Funny "War on Photography" Anecdote
Posting an excerpt would give it away.
Entries Tagged "police"
Page 14 of 29
Boston Police Consider Using Linux to be Ground for Suspicion
This is pretty awful. More war on the unexpected.
EDITED TO ADD (4/16): On further analysis, this seems more reasonable than I first thought.
How Not to Carry Around Secret Documents
Here’s a tip: when walking around in public with secret government documents, put them in an envelope.
A huge MI5 and police counterterrorist operation against al-Qaeda suspects had to be brought forward at short notice last night after Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism chief accidentally revealed a briefing document.
[…]
The operation was nearly blown when Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick walked up Downing Street holding a document marked “secret” with highly sensitive operational details visible to photographers.
The document, carried under his arm, revealed how many terrorist suspects were to be arrested, in which cities across the North West. It revealed that armed members of the Greater Manchester Police would force entry into a number of homes. The operation’s secret code headed the list of action that was to take place.
Now the debate begins about whether he was just stupid, or very very stupid:
Opposition MPs criticised Mr Quick, with the Liberal Democrats describing him as “accident prone” and the Conservatives condemning his “very alarming” lapse of judgement.
But former Labour Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said it would be wrong for such an experienced officer to resign “for holding a piece of paper the wrong way”.
It wasn’t just a piece of paper. It was a secret piece of paper. (Here’s the best blow-up of the picture. And surely these people have procedures for transporting classified material. That’s what the mistake was: not following proper procedure.
He resigned.
Police Powers and the UK Government in the 1980s
I found this great paragraph in this article on the future of privacy in the UK:
One of the few home secretaries who dominated his department rather than be cowed by it was Lord Whitelaw in the 1980s. He boasted how after any security lapse, the police would come to beg for new and draconian powers. He laughed and sent them packing, saying only a bunch of softies would erode British liberty to give themselves an easier job. He said they laughed in return and remarked that “it was worth a try”.
DNA False Positives
A story about a very expensive series of false positives. The German police spent years and millions of dollars tracking a mysterious killer whose DNA had been found at the scenes of six murders. Finally they realized they were tracking a worker at the factory that assembled the prepackaged swabs used for DNA testing.
This story could be used as justification for a massive DNA database. After all, if that factory worker had his or her DNA in the database, the police would have quickly realized what the problem was.
Man Arrested by Amtrak Police for Taking Photographs for Amtrak Photography Contest
You can’t make this stuff up. Even Stephen Colbert made fun of it.
This isn’t the first time Amtrak police have been idiots.
And in related news, in the U.K. it soon might be illegal to photograph the police.
EDITED TO ADD (2/10): The photographer’s page about the incident has been replaced with the words “No comment!” Anyone have a link to a copy? In the meantime, here’s an entry about the incident on a photo activist’s blog.
EDITED AGAIN: Thanks to Phil M. in comments for finding these Google Cache links from Duane Kerzic’s site:
- letter to Amtrak’s CEO
- Amtrak’s acknowledgement of receipt of a query about their rules
- New Jersey Transit’s acknowledgement of an e-mail he sent (which quotes his message to them)
- response from NJT
Phil adds: “The main Amtrak page on his site has since been crawled, so Google now has the ‘no comment’ note cached.”
Friday Squid Blogging: Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device (SQUID)
New security device:
But what if an officer could lay down a road trap in seconds, then activate it from a nearby hiding place? What if—like sea monsters of ancient lore—the trap could reach up from below to ensnare anything from a MINI Cooper to a Ford Expedition? What if this trap were as small as a spare tire, as light as a tire jack, and cost under a grand?
Thanks to imaginative design and engineering funded by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Office of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), such a trap may be stopping brigands by 2010. It’s called the Safe Quick Undercarriage Immobilization Device, or SQUID. When closed, the current prototype resembles a cheese wheel full of holes. When open (deployed), it becomes a mass of tentacles entangling the axles. By stopping the axles instead of the wheels, SQUID may change how fleeing drivers are, quite literally, caught.
Of course, there’s a lot separating a cool idea from reality. But it is a cool idea.
The Exclusionary Rule and Security
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that evidence gathered as a result of errors in a police database is admissible in court. Their narrow decision is wrong, and will only ensure that police databases remain error-filled in the future.
The specifics of the case are simple. A computer database said there was a felony arrest warrant pending for Bennie Herring when there actually wasn’t. When the police came to arrest him, they searched his home and found illegal drugs and a gun. The Supreme Court was asked to rule whether the police had the right to arrest him for possessing those items, even though there was no legal basis for the search and arrest in the first place.
