California law enforcement misused state databases more than 7k times in 2023

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/california-police-misused-state-databases-more-7000-times-2023

by hn_acker • 1 year ago

564 291 1 year ago

Suppafly• 1 year ago

That seems like it's only data that's self reported by the agencies themselves, I suspect the real number is much, much higher.

sbarre• 1 year ago

The article also mentions this is only one of many databases, and the only one that has self-reporting requirements for abuse.

EA-3167• 1 year ago

Well it's no shock that the top of the list of offenders is the LA Sheriff Dept, they're a nightmare of abuse at pretty much every level.

cge• 1 year ago

It appears the LASD is not just at the top of the list, but essentially is the list: they account for 93% of the violations.

Which, as you point out, is not surprising. The LASD is enough of a mess that I've heard other nearby police departments complain about them, not to mention their history of gangs, corruption, and conflicts with the Board of Supervisors and FBI.

wahern2• 1 year ago

In California it's generally the county sheriff who issues carry permits. Apparently sometime in the past few years municipal police were also given the authority to do this, but for decades I believe it was just the sheriff. And it was discretionary and highly political--urban sheriff's departments were invariably, "no", unless you were a high profile figure, whereas rural sheriff's departments were typically an easy, "yes", unless they had a reason (good or bad) not to. And sometimes there were jurisdictional fights where rural sheriff's departments would bend the rules and issue permits to residents of urban counties, (arguably) sometimes just to spite the cities. Like most jurisdictions in the US, sheriffs are an elected position, and very often crudely politicized, especially in states like California with strong urban/rural partisanship.

In any event, it's likely most Californians still go straight to the sheriff's department when seeking a permit.

Redoubts• 1 year ago

Guess there’s no Delete Act for state databases

delichon• 1 year ago

  In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data to find Americans’ communications. --https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/internal-documents-show-how-little-fbi-did-correct-misuse-section-702-databases

So the story is that California isn't holding up their end of the police state? Compared to the FBI they're hardly trying.

datavirtue3• 1 year ago

I'm cool with this. The FBI purged my city and state of rampant corruption and they remove heinous violent criminals from the street every day, often before they can commit any other crimes. Most of the people who work there are tireless and thankless servants.

And to all the haters, let's see how you feel when your daughter is abducted and taken over state lines or your local law enforcement becomes corrupt and starts working with criminals. The FBI showing up is a great feeling.

saikia81• 1 year ago

I have no ball in this game, as I am non-US. but sounds like the same can be said. Just wait until the FBI starts harassing your family outside their lawful jurisdiction. Or an FBI agent abusing their family. But at least your children will be safe from the dangerous streets...

mptest2• 1 year ago

I promise bad things still happen in your city. Do you think drugs stop getting sold when a dealer is picked up? Seems fairly naïve...

nxobject3• 1 year ago

Other than their federal jurisdiction, what separates them, structurally, from any other flawed LEA and makes then incorruptible? (And, where the hell do you live?)

rafram• 1 year ago

let's see how you feel when your daughter is abducted and taken over state lines

Well, if it’s any comfort, the person most likely by far to abduct your daughter is you. Stranger abduction is exceedingly rare.

nucleogenesis• 1 year ago

Plenty of law enforcement agencies aren’t too different from criminal organizations as-is.

LA Sheriff in particular is known to have several criminal gangs within their ranks.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs

alecco• 1 year ago

I'm cool with this. The FBI purged my city and state of rampant corruption

That's all nice until they finish the job and start looking for ways to stay employed.

ahmeneeroe-v22• 1 year ago

Just chiming in to say I am incredibly sympathetic to this line of thinking, even though I am ultimately pro-privacy in spite of the real costs you talk about

flanked-evergl• 1 year ago

What was Biden looking for?

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

"Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits"

Well that was a fuck-up! Not only is Los Angeles politically vulnerable right now, LASD went after gun owners. Bipartisan hell in 3, 2, 1...

xbar• 1 year ago

What say you, Rob Bonta?

psunavy039• 1 year ago

He will likely invoke the "but guns" exception to all California policies and ignore it.

snakeyjake3• 1 year ago

7,000 times out of how many accesses?

7,636?

10 quadrillion?

Does California law enforcement's rate of misuse of information systems exceed, equal, or fall short of my own misuse (usually unintentional, due to lack of clear policy/guidance) of various information systems?

9283409232• 1 year ago

I don't think it matters.

