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Subject To a "Stop and Frisk"? There's an App For That
lightbox32 writes "The New York Civil Liberties Union released a free smartphone application on Wednesday that allows people to record videos of and report police 'stop and frisk' activity, a practice widely denounced by civil rights groups as mostly targeting minorities and almost never resulting in arrests. The app was thoroughly criticized by the New York Police Department, which said that the tool might prove useful for criminals."
On first blush, the thought of using an app like this sounds good: it keeps the police on their best behavior, because they know they're being recorded. The problem is this app doesn't just record, it aggregates recordings, and as we all know, once you have aggregate data, you can do all sorts of useful things with it, such as predict where the police are, a handy thing to know if you are trying to avoid them. The more data is aggregated, the more valuable a target it becomes. A better solution would be for the app to record police actions only on the device, and to have any reporting go through ordinary, public communication channels to lower its profile.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Probable cause? Odour, pupil dilation, behaviour. You can smell a dope user from a distance and you don't need to be a trained sniffer dog to do so, either.