alt Hacker News> Harpe accepted responsibility for sharing her credentials but argued that firing her was excessive.
> In her appeal, Harpe said her husband was a certified federal law enforcement officer and that every search was conducted for law enforcement purposes.
> “The violation occurred because I gave my husband, who is a certified law enforcement officer with the Department of Homeland Security, access to my Flock account,” Harpe wrote. “Every search he conducted was for law enforcement use only and not for personal gain.”
There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility. They believe they should have unrestricted access to everyone else and that they are above us all.
Firing her was not excessive, it is the bare minimum. Officers should be held to a higher standard, not lower. She and her husband should be in a jail cell.
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> There seems to be a subset of law enforcement officers who fundamentally don't understand privacy, checks and balances, and responsibility.
This is why two things should be mandatory for new officers: psychological examination and a mandatory law degree from a qualified institution. If you're enforcing the law, you need to actually know its contents and how it works. That would naturally limit the numbers and discourage people who haven't gotten over high school from using their job as a torment nexus.
When Batman created his sonar system we cheered because he needed it to fight "the bad guy". It took Alfred to explain this was too much. "The bad guy" has been used for hundreds of years to escuse simple solutions under the premise that we're "the good guys".
This was also surprising to me, I'd think the firing would be automatic and then it'd be a legal case about unauthorized access of govt computers, which is generally taken pretty seriously.
You can't make the same argument with financial systems by giving someone at a different bank access to your bank just because you're both "financial professionals", and that's arguably much less sensitive data.