are digging themselves into a hole here, and it's glorious.
That said, we aren't at the point where violence against people is a legitimate form of protest. In self defense, sure, but protesters should not, at this point, be attacking people. Burn down all the Targets, police stations, and cop cars you want. Let it be the cops who do all the violence against people. That's what's actually going to get peoples' attention.
Something tells me you wouldn't support this were it your business being burned. They're gonna run into some roof Koreans, get shot, then more people will get mad even though it's completely justifiable to defend one's property with lethal force from an angry mob.
It's actually not justifiable to protect property with lethal force, and doing so is unlawful in many jurisdictions. Protecting the life of yourself and others is a justifiable reason to use lethal force.
I'm trying to be charitable here, so I will ask you to reflect on the reasons why you think protecting replaceable (or even irreplaceable) property is worth extinguishing a human life.
And, something tells me that if you and your family had been oppressed by the police for hundreds of years, you would support this. Moreover, businesses have insurance that covers these kinds of losses.
As I said, violence against people is simply not acceptable here. Showing how violence is often the first resort of police rather than a last resort is the entire point of these protests.
If it makes you feel a little better about the world, I downvoted you because I thought you were wrong that no one supports this, not at all because I support burning police cars. I've definitely seen lots of support online that accepts the destruction of police (aka public) property as a legitimate (or at least expected) form of protest, and am surprised that you haven't. So yes, there are supporters, but possibly not quite as many as it would first appear.
I read one article in Jacobin, an interview with an individual who rationalized it: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/frances-fox-piven-protests-mo...
However, I haven't really seen others support it, aside from the obvious lunatics on television (many of whom simply want to grab free stuff). I'm not sure which sites I'd have needed to frequent to see such support, but I'm always looking to expand my knowledge base, so would appreciate a few recommendations.
I'm reluctant to give my best recommendation, because it's a fragile community, but hopefully this thread is far enough along that it doesn't have a lot of traffic at this point.
Currently, the discussion at http://slatestarcodex.com is the best that I've found on the internet for hearing intelligent views from people I otherwise disagree with. The "open threads" are very long, and contain a lot (50%?) of dross, but there are also a lot of gems within them. Post-Floyd, I was surprised by how many people whose opinions I generally respect were at least conditionally supportive of burning the police precinct office in Minneapolis.
If you are interested in this question, you could pose it there. It would be considered "culture war", and thus only acceptable in the "fractional" open threads. That is, the ones that end with ".25", ".5", or ".75". To reduce visibility, these aren't officially listed on the front page, but are available from the Recent Posts or from the Archives link. Create an account, post the question there in as fair and open-ended a manner as you can, and I think you'd get good responses.
I’m gonna be the controversial voice who says anyone who misconstrues that specific previous comment as being supportive or normalizing unethical law enforcement practices probably is probably misconstruing willfully and intentionally.
For better or worse, those practices are already normalized. Average analyst at most FIs has good Google-fu skills and would likely be able to connect the dots as described in the article. I think you are right about HN bias in this area. Heavens know I don't like it the same way I don't like cop porn. That said, it is hard to argue with your point.
It's called OSINT and it's been around a lot longer than 2010.
I listened to a 1940's episode of Dragnet a couple of days ago, and it was pretty much the same thing. Burglar was identified by photographs, his job, and a tattoo.
This is just normal police work. People make a big deal out of it because it's "Cyber" this and "e" that.
Dragnet is good, but I much prefer Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
The man with the gold-plated expense account!
"action-packed" expense account, actually :-D
Curiously, the term "cyber" originally referred not only to computing, but general issues of control and communication over large distances, particularly during wartime (encrypted radio messages and the like): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/153954.The_Human_Use_of_...
Not really. This is easier than "normal police work," because almost everybody carries a camera and a tracking device with them at all times now, and people can't resist posting things like that online.
It's impressive how anyone can be "doxxed" these days. A few clues, each with a few bits of information, and soon enough you have a unique identifier.
True... but I think it’s just called an “investigation” when done by the authorities.
Related: an analysis on Light's mistakes in Death Note https://www.gwern.net/Death-Note-Anonymity
Maybe the FBI has someone with Shinigami eyes on staff
If you put in even a little effort to conceal your identity, it makes it very hard to find you.
But if you go around with your tattoos and face uncovered, and wearing uniquely identifiable clothing, any 4chan thread can find your identity in a few hours.
The flip side is when 4Chan, (or Twitter, or Reddit) identifies you, it's not always correct. And that doesn't seem to matter to the angry mobs.
See: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/what-its-like-to-get...
That's neither unique to internet sleuths nor to angry mobs. LE will also on occasion misidentify people, and they + DAs also don't always stop that quickly.
I'm shocked less by the fact the person was identified and more by the fact the person didn't feel the need to cover up an identifying tattoo or a limited-run t-shirt they left a review for while committing a felony. I'm starting to think criminals are stupid.
It just means we're catching the stupid ones
That is a really dangerous move and doesn't really line up with my experiences. This woman was pretty stupid. She's not a criminal though, she's a massage therapist.
I had my tongue so far in my cheek when I wrote that I may need stitches.
She may not be a career criminal but after she torched a police car she's at least an amateur.
Who committed a criminal act. Doesn't that make her a criminal?
Reminds me: when I was younger, I rear ended the car in front if me. When I recounted the story to my friend’s mom, I said I had a good following distance, to which she said I obviously didn’t. The proof is in the pudding. Same with the “Straight A Student” who insists they can’t have earned a B since they are a Straight A Student. Welp, you did earn the B, so...
There is a lack of accountability and people look for reasons to escape it, not embrace it.
Wait, what!? How does torching a police car not count as a criminal act?
It's the difference between premeditated and an act of passion. There are tons of people who aren't fighters that leave the house, get drunk then try to start a fight in the street.
There are at least three readings of hoorayimhelping's post:
1. This person is not a criminal in some particular all-encompassing sense of the word. I.e., some people commit one-off crimes of passion while others make a lifestyle/career out of crime. Presuming that the latter are stupid because the former are stupid is dangerous because organized criminals have learned good internet op-sec. That's interesting.
2. Thinking of people who commit crimes as "criminals" and making blanket assumptions about the criminal element is a mistake. That might be a well-trodden critique, but it's interesting enough that there have been some (quite influential) books written around the topic. This seems like the more likely intent. Thinking about how the social phenomena induced by the internet and social media interact with those 20th century ideas about identity and subjectivity might result in an interesting conversation. E.g., suppose torching a cop car was an act of passion and this person's name is now forever associated with a crime of passion. That seems... new and different... relative to 30 years ago. Back then, you could just move somewhere new where no one knew your past; as long as you didn't become a criminal in that new place, you could basically start over. What might be the societal implications of continuing to assign "criminal" as a dominant identity in the age of an internet that never forgets?
3. hoorayimhelping believes that there is no law in the US which prohibits the torching of cop cars.
The first two are charitable interpretations that might result in curiosity-driven conversation (in which you may or may not want to participate). The third.... isn't so charitable and is unlikely to go anywhere.
Whether someone "is a criminal" should have something to do with how much of a regular part of their life it is. Just like someone who smoked a joint once 20 years ago isn't considered a drug user, someone who committed a one-off crime isn't a criminal.
We are down pretty deep into pedantry at this point, but... Current definition is that someone who has committed a crime and been convicted is a criminal. If that crime is a felony, they are also a felon. Depending on the state of residence, felons may have voting rights suspended, may be disqualified from jobs, loans, educational grants, etc.
You are right to point out that we usually use the noun "criminal" more to refer to someone that makes a habit of crime or makes their living from crime.
