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.
>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 don't think this is a given. Just Stop Oil says that their tactics do make people hate them, but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to. Their position is that if they achieve what they want while gathering animosity towards their organisation, once achieved, they can disband.
This is referred to as shifting the Overton window. If voices from the extreme are not heard, the Overton window moves away from their position, so protests help their cause even if only a minority completely agree with them.
If it’s a “well known tactic” (well known by whom?) then it’s a counter-productive one - the more the extreme is heard in the mainstream, the more rational the slightly less extreme version sounds (It’s something the right-wing tends to use extremely effectively, the left wing spends too much energy infighting)
For the first time, I see that being a problem to right-wing parties, specially in USA. Now you have neonazis gathering a community by saying you are not extreme enough, and harassing the Jewish people of your side. It's crazy when you compare that to 10 years ago, but it is what it is.
This is interesting and all but is ultimately just an aside. Are the law enforcement actions on display here legal in Denmark? If not, surely there's prison sentences in store for anyone involved. Right?
I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally. Obviously one person doesn't represent a movement, but if I only ever see immoral people leading a movement, that will form a basis for my opinion of the movement.
My observation of these activists is usually that they seek attention at any cost. They will hurt people to achieve that attention. Worse, I don't even think it's about the movement. They just want the attention personally. Others in the movement tacitly condone this behaviour.
I think the most frustrating part of this is that they claim it's to raise awareness. Who among us has not heard of global warming? Who has not heard of data privacy? The reality is that they're not getting the public support they desire because people just don't agree with their goals or beliefs, not because the public is "unaware."
> I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally.
Most people aren't this particular brand of irrational.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence you stand on. They are basically the same thing, especially these days when you get marked as terrorist for talking bad about the people in power.
yet you fail to account for the fact that said people wouldn't wouldn't be in power did terrorism not have occurred in the first place. How many bad leaders in the west resulting directly or indirectly from terror attacks?
> difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
And freedom fighters are supposed to actually care about "freedom" while terrorists generally do not. I fail to see what great advancements in freedom for anyone involved have come out of the terror attacks performed over the past 25 years.
Terrorism very much does work. The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded (in one case formally, in the other almost) because they weren't needed anymore. Taliban also got the US out from Afghanistan pretty handily with mostly terrorism.
Two towrers falling, man of the weat warring man of the east, all seeing stones in every mans hand for the kings to see and understand through and a fiery behavioural ring, burning in the dark ready to consume all civilzation in endless war.
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
This is also why twitter drove journalism (and perhaps even the country) off a cliff.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
> The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has prompted healthcare executives to say they will address growing frustrations among Americans struggling with access to and costs of medical care.
> Months after the killing of a top health insurance executive unleashed Americans’ pent-up anger over denials of medical care, the industry announced Monday that it will take action to “streamline, simplify and reduce” the preapproval process.
>One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
What kind of broken logic is this? What good did this do for you if the end result for you is the same or worse now? Other than feel good for vigilante vengeance than then backfires on you in the end. It's not like there's a shortage of CEOs to take his place and keep doing the same thing.
You're not in a comic book movie where if you kill the main "bad guy" then society magically fixes itself at the end, because there is no main villain here, society is broken not because of the decisions of one CEO, but because of a combination of decisions of thousands of people, factors and incentives accumulated over decades that lead to healthcare and other things sucking, and you don't fix it overnight by killing one guy, you instead just make it worse for everyone else who isn't a murderer.
You fix it by talking, campaigning, gathering people and voting, knowing that it will also take decades to undo, the same way as it took decades to get to this stage. That's the only way you enact change that will will guarantee bi-partisan buy-in and actually stick around for the long term. Policy changes implemented by populist movements under threat of violence rarely produce good outcomes that last.
If the system is rigged heavily against you, relying on it to affect change does feel like a losing strategy.
The fact that such a large part of the population supports literal murder could also be considered a political statement. One that would not have been expressed so strongly without what happened.
So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap. Musk’s wealth grew by $1 million per minute over the past year. Who can seriously argue that this is fair and balanced?
Your income may remain constant while your wealth rises significantly (say... because your investments are doing well, because you inherited... etc). The two are often confused when talking about (tech) billionaires.
>It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping... instead abusing them for personal gain.
That's what the justice system is for. If you don't like the way it works, then vote to change it. Look how Luis Rossman is doing it for a good example.
But shooting people you don't like as vengeance for what you perceive is wrong, is some third world banana republic shit, and no such country where this is normalized is remotely safe or functional, look at Africa and parts of Latam.
You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
Sorry the justice system is setup to protect them, not you. By putting fear in the leaders of these companies, and showing people that yes, you CAN actually stand up to their corrupt ways and beat them because in the end they are just people, even if they don't see you that way.
I don't know about this case, so I can only speak in general.
A lot of times people that say this don't make a strong case that some theoretical more moderate protest would be effective. There is just a feeling that if they personally feel offended by the actions of the protester then it's probably a bad thing.
In reality it's often more complicated. I know some people that are involved with controversial protests, and the effectiveness of their actions is definitely something they think about. It can't be too extreme, that will put people off like you say. But often there is conversations like in this thread, "this protester goes too far, but they do have a point". This moves the Overton window in the desired direction.
The goal isn't too make you like the protester, it's to make you think about the issues.
How is force working for Hamas? The shift in general sentiment towards Israel came from Israel's blatant disregard for civilian life and from their apartheid politics being put in spotlight. Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane and their Oct 7 attack served as an excuse for Israel to set them back and hunt them regardless of collateral casualties, terrorizing their compatriots
On examination of the evidence, Hamas appears to be an organization dedicated to harming Israel, not helping the Palestinian people (or improving public opinion of Hamas). In this regard, I would say that Hamas has been very effective at provoking heinous overreach by the zionists, causing severe damage to Israeli credibility. To Hamas, it seems that Palestinian deaths are the price they are willing to pay, being integral to their strategic mission and personnel supply chain.
Why would you think so? The conflict will most likely be decided by Israel (and by extension USA) having the biggest influence both globally and locally, and the biggest guns, but there is no misconception about it, so I decided not to add it.
How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
Even if every single Hamas was killed - you have a whole population totally traumatized. That's extremely fertile ground for something like Hamas to pop up again. So, a lot of sufferring but Bibi and "Hamas" (or whatever) prospers.
Hamas has been killed. Again and again and again. But people keep joining this "Hamas" resistance group against Israel so the group never seems to go away. And do you know why they join? They join because Israel killed their whole families.
> but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
And who do you see on track to displace Hamas? After years and years of conflict and being "bombed to shit", they're as entrenched as ever while their enemy declines much faster.
Israel is getting to a point where it has no friends left in the world, where the average European youth thinks nuking Israel and turning into a glass parking lot would probably be a net positive. Jews are starting to be broadly despised again thanks to Israeli policy, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Hamas operatives lead shitty lives in the Gaza strip as they have for decades, but they certainly aren't losing control.
Over the course of a few years, Hamas managed to turn wearing a star of David in big EU cities into a dangerous political statement. And we're supposed to believe that they're not winning?
Your arguments are self-contradictory. You say force is great, but only for Hamas - not for Israel.
A youth who thinks Israel should be genocided doesn’t care about genocide, so why hate Israel?
The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway, and who naively think that the hatred won’t backfire on them. Once you start promoting racism it comes for everyone.
>The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway
You are mistaken, the sentiments are shifting across the board.
This is probably driven to a significant degree by the Israeli national policy of tying any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the broad acceptance of that policy by Jewish communities globally. Because of this implicit endorsement, it is not surprising that many would struggle to separate between the actions by taken by the state of Israel and those who call themselves Jews.
