Dutch Police Build a Pokemon Go-Style App For Hunting Wanted Criminals (csoonline.com)

"How can the police induce citizens to help investigate crime? By trying to make it 'cool' and turning it into a game that awards points for hits," reports CSO. mrwireless writes: Through their 'police of the future' innovation initiative, and inspired by Pokemon Go, the Dutch police are building an app where you can score points by photographing the license plates of stolen cars. When a car is reported stolen the app will notify people in the neighbourhood, and then the game is on! Privacy activists are worried this creates a whole new relationship with the police, as a deputization of citizens blurs boundaries, and institutionalizes 'coveillance' -- citizens spying on citizens. It could be a slippery slope to situations that more resemble the Stasi regime's, which famously used this form of neighborly surveillance as its preferred method of control.
CSO cites Spiegel Online's description of the unofficial 189,000 Stasi informants as "totally normal citizens of East Germany who betrayed others: neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members."

The Dutch police are also building another app that allows citizens to search for missing persons.

Comments

Better than the alternative?

[dj245]

The alternative is sensors and cameras automatically finding persons of interest and uniformed officers grabbing people without notice. Having at least one citizen in the loop may make the police more trustworthy, if the system is set up only for serious crimes.

Re:Better than the alternative?

[guruevi]

This is basically the same though but instead of buying sensors on a state budget where it can be controlled with oversight, this is making every citizen's device the 'sensor'.

The goal is that you take pictures of people's license plates (including the GPS location) and then you get rewards. The fact that a particular car may be stolen is only matched after the plate has been stored and processed. So they're building a giant database of people's whereabouts without having to invest in the camera systems all while evading state oversight on privacy rules.

This type of surveillance is particularly useful to the State of the Netherlands because the tax systems, if you have a car, you pay extreme amounts of 'road taxes' on the car for personal use however for "home-work" travel use, you can deduct the distances you cover.

Many people nowadays have figured that if they take a back-road home, they can evade the highway where there are already license plate cameras in order to be able to make detours to the grocery store without "losing" the deduction. If you take a detour for personal affairs (like shopping), the entire trip is no longer deductible and cameras on the highways have already caught people that deduct too much this way.

So now they're basically wanting people everywhere take pictures of license plates, under the guise of "car theft prevention" so the state can map the whereabouts of people, if they happen to deduct home-work road taxes but are parked not at home or at work, the state could calculate how many days they took the deduction without qualifying for it.

Wow, this is a remarkably bad idea

[rsilvergun]

Hey, I know, let's encourage the general populace (particularly the younger set) to hunt down potentially violent criminals. Surely there is no way this can backfire?

The Stasi was not the beginning of this

[RhettLivingston]

These methods have been used throughout time. The only new thing here is the modern tech boost.

Germany was certainly very actively using these tactics during WWII to root out those destined for concentration camps. Informing on neighbors was highly encouraged and not doing so was very dangerous.

This is a tactic most utilized in social policing and tends to reemerge with populist movements. It may start out with "crime", but the crimes tend to evolve because citizens routinely think people with different belief systems need to be punished and feel empowered to do it themselves.

Re:The Stasi was not the beginning of this

[Anonymous Coward]

These methods have been used throughout time.

It's funny how Slashdot's idea of time begins in the twentieth century. Police didn't really exist until the nineteenth century. Before that there were soldiers to quell riots, and in some societies there were jailers and kinds of soldiers ("marshals" in American parlance, from "martial" meaning military) to enforce court orders. There weren't investigators or detectives like we have today: that's why detective fiction begins in the nineteenth century. In ancient Athens, the "Cretan Archers" existed to quell riots, but that's about all; in Rome, there were riot troops and firemen. Solving crime and bringing charges was the citizen's responsibility: the aggrieved party or someone acting on that party's behalf would have to investigate and prosecute. The idea of having the state do those things was totally alien for most of human history before the nineteenth century.

This is NOT Stazi state

[abies]

There is a huge difference between crowd-sourcing 'wanted warrant' search versus asking people to report perceived offenses against a state on their own volition.

East Germany (and other Eastern Block states) problem with citizens spying and reporting crimes was that it was mostly interested in political crimes/dissent. As it was something hard to prove or disprove, people were often reporting people they disliked, just for sake of causing them trouble.

It was:
1) possible false accusations due to personal hatred
2) being hunted for 'thought crimes' or any disapproval of state
3) not being able to trust your neighbors(or even family)
which was making it bad, not a pure fact that it was civilian reporting a crime.

That article kind of equates calling police when you see/hear somebody beating his wife in apartment next door to falsely accusing your coworker of anti-state collaboration so he will get taken to Gulag and you can get his position. In both cases you are turning against somebody who possibly trusted you and reporting him to state-run enforcement. But there IS a difference - and I think that finding stolen cars firmly fit into former category.

If police will start falsely flagging cars of political dissidents as stolen and using other citizens to hunt them down, only then it becomes a problem. But guess what - if they do that and do NOT involve other citizens, it is problem of same size.

Re:This is NOT Stazi state

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a huge difference between crowd-sourcing 'wanted warrant' search versus asking people to report perceived offenses against a state on their own volition.

Sure, but a crowd-sourced 'wanted warrant' search is very close to a government-sponsored witch hunt or lynch mob. It enourages people to form unregulated vigilante mobs to unquestioningly enforce the will of the government. What if you were wrongly accused of a crime? Would you rather be arrested by an official police officer who was trained to be professional and to respect your rights (although, I admit, they do not always follow their training), or would you rather be arrested by an angry mob of random citizens who enjoy finding the "evil" people, and who don't really care whether you're guilty or not.

Re:Germany is still an occupied country

[Anonymous Coward]

Willingly hosting foreign troops in your country isn't quite the same as an occupation. Before the Two + Four treaty you would have had a point with Germany, that the two Germany's were occupied. These days, Germany could tell the US troops to get bent and they would need to. It is just not in Germany's (and NATO's) security interests to do so.

Japan on the other hand, I'm sure Okinawans would agree with you that its an occupation. Again at this point Japan could tell the US to get bent, but as with Germany. It is simply not in Japan's security interests either, especially with the North Korean's being a little unhinged of late.

The arrangement however does keep Japan from developing nuclear weapons, which it easily has the technology to produce a nuclear tipped ICBM within a year if it wanted. That's what the US gets in return, a non-nuclear Japan.

Reminds me of a certain book and movie

[craXORjack]

This sounds like Stephen King's novel, The Running Man. The movie diverged a bit but was similar. Citizens help the authorities catch someone on the run.