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That seems like it's only data that's self reported by the agencies themselves, I suspect the real number is much, much higher.
The article also mentions this is only one of many databases, and the only one that has self-reporting requirements for abuse.
Well it's no shock that the top of the list of offenders is the LA Sheriff Dept, they're a nightmare of abuse at pretty much every level.
It appears the LASD is not just at the top of the list, but essentially is the list: they account for 93% of the violations.
Which, as you point out, is not surprising. The LASD is enough of a mess that I've heard other nearby police departments complain about them, not to mention their history of gangs, corruption, and conflicts with the Board of Supervisors and FBI.
In California it's generally the county sheriff who issues carry permits. Apparently sometime in the past few years municipal police were also given the authority to do this, but for decades I believe it was just the sheriff. And it was discretionary and highly political--urban sheriff's departments were invariably, "no", unless you were a high profile figure, whereas rural sheriff's departments were typically an easy, "yes", unless they had a reason (good or bad) not to. And sometimes there were jurisdictional fights where rural sheriff's departments would bend the rules and issue permits to residents of urban counties, (arguably) sometimes just to spite the cities. Like most jurisdictions in the US, sheriffs are an elected position, and very often crudely politicized, especially in states like California with strong urban/rural partisanship.
In any event, it's likely most Californians still go straight to the sheriff's department when seeking a permit.
I haven't been to a state where there isn't strong urban/rural partisanship. Is that what Rhode Island is like?
Historically (as in past 100-150 years), the Deep South and West, though today probably only states like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, etc. Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia now have rural/urban divides that are stronger (more predictive) than, e.g., racial and class divides. Historically the West was rather homogenous politically, relatively speaking, but that's rapidly receding from memory. Though if you squint both Democratic and Republican West Coast politicians in some state (e.g. governor) and national offices (senator), but definitely not local offices, tend to still be a little more centrist than you'd expect as compared to their counterparts back east.
Guess there’s no Delete Act for state databases
So the story is that California isn't holding up their end of the police state? Compared to the FBI they're hardly trying.
I'm cool with this. The FBI purged my city and state of rampant corruption and they remove heinous violent criminals from the street every day, often before they can commit any other crimes. Most of the people who work there are tireless and thankless servants.
And to all the haters, let's see how you feel when your daughter is abducted and taken over state lines or your local law enforcement becomes corrupt and starts working with criminals. The FBI showing up is a great feeling.
I have no ball in this game, as I am non-US. but sounds like the same can be said. Just wait until the FBI starts harassing your family outside their lawful jurisdiction. Or an FBI agent abusing their family. But at least your children will be safe from the dangerous streets...
They get their guy at all costs and will trample innocent people to do it. Many times, even often and predictably, they will extort oranipulate people into putting themselves in harms way to obtain their objectives. I didn't say the FBI is all unicorns and rainbows.
I promise bad things still happen in your city. Do you think drugs stop getting sold when a dealer is picked up? Seems fairly naïve...
Other than their federal jurisdiction, what separates them, structurally, from any other flawed LEA and makes then incorruptible? (And, where the hell do you live?)
Well, if it’s any comfort, the person most likely by far to abduct your daughter is you. Stranger abduction is exceedingly rare.
Struggling to perceive your thought process here. Did you really think you were making an effective point here?
Plenty of law enforcement agencies aren’t too different from criminal organizations as-is.
LA Sheriff in particular is known to have several criminal gangs within their ranks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
That's all nice until they finish the job and start looking for ways to stay employed.
Just chiming in to say I am incredibly sympathetic to this line of thinking, even though I am ultimately pro-privacy in spite of the real costs you talk about
Everyone is sympathetic to that line of thinking. Most, here at least, have the brain cells to rub together to recognize that the costs of civil rights' absence are greater than the costs incurred by those rights.
What was Biden looking for?
"Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits"
Well that was a fuck-up! Not only is Los Angeles politically vulnerable right now, LASD went after gun owners. Bipartisan hell in 3, 2, 1...
What say you, Rob Bonta?
He will likely invoke the "but guns" exception to all California policies and ignore it.
7,000 times out of how many accesses?
7,636?
10 quadrillion?
Does California law enforcement's rate of misuse of information systems exceed, equal, or fall short of my own misuse (usually unintentional, due to lack of clear policy/guidance) of various information systems?
I don't think it matters.
Of course it does. It doesn't absolve anything if the rate is low. But the frequency is absolutely meaningful.
Isn’t it a little like Ted Bundy pointing out he hasn’t murdered the vast majority of Americans, though?
At the very least, I wonder how many officers are responsible for the violations. 7000? 1? LASD only has 18k employees.
No. It's like tracking the homicide rate. The rate going down or being low doesn't mean murder is fine.
You expect there to be no murders.
I expect murders to be low, and for murderers to be punished.
I also expect the number of murderers in the police force to be only slightly better than that of the rest of society. There are background checks, but there are also other factors that may increase the rate, regardless: I expect from them what I expect from everyone.
So-- 7,000 murders per year.
For Iceland that's high. I think they had 3 last year.
For the United States, that's fucking fantastic! I wish we had 7,000 murders per year! If we had 3 that would be awesome but I'm not delusional.
It's all about the wider context.
Especially in this case, 6,800 of the misuses were from the LA sheriff's department doing background checks for gun permits so that's almost certainly a policy and procedure problem that has been fixed.
So that leaves around 200 cases.
Is that good? No.
But how bad is it? 200 misuses out of ten quadrillion accesses is pretty not bad, if you ask me. edit: and that's a sign that things are going well because I am not dumb enough to expect 0 misuses of anything by any group of individuals. I expect misuses to be low and for misuse to be punished.
Yes, the top-line number doesn't tell you much. Additional details matter: Was it one department or endemic? It appears mostly related to one large Sherrif department:
"""The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) sheriff’s department’s 6,789 abuses made up a majority of the record 7,275 violations across California that were reported to the state Department of Justice (CADOJ) in 2023 regarding the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS). """
Does misuse of the databases lead to tangible consequences? Maybe yes: "Across California between 2019 and 2023, there have been:
"" 761 investigations of CLETS misuse, resulting in findings of at least 7,635 individual violations of the system’s rules 55 officer suspensions, 50 resignations, and 42 firings related to CLETS misuse six misdemeanor convictions and one felony conviction related to CLETS misuse ""
So for the concealed carry there is a background check involved, but it has to be done in a certain way, and the police instead were being more "thorough" and were digging through more databases than they were supposed to? I guess they do have access to those databases, but are only supposed to check them if they suspect a crime was committed.
What's the personal motivation there? It seems like they were going out of their way to be more "thorough", wouldn't it save them time and grief not to check more than needed. Is some higher political figure asking them to be more "thorough". I don't quite get the whole picture. Of course, they broke the law, but just wondering about their motive.
It is an ideologically driven belief that "dirty civilians" don't deserve firearms, and any reason to deny them access should be used.
