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Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

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Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#91

Post by pc86 »

acidhousemcnab wrote: post #20
shermantanktop wrote: post #9

Looks like a nothingburger? It's unfunded. An email describes a protest without giving a framing that the site would prefer. Then it turns out that nobody knows what it does, but it might do something bad. I'm all for transparency and accountability but my assumption is that the bad things being done by LEO and intelligence are far worse than this.

There were a lot of articles describing Snowdon / Manning and Wikileaks releases as exactly "nothing burgers", in those journals of note that people read to tell them what to think about matters - but I'm not sure what a "nothing burger" means - pulverised cattle flesh flattened into an oval, that doesn't exist?

Is there a term for this weird autistic pseudo-nerd-sniping where someone pretends not to understand a very common expression and takes it absurdly literally to try to prove a point?

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#92

Post by baddash »

My thoughts as someone who doesn't know much about these types of things:

1. Terry Albury calling this list the "Panopticon" could have merit since he's a former FBI agent. However, I'd have to research more into him to figure out how credible he is, and why he is framing it like this.

2. Amazon and Facebook being in the title is most likely clickbait. They're literally only mentioned once in the article and the rest of it has nothing to do with them.

3. It's concerning that the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) can potentially cause this network to be used to label protestors as "far-left domestic terrorists", however, that is more of an issue with the NSPM than this network. Understanding the NSPM and the effects of it is probably worthwhile.

4. The article mentions that there's no oversight program for Seattle Shield. Is that a problem? Is it typical to have oversight for a program like this, or necessary? What would the program be like?

Overall, the article feels sort of sensationalized. It frames Seattle Shield as suspicious and questionable due to its secrecy and the fact that it performs surveillance. However, there aren't any strong facts or evidence of this program being abused in some Big Brother-type way. Terry Albury framing it in this manner might be the most credible point against it, but I would have to look into that to determine how credible it is.

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#93

Post by arcanemachiner »

andrybak wrote: post #45
ensen wrote: post #2

archive that won't hijack your back button https://archive.is/Td9AR

archive.is is one of the domains of archive.today, which used its end users for a DDOS attack on a blog. This caused English Wikipedia to deprecate it with the end goal of blacklisting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...

Complaining about bad people is fun, don't get me wrong... but your post doesn't contain an alternative archive link. You're just siphoning people into your soapbox.

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#94

Post by red-iron-pine »

acidhousemcnab wrote: post #26
QuercusMax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientologists being involved with intelligence agencies doesn't surprise me even a bit, it makes a lot of sense as a CIA cutout.

Any belief system or club that validates sociopathy as a "higher" state of evolution or enlightenment will worm it's way into intelligence agencies.

the mormons are big in feddy gov agencies, for example

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#95

Post by red-iron-pine »

stronglikedan wrote: post #79
jedahan wrote: post #54

Reminder if you work for any of these companies (not unlikely on this site) you are actively enabling this. If your first reaction is doubt, deflection, rationalization or discomfort, there are ways out.

If you work for any company, you're actively enabling injustices against someone , so just make a living and don't worry so much.

this is the high quality content that I come to HN for

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#96

Post by red-iron-pine »

lorecore wrote: post #83
Zhenya wrote: post #75

[flagged]

Why would an attack on Israel warrant spying on US citizens? We are not Israel and our government should not be working for Israeli interests.

you're not gonna believe this

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#97

Post by pc86 »

shevy-java wrote: post #46

Not so surprising - we kind of suspected this. Anyone remembers Snowden or Assange? We have to accept the fact that presently all democracies are merely simulation of a democracy. At the least in the USA; other countries may be a bit better, e. g. Switzerland or the scandinavian countries are somewhat better (though also not to be trusted - see how Sweden pursued Assange). Perhaps this is how things always end? Democ…

Authoritarianism didn't work in the past because it was too hard to control that many people. You simply didn't have the scale unless you were willing to roll tanks down city streets, and even then all it did was buy you an extra couple years, maybe a decade or two. Eventually, someone always got close enough to end you and then it started falling apart.

Technology has made it not only possible, but easy, to control a lot more people. Freedom generally, and democracy specifically, are the exception. Might-makes-right authoritarianism is the default human condition and I think we're seeing a regression to the mean. I don't even mean in the last few years or whatever, I'm not making a comment on any country's government today. But look at the last 30-40 years, and imagine what the next 30-40 might look like, and I think we're going to look back on today fondly as when we had more freedom.

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#98

Post by loeg »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #44
sysguest wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

damn I wonder how many scientology believers in intel actually believe in scientology... I mean, it shows how much intel agencies can "screen for high intelligence individuals" ?

people believe in scientology as much as they believe in a literature club. If you listen to someone like Tom Cruise's statements he says "I have gotten to where I am today because of Scientology". He doesn't name off specific procedures, treatments, practices, etc. Partially because they are barred from naming them. But if you're looking for a club you can advance it, I highly suspect Scientology is as quid pro quo…

You get or used to get true believers working in hellish conditions[1] on the boats, paid ~nothing. It might be a quid pro quo convenience for the Tom Cruises, but there are also some suckers.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Org#Lawsuits

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#99

Post by dakolli »

Random Idea:

Make a tool/browser extension that submits suspicious queries to Google, Facebook, Amazon on behalf of the user like "how to make a bomb", "How to make an explosive drone" or whatever. Have it run several times a day and use a lightweight abliterated llm to create unique queries that would match the kind of heuristics these programs are filtering for.

Hopefully 10s of thousands of users use it and poison the ETL of these intelligence gathering operations. This kinda creates a prisoner dilemma for the first set of users, perhaps the tool would only start making queries once there was enough of a user base so that the first few users aren't signing up themselves for unnecessary scrutiny.

Re: Seattle Shield, an intelligence-sharing network operated by the Seattle police

#100

Post by john_strinlai »

whimsicalism wrote: post #57
jedahan wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That network is shared with police departments in cities outside Seattle per the article.

I encourage people imagining this as some high-scale surveillance dragnet to look at the Seattle Shield website and form their opinions https://seattleshield.org/default.aspx?MenuItemID=53&MenuGro...

ah, yes, the little 8-line explanation there by the entity in question absolutely clears them of all suspicion, really.

i am sure that information obtained by seattle shield is not shared to anyone outside of seattle borders. police departments and the FBI are not known to share information, after all. police are especially cagey about sharing with other agencies when it comes to counter-terrorism.

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