The final victory of Islamic Republic was after they did NOT used force against west, but when America and Israel started idiotic war, bragged about using force and then promptly lost.
This was quite literally the case of "actions backfire" situation.
Attacking families is firmly across the line and looks like crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
No wonder he gets raided, at one point it becomes a topic about protecting one's family, left or right, moral or crook doesn't matter anymore.
Its not activist anymore in any meaningful sense, just a fanatic.
> crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
You just committed exactly the kind of escalation that you condemn when it's about him.
So what if someone can vouch for him? What's that worth? "Vouching" is worthless in any circumstance I can think of, and nobody can give you guarantees about anything. I can't vouch that you won't do exactly the same, or that you weren't the masked police who raced to the breakers so he's not filmed while breaking the law (innocent people have nothing to hide, right?), or that you're not one of the politicians pushing for oppressive laws for your personal benefit.
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 focused on 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” and stoking this moral panic is what is enabling the 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 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 away your opportunity to do anything more exciting than build powerpoints at a braindead consulting firm.
> 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 what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.
I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.
It feels like I'm force to pay tax which then evaporates into the pockets of private companies like Palantir, though... I mean, you arguably can't even fully participate in the society you pay taxes to help run if you don't have a Google or Apple spycube.
If you think that Jesper isn't attacking the right issues, but Lars does, then you should definitely hope that Lars switches to Jesper's more popular approach.
Unless you think there can never be a democratic consensus in favor of privacy, therefore the only way is for a small vanguard of privacy activists to impose their will on the hostile majority and establish a totalitarian privacy dictatorship. Then it wouldn't matter so much whether you look good in the court of popular opinion or not.
Even if you don't think he goes too far ethically, you can probably agree that it's reasonable for the police to intervene once he's interfering with the cars of government ministers.
The police definitely need to intervene, but I'd like to think that playing tit-for-tat with the government is a valid protest, and that this won't result in a loss of freedom.
I guess they need to ascertain whether he's operating organically, or at the behest of another nation, and whether he's scouting out ministers for something bigger in the future.
Though, the irony in all this, is that it all could've been avoided if the government weren't acting at the behest of another nation, and scouting out what they can get away with on their authoritarian warpath. Maybe the police are arresting the wrong people.
A kilo of weed is clearly a dealer, and part of organised crime. The same people are deeply involved in forced sex work and people trafficking, extortion, illegal weapons, etc. There is a clear difference between end users and small time dealers and the distributors.
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.
I still don't understand what that has to do with encryption. Are these two separate policy proposals, one for GPS tracking and one for encryption, that this person is supporting?
Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time. Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
He has to use a different method because obviously he does not have a backdoor into the prime minister's phone. The fact that "obviously wrong" invasive methods have to be used (now) to imitate something that the prime minister want to apply to every citizen (except himself and his buddies) in the future can be seen as part of the point.
Yes, but that also means he both goes too far (for people like me who might sympathize with him) and loses the connection with the original issue, creating his own communication problem. Yes, it is good and necessary to show politicians what they are doing to the citizens they are supposed to represent, but that does not justify all means.
It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response. On the one hand I agree that gps-tracking is not exactly the same as analyzing people's messages, on the other hand one can often infer whereabouts through messaging services indirectly or even directly such as when people share their gps location with one another (a feature that e.g. whatsapp has).
Anyway, apparently this Peter Hummelgaard has said:
"I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ... and given that the prerequisite for freedom is security, yes, I believe that more surveillance equates to more freedom"
so I think you will find it easier to understand these kinds of protest actions if you consider them in the context of privacy vs. surveillance more broadly conceived.
> It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response.
"It's not that complicated"... indeed?
Privacy was a thing long before encryption even existed. So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible. (And for arresting stalkers and wiretappers.)
Encryption changed all that. It effectively undermined the ability of warrants to do their job.
Regardless of how you feel about the above, surely you agree that none of that is factually incorrect, right? Plaintext + privacy were simultaneously a thing for a long time, right?
So, whatever you feel, doesn't it feel a little disingenuous to suggest that the two are necessarily tied together? And to smear someone as hypocritical because they believe in both? Did the guy ever advocate for exposing everyone's real-time location?
Look, I don't even know the guy. And I'm not even trying to defend anything here on its merits. I'm just trying to set the record straight as to what the facts and the logical implications are(n't). Do you(/him/etc.) want an honest debate? Where you can actually win with people coming to support your ideas on their merits? Or do you want to take the craziest logical leaps and lose all your potential supporters in the process?
>That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible.
Hmmm, in context he was(?) tracking a public ministers car.
I'm Australian and I'm all for peeling back and making transparent all the comings and goings of public officials (within reason) - they deserve a good return, a hefty return even, for dedicated public service .. and they deserve to know that there's a hammer waiting for any betrayal of public trust, shady financial dealings (while in office), etc.
As a "known in advance covenant" that's not altogether unreasonable, raises the bar for would be Trumpesque grifters, and allows for privacy for those not seeking access to public offices, trust, and cookie jars.
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.
Does he have any power to change anything? Or does he have only power to expose the abusers and corrupted?
Only taking action because you can change corrupt ways doesn’t actually change anything because the average person has no power to do so. And the proper channels are gummed up to not change anything.
What Lars does is possibly inform or change perspective of those unfamiliar with their nation/world-state.
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?
> The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
That is far from obvious.
In general i think that attempting to alter the course of justice via a threat is much worse than a simple threat. Any situation where officers of the court are afraid to impartially do their duties to coercion is a fundamental threat to society and should be dealt with harshly.
> ... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here.
I'm basing my view on the arguments presented in this thread.
So far what has been presented is that the prosecutor did something very normal that happens all the time for very reasonable reasons. Its possible that in this case it happened due to inappropriate reasons, idk, but so far nobody has even presented a theory for why the action was corrupt instead of normal.
In general i think it is the job of the person arguing that misconduct occured to present evidence that it actually happened. Otherwise things descend into witch hunts as it is very difficult to prove a negative.
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.
Some people want world peace and denuclearization. Each country is currently as it finds itself and takes a great deal of leadership and buy-in to change.
That’s not the real world. Criminals will always find a way to get guns no matter the amount of gun control you impose, so I’d rather have law abiding citizens be armed as well
It is the real world in many places. "Criminals" are not a homogenous group. Petty criminals will not usually be making the effort to get a gun if getting a gun is inconvenient. Some high level criminals will find ways to get guns but the number of criminals with guns will be much lower with gun controls.
It’s not your real world, lots of other countries have so little gun violence that a shooting makes the national news when it happens and thats maybe once or twice a year.
I'd say it is. Yes there are people that own guns or hunting rifles. Most still don't think about guns or shooting first. Guns are supposed to be locked in a safe etc.
All that does obviously not apply to a criminal who does not follow the law.
In the EU the answer is always "it's unclear". Yes you can, but you also can't.
ECHR necessarily guarantees the right to shoot some intruders in some situations, but it's kind of impossible to know which situations those are except after the fact.
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.
I am Swedish, and it’s very true that ”it depends”.
This guy for example was convicted of murder because he got his gun out without even trying to contact the police directly or indirectly. So even if he pulled the trigger under reasonable circumstances (a know violent offender was trying to take his rifle) he was found guilty because he should not have gone for the gun without considering alternatives like locking the door or fleeing.
I can’t see him being anywhere near guaranteed to claim self defense even if he had fired a warning shot first.
> They’d basically have to attack you first for lethal force to be legal.
