Comment by shakna
5 days ago
Police, in many countries, have already been found to violate the laws protecting surveillance systems that already exist.
If a warrant doesn't stop them today, why do you think it will tomorrow?
5 days ago
Police, in many countries, have already been found to violate the laws protecting surveillance systems that already exist.
If a warrant doesn't stop them today, why do you think it will tomorrow?
I don't believe in "police" as a transnational group. I don't believe that the actions of police in some other country carries any information about the culture of police in mine.
If police use these systems outside of their intended and legally mandated forms, that must be dealt with. We do need effective police though. We do that with robust surveillance infrastructure for police queries in the database, possible even with a mandatory log of queries as part of discovery.
I don't have to "think" it will stop them, I can utilize the levers of democracy to check them.
The obvious question there is... Has it ever happened in yours?
I'd be surprised it you couldn't find some instances, but I'm also confident that those cases were dealt with by procedural enhancements.
Just recently we had a case where an employee was caught snooping in some address and family data. The person was fired, reported to the police for investigation, and the relevant employer is now looking at their processes to make sure it doesn't happen again. Along with that, everybody directly affected has been notified. That seems like a reasonable response to me.
I'm much more concerned with all the times we don't find out. We need strong checks on access to this data, which is fortunately also a legal requirement. I generally trust that the relevant authorities are keeping track of that.
Importantly, what I hope you're seeing from this reply is a trust in the institutions of my government. I trust that the processes are being followed, and that the processes are built in such a way that they check each other.
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