alt Hacker News> This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.
According to proponents, this is untrue. The intent of that database is that looking into it will still require a warrent, and will thusly require the suspect to already have been identified.
I'm no expert, but that sounds reasonably similar to how we treat other investigative means.
Replies
How do you prevent a misuse or switching to "let's just start looking into this without warrant until this popular issue(i.e. immigrants, USA, Russia, religios tensions, ethnic tensions) is solved" when the next political crisis hits?
See recent article [1] about a municipality (?) violating its own law and state law to share surveillance data (license plates) with almost 300 agencies.
Once you have collected the data it won’t be uncollected, to paraphrase Pink Floyd, when the right one walks out of the door.
Information recorded will always have the temptations and tendencies to be misused. Might happen slowly, but over time they would find more and more reasons to get a warrant and at some point some hapless judge will just hand them out like daily business.
Experience shows, that humans cannot be trusted to remain vigilant forever.
There is no reason to believe it wouldn't eventually be used to generate leads as opposed to needing a warrant to sift through.
At the same time, proponents have said that the whole idea of the database is to detect people with suspicious behavior.
Also, this is still nothing like getting a warrant to a wire tap - any suspicion will reveal YEARS of private information about you to the investigators. Furthermore, knowing that this can be used to identify suspects, surely it will have an effect on peoples behaviors.
They propose to include health records! What if you like to read about bomb making out of curiosity, have a relative who is in jail for violence, and you start seeing a psychiatrist? How many boxes have to be ticked before a flag is raised, and how is that going to affect what you tell the psychiatrist about how you really feel?
I also don't trust the police to not make mistakes or behave unethically enough to be comfortable with this. Denmark is not a very corrupt country, but we still see misuse of power. Just recently it was revealed how a police handler explicitly instructed an informant to lie in court and frame someone else, just so the handler could keep his source. Are these the kind of people who should have access to my search history and health data? No fucking thanks.