This uses some awfully passive language about how the app came to be installed. Did the officers install it themselves from the list of approved apps, or did someone push it down onto a bunch of devices? If the officers installed it themselves, that somewhat discredits the idea the individual police officers had no idea.
Considering the discretion police can exercise, which is in practice far greater than laws would suggest, knowing who the individuals involved in such decisions is even more important. Keeping bad decision makers out of positions of responsibility is crucial to competent policing.
And should be treated as a pretty major policy gap in policing... Officers should not be using BYOD, they work with far to sensitive of data both in the sense of leaking what they're working on (giving privy folks a preview to investigations), but also leaking "customer" (the public's) sensitive data to those without authorization.
They likely have work issued mobile phones, I know my local force does that.
Edit: reading the judgement shows the phones were issued by the force:
> While it is acknowledged that the App was downloaded onto officially provided encrypted mobile devices, evidence was provided during the investigation to indicate that copies of call recordings had been manually transferred onto removable media
US-flavoured English has this type of "rap" as well, as in Raganwald faced the rap for making too many reddit-esque puns on Hacker News. The mods reviewed his rap sheet and determined that permanent expulsion was warranted for this transgression.
I believe both descend from "rap" as a form of rebuke, in one case synonymous with criticism, in the other synonymous with a conviction in a court of law.
Surely "faced the rap" comes from a rap sheet, the Record of Arrests and Prosecutions, aka the documents inside the manilla folder you see in movies, in the scene where the detective whistles and says "looks like our guy's been busy..."
I bet "record of arrests and prosecutions" is a false etymology for "rap sheet."
OED attests "rap" in this sense of punishment back to the 1860s at least, and "face the rap," "beat the rap," etc., to the early 1900s. "Rap sheet," the 50s.
I agree that they are derived from the physical "rap."
I am curious about is the origin of 'rap' as an informal discussion: I want to rap to you today—lyric spoken by Maurice White of "Earth, Wind, and Fire."
I believe that's the origin of the noun Rap as a music genre, which is now mostly known as Hip-Hop.
It's probably from the "rap on the door" sense, carrying the metaphor of visiting someone to talk. "Calling" on someone is a (somewhat anachronistic) similar idea.
I'm pretty sure it's jazz talk, so I'd look at urban black culture of the early 20c.
Could have ended up being knock music or call music?
edit: your "rap" is (usually) how you talk to women, and going "calling" was once the same sort of euphemism.
> "Calling" on someone is a (somewhat anachronistic)
Way to make us feel old! I was at school when children started to have phones, through to MSN and early smart phones, but 'calling on' people was at least the bridge between that and RL interaction. (I'm sure we texted things like 'call on you later'.) Is it not still? Whatever the technology isn't there a need for that?
Obviously language can fade independently of technology, but it was quite funny to note some of the same weird school playground phrases familiar to both me and my father at the same school(s) 30y apart.
The part I'm missing is: why is this bad? I expect police officers to wear body cams, for instance. I automatically assume any interaction I have with a police officer is being recorded. I didn't realize these was an expectation of privacy.
Don't you have a right to meet your accuser, however? I know this typically only applies in court, but encouraging off-the-record communication is basically encouraging parallel construction is it not?
> Don't you have a right to meet your accuser, however?
It only applies to those who give testimony against you in court.
If an informant's tip leads to enough hard evidence to convict, they may not need to testify and thus are not your accuser; your accuser is whoever's testifying about that evidence (forensic tech, detective, etc.) Anonymous tips are a thing, after all.
That's generally (as in, both in the US [6th amendment] and the UK [Article 6 of the ECHR]) regarding witnesses offering testimony during trials (and the right of the defendant to cross-examine them) - not people giving anonymous tips which might inspire police to do investigations of their own.
Maybe the caller is not accusing anyone of anything.
Imagine there's a stabbing. The police show up and immediately start questioning bystanders. No-one wants to talk. A detective hands out business cards, and says 'if you remember anything, then give me a call on my mobile'.
On the way home, one of the bystanders sees a bloody cloth next to a public bin a block or two away that looks like the knife might be wrapped up in it. They're scared that it might have been a gangland killing, so they call up and report what they saw in confidence, fearing retribution.
The caller's not made any accusation. The physical evidence stands for itself in court. There's no need for an illegal or warrantless search to find the knife, and neither does the tip-off form a basis for creating probable cause for a search.
In this case, at the very least I think it is reasonable for the caller to expect a level of privacy, and the police should be obliged to inform the caller that the call is being recorded.
Yes. But if there's a stabbing, a detective comes round knocking on doors and handing out business cards with a mobile number on, I think it's reasonable to have the belief that the call to the mobile is not recorded.
> Also, the app they're talking about isn't a thing that records phone calls on your mobile, it's for accessing the call recorder system.
That does not seem to be what the article is saying.
> Several police forces in Britain [used] a calling app that recorded hundreds of thousands of phone conversations and illegally retained that data.
> Some 1,015 staff downloaded the software on their work phones and made more than 200,000 records of phone chats, which the regulator reckons was likely with "victims, witnesses, and perpetrators of suspected crimes" and were "automatically saved."
> When enabled, the app records and stores all phone calls made in the mobile device.
Fines should still have an impact; it’s basically a reallocation of budget, and any org presumably wants to maximize their slice of the pie to achieve whatever their goals are (personal or otherwise).
Ofc, the usual story is that the fines aren’t that high, and can be effectively treated as a cost of doing business, so they do little to nothing for incentives.
I think that’s missing the point that the department fined is unlikely to recover the whole fine and most departments respond to incentives to maximise their longevity and budget, so there is a meaningful incentive from intra-governmental fines of sufficient size.
