Comment on Dutch cops arrest man after sending him confidential files by mistake
MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com 6 hours agoThat’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.
webp@mander.xyz 5 hours ago
Only because the conditions the police created gave him the opportunity to be in the wrong.
MountingSuspicion@reddthat.com 5 hours ago
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.
Chais@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
I think the point webp@mander.xyz 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.
webp@mander.xyz 5 hours ago
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.