As a Libertarian like Snowden, I support transparency up to the point of causing specific harm to innocent individuals. If the NYT or Washington Post actually release information that results in anyone being killed or imprisoned by plausible enemies (not by say Canada) that's where I would draw the line. Specific details about military or valid intelligence operations that would be genuinely useful and non-obvious to plausible future enemies may also be crossing the line. For anything else I say bring it on! That information wants to be free. Just saying that the US engages in cyber attacks against certain countries or even mentioning how many such attacks we typically engage in in a year is anything but harmful to Americans and the rest of the world. Mainly because of the hypocrisy. I believe hypocrisy should always be exposed. In order to correct an out of control government the people have to know what is going on.
Q: Let's get back to what happened in New York and Washington. What is your assessment of the attacks on America? What's their effect on America and the Muslim world?
BIN LADEN: The events of Tuesday, September the 11th, in New York and Washington are great on all levels. Their repercussions are not over. Although the collapse of the twin towers is huge, but the events that followed, and I'm not just talking about the economic repercussions, those are continuing, the events that followed are dangerous and more enormous than the collapse of the towers.
The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.
...
I tell you freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people and the West in general will enter an unbearable hell and a choking life
If you read the whole interview you see that he does briefly mention his earlier demands that the US leave Saudi Arabia, but in this interview he focuses more on Palestine and the death of Muslims from American bombs. He mentions many times that 9/11 was justified as payback for American wars in Muslim countries. Nowhere does he mention annexing North America and imposing Muslim law which would be a ludicrous goal in any case. If that was so important to him I wonder why he left it out in such a high profile interview with Al Jazeera.
Do you know what Bin Laden's demands were to the US after 9/11?
To get the fuck out of Saudi Arabia. That was his whole beef with us. Period. His aim was not world conquest as you warmongers always like to believe.
They understand this is a long term struggle. They are patient, and will continue it. The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.
How surprised would you be to discover that your real enemy was not Al Qaeda at all, but your own fellow citizens? The ones who believe in freedom and will resist people like you and your police state policies. People who will fight you in the streets for their freedom if necessary. The misconception is that it takes a majority of the population to revolt. It doesn't. It just takes enough to give the armed forces a good fight.
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson recieved 1.2 million votes in the last presidential election. A full 1% of the total votes. If every one of those 1.2 million people learned how to shoot and bought themselves some decent weapons and body armor and if the techies among us spent years or decades working on Big Dog esque combat robots to enhance our numbers I think we could give you fascist fucks a decent fight. Especially since it would be all guerrila warfare just like in the war of independence.
an attack that can influence a piece of critical infrastructure.
I welcome such attacks. Bring them on I say. Their "damage" will be very limited and then maybe the idiots that put things like power plants, traffic lights, dams, air traffic control systems, banks, and nuclear reactors on the internet can be fired, sued, and/or prosecuted for gross negligence. I consider such attacks to be healthy if it prevents such idiotic behavior in the future. Once you air gap all critical computer systems then there is no excuse for any of this cyberwar bullshit and morons can stop ranting about it. The internet was never intended for such systems and they have no business being connected to the world wide web. Meanwhile governments around the world can focus on knocking out World of Warcraft servers instead of dropping bombs on people. Works for me.
At best the service will simply be shut down by the NSA if they cannot compromise it. Lockbox claims to use client side encryption. If the system is executed perfectly and all of your data is fully encrypted before it leaves your computer this might be difficult, but if the service is shut down you will probably lose your data anyway. Which means you will need a local backup which would seem to ruin the point. I think it's about time to admit that saving any data on a remote server in the US, UK, or close allies of either has to be considered to be stored by the NSA/GCHQ and forwarded to other law enforcement agencies if deemed appropriate. And international cooperation in this regard among close allies cannot be ruled out.
In the sort of privacy-hostile environment currently faced in the US, UK and much of the world going full tin foil hat is the only way. Any information you want to remain private has to be encrypted by a system fully under your control before it leaves your computer and your passphrase has to not just be secure, but NSA/GCHQ secure. And it wouldn't hurt to toss in some multifactor authentication and steganography as well.
I don't think an overseas service is better for the NSA. They don't have to even pretend to have ethical or legal constraints, but they are limited by international politics. They are stuck asking for cooperation. Or trying to bribe the right people. Within the US they have the full force of the US government behind them and can simply put uncooperative people in jail.
