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from the Not-that-NSA,-the-other-one. dept.
The US National Sheriffs' Association wants Google to block its crowd-sourced traffic app Waze from being able to report the position of police officers, saying the information is putting officer's lives at risk.
"The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the responsible corporate citizen they have always been and remove this feature from the application even before any litigation or statutory action," AP reports Sheriff Mike Brown, the chairman of the NSA's technology committee, told the association's winter conference in Washington.
Waze, founded in 2008 and purchased 18 months ago by Google for $1.1bn, has about 50 million users who anonymously share their locations to help gauge road traffic flows. The app also allows police reports and road closures to be added to maps and shared with other users.
Brown called the app a "police stalker," and said being able to identify where officers were located could put them at personal risk. Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his members had concerns as well.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/26/nsa_gunning_for_google_wants_copspotting_taken_off_waze_app/
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 27 2015, @09:38PM
Yes, it does provide many more counterexamples, but the counter-counter examples show it doesn't have to be that way. And I suspect it might ultimately be in our collective best interest to avoid that blood-letting if we can, because that tends to allow other, different sociopaths like Stalin and Mao to rise to the top because they're the ones who don't shy away from mass executions of their enemies.
Now, I'm as vindictive as the next guy. I would like to see every last bastard on Wall Street swing from lamp posts, even though I know and like a few guys who work on Wall Street. But it's possible it would be just as satisfying to see them breaking rocks or sentenced to feed starving orphans in Africa. Or to sort through garbage dumps like the poor do in Rio. And maybe they and everyone else can learn some important lessons about right & wrong, humility, and humanity along the way.
That said, the sick bastards in the CIA who tortured people and the guy who ordered it should face the death penalty, period. No excuses there, and no forgiveness. Only justice.
Washington DC delenda est.