They just violently entered his home in an effort to attack him, dressed in a way designed to intimidate. These cops were deliberately cosplaying as some sort of a hit squad, they obviously wanted him to believe that they were going to kill him.
It's not like the cops just accidentally went out dressed like that.
This is Denmark, not some Brasilian favela. That type of violent crime extremely rare in Scandinavia. But cops wearing civilian clothes while conducting a raid is fairly normal. Especially when they want to preserve evidence which might be quickly destroyed if the suspect sees them coming.
If a masked person, that doesn't first identify themselves clearly as the police (which is difficult since, well, they are masked) breaks into my house, that's a lethal attack for sure.
What are you going to do after they enter the house (if they aren't indeed the police and you trust they won't kill or rape your family)?
While this is still bad, If you watch the video, the officers announce themselves and enter with empty hands... it's very different from videos of "raids" by US police that I've seen.
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.
A Danish privacy activist (not a protected title) using Google Nest.
On a second thought (addendum), ...
1) Publishing PII like phone number of a high profile person in your society is causing them harm since they obviously put effort into not having such out in the open. (e.g. I can find anyone's phone number in my country via leaks. No big deal... but I shouldn't publish such. I shouldn't possess such data either.)
2) SSN is a different category of PII. Publishing this of anyone is an invitation of harm, even more so of a high profile person in your society.
It is akin to inviting people to DDoS a website, or blocking them physically access to exit their house. That kind of thing. Except that on the internet, anyone can abuse this. Even people (including criminals) in foreign countries, residing in hazardous jurisdictions (e.g. Russia).
Either way, what's the point of publishing such information? When German activists published the fingerprint of a German minister, they were making a point. They got the fingerprint via a glass of wine, but the interesting point is that a fingerprint cannot be revoked. It isn't used to authenticate a password, but a user(name). It should therefore not be used as single factor.
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.
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.
How did he get the videos out of the cameras that were seized if the recording was also not uploaded? Can Nest cameras upload/stream to private servers? (never had one so I have no idea)
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.
I guess it's like castle doctrine for the information space. Something like "your right to privacy stops when you openly try to undermine mine...".
I see it as a morally valid approach. Politicians are well within their power to not be corrupt and value the US/bigcorp/oligarch x over the people they vowed to represent.
Whatever Lars may be, the fact that a lawful arrest could not be filmed sucks. I can find other reasons behind needing to cut the circuit breakers during an arrest of a hacker in an effort to secure evidence.
Peter Hummelgaard on the other hand, can just fuck right off. Former head of the ministry of justice seriously argued that the mass surveillance initiatives he led were right because he "felt" it...
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.
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.
Could you supply some ressources that make your framing plausible? That would be a valuable service to the community, as this discussion seems to be highly polarized. (from the ratio of downvoted comments to all comments).
Reading through this discussion and not having heared of this before it's hard to tell what's genuine and what's not.
One could read this persons activism as a narrative of "lesson learned" in this regard. Well you want the law applied to everyone equally? Well, actually.. you're right. In the sense as it seems to be the case that there is a motive in this persons action of make them experience being subjected to the legal/social order they promote.
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.
In a functioning legal system it matters what you said or didn't. In a non-functioning legal system they will just convict you regardless of what was said or done.
> She currently lives at a secret address due to security concerns.
Oh so she cares about her own privacy? Curious then that she seems to be such an ardent advocate for Chat Control and for the erosion of encryption.
Politicians are such a disgusting, hypocritical bunch of "people", more people should be "doxxing" these weasels. Maybe eventually we'll find one of them that has 2 braincells to put together to comprehend their hypocrisy, but I guess there's little chance of that.
She didn’t choose to make that move. PET (the equivalent of FBI) made the decision to protect her address. I’m sure she much prefer the time back when she was living at her own place and her address was freely available to the public without any issues.
There is no hypocrisy here.
As for releasing social security numbers of people, she’s against it no matter who’s doing the doxing and who the target is. But yes, obviously the government knows hos government issued ID corresponds to who. That’s pretty obvious. But that doesn’t mean everyone in the country has to have access to it. Your doctor also has access to your medical journal, that doesn’t give you the right to publish the medical journal of your doctor on Facebook if you get angry at him for giving you a bad diagnosis.
> 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.
Politicians these days are expected to have harder and harder skin. I've seen lots of stories in the news lately of (in particular young) politicians from scandinavia who dropped out of politics due to harassment, anonymous threats etc. And even more people who never get into politics, because of hearing about such stories. I sure as hell would not get into politics today.
I fear for what our political system will look like when only those who have become completely numb to such threats remain. What kinds people are they, those who can live with hundreds of daily hate messages and death threats, doxing of oneself and family members, having to live with security guards and secret addresses? What are we losing by allowing this kind of "freedom of speech"?
If your morals consist of eye-for-an-eye retribution, then maybe his actions make sense. But I do not believe that that gives us a better society.
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.
> He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her
Denmark is a democracy, that is a decision for the electroate to make during an election. In general we give governments rights and abilities that normal people do not have. Where the line should be is up to the voters to decide.
> and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed."
Not really equivalent. I'm pretty sure the Danish survelience plans, whatever you think of them, intend to have some sort of controls against misuse. (Im not saying that makes them good or ok, just that they aren't equivalent to doxing people)
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.
People that want to be powerful for personal gain will be filtered. People that legimitely want to give their all for their country will be encouraged.
It won't prevent bad people from rising to power. After all, i'm pretty sure Putin doesn't have this problem. He just throws people who do this sort of thing out the window. The only politicians that have something to fear from this type of activism is the non evil ones.
Is it "just disagreeing with them" or is it taking away privacy _from those publicly renouncing the right to privacy_, with goal of protecting the right to privacy of everyone else, who didn't renounce it, by pointing out the hipocrisy and that it actually is important, even to those who claim otherwise trying to take it from others?
> 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.
Most of the time i would want the arrests to proceed in a more civil manner unless the situation warranted otherwise, but ultimately yes, i think doxing/harrasment is a crime and people who commit it should be arrested and tried.
I think what is much more important, is that it exposes the shortcomings of the Danish SSN system.
It was introduced in 1968, when Denmark was a high-trust society. It was used as a sort of password and key for looking up your information. If you wanted to create a bank account, you told them your SSN. If you wanted to buy a car, you told them your SSN. If you had any contact with the authorities, you told them your SSN. And so on.
The usage has changed, but not that much. So today, when trust in Danish society is not as high, the system falls short. Identity theft. Privacy. Scamming. They have to be detected and stopped by other means.
The proper path forwards would be to radically change the system (or the 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.
Success in what exactly? There a very strong political movement in Denmark towards protecting privacy rights, then there’s this nutjob who just got out of jail for bribes, harassment, death threats against politicians and immediately he starts stalking the kids of the prime minister.
He’s not doing anything for the cause he claims to fight for. He’s doesn’t want a right to privacy he wants to be allowed to continue to sell drugs “in private” from the government. And he thinks freedom of speech should cover his freedom to harass and threaten politicians which it doesn’t and shouldn’t.
By what metric? The fact that he got arrested for stalking the prime ministers children and releasing private information speaks toward protecting privacy not an issue if lacking privacy.
You can’t just declare “I am an anti violence activist” then go out and beat up politicians and declare that the system has a problem with violence when you get arrested.
This is the equivalent of what he’s done. He claims to support privacy laws so he violated the privacy of someone who is currently protected by the PET (equivalent of FBI) due to safety concerns and he proudly proclaimed that he did so by stalking her children. He’s not a political activist he’s a drug dealer who’s hell bent on getting revenge on politicians because he just spent 8 months in jail after being convicted on counts of death threats harassment and illegal possession of arms and drugs.
