To address those needs we’ve been working on InformaCam, a mobile app that allows Android devices to take images and videos, embed them with geotemporal and other metadata, sign them with a digital signature unique to the device’s camera censor, encrypt and then send those files to someone they trust who maintains a secure server. Among other elements, the process preserves the chain of custody of the media, making it more likely to be admissible in a court of law.
Most of the Guardian Projects apps are focused on removing all traceable information, this one tries to capture and maintain the info.
I am trying to figure out what you mean by that. I am not an NRA person, but I did first hear about this story on a gun blog. The guy that got shot had a job that I did not know existed. Apparently he traveled around to different Walmart stores, using pellet guns to hunt the birds that end up living in the ceilings of the stores. he showed one of the pellet guns to a girl in his hotel room, and someone saw her holding it through the window, and called the police. When the police showed up, they started yelling contradictory instructions at the occupants of the room. The Officers had him crawling towards them on his knees, in his underpants. What appears to have happened is that his underpants were slipping, and he unconsciously reached to pull them back up. So one of the officers shot him.
It was not a sticker on the rifle. It was an engraving on the ejection port cover. They cost about $15.00 with all sorts of slogans. No particular skill is required to install it. The officer had chosen a personally-owned rifle to carry on duty, which is apparently something that they can do. I would think that an obscene slogan would be against lots of policies, and I think you can learn a little about a person when they would put something like that on a gun.
Most likely no. There are a lot of lowers that have the full auto cartouche but it is like putting NOS stickers on your Civic. It looks cool, but doesn’t let you go faster.
IIRC full auto AR-15s/M-16s require a 3rd pin to keep the auto sear mechanism in place. You can see it below above the safety in the pic.
While there are some police and SWAT teams that use full auto, the additional training required and additional costs usually results in any rifles being semi-auto only.
Curiously, and this was true ~2000 so it may have changed, but the only documented case of a LEGAL full auto machine gun being used in a crime in the US since the 70s was a cop who used one in a murder. And for those unaware, if your state allows it you can legally own a full auto. It is a $200 tax stamp and ~6mo+ wait for the ATF to do the paper work/background check. And since the FOPA act was passed in 1986, the registration list is closed, so only guns registered as machine guns before 1986 (with a few historic samples being later grandfathered in) are legal. This means if you were a full auto collector in the early 80s, you could sell them now and move to the Bahamas, as only the bourgeoisie can afford them.
Select fire marked doesn’t equal select fire capable. I’d hazard to guess the kind of person who have a laser engraved dust cover would find a three position marked lower receiver entertaining.
First we need local citizens councils who are elected, background checked, taught how to handle PII. They are not allowed conflicts of interest with the police or courts. They receive into a secured server all police footage and have access to all paperwork and case fielsetc. They review all citizens claims and vote on further investigation, inditements etc. Their voting records are public and can be impeached by the voters.
Then we can tackle the hardware and software problems.
I only brought it up because you said murder, and the legal folks don’t like to say that until there is a conviction. I sometimes wonder if the press saying “alleged” decreases some peoples idea of the seriousness. Sorry for not being more explicit to begin with.
Mr44 touched on the difficulty of getting fully automatic weapons. Registered receivers state at about $20,000. Generally police with automatic weapons are issued by the department. Which typically are not allowed to be modified.
I saying that the NRA is traditionally very silent when police shoot people with guns, or on the rights of certain kinds of people with guns. The NRA stopped being a non-partisan group a long time ago and has been a weird, twisted, right-wing industry lobbying group. It’s values reflect that. Cops shooting people because they suspect a person might have a gun, believe it or not, is objectively a concern to anyone who lawfully carries a gun. But the NRA doesn’t want to offend cops, because it doesn’t want them to start pushing for increased gun control, since people on the right might actually listen them. That’s why the NRA is very quiet when cops kill someone who may or may not have a gun in accordance with their second amendment rights. Meanwhile, they generate stupid non-substantive culture-wars claptrap like this:
The article I read said the weapon was department issued, and that the etching was a department violation (though, it seems, for the obscenity, not necessarily for marking the rifle.)
A lot of PDs seem to think they need select fire rifles…
If, and only if, tampering is automatically treated (harshly) as a criminal act per se as well as a severely aggregating factor in any other incidents that may be connected to the tampering. As long as the current ‘Chicago model’ of just shrugging when 80% of the gear shows signs of deliberate damage, tamper evident isn’t going to be of much use.
(That said, for ‘tampering’ to be treated as a Serious Crime, the onus will be on the engineers to ensure that systems don’t look ‘tampered’ unless they are. False positives would undermine confidence in the system, lead to unjust outcomes, and be used as ammunition by the already-well-stocked police unions. A design that meets these criteria, as well as ‘generally suitable for field use’ is probably going to be reasonably tamper resistant as a byproduct of these design requirements.)
My understanding is that, while “The Pension Fund” is a big account across the department for accounting purposes, individual officers gain entitlement to certain defined benefits from it, which you could target individually in order to deal with the current “Your punishment is to retire on a yearly income higher than the average US wage. Let that be a lesson!” problem.
I would agree that raiding everyone’s pension would be problematic; but there is a certain logic to gouging any civil penalties out of the officer who committed the act being penalized, rather than it coming out of the general department budget. Provides a much more…immediate…incentive.