Nevertheless things have reached a point where you might get idealogically motivated people starting anti-NSA encryption systems and there isn't much the NSA can do against someone willing to risk prison or flee the country or shut down their entire company rather than deal with the devil. The NSA and the government in general are used to dealing with people who are easily controlled with nothing more than money.
But, yeah, the NSA can at least shut down pretty much any US based centralized system intended to fight them. Outside of North America and Western Europe it's a different story though. They don't have any legal power to shut down anything over there.
Some models indicate that a small reduction in emissions won't help. others [climatecommunication.org] indicate that a 2% decrease per year will stabilize CO2 concentrations by 2050.
This is why some of us are skeptical whenever a computer model is substituted for real world experimental evidence. As a programmer I know the truth of GIGO and I don't trust any model without knowing the algorithms used and exactly what assumptions were made to try to reproduce the full complexity of a real world system. This is doubly true when politics or religion are involved.
Before the industrial revolution glaciers remained exactly the same size from the time the earth first formed as a planet. Only humanity is capable of such massive feats. Glacier shrinkage is 100% proof that intelligent life exists on a planet because nothing else can cause that except for animals who have learned to build fires. Try to prove me wrong. You cannot.
Historically governments are the ones to murder and unjustly imprison people by the thousands or millions. And it wouldn't matter that our politicians are mostly owned by corporations if they had no power to pass laws that violated our rights. When was the last time you heard about a corporation abducting, interrogating, beating, torturing, or killing people? Governments are the ones who do that. I think corporations are evil, but governments are a lot more evil. Especially since they will do pretty much whatever the corporations tell them to do. Luckily the corporations don't generally have goals that rely on violence.
The government certainly doesn't represent my interests. It only represents the interests of the majority. Well at least when those interests don't conflict with the congress critter's corporate sugar daddy. The best method of reducing the power of corporations is by not having them. The government could just pass a law (or an amendment if necessary) revoking corporate limited liability and corporate personhood. The individuals responsible for the bad decisions and for carrying them out will be held responsible for their actions. In addition take control of campaign contributions. No individual can donate more than $100 to a campaign and no group or company can donate anything at all. Make it a felony with mandatory minimum prison terms for anyone who is caught doing so. See how easy that was? We don't have to give up all of our human rights to a ginormous government just to keep the corporations in check. All concentrations of power are bad. I don't see why the government should get a pass just because they are funded by taxes.
There is more than one type of corruption. The kind of corruption in the US is one of the government itself accepting large bribes from corporations and our police will beat you or kill you instead of accepting monetary bribes.
Also offering $50 to someone who makes $6000/month is an insult, not a bribe. Try doing it with $5000 instead and see what happens. Probably he'd just keep the money and give you the ticket anyway, but at least you'd have a chance of success.
Living in the US with dark skin is like being a jew in NAZI Germany. Between "if you see something say something" white trash morons fingering every person that looks like a stereotypical Muslim to them and the typical dumb-as-a-rock law enforcement thugs who see every dark skinned person as a terrorist this is a country I would want to flee from.
I wonder what would have happened if he had clammed up and refused to answer any of their questions. What he should have done is tried to leave the airport and fight to get back his possessions if necessary. Once an explosive detector is set off leaving the airport is really the best course of action for anyone. You won't be permitted to fly without being thoroughly violated at that point anyway. May as well come back and try your luck another day. TSA agents have no power to detain you. You are within your rights to take your stuff and walk away. If they try to physically stop you you have the right to defend yourself. The only power they have is the power to prevent you from flying that day out of that airport.
Show me the terrorists. I want to see them. I want to see the evidence against them. Until they show themselves I will continue to assume that they don't exist. Even if planes were blown up every day, it wouldn't justify welcoming a police state. Also why should I care about what is motivating those thugs?
That's one of the other things that are wrong with America, too much hype about ideals that have long ceased to be relevant.
This story shows just how relevant they still are and they are only going to get more and more relevant as our society descends into a police state in every way possible. This sort of thing is precisely why some of us dislike government in general and large governments in particular. Power corrupts. Always. And eventually you end up with a fascist tyranny like we currently have in the US. The ideals of people like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson have never been more relevant than they are today.
