The surveillance state has spent billions and billions of dollars building massive monitoring and data back-haul capabilities, with “fusion centers” that automate analytics and run pre-planned searches for stuff.
The cries of “‘defund the police’ is harsh and may alienate potential allies!” are full-throated, and I am thoroughly sick of them. Police and police unions are manipulating politics shamelessly, and have demonstrated again and again and again that consent decrees and legislation are just something they will work around.
This is very different from the field in which I used to work. Back in the infosec startup world, if you screwed up, you were usually escorted to the parking lot with all of your stuff in a box, immediately. I’ve heard of people quitting on such good terms that they were later able to come back to an employer later, but I’ve never heard of someone being fired and brought back.*
Yesterday I published a posting that was substantially wrong. Ow! [stderr] But, it got me looking into the question of how cop departments pay off awards against them. It’s unsurprisingly murky, but there are stories that indicate how the delicate maneuvers are made.
It was a historic moment, when the city council of Minneapolis agreed that they would defund the police. [npr] But – and there’s always a “but” – guess what didn’t happen?
My recent study of labor relations in the US, during “the golden age” (AKA “when the robber barons ruled”) leaves me with a memory of beatings. Endless beatings. It seems as though the establishment’s first resort when confronted is to grab a stout stick, and beat on someone. If that doesn’t work, they beat that person’s wife and kids.
When the FBI and DHS fusion centers started building vast, unregulated, facial recognition databases, they shrugged elaborately and said that there weren’t any standard protections for doing so, and that they were just experimenting, and it wasn’t going to be used operationally until the legalities were all sorted out.
Willie Sutton robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.”
I’ve been a proponent of cop-cams for years. I would now like to officially reverse my position.
You probably already know I think the FBI are a bunch of chucklefucks. My perspective was formed by working with them on a few cybersecurity cases, including one back in the early days of the commercial internet, in which I was paired with an FBI supervisory special agent who thought that America Online was the internet.