I've made friends with a few former police officers. And they usually tell me the job silently destroys you inside. The job makes you deal with the worst of the worst daily and after a few years, mentally you are fucked. If an officer wants to do something that is constructive rather than destructive of society, they should be commended.
The friends that have left the profession would rather work fastfood than anything even tangentially close to law enforcement, like security.
It would help if they clarified his role. So far all he's done is brag about his history of using his new employer's product to create surveillance devices. Absent any details, it's reasonable to assume he was hired for this experience in the lead up to seeking a goldmine many companies aim for: law enforcement contracts.
So is the concern that they are going to aid law enforcement in catching people who break the law? I'm having a difficult time realizing the outrage here.
They clearly could have made the announcement come off less like it was glorifying the type of surveillance work the former police officer did.
I would hazard a guess that a big part of the crowd who buy and use RaspberryPi products are privacy conscious. So it makes good business sense not to alienate that customer base and throw away all the goodwill the company has garnered over the years.
The concerns over this are justified, and could have been responded to in a calm manner.
Instead those in charge of that social media account decided to act up in an incredibly childish manner.
If the hiring of an ex surveillance specialist to a FOSS software & hardware company does not rub you the wrong way, then I would at least think the bad PR handling from a pure business standpoint would.
Yeah, I definitely think they could have handled it better. Mainly, what rubs me as intellectually dishonest to condemn this one person without knowing him because he used to be in law enforcement.
Braking the law doesn't mean doing anything wrong, and a lot of the people these people harass haven't even broken the law. These people infiltrate and destroy innocent people's lives.
Imagine meeting someone you love and having a child with them, just for them to disappear one day. Imagine finding out that they actually never existed and were actually a government agent who was assigned to infiltrate your life and possibly frame you for daring to speak against the state. Imagine being that child. Or anyone else in these peoples lives for that matter.
Or imagine finding yourself abandoned in a foreign country by your closest friends of several years who were actually government agents you met on a holiday you won in a fake competition created by the government, then find out that the company you worked for was also a fake company set up just to try to entrap you in some elaborate plan, so now you are unemployed, and everything you said in your own home or car in the last several years probably exists forever on a government server somewhere. Imagine then opening a newspaper and reading that the police claim to be underfunded...
Imaging what it does to a person to find out that their life for years has been a real life government conspiracy. That their friends, neighbours, co-workers, partner, etc. are not real and that they have had no privacy. It may not even be you they are after, but someone close to you.
These are both real cases, one from the UK where this cop is from and one from Sweden where I'm from, and they are far from unique.
My objection is not really that they hired him. I believe that people can change and no one is irredeemable, but I don't think they should advertise it like this. It's like hiring an ex-con who used to use your product to victimize others and then bragging about it and getting upset when people are unconformable with it.
If nothing else, I think they should show more respect for people who are victims of the police and state-sponsored surveillance.
I don't know anything about him besides him having been a "Surveillance Officer" for 15 years. I feel the same about that as I feel about someone who has been a member of a crime gang or terrorist organization for that long. As long as the individual joined voluntarily and had the option to leave, I don't think it's unreasonable to judge them for the actions of the organization (or even organization type) without knowing what that individual specifically did.
If "we" is you, go ahead! You're free to judge whomever you want.
This is a fairly simple issue - a community of people who are pro-privacy and anti-surveillance have concerns about a former surveillance officer working for an organization which creates small, portable, popular computing devices.
If you haven't heard about law enforcement abuses of surveillance, here are some helpful links:
In the West I would say it feels paranoid, but in certain east Asian or Middle-eastern countries (that will remain nameless) I wouldn't ask questions in the first place. Thankfully I'm in the former.
You sound like you're not part of any marginalized, surveilled, or abused communities. Police in some places still arrest people for violating state level sodomy laws even though the SCOTUS ruling nullified them.
No, this is still very much a problem here in the West.
That's obviously not good and we should speak up when these things happen because that sounds unlawful. The point is that we have the freedom here to stand up and say that, and in other countries you wouldn't even have that much. It could be a lot worse.
I’d believe this, and almost want to commend the ones you know for leaving.
I’m not quite jaded enough (barely) that I still believe that people can grow up in decent environments, somewhat sheltered from the world, thinking they can go into policing or politics and “do some good”. I don’t know that I still believe that they actually can do any good… but if they started off naively optimistic and then realized what it was like, and left? That takes a degree of character, and some guts knowing you’re leaving a profession. There’s opportunity cost.
Now… this particular guy at RPi and 15 years to figure it out? Eh. And generally unsure why this is being flagged, except for “drama” maybe. It’s a bad look from an organization that lots of people know about and respect(ed).
Police depts have a plenty of departments that aren't public facing. I imagine you can spend 15 years in building surveillance devices and not suffer the mental breaking point of a beat cop or CSAM investigator.
If you can turn a side hobby into a second career, why not go for it?
The RPi's social media poster definitely needs retraining. There is no need to be this passive aggressive on a commercial account.
The friends that have left the profession would rather work fastfood than anything even tangentially close to law enforcement, like security.