I'm Danish and lars kragh andersen is a bit of a grey zone. He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online. He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
On the flip-side, he's sort of right. I assume that putting a GPS tracker on the car of our minister of justice is illegal, but that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe. Similarily the politicians he stalk and harras are pro Palintir getting access to all our data, so Lars Andersen is sort of giving the politicians a taste of what they want to give everyone.
He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I suspect next time he'll have his cameras running with backup powers though.
If politicians are attempting to undermine your children’s right to privacy forever, and yet these same politicians don’t like when this is being done to their own children…it shows either an astonishing level of hypocrisy and/or stupidity.
Europe is filled with these types of authoritarian urbanites, who make decisions from an elitist “i know what’s best for you” attitude while eating 6 course dinners. This is the same class of European leaders who steered the regions entire energy/economic/social policy so bad that the whole European model of the last few decades is in slow collapse and fiscally unsustainable. Yet ironically, the most common phrase you’ll hear while eating these 6 course dinners is “sustainability.”
These people are some of the worst hypocrites on pretty much every topic imaginable and need to be called out for it.
This is what I meant by the grey zone. I personally think it goes too far, but I agree with the point you make here. Where it becomes problematic is that the method does not get the point across to any audience which doesn't already agree with them.
Compare this to Jesper Graugaard, who is know locally as the "Chromebook-dad". He's been campaigning against big tech in our schools for like a decade, and after 6 years we recently had a ruling forbidding our cities from using Google services without proper data ownership agreements. He's obviously not the only party behind this, but he's a massive force in the agenda against non-EU tech in our schools. He does it through reform and political campaigning.
Jesper has wide public support, Lars is not viewed favourable. This story hasn't even hit our news, I've only heard about it here on HN.
I think you and I disagree. I don’t think Jesper is attacking the right issues.
Big tech (private companies who largely just care about profits) and foreign governments (the Americans for example), are way lower on my “things Europe should be worried” about list. They’re there of course, but lower.
Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money. And the US government is truly a disinterested party. 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding). When push comes to shove, they fundamentally do not care what happens here.
The real threat is our own governments, who we have given the legal authority to enact all the negative outcomes that will come from totalitarian erosions of privacy and over regulation of individuals. Building up this scary “foreign boogieman” is what is enabling some of this authoritarian action.
Pointing fingers at Big Tech and the US is a giant distraction tactic so you don’t look at the terrible things our own domestic politicians have done and are doing and the fact they have zero plans to do the hard things needed to get us out of this mess. It's just champagne and smiling over dinner, while the old eat the young, the government eats the private sector, and endless legislation eats personal freedoms and responsibilities.
I expect he’ll be justified and vindicated in history if we end up in a global totalitarian prison planet scenario that seems to become more possible as the tech reaches that capability. “For the safety of the children” ofcourse.
Probably best thing that can happen to your country.
Edit: On a more bright side - at what point does the game of criminals masquerading as activists / journalists come to end. I remember listening to Flock founder say entire LA's or SF's police was being run by criminal gang. Reading some of the extremist comments here it seems the gangs made their way here too, trying to manipulate people.
World is not black and white. Most people would probably prefer to live in a world with low-power petty-crime rings and ability to be free and safe apart from having their wallet stolen once in a while rather than with e.g. Russian-like state mafia country with enormous amount of power and ability to target everyone at every time for their families interests. When you have a destroyed social ladder and everything can be taken at any moment under few people control immediately because they just want it.
That's apart from the fact that in the palantir case you also invite foreign intelligence and CIA to your home.
They're probably not being sarcastic. Wrong, and ppssibly evil, but not sarcastic. There are some weirdly big Palantir fans on HN. No clue what drives them, but I'm guessing they're not keen students of history.
Lars is good at exposing the hypocrisy of the Danish government. In a former case he, sent the exact same threatening text to a prosecutor as that prosecutor had received a police report from a third party about, and that the prosecutor refused to pursue. Lars got jail time for that. Rules for thee but not for me.
You are correct that two wrongs don't make a right, but I think that it is obvious that the threat was not real, only symbolic. Therefore it wasn't "wrong". Meanwhile the original, not prosecuted threat message, was real. It's clear that it shows both vindictiveness and unwillingness to protect certain people.
You dont have to give up equality under the law, you just have to accept that there is a lot more that goes into a prosecution than the act. Were witnesses cooperative and credible, what was the intent, what was context.
I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider.
Your obfuscation carries no argumentative weight, as the uncertainty your obfuscation attempts to introduce might as well be used in the reverse: maybe the guy who made the original threat (that was not prosecuted) had a criminal record involving violent crimes whereas Lars' text obviously should be taken in the political, non-violent, activist context that is his modus operandi.
I don't think they would reject that. In fact, you are arguing their point: It's the context that matters, not just the act. Without knowing the context it's not valid to presume a particular scenario.
It's obfuscation because you're leaving out that this is an openly political fight of an in-power leftist politician against an "extreme-right" party (of course, they're well to the left of the US democrat party).