And I'll also add that the word "criminal" is often used to imply someone is subhuman. Possibly subconsciously, but it's common to see people outraged by police brutality only if they think an innocent person is the victim. Things like "no innocent person should be treated that way." I think this is the primary objective of the ever-present ad-hominem attacks such as "well he was no angel."
I don't think this is "deep into pedantry". I think it's probably one aspect of the most important conversation we need to have about the effect that "organizing the world's information" has on society.
The extraordinary permanence of certain aspects of identity ("criminal", "felon", "rapist", "racist", etc.) in the information age is radically different from how identity has worked for the past 100 years or so. The possibility of "starting over" is gone.
Legitimate question: What's your definition of a criminal?
If she did it, she's a criminal.
Meh, it was just some lawless mafia thug's car; I say we let it slide as she provided a net good to society.
She doesn't seem to have started the initial fires, so I'm much less shocked. It's not smart, but it was almost certainly a spontaneous act. emboldened by the crowd.
From the link:
"various videos captured her wearing protective goggles and gloves, taking a flaming piece of wooden police barricade from the rear window of the sedan that was already on fire, and then shoving the flaming wood into the SUV that was not on fire."
Having protective goggles and gloves?
Did you forget about pandemic?
Good point. Blood samples of corona virus disease patients frequently show markers of neurological damage.
The defense attorney could try the "Infectious toxic encephalopathy" gambit .
That was not my point and you understand it.
pandemics + police brutality means protective gear is a must!
Pandemic and police use of chemical weaponry makes googles and gloves a pretty standard precaution for attending a protest these days.
That was a rational premeditative act. It wasn't "caught up" in the moment.
I went to a protest with goggles after reading about my friends in Philly getting gassed. You don't have to be doing anything illegal for police to gas you. https://whyy.org/articles/eyes-blistering-crawling-on-highwa...
Pretty standard at protests that have teargas.
According to some prosecutors I know, it is quite common for criminals to post their exploits on Facebook.
I suspect ego and greed are responsible for catching a lot of people who have committed a crime. They just can’t seem to resist bragging about it and if they can resist bragging about it they can’t resist trying to get away with it again.
I know you you meant it tongue-in-cheek, but when I was investigating computer crimes in 2003/4/5, the criminals would often sign their work on the assumption that the police were stupid.
Heh, like the Wet Bandits.
The criminals who get caught are stupid.
The smart criminals rule us.
If you’re gonna do a crime, do a complicated crime...
I think people put a little too much faith into "safety in numbers" during these riots.
You don't need to look past the cause they're protesting to see how stupid they are.
Police brutality shouldn't be protested?
awesome work
Maximum sentence is 10 years, she's unlikely to get that, but _minimum_ is 5 years IIRC. That's a _long_ time. And then you're a felon and you can't find a decent job. What was the calculus there, I wonder? Under what circumstances would a person rationally consider torching a police cruiser to be worth the risk of 5 years in the slammer?
Perhaps when prioritising their morality and cause, over what's beneficial for them?
What "morality" or "cause" are you talking about? She burned a police cruiser.
The war against police brutality, of course.
Kneeling didn't work, soooo...
Expected respondes: pass a law. Protest peacefully. Stand in front of city hall with assault rifles. Vote for (some centrist).
Just because you may not like how someone is dealing with the fact that they could be killed with no recourse by cops because of the color of their skin, doesn't mean their methods are invalid or even irrational.
The classic star wars question - is Luke Skywalker a rebel hero, or a terrorist threat to order? Before the Empire blew up an entire planet to make a point, it was a fairly valid question.
Please explain how a white woman torching a police cruiser advances _any_ goals other than increasing the dramatically underrepresented white female prison population. Please also mention which other types of crime you consider conducive to rectifying the situation in any meaningful way.
How would you feel if someone set your car on fire? Probably like someone doesn't appreciate you very much, right? Well this is how they want the city to feel about their police force.
It also demonstrates that by and large, police don't prevent chaos and property damage. Most of the time, people simply decide not to do this, and when they decide they want to, police are largely powerless to stop them. This should lead others to more broadly question whether police are capable of stopping other bad actors, rather than merely reacting to them.
Not a full study, but when people were kneeling to draw attention, it poled at about 30% for 60% against 10% undecided. When people burned down the police precinct in Minneapolis and documented the unwarranted police violence, it polled at about 60% for and 30% against.
I don't know why, but as a general rule with people, if it bleeds, it leads. And that's what's worked here.
The opposite side of the equation is how does the police slashing tires and breaking civilian property advance their goal beyond dramatically increasing the levels of anger towards them?
If she's going to jail for torching a car, then will the officers that committed similar property damage also be going to jail?
To expand on your explanation -- not only did kneeling not work, it was roundly mocked and derided by even progressives.
It turns out, Americans pay attention when you start smashing property and taking flatscreen TVs.
Given episodes 7-9, Luke is a terroristic threat to order. After destroying the existing order, he failed to establish anything better and it quickly devolved into what we see in 7. And he also failed to kill the main villain which meant that all the chaos and death that he was responsible for had no offsetting good.
In America right now there are ongoing protests and riots over the conduct of domestic police departments, specifically their proclivity toward extrajudicial execution and battery of black people in the streets. Damaging police property including their cars and precincts is a powerful (if legally risky) expression of that anger.
We are On 21st century, we know violence doesn’t stop violence, crime doesn’t stop crime. People should use modern tools to reduce racial issues. Like voting or social media’s, never burn a state property. Tax money could be used for better things But now the police department will buy 2 more cars.
The revolution may not be televised... but couldn’t it be streamed?
I want to see people use live streaming to debate first, but then organize so effectively to just swarm on the old systems to make change. People need to move faster.
The debate is over. You and I weren’t invited.
No, we don't know that.
Historically it has been violence that stopped violence, and crime (like toppling an unjust government, breaking segregation laws, etc) that stopped crime.
Yeah, they've tried blogging about it. There are also tons of books on the matter, vlogs, articles, etc. They voted Obama twice. Didn't work.
A few months of angry riots and a few burned down police departments though, could send a very clear message to politicians and police chiefs, and help change laws to restrict police abuse.
Idk, World War II ended a genocide, and the US civil war (mostly) ended slavery in the US. Both were pretty violent events if I'm remembering correctly. That being said, destroying property isn't violence, and "crime" is kind of a useless metric for morality. Slavery and genocide in the instances above were not legally crimes. Your opinion of police or nazis will color how much you view, say destroying a police car or a German tank as a morally wrong.
Black people in the US constantly fear being killed or harassed by police. Yeah, burning a car doesn't solve anything, but keeping quiet and playing ball since the civil rights movement hasn't really moved the needle. Policing and constant surveillance of black communities has gotten worse since then, and protections for police, both legally and politically, have increased. Sometimes you have to burn a car or break some glass for the nation to pay attention.
Also I would say that the initial reaction of rioting is what drove people to organize and peacefully protest, and in a lot of US cities and states, the combination of these has already resulted in policy change. I'm sure most of these people are also posting on social media and planning to vote as well.
I guess this is a long winded way of saying that torching a car is small potatoes compared to government sanctioned murder and oppression, and this kind of thing is forcing people to pay attention and have conversations about this stuff.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy, instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." Martin Luther King Jr.
World War II and the US civil war didn't ended the violence, it just changed the way that violence manifests. If you look in many groups on Facebook, 9gag or redit , you will see Violence in protests are being used to create more hate in people who hates. I really believe that the society was improved by ideas not wars.
Police departments around the country are being downsized, kicked out of their unions, and in some cases defunded entirely. That's good news! The money will be used for better things.
It's not the sort of thing HN likes to hear but the techniques used in these protests are pretty much working as expected.
That's good news? I disagree.
The police are not perfect. We need to hold them accountable to some reasonable standards of behavior. But if you defund them entirely, then what do you expect is going to happen? Peace and harmony?