JumpCrisscross3• 1 year ago

I don't think it matters

Of course it does. It doesn't absolve anything if the rate is low. But the frequency is absolutely meaningful.

SubiculumCode• 1 year ago

Yes, the top-line number doesn't tell you much. Additional details matter: Was it one department or endemic? It appears mostly related to one large Sherrif department:

"""The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) sheriff’s department’s 6,789 abuses made up a majority of the record 7,275 violations across California that were reported to the state Department of Justice (CADOJ) in 2023 regarding the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS). """

Does misuse of the databases lead to tangible consequences? Maybe yes: "Across California between 2019 and 2023, there have been:

"" 761 investigations of CLETS misuse, resulting in findings of at least 7,635 individual violations of the system’s rules 55 officer suspensions, 50 resignations, and 42 firings related to CLETS misuse six misdemeanor convictions and one felony conviction related to CLETS misuse ""

rdtsc2• 1 year ago

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LACSD) committed wholesale abuse of sensitive criminal justice databases in 2023, violating a specific rule against searching the data to run background checks for concealed carry firearm permits

So for the concealed carry there is a background check involved, but it has to be done in a certain way, and the police instead were being more "thorough" and were digging through more databases than they were supposed to? I guess they do have access to those databases, but are only supposed to check them if they suspect a crime was committed.

What's the personal motivation there? It seems like they were going out of their way to be more "thorough", wouldn't it save them time and grief not to check more than needed. Is some higher political figure asking them to be more "thorough". I don't quite get the whole picture. Of course, they broke the law, but just wondering about their motive.

pc8614• 1 year ago

It is an ideologically driven belief that "dirty civilians" don't deserve firearms, and any reason to deny them access should be used.

lukan• 1 year ago

This is not about the right to have firearms, but the right to carry them concealed, which is not exactly the same.

th0ma5• 1 year ago

Probably also Wilhoit's law some too "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." So not only do some people not get the right to own a gun effectively, but specifically certainly kinds of people arbitrarily.

andrewla2• 1 year ago

I think the most likely good faith version of this is that the LACSD wants to prevent people that are bad actors from obtaining the licenses.

Where this touches on abuse are people who are not convicted of any particular criminal offense related to firearms, or people that have had negative contact with the LACSD.

So on the "positive" side this might allow them to prevent a person who they strongly believe is a gang leader but has not been convicted of any offense from obtaining a permit.

On the "negative" side this might be people like defense attorneys, anti-police activists, or private investigators who have a tendencious relationship with the police from obtaining such a permit. Or in some cases maybe even people who have simply had a negative interaction -- filing reports critical of officers, etc., who are being spitefully targetted.

The law attempts to strike a balance between the concerns and law enforcement overreach and exists for a reason.

varenc• 1 year ago

The CLETS database LACSD used includes non-conviction records, investigative records, gang affiliations, and other data that aren’t part of the proper background check process. For example, if you were arrested but never charged, or if you’re a known gang member without any convictions, those records would be in CLETS but not in the system they’re legally supposed to use for concealed carry permits (CCPs).

State law doesn’t allow this kind of non-conviction information to be used in CCP decisions, so this was an overreach. (previously you had to be of "good moral character" and have "good cause" to get a CCP, but these have been replaced with objective criteria)

You could argue that having more information might lead to better decisions on who gets a permit, but that’s not what the law allows—and letting police pull extra data whenever they feel like it creates obvious risks of abuse.

bbarn• 1 year ago

The issue at hand is despite federal rulings forcing all states to have some level of "shall issue" concealed permits, and laws on the books, California's process has left it to county sheriffs to follow the evaluation criteria. Some, like San Bernardino, practically rubber stamp them if you pass the background checks. Others, like Ventura, Riverside, LA, etc. try their hardest to find ways to reject them - even circumventing the law to do so.

They've also tried to implement strong arm policies like "We will notify your employer you have a license" knowing most large employers in California are fairly liberal and anti-gun and might look at that negatively to try to dissuade people from even exercising the right.

rdtsc2• 1 year ago

Aha, that's the kind of nuance I was missing. Something just didn't add up. One would like to believe these are all just hard-working officers, going above and beyond their "call of duty" to keep the guns out of "bad citizens'" hands, but that seemed a little too naive of an idea.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

And others still, like Santa Clara County, have the sheriff sell them for personal enrichment. Ah, but I should not allege falsehoods like that. They simply have those who donated to the sheriff's campaign get them at 90%+ and those who didn't at less than 10%. Once this was identified, she retired and gets to keep her multi hundred thousand dollar pension.