The underlying problem is that a LOT of public servants are very scared what will happen if the party who keeps getting threatened gets elected, which is a real possibility. So, they're using all sorts of underhanded tactics to try to prevent it. In a way, it's a fight about public servants trying to keep their job safe. It's political because they all owe their jobs to a particular coalition that's been in power for ages and ages.
Oh and it's a fight about muslim immigration and the influence of that in and on society. So ...
That's why it's obfuscation. You're leaving important things out.
The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
> I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider
... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here. You are aware you're making that implicit statement, right?
Indeed, that’s why selective prosecution is an effective weapon. The consequences are asymmetric and demonstrating selectivity is impossible without exposing oneself to the downside. It’s definitely a stable incumbent regime tactic.
Pretty tricky by the cops to turn off power directly and to steal his cameras. Shows that if you are concerned something like this would happen to you that you need to invest in more resilient solutions. Probably something with batteries and also hidden.
They did this to Afroman, too. Though, in his case, they didn't lead with the panel and the result is the infamous video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0bNy7XO-SCI0 It makes you wonder how much of an effect this incident has had on protocols.
But, yeah, depending on your threat matrix, you might want to consider hidden trail cams with their own cell service.
There have been cases in the US where homeowners shot cops dead who were in the process of unexpectedly raiding their home, because the homeowner had no idea they were cops and not home invasion robbers; and in some cases have been acquitted of murder charges by juries for this.
I'd personally like to see the laws protecting this strengthened, to make sure that cops aren't charging unannounced into peoples' homes and then charging the homeowner with murder when they react with reasonable gun violence in self-defense.
We don't have precedent in the way that common law countries do, and the judgements in actual cases point in slightly different directions-- in one case a court felt that the failure to fire a warning shot made it not self-defence, in another fighting people trying to get into an apartment with a knife was deemed acceptable.
Generally though, if someone is breaking into your apartment while you're there, possibly trying to get at you, there's no limit, as long as you're actually trying to defend yourself (so no executing someone who you've clearly disabled, etc.).
If people are breaking into your apartment and you fire a warning shot, then proceed to shoot the attackers, no one will complain.
You can. But ammunition and the guns have to be stored in separate safes. And it's essentially impossible to get off with a self defense claim if you have time to gather your legal guns
Just because Denmark doesn't have the same gun laws, culture around using guns for self-defense, or prevalence of guns as the US does, it doesn't mean that Danish police face no risk when they raid someone's home. Anytime the cops raid someone's home, regardless of whether or not is it a legitimate raid of a legitimate criminal, it's a violent act and there's risk that the cops will be hurt or killed.
Since 1945 12 cops have been killed in the line of duty (excluding traffic accidents), mostly when responding to a violent crime (trying to stop bank robberies lead to 6 of those fatalities).
The activist is well known. They likely knew he would answer the door, yet they still broke it down. In the U.S., you'd probably shoot some dog in that situation, if one was available.
The entire scene is probably not meant as effective policing, but as punitive theater. This also explains why they disabled the cameras, as the theater was not intended for content reuse.
Given that, I'd assume they knew he wouldn't shoot them or do anything even remotely like that.
I was on a consultant-assignment at a company that got raided by the police in the EU. The police was extremely careful not to scan any data that where stored on US-servers. The company used Google for mail and file storage, so all computers had to be taken offline before they could scan them.
While I don't doubt they have a way of getting permission to access that data, I don't think they will put in the effort unless you're a relally big fish.
Maybe he wanted to make sure a lot of copies of the evidence were floating around. Surveillance capitalism is like a free unlimited backup service you can't restore from.
He describe himself as an anarcho capitalist so I guess, ideologically, it is government surveillance that he is concerned with and that the free market will sort out the rest.
Nobody in Denmark actually thinks of Lars Andersen as any sort of serious privacy activist. He is a drug-addled moron who just happens to dabble in those things. He's an idiot and contributes nothing of value to society.
If the goal was to maximize attention to the event (in order to use it to steer attention towards the cause) then it was quite successful, no? After all, we're talking about it here. Mostly about him and the details of the event, but some sub-threads are about the cause too.
> The prefece to the story is, that I in a kind of roundabout and (I think) humorous way published "my two favorite numbers" by spelling out a 10 diget and a 8 diget number with letters. I didn't tell what they ment, but they where prime minister Mette Frederiksen's social security and phone number
Umm, so was he arrested for doxing the prime minister? Is there more to the story than that?
As someone who cares about privacy, arresting people who dox other people seems like a good thing. Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous, but still at the end of the day i have trouble objecting to someone getting arrested for doxing people.
That same prime minister supports the warrant-less use of medical records in police work and the ban of encryption through chat control. She wants to prevent the Danish population from having privacy, but demands it herself. Sorry, but that's not the Western way.
That's a bit simplified, isn't it? He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her, and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed." If it was about, I dunno, pizza toppings or school budgeting, then obviously the actions would have been different.