And yet, I find myself completely unsurprised. How long before all this surveillance infrastructure gets used against farmers standing up against Monstano, or generic drug makers
Some years ago I returned from a trip abroad with some generic drugs in my luggage. The US customs guy searching my luggage noticed them. He told me that I should stop buying foreign generics because they were used to fund terrorists. I asked him if he seriously believed that or if it was just something he was supposed to say. He replied that he seriously believed it. So I think the generic drugs = terrorism line has already been crossed by our government.
Look, I don't want an Amazon monopoly of all of retail any more than the next guy, but maybe these brick-and-mortar chains deserve it. So much of the retail space has been taken over by large corporations that offer better prices than mom-and-pop stores but lack any semblance of customer service. Their employees aren't trained, and the products are exactly the same junk you find everywhere else. They just aren't a good experience.
It must be nice to be rich. But if there are no brick and mortar stores where will you go when you want to take your BMW out for a spin? I shop at Walmart as much as I can and even those prices are barely affordable for me. Or perhaps you'd rather pay more in taxes so that people like me can get food stamp cards so that we too can afford to shop at mom 'n pop boutique stores which charge 2-3 times more. That way we can all afford to have a "good experience" when we shop and can avoid buying "the same junk you find everywhere". It's so annoying when rich people assume that everyone else is at least as rich as they are.
Actually the right to record police has been affirmed by state supreme courts in pretty much every state now. Massachusetts was one of the last. We can finally record them with confidence that at least the law would be on our side, but that doesn't mean they will not just smash the recorder and then beat you to death with the remains of it. These are dangerous, violent, angry, unpredictable people with no sense of right or wrong.
There are even more cops that are provoked into taking actions they shouldn't take by taunting assholes, who somehow never show up in the news.
Don't call me an asshole. The cop swore at me first. So cops have the right to swear at regular citizens, but we do not have the right to swear back at them? Is this some kind of aristocracy class system, where cops are the only first class citizens?
But maybe if X number complaints filed against against an officer that guy gets to where the camera for a month.
Unfortunately in my state complaints against cops are kept strictly confidential. The only people who would know about them are the people who filed them and the cops themselves and the cops are not going to police themselves. That much should be pretty clear by now. Law suits are public record of course. That was one reason I wanted to sue my police attacker, but I couldn't afford the law suit and the cop probably would have finished off what he started and simply murdered me anyway. He's just that kind of guy.
But by and large, this group of cops is small by comparison to the total number of cops that follow the rules most of the time, do their jobs without trying to piss off and provoke everyone they come into contact with.
Bullshit. You have no better statistical basis to make such a claim than anyone else. Go read about the Stanford Prison Experiment and then try to say this with a straight face. Given power people turn bad. They turn mean and violent. And those are people that didn't even start that way. Most cops start that way and just grow worse when they graduate frorm school yard bully to professional thug.Your claim is more wishful thinking than anything else.
Yes. When your sample size is only 2 or 3. Power corrupts and police are no more immune from that corruption than the rest of us. It would be very surprising if it were otherwise.
Any "law enforcement" or government issue google glass is going to be passing through their teammates and supervisors, so it's not as if this is going to auto-youtube all the beatings. Those videos won't make it online unless someone else also took a shot with his own, which is no different from currently.
Well for this system to work or even to be taken seriously the footage would have to be automatically uploaded somewhere that is not accessible by any police officer. Otherwise it's pretty obvious that any negative footage will be deleted. Since there are already several systems that do this for the rest of us, I certainly don't think implementing such a system for the police would be impossible.
Dashcams do little or nothing to prevent police brutality or the false charges that follow. Cops know enough to not beat or kill anyone within the view of the camera. I don't think it's necessary to force cops to leave the camera on when going to the bathroom. They can switch it off just before they go in. But if he wants to arrest someone during his bathroom break his testimony about whatever he claims occured while in there should be ignored. All charges he makes against someone during his bathroom break should be automatically dismissed.
If he 'forgets' to turn it back on and ends up miles from a bathroom when the camera is finally turned back on again any charges he makes against anyone during that time should automatically be dismissed and his testimony from that missing period should be inadmissable in any trial. Hopefully a jury will also consider the fact that the cop turned off his camera right before the police brutality was alleged to have taken place in any lawsuit against the department.
