> I clicked this. It contains a apparently completely baseless claim that a masked looter is an "undercover cop". The claim also has been denied by the St. Paul police department.

That is only one of the reports in that lengthy tweet thread. And it's not baseless, here is the evidence for it: https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1266166402521522176

Here's the tweet where the St. Paul police department denied it: https://twitter.com/sppdmn/status/1266202225677910022

Posted 2.5 hours after the original claim - fast investigation for the police to clear themselves of all wrongdoing.

> Is it your intention to discredit claims of police brutality by repeating apparently false ones?

Lol.

This just in, serial arsonist denies ever committing arson!

Ah yes, cops telling you that they didn't do it.

At first I said to myself "he didn't do it, he isn't a cop..." and then I started to think about the source of the information.

I'm not taking sides here. I don't know if he did it or not. I just like to question all sources at this point. Just because they say they didn't do it, doesn't mean they didn't do it.

I didn't check all of them, but the ones about "Police slashing tires", are just someone saying "It was police".

They should not be included in your list. You know as well as I do that people are going to lie about it. It does no one any good to include things like that.

Not sure why it was flagged but I use hn.algolia.com and it was one of the top links.

I upvoted it. The police are making the situation worse and people need to know they are no longer the police who are their to protect them but the police who are abusing their power and worse than terrorists.

This issue is way more important than SpaceX launch.

It could mean we don’t have the next black Astronaut, or the next minority space engineer, or the next minority Elon Musk. Because a minor police encounter would have led to their death.

Yeah, people forget that not literally every website needs to be an activist forum.

Haha sadly, there's no JS. I would load vue though if that meant they wouldn't bury the thread..

Does every website need to be an activist website? Seems redundant.

Even better, it should have been implemented in rust. HN’s rust fixation (I get it, I like rust, but...) and aversion to anything involving society would have been held in perfect balance.

Exactly. HN caring more about wanting government to force Apple to allow side loading than police misconduct shows why you basically need rioting to make people pay attention.

A football player kneeling peacefully as a stand against police misconduct and being called a son of a bitch by the President doesn’t get a peep from HN. People start rioting gets attention.

They'd probably take the Volkswagen strategy:

Team A builds a feature that detects when the device is in a localized area. (This already exists)

Team B builds a feature that disables the camera. (I could see this being a parental control)

Both features are reasonable by themselves. It's when they are combined that they become an issue. The trick is that Teams A and B don't know of each other's existence.

If it was a choice between following the order and being out of a job? Not very, particularly since your sacrifice would almost certainly be in vain.

Almost anything can have legitamate reasons. You can kill someone with a hammer, doesn't make it unethical to make a hammer. I don't know why you woukd have a reason to turn off a camera. What I'm saying is, it doesn't necessarily mean the programmers are unethical or evil.

How would you go about implementing the feature so that it passes inspection but completely fails in the field? It's like a high stakes game of TDD-golf.

I imagine tools like this would most likely come out of military companies such as Lockheed and Raytheon. Surprised to hear it coming out of Apple

imagine being able to turn your boss over to authorities and trusting that you wouldn't be retaliated against.

You're assuming the speculation is the actual intent. What if it was something more benign, like allowing it to turn off cameras in a nuclear power plant or secure facilities or something like that.

About as spineless and unethical as every other human being.

You know how we have some people worth billions and simultaneously people literally digging through garbage for food?

That's not an accident, it's a constant built into this species, unless we start doing some eugenics, preventing idiots from breeding, which'll take far longer than your lifetime to come into effect.

You interested in attempting to improve this species your whole life, getting nothing but shit for it and dying without seeing any fruits of your labor? I'm not and neither is anyone else who's not a fundamentalist idiot.

So yes, spineless and unethical is everyday reality. If you don't want to deal with it, go into academia or get a high paying job. Once you spend some time around people who know how to behave themselves, you'll be the one asking for a police state to protect you from the masses upsetting your privileged existence. Funny how that works :)

What do you think America and Europe are, but military states preventing the rest of the world from invading their cushy way of life? How awful right? Let's open all borders and have freedom for everyone. Right, alright then.

This is the number one reason I can come off as inflexible in terms of sanctioning remote control or backdooring of user device features, or the implementation of anti-features.

