
Denver Police Caught Misusing Databases Got Light Punishments, Report Says - growlix
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/us/denver-police-criminal-databases-personal-use.html
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jc4p
I think the bigger issue (which another article I read on this last week
described, but I sadly can't find it right now) is that low punishment for
when it's caught means its more likely to happen and not be caught. There were
3 cases reported in 2015, how many went unreported? If the culture is "oh it's
fine, just don't be egregious about it" I expect it's happened a lot more than
3 times in the last year.

Do they not maintain proper audit logs? I work for Stack Overflow and I can't
look at a user's PII without it being logged in multiple systems, do we have
higher internal security than the police department?

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sixothree
Imaging how these low-lifes would be treated if these were HIPAA violations.

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handedness
One _could_ argue that they aren't necessarily low-lifes: I'd wager many, many
people would abuse such power if they could. Which is why it's more important
to place constraints on positions of power, than to hope that we only staff
those positions with wholly noble people (who are incredibly few in number, in
reality).

The other consideration is that if they were doing so under the threat of
HIPAA violations, they may not have abused the information quite so casually.
Jealous husband fears a slap on the wrist, he abuses the database. Jealous
husband fears jail time, he possibly [hires P.I. / follows his wife / etc.].

I'm not defending them–law enforcement enjoys some protections that are
arguably unconstitutional, and as such should be held to a much higher
standard–but it's unproductive to examine what would have happened if the
penalties were different, while simultaneously assuming that the actors would
have made identical decisions based on different criteria.

And the reason that's important brings me back to my first point–built-in
constraints are the only way to solve this sort of thing, which is the same
reasoning the founders used to try to place constraints on American
politicians.

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jacquesm
> One could argue that they aren't necessarily low-lifes: I'd wager many, many
> people would abuse such power if they could.

The fact that there may be more of them does not change that they are low-
lifes.

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handedness
Sure, but then we wind up having to broadly categorize most people as low-
lifes. Which may be true, but that's all the more reason to construct a system
that can survive them, not a system that falls apart when representative human
beings are part of it.

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jbapple
The buried lede: one of the officers used the information to drive to the
victim's house and threaten him, yet received only a written reprimand.

If the situation had been reversed, and that man had driven to a police
officer's house to threaten him, I think that man would have been criminally
charged or even shot on the spot.

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hughdbrown
That's not the way I read it. I read it that the husband threatened the would-
be adulterer, not that the police officer did:

"When a Colorado man thought his wife might be having an affair, he asked a
Denver police officer to dig up personal details about the man he suspected.
The husband then drove by his house and threatened him, according to a
civilian oversight agency’s report."

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jbapple
> I read it that the husband threatened the would-be adulterer, not that the
> police officer did:

You are right; I was wrong.

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a3n
What would be my penalty if I gained access and used the same information they
did in exactly the same way? I would certainly be arrested, even if the data
was publicly available.

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clarkmoody
The problem with State-run police is that they live under a different set of
laws than the rest of us. We need to start treating all equally under the law,
rather than having two classes of people: the State-connected, and the
commoners.