This is not about the right to have firearms, but the right to carry them concealed, which is not exactly the same.
To "bear" means to carry. "You may have this firearm but you cannot carry it in a manner which is fit for purpose anywhere other than your own private property" is a pretty tough sell to anyone who believes in the second amendment.
But that would comport with the 2nd's militia concept: guns owned and kept for militia use in times of emergency, not everyday carry.
I'm happy to get into a 2A debate (as funny as it sounds it is a hobby of mine!) but it seems like a tangent for this thread specifically. I'll just say that this definition of "militia" is completely incorrect in the historical context in which it was written. The next thing you'll say is that "well-regulated" means regulated by the government which is also 100% incorrect.
Militia is the people - it's everyone, individually. Well-regulated means well-functioning, fit for purpose. In order for individual people to be fit for militia/defensive service, they cannot be deprived of their right to make, purchase, own, use, and/or carry firearms.
My favorite quote related to this:
"I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people." - George Mason, address to Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788
That's also true for the definition of arms.
You can define "militia" as "all the of-age white males" if we get to define "arms" as "muskets". Fair trade!
I'm happy to debate or discuss this in good faith but this isn't a good faith argument.
"Arms" meant (means) state-of-the-art, military-level hardware. The muskets that civilians had in their homes were as good or better than what you'd be issued by the burgeoning American military, to the extent that you were issue anything and weren't just expected to bring your own. Throughout all of American history, perhaps with the exception of nuclear arms and vehicles like tanks and submarines, firearms research and development has occurred in private industry and made its way into the military later.
Ah yes, the argument that was explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court as "bordering on the frivolous."
I suppose the First Amendment is also limited to quill pens, parchment, and yelling to passersby from a literal soapbox?
George Mason was an anti-federalist arguing his opposition to the Constitution. When he says "They consist now of the whole people" he is referring to the present moment under the Articles of Confederation. He goes on to argue his opposition to the constitution, saying:
He very clearly believed that the federal government under the Constitution would have the power to determine who did and did not belong to the Militia which is one of many reasons he voted against ratification. He also clearly believes that the federal government has the task of regulating it given the talk of punishments and fines, though he seems fine with that as long as they are reasonable. That it was ratified in that form makes your referenced quote an argument against your reading of the second amendment.
That particular quote does not really support the presumption here. In that debate, as with most ratifying debates around the constitution and the bill of rights, the concern is that the federal government not usurp the ability of states to arm their militias.
That quote in context [1] clearly is about who the members of the militia are drawn from, not the implicit militia-ness of all citizens. He even states this explicitly later in the same argument: "Under the present government, all ranks of people are subject to militia duty".
In the end, they wrote what they wrote and they ratified what they ratified -- "the right of the people" and not the right of the "several states" or the "militia of the several states" as is used elsewhere in the document. So it's a right of the people, period, and "keep and bear" has a plain meaning (Scalia wrote something to the effect of "you cannot interpret 'he filled and kicked the bucket' to mean 'he filled the bucket and died').
Some state constitutions (contemporaneous and known to the authors of the constitution) carved out an explicit self-defense or individual right to arms, but this language was not encoded into the second amendment.
Whenever I encounter quotes from the constitutional ratification debates that purport to claim an individual right to keep and bear arms, on closer inspection in context, they are arguing about states vs. federal authority, not an individual right. If you choose to respond by offering other supporting quotes, please give a link to the full context and due consideration of it, because I have yet to see an actual quote that holds up.
[1] https://constitution.org/1-Constitution/rc/rat_va_13.htm
I don't understand why if they used the words 'well-regulated militia' that so many pro-gun people argue that what _they actually meant_ was "any random person". They had words for that and they chose the words 'well-regulated militia'.
Regulated like pressure regulator, not regulated like the sort government bureaucracy HN idolizes. The latter meaning came later.
Basically the same situation as when you read "gay" in a historical context.
Well regulated as in "well equipped". A militia wouldn't be worth much with pikes and spoons. Particularly the glorious founders antipathy for a standing army.
I don't like guns, but I think the masses right to own arms is more constitutional than the standing army.
If you're interpreting Shakespeare you need to know not only the definitions of the words used but the context in which they were used. In the context of the mid/late 18th century, "regulated" typically meant functioning, working, fit-for-purpose, and at the risk of gross over-simplification, "good." A good militia is required for the security of the free (as opposed to authoritarian) state.
The bill of rights is a list of things the federal government cannot do (and through case law, individual states). It is entirely restrictions on the government, not restrictions on citizens. It's a stretch to assume that the one word "regulated" in 2A actually mean restrictions on citizens when no other word in the first ten amendments restricts any citizens' rights.
The 2nd amendment is now written in the blood of your schoolchildren. Responsible gun ownership works, see most of Europe.
Except that is not the definition of the Second Amendment according to US Supreme Court case law.
So can we safely assume that in 2007 you were steadfastly in support of the constitutionality of regulating weapons that fall outside of reasonable use in a Militia as in US v. Miller? Or does your complete and total deference to case law only go in one direction?
Per Miller:
If you point to Miller, it becomes clear that military weapons were more acceptable for personal ownership under their interpretation of the 2A than a sawed-off shotgun, which was considered only useful for crimes when the NFA was passed (similar to other "concealable" arms). Consequently, the common refrain that "well-regulated militia" now implies something like the National Guard, would thus also imply that in fact it's more reasonable to privately own a tank or fighter jet than a suppressor.
I don't think that most anti-2A advocates really understand that our current legislative limits on gun ownership are about as restrictive as they can be. Amend the 2A if you like (and it probably should be, even if only for clarity), but don't try to amend history.
There is no textual interpretation of the 2A that would not allow for private firearm ownership. Every state constitution that directly preceded the Federal US constitution had a section that said some variation of:
That specific quote came from Pennsylvania's constitution (Article 13), which was a Quaker colony at the time, that was much less friendly to firearms than other states, but even they explicitly spelled out the right to arms for personal defense. Heller (2008) reaffirmed this. That we have the largest standing army on Earth now would be horrifying to the founders, because they knew exactly the kind of Imperialism and Authoritarianism that follows, as opposed to a muster-able militia.
As Huey Newton noted: "Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment."
Yes, absolutely. I don't think that, for instance, anyone should own chemical weapons, or weapons like cluster munitions. Generally, any weapon that you would not deploy defensively in a conflict should not be in the hands of a defensive force (the citizenry/ militia). I don't think anyone should have nukes, period, but that's a different discussion.
These two threads have many sources showing the individual right was not the prevailing understanding, but that it was taken for granted.
https://x.com/2aHistory/status/1712209761171612093 https://x.com/MorosKostas/status/1645290263299117056
You're not wrong but with all the other laws surrounding firearms in public and in vehicles not being able to have a concealed carry permit is a huge practical impediment to exercising one's rights.
