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Comment by bjornsing | Hacker News Reader

Yea I sometimes get a feeling that a large portion of the population just doesn’t understand conditionals. If you tell them “you have the authority to do X if Y”, they just ignore the Y part.

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It's not about understanding, it's about seeing these sort of rules bent dozens of times first and then finally doing it yourself. Rules are only as strong as their enforcement and in many cases it turns out that no-one has neither the incentive nor the ability to enforce them very hard.

After some bantering with Swedish police officers on Twitter I’ve come to believe that many of them simply do not make a distinction between what they have the authority to do, and what they can get away with in practice.

One of the things that would help this if anytime any of these surveillance powers get used, they have to be used as part of a specific ongoing investigation, and when that investigation is closed, everything related to it becomes a matter of public record.

And then you have some hard rules like, investigations are automatically closed after the statute of limitations runs, or if the target of the investigation dies, or the victim chooses not to press charges etc. Things not in the control of the investigators, so they can't keep an investigation open forever to prevent their abuses from becoming public.

This is unworkable, sadly. I don't want my past location data to become a "matter of public record" merely because I have been caught up as a bystander in some random law enforcement investigation and it all ends up in the case file.

Obviously personally identifying information could be redacted without doing so for the request itself.

But you're just reiterating the problem that third parties are collecting the location data of innocent bystanders. Otherwise it wouldn't exist to be in the file.

People who are drunk on power subscribe to the "ask for forgiveness, not permission" philosophy. They think everything they do is right and just. They cannot understand or even believe people would not trust them and see the conditional as a pointless hindrance, bureaucratic red tape meant to stifle upstanding people like them.

Also, the system doesn't really penalize this philosophy. Try to do everything by the book and you find that you can't really get anything done. Cut some corners, you get shit done and, in the worst case, you get a mild slap on the wrist several years later.

And completely break down some walls, injuring others in the process? Get a promotion, and if caught just move somewhere else to do the same thing over again.

People love to wield power over those they oppose and don't care if the system they implement is abused until they're the targets of the abuse.

For example: most people love the police when they coercing wealth from strangers to fund their projects but hate when the same police step on their chest until they stop breathing during a traffic stop.

Your first sentence is generally true but

> when they coercing wealth from strangers to fund their projects

I have no idea what you're referencing here, so I can't say if it's abuse or not.

Because the government and pretty much all those power ignore Y, and whenever they get caught, vast majority of cases they don't get punished. Of course anyone remotely intelligent would ignore the Y part too. Only extremely gullible people with their blind trust in government would look at Y part and nod along. This particular case very much the exception.

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