No, what's going to happen is that criminals will still be criminals, and perhaps bolder and more blatant criminals. Drug addicts will continue to be drug addicts, and will do crazy things while they're high, and crazy things in order to get money to get high. Such people will continue to interact with non-criminal non-addict people, who will feel threatened. But now the police won't be there. Now what?
In a country with an armed population, the police probably reduce the number of misbehaving people who are killed, because (for all their flaws) they are still less trigger-happy than a frightened gun-owner who feels threatened by an encounter with some strange-acting person.
As someone who has had many of these encounters, I've never had the police help. At best they'll show up a half hour later and take a report. The police were never "there" in any meaningful sense.
Time after time, this has proven to not be true. When a frightened gun-owner reaches for his weapon, he knows he is risking all his money and probably his freedom if he's found to have fired it when it wasn't necessary. And so they tend to use some discretion. Cops do not risk the same, and so they shoot people all the time when their life isn't threatened.
So? Some people consider police bad, either at specific instances (some policemen/departments at some times doing bad things) or inherently (the police as an institution in general), and have been fighting against them for centuries...
Some people think police should pay for the abuses that they regularly and without punishment do.
Some others think police should stop existing in general, or exist only in a very limited capacity, or be replaced by citizen patrols, and several other varieties...
So, that morality and cause... Doesn't have to agree with yours to be a morality, and even less so to be a cause...
Their beliefs are irrelevant. You don't get to break laws and due process just because of your beliefs and anger. How many mass shootings have we seen from people with "beliefs". Stop trying to justify people burning cars just because they don't get one they want right away.
Yes you do. You might not get away with it, but that's not really pertinent.
In fact historically most change happened through people breaking laws because of their beliefs and anger.
And in every past society, like ours, most thought its laws are the apex of law-making, and should never be challenged or broken in anger, nor its law agents assaulted etc. Only history doesn't work that way.
Yes, you do get to break the law after working inside the system fails. You know this country was founded by people breaking the laws of England, right?
What makes you think every person knows the mandatory minimum sentencing for every single crime?
I doubt many non-lawyers know precisely what the penalty for arson is. However I do think it's general knowledge that arson is considered a serious crime with serious penalties. Arson in the general case is easily the worst sort of property crime since it often goes hand-in-hand with murder. Granted, murder wasn't really a plausible outcome in this particular cause, but the general association between arson and murder is nevertheless commonly understood and arson is consequently understood to be a very serious matter, even when nobody gets hurt.
Apparently she picked up an already burning piece of wood and threw it in. So it's less likely that she left the house that morning with the intent of torching cars.
In the moment, with everyone and everthing going on around her, I doubt she was thinking rationally or even knew that torching a car would be a long prison sentence. (if someone asked me before reading this article, I would have assumed a large fine + some community service maybe; then again I am not American so I have no idea how sentences compare).
In the moment, with everyone and everthing going on around her, I doubt she was thinking rationally or even knew that torching a car would be a long prison sentence
"Everyone else was doing it" didn't fly with my mom, and probably won't get a pass from Judge Wapner, either.
It passes with enforcement among themselves
Herd mentality is a thing though and I would not be surprised if a judge took that into account when sentencing.
It's much more likely you will be made the example, because you were the only person caught torching two police cars. I realize these things are symbolic and all but anybody who's actually been to a prison would never recklessly endanger their freedom wasting it on burning taxpayer money which is infinite in supply. Those cars will be replaced tomorrow while you go to prison for years. If you want to bring down the system get a majority of people to stop paying taxes then you get the Bernie Madoff club fed don't arson a cruiser you're just playing into the state's hands and getting a violent offender custody status now you have to fend for yourself against experienced violent criminals constantly trying to steal your commissary or provoke you into doing more time. It's not just that you go to prison, it's that you get more time added as a 'normal' non career criminal who now has to deal with prof criminals daily or getting crossed out from work assignments by guards who are constantly on your ass and decide to increase your time or worse send you to a more high security prison where you are almost guaranteed to do more time.
Anybody thinking of going outside and playing anarchist should know what they're getting themselves into, wait until your cellmate tells you that they're getting out in 2 months and you have to hold their contraband and weapons or the guards decide to put you in a high security yard because you're in there for something ridiculous like 'terroristic threats and arson'. You don't ever get out on schedule
"Everyone else was doing it" is pretty close to "nobody else got in trouble for it".
Which is the logic behind Qualified Immunity.
No. The reasoning is to protect police from frivolous lawsuits and financial liability in cases where they acted in good faith in unclear situations. If you want to get rid of it, get rid of it for all government employees, including elected officials.
Hey that defense worked in the Rodney King case. But she's not a cop, and was destroying police property, not a human being. So yeah, she'll probably get charged.
Are you unaware that Koon and Powell both went to Federal prison for the King beating?
King survived, but two innocents were murdered by a black man who sought to assassinate Koon[0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200604062152/https://www.latim...
I'm suprised at how long the sentence is. I knew someone in the military who got drunk and burned his ex-girlfriend's car, and he only got 6 months.
My guess is that it being a police car dramatically increases the sentence and chance of being caught.
Meanwhile, if the police destroy your car, they don't even get charged. See the video of them slashing tires in Minneapolis. One law for them, another for us.
If only the FBI used the same zeal in going after the perpetrators of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wk-mRv1Nlo
huh, because you almost never see the cops caught committing crimes with their own dash cams. Seems to always be off when they commit a crime in front of their car.
Think that's pretty much why people are torching cop cars. You'd have to get up pretty early to prove that person is a danger to society, but now their whole life is fucked which doesn't help anyone. We could however use a few hours a week to pickup park trash to better society and the lesson would probably be learned.
How much does a trash picker make per day? I assume it would take many year of trash picking to pay off that car.
That's true. Now take the value of a free trash picker and compare that against what we pay for incarceration for 5 years + the cost of the car. One is way more expensive. I'm not even against someone having to pay for the car a few dollars for the rest of their life. But you're not getting repayment for the car while someone is in prison.
It's a deterrent for the next person that thinks about torching a police car
Is it though? I’m willing to bet she put zero thought into the consequences of her actions before she (allegedly) picked up the burning piece of wood and stuck it in the back of a cop car.
Very unlikely tbh, but let her work an pay it of would certainly also have that effect if it gets a bit media attention.
I don't live in the US but I know someone who spray painted trains at night for a few year. That eventually did cost him a decent car. Obviously not as much as he caused damage over the years but enough to make some teens think twice whether a nice car or temporary colored train are their short term goals.
If she knew what the cost was, I'd guess she wouldn't make the same mistake. In the same way we don't punish people for the crimes of their parents, should we then punish people for crimes yet to be committed?
https://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-...
She's kinda fucked either way. Even a misdemeanor would be annoying to have to explain every time she wanted a job, a felony would just about guarantee she'd only ever be able to be an entrepreneur. But otherwise I agree, skip jail, just hit her with a treasury offset for the cost of the car along with a suitable extra for penalty. She'll get the message for a long time.
any time we can skip paying for incarceration, I'm fine with that. With the exception of people who pose a risk to society.
Then if someone can't pay it back, you either have to 1) not penalize them, making poverty equal immunity, or 2) jail them, making it jail for the poor and a fine for the rich. Neither seems fair.
You can garnish wages at 1-2 percent. The goal isn't getting repayment, and when you factor against the cost of incarceration, not sending someone to prison for five years is a wash. From what I've read, the average cost of incarceration costs about 70k. Probably enough to pay for the car in one year. So the minimum sentence of 5 years is going to run 1.2 mil while the inmate can't pay because best case they make $1-2 an hour.
It's far more costly to incarcerate than to get repayment for almost everything. It's still more costly to incarcerate than to just forgive the debt and make it painful enough to not repeat.