Probably also Wilhoit's law some too "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." So not only do some people not get the right to own a gun effectively, but specifically certainly kinds of people arbitrarily.
Yeah I would be very interested in the demographic makeup of those people who were checked in this database compared to those who weren't. Maybe cross-referenced with who accepted/reviewed/received their application.
Maybe nothing but perhaps very interesting.
There has been documented corruption and abuse in basically every state that uses a "may-issue" firearms permit scheme that allows official "discretion" about "suitability," as opposed to a "shall-issue" one where issuing a permit is mandatory to anyone who meets the qualifications.
California has been a shall-issue state since 2022, when Bruen made may-issue unconstitutional.
Theoretically all states are shall issue because of that case. In practice they just went from handing out definitive "no, you can't, because I feel like it" denials as was their discretion to soft denial via bureaucratic runaround.
I think the most likely good faith version of this is that the LACSD wants to prevent people that are bad actors from obtaining the licenses.
Where this touches on abuse are people who are not convicted of any particular criminal offense related to firearms, or people that have had negative contact with the LACSD.
So on the "positive" side this might allow them to prevent a person who they strongly believe is a gang leader but has not been convicted of any offense from obtaining a permit.
On the "negative" side this might be people like defense attorneys, anti-police activists, or private investigators who have a tendencious relationship with the police from obtaining such a permit. Or in some cases maybe even people who have simply had a negative interaction -- filing reports critical of officers, etc., who are being spitefully targetted.
The law attempts to strike a balance between the concerns and law enforcement overreach and exists for a reason.
The CLETS database LACSD used includes non-conviction records, investigative records, gang affiliations, and other data that aren’t part of the proper background check process. For example, if you were arrested but never charged, or if you’re a known gang member without any convictions, those records would be in CLETS but not in the system they’re legally supposed to use for concealed carry permits (CCPs).
State law doesn’t allow this kind of non-conviction information to be used in CCP decisions, so this was an overreach. (previously you had to be of "good moral character" and have "good cause" to get a CCP, but these have been replaced with objective criteria)
You could argue that having more information might lead to better decisions on who gets a permit, but that’s not what the law allows—and letting police pull extra data whenever they feel like it creates obvious risks of abuse.
The issue at hand is despite federal rulings forcing all states to have some level of "shall issue" concealed permits, and laws on the books, California's process has left it to county sheriffs to follow the evaluation criteria. Some, like San Bernardino, practically rubber stamp them if you pass the background checks. Others, like Ventura, Riverside, LA, etc. try their hardest to find ways to reject them - even circumventing the law to do so.
They've also tried to implement strong arm policies like "We will notify your employer you have a license" knowing most large employers in California are fairly liberal and anti-gun and might look at that negatively to try to dissuade people from even exercising the right.
Aha, that's the kind of nuance I was missing. Something just didn't add up. One would like to believe these are all just hard-working officers, going above and beyond their "call of duty" to keep the guns out of "bad citizens'" hands, but that seemed a little too naive of an idea.
And others still, like Santa Clara County, have the sheriff sell them for personal enrichment. Ah, but I should not allege falsehoods like that. They simply have those who donated to the sheriff's campaign get them at 90%+ and those who didn't at less than 10%. Once this was identified, she retired and gets to keep her multi hundred thousand dollar pension.
A $200k annual pension is worth about $3m.
CC permits and anything firearm related winds up having to do elaborate song and dance routines to avoid being unconstitutional. Searching the crappy DB that only contains stuff they're allowed to care about instead of searching the good DB that they use when they really want to find dirt on someone falls into that category.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...
As if anyone needed any more proof that LASD is just a criminal gang with a badge.
When people say "I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide" this is the exact kind of edge-case I always think about.
The problem with a lot of these massive surveillance systems is that a lot of people end up with access to them, and some of those people may not be trustworthy.
In this case, your ex-wife gets engaged to a cop and now they're abusing their access to databases to cause you harm.
(That note that "he now works for a different police department 30 miles away" is such a toxic aspect of American policing: cops who get fired for stuff like this inevitably end up in the exact same job somewhere else.)
The biggest problem with police is it's the sort of job where the more a given person wants that job, the less they should probably have it. For their sake and others.
Another huge problem is that law allows union bargaining agreements to dictate what happens to disciplinary records, that officers are allowed to resign when there are investigations happening that effectively kills them, etc. Once an investigation starts you shouldn't be allowed to resign, or at the very least the investigation should still continue and you should still be able to be punished after. Any union contract requiring the deletion/obfuscation of any disciplinary records for any reason other than clerical error or pardon should be illegal.
I don't think requires any union pressure; the department is happy to be both rid of a problem officer and not have to put it in the public record just how bad the problem officer was.
I have a friend who is a cop in Indiana (a "right to work" state), and after talking with him, I've realized that the department, as an organization, can largely be modeled as an entity that takes action to minimize its liability (individual officers are mostly shielded from civil liability, but the department is much less so). Apropos to this subject:
- They want to minimize the number of apparent past bad actors that will be revealed during discover because a lot of past bad actors could be presented as a pattern of poor hiring and/or training. Allowing officers to resign to kill an investigation is golden).
- When something bad happens and it makes it into a courtroom with sufficient evidence that it happened, they want every officer in the department to testify that the action in question is definitely not common practice and completely contrary to training. Such testimony would be greatly undermined by a subpoena that revealed several investigations finding officers to have engaged in such behavior in the past. Again anything that stops the investigation before it can find anything material could potentially save the department millions of dollars in future liability.
"the department is happy to be both rid of a problem officer and not have to put it in the public record just how bad the problem officer was."
...have you not seen the extents that LE agencies and the FOP will go to make sure these folk aren't fired? There's a reason LE have FOP cards in their wallets that include a statement to be read verbatim into a transcript for disciplinary meetings.
You have a very rose-stained perception into these things. I highly recommend you do some court watching to really understand how these systems work. These sorts of retrospective analyses of misconduct truly don't exist as deeply or as strong as you think they are.
I recommend reading: https://chicagoreader.com/news/police-misconduct-brady/ (disclaimer: I'm one of the authors)
As a US outsider (Australia) I see the Tulsi Gabbard hearing has stirred a barely tangential can of worms re: disclosure and keeping secrets.
It's national security related, Was Snowden a traitor or a whistleblower and pokes the bear on whistleblowers and duty to disclose poor and outright illegal behaviour.
Not sure if that's your beat or interest as a reporer .. but it goes to a core issue wt public institutions.
related: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard...
Transparency is indeed a large focus of mine, but it's mostly focused on local transparency and not federal.
Understandable :)
- Neither GP nor I were talking about officers being fired.
- GP was talking about a dynamic of officers resigning to avoid disciplinary actions on their record and working elsewhere.
- GP suggests this is due to union pressure.
- Indiana has much less strong police unions compared to Chicago
- My point is that there is still an incentive for departments to allow problem officers to retire before any investigation can confirm allegations of wrongdoing.
