Your good friends the cops want to help you get back at your ex
Nothing says "I'm still thinking about you" like a no knock raid!
Are you still mad at your ex? This Valentine’s Day, unleash the full apparatus of federal and state governments on them.
At least four Sheriff’s departments around the country as well as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, are celebrating the day of love with ads imploring jilted lovers to snitch on their former mates.
This is about as cute as the FBI celebrating MLK day (the agency had King wiretapped) and it’s also an insane overreach of government power rife with potential abuses.
The ATF, for example, uses an a third party anonymous portal to process tips, called Reportit. According to their website, their product “helps build positive relationships with your employees, students, residents, and other members of your community by providing a simple to use smartphone app and internet reporting platform.”
Furthermore:
report it® allows you to crowdsource important information in real time and in an anonymous and discreet manor (sic yikes). Our proprietary technology supports reporting from any internet connected device. All collected data is securely stored in the cloud and immediately forwarded to your designated recipients based upon location and nature of concern.
Anonymous crime tip lines aren’t new and neither are the abuses they can generate. As Scott Shackford observed in Reason:
To be completely clear here: The ATF doesn't respond to illegal gun sales with a polite knock on the door and questions. In January, for example, ATF agents swooped into Wilkes-Barre Township at the crack of dawn to raid a home, scaring the neighbors.
Crime Stoppers has for years served this function for local law enforcement. A San Antonio man spent eight years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit that originated with a Crime Stoppers tip. Three New York men spent a year in Rikers after a Crime Stoppers tip led to their arrest for guns. Advocates suspect police themselves had phoned in the tip to get more collars. Lesson unlearned, Mayor Eric Adams pledged to work more closely with Crime Stoppers, promote the group with advertising, and fundraise to increase the cash prize awarded to anonymous tippers.
Anyway, living well is the best revenge people!
- select recipient based on location and category;
- store archive copy;
- from any internet connected device.
These assholes "proprietary software" is fucking HTML. No JavaScript, no CSS, just a vanilla HTML form with two <Required> tags.
It just makes ATF look so fucking pathetic that they can't set this up on their own. They don't have to know HTML! Google forms, Excel, a fucking Microsoft Outlook rule—and if they absolutely must have a pointlessly and ludicrously obtuse technical platform from an unaccountable third-party—that's what Microsoft SharePoint is for!