Having their business transparent makes sense but by restricting people's personal lives like this would disincentivize good people from rising to power, which is not what we want.
> Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous
Do you really want armed and masked police to break down the doors of people who dox others, disable their cameras, and arrest them while refusing to tell them the charges? Because without these details this would have been a non-story.
Calling the self declared Internet troll a privacy activist feels disingenuous. This is the former corrupt cop turned drug dealer who publicly and proudly proclaimed that he was stalking the children of the prime minister of Denmark so he could figure out where she lived, because he wanted to expose those details.
She currently lives at a secret address due to security concerns.
The tone of the post sounds like smear since it entirely dismisses his advocacy of personal liberty with claims that havn't been published in Danish media as far as I know.
It would be interesting if you could elaborate on the claims that be was a corrupt police officer and drug dealer.
My understanding of his own account is that he left the force when he wasn't comfortable arresting people over weed and that he saw systematic abuse of power that he didn't want to partake in. Is there more to the story?
His recent activism has been focusing on contrasting the privacy people in power demand with their work to deny the broad population privacy.
> you could elaborate on the claims that be was a corrupt police officer and drug dealer.
This is public record. It’s entirely published he’s charged and received a prison sentence for the crime, the investigation into corruption started but needed early when he handed in his resignation. which is just proof that he was a corrupt cop in a corrupt system. I mean no drug dealer who gets charged is going to get off by going “ok I’ll quit then”.
> My understanding of his own account is that he left the force when he wasn't comfortable arresting people over weed
This flips the script. He public made statements that he would carry drugs on the job, and felt I’d should be legal, and that he wouldn’t enforce the drug law. The investigation that followed he handed in his resignation. And the corrupt Danish police force being what it is, dropped the investigation.
His “activism” has since consisted of amongst other things starting to sell drugs and then claiming that its activism when he got charged with prison for it. To be clear, he didn’t stage the public sale of a symbolic amount to get arrested and protest through civil disobedience. He straight up went breaking bad and started a drug peddling operation.
>And the corrupt Danish police force being what it is, dropped the investigation.
How is that corruption? If the issue was that he was saying he wasn't gonna do his job, and then he quit his job, wouldn't that just rectify the situation?
He was saying that he broke the law routinely and they decided to end the investigation. That’s corruption, police should be investigated for routinely failing to do their job just the same as when they break the law or abuse their office.
I get the impression that you have (or claim to have) information that isn't publicly available and think he is disingenuous or imormal as a person.
Do you also disagree with the causes he is promoting or only the person and/or methods?
Some of his ideas, like full anarcho capitalism, I would need to be convinced before being onboard with. But opposing mass surveillance and promoting government accountability seems odd to vigorously oppose.
I don’t have any non public information. This is all public record, he was found guilty and charged with jail on multiple occasions. He pops up in the news periodically for having broken yet another law and i charged and convicted for it.
And “being opposed to mass surveillance” and literally stalking kids of the prime minister to attempt to expose the PET (equivalent to FBI) exposed secret location her family is staying at are not the same.
Obviously every drug dealer is going to “be of the ideology that dealing drugs should be legal” but that doesn’t make dealing drugs activism. Same as abusing the office of being a cop. It doesn’t matter if you believe it should be legal for cops to beat up protestors, that doesn’t make a cop breaking the law to beat up protestors an act of activism.
The guy is just a sleezebag who cries “activism” every time he faces consequences for breaking the law in this illegal activism or when he’s harassing politicians. That’s not actual activism and he’s not supporting any cause he’s just acting like an idiot doing what he’s doing.
I don’t care if you think drugs should be legalized, or even if you do drugs in your free time. If you are a cop doing drugs while on duty and decide to take it on yourself to not enforce the law against drug dealers you are corrupt, because you have decided to subjugate the law you are forced with enforcing. Now it’s true that he wasn’t officially charged with taking kickbacks from the drug dealers he would let operate but in my optics that is entirely due to them letting him hand in a resignation to stop the investigation, propably to protect his fellow cops who would have been named and shamed for also doing drugs on the job. But to be clear, deciding to protect drug dealers in your job as a cop is. It activism it’s corruption.
Claiming it’s about ideology defies the point. He spent years as a cop letting drug dealers deal drugs and then came out saying the only reason he was breaking the law was because he didn’t believe in it. That’s not ideology that’s corruption. If he had decided to stop being a cop to not enforce a law he didn’t like that’s different. But that’s not what happened. He quit hen his illegal enterprise got caught. Cops do not get to enforce the law selectively based on what laws they like and dislike and get off just by claiming “ideology”.