- I am more than willing to believe that lots of wrongdoing is enabled by the actions of unions, I just think that a policy allowing problem officers to resign with a clean record rather than be investigated is not solely motivated by union pressure.
You're not talking about officers being fired because it doesn't happen very often :). Your lens is from the now-world where, in any other job, you would be fired 100 times over for actions done by police on a routine basis. It's firing-adjacent, yeah?
Police unions are not really unions in the traditional sense and wield alot of influence because of the nature of the job. But they aren’t a boogeyman.
All politics is local, and the creative expression of discretion is a source of power for many different stakeholders.
The reality is that giving a mulligan to some jackass cop who fucks up has benefits to many stakeholders. Investigations involve looking at things, and sometimes you see things when you bother to look.
This type of behavior is typical in close groups of people with power… see corporate boards, Catholic Church, etc.
Thanks; that paragraph sums up a lot of what I was trying to say.
Why? Most police spend their time keeping the peace and catching bad guys. That seems an intrinsically rewarding activity. No need to posit any character flaw to explain why someone would want to do that. Maybe you are thinking “power over other people” is the issue, but I think most cops see that as a necessary tool rather than the chief reward.
Could have fooled me!
I'm more worried about the Police than any other class of criminals.
I think that is a pretty privileged position. You might feel different if there were homicides and armed burglaries in your neighborhood
Personally, I’m not so sure. That’s not to say I welcome the burglars and murderers but it would be comedy to say, “At least it can’t get any worse,” and then the police show up.
The problem with this view is that there are a lot of high profile cases that are examples of people abusing their power.
I am happy to believe that “most cops” see it that way.
I am less familiar with those police officers supporting reforms that would either expose or suppress the bad behavior of the minority.
This is not the problem.
The problem is a higher portion of people who just want to power trip apply to these positions, even if they are not the majority of the police force. Basically, it is the dream job for a bully.
It seems there should be severe penalties for "power tripping" (aka misuse of authority and databases for special purposes); slap of the wrist fine, suspended paychecks and internal investigations will not deter this group of people. I don't see how these crimes are considered less than drug dealing.
Specifically the punishment should include mandatory jail time and permanent ban from jobs where they have any form of authority over others including management, teaching, and all government positions.
I wonder if the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be used against them in these cases. I'm not a law expert, but it seems to be used for similar "unauthorized access" cases.
For that, the country would need DAs who are willing to prosecute criminals.
Excerpting power over others is intrinsically rewarding too, so I'm not sure why we should only expect the pure motivation.
There are countless videos demonstrating that some cops are power tripping. Some guy doesn't react quickly enough to a request and they get floored brutally while the cop screams at him: "Don't you dare f** with me or I'll turn you into a puddle you a*h**! Do you understand me! I said do you understand me!"
You might argue that hey, he has adrenaline flowing and so maybe he was a bit over the line. But they are professionals supposedly trained in effective deescalation techniques. Those techniques aren't just because it is humane, it is because it results in better outcomes. But the ego trippers put all that aside because they enjoy being the punisher.
Both of my grandfathers (and an uncle and a brother in law) were career cops. One of my grandfathers said: the power given to you as a cop either brings out the best in you or the worst.
Watch this for one of the most vivid illustrations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OflGwyWcft8
Yup. That cop was not only not punished, he said he has PTSD as a result. He retired young with benefits.
not just the same job, likely a cash transfer bonus. get caught doing bad shit, and get a new boat for next season.
Of course, this applies mass data collection by private entities too [1], and entities seeking to cross-reference commercially-available data sources together – even governments (thanks, Palantir!). There are plenty of ways to harass people without misusing your privileges as law enforcement.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/13/uber-empl...
Ex Palantir here: Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations. The tools don't collect data. It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case. When I was at Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.
I'm not advocating for the company, but the statement in the comment is shallow. I was a̶b̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ assaulted while employed there, which is why I left, but my comment stands.
You weren't abused. You were just talked to in a way that caused an elevated emotional response.
That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument. An I am a gun rights advocate yet am against Palantir's product usage on US citizens. Good food for thought.
“You weren’t murdered, you were just interacted with in a way that caused cardiac arrest”
Typical cop press brief
The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? If you had perfect enforcement then it would obviously be the latter, because you'd arrest the murderers without harassing people who buy guns for hunting or self defense etc.
But law enforcement isn't perfect, so there is going to be some spillover where some murderers wouldn't have been caught. Then you have to get into debatable questions like, if it was illegal for them to buy a gun, would they have just bought a gun illegally, or used some other kind of weapon? If there are a lot of murders happening, how many of them could be prevented by using more resources to catch them or e.g. legalizing drugs to reduce gang activity, without banning guns? The pro-gun argument is that the positives outweigh the negatives and/or we're better off doing the other things to prevent murders instead.
You can ask similar questions about Palantir and mass surveillance, but that doesn't mean you have to come to the same conclusion, because it has different positives and negatives and ability to be mitigated if you do it.
In particular, preventing abuses by governments is much harder because you'd be relying on the government to prosecute itself, which is notoriously ineffective, especially with programs that are insulated from public accountability through secrecy. Meanwhile the negatives are much more dangerous because of the speed, scale and severity at which an already-existent mass surveillance system can be converted into a tool of mass oppression when there is a change in administrations. And the positives are muted because the legitimate goals of mass surveillance can also be achieved -- often at lower expense, given how much it costs to sift through a firehose of >99% false positives and innocent behavior -- using traditional targeted investigative methods.
I disagree with your framing. The bill of rights specifically guarantees both the right to bear arms and the right to not be unreasonably searched.
That's because the bill of rights enumerates some of the rights people have against the government rather than the other way around. But that doesn't really get you out of it
Suppose you have a private mass surveillance system, where people "voluntarily" (i.e. because the market is consolidated and every company is doing it) give up their data to a private company that keeps a big database. Then the company "voluntarily" informs on citizens to the government (because the company wants to be on the government's good side), or imposes penalties for crimethink all on its own. Is that okay then? Should we be satisfied with it because it's not the government? Nope. Still a big problem.
The reason isn't that it's the government, it's that it's a bad trade off.
Suppose you're the "good guys" and trying to catch terrorists. There are 330 million people and 50 terrorists. If you have a mass surveillance system with only a 0.1% false positive rate, the system is totally useless. You have 330,000 false positives and investigating all those dead ends would be a huge waste of resources that would be better spent using traditional investigative methods on traditional leads.
Now suppose you're the bad guys trying to catch resistance fighters, with the same mass surveillance system. 0.1% false positive rate? Okay, round up the 330,000 people and execute them all without trial. Way cheaper than having to sift through them. Very effective system when you don't have to care about that guilt or innocence stuff.
And that's what makes the system so dangerous. It's only useful in proportion to how little you care about innocent people, and the extent to which an entity does is a thing that can change over time, so it's massively dangerous to leave a system like that sitting around without vigorous efforts to dismantle it.