But if the streams aren't made public then how will the footage be used against the police themselves? And don't say a supervisor will release it. If the police maintain control of the footage, all police brutality/murder footage will vanish almost as soon as it is recorded.
In my state the police used dashcams for a while until they discovered that the additional video evidence caused them to lose cases a lot more often than it helped them win them. So they ended the program. Police will always protect their own. That is their first rule. So how do you keep the footage from the public and keep it out of the hands of the police themselves? There would have to be some kind of neutral third party that stored the footage and released copies of the footage to both prosecutors and defendents in various criminal and civil trials.
As a victim of police brutality and the inevitable frame-up cover charges that followed and the violent criminal record to show for it, I definitely endorse this idea.
What's more I think any of the typical contempt of cop charges or even more ambitious/serious cover charges like assault and battery with a deadly weapon or drug/firearm possession should be automatically thrown out if the officer does not have 100% video coverage of the event. Cops, especially American ones, have proven again and again that they cannot be trusted and that they are no more immune from the corruption of arbitrary power than the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment. If anything the kind of people who become police officers in the US, who grew up idealizing violent, out of control TV cops like Dirty Harry or the character in The Wire are less likely to resist the temptation to take out their anger on all non-cops they come into contact with.
While this may not stop them from tazing 14 year old girls in the head it would at least discourage or eliminate some of the inevitable false charges that often follow, literally adding insult to injury. No, this won't directly stop all police brutality because they will usually remove or turn off or even break whatever recording device they are issued before beating anyone, but it may prevent their excuses, the false charges which led them to having to violently 'defend themselves' from whatever unarmed 10 year old girl/ninja that was attacking him. Without the comfort of the always reliable cover charges, lawsuits start to become more of a concern and certain cops may think twice about beating or killing people when they cannot just make up a story about having to defend themselves from a violent and out of control attacker.
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As a Libertarian like Snowden, I support transparency up to the point of causing specific harm to innocent individuals. If the NYT or Washington Post actually release information that results in anyone being killed or imprisoned by plausible enemies (not by say Canada) that's where I would draw the line. Specific details about military or valid intelligence operations that would be genuinely useful and non-obvious to plausible future enemies may also be crossing the line. For anything else I say bring it on! That information wants to be free. Just saying that the US engages in cyber attacks against certain countries or even mentioning how many such attacks we typically engage in in a year is anything but harmful to Americans and the rest of the world. Mainly because of the hypocrisy. I believe hypocrisy should always be exposed. In order to correct an out of control government the people have to know what is going on.
http://edition.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/south/02/05/binladen.transcript/
Q: Let's get back to what happened in New York and Washington. What is your assessment of the attacks on America? What's their effect on America and the Muslim world?
BIN LADEN: The events of Tuesday, September the 11th, in New York and Washington are great on all levels. Their repercussions are not over. Although the collapse of the twin towers is huge, but the events that followed, and I'm not just talking about the economic repercussions, those are continuing, the events that followed are dangerous and more enormous than the collapse of the towers.
The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed. Those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights, and humanity have been destroyed. They have gone up in smoke.
...
I tell you freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people and the West in general will enter an unbearable hell and a choking life
If you read the whole interview you see that he does briefly mention his earlier demands that the US leave Saudi Arabia, but in this interview he focuses more on Palestine and the death of Muslims from American bombs. He mentions many times that 9/11 was justified as payback for American wars in Muslim countries. Nowhere does he mention annexing North America and imposing Muslim law which would be a ludicrous goal in any case. If that was so important to him I wonder why he left it out in such a high profile interview with Al Jazeera.
Do you know what Bin Laden's demands were to the US after 9/11?
To get the fuck out of Saudi Arabia. That was his whole beef with us. Period. His aim was not world conquest as you warmongers always like to believe.
They understand this is a long term struggle. They are patient, and will continue it. The problem is likely to get worse before it gets better.
How surprised would you be to discover that your real enemy was not Al Qaeda at all, but your own fellow citizens? The ones who believe in freedom and will resist people like you and your police state policies. People who will fight you in the streets for their freedom if necessary. The misconception is that it takes a majority of the population to revolt. It doesn't. It just takes enough to give the armed forces a good fight.
