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Wikipedia Entries On NYPD Violence Get Some Edits From Headquarters
First reported by Capital, and picked up by Reason, it seems that "Computers operating on the New York Police Department’s computer network at its 1 Police Plaza headquarters have been used to alter Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality."
Computer users identified by Capital as working on the NYPD headquarters' network have edited and attempted to delete Wikipedia entries for several well-known victims of police altercations, including entries for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo. Capital identified 85 NYPD addresses that have edited Wikipedia, although it is unclear how many users were involved, as computers on the NYPD network can operate on the department’s range of IP addresses.
Besides edits to entries about specific instances of misconduct, edits from the same NYPD IP blocks were discovered in Wikipedia entries about the city's stop-and-frisk program and about NYPD misconduct more generally.
That being said, if these are actually part of someone's job, they should really be making press releases or blog entries where relevant and letting the community update wikipedia; or they should be disclosing who they are when relevant. (E.g. trying to remove the Sean Bell shooting incident--plenty of stories become non-stories over time, but someone with an incentive to remove the story probably shouldn't be able to do so without disclosing their relationship to the subject matter.)
I wouldn't dismiss the criminal aspect of this so quickly. There are plenty of laws on the books designed to prevent government agencies from using taxpayer resources on misinforming the public. If any of the edits were deliberately false, it's entirely possible it was a crime for the NYPD, even if it's not a crime for the jerk down the street.
If we can get Aaron Swartz to kill himself over "Hacking" by downloading a bunch of easily available peer-reviewed journals, why can't we treat "tampering of community works" with the same, broad, over-reaching laws?
What happened to Aaron Schwartz was a tragedy, as it is any time someone takes their own life. But he broke into a Harvard networking closet (that's physical trespass), and rewired a router (that's computer trespass) in order to download the journal articles that he otherwise did not have access to (or at least not at the speed with which he downloaded them). That's hardly "easily available". Was the justice department wrong to lay charges in that case? If they were wrong to do so, was it because what he did wasn't a crime or because he was a suicide risk due to mental health issues? If the latter, do we allow anyone with mental health problems to get away with any crimes because they would be a suicide risk if arrested and charged?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I've seen a lot of dicy things go down on wikipedia over the years.
They're generally okay with non-controversial information of a very general nature. But anything that gets political or very specific... and you can't trust them.
It isn't just that people will go in or hire people to go in and change things in their favor. The community itself is often biased or just lazy.
They'll do things like make a statement without attribution or proof and then if you say it is wrong they ask you for proof.
Or they'll say something is true and use as evidence a blog post or a tweet as if that's evidence of anything. And then if you say that is wrong... they'll say "where is your proof"... never mind that they were posting assertions without proof in the first place and the burden of proof was on them.
It is an on going thing on wikipedia.
I like the service a lot, it has a lot of really good information on it... it is just very vulnerable to assholes and lazy idiots.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
An arm bar is not at all the same thing as a choke hold. As the name implies, an arm bar is applied to the arm of the person you're executing it on, while a choke hold is applied to the neck and is extremely against procedure (although, of course, not really illegal in any real sense because a cop is really allowed to do anything they want to you). If the NYPD has decided to start referring to a choke hold as an arm bar, they're doing it in a desperate attempt to confuse the situation, which is sad and also probably ineffective as long as everyone's carrying cameras around.