So unemployment equals immunity?
Potentially, though it would have to be lifelong unemployment. And no benefits, since presumably we could take some portion of those.
Maybe, you can put a dollar value on community service. If someone is unemployed, they probably have lots of time. Not always the case, and unemployment has a lot of causes.
In 2015, according to [0], the average was about half that.
How do you get from 70K (presumably per year) to $1.2M over five years? On average it should be more like $135K, with some cheaper states spending about half that.
[0] https://www.vera.org/publications/price-of-prisons-2015-stat...
Bad Math.
These numbers are quite a bit lower, I was reading the CA LAO numbers from 18-19 the other day and didn't really factor in cheaper states.
Even at 135k, the cost to society is 135k + the cost of the car + lost productivity of the individual and the economic drag that has on the immediate community, family/roomates/partners and such. At that price, getting community service is a major cost savings and getting repayment is even better.
True, a financial penalty isn't enforceable if the criminal never again has income. That seems like it would be a fairly narrow niche case, though. Perhaps some form of community service could be useful in that situation.
Very much. You'd be surprised what people do to avoid minor inconvenience.
That phenomena is why I don't participate in this sort of events. The best way to avoid getting swept up in a mob mentality is to avoid the mob in the first place.
Not in the video I saw. She was using a lighter and spray can to do the job.
People do irrational things sometimes, story at 10.
My reaction to those numbers is different. 5 years seems absurdly large to me for a spontaneous act of vandalism that cost the tax payers max $100,000.
Fire is probably the key element here.
There have been instances in the past where fires set have spread and killed numerous people. People get freaked out and push for harsher sentences.
I have a hard time imagining smashing cars would result in that harsh of a sentence.
So did the gal plead guilty already? Has she been arraigned yet, I couldn't make it out.
More info here: https://www.inquirer.com/news/philly-protests-arrests-fbi-lo...
Philly Inquirer article has more on other cases where "alleged arsonists" are being caught via social media posts.
I don't know what the actual charges are, I can't seem to find a copy of the criminal complaint. But the DOJ press release included:
"If convicted, the defendant faces a maximum possible sentence of eighty years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $500,000."
She might be charged with terrorism crimes, but either way it looks bad for her. At least a felony - even without prison time that will sting.
I mean... good?
Sounds like the kind of internet sleuthing I'd expect to see on 4chan. Glad to see the FBI was able to leverage those techniques too.
I'd expect the FBI to be better at it than 4chan though.
HWNDU and that air strike in Syria were pretty impressive though.
I'm surprised that the people charged with investigating her clicked on every single link in google and read every review. That shirt is all over the internet. Seems like a needle in a haystack.
Parallel construction? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
this was my immediate suspicion as well; feds surely have cell tower records at the very least
Parallel construction, I'm glad you beat me to it. This isn't quite "we correlated historic cellular records and the RFID tags in her shoes, but gave credit to a psychic medium," but it's pretty close.
Yikes. That good faith exception example is particularly troubling. I think the only way that should be construed as constitutional is if, when the illegal search was uncovered, it resulted in serious consequences for the offender. But I highly doubt that happens. System is broken.
I'm also suspicious that the article keeps emphasizing "amateur photos given to authorities" as if they are deliberately steering away from the term "police surveillance footage" or perhaps "images obtained by scanning social media".
While I have no issue with police investigating lawbreakers, the public should know what the police are doing and how, so they can be confident that police are correctly following the law while executing their duty.
But perhaps I'm reading too much into that wording, and in fact some protesters who took photos thought the arson was over-reach, so they supplied the photos to the police.
You’re definitely right. This twitter thread uses excerpts from the charging documents to explain the steps the FBI took: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1273098216775524355.html
That thread suddenly disappeared, and one which is claimed to be a "reconstructed" copy in another profile has disappeared too, it's so weird. It's not like the original PDF isn't online still.
My thought as well. I did not know there was a name for it.
Thank you.
Yeah. It’s weird how I haven’t heard the word Stingray at all lately.
Stingray is the old model. The new model is called Crossbow.
I think the more plausable explaination is a FBI agent watched a few videos online. Ran a cellphone location/time query. Looked through the results and referenced owners drivers license photos. Then tried to find some way to explain it without tipping off rioters to not carry their phones with them.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/02/07/google-location-pol...
In that explanation, this purported investigative chain would still require just as much work to create. That's a lot of effort just to deflect from cell phone surveillance, especially for a cop - an aggro type personality would just rely on downplaying the cell angle in the media, rather than spending time coming up with a plausible excuse.
If there's an obfuscation of the actual investigation here, I'd guess it's more a hiding of highly automated tools that process open source intelligence, probably by policy of the federal agency with the tool. Imagine a FBI/DEA/NSA tool that links and summarizes social media activity based on identities. So facial recognition + cell database -> trail of pictures to craft a link-narrative, without the work of having to dig much or do automated facial recognition. Tangentially I wouldn't be surprised if declaring "antifa" a "terrorist" organization is actually an internal dog whistle that blesses the use of XKEYSCORE etc against American citizens.
It's still a finite number of sites, and a finite number of comments. Could probably do a CTRL+F for Philadelphia across all of them relatively quickly. Or have tools to automate the search
they went to a seller of it on etsy
This is why black bloc: it's a tactic, not a group. Mass anonymity, reduce individual identifying marks.
I wonder if when they found someone who set a police car on fire, will he be charged to pay for it or whill they put him in prison and feed him with tax (or printer goes brrrrr) money?
She was charged criminally. The PD could also bring a civil suit for her to pay for the damage, but they probably won't bother.
I'd bet the police did none of this but a hive mind somewhere which handed the info over.
You're getting downvoted but you're probably 1/2 right. It probably wasn't a "hive mind" but it probably was a 3rd party that is an expert in computer forensics. It's pretty common for the government to hire 3rd party contractors for this type of thing.
4chan internet detective!
They catch them with Etsy and LinkedIn. Or at least construct that evidence path post facto? Ok, sure. Seems normal.
But is there a Kickstarter legal defense fund?
I'm curious if you really think that it is ok to set fire to a police car? If so, what's the logic? Because my understanding of the first amendment (i.e. the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances) does not protect you if you commit crimes.
If the police are indiscriminately killing members of my race simply because they're afraid of people from my race, I don't think a little property damage to draw attention to that fact is really an equivalent response. So yeah, I'm OK with setting fire to a police car in this circumstance.
But the bigger question is, did they really find the person doing the work they claimed or did they use parallel construction to hide illegal use of surveillance tools?
Based on the metrics I have seen, police are not indiscriminately killing any particular race - deaths from police are not too far off of the crime rates by race. Police killings is a problem, but does not seem to be a problem targeted at any particular race.
Do you think that when police wrongly kill people, they don't also assume the victim is guilty and file it as justified? When they kill a black person during a minor, not violent crime, do you think it's ok because of the correlation with a crime?
Also, since police are notorious for hiding and protecting such metrics, care to provide any sources?
I don't think it is OK to kill anyone during a minor non-violent crime, I just think that if there were a significant number of police killing black people due to their race you would see it in the numbers.
People shot to death by police in the US by race (technically not the same number as are killed, but should be close enough): https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
Percentage of population by race: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/IPE120218
Homicides by race: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Violent crimes by race (2016): https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
If you are looking at black people in particular, they make up ~23% of the people shot by police while making up ~13% of the population of the US. They commit ~50% of the homicides, and more than 23% of violent crimes such as robbery, assault, and burglary so to me this shows that the police do not have a significant bias towards killing black people, as if there was no discrimination at all you would expect the number of police killings to match the violent crime rates (since violent crimes generally lead to justified police shootings).