Because no one has mentioned it here: Lars Andersen is also a right-wing extremist who regularly posts racist content on social media. His privacy/free speech activism seems to be (at least partly) motivated by this.
I think this is useful context for evaluating his judgment.
All too often people throw around the racist buzzword without ever actually providing evidence. It's as if we're expected to just blindly trust and follow that somebody is now excommunicated from modern society.
Sure thing. If you view his X profile without logging in, nearly all his top posts demonstrate what I mean: advocating for remigration (i.e. ethnic cleansing), comparing Muslims to monkeys, supporting far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Rasmus Paludan, sharing YouTube comments with racial slurs...
https://x.com/LarsAnders1620/status/1885254465160118655, first one that comes up when I view X (not signed in). I don't think this is enough (as OP declared) to authoritatively place him in 'right wing extremist' but probably racist. I don't speak danish, but someone that could would be able to make a more complete judgement because most, if not all posts of his, are in Danish.
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.
>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 don't think this is a given. Just Stop Oil says that their tactics do make people hate them, but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to. Their position is that if they achieve what they want while gathering animosity towards their organisation, once achieved, they can disband.
> but their research tells them that it still makes peoples opinions on the issues move in the direction that they want them to.
I'd really like to see that research.
This is referred to as shifting the Overton window. If voices from the extreme are not heard, the Overton window moves away from their position, so protests help their cause even if only a minority completely agree with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Isn't Just Stop Oil funded by an oil heiress?
> but their research tells them
Thier "research" might be full of yes men.
I suspect their research is as rigorous and valid as their philosophy.
what do you think they should do instead of what they currently do?
Its a know tatic to sponsor the extreme fringe to discredit a cause. Just stop oil receiving oil money?
If it’s a “well known tactic” (well known by whom?) then it’s a counter-productive one - the more the extreme is heard in the mainstream, the more rational the slightly less extreme version sounds (It’s something the right-wing tends to use extremely effectively, the left wing spends too much energy infighting)
For the first time, I see that being a problem to right-wing parties, specially in USA. Now you have neonazis gathering a community by saying you are not extreme enough, and harassing the Jewish people of your side. It's crazy when you compare that to 10 years ago, but it is what it is.
Very charitable to call it a “grey zone” to stalk and dox children of politicians.
I know of Peter Hummelgaard and I am not even from Denmark. Just because his work and plans. He certainly deserves that tracker and then some...
This is interesting and all but is ultimately just an aside. Are the law enforcement actions on display here legal in Denmark? If not, surely there's prison sentences in store for anyone involved. Right?
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 have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally. Obviously one person doesn't represent a movement, but if I only ever see immoral people leading a movement, that will form a basis for my opinion of the movement.
My observation of these activists is usually that they seek attention at any cost. They will hurt people to achieve that attention. Worse, I don't even think it's about the movement. They just want the attention personally. Others in the movement tacitly condone this behaviour.
I think the most frustrating part of this is that they claim it's to raise awareness. Who among us has not heard of global warming? Who has not heard of data privacy? The reality is that they're not getting the public support they desire because people just don't agree with their goals or beliefs, not because the public is "unaware."
> I have heard this claim before but I find it unconvincing. I have given up support of movements for which activists have acted cruelly or otherwise immorally.
Most people aren't this particular brand of irrational.
> that's what activist have to do to shake people
That's also the line most terrorist groups use.
Its not exactly wrong i suppose. 9/11 did get Americans to think about the middle east a lot more.
The difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence you stand on. They are basically the same thing, especially these days when you get marked as terrorist for talking bad about the people in power.
yet you fail to account for the fact that said people wouldn't wouldn't be in power did terrorism not have occurred in the first place. How many bad leaders in the west resulting directly or indirectly from terror attacks?
> difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is a matter of which side of the fence
Oft repeated but untrue. Terrorism, empirically, doesn’t work. Non-violent protest, and armed insurrection (aimed at the state, not its population) do. Sometimes freedom fighters can benefit from terrorism. But they are distinct strategies with separate targets.
And freedom fighters are supposed to actually care about "freedom" while terrorists generally do not. I fail to see what great advancements in freedom for anyone involved have come out of the terror attacks performed over the past 25 years.
Islamists fight to be the oppressors, not to help the oppressed.
Terrorism very much does work. The Basque and the Northern Irish terrorists / freedom fighters have gotten a so many of their demands for autonomy met that they disbanded (in one case formally, in the other almost) because they weren't needed anymore. Taliban also got the US out from Afghanistan pretty handily with mostly terrorism.
Two towrers falling, man of the weat warring man of the east, all seeing stones in every mans hand for the kings to see and understand through and a fiery behavioural ring, burning in the dark ready to consume all civilzation in endless war.
Not if it's detrimental to their cause. E.g. the just-stop-oil people have only garnered haters. A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
> A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
There have been several public opinion polls that included questions about Luigi Mangione. He’s consistently unpopular among the average population and his actions are generally unsupported. Not at all surprising for an extremist activist who literally committed murder in public.
It’s only when you visit smaller internet bubbles like Reddit where you can start to get into areas where it feels like his actions are widely supported.
A lot of activists are like this: If you go into little bubbles that align with their actions they seem popular. Zoom out and look at the population, including people they were trying to persuade and reach, and they’re not popular like they seem within the bubble.
This is also why twitter drove journalism (and perhaps even the country) off a cliff.
Naive journalists thought twitter was a "public square" that they could conveniently access from the comfort of their living room. They didn't know that it was a powerful echo chamber that resonated the best with strong views, and the space had long been a refuge for people with extreme outlier opinions.
Hence why "topics worthy of national attention" where just whatever was trending on twitter.
>A successful case might be Luigi Mangione.
Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Did it achieve the effect that everyone is getting cheaper healthcare now?
OR, on the contrary, it only achieved that CEOs are now getting more anonymity and private security, while the plebs are getting more invasive law enforcement tracking like Palantir and Flock shoved up their ass to prevent them from doing something like that again?
> Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
There's many anecdotes of people who managed to get lifesaving or lifechanging treatments in the panic after the CEO got murdered. Obviously, anecdotes aren't data - but it is highly likely that even though one life was lost, many were saved.
How would be the US now without Luigi Mangione? Would you have cheaper healthcare? Would Palantir or Flock disappear?
Healthcare was much cheaper for several months after Luigi Mangione.
Source?
From https://www.newsweek.com/brian-thompson-muder-health-insuran...
> The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has prompted healthcare executives to say they will address growing frustrations among Americans struggling with access to and costs of medical care.
From https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/23/health/health-insurers-preapp...
> Months after the killing of a top health insurance executive unleashed Americans’ pent-up anger over denials of medical care, the industry announced Monday that it will take action to “streamline, simplify and reduce” the preapproval process.
However, from https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/04/health/insurers-prior-authori...
> However, multiple provider associations and patient advocacy groups interviewed by CNN say that little, if anything, has changed over the past year.
So, hard to say for sure.
> Sorry, but how was that murder successful?
Successful in winning over the public.
The public was already on Luigi Mangione's side in theory.
In practice however he didn't inspire further revolutionary action by the public, because they were pacified by memes. And that's why he's a failure.
> how was that murder successful?
One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
It seemed for a brief moment like some of the other psychopaths CEOs might start changing things for the better.
But you're right, when there wasn't a wave of "finding out" for other health care CEOs they seemed to go right back to it.
> in charge of
Please, he was a middle manager with a CEO title.
>One less psychopath in charge of a US health care provider being around?