Likely the same reason folks in China and Singapore accept a panopticon. It's a safe, comfortable environment. I feel dramatically safer at 2am in Shanghai than I do in any US city. It's not the trade-off I want for myself, but it's understandable - and were I born there, I might even endorse it.
To the extent that the economy is doing well and folks feel like the country is headed in a positive direction they're generally willing to accept an awful lot from the state.
When that inevitably changes though (due to cyclicality), things tend to get spicy.
> I feel dramatically safer at 2am in Shanghai than I do in any US city.
To be fair, the US is a poor example. I’d feel safer in any European city at 2am then in a US city in the middle of the day. At least I don’t have to worry about being shot for no reason.¹ In the US I was reminded of that possibility every time I walked into a museum.
Why do Americans routinely still believe the UK is an exceptional, universal surveillance state?
There were two studies done (in Kings Lynn in Norfolk and in a section of Putney) that are full of mistakes, that US media has picked up as some kind of indication that the UK is down some dark path the same as China.
People believe every residential street has police cameras (not even close to true) or that the _government_ operates "millions" of cameras (not true), or that there's nowhere you can go in the UK where you can't be immediately followed on camera.
Most of the "millions" of cameras in the studies are, like most of the millions of cameras in the USA, pointing from the back of shop out through the glass at the front. If the police want those they have to ask, on foot, to the manager of the store, and the store manager may require them to have a warrant.
And then ask yourself: how different is it in the USA?
(Throwaway because I am really done with commenting here, but this CCTV misunderstanding always makes me laugh. Here's a tip: the USA is not really very different. (Except that our police aren't armed to the teeth, you don't get nearly shot to death for going to the wrong house while black, and our politicians don't plan to put prisons next to theme parks to score points)
This always fascinates me too. America has been repeatedly shown to be systematically spying on their citizens via the NSA, make no apologies for it and continue to do so.
But then any mention of the UK and americans are like "how do you live in a surveillance state?!"
Because there's a material difference between the NSA snooping on your metadata, and your local constabulary having video feeds of every corner of your village. Abuses by the NSA are bigger picture things that mostly aren't seen to affect everyday Americans. Abuses by the local constabulary are much more real to the community, like domestic abuse.
Of course, I think a large number of Americans don't have direct exposure to the UK system, and have only seen it misused in popular media, eg Hot Fuzz.
Your comment is basically just whataboutism. Bringing up racism in the US for no reason (in a way that subtlety denies the massive racism problem in the UK/europe) just to deflect from the debate of surveillance powers in the UK is quite the take. Especially when the comment you are replying to seems to be written by an austrian not the american boogeyman.
It's weird that you only focus on the issue of CCTV cameras, when the debate is about much more than that. British authorities are allowed by law to engage in massive surveillance that does not happen even in the US (or at least, not overly and not fully allowed by the law). You might be ok with that, but it's weird to downplay it.
>but it will also introduce new domestic powers, including a government database that stores the web history of every citizen in the country. [..]
>Police officers will then be able to access a central search engine known as the "request filter" to retrieve this information. [..]
>The key point about this power, though, is that it has no judicial oversight. Access to citizens’ web history will be solely at the discretion of the police, with a specially trained supervising officer approving or denying requests
It is historically derived from trust in the government, police and security services. High profile failures aside, that trust has mostly been earned and respected for a long time. It doesn't change the principles or deeper dangers of course but it does affect public perception. Most people simply have bigger things to worry about when they believe these tools are usually being employed with good intentions.
I think your distrust is probably wise. Even if things are trustworthy today there is always a chance of that changing with a new government tomorrow and history provides too many examples where that didn't end well.
Unfortunately part of the problem is that different types of people experience these systems very differently. I'm unremarkable and unlikely to attract the interest of the authorities by association either so most of the ongoing problems you do see in the news don't tend to affect me or those close to me. I remember how one similarly unremarkable person I know was shocked and quite upset when they were challenged by a huge scary-looking guy to show some kind of ticket while travelling in London even though they had one and hadn't done anything wrong. And then I wonder how often a mid-teens black kid living on the estate 25 metres overhead has been "profiled" by the Met and what their experience of being challenged by authority must feel like.
Until we fix the glaring inequalities in our society there will always be big problems lurking underneath sadly.
The US has a very different intellectual tradition arising from a deliberate act of rebellion and a fairly static constitution. Many European countries have a history of fascist dictatorship. Britain has neither, so in my view is somewhat lackadaisical about the risks of state power. We’re rightly proud that we didn’t succumb as Italy or Germany did, but of course that means that dictatorship is something that happens to other people or comes from Brussels. It’s true that our electoral democracy is relatively safe (redrawing of constituencies is normal, new ID card requirements are dubiously motivated) but that leaves a lot of scope for far more intrusion with far less constitutional oversight than many other Western liberal states. Notably, there is less scepticism about state power in other democracies where there is a similar lack of scepticism for historical reasons—e.g., France, where the legacy of Vichy is often downplayed relative to the resistance, or Japan, which never really confronted its past.
Surrey Police and Sussex Police were given access to the Another Call Recorder app [...] The police officers were themselves unaware that calls would be recorded.
Yeah, I guess that wasn't clear from the name of the app...
As an iPhone user in a region where single-consent is the law, are there any convenient ways to record phone calls without extra hardware or jail breaking?
As an android user, same question. The last app I used successfully stopped working after a while, and I got the impression Google did this deliberately.
just patch inputs and outputs to audacity (or your recording software of choice). for pipewire theres helvum[0] or qpwgraph[1]. for JACK there's Catia[2].
If you have a headphone jack and a splitter that could work. I do not know of any "two sided" Bluetooth devices that could sit between a phone and headset.