The root cause of black people being so over-represented in violent crimes may be discrimination. However, the reality is that right now black people commit a significant portion of the violent crimes in the US, and as a result you would expect them to be over-represented in the number of people being killed by police, even without any discrimination by the police. This does not show that police never discriminate against black people, or that police brutality is not a problem, it just shows that when it comes to police killings, it does not seem to be an issue caused by police targeting black people.
Personally, I think that the biggest issue is that in the US there seems to be a number of dense areas of significant poverty and violence, which are predominantly black. If you grow up in one of these areas, there is a good chance you will be pulled into this violence and continue the cycle. Discrimination and over-policing of minor crimes just makes this problem worse, as black people in these areas are kept in poverty and with limited options to get out, and people who have the means to move get out of the area just leaving behind the people with no other options.
I looked into it a few years ago. Because it's also about structural racism, you need to compare rastes and numbers with comparable international figures, as there are biases stacked upon biases if you only look at domestic relative rates. Those crime statistics you cited, try to compare them to some other first world countries. Look at incarceration rates, convication rates, ratio of jury trials, and percentages of subpopulations in prison at any one time, and as long as you are willing to accept it, you'll soon start to see a very clear pattern. You'll see that US crimes statistics over ethnicity and income doesn't look like anything, or anywhere else at all. It's bizarrely skewed, not subtle at all.
Crime statistics are definitely skewed, and discrimination is a huge part of that. But the question is not whether black people are being killed at a higher rate due to discrimination, the question is whether black people are being killed at a higher rate because the police are targeting them due to their race. The answer to the former is definitely yes - due to a variety of factors including discrimination black people commit more violent crimes and as a result are killed by the police more frequently. I think the answer to the latter is no, there is not strong evidence that police officers are more likely to kill black people over white people in the same situation.
You might want to cross-reference those deaths with the rate of wrongful arrest (don't have it in front of me, but high ~48% black), and a clearer picture will form: it is clear that black people are simply policed more and often for exceptionally petty charges. It turns out the rate of criminals in a place is directly related to the amount of police in a location that are motivated to arrest people. The number is highly misleading, purposefully so. And of those alleged "criminals" how many really deserved to die? So, yes, there is definitely a racial element to this.
Yes, under certain conditions, setting a police car on fire seems like an ethical action. Welcome to the US. If the police are unaccountable, they're thugs and not police. It's fine to burn the cars of thugs and those that prey upon us.
Those cars that are burning don't belong to the thugs. They belong to American citizens. They were purchased with your tax dollars. They will have to be purchased again with your tax dollars. It's also a crime.
I'm all for major changes to policing in the US. Our police departments are far to aggressive. But...seems like we are hurting each other.
Ironically, doesn't this partially disprove one of the major complaints against the abolish police movement that we need police to solve crimes? Preventing and solving crime usually doesn't require a gun. It may be time to specialize and have less generic police and more non-violent investigators, social workers, mental health experts, crisis workers, etc.
I think most countries most cops don't carry guns. Even in the US most security guards don't. My preference would be ban handguns and have far less armed police. And much higher vetting for cops that do carry.
We can’t even get assault rifles banned, good luck banning hand guns.
All rifles combined -- including "assault rifles" -- are involved in fewer murders than knives. Also involved in fewer murders than hands/fists. This is true even in states where laws for obtaining them are very lax:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
That's my point. For all the demonization of rifles and assault rifles, handguns are the bulk of the problem.
But I think handguns would be even harder politically to ban.
Big problem is the Supreme Court said states can't ban handguns. Which is sort of insane because they allow states to ban 'assault weapons' and sawed off shotguns.
The US isn't most countries, there are 300+ million guns and the cops have to do 10 million arrests a year. They have to be armed for their own safety.
Now they have to find the clown who stole the rifle from a police car in Seattle and got disarmed by Shooter Rughi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVAMUejexa0
LinkedIn has become basically a requirement for applying for many jobs making it one of the hardest public profiles for the privacy conscious to hide from Google. I have a pretty common name, which is normally a good anonymity cloak, but if you also know my profession then my Linkedin profile pops up as the first Google result revealing many accurate personal details about me.
Is it really that popular nowadays? I remember it feeling like it was an antiquated platform 6 or 7 years ago before my latest job, and in my head I now imagine it as a MySpace-like dinosaur website. Has it made a resurgence? I might just be ignorant.
It's hard for me to remember a software dev candidate I've interviewed in the past three or four years who didn't have a LinkedIn profile. Like one out of several dozens, maybe.
This could point at an earlier step in the pipeline - e.g. the recruiters at those companies may have been using LinkedIn as a primary search tool - but that's a signal of its own.
LinkedIn is for those who don’t have a GitHub. My work speaks for itself; if it’s somehow not enough, the company isn’t worth my time anyway.
You're missing out on a lot of opportunities by not giving LI consideration. A lot of good companies use it, GitHub is also important for developers.
However, you can double your income by thinking differently about LI. If that doesn't speak to its value as a network, I might need to reassess what network value means.
How? I would love to double my income.
1. having a really well written profile, hire an expert
2. less LI, but become a thought leader
3. Network, write, promote. People are more likely do business with people they "know" so make sure they see your face on a regular basis.
4. Sales skills and business acumen, you will need this if you want to break out of the average
1. Never did spend more than a few minutes at a time, but have recruiters reaching out on the regular.
2. This is not a LinkedIn skill. I speak at industry conferences regularly through relationships I've built entirely outside of LinkedIn.
3. Conference speaking does this for me.
4. This isn't even tangentially relayed to LinkedIn.
My first job out of college was from a bunch of cold applications. Since then, I've gotten all my roles by reaching out to people (outside of LinkedIn) to connect, and through my network. The skills you highlight as important are not exclusive to, or necessarily learnable on LinkedIn.
My current compensation is more than 4x what it was at my first job out of college 14 years ago. It would have been difficult to pull that off without getting in touch with recruiters at major tech companies on LinkedIn.
I did not have an expert write my profile and in fact I’ve hardly touched it in years.
How does it compare to industry average today?
Those numbers are highly tied to an independent event (your first salary, you could be a better negotiator today) and have been changed by inflation
So is mine, and none of it is due to LinkedIn.
My most recent job search consisted entirely of friendly intros (most by colleagues at the hiring manager level) at a mix of startups and major tech companies. I have met these people through the normal course of business and life, and never through LinkedIn.
Maybe I'm special, because I've spent my career in tech consulting, so I got to network that way, but this is hardly a unique career path.
Most employees will want to know your work background, though many will be perfectly happy with a html or pdf CV.
Github is great at showing your individual ability, on projects that you're working on yourself and/or ones that you want to showcase.
What happens when you have do code features that you won't want to do? No one puts their dogshit, get-it-done-before-the-weekend code on github.
And it's useless for telling me how well you'll do on a team, how you'll interact with other stakeholders, if you're sketchy and will run off with our IP (or just sell creds on the darknet), and if you'll be able to handle high powered office/project politics and their pressures. Linkedin may not be a perfect (or even good) signal for that, but it's a start. Long work histories but no contacts on Linkedin? Okay, not a dealbreaker, but may be worthy of an explanation.
If you're ignorant, than so am I. My linkedin is horribly out of date (like, a decade out of date) and it hasn't seemed to matter one bit.
Of course, it's difficult to a/b test that…
The reason employers love LinkedIn is that it makes it a lot harder to lie about your work history since it links all your companies and coworkers. In a way it serves a similar function to credit reporting bureaus in providing an accurate background check. This is also why cops love it.
This is a good point. It also one of the many reasons why it's a privacy nightmare.
Terrorists too. I've read about ISIS using it to learn more about people they kidnapped
I deleted my linkedin a few years ago.
I only ever got cold-calls for shitty jobs that I obviously wouldn't be interested in. Every interesting cold call I've gotten has come from elsewhere (e.g. my blog).