What kind of broken logic is this? What good did this do for you if the end result for you is the same or worse now? Other than feel good for vigilante vengeance than then backfires on you in the end. It's not like there's a shortage of CEOs to take his place and keep doing the same thing.
You're not in a comic book movie where if you kill the main "bad guy" then society magically fixes itself at the end, because there is no main villain here, society is broken not because of the decisions of one CEO, but because of a combination of decisions of thousands of people, factors and incentives accumulated over decades that lead to healthcare and other things sucking, and you don't fix it overnight by killing one guy, you instead just make it worse for everyone else who isn't a murderer.
You fix it by talking, campaigning, gathering people and voting, knowing that it will also take decades to undo, the same way as it took decades to get to this stage. That's the only way you enact change that will will guarantee bi-partisan buy-in and actually stick around for the long term. Policy changes implemented by populist movements under threat of violence rarely produce good outcomes that last.
If the system is rigged heavily against you, relying on it to affect change does feel like a losing strategy.
The fact that such a large part of the population supports literal murder could also be considered a political statement. One that would not have been expressed so strongly without what happened.
So much of this madness could be resolved with a simple income cap. Musk’s wealth grew by $1 million per minute over the past year. Who can seriously argue that this is fair and balanced?
Are you talking about income or actual wealth?
Your income may remain constant while your wealth rises significantly (say... because your investments are doing well, because you inherited... etc). The two are often confused when talking about (tech) billionaires.
> What kind of broken logic is this?
It's not even slightly broken.
It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping, instead abusing those people for personal gain.
Is that really something you think should keep heading in the same abusive direction it's been going for many years? :(
>It's about the people responsible for destroying the lives of those they're supposed to be helping... instead abusing them for personal gain.
That's what the justice system is for. If you don't like the way it works, then vote to change it. Look how Luis Rossman is doing it for a good example.
But shooting people you don't like as vengeance for what you perceive is wrong, is some third world banana republic shit, and no such country where this is normalized is remotely safe or functional, look at Africa and parts of Latam.
You think you want that but you don't actually. IF you do sincerely want that, then I sincerely hope you get what you want, but both ways for you and only you, while the rest of us stay isolated as spectators.
> third world banana republic shit
Welcome to America. Are you new here? :D
what the justice system is for is redirecting anger by making people like you think the justice system is going to fix the things you're angry about
funny how this went from +3 to -2 score during American waking hours
Sorry the justice system is setup to protect them, not you. By putting fear in the leaders of these companies, and showing people that yes, you CAN actually stand up to their corrupt ways and beat them because in the end they are just people, even if they don't see you that way.
doxxing and/or stalking the kids (minors) of the person you disagree with is still kind of a d*ck move though
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I don't know about this case, so I can only speak in general.
A lot of times people that say this don't make a strong case that some theoretical more moderate protest would be effective. There is just a feeling that if they personally feel offended by the actions of the protester then it's probably a bad thing.
In reality it's often more complicated. I know some people that are involved with controversial protests, and the effectiveness of their actions is definitely something they think about. It can't be too extreme, that will put people off like you say. But often there is conversations like in this thread, "this protester goes too far, but they do have a point". This moves the Overton window in the desired direction.
The goal isn't too make you like the protester, it's to make you think about the issues.
Yes I totally agree, and there are nuances and details
But it's easy to push to one side or another
Worked for the IRA. Working for Hamas. Working for the Islamic Republic.
Cowards would have you believe otherwise, but force is sometimes the only way to get what you want.
It really doesn't matter if you come across as the villain as long as you impose great enough costs for not delivering your desired reality.
How is force working for Hamas? The shift in general sentiment towards Israel came from Israel's blatant disregard for civilian life and from their apartheid politics being put in spotlight. Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane and their Oct 7 attack served as an excuse for Israel to set them back and hunt them regardless of collateral casualties, terrorizing their compatriots
On examination of the evidence, Hamas appears to be an organization dedicated to harming Israel, not helping the Palestinian people (or improving public opinion of Hamas). In this regard, I would say that Hamas has been very effective at provoking heinous overreach by the zionists, causing severe damage to Israeli credibility. To Hamas, it seems that Palestinian deaths are the price they are willing to pay, being integral to their strategic mission and personnel supply chain.
You seem to think the conflict will be decided by the vibes and sentiments of people who don't matter.
Why would you think so? The conflict will most likely be decided by Israel (and by extension USA) having the biggest influence both globally and locally, and the biggest guns, but there is no misconception about it, so I decided not to add it.
> How is force working for Hamas?
Brilliantly. It coaxed an Israeli overreaction which has led to basically the entirety of the rest of the world turning against Israel.
> Hamas are still regarded as terrorist savages by everyone sane
Why would Hamas care? They remain firmly in control of Gaza, while their cause is winning hearts and minds globally.
It’s sounds like you think it’s brilliant that more Palestinians were killed as long as it negatively affected Israel’s PR.
lol
Typical Jewish troll, none of the comments suggested an endorsement of Hamas’s approach.
Noone is responsible for others' (overre)actions.
So if you think justice for Palestinian civilians is their cause, it's not them who are responsible for it winning hearts and minds globally
While there are useful idiots in any situation (especially inside the UN), the level of sympathy for them - while was never high is going down steadly
The level of general sympathy for one of those (and their level of success) is much higher than for the others
Maybe because they were actively avoiding civilian targets
And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
>And even then mostly because a lot of people were supportive of their cause even if they were against their methods
But IRA didn't win because those people supported their cause, IRA won despite those people being against their methods.
It was the force they used which directly led to the GFA, without the bombs and the killing the British would never have surrendered.
How can we know the IRA “won”? The country changed a hell of a lot over the course of the Troubles and by the time of the GFA in 1998 I don’t see how it is so clear that the reforms wouldn’t have also been achieved via other peaceful and democratic means.
> How can we know the IRA “won”?
In signing the GFA, the UK effectively gave up on it's sovereignty over NI. That was never going to happen through "peaceful and democratic means"
What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet. The devolution of Scotland and Wales happened peacefully a couple(?) of years later, and Scotland may also separate in future.
> What makes it giving up sovereignty? I understand it creates the potential for separation in future but not yet.
Look at where the border is, the separation has already happened to a very significant degree.
Good god!
It's difficult to make out if this is ignorance, a poor attempt at satire or simply trolling.
Which part do you disagree with?
The border is in the North Channel today, so the bit about sovereignty clearly holds up.
Are you saying the GFA would have been reached through peaceful means?
The rabbit hole goes much deeper than simply "they gave up on sovereignty"
2 out of 3 for "bombed to shit". I wouldn't call that "working".
I'm not sure if Iran's regime has the staying power, but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
Even if every single Hamas was killed - you have a whole population totally traumatized. That's extremely fertile ground for something like Hamas to pop up again. So, a lot of sufferring but Bibi and "Hamas" (or whatever) prospers.
Hamas has been killed. Again and again and again. But people keep joining this "Hamas" resistance group against Israel so the group never seems to go away. And do you know why they join? They join because Israel killed their whole families.
> but Hamas sure doesn't seem to be in a good shape lately.
And who do you see on track to displace Hamas? After years and years of conflict and being "bombed to shit", they're as entrenched as ever while their enemy declines much faster.
Israel is getting to a point where it has no friends left in the world, where the average European youth thinks nuking Israel and turning into a glass parking lot would probably be a net positive. Jews are starting to be broadly despised again thanks to Israeli policy, something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
Hamas operatives lead shitty lives in the Gaza strip as they have for decades, but they certainly aren't losing control.
Over the course of a few years, Hamas managed to turn wearing a star of David in big EU cities into a dangerous political statement. And we're supposed to believe that they're not winning?
