'Cops and public bodies BUNGLE snooping powers by spying on 3,000 law-abiding Brits' Thousands of innocent Brits have reportedly been mistakenly snooped on by UK police and public bodies. That claim, which involved nearly 3,000 citizens, was made in a Times report (£) on Saturday. It was alleged that "Authorities routinely use sweeping legal powers to collect phone and internet records secretly". And there …
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If 78% are the wrong address, does that mean the argument goes something like:
We want to spy on person A at personA@somewhere.com, but we don't really have any justifiable reason to.
However, we have person B who is a real villain and we can justify spying on him at er, personA@somewhere.com.
Drat, we made a mistake and submitted the wrong communications address and accidentally got all this information, sorry.
The sorry may not be part of the formal process....
One of the main reason why the UK has fairly low rates of crime is because there is a good deal of public co-operation. It's a shame to see this co-operation and acceptance of policing being eroded.
The nine principles of good policing are just as valid as they were almost two centuries ago: Perhaps plod could be encouraged to bear them in mind.
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/policeNine.php
Kent Police evidently can't wean themselves of dodgy tactics in the pursuit of any result. During their spate of 'fantasy clear up rates' about 25 years ago, a local guy I knew by reputation (principally for being entirely off his face 98 percent of the time) was up in court on two counts of burglary, but asked for another 173 to be taken into consideration. It was a shocker even by Kents low standards; the guy couldn't have reliably recalled the digits between 1 and 173, let alone that many burglaries. It was to no ones surprise the courts didn't bat an eyelid in accepting it though.
He gets a reduced sentence.
The police force get to upward trend their key performance indicators with reference to incident response rate metrics
The offices get a pat on the back down at the rolled-up-trousers
The good people of kent feel safe that detection rates are up.
The real crims breath a sigh of relief that they aren't going to get caught
Less tax payers money is wasted on other court cases
Everyone's a winner !
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