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson recieved 1.2 million votes in the last presidential election. A full 1% of the total votes. If every one of those 1.2 million people learned how to shoot and bought themselves some decent weapons and body armor and if the techies among us spent years or decades working on Big Dog esque combat robots to enhance our numbers I think we could give you fascist fucks a decent fight. Especially since it would be all guerrila warfare just like in the war of independence.
an attack that can influence a piece of critical infrastructure.
I welcome such attacks. Bring them on I say. Their "damage" will be very limited and then maybe the idiots that put things like power plants, traffic lights, dams, air traffic control systems, banks, and nuclear reactors on the internet can be fired, sued, and/or prosecuted for gross negligence. I consider such attacks to be healthy if it prevents such idiotic behavior in the future. Once you air gap all critical computer systems then there is no excuse for any of this cyberwar bullshit and morons can stop ranting about it. The internet was never intended for such systems and they have no business being connected to the world wide web. Meanwhile governments around the world can focus on knocking out World of Warcraft servers instead of dropping bombs on people. Works for me.
At best the service will simply be shut down by the NSA if they cannot compromise it. Lockbox claims to use client side encryption. If the system is executed perfectly and all of your data is fully encrypted before it leaves your computer this might be difficult, but if the service is shut down you will probably lose your data anyway. Which means you will need a local backup which would seem to ruin the point. I think it's about time to admit that saving any data on a remote server in the US, UK, or close allies of either has to be considered to be stored by the NSA/GCHQ and forwarded to other law enforcement agencies if deemed appropriate. And international cooperation in this regard among close allies cannot be ruled out.
In the sort of privacy-hostile environment currently faced in the US, UK and much of the world going full tin foil hat is the only way. Any information you want to remain private has to be encrypted by a system fully under your control before it leaves your computer and your passphrase has to not just be secure, but NSA/GCHQ secure. And it wouldn't hurt to toss in some multifactor authentication and steganography as well.
I don't think an overseas service is better for the NSA. They don't have to even pretend to have ethical or legal constraints, but they are limited by international politics. They are stuck asking for cooperation. Or trying to bribe the right people. Within the US they have the full force of the US government behind them and can simply put uncooperative people in jail.
Nevertheless things have reached a point where you might get idealogically motivated people starting anti-NSA encryption systems and there isn't much the NSA can do against someone willing to risk prison or flee the country or shut down their entire company rather than deal with the devil. The NSA and the government in general are used to dealing with people who are easily controlled with nothing more than money.
But, yeah, the NSA can at least shut down pretty much any US based centralized system intended to fight them. Outside of North America and Western Europe it's a different story though. They don't have any legal power to shut down anything over there.
I wish I knew where all of these out of work physicists are. I need one to design a klystron or gyrotron for me.
Some models indicate that a small reduction in emissions won't help. others [climatecommunication.org] indicate that a 2% decrease per year will stabilize CO2 concentrations by 2050.
This is why some of us are skeptical whenever a computer model is substituted for real world experimental evidence. As a programmer I know the truth of GIGO and I don't trust any model without knowing the algorithms used and exactly what assumptions were made to try to reproduce the full complexity of a real world system. This is doubly true when politics or religion are involved.
Before the industrial revolution glaciers remained exactly the same size from the time the earth first formed as a planet. Only humanity is capable of such massive feats. Glacier shrinkage is 100% proof that intelligent life exists on a planet because nothing else can cause that except for animals who have learned to build fires. Try to prove me wrong. You cannot.
Historically governments are the ones to murder and unjustly imprison people by the thousands or millions. And it wouldn't matter that our politicians are mostly owned by corporations if they had no power to pass laws that violated our rights. When was the last time you heard about a corporation abducting, interrogating, beating, torturing, or killing people? Governments are the ones who do that. I think corporations are evil, but governments are a lot more evil. Especially since they will do pretty much whatever the corporations tell them to do. Luckily the corporations don't generally have goals that rely on violence.
The government certainly doesn't represent my interests. It only represents the interests of the majority. Well at least when those interests don't conflict with the congress critter's corporate sugar daddy. The best method of reducing the power of corporations is by not having them. The government could just pass a law (or an amendment if necessary) revoking corporate limited liability and corporate personhood. The individuals responsible for the bad decisions and for carrying them out will be held responsible for their actions. In addition take control of campaign contributions. No individual can donate more than $100 to a campaign and no group or company can donate anything at all. Make it a felony with mandatory minimum prison terms for anyone who is caught doing so. See how easy that was? We don't have to give up all of our human rights to a ginormous government just to keep the corporations in check. All concentrations of power are bad. I don't see why the government should get a pass just because they are funded by taxes.
