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People Staring at Computers (2021)

kylemcdonald.net

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Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#31

Post by j33zusjuice »

mkl95 wrote: post #21
bitwize wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had the government wanted to give him a harder time than they did, it could've been a significant issue. FBI agents are trained in interrogation techniques designed to manipulate you into saying contradictory things, for the sole purpose of being able to slap you with a false-statements charge in case they can't get enough on you to convict you of the crime they were actually investigating.

Any idea why they do this? Is it a PR thing? Some angle like 95% of our suspects are convicted within 5 years .

There are historical reasons, like the fact that LE was created to protect a special class), which deeply impact the way LE is trained, which dictates how LE interacts with normal people. There’s what you suggested, that they want great stats, because political careers are made off of stats, and winning high profile cases (there’s a long list of questionable cases where DAs railroaded a person or group just before they ran for governor or congress.

The book “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice” discusses a lot of the failings of the system, and gives suggestions on how to fix the system without tearing it down. In discussing the failings, he gives a lot of thoughts on why things are as they are, etc. It’s a pretty easy read.

In case you missed the link on the origins of police somewhere else in the comments: https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the...

Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#33

Post by uglycinema »

“I remember being a bit nervous on the first visit. Not because I thought I was doing anything wrong, or because I was worried about getting "caught".It was more like stage fright. ”

“Sometimes I would open another tab and load Flickr or Open Processing so I had an excuse if someone asked why I was comparing every single computer.”

Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#34

Post by yucky »

hackton wrote: post #24
jacknews wrote: post #11

The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do. https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the...

Pretty much like HR in companies

If HR isn't there to protect a company, who would? Or is the argument that it isn't needed?

Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#35

Post by yucky »

jason-phillips wrote: post #17
jacknews wrote: post #11

The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do. https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the...

> The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do. I think it's rather naive to consider otherwise. Somewhere along the way we were fed this childish mythology about the importance of the individual, which is definitely captivating, stirring one's imagination with sparks of creativity, but the truth is that institutions and 'the system' are the bedr…

Except government can't stop growing, so that eventually doesn't end well.

Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#36

Post by ewzimm »

jason-phillips wrote: post #17
jacknews wrote: post #11

The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do. https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the...

> The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do. I think it's rather naive to consider otherwise. Somewhere along the way we were fed this childish mythology about the importance of the individual, which is definitely captivating, stirring one's imagination with sparks of creativity, but the truth is that institutions and 'the system' are the bedr…

In these discussions, there's always an implicit assumption of certain intentions being the "real" ones. Statements like "police were created to..." first imply that there was a creator whose intentions define the police through incarnations, a kind of "god of police," and, more likely, if it was not a single individual, it is a "pantheon of police" composed of its creators and sustainers. And then we have the image of the state as a composite entity which exerts control over the pantheon without being corporeal itself, maybe as the composite will of a class of people.

To me, this idea of the personification of state power into an all-powerful driving force seems more mythological than the importance of individual decisions being made by those who carry out the work of the state. An individual officer may have a similar belief in the intentions of the state, but their actions are ultimately their own.

It seems ironic that the more we tend to be critical of state power, the more we tend to mythologize it into a kind of personification. You might not fall into this trap, but many do. But why should the intentions of the composite pseudo-entity matter more than the intentions of the real individuals who carry out the work? Isn't each police officer a person who has different goals and ideas about who they are and who they serve? Is this really so insignificant, or is it so overwhelmed by institutional goals that it becomes irellevant? Or could the real people and not their abstractions be the real bedrock of civilization?

Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#37

Post by whycombinetor »

Dunno how the hell one would not expect this to be be highly illegal. The guy literally wrote a software tool that covertly sends images from an unsuspecting device's camera to his personal servers, and installed+activated it on target machines belonging to the US's 3rd largest company by market cap in 2010 (now 1st largest). I get that in the pre-Snowden world, it felt like you were building a cutesy proof-of-concept to showcase to the world the possibilities of invasive mass surveillance, but that doesn't change the duck test that you actually built the mechanism and deployed it.

Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#38

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

whycombinetor wrote: post #37

Dunno how the hell one would not expect this to be be highly illegal. The guy literally wrote a software tool that covertly sends images from an unsuspecting device's camera to his personal servers, and installed+activated it on target machines belonging to the US's 3rd largest company by market cap in 2010 (now 1st largest). I get that in the pre-Snowden world, it felt like you were building a cutesy proof-of-concep…

since he had legal access to the computer, I don't think what he did is legally want different than running OBS on your own computer.

Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#39

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #20
FoomFries wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you have a case where the officer will try and use what you said against you. So, even if it wasn’t knowingly in truth, in practice it will be up to you to defend that truth. Whereas silence saves you the hassle.

In practice, good-faith and respectful interactions with law enforcement have a positive outcome.

unfortunately the positive outcome they often have is teaching people that is a very bad idea to have goid-faith interactions with last enforcement.

Re: People Staring at Computers (2021)

#40

Post by objectivetruth »

indymike wrote: post #25
jacknews wrote: post #11

The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system', not people, and that's what they continue to do. https://worxintheory.wordpress.com/2014/12/07/origins-of-the...

> The police forces were created to protect property and 'the system' If that is the case, why is civil asset forfeiture a thing? It seems to undermine property rights and is a glaring failure in the system.

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