As the article makes clear, they're just incompetent. However police-types seem to be very conservative by nature which can lead to a very technophobic workforce.
It is pretty surprising how slowly police are changing with the times. You'd expect every major police force to have a "computer crimes" division, but they don't. Only really the MET (London's police force) has a decent computer crimes division.
You often read about digital crimes (e.g. harassment, theft, fraud, etc) going completely uninvestigated because of how few "digital police" they have (e.g. 1/1000th the size of the officers investigating physical crimes).
As a specific example, for almost a year when you Googled "UK passport renew" the first Google adword result was an obviously fraudulent one, yet nothing was done even though they had to have known about it.
PS - I bet you could use Tasker (or a similar app) to wipe your phone if it didn't regain data access for a long period of time (e.g. 6-12 hours). So if they took your phone and shoved it into a bag, the phone still auto-wipes if they fail to turn it off.
PPS - Although realistically you're best not storing the data on your phone at all. The UK police can force you to give up your encryption keys, however they would struggle to get your data off of a foreign owned-operated website.
I wouldn't describe this as "incompetent", I'd describe this as "the phone security working".
There are techniques for tethering the phone and then downloading data from it, but arguably these rely on loopholes that Apple can and should be fixing.
Phones don't have a concept of PACE. Until we can agree on a legal and technical system whereby the police have access to phones if and only if it's part of a criminal investigation, there are only two possibilities: too much police access, or no police access.
> Only really the MET (London's police force) has a decent computer crimes division.
It doesn't surprise me. Doing this stuff effectively is very hard, the number of people who could get up to speed quickly is small. It's not like your company's IT department.
If I recall correctly, there was a sort-of mini bubble some years back where every force out there rushed to get a computer crimes division. We can all have fun imagining how most of those went.
I suspect for most forces the payroll budget is nowhere near large enough to hire people with appropriate skills, either. I've lived in places where the chief of police's salary would be considered entry-level pay by IT professionals.
Why does every small town police department need its own staff for investigating "digital" crime? A centralized agency would actually be much more efficient for this, one that can collaborate with the local police department to match physical and digital evidence, perform arrests, etc. Not that I want yet another acronym agency charged with investigating everyone on the Internet, but it seems a waste to have each police department try to set up its own digital forensics lab.
In the UK a town (or what in the US would be called a "city") does not have its own police department. Instead the UK is divided into just 45 territorial police forces, typically the size of a county. So the parent comment is not as inefficient as it would be in a US context where each town has its own independent force.
In the US, I think the main issue has to do with most Police Departments only requiring a High School Diploma as an education requirement. I've had internships with Gov't agencies and volunteered at local PDs and it's a very common thread that a large portion of the workforce is computer illiterate. Sure higher education doesn't necessarily mean people will be proficient with computers but at least they will have exposure and familiarity. Also the people who make the decisions (higher ranking officials) are usually older and also phobic of technology.
It's worse than that: some police departments will actively reject you if you're too smart. There are lots of stories about this which you can find with a quick search, including this one where someone was dismissed and lost their court case: http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...
The problem also lies with compensation. If you have the skills to be a good computer forensics officer, you can make several times more money elsewhere.
I see the lack of seriousness with which law enforcement treats much digital crime as an aspect of the way society sees the Internet as less real and therefore unimportant. I also suspect this problem will disappear as those who grew up with pervasive computing gain influence.
You're 100% right except for one aspect: that it is surprising.
The highest quality services are ones with multiple alternatives and low switching costs. Monopolies tend to provide poorer service and are more conservative because there is reduced incentive or pressure to change.
Police are a perfect example of this; democracy is a weak lever.
Edit: This is not inherently an argument against the provision of the police as a public good. It could be accomplished within democracy by stronger localization and flexibility in choice of provision (e.g. allowing neighborhoods to opt out / choose their own solution).
It would diverge into racketeering, and then into Feudalism with different companies holding control of different regions.
Although it'd be a libertarian distopia. Libertarians want it so badly but they don't really understand that it is how the world worked a thousand years ago.
To be fair, libertarian political philosophers often hold up law enforcement as a shining example of why they're libertarians and not anarcho-capitalists: They believe that there are some things that only government can even hope to handle in an acceptable manner.
That said, I can make no claims for the self-inconsistent mishmash of far-right reactionary and jingoist flippity-flap that tends to pass for libertarianism in a certain country that need not be named.