There are two actors and you're mixing up who is responsible for which outcome. I explained in more detail in another comment
There's no credit due for correctly reading your adversary?
Obviously the Israelis could have just kept their mask on, but Hamas was clearly correct in their calculation that they wouldn't.
Your arguments are self-contradictory. You say force is great, but only for Hamas - not for Israel.
A youth who thinks Israel should be genocided doesn’t care about genocide, so why hate Israel?
The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway, and who naively think that the hatred won’t backfire on them. Once you start promoting racism it comes for everyone.
>The hate in Europe is driven primarily by an influx of people who were hating Jews anyway
You are mistaken, the sentiments are shifting across the board.
This is probably driven to a significant degree by the Israeli national policy of tying any criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the broad acceptance of that policy by Jewish communities globally. Because of this implicit endorsement, it is not surprising that many would struggle to separate between the actions by taken by the state of Israel and those who call themselves Jews.
A youth who hates Israel thinks genociding genociders is okay
The final victory of Islamic Republic was after they did NOT used force against west, but when America and Israel started idiotic war, bragged about using force and then promptly lost.
This was quite literally the case of "actions backfire" situation.
Attacking families is firmly across the line and looks like crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
No wonder he gets raided, at one point it becomes a topic about protecting one's family, left or right, moral or crook doesn't matter anymore.
Its not activist anymore in any meaningful sense, just a fanatic.
> crazy man's personal vendetta. Who can vouch he won't go further and ie won't kidnap a kid to achieve his goals.
You just committed exactly the kind of escalation that you condemn when it's about him.
So what if someone can vouch for him? What's that worth? "Vouching" is worthless in any circumstance I can think of, and nobody can give you guarantees about anything. I can't vouch that you won't do exactly the same, or that you weren't the masked police who raced to the breakers so he's not filmed while breaking the law (innocent people have nothing to hide, right?), or that you're not one of the politicians pushing for oppressive laws for your personal benefit.
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 focused on 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” and stoking this moral panic is what is enabling the 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 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 away your opportunity to do anything more exciting than build powerpoints at a braindead consulting firm.
> 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 what happens when your money is gone? What happens when the government has no money anymore because the super rich took it all? Your life turns to shit real fast when you can't afford housing, healthcare and food.
I get when you are in an authoritarian country, or one on the path to becoming so like the US, that the government looks to be the most dangerous actor. But in the west that is still free, its the corps that I worry about the most.
Private companies want your money but they don’t take it. You give it to them in exchange for something.
It feels like I'm force to pay tax which then evaporates into the pockets of private companies like Palantir, though... I mean, you arguably can't even fully participate in the society you pay taxes to help run if you don't have a Google or Apple spycube.
If you think that Jesper isn't attacking the right issues, but Lars does, then you should definitely hope that Lars switches to Jesper's more popular approach.
Unless you think there can never be a democratic consensus in favor of privacy, therefore the only way is for a small vanguard of privacy activists to impose their will on the hostile majority and establish a totalitarian privacy dictatorship. Then it wouldn't matter so much whether you look good in the court of popular opinion or not.
> 99% of Americans couldn’t place Denmark on a map (I’m not kidding)
sixty one percent of statistics are fabricated on the spot?
Even if you don't think he goes too far ethically, you can probably agree that it's reasonable for the police to intervene once he's interfering with the cars of government ministers.
The police definitely need to intervene, but I'd like to think that playing tit-for-tat with the government is a valid protest, and that this won't result in a loss of freedom.
I guess they need to ascertain whether he's operating organically, or at the behest of another nation, and whether he's scouting out ministers for something bigger in the future.
Though, the irony in all this, is that it all could've been avoided if the government weren't acting at the behest of another nation, and scouting out what they can get away with on their authoritarian warpath. Maybe the police are arresting the wrong people.
Will the police intervene and arrest the ministers when the laws the ministers are enacting result in the same outcome for me?
never - the courts must make decisions
> he'd ignore people carrying a kilo gram of weed
This is an unequivocally reasonable approach. The prohibition of cannabis is a grotesque charade.
A kilo of weed is clearly a dealer, and part of organised crime. The same people are deeply involved in forced sex work and people trafficking, extortion, illegal weapons, etc. There is a clear difference between end users and small time dealers and the distributors.
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.
I tend to disagree. 1984 seems the playbook for the majority of politicians. For them, it's inspirational.
I'm confused reading this. How in the world is GPS-tracking someone's car supposed to show hypocrisy with respect to encryption?
Because this someone wants to know location of everyone in the country while his own location should be of course private and protected.
I still don't understand what that has to do with encryption. Are these two separate policy proposals, one for GPS tracking and one for encryption, that this person is supporting?
Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time. Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
It may be of the same order, but it is a different thing. No one, not even techies like here on HN, are going to see his actions as valid.
He has to use a different method because obviously he does not have a backdoor into the prime minister's phone. The fact that "obviously wrong" invasive methods have to be used (now) to imitate something that the prime minister want to apply to every citizen (except himself and his buddies) in the future can be seen as part of the point.
Yes, but that also means he both goes too far (for people like me who might sympathize with him) and loses the connection with the original issue, creating his own communication problem. Yes, it is good and necessary to show politicians what they are doing to the citizens they are supposed to represent, but that does not justify all means.
> Think about why do governments want to ban encryption? Because they want to know everything about you all the time.
Or, say, because they want a judicial warrant to be sufficient for obtaining someone's information without their consent?
> Collecting information on someone such as their location is of the same order.
Huh? This sounds crazy.
It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response. On the one hand I agree that gps-tracking is not exactly the same as analyzing people's messages, on the other hand one can often infer whereabouts through messaging services indirectly or even directly such as when people share their gps location with one another (a feature that e.g. whatsapp has).
Anyway, apparently this Peter Hummelgaard has said:
"I indisputably believe that surveillance creates an increased sense of security ... and given that the prerequisite for freedom is security, yes, I believe that more surveillance equates to more freedom"
so I think you will find it easier to understand these kinds of protest actions if you consider them in the context of privacy vs. surveillance more broadly conceived.
(source for quote https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115314954743042414 -> https://www.dr.dk/lyd/special-radio/prompt/prompt-2025/egois...)
> It's not that complicated. Minister wants to remove citizens privacy. Protester invades privacy of minister in response.
"It's not that complicated"... indeed?
Privacy was a thing long before encryption even existed. So were stalking, wiretapping, etc. That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible. (And for arresting stalkers and wiretappers.)
Encryption changed all that. It effectively undermined the ability of warrants to do their job.
Regardless of how you feel about the above, surely you agree that none of that is factually incorrect, right? Plaintext + privacy were simultaneously a thing for a long time, right?
So, whatever you feel, doesn't it feel a little disingenuous to suggest that the two are necessarily tied together? And to smear someone as hypocritical because they believe in both? Did the guy ever advocate for exposing everyone's real-time location?
Look, I don't even know the guy. And I'm not even trying to defend anything here on its merits. I'm just trying to set the record straight as to what the facts and the logical implications are(n't). Do you(/him/etc.) want an honest debate? Where you can actually win with people coming to support your ideas on their merits? Or do you want to take the craziest logical leaps and lose all your potential supporters in the process?
>That whole time, judicial warrants had always been legally and practically adequate for obtaining and reviewing evidence that was physically accessible.
Certainly not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrecy_of_correspondence
Encryption is used to remain private in ones comings and goings and communication.
It’s not the same as gps, but it’s similar. If you can decrypt someone’s communications, you can more easily determine their location.
Hmmm, in context he was(?) tracking a public ministers car.
