Not just the police: if your data or the data of the organization you work for is considered valuable enough[0], you also have to worry about thieves, foreign spies/saboteurs, corporate espionage, a wayward relative looking for banking passwords or Bitcoin to fund their drug/gambling habit, or a particularly obsessive ex.
[0] Mine isn't, and paranoia isn't one of my vices, so this is all academic to me.
Realistically, for most of us on this forum it's not even the police.
For most of us the police where we live aren't that corrupt (though it's par for the course of internet discourse to pretend there's one monolithic "the police"), and most of us statistically speaking aren't in the minority groups that get disproportionately targeted.
If that isn't you—if police where you live and travel are corrupt or if you're a minority who gets disproportionate enforcement—then sure, it's the police.
I live in South Wales -- a few years back police officers responded to a call about a black man having a mental health crisis and choked- err, sorry, "restrained" him to death. The police in the UK (even in my specific county) have a non-zero number of tasers deployed against children under the age of 10. The state has arrested people for speaking against Israel.
If our police are corrupt (they most certainly are), then it is entirely certain that the police in America, with a much worse record of abuses, is corrupt too.
> entirely certain that the police in America, with a much worse record of abuses
The fundamental misunderstanding that is unfortunately quite the norm in internet discourse is the idea that America has a police force. It does not. The US has a bewildering array of about 18000 federal, state, county, and local police forces that operate independently, have varying degrees of accountability to entirely different governments, and can't really be spoken about in aggregate without severely oversimplifying things.
Of course, that doesn't stop people from trying to do so anyway, which is how you get comments like this where people generalize their own experience with a different country's police force on a different continent and then assume from media coverage alone that "America's" is obviously worse.
I think you’re parsing “the” too literally - plenty of Americans would say the same thing verbatim, too, without literally assuming the existence of one police force. Broad generalizations about American policing are reasonable - that’s why we can talk about “police reform”, and why the Fraternal Order of Police exists as an American organization. (I say this as a resident of a bright blue city with a police department under a federal consent decree, and with a police union founded by a card carrying white supremacist… who is perfectly capable of distinguishing that from ICE and BORTAC.)
> plenty of Americans would say the same thing verbatim, too, without literally assuming the existence of one police force
They're also wrong to do so, because police forces vary widely by jurisdiction and cannot be generalized. I don't only object to people from other countries doing it, it's just particularly uninformed when they do.
I say this as a resident of a small city with a police force that has never had any controversy whatsoever, but whose officers feel acutely the generalized hatred directed at everyone in blue that has become vogue in a large segment of the country.
Just because your police forces are awful doesn't mean they all are.
I'm making no claims about the quality of any police force in particular other than the one in my city. I'm only arguing that you can't generize from one to all and that the widespread criticism of "the police" without specifying which department or agency you're talking about is both imprecise and harmful.
What this all has in common is no one is engaging in a complex personal surveillance enterprise to target you, because they don't need to.
It's not even a $5 wrench scenario, because they don't care: the point of jack booted thugs is you simply apply force to every problem and potential problem, and dare anyone to stop you.
Yeah. If you've drawn the unfavorable attention of the police (which I'm aware isn't difficult in many cases), it's extremely unlikely any of them are thinking "let's painstakingly disassemble and reassemble this guy's laptop!" But like I said upthread, there are still several plausible reasons why you might want to secure your hardware (and the threat of arbitrary police surveillance still isn't zero).
But on another note, in many countries (where digital privacy isn't already illegal) law enforcement is pushing for encryption backdoors and the like, so that kind of wiretapping will be their go-to, and in the police's ideal world they will simply be able to remotely log in to any phone, operating system, or CPU firmware and rummage around to their heart's content.
Until that comes to pass (heaven forbid), I doubt they will usually make the effort to check anyone's screws for nail polish. They're all about the brute force.
> It's not even a $5 wrench scenario
It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario.
> It's a $0 "type in your password or we're sticking you in a cell and leaving for the weekend" scenario.
Missing the point: the point is - they're not listening at all. They don't care. You're not a problem to be taken seriously and carefully investigated. You're going to be stuck in the cell and forgotten about anyway. Your equipment will be destroyed. No one is looking.
Corrupt police are often motivated by money, so the scenario could be: "we overheard you talking about transferring money/cryptocurrency/whatever and we are confiscating it, gives us access or else".
My point in starting this thread wasn't that the police are evil/misunderstood/chaotic-neutral, it was that the threat model here shouldn't be solely about one kind of adversary.
I live in Germany, where it's illegal to not support Israel, and police have raided the homes of non-Israel-supporters. It's not likely - it only happened a few times - but it's possible, and protecting yourself is only moderately paranoid.
Not just the police: if your data or the data of the organization you work for is considered valuable enough[0], you also have to worry about thieves, foreign spies/saboteurs, corporate espionage, a wayward relative looking for banking passwords or Bitcoin to fund their drug/gambling habit, or a particularly obsessive ex.
[0] Mine isn't, and paranoia isn't one of my vices, so this is all academic to me.