I think I agree with your message, even if I don't, I appreciate you addressing the topic. But what it made me realize is this: there is no Palantir that civilians can purchase that will "aggregate data" of the police that the public can meddle through. That is the core difference, and explains why I feel the way I do. Thank you.
I agree in the sense that it is directly the fault of the people doing the surveillance but this sounds like "guns dont kill people, people kill people..." which is true semantically, but not in spirit.
Palantir for example works directly with the government on State and Federal levels, and know damn well what they are doing, what their tools are used for, and answer directly to the requests of the government in regards to contracted work (all at the cost of the taxpayer mind you). These are mass surveillance tools, they have one purpose.
I also don't think its insignificant to recognize the backroom deals here that have created this vicious cycle of:
working as a govt official and giving kickbacks and heavily inflated contracts to contractors, and forming laws favorable to those contractors -> then getting a consulting job at those same defense contractors or lobbying groups -> and then moving back into politics
we can't just strip away the context here, a database has a purpose, what purpose does mass surveillance tools have? I'd argue that there is no proper use case for these tools against Americans, other than authoritarianism.
Sure, if PostgreSQL were specifically selling their tools to organizations known to commit those sort of abuses.
This is exactly what Oracle does.
Oracle and Larry Ellison specifically are routinely called the devil incarnate though, so they're not exactly getting a break here.
Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. So, no, Palantir does not get to claim some kind of neutrality here. It is a company knowingly enabling mass government surveillance and the associated abuses for the sake of profit.
The name of the company itself is another dead giveaway.
Palantir (in tolkien lore) isn't evil itself - it's only used for evil in the hands of those who wield it.
Mass scale surveillance wasn't practical or affordable until Linux HPC and OSS. The whole community is enabling.
Well, ring me up when "Linux HPC" and "OSS" becomes a majority-government contractor, and I'll switch to rack Mac Pros.
Your premise is that absent of Palantir there would be no tooling. Someone is going to do it and it might as well be Peter Thiel & co because they're already doing all the other data surveillance.
You are going to die someday, right? How close do you have to be to deaths door for it to be morally okay for me to smother you with a pillow[1]? It was going to happen anyway, why would it matter that I did it?
1. Or carbon monoxide mask, if the distress of asphyxiation is throwing you off the from point I'm trying to make
"Someone else will just do this thing anyway, so I might as well do it" is a fairly weak excuse. I doubt it would hold up as a defense of a crime.
You can justify anything after the fact with this reasoning.
"If I don't, someone else will" can be said about pretty much anything, it is not an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card.
No, my premise is that whoever is doing it bears full moral responsibility for it, unless they're literally forced into it.
"We just make and sell bone saws, it's not us that murder journalists by dismembering them while they're still alive. I mean, sure, our only customers are Saudi military and intelligence forces, but how could we possibly predict they'd misuse the tools we make?"
bone saws can't cut flesh fyi
We don't know because we're not in the government to be best buds with Crown Prince Bonesaw
Which is why we’ve partnered with CleaverCo, to synergistically deliver high-performance vertically integrated scalable dismemberment solutions for the enterprise and beyond.
The idea that a saw with a finely serrated edge couldn't cut a steak in half might be a little too far out there for me.
Have you ever seen a cast saw in action? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx1AiQdMQro
Some bone saws may have that sort of action, but not all of them do.
I appreciate your comment, and it takes courage to post an unpopular opinion, but I'm not convinced about the analogy - Is Palantir used for myriad varied and lovely other cases? Or is it less like Postgres and more like napalm and ICBMs in that sure, it takes a human being to use it for its very much intended purpose?
Potato potato. Palantir explicitly provides tools for data analysis and operations for government and enforcement agencies. Postgres is a database used for virtually anything that needs a database. The two aren't the same.
For the record - Palantir isn't 100% culpable of a government resource abusing its capabilities, but it sure unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities that were either too expensive or too difficult to do previously (for example, storing records in an RDMS).
ACLs require humans to configure them. Uber also has a robust ACL. It doesn't stop someone in the org from using and abusing its God-mode.
What I don’t like about this kind of “moral” analysis is you are basically reacting to negative branding. do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? I don’t think you do, it’s just they may not have the same “bad guy” labels.
Actually there are us who would consider what impacts our employers have. E.g. I avoid working for adtech, and sure as hell would not want to work for a company providing government surveillance software.
You’re telling me bad guy labels (bad image for you), not impact. You're personifying on organization.
For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. Your job at the children’s charity could be scamming old ladies.
This only happens because companies need to adhere to regulations, not because they're doing it out of respect for people.
And by simply not working in adtech, I don't need to go through some mental gymnastics to justify what I spend 40 hours a week building. The beauty of being a programmer is there's a bunch of work out there that doesn't involve crappifying the internet.
On the other hand, if everybody all collectively agreed not to work on adtech, there would be no adtech (or adtech companies). Our decisions don't exist in a vacuum with everyone else's choices being static.
Yes, absolutely. I think it's very common for people to make ethical decisions in how they make their money and how they spend their money.
That’s not what I said. Do you actually know the impact? Or do you just know what labels they have?
We don't know how many victims there were of the Nazi atrocities, but I feel pretty confident going by what you could call their qualitative, "labels." In fact, I don't think the true casualty numbers are known for most wars and genocides. Utilitarian calculations are limited to situations with controlled conditions and scientific openness, like when charities try to keep track of their cost effectiveness.
Of course not, we all operate in uncertainty. We can try to make ethical decisions even while quantified ethics are an unsolved problem.
I am not. Palantir not only brands themselves as providing data analysis for governments but they also actually sell those tools too.
What is the impact of that relative to the other products and commerce you participate in? What would happen if Palantir didn’t exist?
Do you call your gas company to make sure they didn’t buy from OPEC?
"Oh, you're taking a stand on one thing? Explain why you don't take a stand on everything!"
The impact is exactly what is pointed out in the article - someone in the local police department could use it against me.
No, because that doesn't affect me.
See, you keep clinging to some morality claim, and I am explicitly not. I am saying that there is potentially a direct impact on abuse against me personally.
This is such a dodge, whataboutism at its finest. “You have a moral critique of a thing? Well that’s weird because you clearly don’t have a detailed moral analysis of literally everything else you do in life, therefore this critique is just because of negative branding”.
“Moral” in quotes is a tell, too. You’re arguing that morality is illegitimate unless someone has done a full “utilitarian” breakdown of everything they do in their lives. And of course you will only accept that breakdown if you deem it sufficient.
No. I’m arguing that morality is determined by what you do (help or harm), not what industry your employer is in and how the media perceives that market segment.
This shallow label analysis (oil bad, palantir bad, non profit good) is not “morality”, it’s politics.
Most people espouse a utilitarian ethics, but rely on media and social cues rather than harm to determine their choices.