A $200k annual pension is worth about $3m.

potato37328426• 1 year ago

CC permits and anything firearm related winds up having to do elaborate song and dance routines to avoid being unconstitutional. Searching the crappy DB that only contains stuff they're allowed to care about instead of searching the good DB that they use when they really want to find dirt on someone falls into that category.

marxisttemp• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangs_in_the_Los_Angeles_Count...

pc8614• 1 year ago

As if anyone needed any more proof that LASD is just a criminal gang with a badge.

simonw• 1 year ago

A Redding Police Department officer in 2021 was charged with six misdemeanors after being accused of accessing CLETS to set up a traffic stop for his fiancée's ex-husband, resulting in the man's car being towed and impounded, the local outlet A News Cafe reported. Court records show the officer was fired, but he was ultimately acquitted by a jury in the criminal case. He now works for a different police department 30 miles away.

When people say "I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide" this is the exact kind of edge-case I always think about.

The problem with a lot of these massive surveillance systems is that a lot of people end up with access to them, and some of those people may not be trustworthy.

In this case, your ex-wife gets engaged to a cop and now they're abusing their access to databases to cause you harm.

(That note that "he now works for a different police department 30 miles away" is such a toxic aspect of American policing: cops who get fired for stuff like this inevitably end up in the exact same job somewhere else.)

ToucanLoucan• 1 year ago

The biggest problem with police is it's the sort of job where the more a given person wants that job, the less they should probably have it. For their sake and others.

pc8614• 1 year ago

Another huge problem is that law allows union bargaining agreements to dictate what happens to disciplinary records, that officers are allowed to resign when there are investigations happening that effectively kills them, etc. Once an investigation starts you shouldn't be allowed to resign, or at the very least the investigation should still continue and you should still be able to be punished after. Any union contract requiring the deletion/obfuscation of any disciplinary records for any reason other than clerical error or pardon should be illegal.

jl6• 1 year ago

Why? Most police spend their time keeping the peace and catching bad guys. That seems an intrinsically rewarding activity. No need to posit any character flaw to explain why someone would want to do that. Maybe you are thinking “power over other people” is the issue, but I think most cops see that as a necessary tool rather than the chief reward.

sambull• 1 year ago

not just the same job, likely a cash transfer bonus. get caught doing bad shit, and get a new boat for next season.

nxobject3• 1 year ago

Of course, this applies mass data collection by private entities too [1], and entities seeking to cross-reference commercially-available data sources together – even governments (thanks, Palantir!). There are plenty of ways to harass people without misusing your privileges as law enforcement.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/13/uber-empl...

TriangleEdge• 1 year ago

Ex Palantir here: Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations. The tools don't collect data. It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case. When I was at Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.

I'm not advocating for the company, but the statement in the comment is shallow. I was a̶b̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ assaulted while employed there, which is why I left, but my comment stands.

schainks• 1 year ago

Reminds me of this: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/13/uber-empl...

bttrpll• 1 year ago

Also reminds me of Amazon being sued for giving employees access to Ring data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/08/ring-ha...

nonameiguess• 1 year ago

I don't disagree on the principle you're advocating for here, but this example isn't about massive surveillance systems. CLETS seems to aggregate various databases police already had access to, probably some of which include data that ideally we wouldn't collect at all, but vehicle registration has to be stored somewhere and cops always have and always will have access to that.

rcpt2• 1 year ago

Yeah. In my opinion we should replace most of these cops with traffic cameras which don't do this kind of crap

sweeter2• 1 year ago

The other factor is that police have near blanket immunity to violate any of our rights, whether that be privacy, using the power of the state to harass individuals, and even killing or maiming people. Then the worst consequence they face is a light slap on the wrist, paid vacation and then a transfer to another Police department. Police only serve one purpose, and that is... well if you know, you know. They have a mass surveillance state in their hands, blanket immunity, and no oversight or checks and balances. People should at the very least recognize this fact.

On top of that I get super frustrated when people want to do austerity measures like cutting funding to libraries, cancer research, public health etc... but refuse to even acknowledge that the police takes up the majority of a states public funding by orders of magnitude, and often receive "surplus" military weaponry.