There is more than one type of corruption. The kind of corruption in the US is one of the government itself accepting large bribes from corporations and our police will beat you or kill you instead of accepting monetary bribes.
Also offering $50 to someone who makes $6000/month is an insult, not a bribe. Try doing it with $5000 instead and see what happens. Probably he'd just keep the money and give you the ticket anyway, but at least you'd have a chance of success.
Living in the US with dark skin is like being a jew in NAZI Germany. Between "if you see something say something" white trash morons fingering every person that looks like a stereotypical Muslim to them and the typical dumb-as-a-rock law enforcement thugs who see every dark skinned person as a terrorist this is a country I would want to flee from.
I wonder what would have happened if he had clammed up and refused to answer any of their questions. What he should have done is tried to leave the airport and fight to get back his possessions if necessary. Once an explosive detector is set off leaving the airport is really the best course of action for anyone. You won't be permitted to fly without being thoroughly violated at that point anyway. May as well come back and try your luck another day. TSA agents have no power to detain you. You are within your rights to take your stuff and walk away. If they try to physically stop you you have the right to defend yourself. The only power they have is the power to prevent you from flying that day out of that airport.
Show me the terrorists. I want to see them. I want to see the evidence against them. Until they show themselves I will continue to assume that they don't exist. Even if planes were blown up every day, it wouldn't justify welcoming a police state. Also why should I care about what is motivating those thugs?
That's one of the other things that are wrong with America, too much hype about ideals that have long ceased to be relevant.
This story shows just how relevant they still are and they are only going to get more and more relevant as our society descends into a police state in every way possible. This sort of thing is precisely why some of us dislike government in general and large governments in particular. Power corrupts. Always. And eventually you end up with a fascist tyranny like we currently have in the US. The ideals of people like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson have never been more relevant than they are today.
And yet, I find myself completely unsurprised. How long before all this surveillance infrastructure gets used against farmers standing up against Monstano, or generic drug makers
Some years ago I returned from a trip abroad with some generic drugs in my luggage. The US customs guy searching my luggage noticed them. He told me that I should stop buying foreign generics because they were used to fund terrorists. I asked him if he seriously believed that or if it was just something he was supposed to say. He replied that he seriously believed it. So I think the generic drugs = terrorism line has already been crossed by our government.
Look, I don't want an Amazon monopoly of all of retail any more than the next guy, but maybe these brick-and-mortar chains deserve it. So much of the retail space has been taken over by large corporations that offer better prices than mom-and-pop stores but lack any semblance of customer service. Their employees aren't trained, and the products are exactly the same junk you find everywhere else. They just aren't a good experience.
It must be nice to be rich. But if there are no brick and mortar stores where will you go when you want to take your BMW out for a spin? I shop at Walmart as much as I can and even those prices are barely affordable for me. Or perhaps you'd rather pay more in taxes so that people like me can get food stamp cards so that we too can afford to shop at mom 'n pop boutique stores which charge 2-3 times more. That way we can all afford to have a "good experience" when we shop and can avoid buying "the same junk you find everywhere". It's so annoying when rich people assume that everyone else is at least as rich as they are.
Actually the right to record police has been affirmed by state supreme courts in pretty much every state now. Massachusetts was one of the last. We can finally record them with confidence that at least the law would be on our side, but that doesn't mean they will not just smash the recorder and then beat you to death with the remains of it. These are dangerous, violent, angry, unpredictable people with no sense of right or wrong.
There are even more cops that are provoked into taking actions they shouldn't take by taunting assholes, who somehow never show up in the news.
Don't call me an asshole. The cop swore at me first. So cops have the right to swear at regular citizens, but we do not have the right to swear back at them? Is this some kind of aristocracy class system, where cops are the only first class citizens?
But maybe if X number complaints filed against against an officer that guy gets to where the camera for a month.
