Please hand over your nerd membership card. It has been invalidated by an nothing-to-hide post, Thanks.

There are two groups of psycho historians. The secret inner circle ensures that history does as itâ(TM)s told.

I am against the death penalty. But your post is misinformed: The guy is 25 years old. Has multiple similar charges, spent time in prison.

He is old enough to take responsibility and has been given enough chances. Throw the f...ing book at him. 10 to 20 years should cool him off.

I do not agree with the US justice system to send people to prison for life that the US do not consider old enough to drink. I think that most of the punishments are way to hard even for older people.

But a 25 year old f.cker that got someone killed by swatting so often that the slim chances became reality? AFTER he already spent time in prison for swatting without someone dying?

Send him away. For a long time.

And by the way: Fix your police.

Are you accusing Moxi Marlinspike of being a collaborator? Or are you simply spreading FUD so that nobody even *tries* to protect the little rest of their privacy?

Addition: I know, Contacts, Calendar and messages are encrypted after a reboot since the Snowden files. But they were not before. I am convinced that this was done to help the US surveillance scheme, but who could prove that?

The part about apple is a bold statement. Nobody has reported unwanted communications with apple servers when Siri is not activated (received the activation command and interpreted it *locally*).

They had and have their hands in the cookie jar, though. They left messages and contacts, calender and call lists unencrypted, as those things were most interesting to the powers that be. If the icloud is activated, they will copy your call lists to their servers for your (the governments) convenience.

Your general statement is correct, 1984 is upon us. With less violence against dissidents than predicted, but still switching them off through propaganda, alternative facts and bogus criminal charges.

This is why we need to tell people how they can protect themselves for now and where the threads are.

When secure messengers are illegal - not if - the lacking sideloading possibility of iPhones will leave people unprotected. But at the moment people wealthy enough to buy iPhones have it easier to protect their privacy than android users - unless they install a hardened android without google apps, risking their warranty.

The iPhone makes it easier to use secure cloud providers for notes (IMAP), calendar (caldav), contacts (carddav), documents (webdav). On android it is harder.

The US government complains about iPhones they can not access. Analysts criticize apple for not extracting enough data or even for making data collection optional.

Apple is evil for a lot of reasons not mentioned here - it just so happens that Google has become worse.

At the moment wealthy people have it easier to protect their privacy than poor people on mobile devices. Cheap Android devices like those from One plus have backdoors and spyware preinstalled. We should inform poor people how to install a better android flavor.

I know that we are losing this war against total surveillance. But while we still fight, we should be precise in our criticism and help lesser informed people to make a decision:

This is why privacy is so important, because...

Privacy costs comfort. How much privacy are you willing to sacrifice for convenience?

Installing a more privacy friendly Android, activating tracking blockers, using more privacy oriented cloud providers and using signal from their website is costing the least comfort.

Using boot time encryption implies typing in a long passphrase after each reboot. If it is random and long enough there is no need to change it often. After a while the long passphrase types itself semi-automatical.

Encrypting emails from end to end costs usabilty, especially under iOS. Removing google apps makes it way harder to install or use certain programs like turn by turn navigation.

Turning off the icloud completely costs some usability. Not turning it off makes it easier for private or official attackers to get the valued informations about contacts, communication data and the actual communications. Apple has the data from most iOS users, so there is no need to attack individual devices.

How to make Windows 10 a little bit less snoopy? Use this tool to change the settings easier, if you must run Windows in the first place: (explain). Use a legal copy of Windows 10 enterprise with disabled telemetry if possible. Use Linux if possible, use these settings: ...

I am as pessimistic as you are. But even though it is likely that we lose the war we should not spread FUD. We should be as specific about privacy as possible. Your post misses that mark.

This is not how it works. His call was the conditio sine qua non the shooting would not have happened. He knew of the danger his criminal actions posed to other peoples lifes, he simply did not care.

He did it for thrills and for money.

He killed this guy by proxy, but he still killed that guy.

He tried multiple times. That is a way to increase the odds.

Oh no. I agree, undertrained, underpaid and trigger-happy american police forces played a big role in this.

But this guy swatted multiple persons in multiple states! Even if our police is far less trigger happy, I am quite shure that you could get someone killed if you repeat the swatting often enough.

This guy played russian roulette with other peoples lives countless times.

- He should have been stopped long ago.
- Police should be able to detect spoofed or suppressed caller IDs.
- Police should de-escalate a hostage situation, not fire shots into unarmed people.

But this was murder: Not only did he know that the US police forces are badly trained and militarized, so he was able to see the danger he was putting his victims into. He did it repeatedly so even by european standards I would argue that eventually, he will get someone killed or badly injured.

He knew that but did not care - he even went to jail for swatting and continued. He knew of the danger. He did nothing to defuse the situation, he did everything to let the danger appear imminent. Now he got someone killed.

He is a murderer. No police failure could change that.

?
http://work.chron.com/long-tra...
It states itâ(TM)s 19 weeks...

Oh, our officers are armed. In some cities, like Frankfurt, even the city police; although they needed a loophole to do so.

But killing someone is not a joke. Every case is investigated. And the footage of killings -like the dog killing or the guy in the hotel - show simply insecure, undertrained and triggerhappy lunatics.

Ok. I follow your argument. We have less weapons here than you have in the US, thus the cops are always on high alert.

But why on earth is the training time for low profile policemen in Germany about 2 years compared to 6 fucking months in the US, given the fact that every US policeman needs to be his own GSG 9 in the US? The traing for the GSG 9 is even longer.

You undertrain and underpay your police. You can‘t explain that with concealed weapons.

Statistics:

50 shots fired one innocent, unarmed man in the US compared to 100 shots fired in a whole year in Germany.

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

That was one (!) incident.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

About 2 years of training for most low profile policeman in Germany vs. 6 months in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
http://work.chron.com/long-tra...

Yay statistics.

Could international slashdotters from other civilized countries find statistics for their police?

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing there is one.

We have problems in Germany, I won‘t deny it. But a trigger happy, undertrained police force is not one of them.

Yes. Quite common in the US. You have a word for this: Swatting.

But you do know that the police in other countries - including the SWAT-Teams - are trained differently?

That the police is trained way longer than in the US before being released to the public?

That police is trained to deescalate a situation and is only shooting if you are actually approaching them with a gun?

Your police shot one innocent man with more bullets than our police shot in a whole year, including the mercykills on animals? And this includes encouters with criminals wielding guns.

But that costs money. Buying cheap is sometimes very expensive.

I am shure british, french or russian people could provide sources to backup my post, but here are my sources:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

2 years! Compare that to the US. For fucks sake, people here train harder to be a certified private security guard on private property than your actual police in most of the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

No one here fears for their lives on daily encounters with the police. Even if the suspects run away or do not comply, as long as no violence and no weapons are involved. And they are not trained to shoot first and ask questions later.

You risk broken bones, but the brutality and recklessness we see in those videos are not there. Some policemen are assholes and there were actual murders by the police that were swept under the rug, but if you show the footage of the most infamous killings in the US to German Police Officers, they‘d tell you that this goes against any training they had.

You know - the first step to solve a problem is to recognize there is one...