[mcny]

Why are you running data if you don't suspect a crime?

A friend of mine moved to a new neighborhood. Apparently, her neighbor was in the police. She said she was out walking her dog and the neighbor greeted her with her first name and middle name when she had barely moved in. We didn't know her legal middle name was different from what we called her. So we pretty much know he looked her up (driving licence info?) and he wants her to know he looked her up.

Why? Who knows but he did.

[metilda]

Illicit querying of NCIC should be a crime in and of itself that officers and anyone else with access (admin personnel & some security guards) are commonly prosecuted for.

We should have a right to security in our information, and privacy of it from meddlers and nefarious actors like the aformentioned neighbor. Sadly, many of my fellow Americans are all to happy to claim they have nothing to hide, despite how much that attitude continues to hurt them.

[b6]

> Illicit querying of NCIC should be a crime

I'm not disagreeing with this, but I don't think we can trust people to make a system that, e.g., automatically collects and stores the locations of all cars with plates visible to all the roving police cars -- and then not use that information improperly.

I'm hoping that we'll gradually choose deliberate ignorance of certain things we could know because although the knowledge could be helpful in certain cases, it's also too dangerous.

[r00fus]

There shouldn't need to be such a choice. Make both more difficult - license plate tracking and inappropriate lookups.

[tzs]

Is she a renter or an owner? If the latter, her name could probably be found on the property sale records which are public.

[metilda]

Why should it matter, said officer shouldn't be querying NCIC to dox his neighbor. I doubt he actually bothered to use the local parcel viewer.

[tzs]

It matters because to make the inference that he was connected to the police and misused police resources to find her information, that information has to not be readily available to the general public.

If she had been an owner, the information would be available to the public, and not even all that odd for a neighbor to look up (I look up sales records for houses that sell in my neighborhood to see what they sold for, for example, to get an idea of how the market is).

[mcny]

In this case, Renter. Just moved. License would still have old address. You couldn't have "accidentally" found someone like that.

[ryanwaggoner]

You’re making a bunch of leaps in logic here. How do you know he is law enforcement? Also, you said she just moved, so how does her license have her new address? So how exactly did he identify her to look her up?

Maybe he just saw a piece of her mail.

Edit: also, the most obvious question: why didn’t she do the normal thing and ask “hey, how do you know my name?”

[brokenmachine]

Seriously, a stranger stating your full name including a middle name they shouldn't know doesn't seem threatening to you?