Albanian gangs have set up their own CCTV networks to spy on cops | Hacker News Reader

Albanian gangs have set up their own CCTV networks to spy on cops

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159 pointsmschuster91110 comments

One wonders about the future when Gangs could be leveraging big data and machine learning to track police and predict where they will raid. "Predictive policing" indeed.

In Albania, "police" and "gangs" can be 2 groups with a lot of shared interests. A large portion of the economy is fueled from criminal activity abroad, all across Europe. It also finances the state to a large extent.

I'm curious, what is it about Albanian society that has created such notorious criminal enterprised, compared to, say, neighboring countries, like Greece, former Yugoslavian states, Bulgaria, etc.?

I think the difference in these countries can be attributed to Orthodox Christianity and the rather strong extended-family bonds.

For example, post-communist Bulgaria still has a corruption problem to this day, but its nature is rather different. The former communist state security had a monopoly on all illegal activities during the 1990s. Street gangs of “mutras” were allowed to roam the streets, steal cars, racketeer small family businesses for “insurance services”, but were never allowed to touch anyone’s child, to force someone into human trafficking or to engage in their own illegal foreign schemes without the full knowledge of the state. State security had all the information about former smuggling routes and the gangs were used solely for “doing a job” with a higher risk-rate.

The real answer to this question will result in an account ban

An existing clan structure and the collapse of the Albanian state in the 90s leading to intergenerational trauma among the diaspora.

Also, a lot of ethnic Albanians in the diaspora are from Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, and Bosnia so they are survivors or the children of survivors from the Yugoslav Civil War.

You see similar issues and dynamics among Sri Lankan Tamils in Toronto and Australia, Vietnamese gangs in the Bay Area in the 90s and 2000s, Punjabi Gangs in BC in the 90s and 2000s, Algerians in France/Belgium/Netherlands, Kurds from Turkey in France/Sweden/Germany, and Central American gangs like MS-13 across California - all are the children of survivors or survivors from very brutal civil wars dropped into impoverished neighborhoods with locals who were antagonistic to these refugees. Because these survivors had existing community structures and occasionally actual combat experience, they could organize and fight back.

Add to that a lot of the players in the conflicts in the old country ended up converting their militias or organizations into Organized Crime to continue funding the "good fight" in the old country.

Also, other Balkan diasporas have similar issues like the Albanians. Serbian organized crime is a player in NYC, Chicago, Australia, and Germany for example.

Thank you for such a thoughtful, insightful post. Made me think about things in a different way, most appreciated.

Here in Germany, as you say, both Serbian and Albanian gangs are highly successful. To add to your points, both communities are very tightly knit, and it is not uncommon for an Albanian to have family all around the country. This created a kind of a "virtuous" circle where gangs had connections all around the country, and criminal enterprise was by far the most lucrative choice of career.

You've mentioned many examples already, but another on would be Lebanese people who fled the civil war to Europe, and went on to create some of the most powerful criminal organizations in Germany and neighboring countries.

Yep! Pretty much this! Even I've leveraged old world clan networks professionally (helps to get introduced to VCs, Execs, and Politicians in US, Canada, Australia, and the UK). For some reason, Western Europeans, Canadians, and Americans don't have these kinds of tightly knit networks anymore, but hey, us immigrants and children of immigrants need some kind of upper hand when trying to eck out a new life.

A similar story is happening in Netherlands+Belgium with the Mocro Maffia - a big reason they were able to be successful in the XTC game was because Moroccan Jews are a big player in XTC manufacturing in Israel and there was a diaspora of both Muslim and Jewish Moroccans in Belgium, Netherlands, and France that organized crime groups were able to leverage.

And like you said about the Lebanese, same story with a subset of the Shia Lebanese diaspora in South America (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia) helping enable Hezbollah.

Interesting. Suggests that we should not admit refugees from brutal civil wars?

In the 90s, Bulgaria was just like Albania but things got dramatically better once Bulgaria got on the NATO and EU path. That said, Bulgaria is still not on par with the the west and a lot of criminal activity is still going on(not that the west doesn't have criminals but in general Eastern Europe is much worse).

In some ways, you could consider Uber to be a criminal organization. They were pretty much an illegal Taxi service that grew so fast that no one could stand against them for long. I wonder how many gangs are just small scale Uber operations. Providing a service that is in demand, but legally grey/black and resorting to bribery, coercion, and violent means to protect their interests.