If your job is to pour barrels of oil into the ocean, I think that’s worth evaluating. If your job is to do accounting for the oil company, I’m not sure you’re causing harm relative to other accounting employment.
It’s also valid to decide image is important to you, but don’t tell me it’s because you are a Good Samaritan.
This is like saying guns are just a tool and not weapons designed to kill people.
Homer: "Marge, a gun is just a tool! Like a harpoon, or a butcher knife or ... an alligator."
In the Soviet Union, the NKVD had to employ prisoner laborers known as "Zeks" to design and engineer their surveillance equipment. They were motivated to betray others by the thread of a transfer to mines in Siberia that were effectively death camps. This story is told in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, the prison for engineers being the metaphorical first circle of hell.
In the US we just use people who didn't think about it too deeply.
The tools don't collect data, but without the tool, the data is almost useless, as it takes a lot of effort to get anywhere.
If I had to choose to be surveilled 24/7, but my data stuck, unlabeled in there, or 20% of my actions randomly sampled, but fed to a tool that can interpret it, I choose the first, hands down
Reminds me of this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/13/uber-empl...
Also reminds me of Amazon being sued for giving employees access to Ring data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/08/ring-ha...
I don't disagree on the principle you're advocating for here, but this example isn't about massive surveillance systems. CLETS seems to aggregate various databases police already had access to, probably some of which include data that ideally we wouldn't collect at all, but vehicle registration has to be stored somewhere and cops always have and always will have access to that.
Yeah. In my opinion we should replace most of these cops with traffic cameras which don't do this kind of crap
The other factor is that police have near blanket immunity to violate any of our rights, whether that be privacy, using the power of the state to harass individuals, and even killing or maiming people. Then the worst consequence they face is a light slap on the wrist, paid vacation and then a transfer to another Police department. Police only serve one purpose, and that is... well if you know, you know. They have a mass surveillance state in their hands, blanket immunity, and no oversight or checks and balances. People should at the very least recognize this fact.
On top of that I get super frustrated when people want to do austerity measures like cutting funding to libraries, cancer research, public health etc... but refuse to even acknowledge that the police takes up the majority of a states public funding by orders of magnitude, and often receive "surplus" military weaponry.
If anyone actually cared about govt spending, it would be extremely clear that military and police funding would come first and foremost. The reality is that these two things are heavily intertwined, and the ways in which they are corrupt are the same... but one should ask themselves why does the US police force need to be more powerful than nearly every countries military? Who is it that they are fighting and who are they fighting for?
Well, either you pay for healthcare (especially mental health care) and social security programs such as affordable housing... or you'll pay police to deal with the fallout.
Unfortunately, unlike in Europe, "government handouts" for the poor aren't something to score political points with, but authoritarian police is...
The US does not spend extravagantly on police services. Expenditures on police were $240B in 2024 [1], or a little over 3/4s of a percent of GDP. This is actually a little less than the EU average of 0.9% [2]. The US spends a lot in absolute terms because it's a big country and a rich country where you have to pay people working in service jobs a lot.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G160091A027NBEA
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Citation needed, cuz that’s just absolutely untrue.
I was at a party with an early FB employee once and he was bragging about how they would spy on people to see who's profiles they were looking at. He thought it was hilarious, I never used FB again. I think his exact quote was "Hot girls are like celebrities, we watch people refresh their profiles all day long LOL".
I see you also have met zuck
Zuckerberg seems like a normal human after the shit-show we have seen over the last few years.
Nice try, Zuck
It was a point badly made. Compared to other tech billionaires in the news, Zuckerberg’s infractions seem less alarming now days.
Excluding Elon Musk, which tech billionaire(s)?
Mainly Musk, but Ellison and Thiel too.
What a timeline! We only need ever more corrupt and criminal people, to normalize all kinds of behavior and ultimately justify everything!
I think Zuck likes the riches, but not the supposed responsibility of being the boss of it all. Very typical for management actually. Very few ever stand up and say: "It was my mistake! I should have managed this better! I should have placed better safeguards.". Instead Zucky goes in front of the court and acts all stupic uninformed android. Basically, a master class in denial and lying. Not a shred of taking responsibility for what happened.
Pretty low bar if you ask me...
luckily(?), this kind of access is now very restrictive. Most of the employees can't do that.
I thought the people who look up your profile show in the friend suggestions section.
This is a poor signal, at least in my experience. It is possible that no one looks at my profile, but I have a semi-famous acquaintance (we've had dinner but not at one's house) and 80% of my friend suggestions are 1 mutal with that person.
I do interact a lot so maybe people click to see if I also look touched? Either way I have a unique enough name that I'd notice if anyone was viewing my profile via that side-channel.
This will get you immediately fired at Meta today.
Today they only allow creepy surveillance if it makes money.
if it stops someone from making money who does not share their values, it's used, too ... or when they have enough oil to fix the markets
Because it’s unethical or because it’s inefficient to do this manually as opposed to algorithmically?
Because too many stories like this started to get them bad PR, which is a liability, so they put processes in place.
Every large company ends up with these types of situations.
The Snowden dumps showed a widespread culture of the NSA doing this on girlfriends, ex’s, and ‘potential love interests’. Among many other things.
Why do you think he got hunted to the ends of the earth?
Better to make it law and enforce the law than to trust large companies to do anything ethical.
Ethics aren't objective anyway, so it's not useful to rely on them. The US prides itself on being a melting pot full of diverse entrepreneurs. Diversity means different sets of ethics, sometimes varying greatly. I'm hopeful the US can get to a place where we expect everyone to agree on ethics and only reward those that operate with american ethics in mind. Which interestingly enough, I find the ethics that america loves to espouse with their words, more often reflects the enacted ethics of many immigrants when compared to the people who have many generations in this country.
Because of what the guys at the top were doing.
If it had just been the LOVEINT stuff, I think the NSA would've said "oh, right, yes that's not meant to happen, few bad apples, nothing to see here".
But showing a large systemic attitude, lying to congress… and specifically that America works with foreign partners to circumvent constitutional rights everywhere, that will have upset the people in charge.
Plus getting most big tech to use E2E encryption for chat so wiretapping their servers stopped being useful.
That, and also because they can. Hell, extrajudicially destroying people for threatening the system is basically the entire reason for the national security apparatus.
Big corp doesn’t get to do that (generally), hence actually having to (eventually) stop it.
This is a great take . . . if you're a liberal arts major in undergrad. It is literally sophomoric. Abuses in the intelligence community do not obviate the legitimate reasons why the government collects intelligence.
But not tommorrow.
They fired the zuck? that was his idea behind the fb in the first place ..
If you are some low level employee, certainly, the liability is too much.