This is the slave mindset that is letting politicians all over the world erode our rights. More and more and more. Every country is now passing deep anti-privacy, anti-VPN, anti-encryption and age-verification laws. The law is not written by us, its written by people who are only barely accountable to us once every couple of years. Authoritarianism is rising very sharply all over the world, corruption amongst the elites is high, they are increasingly unaligned and unafraid of common people. There's a million tricks to pass laws that citizens don't really want, including skipping public debates, secret amendments, or just relying on plain old propaganda and ignorance/inaction by the majority. The only actual power we have is in action and organization. Following the laws that they write with barely any input from us off a cliff is not right or noble, its death.
I think you’ve got his fake activism mixed up. When he was a cop he wasn’t claiming to be a privacy advocates his stick then was that cops should be allowed to do cocain while on the job and that if a cop though selling drugs was ok they should be free to not uphold the law whenever they felt like it.
His fake stance on privacy came later when he faced consequences for doxing politicians and using the public Facebook pages of politics to advertise his drug peddling enterprise.
Corruption is defined as "the abuse of entrusted power for private (usually financial) gain". Lars' case falls under the category of conscientious objection, as he's ideologically motivated. Pretty disgusting to frame that as corruption.
I think some context is being lost in a literal translation.
I think they mean secret as in unlisted where their records aren't accessible in public government databases. The same protection you would get if you were stalked for example.
No, it’s not just unlisted number and address. PET (Danish equivalent of FBI) by administrative decision has had her move out of her Copenhagen apartment and to an undisclosed location due to security concerns. Her and her family are literally under protection due to security concerns and this guy is stalking her kids trying to dox her.
I get that it's a secret location now, but I don't understand in context if this activist is the trigger of the situation. An if so how can this be considered a threat.
Stalking falls under the broad category of harassment in my eastern european country. I feel as if this would be a non issue given an official police warning. At most.
At the same time, i would presume if his arrest was this irregular and illegal he would be taking it to actual court instead ofthe court of public opinion.
Not exclusive, but in general its a bad idea to post on social media if you plan to take it up in court, as its very easy to accidentally say something that shoots yourself in the foot.
I'm Danish and lars kragh andersen is a bit of a grey zone. He obviously goes over the line, he tried to put GPS trackers on the cars of ministers. He "stalks" their families, and dox their children online. He gave an interview on how he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed when he was a cop because he doesn't agree with the "war on drugs".
On the flip-side, he's sort of right. I assume that putting a GPS tracker on the car of our minister of justice is illegal, but that same minister (Peter Hummelgaard) is one of the key forces behind anti-encryption here in Europe. Similarily the politicians he stalk and harras are pro Palintir getting access to all our data, so Lars Andersen is sort of giving the politicians a taste of what they want to give everyone.
He goes way too far though. Especially if he actually wants change, the way he "protests" is directly damaging his own cause, since nobody is going to sympathise with harrassing children.
I suspect next time he'll have his cameras running with backup powers though.
I think the sim cards are more important: he wrote that Nest switched to local recording mode and the police took the evidence.
> He goes way too far though
that's what activist have to do to shake people
I'll take "Actions that will backfire and you come across as the villain" for $100 Alex
I'm confused reading this. How in the world is GPS-tracking someone's car supposed to show hypocrisy with respect to encryption?
I don’t think he goes too far at all.
If politicians are attempting to undermine your children’s right to privacy forever, and yet these same politicians don’t like when this is being done to their own children…it shows either an astonishing level of hypocrisy and/or stupidity.
Europe is filled with these types of authoritarian urbanites, who make decisions from an elitist “i know what’s best for you” attitude while eating 6 course dinners. This is the same class of European leaders who steered the regions entire energy/economic/social policy so bad that the whole European model of the last few decades is in slow collapse and fiscally unsustainable. Yet ironically, the most common phrase you’ll hear while eating these 6 course dinners is “sustainability.”
These people are some of the worst hypocrites on pretty much every topic imaginable and need to be called out for it.
This is what I meant by the grey zone. I personally think it goes too far, but I agree with the point you make here. Where it becomes problematic is that the method does not get the point across to any audience which doesn't already agree with them.
Compare this to Jesper Graugaard, who is know locally as the "Chromebook-dad". He's been campaigning against big tech in our schools for like a decade, and after 6 years we recently had a ruling forbidding our cities from using Google services without proper data ownership agreements. He's obviously not the only party behind this, but he's a massive force in the agenda against non-EU tech in our schools. He does it through reform and political campaigning.
Jesper has wide public support, Lars is not viewed favourable. This story hasn't even hit our news, I've only heard about it here on HN.
I think you and I disagree. I don’t think Jesper is attacking the right issues.
Big tech (private companies who largely just care about profits) and foreign governments (the Americans for example), are way lower on my “things Europe should be worried” about list. They’re there of course, but lower.
Private companies don’t have the ability to ruin your life in the same way your own government does. They just want your money. And the US government is truly a disinterested party. 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding). When push comes to shove, they fundamentally do not care what happens here.
The real threat is our own governments, who we have given the legal authority to enact all the negative outcomes that will come from totalitarian erosions of privacy and over regulation of individuals. Building up this scary “foreign boogieman” is what is enabling some of this authoritarian action.
