Programmer Tim Clemans Resigns from Seattle Police Department After Six Months

Post by dang » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 11:51 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #35

ihsw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never is a strong word, I think it's too strong. You are absolutely correct that he had no authority to perform modifications to a critical public service, and that his actions bordered on reckless and negligent and that his response to the captain's accusations was cringe-worthy as well as indicative of the ignorance of his actions, but I think it stands to reason that the captain could have handled the situation mo…

Clemans' actions can be chalked up to youthful ignorance and exuberance, whereas the captain has no excuse. He is the central source of truth and the ultimate arbiter in the situation, he should know better than to react so aggressively to one of his own staff members. React aggressively to some aspergers-afflicted kid cavalierly modifying and possibly breaking a public emergency response system with an expected upti…

Post by x1798DE » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 12:10 AM UTC

timclemans wrote: post #85

tptacek wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of messages? What kind of highlighting? What's a specific use case you were targeting? (I'm sure there was one! I just see too many of us speculating about it.)

The messages were by dispatchers. I'll give you an example, shortly after the center was no longer allowed to the app, someone called 911 and claimed his car had been shot. A dispatcher put it down as rock hit the car. A higher up told me that had my app been in used the Chief Dispatcher would have been alerted because they all had keywords for shot, shooting, etc. This is the only tool to see all messages for everyt…

Post by foobarian » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 12:29 AM UTC

sleepybrett wrote: post #48

btilly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is worse, it is not even clear that the captain is entirely wrong here. If Clemans screwed up, he had the potential to have 911 calls be routed to /dev/null. If he succeeded, the department became more efficient. However the 911 system is already working "well enough". Therefore in terms of outside perception any win will be small, and disasters could be huge. He is not the one who has been give the authority to…

Clememns is in the comments explaining how the system worked. He just reads the current calls out of a database and displays them with some highlighting. There is no write.

Post by timclemans206 » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 1:06 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #79

sleepybrett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clemens is in the comment thread. It seems like the system he wrote read out of the 911 call database and displayed all the active calls. Then highlighted calls based on keywords so the head dispatcher could more easily see high priority calls ( crimes in progress ? ). This seems very safe. The captain in question is just protecting his turf. Even if he saw the benefit he would never admit it because it wasn't his id…

How is that very safe? Presumably were looking at this unreviewed web app instead of what they were looking at before.

Post by fineman » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 4:59 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #82

sleepybrett wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clemens is in the comment thread. It seems like the system he wrote read out of the 911 call database and displayed all the active calls. Then highlighted calls based on keywords so the head dispatcher could more easily see high priority calls ( crimes in progress ? ). This seems very safe. The captain in question is just protecting his turf. Even if he saw the benefit he would never admit it because it wasn't his id…

The code itself might be intrinsically safe, but the process it generates might not be. The argument doesn't have to be "this code will crash the 911 system"; it might just be "people are going to get hurt when operators act on the information it attempts to generate".