Unfortunately in my state complaints against cops are kept strictly confidential. The only people who would know about them are the people who filed them and the cops themselves and the cops are not going to police themselves. That much should be pretty clear by now. Law suits are public record of course. That was one reason I wanted to sue my police attacker, but I couldn't afford the law suit and the cop probably would have finished off what he started and simply murdered me anyway. He's just that kind of guy.
But by and large, this group of cops is small by comparison to the total number of cops that follow the rules most of the time, do their jobs without trying to piss off and provoke everyone they come into contact with.
Bullshit. You have no better statistical basis to make such a claim than anyone else. Go read about the Stanford Prison Experiment and then try to say this with a straight face. Given power people turn bad. They turn mean and violent. And those are people that didn't even start that way. Most cops start that way and just grow worse when they graduate frorm school yard bully to professional thug.Your claim is more wishful thinking than anything else.
If the police are not being recorded, then say they're off the clock and have no authority to enforce the law.
I approve of this idea.
So yeah, there a couple bad cops
Yes. When your sample size is only 2 or 3. Power corrupts and police are no more immune from that corruption than the rest of us. It would be very surprising if it were otherwise.
Any "law enforcement" or government issue google glass is going to be passing through their teammates and supervisors, so it's not as if this is going to auto-youtube all the beatings. Those videos won't make it online unless someone else also took a shot with his own, which is no different from currently.
Well for this system to work or even to be taken seriously the footage would have to be automatically uploaded somewhere that is not accessible by any police officer. Otherwise it's pretty obvious that any negative footage will be deleted. Since there are already several systems that do this for the rest of us, I certainly don't think implementing such a system for the police would be impossible.
The streams from these "cop cameras" have to be restricted so that they can only be accessed by the officer's supervisors
If the cops have access to the footage they will just delete it whenever it contains evidence against one of them.
Dashcams do little or nothing to prevent police brutality or the false charges that follow. Cops know enough to not beat or kill anyone within the view of the camera. I don't think it's necessary to force cops to leave the camera on when going to the bathroom. They can switch it off just before they go in. But if he wants to arrest someone during his bathroom break his testimony about whatever he claims occured while in there should be ignored. All charges he makes against someone during his bathroom break should be automatically dismissed.
If he 'forgets' to turn it back on and ends up miles from a bathroom when the camera is finally turned back on again any charges he makes against anyone during that time should automatically be dismissed and his testimony from that missing period should be inadmissable in any trial. Hopefully a jury will also consider the fact that the cop turned off his camera right before the police brutality was alleged to have taken place in any lawsuit against the department.
But if the streams aren't made public then how will the footage be used against the police themselves? And don't say a supervisor will release it. If the police maintain control of the footage, all police brutality/murder footage will vanish almost as soon as it is recorded.
In my state the police used dashcams for a while until they discovered that the additional video evidence caused them to lose cases a lot more often than it helped them win them. So they ended the program. Police will always protect their own. That is their first rule. So how do you keep the footage from the public and keep it out of the hands of the police themselves? There would have to be some kind of neutral third party that stored the footage and released copies of the footage to both prosecutors and defendents in various criminal and civil trials.
As a victim of police brutality and the inevitable frame-up cover charges that followed and the violent criminal record to show for it, I definitely endorse this idea.
What's more I think any of the typical contempt of cop charges or even more ambitious/serious cover charges like assault and battery with a deadly weapon or drug/firearm possession should be automatically thrown out if the officer does not have 100% video coverage of the event. Cops, especially American ones, have proven again and again that they cannot be trusted and that they are no more immune from the corruption of arbitrary power than the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment. If anything the kind of people who become police officers in the US, who grew up idealizing violent, out of control TV cops like Dirty Harry or the character in The Wire are less likely to resist the temptation to take out their anger on all non-cops they come into contact with.
While this may not stop them from tazing 14 year old girls in the head it would at least discourage or eliminate some of the inevitable false charges that often follow, literally adding insult to injury. No, this won't directly stop all police brutality because they will usually remove or turn off or even break whatever recording device they are issued before beating anyone, but it may prevent their excuses, the false charges which led them to having to violently 'defend themselves' from whatever unarmed 10 year old girl/ninja that was attacking him. Without the comfort of the always reliable cover charges, lawsuits start to become more of a concern and certain cops may think twice about beating or killing people when they cannot just make up a story about having to defend themselves from a violent and out of control attacker.