Pointing fingers at Big Tech and the US is a giant distraction tactic so you don’t look at the terrible things our own domestic politicians have done and are doing and the fact they have zero plans to do the hard things needed to get us out of this mess. It's just champagne and smiling over dinner, while the old eat the young, the government eats the private sector, and endless legislation eats personal freedoms and responsibilities.
I expect he’ll be justified and vindicated in history if we end up in a global totalitarian prison planet scenario that seems to become more possible as the tech reaches that capability. “For the safety of the children” ofcourse.
What kind of history will a totalitarian prison planet write, I wonder.
1984 will be banned as being too inspirational, perhaps?
1984 is not inspirational, it's cautionary. The main character has already lost from the first page of the book.
> he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed
This is an unequivocally reasonable approach. The prohibition of cannabis is a grotesque charade.
> Palintir getting access to all our data
Probably best thing that can happen to your country.
Edit: On a more bright side - at what point does the game of criminals masquerading as activists / journalists come to end. I remember listening to Flock founder say entire LA's or SF's police was being run by criminal gang. Reading some of the extremist comments here it seems the gangs made their way here too, trying to manipulate people.
World is not black and white. Most people would probably prefer to live in a world with low-power petty-crime rings and ability to be free and safe apart from having their wallet stolen once in a while rather than with e.g. Russian-like state mafia country with enormous amount of power and ability to target everyone at every time for their families interests. When you have a destroyed social ladder and everything can be taken at any moment under few people control immediately because they just want it.
That's apart from the fact that in the palantir case you also invite foreign intelligence and CIA to your home.
Sarcasm tag missing or is this serious?
They're probably not being sarcastic. Wrong, and ppssibly evil, but not sarcastic. There are some weirdly big Palantir fans on HN. No clue what drives them, but I'm guessing they're not keen students of history.
It falls under the "social outreach" line item I believe
...or Tolkien.
Nothing weird of wanting a working justice system. Defending child stalkers is weird.
Benn Jordan did a video recently where he showed Flock cameras, which were hackable, pointing at children's playgrounds. Who is stalking the children?
Like leather-boot-head-stomping justice?
Lars is good at exposing the hypocrisy of the Danish government. In a former case he, sent the exact same threatening text to a prosecutor as that prosecutor had received a police report from a third party about, and that the prosecutor refused to pursue. Lars got jail time for that. Rules for thee but not for me.
Or alternatively, 2 wrongs don't make a right.
Even if the text message was exactly the same, there are plenty of valid reasons why one might be prosecutable and the other might not be.
You are correct that two wrongs don't make a right, but I think that it is obvious that the threat was not real, only symbolic. Therefore it wasn't "wrong". Meanwhile the original, not prosecuted threat message, was real. It's clear that it shows both vindictiveness and unwillingness to protect certain people.
Sure. If you accept that we give up on equality before the law, one might be prosecutable and the other not.
Some of us prefer not to give up on that though.
You dont have to give up equality under the law, you just have to accept that there is a lot more that goes into a prosecution than the act. Were witnesses cooperative and credible, what was the intent, what was context.
I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider.
Your obfuscation carries no argumentative weight, as the uncertainty your obfuscation attempts to introduce might as well be used in the reverse: maybe the guy who made the original threat (that was not prosecuted) had a criminal record involving violent crimes whereas Lars' text obviously should be taken in the political, non-violent, activist context that is his modus operandi.
Correct
> might as well be used in the reverse
I don't think they would reject that. In fact, you are arguing their point: It's the context that matters, not just the act. Without knowing the context it's not valid to presume a particular scenario.
Not sure how that's "obfuscation".
It's obfuscation because you're leaving out that this is an openly political fight of an in-power leftist politician against an "extreme-right" party (of course, they're well to the left of the US democrat party).
The underlying problem is that a LOT of public servants are very scared what will happen if the party who keeps getting threatened gets elected, which is a real possibility. So, they're using all sorts of underhanded tactics to try to prevent it. In a way, it's a fight about public servants trying to keep their job safe. It's political because they all owe their jobs to a particular coalition that's been in power for ages and ages.
Oh and it's a fight about muslim immigration and the influence of that in and on society. So ...
That's why it's obfuscation. You're leaving important things out.
> what was the intent, what was context.
The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
> I dont know the specifics of this case. Maybe there was a miscarriage of justice. But just the fact the acts are the same doesn't show that. There is a lot more factors to consider
... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here. You are aware you're making that implicit statement, right?
Indeed, that’s why selective prosecution is an effective weapon. The consequences are asymmetric and demonstrating selectivity is impossible without exposing oneself to the downside. It’s definitely a stable incumbent regime tactic.
This selective prosecution is what Samuel Francis calls "anarcho-tyranny".
Pretty tricky by the cops to turn off power directly and to steal his cameras. Shows that if you are concerned something like this would happen to you that you need to invest in more resilient solutions. Probably something with batteries and also hidden.
