Again, I'm no expert, but I do believe the law would be what would stop you. It could be poorly written, but then we should just rewrite it.
Again, I'm no expert, but I do believe the law would be what would stop you. It could be poorly written, but then we should just rewrite it.
I don't quite understand your position. The intelligence community has shown time and again that they are happy to be innovative (and secretive) with interpretations of the law that enable them access to vast swaths of U.S. persons data without a warrant.
This is recent history, too. With the NSA interpreting the addition of the word "relevant" in Section 215 of the Patriot Act to mean "indefinite bulk collection of records on every U.S. citizen".
Where do you get your confidence from? The confidence that there will be robust public debate before an encroachment on the exploitation of data already collected on a country's citizens?
Do you believe this sort of bulk seizure and screening of the data of a country's citizens to be limited to the U.S.?
Police, in many countries, have already been found to violate the laws protecting surveillance systems that already exist.
If a warrant doesn't stop them today, why do you think it will tomorrow?
I don't believe in "police" as a transnational group. I don't believe that the actions of police in some other country carries any information about the culture of police in mine.
If police use these systems outside of their intended and legally mandated forms, that must be dealt with. We do need effective police though. We do that with robust surveillance infrastructure for police queries in the database, possible even with a mandatory log of queries as part of discovery.
I don't have to "think" it will stop them, I can utilize the levers of democracy to check them.
The obvious question there is... Has it ever happened in yours?
I'd be surprised it you couldn't find some instances, but I'm also confident that those cases were dealt with by procedural enhancements.
Just recently we had a case where an employee was caught snooping in some address and family data. The person was fired, reported to the police for investigation, and the relevant employer is now looking at their processes to make sure it doesn't happen again. Along with that, everybody directly affected has been notified. That seems like a reasonable response to me.
I'm much more concerned with all the times we don't find out. We need strong checks on access to this data, which is fortunately also a legal requirement. I generally trust that the relevant authorities are keeping track of that.
Importantly, what I hope you're seeing from this reply is a trust in the institutions of my government. I trust that the processes are being followed, and that the processes are built in such a way that they check each other.
That doesn't seem like a reasonable response to me.
An employee was caught criminally stalking their family, and using the force of the government to do so.
Rather than being prosecuted, like happens outside the force, they were fired and let go to continue living their life - likely to be rehired in another police force if the pattern plays out as it regularly does.
That this can happen without large alarm bells, means that the checks on access are not effective - because it is not a once in a lifetime event.
I do see your trust. But I also see you yourself producing evidence suggesting such trust is unfounded.
> An employee was caught criminally stalking their family, and using the force of the government to do so.
So far he has not been caught criminally doing anything, because the system that found a brrach of process is not the system that determines criminality. Right now he has violated an internal process and been fired for that deriliction of duty.
> Rather than being prosecuted
He is very likely ALSO going to be prosecuted, since the system that found the violafion of the process also determined that such a violation is possibly illegal and activated the police. He is being investigated, and if they can prove anything criminal, he'll get convicted for that.
Obviously the bar for proving criminality is higher than the bar for dismissal.
> That this can happen without large alarm bells, means that the checks on access are not effective
This is exactly the debate that is happening right now because of this case. I'll end by quoting a professor that commented on this case recently:
"This should make us prioritize investing in security, investing in describing our processes and ways of working, such that you can find outliers. Maybe instead of investing in AI, which is fun to have but doesn't actually solve any of the serious problems"