How many new grey market criminal organizations will we call disruptive instead of criminal? What will happen when criminal organizations will be able to get rounds of investment, the same as any legal organization? With major corporations intentionally violating the law as a "cost of business" what is the line between criminal and legitimate organizations?

Can Uber corporate put a bullet in your head for refusal of payment, or literally kneecap you for competing?

That is the differentiator between grey market and black market.

Depending on which country you are in, I think that's a distinct possibility. In the USA they will probably just use legal means to SLAPP anyone they don't like. But in other countries...

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/11/uber-hired-olig...

In countries like Russia, China, India, etc you need to hire these kinds of Oligarchs and Lobbyists to operate. Otherwise bad things happen.

Look at Amazon India for example - Prime Video India basically shut down for a year due to the Tandav scandal and Amazon Delivery Trucks in Bangalore were burnt because they pissed off the Small Business/Pharmacy lobby in KA. And they were publically humiliated before all this by the Minister of Commerce in 2019.

This was a big reason Uber divested out of China and ASEAN - they started stepping on entrenched players toes and had no political cover. In the US, the worst that would happen is corporate litigation with an out of court settlment or speeches by local politicians. Not in developing countries.

Weaponized litigation like SLAAP is of course being abused, but as a business operating in the developed world, the rule of law still holds. You won't mysteriously have the IRS or FBI start auditing every single of your transcations, see your trucks or stores burned down, be held PERSONALLY liable, or even mysteriously get shot while leaving court.

Personal reliability is a good thing.

Why should people be indemnified under the fictious umbrella of the corporation as juristic person?

This is a historic aberration that needs to end.

Truth or consequences!

The future is active in ukraine. Take them out with a drone, for cost of a gun, you dont even have to be nearby.

In fact, if they flash signals (red blue lights) .. you can automate it..

Automation might be viable in some places in the Americas where cartels effectivley have full control over a region, or for anyone else in a sufficiently remote region who wants to achieve something simialr. Everywhere else you would want to choose your targets carefully. It's easier for police to turn a blind eye if you don't appear to be waging war against them.

Thats were you wrong, that a faction has to be defined to wage a war. Its just another city were some unknown party carried solar charged boxes on the roof, that dislodge drones on siren sound or whatever. The idea, that there is a "war" declaration or even somebody there, is part of the past.

You could hire gig workers to place the dronepackages a "pr" gag allover town. There is not a need for flags, territory or other outdated concepts. Just attrition and correlation.. of wear and tear on civilization

"There is not a need for flags, territory or other outdated concepts."

Any conflict has reasons behind it, as it is just another enterprise that consumes resources for expected rewards. Given the practical needs to manage the said consumed resources, even in guerilla style warfare the conflicts have to have limits (i.e. be contained to a territory). The territory, which these conflicts are waged on, can be and is sooner or later linked to (at least suspected) interested parties. The flags are basically just means to identify a given interested party once it grows past the Dunbar’s number. I do not say that there aren't concepts out there that have little to no practical use (say, an anthem, or a motto), I'm just saying that your list outdated concepts were not good examples.

The reason being that non-state actors, who want to become state actors thrive in a chaotic environment. Coporations and non suit wearing gangsters who can rely on there own power monopolies as long as they are unchallenged by the state, might push such a environment via third parties, to be "left alone".

Yeah, it's going to be fascinating to see what sort of practices make their way back from Ukraine.

It will be interesting to see the police response to the next abusive cop put paid leave being killed or maimed by a drone released by vigilantes.

How about a scenario where police officers are sousveilled by large, anonymous groups to build datasets that can be used to apply pressure to law enforcement and their union groups when they attempt to take more power by demanding larger police budgets.

Wouldn't it be simpler for them to just have moles in the police department? Or bribe some of the officials involved?

These things don't exclude each other. Also, people can be more expensive and less reliable than machinery.

Moles can testify. Cameras cannot.

Technology doesn't have family members you can cripple.

Exactly, where there's a will, there's a way.

What is your interpretation of a will?

Automation thru better tech infrastructure is key. Moles keep asking for more benefits, like insurance, improved health coverage, increasing travel expense and so on. Money is not raining on anyone including gangs where any service price can be paid, no question asked.