If anyone actually cared about govt spending, it would be extremely clear that military and police funding would come first and foremost. The reality is that these two things are heavily intertwined, and the ways in which they are corrupt are the same... but one should ask themselves why does the US police force need to be more powerful than nearly every countries military? Who is it that they are fighting and who are they fighting for?

mschuster91• 1 year ago

but one should ask themselves why does the US police force need to be more powerful than nearly every countries military? Who is it that they are fighting and who are they fighting for?

Well, either you pay for healthcare (especially mental health care) and social security programs such as affordable housing... or you'll pay police to deal with the fallout.

Unfortunately, unlike in Europe, "government handouts" for the poor aren't something to score political points with, but authoritarian police is...

derektank• 1 year ago

The US does not spend extravagantly on police services. Expenditures on police were $240B in 2024 [1], or a little over 3/4s of a percent of GDP. This is actually a little less than the EU average of 0.9% [2]. The US spends a lot in absolute terms because it's a big country and a rich country where you have to pay people working in service jobs a lot.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/G160091A027NBEA

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

happyopossum2• 1 year ago

refuse to even acknowledge that the police takes up the majority of a states public funding by orders of magnitude

Citation needed, cuz that’s just absolutely untrue.

siltcakes• 1 year ago

I was at a party with an early FB employee once and he was bragging about how they would spy on people to see who's profiles they were looking at. He thought it was hilarious, I never used FB again. I think his exact quote was "Hot girls are like celebrities, we watch people refresh their profiles all day long LOL".

hipadev23• 1 year ago

I see you also have met zuck

j16sdiz• 1 year ago

luckily(?), this kind of access is now very restrictive. Most of the employees can't do that.

dzink• 1 year ago

I thought the people who look up your profile show in the friend suggestions section.

etrautmann• 1 year ago

This will get you immediately fired at Meta today.

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

I have heard that the NSA has such a chronic problem with employees spying on their Significant Others, that they have a code word for it: LOVEINT.

I admit, in one of my very first jobs, I accessed the company DB, to find out about celebrities. I almost got fired, and learned a hard (and early) lesson about the importance of privacy and being careful about admin dashboards.

Overpowered admin dashboards are a problem. I tend to spend a lot of time on backends, locking down permissions.

These days, I am so anal about privacy and security, that it pisses people off. I just know that there’s plenty of knuckleheads like me, out there.

"Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be."

-Lyndon B. Johnson

nickfromseattle• 1 year ago

I was talking to I believe an FB engineer and this must have been 10+ years ago at this point, he said,

- FB found restricting access was difficult because engineers do sometimes bump into incidental user data while doing their job

- And engineers, being sufficiently motivated, can find a way around security measures

- So instead of reducing productivity with ineffective security measures, FB logs all access to private user info, and a separate team will request a reason, and if you don't have a 100% legitimate work related reason to be viewing it, you're terminated immediately

- And it does occasionally happen

- And best practice if you might incidentally see private user data is to do it on an FB profile of a dev friend also working at FB

mu53• 1 year ago

It is still a problem today. I lived in SF for a stretch working at non-FANG tech companies, and I met a lot of people who worked for Apple, Facebook, and Google.

After meeting some of those people at a meditation group, they began being creepy by making obtuse, but oddly specific comments on things that I was doing online to suggest they were. I got creeped out and stopped going to that class. I began meeting friends or friends of their friends at different places.

Ultimately, it escalated to the point that an employee at Apple was leaving poisoned treats outside of my door and then listening me dealing with my dog being sick.

You cannot talk about any of this because its really easy for the stalkers to deny its happening. There are no laws in this area yet. If you try to complain or get anyone's attention, guess who is watching your every move. The exact same people that are committing the crimes.

People will look back at today at the political or social strife, and they will wonder how we never connected the dots.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 year ago

this is the exact kind of edge-case I always think about.

I think you're overly generous in calling this an "edge case". I do not think it uncommon at all, what we hear about are those who are too stupid to remain uncaught.

datavirtue3• 1 year ago

No human is trustworthy. Verify.

plagiarist2• 1 year ago

The other problem is this fellow was acquitted when he should have been jailed for stalking.

weddpros4• 1 year ago

Let's remember, it's not just about privacy, it's privacy against government overreach. Those in power, whether government officials or public servants, often abuse it.