Once you accept something controversial can be done be highly in situation X, the fact you allow it in situation X eventually gets used as a point that it should be allowed in situation Y, where Y was the controversial thing in the first place.

Do you think the police would just like, abuse their power? Surely not.

Legislation? You don't need legislation during a declared emergency.

You don't need legislation to do anyway, you just go ahead and do it using whatever means at your disposal. The legal repercussions come later, if at ll.

Aren't you trying to act as a courtroom, though? The main issue I have with your site is that your fundamental premise involves a presumption of guilt. You declare this behavior "brutality" (which implies a forgone conclusion of injustice and the misuse of force) before a fair system of investigation, testimony, factual analysis, and so on, can be performed.

I'm not saying these videos aren't showing an injustice and a misuse of force, I'm saying that making a fair conclusion is complicated and should be done by a complex process that you can't hope to do yourself. And if you simply aggregate videos of police using force and label them all as brutality, frankly you are abandoning the ideal of justice in the pursuit of it.

Your site should present these videos as acts that warrant investigation, not as a wall of shame for (assumed) guilty/bad cops (even though many of them are guilty/bad).

There is deep, systemic injustice in our society, and there are murders and brutalities taking place all too often, and this does demand action and attention. I applaud action to that effect and I honor that you are motivated by the pursuit of justice. But you need to recognize that it is a challenging task that requires a measure of elevated ethical discipline in order not to backfire or undermine itself. The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is a core precept of a good justice system, but not one that your approach seems to embrace.

> The more recent history suggests that the people who wish to deter or educate the cops are significantly outgunned

Then these young people (in the U.S.) should stop fighting for gun control when it only works against them in times such as these. Can you imagine how these protesters would be treated if most of them were carrying a rifle?

Could the police roll out tanks in response? Sure, but I do not believe the U.S. politicians would be willing to start all out war between police and civilians.

I don't condone the looting and destruction of property. Having said that the curfews in place are a form of suppression/muzzling the peaceful protesters.

The police have for too long had unchecked power in the U.S. I've always been taught to be respectful and have been treated in kind in my interactions with police (but I am white.) If a cop is having a bad day or he's just a bully, that should not keep bystanders from helping a victim of police brutality with the threat of "assaulting a police officer."

Just because it's painful doesn't mean it's hopeless.

Protests now, and when you get home, call, email, and write letters to every person that conceivably has authority over how the police act. Don't relent. They did arrest the murderer, after all.

I noticed personally that people who are attracted to power are also attracted to being a cop.

In my own school there was a bully who used to bully smaller kids together with his friend. Notice that he always needed his friend, and always needed the kid to be smaller.

Years later I saw him in cop uniform. My first reaction was WTF, but on second thought it made perfect sense.

Part of the problem is they usually don’t live in the communities with the people they police, they live outside the city in affluent white suburbs. Residency requirements are easily circumvented.

> Yet they are carrying out these acts like they're in a foreign country.

Which would make this better how exactly?

> This is assuming that you are not doing anything illegal.

Unfortunately, you are rarely the one who decides what is legal and what is not. I remember Edward Snowden mentioning this in some AMA on Reddit as one of the reasons why for a society it's a bad idea to strive for zero crime rates: After all, this most likely means that it's impossible to commit a crime and, thus, rebel against or, if need be, even overthrow the system.

> This is assuming that you are not doing anything illegal

I have only good intentions. Doing something illegal could be shifting rapidly. Trump intends to make antifa a terrorist organization (of which I have zero affiliation and conflicted feelings about). I believe that action is but a taste of what is to come.

I'm fascinated by IPFS (and plan on using it elsewhere) but I my desire is to have as wide exposure as possible.

Yeah, that is true. The problem is that twitter is also a firehose of effluent. It would be nice to have curated content and dialog too.

The other angle is memes. I think that bumper sticker politics is more relevant today than when it was on actual bumpers.

From random pizza-gate types, then up through the power hierarchy to the very top of a handful of world superpowers.

An effort perhaps quixotic at best, it's worth thinking about. We are at a tipping point in civilization and I don't want to complicit that going the wrong way.

Exactly. IIRC alphabet agencies operate many tor exit nodes.

Leaders in black protests have been killed off by white power supremacists over the years. The creator of this site risks the same.

needs a better interface, but it's my fav candidate for immediate backup if it were necessary.