Not having a linkedin has, I think, never impeded my ability to get an interview or a job offer.
If your resume is otherwise very weak it might be somewhat useful, but honestly if someone is relying heavily on linkedin in their resume, I'd view that as a pretty bad sign.
LinkedIn is a must-have if you are an independent consultant, author or product owner. This is a primary platform to promote your product/book/blog and create the community around it. However, regular employee also can benefit from well-composed cv and creating connections. I use it on a daily basis as my only social network
Interesting. I have a product which is basically a blog + YT channel full of Elixir tutorials and I recently decided to delete my LinkedIn profile.
I could reverse that, though since they put a 45 day waiting period on deleting it. How would I use LI as a "primary platform" to promote my service or build a community around it?
Which jobs require a LinkedIn profile? I've never had one and never been asked about it.
I have gotten lots of recruiter emails saying they saw my LinkedIn profile, which is kinda funny, since it doesn't exist.
Could just be the kinds of jobs I'm interested in.
As a student its one of those things that you can't risk not having on your résumé. There's always one recruiter or one document-scraping application portal that could reject it. Plus every career counselor I've seen has suggested it.
I personally think that for software dev at least, making connections via Twitter or via friends is a better way to go for the first internship, but everyone has different paths to success :)
FWIW, I've seen quite a few resumes of software engineers at this point and I would say less than half have LinkedIn on it.
"Can't risk" is interesting, you could say that about anything you could put on your resume if there's a chance it helps, but something like LinkedIn seems just redundant with your resume's content.
When you are desperate looking for your first job or internship you probably don’t have a great grasp of the hiring process because of conflicting voices on how to get a job. Even if technical forums say don’t bother, career counselors and hr folks seem to place importance on LinkedIn, leading to the “can’t risk” attitude, especially if you don’t have a foot in the door.
I don't list my LinkedIn profile on my resume, but I have one and it's under the name used on my resume. Every time I've applied for a job, LI shows n people from $place_I_applied_to has viewed your profile recently.
So people definitely use it, even if it isn't on your resume.
I graduated 4 years ago, and I never put my linkedin on my resume (actually deleted it a few years ago) and was never asked about it (nor was I ever turned down from an interview).
They're probably right, if your goal is to get a job as a career counselor.
Have you ever felt like you were missing anything? I also deleted mine a long time ago and the only thing I miss is an easy way to contact people that I don't follow on Twitter (I also don't have Facebook).
I've used LI to get a few interviews, but not a job. I'm not in 'tech' per se (bio stuff), so for me it's a mixed bag.
If you are going to use it for a job hunt, then use it aggressively. Message/cold-call people that you want to work for, send them a cover letter and CV, ask to talk off LI and on the phone/over-coffee asap. Cold-emailing people from a company directory is kinda the same thing here. The 'rules' for Tinder aren't that far off for LI, sad as that is.
Outside of a job hunt that you're preforming, yeah, it's mostly recruiter spam. The feed is practically useless in my experience, but I am not a power user.
All that said, networking is that key to getting hired.
Which details are you concerned about? I'm in much the same situation with a common name, but I don't see anything I'm concerned about the whole world knowing on there. You get the schools I went to, the jobs I've had, and my general physical location, but not much else. I'd be leaking as much or more information if I just put a resume up on a personal website.
It's the same information, but if you put it on your personal site, it would be less likely to be included in mass data sharing/scraping with people you might not want the info shared with.
You can adjust your public profile to only expose the minimal details and have the recruiter connect to you for anything more. I agree it would be great if LinkedIn had a way to have a purely private profile that is only shared on demand, viewable with a key or something for a restricted period.
But yeah, it does not solve the problem of social pressure where you could be considered as less reliable or trustworthy if you don't have a public profile with many details.
They probably sell tons of information to law enforcement. That seems to be a lucrative revenue stream for information companies.
In what way is it required? What specifically are they looking for?
Isn't it pretty easy to hide from Google? It's had settings like "don't let search engines index my profile" and "only show to people with an n-degree relationship" for a long time.
One interesting note - she's being charged federally, not by local Philly PD.
She crossed state lines?
It isn't necessary to "cross state lines" to be charged with a federal crime.
Did it affect interstate commerce?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, it's a good joke - this is one of the two standards (along with "necessary and proper") that courts have used to justify ~every federal law as constitutional.
Fun fact: the federal law that bans firearms in schools is based on "interstate commerce".
I don't have a copy of the indictment, but in other police car cases they've used the fact that the car itself was imported, therefore destroying it affects international commerce.
No, but it would have to violate federal laws. Most crimes are crimes under state law. For example murder is illegal under state laws[1], it only falls under federal jurisdiction under certain circumstances, like if it is on federal property of involves from federal employees.
Sometimes when states fail to prosecute, or fail to get a conviction, the Feds will prosecute. But the original crime might not be a federal crime, so they prosecute under something else (there are ~3000 federal laws to choose from).
For example, sometimes when police kill citizens, and DAs don't prosecute, the Feds will. But the murder isn't in federal jurisdiction, so they charge them with "color of law"[2][3], which is a federal crime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_(United_States_law)#Jur...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_(law)
[4] https://www.justice.gov/crt/deprivation-rights-under-color-l...
I would be surprised if the feds were not directed to make arrests and charge as harshly as possible.
Bill Bar certainly doesn't strike me as a advocate for leniency in this situation
Another interesting note - nation wide looting and destruction for BLM. Yet not a single protest from these righteous folks regarding Chinese government for releasing virus and ruining the economy.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The police department receives federal funding. It's mentioned in the affidavit.
Jesus. A 33 year old massage therapist with a peace tattoo. This is getting surreal. I feel a little sorry for her, not because she got caught (the crime, if she did it, is what it is) but because over and above that, she is about to become the target of a torrent of pent-up rage and counteragression from the right, who now have a perfect symbol to direct it at. (I feel the same way for the targets from the left too. My sympathies are with witches, not witch hunters.)
And the shirt that got her busted makes it more ironic:
"Keep the immigrants, deport the racists."
How is it ironic?
A person setting a police car on fire might not be the best judge of character and who best contributes to society.
"Keep the immigrants, deport the arsonists"
Under normal circumstances, society gets pretty angry at arsonists irrespective of their political beliefs. Do you also feel bad for the guy who mailed CNN pipe bombs?
I don't expect to see this kind of childish logic on HN. You really think burning an abandoned police car is the same as mailing explosives to a news team?
Is this some sick joke? Do you really not see how arson and explosives are absolutely comparable crimes? The arson which accompanied looting in Philadelphia caused a massive fire in downtown Philly which could have easily killed people. Your apologism for serious crimes because I guess it suits your political biases is not OK.
I honestly can't tell if this is satire, but if nit, this comment is the laziest kind of strawman argument I've ever seen...
Burning down an occupied home, and burning an unoccupied car are both arson, do you think they're comparable crimes?
Actually let me answer that for you, because maybe this is just the legendary HN contrarian who does not let common sense stand in the way of making a point...
They're not. Sending pipe bombs to CNN is intentionally trying to kill people. Burning a police car is intentionally trying to destroy property. Sure someone could be hurt by both, but you'd have to throw out any semblance of common sense to pretend that they're comparable in malice...
Thanks for that last paragraph. Could you please post more that way and less (for example) like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23559623? I realize that these topics are extremely emotional, and rightly so, but it makes a huge difference in the threads, and—at least here—is a more effective way to advance your views.
Repeat after me: Cars do not have feelings. Cars do not have families.
Fire spreads.
Are you claiming that fire from an unoccupied police car somehow spreads over non-flammable cement/asphalt? If so, you may have some misconceptions about the nature of fire.
I think it's fairly clear that this fire was not intended to spread and had little chance of spreading.