That always carries the risk of leaving a trail somewhere or getting set up by a sting operation. Tech, assuming it's reasonably well secured (and tamper proof is ever easier and easier to achieve), doesn't.

It could also be used to tack bas cops

It has the potential to be utilized for monitoring misconduct by police officers.

They already are.

Drug gangs have used devices to detect raids by detecting poor opsec (Bluetooth, etc). As this tech gets easier, it’s easier to build surveillance networks.

No doubt there are significant netowkrs of surveillance all over!

A lot of poor, majority black and brown, neighborhoods have community organized "cop watches". They usually play a role similar to what the Black Panthers did. Just show up when a cop pulls someone over and sit there and watch (and nowadays, record) just to let them know the public's eye is on them

It'd be amazing to see surveillance capitalism turned against itself like this

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

I keep wondering when citizen ALPR will start augmenting some of these roles.

I don't know if it's universal, but here government-owned vehicles always have an X in the license plate, so you wouldn't even need a database, just alert on any X-plate entering the neighborhood.

Could detect strobing lights with the same cameras, and summon the Watchers automatically.

At some point we will need this to protect from the police. The way they are legislating in Spain lately is atrocious and the priorities do not respond to citizens demands at all.

> Photo credit should read Gent Shkullaku/AFP via Getty Image

I love how they just copied the instructions into the photo credit without giving it a second thought.

could it also be that the person submitting the content to the CMS didn't process the instructions clearly so they are the ones that put the "odd" extra text in the field?

i ask as someone that is constantly amazed at what kind of differing ways people can put dirty content into a CMS that i manage.

In Mexico, cartels set their own communication network

https://www.wired.com/2011/12/cartel-radio-mexico/

What’s interesting is that the article doesn’t go into how they use the internet for comms which seems like a more critical piece of infrastructure than mid level players using it to communicate when Mexican soldiers are moving through an area.

Based on articles like this, one gets an impression that Albania is a bad place - which is not the case according to people who actually spent some time there: https://youtu.be/R1BYTmqWjTU

Lots of people will tell you Mexico isn’t a bad place despite half the country being controlled by violent warlords. I’m really not sure what the point of “actually”ing here is?

Have you ever left your Midwest bubble?

I don’t live in the Midwest and yea I’ve been all over the world. Do you have a point?

Honestly the violent warlords are better. Just from my time in Mexico. Areas controlled by police the police will arrest you for any random reason. The violent warlords are running drugs and have no interest in robbing a tourist for $20, it's a total waste of their time.

It isn't the police that is making mexico one of the most violent places in the world, I'm sure they play a part in it as in all developing countries but said violence ends up being linked to the "violent warlords" anyway more often than not in the form of corrupt policemen working for them.

Tourists tend to be treated with kiddy gloves by organized crime because of the response that diplomatic blunders trigger. Odds are as well that, if you as a tourist went out of your way to go to a warlord controlled area you were(or were seen as) their client.

I was in a non-touristy part of mexico, and the only crime we had was when someone left their iPhone with their stuff at a park and the phone disappeared (I would expect the same almost anywhere in North America).

Meanwhile the police shakedowns were incessant. We ended up paying over $100 USDd/day to police in straight up bribes for made up offenses.

100% this is my experience. I don't ever go to the tourist towns so maybe police are less hassling there.

Has it occurred to you that the police and cartels might not be operating as separate entities when it comes to shaking down tourists for cash?

It's occurred to me, but this happens even in places where tourists basically aren't found and there is no well oiled machine for it even be worth the cartel's time to like keep watch for tourists and call the police to shake them down. That and the cartel can just straight up roll up with guns and take all your shit, why wouldn't they just do that if they wanted your money? Instead you find the cartels want nothing and the police want a bribe that would amount to very little for the cartels and not at all worth some arrangement picking up pennies with bumfuck police that almost never see a tourist.

You're making a number of assumptions for what's required in this process beyond "shake down any tourists you like and give us a cut when you do (or we'll kill you)".

>That and the cartel can just straight up roll up with guns and take all your shit, why wouldn't they just do that if they wanted your money?

Being robbed by the government is more palatable to tourists. Would you travel to a place where ununiformed criminals shook you down for $100 a day?

>"shake down any tourists you like and give us a cut when you do (or we'll kill you)".

