171–180 of 222 posts
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.
Is it though? Finding some ethically neutral Crud gig?
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Depends on what they consider "destructive", and it's not like there isn't already a way for contacting law enforcement when the circumstances warrant it. The Nextdoor analogy is even more apt because it's kind of notorious for being used by people to complain about all sorts of ridiculous things that don't deserve attention
Sure, but nobody tries to portray NextDoor as an "intelligence sharing network operation" and a "nationwide surveillance apparatus".
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I don't know what neighborhood you live in, but there aren't many billion-dollar corporations hanging out on my block. Given how much shady stuff has come out about some of these companies, I don't think it's really that terrible a presumption that pretty much anything they've invested time and effort into that isn't already public knowledge might have been used for some stuff that we'd be unhappy to find out about.
The density of these offices in downtown Seattle is super high and it's also an area that has a lot of crime so this implementation makes sense. Probably low ROI in other areas like your neighborhood that don't fit this profile.
There are already established ways for crimes to be reported to law enforcement, and arguably even in those ways that are ostensibly open to the public, it's already a well-known thing that the amount of help someone gets is proportionate to their wealth/power/social/influence/etc. There's absolutely no need to have a special extra channel for them that's not visible to the public if there's truly nothing to hide because the justice system already is tilted widely in their favor in the normal way things work.
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Sure, but nobody tries to portray NextDoor as an "intelligence sharing network operation" and a "nationwide surveillance apparatus".
Yes, because Amazon, etc. are not the ones using Nextdoor. My point is that if you think this is just "Nextdoor but for Seattle companies", consider what you think the equivalent of a frivolous and out-of-touch comment like "oh no there's a person who isn't the same race as me walking down my street" is for a billion dollar company and what type of effects setting up a place for them to funnel things like that to law…
A store keeper emails this shield group and says "hey this person came into my store and engaged in disruptive behavior."
An Amazon security personnel emails this shield group and says "hey this person came into our office and engaged in disruptive behavior."
What makes one of these so much more impactful than the other?
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Yes, because Amazon, etc. are not the ones using Nextdoor. My point is that if you think this is just "Nextdoor but for Seattle companies", consider what you think the equivalent of a frivolous and out-of-touch comment like "oh no there's a person who isn't the same race as me walking down my street" is for a billion dollar company and what type of effects setting up a place for them to funnel things like that to law…
Put yourself in the shoes of the police here: A store keeper emails this shield group and says "hey this person came into my store and engaged in disruptive behavior." An Amazon security personnel emails this shield group and says "hey this person came into our office and engaged in disruptive behavior." What makes one of these so much more impactful than the other?
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I don't mean to be some annoying contrarian or something, but couldn't it be the case that if the govt was investing someone who was planning a terrorist attack, then notifying the person being investigated could work against stopping them? Not saying it wouldn't get abused though, which seems like the primary concern of most people in these discussions..
Oh yes, the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse. Better to wiretap everyone just in case. Why stop there ? After all there a chance any privacy could be used to conceal some terrorist plot, better to record every meat-space conversations too, let's not take any risk.
The party in power always wants control. Whether this is bad or not usually depends on if you align with the party in control or not.
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> say you run a store in the city. You encounter someone who smashes some merchandise. The police don't make an arrest because the person insists it was accidental, but you're confident it was intentional. Is it wrong to share this experience with other shopkeepers? When the "shopkeepers" are billion dollar corporations, and several levels of law enforcement (including national ones like immigration officials) are al…
As per the article, this isn't just used by Amazon and Meta, local non profits are also use this resource.
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The thing is... under the laws as they're written today, if US Gov wants to take a peek at your stuff on FB and friends servers, FB can be barred from informing you that such a request has come in under the National Security Letter (NSL) guidelines. It's a very complicated thing :/.
I don't mean to be some annoying contrarian or something, but couldn't it be the case that if the govt was investing someone who was planning a terrorist attack, then notifying the person being investigated could work against stopping them? Not saying it wouldn't get abused though, which seems like the primary concern of most people in these discussions..
In general the need for secrecy is liable to be inversely related to the time required for it to be secret from what we do know and this is under comparatively sane regimes. Our current regime wants to build concentration camps and imprison journalists for reporting on their foibles.
What you SHOULD do is have sane limits with truly independent oversight by parties accountable to congress and the people. After a comparatively short duration virtually everything should become public and any misuse of said systems should result in prison. It's not like we couldn't build a system that with appropriate checks and balances but we certainly don't have one now.
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As per the article, this isn't just used by Amazon and Meta, local non profits are also use this resource.
I'd be interested in details about how visible reports from a given organization are to the others on the platform. People seem to be making comparisons to Nextdoor, but one of the fundamental parts of it is the public feed. If this is essentially a special way to DM law enforcement, it's not really comparable.
A 911 call might be subject to public records requests, but so is this Shield bulletin.
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Put yourself in the shoes of the police here: A store keeper emails this shield group and says "hey this person came into my store and engaged in disruptive behavior." An Amazon security personnel emails this shield group and says "hey this person came into our office and engaged in disruptive behavior." What makes one of these so much more impactful than the other?
I'm saying that the alternative is "An Amazon security personnel or store keeper reports a crime via the normal public channels and there's the usual paper trail for it". Your premise that this is only ever used for anything benign is what I'm disagreeing with here; obviously if you assume it, then nothing sketchy is going on, but at that point the argument is circular.
> Through public records requests, Prism obtained the Seattle Shield bulletins, as well as a full list of Seattle Shield members who had access to the program as of 2020