I'm Australian and I'm all for peeling back and making transparent all the comings and goings of public officials (within reason) - they deserve a good return, a hefty return even, for dedicated public service .. and they deserve to know that there's a hammer waiting for any betrayal of public trust, shady financial dealings (while in office), etc.
As a "known in advance covenant" that's not altogether unreasonable, raises the bar for would be Trumpesque grifters, and allows for privacy for those not seeking access to public offices, trust, and cookie jars.
but all he does is things the politicians thinks are perfectly okay to do to the "plebs" they are supposed to represent.
when they do it, its A-OKAY, but if he does even 1/10, its the worst catastrophy in the world.
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.
> Rules for thee but not for me
This pretty accurately describes lots of stuff going on here in Germany as well and well the state of most of our "liberal democracies".
> exposing the hypocrisy of the Danish government
Does that change anything?
Does he have any power to change anything? Or does he have only power to expose the abusers and corrupted?
Only taking action because you can change corrupt ways doesn’t actually change anything because the average person has no power to do so. And the proper channels are gummed up to not change anything.
What Lars does is possibly inform or change perspective of those unfamiliar with their nation/world-state.
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.
> 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.
Correct
> 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?
> The intent and context are obviously better for the one who's clearly sending the "threat" as a political statement against selective enforcement.
That is far from obvious.
In general i think that attempting to alter the course of justice via a threat is much worse than a simple threat. Any situation where officers of the court are afraid to impartially do their duties to coercion is a fundamental threat to society and should be dealt with harshly.
> ... and you're willing to give the benefit of doubt to those with power here.
I'm basing my view on the arguments presented in this thread.
So far what has been presented is that the prosecutor did something very normal that happens all the time for very reasonable reasons. Its possible that in this case it happened due to inappropriate reasons, idk, but so far nobody has even presented a theory for why the action was corrupt instead of normal.
In general i think it is the job of the person arguing that misconduct occured to present evidence that it actually happened. Otherwise things descend into witch hunts as it is very difficult to prove a negative.
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.
"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.
Trail cams (and other hidden cams) often have local SD backup. Better break out the “broom” and steal every electronic device just in case.
> 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.
> cops were fired for illegal raids.
This kind of pro-cop propaganda placing them above the law is disgusting.
Cops should go to prison for illegal raids. Some behaviour needs to be severely punished.
This kind of betrayal of trust is one of the most severe crimes one can commit against society, the punishments should be equally severe.
Some people want world peace and denuclearization. Each country is currently as it finds itself and takes a great deal of leadership and buy-in to change.
Me too, but I bet the cops did carry.
That’s not the real world. Criminals will always find a way to get guns no matter the amount of gun control you impose, so I’d rather have law abiding citizens be armed as well
It is the real world in many places. "Criminals" are not a homogenous group. Petty criminals will not usually be making the effort to get a gun if getting a gun is inconvenient. Some high level criminals will find ways to get guns but the number of criminals with guns will be much lower with gun controls.
Also if getting a gun is dangerous. Why escalate a petty theft into a murder?
It’s not your real world, lots of other countries have so little gun violence that a shooting makes the national news when it happens and thats maybe once or twice a year.
It must be nice getting to live in an area that doesn't have entire subcultures dedicated to guns and crime.
> Criminals will always find a way to get guns [...]
In that case, how about the cops can just shoot anyone with a gun who's not a cop?
Should keep things pretty simple, and the majority of the population in the US would be a bunch safer. :D
"You can never ban all guns, so don't bother banning any guns. It makes no sense to reduce gun violence if you cannot eliminate it completely."
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'd say it is. Yes there are people that own guns or hunting rifles. Most still don't think about guns or shooting first. Guns are supposed to be locked in a safe etc. All that does obviously not apply to a criminal who does not follow the law.
I’m pretty sure you’re not allowed to use your legal firearms against people in Denmark. Even in a home intrusion event.
You can if there's a direct threat to your life (i.e. you can see that the intruder is also armed).
But you can't use it against someone for just entering your premises illegally. It needs to be a clear and present danger.
In the EU the answer is always "it's unclear". Yes you can, but you also can't.
ECHR necessarily guarantees the right to shoot some intruders in some situations, but it's kind of impossible to know which situations those are except after the fact.
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.
I am Swedish, and it’s very true that ”it depends”.
This guy for example was convicted of murder because he got his gun out without even trying to contact the police directly or indirectly. So even if he pulled the trigger under reasonable circumstances (a know violent offender was trying to take his rifle) he was found guilty because he should not have gone for the gun without considering alternatives like locking the door or fleeing.
I can’t see him being anywhere near guaranteed to claim self defense even if he had fired a warning shot first.
https://svenskjakt.se/start/nyhet/skot-inkraktare-med-algstu...
> They’d basically have to attack you first for lethal force to be legal.
They just violently entered his home in an effort to attack him, dressed in a way designed to intimidate. These cops were deliberately cosplaying as some sort of a hit squad, they obviously wanted him to believe that they were going to kill him.
It's not like the cops just accidentally went out dressed like that.
This is Denmark, not some Brasilian favela. That type of violent crime extremely rare in Scandinavia. But cops wearing civilian clothes while conducting a raid is fairly normal. Especially when they want to preserve evidence which might be quickly destroyed if the suspect sees them coming.
If a masked person, that doesn't first identify themselves clearly as the police (which is difficult since, well, they are masked) breaks into my house, that's a lethal attack for sure.
What are you going to do after they enter the house (if they aren't indeed the police and you trust they won't kill or rape your family)?
While this is still bad, If you watch the video, the officers announce themselves and enter with empty hands... it's very different from videos of "raids" by US police that I've seen.
> 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.
Rofl
>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
A Danish privacy activist (not a protected title) using Google Nest.
On a second thought (addendum), ...
1) Publishing PII like phone number of a high profile person in your society is causing them harm since they obviously put effort into not having such out in the open. (e.g. I can find anyone's phone number in my country via leaks. No big deal... but I shouldn't publish such. I shouldn't possess such data either.)
2) SSN is a different category of PII. Publishing this of anyone is an invitation of harm, even more so of a high profile person in your society.
It is akin to inviting people to DDoS a website, or blocking them physically access to exit their house. That kind of thing. Except that on the internet, anyone can abuse this. Even people (including criminals) in foreign countries, residing in hazardous jurisdictions (e.g. Russia).
Either way, what's the point of publishing such information? When German activists published the fingerprint of a German minister, they were making a point. They got the fingerprint via a glass of wine, but the interesting point is that a fingerprint cannot be revoked. It isn't used to authenticate a password, but a user(name). It should therefore not be used as single factor.
Privacy advocate with Google-nest cameras inside his home?
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.
Yeah, he seems confused to me. Well meaning, but not so consistent.
What is good is that he is a wrench, that throws itself in the works repeatedly. This is a healthy thing to have.
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.
> The police was extremely careful not to scan any data that where stored on US-servers
This seems exactly backwards to what I'd expect, I wonder what the official rationale is.
On device recording, so at least the illusion of privacy.
How did he get the videos out of the cameras that were seized if the recording was also not uploaded? Can Nest cameras upload/stream to private servers? (never had one so I have no idea)
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)
Where did you see anarcho capitalist? I only saw "libertarian" (which is not the same thing).
i guess they weren't trying to get his computer in a powered up state.
Twitter is even the place for this kind of news? What does people keep there?
Calling yourself a "privacy advocate" while gloating that you posted PII is quite something
I guess it's like castle doctrine for the information space. Something like "your right to privacy stops when you openly try to undermine mine...".
I see it as a morally valid approach. Politicians are well within their power to not be corrupt and value the US/bigcorp/oligarch x over the people they vowed to represent.