They did this to Afroman, too. Though, in his case, they didn't lead with the panel and the result is the infamous video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0bNy7XO-SCI0 It makes you wonder how much of an effect this incident has had on protocols.
But, yeah, depending on your threat matrix, you might want to consider hidden trail cams with their own cell service.
Next step would be to cut the cells too.
> When the two civilian dressed masked men entered the apparentment
I think this is very irresponsible. What would happen if the owner was armed and harmed the police thinking that they were criminals?
This is a very... US comment to make.
There have been cases in the US where homeowners shot cops dead who were in the process of unexpectedly raiding their home, because the homeowner had no idea they were cops and not home invasion robbers; and in some cases have been acquitted of murder charges by juries for this.
I'd personally like to see the laws protecting this strengthened, to make sure that cops aren't charging unannounced into peoples' homes and then charging the homeowner with murder when they react with reasonable gun violence in self-defense.
I would much prefer a society where all homeowners and cops don't carry guns and cops were fired for illegal raids.
Me too, but I bet the cops did carry.
I'm fully European, would not wonder for a second before plunging a knife into an intruder if I happened to have one near me.
No it is not. Europeans can have guns, and there was a recent case in Belgium where such a thing happened.
I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to use your legal firearms against people in Denmark. Even in a home intrusion event.
This was in Denmark
You can own guns in Denmark as well.
Yes and no.
Weapons are normal here too.
Shooting intruders isn’t though. They’d basically have to attack you first for lethal force to be legal.
This is not the law here in Sweden, at least.
We don't have precedent in the way that common law countries do, and the judgements in actual cases point in slightly different directions-- in one case a court felt that the failure to fire a warning shot made it not self-defence, in another fighting people trying to get into an apartment with a knife was deemed acceptable.
Generally though, if someone is breaking into your apartment while you're there, possibly trying to get at you, there's no limit, as long as you're actually trying to defend yourself (so no executing someone who you've clearly disabled, etc.).
If people are breaking into your apartment and you fire a warning shot, then proceed to shoot the attackers, no one will complain.
> What would happen if the owner was armed
Might as well talk about unicorns as we are imaging this scenario in Denmark.
You can own multiple guns and store them at your residence in Denmark. I know a couple of people who do so, admittedly both ex-military.
This isn't limited to shotguns or bolt action rifles for hunting. You can own up to six handguns.
You do need to be licensed however, and given Andersen's history he probably wouldn't be permitted.
You can. But ammunition and the guns have to be stored in separate safes. And it's essentially impossible to get off with a self defense claim if you have time to gather your legal guns
It would still (in most cases, your response have to be proportional to the threat) be a crime to use them against a intruder.
You should also add that most private guns owned in Denmark are typically for hunting, not self defence.
This is Denmark, nobody except gang members is armed
Well, and the police.
Yes, gang members.
>What would happen if the owner was armed and harmed the police thinking that they were criminals?
A hefty prison sentence for illegal handling of firearms and attempted homicide would be my guess.
I was thinking of the police officers. Why risk your life for such a petty crime?
This is Denmark not America, there is literally no risk to their life.
Just because Denmark doesn't have the same gun laws, culture around using guns for self-defense, or prevalence of guns as the US does, it doesn't mean that Danish police face no risk when they raid someone's home. Anytime the cops raid someone's home, regardless of whether or not is it a legitimate raid of a legitimate criminal, it's a violent act and there's risk that the cops will be hurt or killed.
Since 1945 12 cops have been killed in the line of duty (excluding traffic accidents), mostly when responding to a violent crime (trying to stop bank robberies lead to 6 of those fatalities).
Do you have any danish stats to back up your claim?
The activist is well known. They likely knew he would answer the door, yet they still broke it down. In the U.S., you'd probably shoot some dog in that situation, if one was available.
The entire scene is probably not meant as effective policing, but as punitive theater. This also explains why they disabled the cameras, as the theater was not intended for content reuse.
Given that, I'd assume they knew he wouldn't shoot them or do anything even remotely like that.
I think the gun proliferation situation in Denmark is probably different than the US
Privacy advocate with Google-nest cameras inside his home?
I was on a consultant-assignment at a company that got raided by the police in the EU. The police was extremely careful not to scan any data that where stored on US-servers. The company used Google for mail and file storage, so all computers had to be taken offline before they could scan them.
While I don't doubt they have a way of getting permission to access that data, I don't think they will put in the effort unless you're a relally big fish.
Maybe he wanted to make sure a lot of copies of the evidence were floating around. Surveillance capitalism is like a free unlimited backup service you can't restore from.
Lol, yes.
He describe himself as an anarcho capitalist so I guess, ideologically, it is government surveillance that he is concerned with and that the free market will sort out the rest.
Hilarious take, why ban it by accountable governments but not unaccountable companies (which can then sell to accountable governments anyway)
On device recording, so at least the illusion of privacy.
i guess they weren't trying to get his computer in a powered up state.