What you are describing is a tax. A tax is generally understood to reduce an activity which is why cigarettes etc are highly taxed. Not sure this is making the argument you think it is. In fact you are describing a system where the cartel disincentives this behavior, by making it less profitable.

>Being robbed by the government is more palatable to tourists.

Hard disagree with this one.

> What you are describing... by making it less profitable.

Absolutely correct and totally irrelevant to the original point, which was that the administrative overhead for the cartel is vanishingly small.

>Hard disagree

It was palatable enough for you to travel to Mexico.

I mean yeah, but I've also travelled as a private citizen to a number of places that someone politically-uncorrect would call "3rd world shitholes" like Iraq, Syria, etc. I've travelled places where I've been handed an AK by the locals and basically told "good fucking luck, try not to die." I'll go pretty much anywhere; I've been shot at, I've been robbed, I've been pushed out of cars abandoned in the middle of nowhere, I've had my shit jacked before and I generally not hold it against the police or the country in general if ununiformed criminals do that.

This is purely a matter of opinion but being told I have to worry about the cartels and the police is a bigger pill to swallow than just worrying about the cartels. The fact I personally was willing to go doesn't indicate I find being robbed in uniform more palatable.

The point is that a police uniform gives a veneer of respectability to robbery (they even call it something different--a bribe!) that a mugging does not posses, and presents as a routine matter instead of an assault or threat of violence (the threats there, of course, just less explicit). The uniform is a bone-stock, fundamental element of the police bribe dynamic. You can hard disagree that tourists find it more agreeable, but you need to throw out some kind of argument for why that is (more than just how hard ya are).

Um the paragraph you appear to have interpreted as "how hard you are" was a response to my tolerance to travel to somewhere in Mexico (re: It was palatable enough for you to travel to Mexico.) I'm utterly baffled you took that as a reply to something else, but I'm pretty sure in any case that characterization was bad faith. The whole point was not that I find it "palatable" but that I'm willing to travel to unpalatable places.

In any case, you're telling me I "need" this or that to disagree with a mere opinion about "palate", which is just insane. An opinion cannot be proved, I think you know this, and I don't see you offering some kind of poll that samples tourists about who they'd rather be robbed by or whatever you may be looking for either so I will disengage now.

Remember that you asked this question...

>That and the cartel can just straight up roll up with guns and take all your shit, why wouldn't they just do that if they wanted your money?

...and I gave you this answer (paraphrased)...

>Because it's easier to get the cops to do it for them.

Looks like we're done here.

Could you imagine a scenario where what is happening in the cartel controlled areas is putting pressure on the non cartel controlled areas and that pressure results in the police behaving the way that they are?

In other words, do you think it's possible that the cartels are responsible for the shitty police behaviour in the rest of Mexico?

It's an interesting question.

In US I find gang-active areas there is far less police hassling as they are focused on either severe crimes or just fucking off doing nothing. I've lived in several semi-dangerous cities and police do not enforce traffic laws (like at all) as they have bigger fish to fry. Your odds of getting shook down are practically zero. Whereas in bumfuck US you get pulled over all the time for practically nothing, "civil asset forfeiture" (aka shakedown) cuz a dog looked at you wrong etc. I will admit my basis for comparison is a bit different though as I don't worry at all going into even the most dangerous parts of US because here I can legally have a gun, in Mexico all I can do is run.

I suspect based on my other Norte Americano experiences the police in Mexico would be even worse without the cartels, but I'm not sure.

Resources spent dealing with gang activity in one area are resources that can't be spent on dealing with police malfeasance in another area.

We are all impoverished by corruption, even in areas outside of where we live.

It's a nice thought that resources would be redirected to correcting malfeasance but in practice in most of the US it seems resources get redirected to pettier and pettier "crimes" when there is less serious crime.

It's not a bad place for a tourist with a US passport on an ample budget. It's a bad place with dire job prospects for anyone trying to start a life there. Instead of "travelling the world in your 20s", these people travel across Europe drug trafficking just to be able to stand on their feet.

The generalized view of Albanians is they are international drug traffickers?

It's probably easier to start a small business in Albania though than it is in the EU - mostly due to less regulation and, yes, also corruption - you need less money to bend the rules - and everybody can do that - not just those with pockets deep enough to lobby.

I may be wildly and incorrectly speculating here, but my immediate assumption about any area with a weak government and a serious corruption and organized crime problem is that starting a successful business is a great way to have a few friendly people (maybe in uniforms, maybe without) show up at your house one day, to explain to you how they are going to be involved in said business.