Whatever Lars may be, the fact that a lawful arrest could not be filmed sucks. I can find other reasons behind needing to cut the circuit breakers during an arrest of a hacker in an effort to secure evidence.
Peter Hummelgaard on the other hand, can just fuck right off. Former head of the ministry of justice seriously argued that the mass surveillance initiatives he led were right because he "felt" it...
If cops are supposedly worried about cameras and believe turning the power off stops it, then put a UPS on the DVR (if present) and each camera.
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.
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.
Could you supply some ressources that make your framing plausible? That would be a valuable service to the community, as this discussion seems to be highly polarized. (from the ratio of downvoted comments to all comments). Reading through this discussion and not having heared of this before it's hard to tell what's genuine and what's not.
One could read this persons activism as a narrative of "lesson learned" in this regard. Well you want the law applied to everyone equally? Well, actually.. you're right. In the sense as it seems to be the case that there is a motive in this persons action of make them experience being subjected to the legal/social order they promote.
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.
No that's not what corruption means
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!?!
What security concerns? Of a person telling people where you live?
Are the homes of Danish prime ministers secret?
Usually it is not a secret, but currently the prime minister and her family live at a secret address.
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.
What security concerns? Why would the Danish PM fear for her life just because her address is known? I know where my PM lives.
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.
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.
It's the other way around.
In a functioning legal system it matters what you said or didn't. In a non-functioning legal system they will just convict you regardless of what was said or done.
> She currently lives at a secret address due to security concerns.
Oh so she cares about her own privacy? Curious then that she seems to be such an ardent advocate for Chat Control and for the erosion of encryption.
Politicians are such a disgusting, hypocritical bunch of "people", more people should be "doxxing" these weasels. Maybe eventually we'll find one of them that has 2 braincells to put together to comprehend their hypocrisy, but I guess there's little chance of that.
> Oh so she cares about her own privacy?
She didn’t choose to make that move. PET (the equivalent of FBI) made the decision to protect her address. I’m sure she much prefer the time back when she was living at her own place and her address was freely available to the public without any issues.
There is no hypocrisy here. As for releasing social security numbers of people, she’s against it no matter who’s doing the doxing and who the target is. But yes, obviously the government knows hos government issued ID corresponds to who. That’s pretty obvious. But that doesn’t mean everyone in the country has to have access to it. Your doctor also has access to your medical journal, that doesn’t give you the right to publish the medical journal of your doctor on Facebook if you get angry at him for giving you a bad diagnosis.
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
> 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.
Politicians these days are expected to have harder and harder skin. I've seen lots of stories in the news lately of (in particular young) politicians from scandinavia who dropped out of politics due to harassment, anonymous threats etc. And even more people who never get into politics, because of hearing about such stories. I sure as hell would not get into politics today.
I fear for what our political system will look like when only those who have become completely numb to such threats remain. What kinds people are they, those who can live with hundreds of daily hate messages and death threats, doxing of oneself and family members, having to live with security guards and secret addresses? What are we losing by allowing this kind of "freedom of speech"?
If your morals consist of eye-for-an-eye retribution, then maybe his actions make sense. But I do not believe that that gives us a better society.
This politician dropping out of politics would be a good thing? That's the point?
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.
> That's a bit simplified, isn't it?
No, i dont think it is.
> He's pointing out precisely that "doxing" the entire population of Denmark shouldn't be acceptable to her
Denmark is a democracy, that is a decision for the electroate to make during an election. In general we give governments rights and abilities that normal people do not have. Where the line should be is up to the voters to decide.
> and that she's literally not accepting herself being "doxxed."
Not really equivalent. I'm pretty sure the Danish survelience plans, whatever you think of them, intend to have some sort of controls against misuse. (Im not saying that makes them good or ok, just that they aren't equivalent to doxing people)
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.
People that want to be powerful for personal gain will be filtered. People that legimitely want to give their all for their country will be encouraged.
Good, I don't want people rising to unlimited, uncheckable power and creating oppressive hierarchies in general.
It won't prevent bad people from rising to power. After all, i'm pretty sure Putin doesn't have this problem. He just throws people who do this sort of thing out the window. The only politicians that have something to fear from this type of activism is the non evil ones.
The most powerful people are those who are billionaires
Is it "just disagreeing with them" or is it taking away privacy _from those publicly renouncing the right to privacy_, with goal of protecting the right to privacy of everyone else, who didn't renounce it, by pointing out the hipocrisy and that it actually is important, even to those who claim otherwise trying to take it from others?
Actually it does, and much more.
> 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.
Most of the time i would want the arrests to proceed in a more civil manner unless the situation warranted otherwise, but ultimately yes, i think doxing/harrasment is a crime and people who commit it should be arrested and tried.
Both sides are not looking too pretty here.
I think what is much more important, is that it exposes the shortcomings of the Danish SSN system.
It was introduced in 1968, when Denmark was a high-trust society. It was used as a sort of password and key for looking up your information. If you wanted to create a bank account, you told them your SSN. If you wanted to buy a car, you told them your SSN. If you had any contact with the authorities, you told them your SSN. And so on.
The usage has changed, but not that much. So today, when trust in Danish society is not as high, the system falls short. Identity theft. Privacy. Scamming. They have to be detected and stopped by other means.
The proper path forwards would be to radically change the system (or the society).
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?
Success in what exactly? There a very strong political movement in Denmark towards protecting privacy rights, then there’s this nutjob who just got out of jail for bribes, harassment, death threats against politicians and immediately he starts stalking the kids of the prime minister.
He’s not doing anything for the cause he claims to fight for. He’s doesn’t want a right to privacy he wants to be allowed to continue to sell drugs “in private” from the government. And he thinks freedom of speech should cover his freedom to harass and threaten politicians which it doesn’t and shouldn’t.
> Success in what exactly? There a very strong political movement in Denmark towards protecting privacy rights
Doesn't seem to be working.
By what metric? The fact that he got arrested for stalking the prime ministers children and releasing private information speaks toward protecting privacy not an issue if lacking privacy.
You can’t just declare “I am an anti violence activist” then go out and beat up politicians and declare that the system has a problem with violence when you get arrested.
This is the equivalent of what he’s done. He claims to support privacy laws so he violated the privacy of someone who is currently protected by the PET (equivalent of FBI) due to safety concerns and he proudly proclaimed that he did so by stalking her children. He’s not a political activist he’s a drug dealer who’s hell bent on getting revenge on politicians because he just spent 8 months in jail after being convicted on counts of death threats harassment and illegal possession of arms and drugs.
*winning
Sorry, you made a silly typo that made you look bad. I fixed it.
Because no one has mentioned it here: Lars Andersen is also a right-wing extremist who regularly posts racist content on social media. His privacy/free speech activism seems to be (at least partly) motivated by this.
I think this is useful context for evaluating his judgment.
An example would've been nice.
All too often people throw around the racist buzzword without ever actually providing evidence. It's as if we're expected to just blindly trust and follow that somebody is now excommunicated from modern society.
Sure thing. If you view his X profile without logging in, nearly all his top posts demonstrate what I mean: advocating for remigration (i.e. ethnic cleansing), comparing Muslims to monkeys, supporting far-right figures like Tommy Robinson and Rasmus Paludan, sharing YouTube comments with racial slurs...
https://x.com/LarsAnders1620/status/1885254465160118655, first one that comes up when I view X (not signed in). I don't think this is enough (as OP declared) to authoritatively place him in 'right wing extremist' but probably racist. I don't speak danish, but someone that could would be able to make a more complete judgement because most, if not all posts of his, are in Danish.
Simp much