this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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THE POLICE PROBLEM

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    The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.

    99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.

    When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.

    When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."

    When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.

    Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.

    The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.

    All this is a path to a police state.

    In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.

    Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.

    That's the solution.

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Corrupt UK police analyst gets prison time for tipping off a friend that encrypted messaging app had been compromised (1ft.io)
submitted 1 year ago by DougHolland@lemmy.world to c/thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world
33 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 131 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The analyst told her friend that the police could access what was thought of as private. That was the crime. Being honest about what the police can do.

The police also say that having the ability to breach privacy is key to keeping people safe but there is no mention of when info secretly scraped from the unsuspecting prevented other unsuspecting people from morbid circumstances.

This whole event looks like the cops are big mad they will now be asked for accountability on another method of investigation. Imagine having to answer for your actions!

[–] Chouxfleur@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

To be fair to the plod that's not the only thing she's being charged with.

She's specifically been leaking information about ongoing investigations which for an LEO is a big no-no.

Mottram drove to Kay and Bennett's house to warn them about the police file on Kay – which as we know, and she didn't, was deliberately bogus.

If she'd just told people that EncroChat was insecure then she'd have plausible deniability, but she's clearly pretty involved in trying to assist people in keeping clear of the law (which is pretty cut and dry in the eyes of the law - regardless of what you think of the morality of it all).

Mottram bought weed from a dealer whose phone number was saved in her mobile phone. She also told Bennett about a murder file she had seen on her boss's desk, and took selfies with her work computer visible and showing an "official sensitive" document.

A few other dodgy bits here too, again, very much in breach of her terms of employment which, for LEA employees can get sticky pretty rapidly.

All of this is quite apart from whether you think the fuzz should have access to private citizens communications (which I should be clear I don't). But she's not just an innocent person who just told her mates that they shouldn't use a specific service to discuss breaking the law.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

According to the NCA, Mottram told Jonathan Kay, 39, the police were monitoring people's encrypted EncroChat conversations, and tipped him off that the cops had intel on him presumably from his use of the app.

She basically tipped off crooks who were selling weapons illegally according to the article.

While I think that cops shouldn't have a backdoor to an encrypted messaging system or access to any messages without a warrant, this woman is also a big piece of shit who deserves to be in jail.

[–] Afghaniscran@feddit.uk 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I just read the article and I missed that somehow. I thought she tipped off her mate who was selling weed and said that they were focussing on arms deals for now but be careful.

[–] TheaoneAndOnly27@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

She tipped off a guy who was selling weed, and that guy tipped off a guy who might be selling arms? Or is being reassured that the police are only focused on firearms currently. The wording was kind of weird in their text message.

[–] Afghaniscran@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago

I agree, I'm not really sure myself. I took it as reassuring him that they were focussing on arms but you could be right that he was tipping off his arms-dealing mate.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 39 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Just want to remind everybody that when the Snowden Revelations came out, not only was the UK's NSA-equivalent (the GCHQ) more abusive and extensive in its civil society surveilance that the NSA, but whilst the US government actually walked back on some of the abuses, the UK government simply retroactivelly legalized it and probably issued a bunch of D-Notices (the UK's Press censorship scheme) to quiet it down (certainly the UK press went real quiet on it really fast).

Also the chief editor at the British newspaper that brough out the Snowden Revelations - The Guardian - was kicked out some months later and that newspaper has not mentioned that subject since.

The country is way more authoritarian than people outside of it think: just because the "upper" classes are generally trained to be posh and project a gentlemany image (that and being inducted into the "old boys network" are the main selling points of private schools in the UK, curiously called "public schools" over there even though they're £30k per year per pupil) doesn't mean they don't think everybody else are plebes that need to be kept in their place and share the "lower" classes' belief that foreigners are inferior.

[–] Squizzy@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So many famous Brits are private school grads, seeing John Oliver and Richard Ayoade went to the same schools as the likes of BoJo and Thatcher is insane. So much of their public face is made up of this tiny population of people.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Well, if I remember it correctly 11% of the population attends Public Schools, though the most exclusive ones are attended by a tiny fraction of the population which are overwhelmingly represented in the Media, amongst High Court judges and in Politics.

The system that preserves power and wealth across generations through limiting opportunities for the rest also includes Cambridge and Oxford, were public school educated students used to be 70% not long ago (though nowadays its better and and they're only about half) even though they're 11% of all pupils, no doubt due the unmeritocratic selection process which relies on interviews rather than independent educational assessment (one of my acquainces was refused entry into an Architecture Degree because, as he was told, "he did not went to the right school", an impossible barrier to entry for most, more so for somebody of Arabic ancestry who had grown up in a Single Parent home because his father died when he was a child).

[–] halfempty@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago

I don't think that what she did was wrong. I think that the police hacking a person's device is wrong.

[–] Whirling_Cloudburst@lemmy.world 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is why more people should use Signal.

[–] ThePyroPython@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bold of you to assume that GCHQ & NSA hasn't already compromised Signal.

[–] TWeaK@lemm.ee 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Pretty unlikely. It's more likely they would find some way into one device and then replace its Signal app with a compromised version.

[–] GBU_28@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very unlikely they cracked it's encryption, but they can just crack the "human" part. Unattended device, patterns, contacts, etc

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did you just say what the comment already said, worded differently? Isn’t this what Reddit bots used to do for karma?

[–] GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

What the fuck are you talking about? I saw your comment and replied

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is it "corrupt" or corrupt? Because there is a difference, and the deference shown in the article is part of the problem.

[–] sik0fewl@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The former. It is a quote and does not seem like corruption to me.

Edit: it's also quoted in the headline, but OP changed it.

[–] DougHolland@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

Absolutely agreed, and I swiped those quote marks on purpose. :)

[–] slurpeesoforion@startrek.website 6 points 1 year ago

If police in general could be trusted, they'd still need to fuck off.

[–] youngGoku@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How can end-to-end encryption be compromised though?

[–] 000999@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The investigation accelerated in early 2019 after receiving EU funding.[2] At the end of January 2020, a judge in Lille, France, authorized the infiltration of the EncroChat servers.[23] Intelligence and technical collaboration between the NCA, the National Gendarmerie and Dutch police culminated in gaining access to messages after the National Gendarmerie put a "technical tool" on EncroChat's servers in France.[20][22][1] The malware allowed them to read messages before they were sent and record lock screen passwords. Messages could be read by law enforcement beginning in April.[12] EncroChat estimated that around 50 percent of devices in Europe were affected in June 2020.[1][17]

[–] youngGoku@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

OK thank you.

This is why we need to use a decentralized, end-to-end encrypted messaging service.

The gubment can not be trusted to keep their hands out of the cookie jar.

[–] DarkenLM@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

True E2EE? Only if you get the key. If they have a backdoor, then it's trivial.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are ways:

  • The encryption protocol might have a weakness
  • One or both of the devices might be compromised
  • The actual application design might have a weakness
  • The actual application might be conpromised (i.e. on purpose rather than an unknown design flaw)
  • The mechanism for generating the actual keys might have a weakeness (for example, for a while the symetrical key generation for HTTPS in the Mozilla browser was a lot less random than it was supposed to be so those connections were a lot easier to crack)
  • The mechanism for distributing the keys might have a weakness

Ultimatelly the one trully safe encryption mechanism is the One Time Pad, and that requires a key as long as the message (hence why seldom used) distributed in a safe way (for starters, never over a public network) and there's still the whole "compromised device" and "compromise application" risks (though implementing the One Time Pad protocol is stupidly simple)