LOL, exactly why do you think we need so many licenses, etc.
If we don't have racketeering right now, how come individual police officers are allowed to keep the proceeds of any drug money they 'find'?
Also, don't most people pay taxes so the force 'protecting' them won't ostensibly take them off to jail?
When the police break the laws that are supposed to protect you is there any recourse for the police, or do they investigate themselves?
Exactly what we have is racketeering, however, we have no alternative forces from which to purchase protection.
If you read any book on the modern nation state it will tell you that the state is defined as the organization with monopolizes and projects violence over a given geographical territory.
If you read any book on the modern nation state it will tell you that the state is defined as the organization with monopolizes and projects violence over a given geographical territory.
You mean... a libertarian book on the nation state. ISIS for example controls and projects violence over a region, but no modern country is going to recognize ISIS as a legitimate nation-state.
If we don't have racketeering right now, how come individual police officers are allowed to keep the proceeds of any drug money they 'find'?
Because there are 12,000 individual police departments in America and it is literally impossible to police them all. The ridiculous decentralization of American police forces leads to racketeering.
Nations with a more centralized, top-down approach to policing do not have to worry about random 5-person police departments abusing the law in a small town in Nebraska somewhere. The fact of the matter is, random 5-person PD in the boonies answers to nobody, and such decentralization leads to racketeering.
Thank you for proving my point.
I know this doesn't sound right to you, but America is the libertarian wonderland you have been waiting for. And it leads to the problems you are apparently against.
And if you don't believe me, then please tell me... what action can you or I take against this behavior?
That definition isn't only used by libertarians, though it's possible that libertarians are more likely to use the "violence" formulation rather than the "physical force" formulation.
International recognition is possibly a separate issue.
According to some theorists, there are states that aren't recognized as states, but may still be states. They may actually rule territory (perhaps quite a stable way) but other states still may not recognize them -- most often because other states support a different claim to rule the territory that the unrecognized state rules. A familiar example in Europe is Northern Cyprus, where there is a state-like entity that has ruled a particular territory with no practical physical challenge for a long time, but almost all other states in the world support a different entity's claims to that territory and wish that the existing ruling entity would dissolve or be absorbed into the other entity.
Ok, so lets take podunk town out of the equation...
How about all the laws the FBI breaks?
How about when the FBI uses the exact same laws podunk town uses to seize money for their officers' personal gain?
How about the ATF selling guns to the cartels?
How about the CIA selling drugs to fund terrorism?
How about your police force being so centralized that your President believes he has the right to summarily execute any US citizen, you've centralized your entire justice system into the hands of one individual, judge, jury and executioner.
The US has centralized police and it's just as corrupt as many other decentralized forces. Also, many nations have centralized police forces that are corrupt. (Federales?)
Running away from your first argument eh? That doesn't strike me as very confident.
I'll take my win: you've already demonstrated ignorance in terms of Civil Forfeiture, and I don't have the time or energy to chase you on a wild goose chase all around US Politics in general.
Hint: Conspiracy Theorists always try the "shotgun" approach when they realize they don't understand an argument. Make a single argument, and make it count. Otherwise, I'm going to delegate you to the conspiracy bin.
Hint 2: My primary point was that policing is decentralized in the US. You've responded by... listing off a whole bunch of different police departments. There is no _single_ police agency in the US, we have competing, independent justice systems. Just as you Libertarians want.
It is pretty surprising how slowly police are changing with the times. You'd expect every major police force to have a "computer crimes" division, but they don't. Only really the MET (London's police force) has a decent computer crimes division.
You often read about digital crimes (e.g. harassment, theft, fraud, etc) going completely uninvestigated because of how few "digital police" they have (e.g. 1/1000th the size of the officers investigating physical crimes).
As a specific example, for almost a year when you Googled "UK passport renew" the first Google adword result was an obviously fraudulent one, yet nothing was done even though they had to have known about it.
PS - I bet you could use Tasker (or a similar app) to wipe your phone if it didn't regain data access for a long period of time (e.g. 6-12 hours). So if they took your phone and shoved it into a bag, the phone still auto-wipes if they fail to turn it off.
PPS - Although realistically you're best not storing the data on your phone at all. The UK police can force you to give up your encryption keys, however they would struggle to get your data off of a foreign owned-operated website.