The public might want to defend their privacy vs. corporations, and/because the media will spin privacy to target companies, while government and public servants escape accountability for their actions.

cratermoon8• 1 year ago

Since when have corporations been accountable for their actions?

electrondood• 1 year ago

I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide

Anyone who says this should then be just fine with putting a webcam in their shower.

happyopossum2• 1 year ago

such a toxic aspect of American policing

Does not jibe with

he was ultimately acquitted

If he was acquitted then he has to be treated as innocent, lest our justice system becomes an avenue for the exact type of crime you’re decrying.

cratermoon8• 1 year ago

You might be under the mistaken impression that the US criminal justice system has anything do with justice. After all, it's right there in the name: justice. It's an old, worn out trope, but it's still true: there are in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

Guess which group cops belong to?

rcpt2• 1 year ago

Feel like he could have done this pretty easily with 1950s tech

janalsncm• 1 year ago

To me the core problem is that the criminal justice system doesn’t work. A man broke the law, was caught, and received no punishment.

If the argument is “we can’t give powers to police because they can be misused” this is an argument for disarming them entirely. To me that is just giving up. Instead, we need to fix systems to hold them accountable.

chii4• 1 year ago

Yep, that's exactly it. The police needs to be held to a higher standard than ordinary citizens in terms of law compliance.

throwaway290• 1 year ago

accessing CLETS to set up a traffic stop for his fiancée's ex-husband
When people say "I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide" this is the exact kind of edge-case I always think about.

These cases are far and between. I suggest to think instead of something like pre-WWII Germany. Once you get everyone's say religion on file it's only a matter of accessing it if you want to prosecute any group at scale. Fun thing there will be no criminal cases at all because it will be fully legal

EvanAnderson• 1 year ago

The example I like to bring up, albeit not in California, is the Brigham Young University police searching local law enforcement databases for sexual assaults on BYU students and reporting the victims for "Honor Code" violations. There's a ton of reporting about this, but as a good overview: https://www.kuer.org/race-religion-social-justice/2021-12-17...

busterarm3• 1 year ago

I recently beat a speeding ticket because by the time it got to court, my officer was fired from his department.

He was fired because he was beating his wife, who worked in the court and took a restraining order out against him.

He did in fact end up working for the department the next town over.

quitit• 1 year ago

I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide.

You are exactly right, "Nothing to hide" is also an invalid argument - because a valid suspicion of criminality will be authorised for subpoena by a judge.

Without such oversight we immediately and repeatedly see abuse of these systems: here's just a tiny list of cases where the "good guys" abused their access to systems to stalk ex-lovers and people they found attractive.

This underlines why the "good guys" argument is both invalid, but deliberately misleading. We don't plan systems and security around good guys, we plan them around bad guys.

USA:

N.J. cop used police databases to stalk ex-girlfriend, investigators say

https://www.nj.com/monmouth/2023/01/nj-cop-used-police-datab...

Officer Fired for Allegedly Using Police Database to Stalk, Harass Women

https://www.newsweek.com/officer-fired-allegedly-using-polic...

Australia:

Former policeman accused of using force database to stalk ex-wife and girlfriend

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/former-policeman...

Former federal police officer faces new charges over stalking of ex-girlfriend

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6138318/former-federa...

(Note the two above articles are not the same person)

UK: Met police officer 'used CCTV cameras to stalk his ex-girlfriend after telling her to take up sex work to pay her bills'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11868575/Met-police...

Creepy cop saw attractive woman on the road and 'looked up her license plate number so he could stalk her on Facebook'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2178556/Officer-Jef...

chii4• 1 year ago

Anytime someone uses the 'nothing to hide' argument, i ask them why they close the toilet door when they do a number two.

chii4• 1 year ago

a toxic aspect of American policing

anywhere you have a brotherhood that is more loyal to members than the public they're meant to serve is not going to produce good results imho.

trod1234• 1 year ago

When people say "I don't see why privacy matters, I have nothing to hide"...

These people fail to follow and resolve the indirect links that threaten their future. Privacy is their future. Without privacy, you have no future, because you are vulnerable to attack by unknown third-parties.

Information is the first thing required for a successful attack on your persons, or family. You can even torture people today and the bar is so incredibly high to prove vexatious acts that there's not much one can do except in some very egregious situations where they step over the line.

ty6853• 1 year ago

Remember when CA 'accidently' released the names and addresses of ALL CCW holders? They weaponize the mere fact they have potential to release these databases.

mjcohen• 1 year ago

Only 7k? They are slipping.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

Typically the tactics and abuses are shared among other staff to help them in their cases. The 7k number should be higher in 2024. Exponentially higher.

phkahler2• 1 year ago

Database use can NOT be limited by policy. If the data is there, people with access to it WILL use it for whatever they want, even if that's simply because nobody told them what the restrictions are.

