Police Scotland are up to their old tricks again. It was revealed last week that they are logging jokes made on the internet because someone, somewhere, might have had their feelings hurt. A freedom-of-information request by The Times showed that more than 3,300 ‘non-crime hate incidents’ – that is, offensive remarks, including jokes on social media – have been stored on a police database somewhere north of Hadrian’s Wall over the past five years. Hundreds of Scots were placed on the insidious database last year alone.
When logging a social-media joke as a hate incident, cops trawling through Twitter must judge it to be motivated by ‘hostility towards race, religion or a person being transgender’. But it does not take much to meet this threshold. According to guidance issued by the College of Policing, an incident can be judged hateful ‘irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify a hate element’. The jokers would then have their ‘repeated behaviour’ monitored by police for signs of ‘criminality’.
Frighteningly, although none of these ‘incidents’ is in any way against the law, the police’s record could show up on an enhanced DBS check. These are used by employers to check an applicant’s suitability for a job. Police Scotland insist that these ‘hate incidents’ will only be revealed to potential employers if cops deem it relevant to the job in question. But given the low bar the police have already established for putting people on the database in the first place, who can say what jobs would be discounted?
The mass collection of electronically transmitted information is an issue of epic proportions!
The vast majority of the data is extraneous, basically worth very little on its own. Chat logs or other platform interaction are routinely logged and stored at least temporarily. Law enforcement officials have most certainly capitalized on the USE of those inherent abilities.
Rock County Jail has been using vender provided facial recognition since 2009 for inmate communication.
Erroneous file transfer is another issue. You’d be surprised to learn how many times I hear pretrial defendants asking the court “Why is there a record in my name in (insert random state) .” ” I’ve never even been to the state of X judge. ”
Scotland yard and the rest of the five eyes are up to the same as the US spooks, collecting and collating data up data out for capital, political and otherwise. Naturally some of them have a hard on for perverts, especially given SCOTUS position of pornography in general. The Christopher Steele document and the Hillary Clinton email server example how both sides attack each other surrounding its use. https://www.judicialwatch.org/tom-fittons-weekly-update/fbi-finds-new-clinton-emails/. If you read the piece the FBI couldn’t state “where they were found” but I have a good bet for that answer. Not all to far from Saratoga springs. There is also the possibility of Google mainframes but I rule them out because they’d first have to go out of their model to do so. Given her political clout I doubt the malfeasance will be used against her.