You'd probably find dealing with seven million pages of official Central European paperwork to be preferable to that sort of thing.

There’s a reason why investors prefer to put their money into countries with strong judicial systems, well understood regulations, and stable governments. It makes it much easier to predict if something is going to be a good investment, and removes the risk of sudden unexpected changes in your operating environment which could sink your new business.

I honestly have no idea why you would think that unpredictable corruption, and a lack of regulation is going to make it easier to start a business. Especially as corruption and weak regulation tend to only benefit the incumbents.

I didn't mean "investors". I meant local people. Average micro-business. I don't know Albania too well - I only spent a couple of weeks there, but I had a feeling it was bustling of small businesses. I have spent however years in other places which have a similar reputation (Indonesia, for example) - and yes, corruption is everywhere, but your average grandma can get out on the street with a cart and sell noodle soup or fried rice. This is something unheard of in the EU. She may have to pay a small bribe to a local gang, but hey - it is the local gang, that operates by the same rules for generations, and everybody knows how it works. So it is not unpredictable after all.

You do have a good point, in that it throws off bigger investors, but people get by. They don't make a killing income, but neither do they starve.

What is "predictable" for bigger investors though is unpredictable for these very people. No wonder the average grandma in the EU does not have the skills to start a small business, if needed. The laws and regulations are simply too complex for her.

I guess the issue is with scaling a business in a corrupt environment (as opposed to starting it, which is 0 friction). Once you grow bigger than your local gang's area, you deal with higher and higher levels of corruption. God forbid you end up scaling a business to the point where you have to bribe the highest level gang - the national government. That would be very expensive and risky (the regime can always change - new people, new demands). BUT assuming you stay small, you can make a living running your own (family) business without much friction.

> No wonder the average grandma in the EU does not have the skills to start a small business, if needed. The laws and regulations are simply too complex for her.

Really I don’t understand where you get your information from. I’ve started businesses in the EU, it’s trivial easy, there are no complicated laws or regulations to worry about, at least not for micro-businesses.

The most likely reason you don’t see so many micro-business in the EU is simply because people have other options that provide greater prosperity and security than running a micro-business. Running businesses are hard, running tiny ones is stressful. You’ve got no safety net, no income guarantee, no rights to holidays or time off. Going and working for an employer that can provide all that is simply a better life for most.

Albania is in the bottom of the pack by ease of business rankings - the only European (not EU) countries worse than it are Bosnia and San Marino. Every other EU country ranks better than Albania, even Greece and Bulgaria

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.BUS.EASE.XQ?end=2019...

San Marino is an easy place of doing business, a country with 34k citizens in wich you can really meet with the top brass to solve your problems. The problem is getting a clearance to start and reside in the country. They can get quite picky about the businesses but if you are in manufacturing or "light" research they are already oriented to service you.

That makes sense! It's basically a small town that has retained some form of soverignity since the Roman era.

Are you from San Marino by chance? It seems like such a cool and wonky political system, and would love to learn more!

I'm italiano not Sammarinese, but we know a lot about them as we speak the same language! Its mostly known for its past as a tax haven, still is with some accounting tricks (like trust funds that can end paying 1.7% on income) and its various ways in which avoided being annexed by other countries, like refusing a land gift from Napoleon (Rimini) to not end up being drawn in his conflicts and end up annexed

Nah, protection money is expensive.

I would guess, it really depends how far you go.

Protection money for running a small mom&pop shop selling kebab or souvenirs for tourists is probably less than the protection money you pay for the same kinds of businesses to the government in Germany (percentage wise).

But the more you want to scale the business and try to deal with higher and higher strata of gangs (all the way up to the national level), the more expensive it gets. And unpredictable.

So my theory is - it is easy to start a micro-business in a corrupt environment, but it is hard to scale it.

> It's a bad place with dire job prospects for anyone trying to start a life there.

Why? Corruption?

The biggest would be bad wages - why earn €6,000/yr when you can earn 3-4x in Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, UK, etc.

Institutionally, the mix of corruption, bad demographics, weak infrastructure due to Hoxhaism plus the post-1991 collapse, blowback from ethnoreligious conflicts across the border in former Yugoslavia, the civil war in the 1997, and the earthquake in 2019 have not helped.