What’s at issue here is the exclusionary rule, which basically says that unconstitutionally or illegally collected evidence is inadmissible in court. It might seem like a technicality, but excluding what is called “the fruit of the poisonous tree” is a security system designed to protect us all from police abuse.
We have a number of rules limiting what the police can do: rules governing arrest, search, interrogation, detention, prosecution, and so on. And one of the ways we ensure that the police follow these rules is by forbidding the police to receive any benefit from breaking them. In fact, we design the system so that the police actually harm their own interests by breaking them, because all evidence that stems from breaking the rules is inadmissible.
And that’s what the exclusionary rule does. If the police search your home without a warrant and find drugs, they can’t arrest you for possession. Since the police have better things to do than waste their time, they have an incentive to get a warrant.
The Herring case is more complicated, because the police thought they did have a warrant. The error was not a police error, but a database error. And, in fact, Judge Roberts wrote for the majority: “The exclusionary rule serves to deter deliberate, reckless, or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring or systemic negligence. The error in this case does not rise to that level.”
Unfortunately, Roberts is wrong. Government databases are filled with errors. People often can’t see data about themselves, and have no way to correct the errors if they do learn of any. And more and more databases are trying to exempt themselves from the Privacy Act of 1974, and specifically the provisions that require data accuracy. The legal argument for excluding this evidence was best made by an amicus curiae brief filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, but in short, the court should exclude the evidence because it’s the only way to ensure police database accuracy.
We are protected from becoming a police state by limits on police power and authority. This is not a trade-off we make lightly: we deliberately hamper law enforcement’s ability to do its job because we recognize that these limits make us safer. Without the exclusionary rule, your only remedy against an illegal search is to bring legal action against the police—and that can be very difficult. We, the people, would rather have you go free than motivate the police to ignore the rules that limit their power.
By not applying the exclusionary rule in the Herring case, the Supreme Court missed an important opportunity to motivate the police to purge errors from their databases. Constitutional lawyers have written many articles about this ruling, but the most interesting idea comes from George Washington University professor Daniel J. Solove, who proposes this compromise: “If a particular database has reasonable protections and deterrents against errors, then the Fourth Amendment exclusionary rule should not apply. If not, then the exclusionary rule should apply. Such a rule would create an incentive for law enforcement officials to maintain accurate databases, to avoid all errors, and would ensure that there would be a penalty or consequence for errors.”
Increasingly, we are being judged by the trail of data we leave behind us. Increasingly, data accuracy is vital to our personal safety and security. And if errors made by police databases aren’t held to the same legal standard as errors made by policemen, then more and more innocent Americans will find themselves the victims of incorrect data.
This essay originally appeared on the Wall Street Journal website.
EDITED TO ADD (2/1): More on the assault on the exclusionary rule.
EDITED TO ADD (2/9): Here’s another recent court case involving the exclusionary rule, and a thoughtful analysis by Orin Kerr.
New Police Computer System Impeding Arrests
In Queensland, Australia, policemen are arresting fewer people because their new data-entry system is too annoying:
He said police were growing reluctant to make arrests following the latest phased roll-out of QPRIME, or Queensland Police Records Information Management Exchange.
“They are reluctant to make arrests and they’re showing a lot more discretion in the arrests they make because QPRIME is so convoluted to navigate,” Mr Leavers said. He said minor street offences, some traffic offences and minor property matters were going unchallenged, but not serious offences.
However, Mr Leavers said there had been occasions where offenders were released rather than kept in custody because of the length of time it now took to prepare court summaries.
“There was an occasion where two people were arrested on multiple charges. It took six detectives more than six hours to enter the details into QPRIME,” he said. “It would have taken even longer to do the summary to go to court the next morning, so basically the suspects were released on bail, rather than kept in custody.”
He said jobs could now take up to seven hours to process because of the amount of data entry involved.
This is a good example of how non-security incentives affect security decisions.
Arming New York City Police with Machine Guns
I have mixed feelings about this:
The NYPD wants all 1,000 Police Academy recruits trained to use M4 automatic machine guns – which are now carried only by the 400 cops in its elite Emergency Service Unit – in time for the holiday celebration in Times Square.
On the one hand, deploying these weapons seems like a bad idea. On the other hand, training is almost never a bad thing.
Oh, and in case you were worried:
There is no intelligence Times Square will be a target on New Year’s Eve. The area will be on high alert, but has been so for every year since the millennium.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.