506
NYPD faces backlash as it prepares to encrypt radio communications | New York | The Guardian
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
506 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
59314 readers
5192 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
True, but your privacy exists even in this case.
Actually I can think of a couple of reasons.
One is that this way the parents of a violent crime or lethal incident victim can be informed about the condition before the press publish the news. Last year we had some cases here in Italy where the parents of people who passed away for some incident/crime discover it from the press even before the authority had time to inform them.
True, in this case is the press that is in the wrong, but they could do it because they had access to the communications.
Another is that maybe it is not a good idea to let criminals know what the police are doing to catch them.
BUT I understand your point given the news about US police I read around.
What I think about it is that if you think that all the US police officers are bad then I agree that the not having access to the radio communications can be a problem. The solution however is not to keep the communications open but to fix the US police.
In that case the records need to be auditable, e.g. available for subpoenas and all that. But given the frequency of their body feels suddenly "malfunctioning" during arrests, I don't see that happening in the shower term.
What we need BEFORE encrypted comms is stronger accountability laws and harsher punishments for police brutality.
Otherwise I won't buy the "protect and serve" excuse. They just want to save their own asses.
It's worth noting that in Italy, police communications are encrypted (they use TETRA radios, like most police forces in Europe). I'm not saying it can't help prevent this, but when weighing the cost and benefits of encryption for police radios, we should take into account that this benefit is not absolute.