On Thursday evening around 7:00 PM, police arrested a 40-year-old man from Ridderkerk on Prinses Beatrixstraat in Ridderkerk for computer hacking. Due to a police error, the man had inadvertently gained access to confidential police documents. When ordered to relinquish these documents, he refused. He stated that he would only comply if he received something in return. Therefore, the decision was made to arrest the man, search his home, and secure the confidential files to prevent possible dissemination.
That’s a little unfair. If I leave my door open while I’m gone and someone comes in and makes copies of my personal documents I guess that’s somewhat my fault, but they did something they knew they shouldn’t have. The guy is basically extorting the police and asking for taxpayer money to delete information he was informed he should not have. It seems like he was notified and given time to comply but chose to demand money. I don’t know the exact content of the files, but there’s a lot of potential harm that can come from certain documents being public. I’m not pro police, but the guy seems to be clearly in the wrong here.
Only because the conditions the police created gave him the opportunity to be in the wrong.
The wrong he did was the extortion. If you feel like people being extorted should not be able to charge people attempting to extort them because they created the conditions for extortion then I think we fundamentally disagree on how law and order should function. Doing something bad/illegal is wrong. Extorting someone for doing something bad/illegal is also wrong. I don’t think you should be able to blame someone for making it easy to extort them as a defense for extortion.
I think the point [email protected] is trying to make is that, if I were to send you digital information and then demanded from you to delete it, one would have potentially a harder time convincing people, that it’s not within your rights to demand remuneration.
Especially with how US-centric and -representative the international media landscape has become.
Even though in most(?) European countries I imagine (didn’t actually check) I could sue you for damages, maybe reduced due to my causing the issue, should you publish the information after I asked you delete it.
But with the power imbalance at play here the police can just roll in and arrest the guy. Allowing them to be terminally stupid in the best case, or malevolent in the worst. They could just as well claim they sent someone secret information, they refused to comply with the request for deletion, so they were arrested.
Depending on how little oversight there actually is, that either is the end of the story or, when asked for proof of this series of events, the “proof” was “accidentally deleted” during the investigation, how clumsy.
This is an translated excerpt from the article:
It does not seem like a power imbalance allows them to just roll up and arrest him. It seems like they have a legal ability to ask him to remove the files and since he did not they have a legal right to charge him/confiscate the files. I generally don’t want to assume public sentiment, but I personally think it’s understandable that some government documents (those pertaining to open investigations) are subject to protections that other documents might not be. For what it’s worth, if someone sent me their digital information they wouldn’t have to ask me to delete it because I would not have saved it in the first place and I certainly would not have asked for payment to delete it if I somehow accidentally downloaded it.
We probably do disagree, because there are conditions that create every crime and punishing the actors does not prevent the crime in the first place. You can see how there is still much crime in places that have supposed “law and order.” Go ahead and downvote.
So what’s your solution? Let criminals do whatever they want without consequences?
Womp womp