But very higher level employees and Zuck himself? I would have to see actual proof of very secure lockout and segregation policies and procedures with zero exceptions or higher level administration access across the entire company to even have a chance to believe it. And that is way more effort and organizationally burdensome and costly than just trusting a few people to not be morons and be available when needed because you pay them enough money to not blab or give out access to others.
yup, and if it wasn't for all the leverage these guys have, despite NDAs, there'd be more influx due to abuse of access to sensitive data. LLMs can come up with bunches of ways how to leak info without revealing one's identity, so it's safe to assume people in higher level positions have bunches of actionable strategies already in place
Zuck has bigger things to care about. But in-aggregate they're checking all of that stuff; it's how Meta knew to buy Instagram (a ton of their users were using it).
This "would get you immediately fired" at Facebook 10 years ago. It happened a lot. It only gets you fired if you get caught and you only get caught if someone complains; the security teams aren't so much asleep at the wheel as there's a mannequin at the wheel so nobody notices what nobody notices.
I have heard that the NSA has such a chronic problem with employees spying on their Significant Others, that they have a code word for it: LOVEINT.
I admit, in one of my very first jobs, I accessed the company DB, to find out about celebrities. I almost got fired, and learned a hard (and early) lesson about the importance of privacy and being careful about admin dashboards.
Overpowered admin dashboards are a problem. I tend to spend a lot of time on backends, locking down permissions.
These days, I am so anal about privacy and security, that it pisses people off. I just know that there’s plenty of knuckleheads like me, out there.
"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be."
-Lyndon B. Johnson
I was talking to I believe an FB engineer and this must have been 10+ years ago at this point, he said,
- FB found restricting access was difficult because engineers do sometimes bump into incidental user data while doing their job
- And engineers, being sufficiently motivated, can find a way around security measures
- So instead of reducing productivity with ineffective security measures, FB logs all access to private user info, and a separate team will request a reason, and if you don't have a 100% legitimate work related reason to be viewing it, you're terminated immediately
- And it does occasionally happen
- And best practice if you might incidentally see private user data is to do it on an FB profile of a dev friend also working at FB
Not only was this true at the time but it was kind of an open secret that some of the data scientists were stalking people and using "I'm a data scientist, I need unfiltered access to the production data" as a cover.
This was afterall the same time where sketchy dudes working at IG were doing the whole "I can verify you on Instagram" thing to hook up with girls.
That’s so wild. Not to downplay the dudes’ grossness which is at 100%, but also imagine the shallowness of someone who would trade sex for a blue checkmark that signify arbitrarily-granted clout on social media.
I miss when “influencer” wasn’t anybody’s career goal.
It is still a problem today. I lived in SF for a stretch working at non-FANG tech companies, and I met a lot of people who worked for Apple, Facebook, and Google.
After meeting some of those people at a meditation group, they began being creepy by making obtuse, but oddly specific comments on things that I was doing online to suggest they were. I got creeped out and stopped going to that class. I began meeting friends or friends of their friends at different places.
Ultimately, it escalated to the point that an employee at Apple was leaving poisoned treats outside of my door and then listening me dealing with my dog being sick.
You cannot talk about any of this because its really easy for the stalkers to deny its happening. There are no laws in this area yet. If you try to complain or get anyone's attention, guess who is watching your every move. The exact same people that are committing the crimes.
People will look back at today at the political or social strife, and they will wonder how we never connected the dots.
I think you're overly generous in calling this an "edge case". I do not think it uncommon at all, what we hear about are those who are too stupid to remain uncaught.
No human is trustworthy. Verify.
The other problem is this fellow was acquitted when he should have been jailed for stalking.
Let's remember, it's not just about privacy, it's privacy against government overreach. Those in power, whether government officials or public servants, often abuse it.
The public might want to defend their privacy vs. corporations, and/because the media will spin privacy to target companies, while government and public servants escape accountability for their actions.
Since when have corporations been accountable for their actions?
I remember a pretty big class action lawsuit against Phillip Morris and "Big Tobacco"?
The BP Oil Spill class action?
The Anderson Family class action against GM?
The VW emissions scandal?
Enron Securities fraud case?
WorldCom accounting fraud case?
Fen-Phen diet drug settlement?
Bank of America Countrywide Mortgage fraud case?
And what were the typical penalties imposed for these incidents?
Asked Perplexity to summarize and answer to you:
Tobacco litigation ($23.6B)
BP oil spill ($20.8B)
VW emissions scandal ($38B)
Enron/WorldCom financial fraud ($9.55B combined)
Pharmaceutical/auto/mortgage cases ($16.15B combined)
Get back to me when you can provide real sources, not some hallucinatin' jumped-up stochastic parrot.
Go to perplexity, learn a thing and use the sources it provides with its results.
Then see for yourself who's the parrot with no sources.
Remember the multiple times tech companies have been fined for failing to "protect privacy"?
Do you remember of any agency having any kind of trouble after leaking private data? It's always the hackers that are to blame when there's a data leak in a government agency.
But when there's a hack at a company? the blame seems to go 100% on the company.
Are you reading the same news the rest of us are? Companies are basically never found liable for a "hack" into their systems. And when the companies share user data intentionally, at worst they get a fine so low as to be meaningless. And in the US, usually not even that, because selling user data is mostly legal.
What usually happens in cases of government agencies getting hacked (in my non-US experience) is that an inspector investigates what went wrong, proposes improvements to security systems and processes, then monitors the agency to make sure they carry them out.
I can recall one or two exceptional cases,and the fines were relatively small, amounting to a slap on the wrist. For example for the 2017 Equifax breach, after 2 years, the total cost of the settlement included $300 million to a fund for victim compensation, $175 million to the states and territories in the agreement, and $100 million to the CFPB in fines. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority imposed a financial penalty of £11,164,400[1]
Equifax's revenue in 2017 was $3.362B. In 2019, after Equifax agreed to the above settlement, revenue was up to $3.508B. Equifax revenue for the twelve months ending September 30, 2024 was $5.588B, a 8.79% increase year-over-year.[2]
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach#Litig...
2. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/EFX/equifax/revenu...
Anyone who says this should then be just fine with putting a webcam in their shower.
Does not jibe with
If he was acquitted then he has to be treated as innocent, lest our justice system becomes an avenue for the exact type of crime you’re decrying.
You might be under the mistaken impression that the US criminal justice system has anything do with justice. After all, it's right there in the name: justice. It's an old, worn out trope, but it's still true: there are in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Guess which group cops belong to?
Feel like he could have done this pretty easily with 1950s tech
To me the core problem is that the criminal justice system doesn’t work. A man broke the law, was caught, and received no punishment.
If the argument is “we can’t give powers to police because they can be misused” this is an argument for disarming them entirely. To me that is just giving up. Instead, we need to fix systems to hold them accountable.
Yep, that's exactly it. The police needs to be held to a higher standard than ordinary citizens in terms of law compliance.
These cases are far and between. I suggest to think instead of something like pre-WWII Germany. Once you get everyone's say religion on file it's only a matter of accessing it if you want to prosecute any group at scale. Fun thing there will be no criminal cases at all because it will be fully legal
The example I like to bring up, albeit not in California, is the Brigham Young University police searching local law enforcement databases for sexual assaults on BYU students and reporting the victims for "Honor Code" violations. There's a ton of reporting about this, but as a good overview: https://www.kuer.org/race-religion-social-justice/2021-12-17...