The best way to prevent misuse of data is not to have it. The second best way is to only allow access through technical means with proper access control at the query level and never access to the raw data.

Loughla• 1 year ago

The problem is that if someone has access to query at all, they can abuse it.

How do you limit to specific search strings? Is that a thing?

phkahler2• 1 year ago

An interface that accepts only certain things - not raw SQL - and only returns whats needed for the task at hand. Logging of who asked for what is good too but is not preventative.

Muromec• 1 year ago

I the industry, we have a monthly refresher training to not forget tne simple fact that checking the balance of your ex account on a production database, however tempting it is, will meam you dont work in the industry anymore

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

There are lots of ways to flag abuse - the most basic one is tagging each access with a valid authorization for that specific data. Using a law enforcement example, if I am investigating a drug-related crime, a search for data on a record that was never searched before or after (or only searched by me) is a very good predictor for abuse.

firejake308• 1 year ago

idk, I would say that at least in healthcare, most people are sufficiently terrified of the consequences of HIPAA violations that they won't access records they aren't supposed to. In this case, what works is a combination of serious, career-ending consequences and the knowledge that compliance departments conduct regular audits of everyone's access logs.

fnordian_slip• 1 year ago

In Germany, there's a random audit of about 10% of queries iirc. Scandals still happen, but police officers get fired for it, and the chance of discovery and the consequences are both high enough that it's probably not as much of a problem over here.

myroon5• 1 year ago

most people are sufficiently terrified of the consequences of HIPAA violations that they won't access records they aren't supposed to

And the rest access records they aren't supposed to: https://www.hipaajournal.com/hipaa-training-survey/

mminer237• 1 year ago

Every police department I've heard of harps on what the restrictions are. They should 100% know.

But how are you going to put an access control in that can tell you if an officer is searching a drunk driver's plate or an ex's? They need access to data quickly. They're already logging who accesses what, which is how they know who abused it and can punish such people, but some things are hard to fix with a technical solution.

southernplaces7• 1 year ago

The same law enforcement constellation that includes the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, famous for being a paragon of respect for civil rights, detainee rights and never having been repeatedly accused of beating arrestees, profiling aggressively or forming its own literal internal gang with which to intimidate whistle blowers and suspects?

Color me surprised that they'd ever abuse state databases on people of interest!

LinuxBender• 1 year ago

I'm surprised that with all the leaks of sensitive databases there isn't a public copy of every government database running on Tor in some distributed anti-take-down configuration by this point.

steezeburger• 1 year ago

How do I join the effort for running these kinds of analyses?

tzury• 1 year ago

That’s about every 30 minutes, every day of the week, including weekends, during their day shift.

cratermoon8• 1 year ago

How many times have Meta, Google, Amazon, Twitter, et all misused databases full of personal private information and no one has raised the slightest fuss?

I'm tired of the "gubmint bad, Free Market™ Good" tropes.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

I bet that, if we look closely right now, there is a lot of data abuse being done for immigration enforcement.

diogenes_atx• 1 year ago

There is an excellent academic study about the (mis)use of surveillance data in the criminal justice system:

Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press

https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...

Based on field work conducted with officers and IT personnel in the Los Angeles Police Department, the author convincingly shows that law enforcement generally follow an "institutional data imperative," i.e., a mandate to collect as much information as possible, in part by securing routine access to a wide range of data on everyday activities from non-police databases. Data originally collected for one purpose is used for another (p. 53).

ForOldHack• 1 year ago

FYI 7,0000 times in 365 days is almost 20 times a day.

josefritzishere• 1 year ago

That sounds like a crime. Maybe someone should be chaerged with one. Too bad there's no police around.

mtnGoat• 1 year ago

Law enforcement in America has an uncanny ability to either blatantly ignore or conveniently misunderstand laws. I’m happy to know they are tracking this and acting on it. I know in health care you get fired on the spot for looking at stuff you shouldn’t, same should apply here at a minimum.

classified• 1 year ago

So what's the difference between cops and other criminals? Cops get protection for their crimes.

California law enforcement misused state databases more than 7k times in 2023

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