To be clear, I'm not saying what she did was right--but I am saying that if we look at intentions and what was likely to happen, this clearly was not done with the intent of destroying anything but property.
And to be clear, if you look at the George Floyd murder and protests, and your biggest concern is the torching of two unoccupied police cars, you aren't concerned about justice or public safety.
Cars are usually filled with gasoline that can spill and spread. Sparks and flames can blow quite some distance and start secondary fires. Police cars probably have ammo inside too, that can ignite. Toxic fumes can blow quite some distance, even into people's homes.
I'm sure that wasn't her intention, but serious fires are started by people who didn't intend to do anything more than have a campfire or fireplace. It's reckless, and it's counter-productive, turning people against the protests.
And just to be clear, it's entirely possible to be concerned about both police brutality and arson.
Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. It's not what this site is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. It's not what this site is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Of course society gets pretty angry at arsonists but my point is that she's also going to get targeted with a whole other level of attack as well, over and above the normal level of anger, for entirely political reasons.
The only reason I would feel sorry for her is that she got fooled by hate and rage on social media. People need to realize that the main purpose of social media rage machine is atrracting clicks. No one really cares about your feelings when they post more and more horrific videos on twitter, they just care about themselves. Mainstream media is not much better.
Probably used https://clearview.ai/ ?
lol, no. they just looked at the t-shirt she was wearing in the videos, found where the t-shirt was sold, saw a review which said they were in philadelphia, googled the username of the reviewer, and eventually found the place they worked
actually investigative work
no subpoena's, no user profile aggregators
its the most acceptable use of public resources and is hardly news in 2020 but its nice to read that public servants will do some basic stuff like this.
or parallel construction.
or that.
basic human investigative work that anyone could do just like we pay them to do, or this high tech unnecessary other thing for someone on film with identifying information.
Would finding this path through parallel construction be easier than finding it through forward construction? The forward construction just seems more logical to me.
The point is that the path potentially being concealed could be illegal.
It if were parallel construction, the intent would be for the forward construction to seem more logical to you.
In this case, you could be proving the efficacy of the tactic.
yeah 2013 called and wants its controversial revelations back, everyone knows what parallel construction is.
and really the only reason thats an interesting public service announcement is by thinking this kind of googling in this article was complicated at all.
the "forward construction" is so easy that you should just assume anyone in any agency is competent enough to do this.
anybody that has looked up a friend from high school, or a potential date, or needed a way to contact someone, should have been inspired enough to do this before. and if you weren't, now you are.
Yeah I agree that when parallel construction happens they make the parallel case a logical one. But that involves making a parallel case. You're saying that the shirt -> Etsy -> Poshmark -> Linkedin chain was not created in that order and was created in some other order. I don't see how it's logical that it could be created in some other order, even with illegal evidence.
I don't know what happened and haven't looked closely enough to have an opinion. I was only noting in response to your comment that in the hypothetical case of parallel construction, the parallel case would seem logical.
Beyond this specific case, I think the point of parallel construction is an interesting one because it makes it really difficult to know the "truth" where law enforcement have significant control over the flow of information.
Sometimes traditional or other media can help with the information asymmetry but sometimes, perhaps, not.
Yeah, I think I agree. My main original point wasn't simply that the accused parallel case was logical, but that it was more logical than any other case even if we assume illegal evidence was involved.
This is as opposed to say a police officer pulling over a drug dealer's car full drugs for failing to use a turn signal. If we assume illegal evidence was involved there, it's most logical the police were given some heads-up that there would be a drug dealer with a car full of drugs in the area to pull over, and the failing to signal on a turn was just used as a convenient excuse.
It's almost like the investigators actually just went through the trouble to do the leg work. Perhaps because they are a consummate professional in their work, or perhaps in this case they felt a personal stake in catching the criminal.
haha right
or it was easy and took 20 minutes?
ya'll never done this before? it doesn't take training. find someone's username and then google their username to see what other services they use, find an email address and check haveibeenpwned to see what other services that has been on, cross link, cross reference, and ideally find some erotic photos from their modeling days and then ask the photographer if there were any more because its attractive
The article says she faces upto 10 years in prison plus $250K fine. Doesn't 10 years in prison seem excessive for destroying two cars?
That's the maximum with all sentencing enhancements and such. It would be very rare for someone to get the maximum, there's a whole stack of formulas on how actual sentences get calculated, and most of them don't add up to something like that.
Unfortunately the US has an incarceration rate about 10X similar countries. A host of problems cause this, including large min and max sentences
Sentences in press releases and articles are usually greatly overstated. See "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS" [1] for an explanation.
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
No, it doesn't. As far as I'm concerned, violence or shit like this should draw life. The law-abiding public doesn't need to be exposed to people like this.
You’ve violated numerous laws whether you know it or not.
Should white collar crime that destroys 1, 10 or 100 lives also “draw life”?
Why or why not?
I've done nothing like this. Nor have most people.
I didn't mean to imply that you did.
You're advocating for arbitrarily cruel punishment that is out of line with sentencing guidelines in the US and international human rights conventions more broadly.
Given that, I'm asking where you draw the line when it comes to "violence" and if you'd be satified to see significantly more people imprisoned for life.
At least in the US, far more people should be removed from society, yes. Even a brief search will turn up large numbers of rapists and murderers (for example) that are sentenced and released over and over again. This is indeed arbitrarily cruel to law-abiding citizens.
As far as it goes, I think conditions in prisons should be far nicer than they are now. In these days of videoconferencing, it needn't be very different than lockdown. I don't believe in punishment; I believe in permanent removal from society.
Arson laws were designed around the idea that fires sometimes go out of control and cause huge amounts of damage, and potentially loss of life.
Laws are also designed around intent rather than outcome. So there are harsh punishments for intending to start/spread any kind of fire, even if it looks unlikely to go out of control in this particular case.
Also, it's unlikely that she'll really get 10 years without someone being hurt in the process.
If I were to highlight excessive penalties, I'd probably point to drug crimes rather than arson. I don't think lighting fires should be a part of the protest landscape.
Not as bad as 38 years in prison for a $9 robbery.
https://www.essence.com/news/willie-simmons-life-prison-alab...
Meanwhile, Wall Street is still at large.
And funnily enough it looks like the top end of town is at it again:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wirecard-shares-slump-over-mi...
Fun fact: the Philadelphia Police Department also likes starting fires. 35 years ago, they used plastic explosives to blow up the house of the MOVE group, killing most of the people inside (including five children). Instead of putting out the fires, the city allowed a good chunk of the predominantly black working class neighborhood to burn to the ground. The city did get sued in 2005 in a civil trial for burning down the houses, but no one from the city government has been criminally charged for the attack. That seems like the kind of terrorist act that the FBI would investigate, but I guess they have different priorities.
Wow, this sounds horrible.can you elaborate on what you mean by "allowed" it to burn down?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing
Specifically - "Although firefighters had earlier drenched the building prior to the bombing, after the fire broke out, officials said they feared that MOVE would shoot at the firefighters, so held them back.
Goode later testified at a 1996 trial that he had ordered the fire to be put out after the bunker had burned. Sambor said he received the order, but the fire commissioner testified that he did not receive the order. Ramona Africa, one of the two MOVE survivors from the house, said that police fired at those trying to escape"
From the links, 60 neighboring homes burned down from it, no fire department presence. So...regardless of the reason, "the fire was allowed to burn".
Wow, that's insane
How is that related? Are you justifying violence?
Context for why someone would want to burn a police car?
That event happened 35 years ago.
yet
Even that was in 2005. Any charges have expiration, and once exonerated can not be brought up again.
Much changes over 15 years.
There isn't a statute of limitations on murder in PA.
The front page has an article about a processor from 42 years ago. What's your point?