Nobody in Denmark actually thinks of Lars Andersen as any sort of serious privacy activist. He is a drug-addled moron who just happens to dabble in those things. He's an idiot and contributes nothing of value to society.
I bet he lives in Amager because his door looks very similar to mine when I was living in there.
People didn't blink when Comey posted a photo of 8647 and got indicted for threatening the president, imagine if he posted Trumps SSN.
Another authoritarian govt
The archetype of the whining activist. Getting himself in idiotic trouble so he could benefit from the status of a victim and ensuing drama
If the goal was to maximize attention to the event (in order to use it to steer attention towards the cause) then it was quite successful, no? After all, we're talking about it here. Mostly about him and the details of the event, but some sub-threads are about the cause too.
So, success?
*winning
Sorry, you made a silly typo that made you look bad. I fixed it.
> The prefece to the story is, that I in a kind of roundabout and (I think) humorous way published "my two favorite numbers" by spelling out a 10 diget and a 8 diget number with letters. I didn't tell what they ment, but they where prime minister Mette Frederiksen's social security and phone number
Umm, so was he arrested for doxing the prime minister? Is there more to the story than that?
As someone who cares about privacy, arresting people who dox other people seems like a good thing. Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous, but still at the end of the day i have trouble objecting to someone getting arrested for doxing people.
That same prime minister supports the warrant-less use of medical records in police work and the ban of encryption through chat control. She wants to prevent the Danish population from having privacy, but demands it herself. Sorry, but that's not the Western way.
Just because you disagree with someone does not make it ok to dox them.
That's a bit simplified, isn't it? He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her, and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed." If it was about, I dunno, pizza toppings or school budgeting, then obviously the actions would have been different.
The lifes of powerful people must be transparent.
Having their business transparent makes sense but by restricting people's personal lives like this would disincentivize good people from rising to power, which is not what we want.
Good, I don't want people rising to unlimited, uncheckable power and creating oppressive hierarchies in general.
The most powerful people are those who are billionaires
> Obviously i want that to apply to everyone not just the rich and famous
Do you really want armed and masked police to break down the doors of people who dox others, disable their cameras, and arrest them while refusing to tell them the charges? Because without these details this would have been a non-story.
Both sides are not looking too pretty here.
Calling the self declared Internet troll a privacy activist feels disingenuous. This is the former corrupt cop turned drug dealer who publicly and proudly proclaimed that he was stalking the children of the prime minister of Denmark so he could figure out where she lived, because he wanted to expose those details.
She currently lives at a secret address due to security concerns.
The tone of the post sounds like smear since it entirely dismisses his advocacy of personal liberty with claims that havn't been published in Danish media as far as I know.
It would be interesting if you could elaborate on the claims that be was a corrupt police officer and drug dealer.
My understanding of his own account is that he left the force when he wasn't comfortable arresting people over weed and that he saw systematic abuse of power that he didn't want to partake in. Is there more to the story?
His recent activism has been focusing on contrasting the privacy people in power demand with their work to deny the broad population privacy.
> you could elaborate on the claims that be was a corrupt police officer and drug dealer.
This is public record. It’s entirely published he’s charged and received a prison sentence for the crime, the investigation into corruption started but needed early when he handed in his resignation. which is just proof that he was a corrupt cop in a corrupt system. I mean no drug dealer who gets charged is going to get off by going “ok I’ll quit then”.
> My understanding of his own account is that he left the force when he wasn't comfortable arresting people over weed
This flips the script. He public made statements that he would carry drugs on the job, and felt I’d should be legal, and that he wouldn’t enforce the drug law. The investigation that followed he handed in his resignation. And the corrupt Danish police force being what it is, dropped the investigation.
His “activism” has since consisted of amongst other things starting to sell drugs and then claiming that its activism when he got charged with prison for it. To be clear, he didn’t stage the public sale of a symbolic amount to get arrested and protest through civil disobedience. He straight up went breaking bad and started a drug peddling operation.
>And the corrupt Danish police force being what it is, dropped the investigation.
How is that corruption? If the issue was that he was saying he wasn't gonna do his job, and then he quit his job, wouldn't that just rectify the situation?
He was saying that he broke the law routinely and they decided to end the investigation. That’s corruption, police should be investigated for routinely failing to do their job just the same as when they break the law or abuse their office.
I get the impression that you have (or claim to have) information that isn't publicly available and think he is disingenuous or imormal as a person.
Do you also disagree with the causes he is promoting or only the person and/or methods?
Some of his ideas, like full anarcho capitalism, I would need to be convinced before being onboard with. But opposing mass surveillance and promoting government accountability seems odd to vigorously oppose.
I don’t have any non public information. This is all public record, he was found guilty and charged with jail on multiple occasions. He pops up in the news periodically for having broken yet another law and i charged and convicted for it.
And “being opposed to mass surveillance” and literally stalking kids of the prime minister to attempt to expose the PET (equivalent to FBI) exposed secret location her family is staying at are not the same.