I haven't been to Albania yet but I've been to Croatia, Montenegro, and Bosnia for several months at a time. I've had nothing but amazing experiences traveling there in the summer and staying at hostels. One time I was lost in Tisno, Croatia and didn't have a working phone. A local picked me up on the side of the road and drove me 10 miles to the center of town and helped me find a friend.

The only "bad" experience I had was after a music festival in Pula, Croatia, some guy tried to mug me. But he did a terrible job at it. I told him "no", held my ground in a defensive stance, and he backed off. Then I went to the nearest bar, told the bouncer there, and he let me chill in there for a while to calm down.

I've heard Albania is of a similar vibe as to these countries, but with less English speakers.

Contrary to others, I had a terrible time in Greece. I was roofied and mugged in Rhodes, had a bad encounter with the cops in Greece, and everyone was just rude.

Lowtrust societies man: They get to you and they are a self fullfilling prophecy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=404IeUzGNZ4

Islands like Rhodes, Zante, Crete, etc. and specific villages targeted only to foreigners like Faliraki, Laganas, etc and on high tourist pediod like August are usually bad indicators of Greece and its people. I don’t know whether you visited those, but it’s pretty much the same in almost all tourist-dependent countries and the most visited sightseeings worldwide. You could visit another island on a different season and just meet the friendliest people around.

Have a good friend with family in Rhodes, always buy bottled beer and water and have it open at your table. Nothing in any bottle behind the bar is as advertised... but you can ususally drink whatver you can get the bartender to drink, especially if the bar tender is the "owner."

Maybe. It's crazy how I went all of the Croatian islands and didn't have one bad experience, but the first greek island I went to was terrible.

> I've heard Albania is of a similar vibe as to these countries,...

That... is far from true. Even ex-YU countries you listed, which share lots of semi-recent history, are very different among themselves, but Albania is a whole new world altogether.

I'm sorry, and embarrassed that this happened to you in Greece. Too late for that now, but try to stay away from tourist attractions, except museums and archeological sites.

Rhodes is pretty, I've been there, but it's gone to tourism and like so many other Greek islands, it's not a place to enjoy, just a place where "you'll get your ass grabbed" (local expression to mean "being taken advantage of").

I wouldn't have expected a tourist to be mugged, at that, normally people will take your money in non-violent ways. But I've been away from Greece for a long while and I guess things change.

Anyway, sorry. I'm currently abroad, in the UK, where I've immigrated. It makes me sad that when I hear Greece being discussed it's always something awful like your experience :(

I'm sorry to say bad things about your home country! It wasn't all bad. I felt a deep connection to the greeks of the past at the Acropolis, and wished I could have seen more wonders of that time.

I will definitely give it another try. The beauty of Greece is undeniable

Albania is neither a good place nor a bad place to be. It is as safe as you can be in Greece.

HOWEVER, what Greece would have done differently if they found such cameras: - They would not remove them directly - Instead, they would chase the signal down to the roots and see who is behind

A friend from high school traveled throughout the US, Asia, and Europe. He loves Albania and settled down there a few years ago.

If i could get back to albania tomorrow, i would!

You can have good experienced in bad places because they are not bad all the time and everywhere but if you want to avoid potential bad experiences you should probably avoid bad places(i.e places where criminality and corruption is high)

Most people in most places are good people. There are very few "truly bad" places.

I've been to Albania a few years ago, at the invitation of a friend. What a beautiful country!

Safety-wise, it felt like ex-Soviet countries did in the early 90s: generally safe but there were lots of gang activity, so you did not want to cross the wrong person. Everyone knew someone who was involved in criminal activity.

In smaller villages, going out to bars in the evening meant that the local tough guys would necessarily stare at us foreigners. There was a general "Americans are not welcome here" feeling in the air (and also in the things kids would shout at us), but it wasn't a big deal. Groceries were dirt cheap, the people - poor. I saw foreign police cars conducting a raid in Albanian villages to catch criminals.

In touristy places, like Saranda, I felt the most safe, even if my friend was pointing out all the bars, restaurants and clubs presumably owned by the mafia.

I had no bad incidents in Albania, only a great time, though my friend handled most interactions with other people. I would not go back without someone local. That's just my preference, I do have friends (non-Albanian) who go regularly on vacation to Albania by themselves.