That you can't estimate how current processors will match your expectations based on how 42 years ago processor matched expectations of people living at the time.
If 42 years ago Intel sold a processor that burned my house down, I might not be the biggest fan of Intel even 42 years later. This isn't about expectations, it's about reputation. Not everyone has a goldfish memory.
MacBooks and Samsung phones had fire problems just a few years ago. So you seem to be wrong.
Just saying, certain people are very very happy to point out the violence of the oppressed, yet throw a hissy fit when people point out the violence of the oppressor.
Justifying is not pointing out.
No, just trying to highlight the double standard when it comes to how law enforcement are treated compared to everyone else.
I also wouldn't classify destroying the car of a government organization as violence. It's destruction, but fairly mild compared to burning people's homes to the ground. And even then, I wouldn't think to compare property damage to actual violence, like murder.
To note another interesting double standard, its interesting how different people view say, the Waco situation than this.
From Wikipedia article:
Seems like the bombing was perhaps not an unreasonable response? I mean, in this case an armed militia fortified itself in a bunker-like property and fired at the police. What were they expecting?
Yes, it’s telling that even mentioning the full context will upset people. Hence your downvotes. People really want to believe that the Philly PD was firebombing black neighborhoods for fun.
Well, consider the language being used:
This language is so evasive that it could accurately describe "MOVE shot at police once with a muzzle-loader, and police returned fire with semi-automatic and automatic weapons."
Words like "compound" and "bunker" don't have a particular meaning either--they are just there to sound cult-y and scary.
If this is actually a justified situation, why not tell the story straight? Why not say that MOVE used semi-automatic and automatic weapons if that's what happened?
Yep, definitely the important details are not present in this picture. However, firing even one shot at the police who's trying to arrest you justifies use of whatever force necessary to subdue the attacker.
5 children were killed by police.
61 homes were burned--the vast majority of these homes were neighbors who had nothing to do with MOVE.
Were either of these things "necessary to subdue the attacker"?
Move was a group who's guidelines looked like cult material and who's members had a lot of criminal convictions. A cop got shot up and the mayor asked them to disband.
Keep in mind, this is a country where you are innocent until prooven guily. The cops don't get to legally go form hit squads and go shooting people they don't like. This isn't the 1800's.
I can certainly agree overwhelming force is not in general a good answer because it emphasizes and strengthens the belief the police are not to be trusted. Would you come out of a building someone was actively firing into? Surrounding the compound at Waco and firing into it was just dumb when dealing with a doomsday cult because it's just going to reinforce their beliefs.
The correct way to look at this tragedy is many police officers were previously soldiers, so keep in mind when they see a cult, their mindset is to kill or capture or dispense with extreme force and what you get is a whole lot of stupidity as compromise.
This is precisely why black bloc tactics [1] are employed: cover tattoos, wear generic clothes and everybody looks basically the same. I'm sure it's far less effective today but avoiding this kind of thing was the original point.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc
Well we do want arsonists brought to justice, don't we?
Sure, but let's prioritize murder and aggravated assault before property crime.
how much property crime is worth prosecuting? it's not as if we can't do it all.
These protests started over a spate of unprosecuted murders, so it does seem we are having trouble doing it all.
Arson is not generally considered a property crime, because it is a major threat to public safety.
The Swedish word for arson is even "mordbrand", literally "murder fire".
That’s pretty metal.
Well, when we discuss arson in the abstract, that will be a relevant thing to bring up, but we're not talking about how arson is generally considered, we're talking about how this arson should be considered. This arson was the burning of two police cars which didn't spread and clearly wasn't intended to.
Compare to when arsonists burned down 61 West Philadelphia homes, killing 5 children. That's a threat to public safety, but the arsonists were never charged, because the arsonists were police. That's a threat to public safety.
Compare to systemic racism, repeated kidnapping and harassment, and over and over again, cops straight-up murdering black people. That's a threat to public safety.
Let's be clear here, you aren't concerned about justice or removing threats to public safety if your biggest concern here is the torching of two unoccupied police cars.
I love how the msm feels the need to specify that the protests that resulted in Police cars bring burned, stores bring looted and cops being shot were "peaceful protests" up until the incident. Imagine if they talked about the Charlottesville rally as largely peaceful until the deadly car attack.
I dunno; I feel like there's something about white supremacy, fascism, and literal nazism, that maybe precludes calling it "peaceful".
And how many Walmarts were looted? Why is the leftist mob immune to criticism even when they are violent?
That sounds sort of like the reverse-halo effect fallacy. Believe it or not terrible people don't necessarily do terrible things every time they do somethings. For example, Fidel Castro caused Cuba to have one of the highest literacy rates in the world. That is true no matter how many people he imprisoned, tortured or killed. Similarly people can peacefully protest even if they are white supremacy, fascism, or _neo_ nazis (pet peeve of mine, but I wouldn't call someone a literal nazi unless they were literally a member of the National Socialist German Workers' Party between 1920 and 1945).
It’s sort of implied nowadays, few are alive who were. But in the 80s I was pretty annoyed when people were described as neonazis when in fact they were of the old guard.
When people are wearing swastikas on their arm and giving Hitler salutes, I'ma call them a literal nazi regardless of it no longer being 1945.
I'm also not really concerned what 'positives' their agenda might include, given the violence that is explicitly part of the ideology they are identifying with.
Even for those who aren't literally wearing symbols of the Nazi party, white supremacy isn't a non-violent ideology. It fundamentally seeks to supress, remove, or otherwise contain non-whites. Putting non-whites in camps is still violent. Expelling them from the country they were born into and lived in their entire lives is still violent. Etc. And if there's a "nice" white supremacist, who is "well, I think whites are better, but you know, live and let live, right?" I'm pretty sure they're not out marching.
I see we have abandoned the facade of neutrality. The right to protest is the same regardless of your cause, as is the duty to remain peaceable.
I didn't say anything about the right to protest. I said a protest isn't peaceful when the protest is literally people saying "We hate (group)". You can't have an ideology of hatred that is also an ideology of peace.
The peacefulness of a protest has nothing to do with the political message. Not every concept is about your political bottom line. Friend and foe alike can engage in peaceful and violent protests.
A "violent protest" is a clear concept that means something. You can very easily imagine a peaceful protester with the most awful things written on their sign. And you can imagine the most violent rioters being inspired by the greatest message.
A sign with "Kill All The Jews" is a violent protest, even if they're doing nothing but standing there. Advocating violence is not peaceful, even if the individual is only saying it.
Perhaps because Nazism and white supremacy are inherently violent ideologies which revolve around openly wish to oppress and murder people in the name of racial supremacy, whereas BLM, whilst violent, is about stoppping violence towards black people?
There's no way the evidence listed is sufficient to pursue prosecution. A peace tattoo and an etsy t-shirt? I certainly wouldn't allow that to go to trial if I were on a grand jury.
She'll likely plead out, so we'll never know what they actually have on her.
Not just any peace tattoo, but a particular peace tattoo. A particular color, position, size, etc. There are plenty of bits of information encoded in such a thing, I think you're understating it a bit.
That particular evidence leads to a very small number of individuals. From there it's probably trivial to figure out from other records (phone, credit card, etc.) and testimonies if the person they have was the one shown on one of the 1829291 pictures posted on social media.
Seems like these two links might be relevant. The case [0] and the charge [1]
[0] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17253155/united-states-...
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/844
Massage therapist lol. Bet she has a PHD too.
Part of me wants to argue if this is even newsworthy. "Person arrested for arson was identified through investigation of publicly available information" is not a novel headline, but the moment you mention that the information was online is the moment Jo Public thinks the police hacked the internet. People in this thread have already mentioned Open Source INTelligence, or OSINT, so I don't think I need to say that Google search is not the same as cracking accounts.