I recently beat a speeding ticket because by the time it got to court, my officer was fired from his department.
He was fired because he was beating his wife, who worked in the court and took a restraining order out against him.
He did in fact end up working for the department the next town over.
You are exactly right, "Nothing to hide" is also an invalid argument - because a valid suspicion of criminality will be authorised for subpoena by a judge.
Without such oversight we immediately and repeatedly see abuse of these systems: here's just a tiny list of cases where the "good guys" abused their access to systems to stalk ex-lovers and people they found attractive.
This underlines why the "good guys" argument is both invalid, but deliberately misleading. We don't plan systems and security around good guys, we plan them around bad guys.
USA:
N.J. cop used police databases to stalk ex-girlfriend, investigators say
https://www.nj.com/monmouth/2023/01/nj-cop-used-police-datab...
Officer Fired for Allegedly Using Police Database to Stalk, Harass Women
https://www.newsweek.com/officer-fired-allegedly-using-polic...
Australia:
Former policeman accused of using force database to stalk ex-wife and girlfriend
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/former-policeman...
Former federal police officer faces new charges over stalking of ex-girlfriend
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6138318/former-federa...
(Note the two above articles are not the same person)
UK: Met police officer 'used CCTV cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend after telling her to take up sex work to pay her bills'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11868575/Met-police...
Creepy cop saw attractive woman on the road and 'looked up her license plate number so he could stalk her on Facebook'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178556/Officer-Jef...
Anytime someone uses the 'nothing to hide' argument, i ask them why they close the toilet door when they do a number two.
anywhere you have a brotherhood that is more loyal to members than the public they're meant to serve is not going to produce good results imho.
These people fail to follow and resolve the indirect links that threaten their future. Privacy is their future. Without privacy, you have no future, because you are vulnerable to attack by unknown third-parties.
Information is the first thing required for a successful attack on your persons, or family. You can even torture people today and the bar is so incredibly high to prove vexatious acts that there's not much one can do except in some very egregious situations where they step over the line.
Remember when CA 'accidently' released the names and addresses of ALL CCW holders? They weaponize the mere fact they have potential to release these databases.
Only 7k? They are slipping.
Typically the tactics and abuses are shared among other staff to help them in their cases. The 7k number should be higher in 2024. Exponentially higher.
Database use can NOT be limited by policy. If the data is there, people with access to it WILL use it for whatever they want, even if that's simply because nobody told them what the restrictions are.
The best way to prevent misuse of data is not to have it. The second best way is to only allow access through technical means with proper access control at the query level and never access to the raw data.
The problem is that if someone has access to query at all, they can abuse it.
How do you limit to specific search strings? Is that a thing?
An interface that accepts only certain things - not raw SQL - and only returns whats needed for the task at hand. Logging of who asked for what is good too but is not preventative.
Database roles are a thing
But DB roles arent case specific. Someone with access to personal records should only be able to query relevant and legal information about the current case at hand. This requires oversight.
Yes. Ultimately I agree this is a social and legal construct, and technology cannot feasibly be configured to enforce it
One of the very few good reasons for in-database logic, such as views and stored procedures is rule enforcement - this allow queries to return only the data you are authorized to see. Doing this across multiple databases on multiple organizations is challenging, but, where I live, we all went through that with GDPR and we are quite good at preventing unauthorized access.
In the end, it feels like nobody (and nothing) can see the whole dataset.
I the industry, we have a monthly refresher training to not forget tne simple fact that checking the balance of your ex account on a production database, however tempting it is, will meam you dont work in the industry anymore
There are lots of ways to flag abuse - the most basic one is tagging each access with a valid authorization for that specific data. Using a law enforcement example, if I am investigating a drug-related crime, a search for data on a record that was never searched before or after (or only searched by me) is a very good predictor for abuse.
idk, I would say that at least in healthcare, most people are sufficiently terrified of the consequences of HIPAA violations that they won't access records they aren't supposed to. In this case, what works is a combination of serious, career-ending consequences and the knowledge that compliance departments conduct regular audits of everyone's access logs.
In Germany, there's a random audit of about 10% of queries iirc. Scandals still happen, but police officers get fired for it, and the chance of discovery and the consequences are both high enough that it's probably not as much of a problem over here.
Damn. It must be nice. Here in the US we struggle to hold police officers accountable for not shooting civilians.
I have hope that the culture around policing will change if people finally realize that the crime rates have dropped. But with fear of crime being a great lever with which to control people's vote, I don't see it happening anytime soon. The population is too vast, outliers too common, and ignorance of statistics too widespread. It will always be easy to convince people that some place they know nothing about is a Mad Max hellscape and that it's coming for them.
And the rest access records they aren't supposed to: https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-training-survey/
Every police department I've heard of harps on what the restrictions are. They should 100% know.
But how are you going to put an access control in that can tell you if an officer is searching a drunk driver's plate or an ex's? They need access to data quickly. They're already logging who accesses what, which is how they know who abused it and can punish such people, but some things are hard to fix with a technical solution.
The same law enforcement constellation that includes the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, famous for being a paragon of respect for civil rights, detainee rights and never having been repeatedly accused of beating arrestees, profiling aggressively or forming its own literal internal gang with which to intimidate whistle blowers and suspects?
Color me surprised that they'd ever abuse state databases on people of interest!
I'm surprised that with all the leaks of sensitive databases there isn't a public copy of every government database running on Tor in some distributed anti-take-down configuration by this point.
How do I join the effort for running these kinds of analyses?
That’s about every 30 minutes, every day of the week, including weekends, during their day shift.
How many times have Meta, Google, Amazon, Twitter, et all misused databases full of personal private information and no one has raised the slightest fuss?
I'm tired of the "gubmint bad, Free Market™ Good" tropes.
I bet that, if we look closely right now, there is a lot of data abuse being done for immigration enforcement.
There is an excellent academic study about the (mis)use of surveillance data in the criminal justice system:
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...
Based on field work conducted with officers and IT personnel in the Los Angeles Police Department, the author convincingly shows that law enforcement generally follow an "institutional data imperative," i.e., a mandate to collect as much information as possible, in part by securing routine access to a wide range of data on everyday activities from non-police databases. Data originally collected for one purpose is used for another (p. 53).
FYI 7,0000 times in 365 days is almost 20 times a day.
That sounds like a crime. Maybe someone should be chaerged with one. Too bad there's no police around.
Law enforcement in America has an uncanny ability to either blatantly ignore or conveniently misunderstand laws. I’m happy to know they are tracking this and acting on it. I know in health care you get fired on the spot for looking at stuff you shouldn’t, same should apply here at a minimum.
So what's the difference between cops and other criminals? Cops get protection for their crimes.