Albania is not a "bad place". It has a troubled history and its people have suffered greatly, especially in the nineties and later.

I'm Greek and, unfortunately, my racist, xenophobic country never welcomed our closest neighbours (and more than just neighbours; half of the Greeks are at least half Albanian, from the time of the Ottoman occupation when we were all one, big, happy jurisdiction, under the Sultan :spits:). In the nineties it seems the word "alvanos" ("Albanian") was an insult, in Greece.

Anyway, Albanians are ordinary people. They won't eat you. Here's a web page that describes some basic greetings in Albanian:

https://ling-app.com/sq/greetings-in-albanian/

Oh, btw, fuck Suella Braverman.

This seems like an odd question to ask, but in Oakland, CA, there are communities trying to do the exact opposite of this. Build CCTV systems to protect AGAINST gangs. I'm curious to know what hardware these guys used. Swords with two edges, you know.

Tangential but I never understood the meaning of the proverb swords with two edges -- if anything it would only make the sword more lethal and powerful. How would this be applicable in this context?

A sword with one edge will have that edge facing the enemy; a sword with two will always have one facing towards the user as well as towards the enemy.

I don't know that this is actually important for sword fighting, but the metaphor at least makes sense to me.

It cuts both ways.

As in the same tool can accomplish two/opposite purposes, or in this case help opposing factions.

If you're used to a sword having a single sharp edge and behave as such while wielding a double-edged sword then the instrument you only intended to harm others with can unintentionally cause harm to yourself. I mean it's probably good idea to be carefully around swords generally, but the phrase is quite old and was maybe a bit more relatable back when it was coined :)

I guess CCTV is a sword in this context. Using separate CCTV networks, cops are spying on everyone. Criminals are spying on cops. It sounds like civilians are spying on certain criminals (halfway around the world). For the metaphor to apply, I think each side of the sword would have to be a different group using the same CCTV Network against the group that is also using it, and especially against the group that set it up in the first place. However, these are all different CCTV networks, so I don't think the sword with two edges saying exactly applies.

A more appropriate saying may be "live by the sword, die by the sword", which implies people who rely on CCTV Networks (cops) will eventually be defeated by similar nefarious tactics (CCTV networks set up by Albanian gangs).

It's dangerous to you and the enemy because it's sharp on both sides..

Two edges means there's always a risk you cut yourself as well if you don't know what you're doing

Yeah, a lot of historical swords like the Roman gladius or the longsword actually had two edges. It's just effective weapon design (mainly it makes it better at thrusting), not a danger to the user.

Is that Oakland, California where a 600 sq foot home in a ghetto is listed for $499,000, property tax is some of the highest in the nation, the public school system has been seized for fiscal mismanagement, and the Oakland Police have been under Federal consent decree for twenty years, since the "riders" scandal where twenty cops planted evidence and beat witnesses, and the seventh Chief of Police, who is paid close to $220k per year, and is from West Oakland, has been fired for concealing police corruption? that Oakland ?

> property tax is some of the highest in the nation

Doesn't matter if it never grows above inflation! Can't beat Prop 13 for property tax value.

You seem to be arguing nobody wants to live there because it's too crowded…

In Mexico the cartels have built their own private cell phone networks in order to maintain secure communications that can't be tapped by the authorities.

And, since they often use the same masts, threaten the repair people of the main networks.

> maintain secure communications that can't be tapped by the authorities

That's...interesting. Which authorities can't tap them? The cartel ones, the local gov, the feds, the feds' consultants from other places, or the technical authorities who know how this gear works?

I mean, I don't doubt criminals use cameras just like the police do, but... how do they know all these cameras are for criminal purposes?

I assume they just took down some random 500 cameras (the photo even shows a shop that probably has their own camera system to prevent theft) and claimed it as a huge success against the mafia. This is what happens when you need to show that you are getting the bad guys when you don't have a single clue.

The photo in the article is just a random photo of Albanian police with a filter, it has nothing to do with the operation in question.

The FT source article had an Albanian representative saying not all cameras were tied to organized crime but they were all set up illegally. If the cameras themselves were illegal, they're necessarily for criminal purposes even if being used in an innocent manner.

That said I have no idea what Albanian law they were breaking. Mounted to public property is my guess, but it's based on nothing.

In Britain, Russian gangs have been spying on cops with CCTV for 30-odd years.

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