[Foundation-l] Stalking Article

Mon Jun 9 18:13:29 UTC 2008

WMF can assist law enforcement not by making complaints, which are
abundant, but by making it easy for law enforcement to investigate and
prosecute. It should be obvious that this risks violating the
community's attitudes and preferences about privacy. Privacy often
conflicts with responsibility. Finding ways of managing the conflict
is a serious challenge. The biggest roles this list can perform are to
call for action, to reflect community opinion, and to lead community
opinion. IMHO.

Unfortunately a change in policy will only occur following a change in
attitudes, which will probably only follow from instances of actual
real-world stalking or recognized cyber-crime.  Perhaps we can delay
the day when some draconian measures will be taken by supporting
modest preventive actions now that are consistent with moderate
(realistic) views of privacy and the trade-offs with responsibility.

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 4:39 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> I agree that it is the police that has to deal with these types of
> instances. The police is however not always as repsonsive as you would hope.
> There is anecdotal evidence that they typically do not want to get involved
> in these cases.
>
> I do agree that getting the attention of the authorities is the best way to
> get some solution. How to get this attention is achieved best when there is
> a dossier about the case and the quality of such a dossier is enhanced when
> other people who know how to build such a dossier testify to the veracity of
> the claims.
>
> I would love to learn that there is indeed a policy of the Foundation for
> such cases.. I would not presume either way that such a policy exists. Such
> a policy is problematic given our privacy rules... It is not obvious that
> the police should always get what it wants. For this reason it helps when
> there is a policy that deals with stalking cases because this can be made a
> clarification to the privacy rules that explains what data can be shared
> with law enforcement organisations...
>
> NB Keep in your mind that we are not talking about US police alone..
> Thanks,
>     GerardM

-- 
Dennis C. During