Obviously every drug dealer is going to “be of the ideology that dealing drugs should be legal” but that doesn’t make dealing drugs activism. Same as abusing the office of being a cop. It doesn’t matter if you believe it should be legal for cops to beat up protestors, that doesn’t make a cop breaking the law to beat up protestors an act of activism.
The guy is just a sleezebag who cries “activism” every time he faces consequences for breaking the law in this illegal activism or when he’s harassing politicians. That’s not actual activism and he’s not supporting any cause he’s just acting like an idiot doing what he’s doing.
Lars was a corrupt cop? Are you just using "corrupt" to mean "someone I don't like"?
I don’t care if you think drugs should be legalized, or even if you do drugs in your free time. If you are a cop doing drugs while on duty and decide to take it on yourself to not enforce the law against drug dealers you are corrupt, because you have decided to subjugate the law you are forced with enforcing. Now it’s true that he wasn’t officially charged with taking kickbacks from the drug dealers he would let operate but in my optics that is entirely due to them letting him hand in a resignation to stop the investigation, propably to protect his fellow cops who would have been named and shamed for also doing drugs on the job. But to be clear, deciding to protect drug dealers in your job as a cop is. It activism it’s corruption.
Claiming it’s about ideology defies the point. He spent years as a cop letting drug dealers deal drugs and then came out saying the only reason he was breaking the law was because he didn’t believe in it. That’s not ideology that’s corruption. If he had decided to stop being a cop to not enforce a law he didn’t like that’s different. But that’s not what happened. He quit hen his illegal enterprise got caught. Cops do not get to enforce the law selectively based on what laws they like and dislike and get off just by claiming “ideology”.
This is the slave mindset that is letting politicians all over the world erode our rights. More and more and more. Every country is now passing deep anti-privacy, anti-VPN, anti-encryption and age-verification laws. The law is not written by us, its written by people who are only barely accountable to us once every couple of years. Authoritarianism is rising very sharply all over the world, corruption amongst the elites is high, they are increasingly unaligned and unafraid of common people. There's a million tricks to pass laws that citizens don't really want, including skipping public debates, secret amendments, or just relying on plain old propaganda and ignorance/inaction by the majority. The only actual power we have is in action and organization. Following the laws that they write with barely any input from us off a cliff is not right or noble, its death.
I think you’ve got his fake activism mixed up. When he was a cop he wasn’t claiming to be a privacy advocates his stick then was that cops should be allowed to do cocain while on the job and that if a cop though selling drugs was ok they should be free to not uphold the law whenever they felt like it.
His fake stance on privacy came later when he faced consequences for doxing politicians and using the public Facebook pages of politics to advertise his drug peddling enterprise.
Corruption is defined as "the abuse of entrusted power for private (usually financial) gain". Lars' case falls under the category of conscientious objection, as he's ideologically motivated. Pretty disgusting to frame that as corruption.
I think the nazis tried the whole "obeying orders" thing and it didn't work for them.
Do you think this defence should have been considered valid for them?
Scenario: cop does cocain on the job and allows friends to sell drugs without enforcing the law.
Me: that’s kind of fucked up and not activism.
You: So you support Hitler!?!
Highly doubt that is the only reason he got this treatment. Need to go through his tweets to figure out what is his deal.
The guy constantly does crazy shit so sure, but this comes days after he announced he was stalking her children, so it’s very likely connected
What security concerns? Of a person telling people where you live?
Are the homes of Danish prime ministers secret?
I think some context is being lost in a literal translation.
I think they mean secret as in unlisted where their records aren't accessible in public government databases. The same protection you would get if you were stalked for example.
No, it’s not just unlisted number and address. PET (Danish equivalent of FBI) by administrative decision has had her move out of her Copenhagen apartment and to an undisclosed location due to security concerns. Her and her family are literally under protection due to security concerns and this guy is stalking her kids trying to dox her.
I get that it's a secret location now, but I don't understand in context if this activist is the trigger of the situation. An if so how can this be considered a threat.
Stalking falls under the broad category of harassment in my eastern european country. I feel as if this would be a non issue given an official police warning. At most.
Usually it is not a secret, but currently the prime minister and her family live at a secret address.
Regardless of intent, this does reveal that certain people are protected by warrantless arrests while the general public is not.
Did his arrest not have a warrant? I'm not familiar how these things work in Denmark, but is there any reason to believe there was no warrant?
Presumably if they had one they would have told him the charges, but I am not sure how the danish law works so perhaps my assumption is incorrect.
At the same time, i would presume if his arrest was this irregular and illegal he would be taking it to actual court instead ofthe court of public opinion.
Are these exclusive opportunities? I'm not familiar with danish law.
Not exclusive, but in general its a bad idea to post on social media if you plan to take it up in court, as its very easy to accidentally say something that shoots yourself in the foot.
I suppose. I don't think that matters much in places with functioning legal systems.