So is the concern that they are going to aid law enforcement in catching people who break the law? I'm having a difficult time realizing the outrage here.

They clearly could have made the announcement come off less like it was glorifying the type of surveillance work the former police officer did.

I would hazard a guess that a big part of the crowd who buy and use RaspberryPi products are privacy conscious. So it makes good business sense not to alienate that customer base and throw away all the goodwill the company has garnered over the years.

The concerns over this are justified, and could have been responded to in a calm manner.

Instead those in charge of that social media account decided to act up in an incredibly childish manner.

If the hiring of an ex surveillance specialist to a FOSS software & hardware company does not rub you the wrong way, then I would at least think the bad PR handling from a pure business standpoint would.

Yeah, I definitely think they could have handled it better. Mainly, what rubs me as intellectually dishonest to condemn this one person without knowing him because he used to be in law enforcement.

Braking the law doesn't mean doing anything wrong, and a lot of the people these people harass haven't even broken the law. These people infiltrate and destroy innocent people's lives.

Imagine meeting someone you love and having a child with them, just for them to disappear one day. Imagine finding out that they actually never existed and were actually a government agent who was assigned to infiltrate your life and possibly frame you for daring to speak against the state. Imagine being that child. Or anyone else in these peoples lives for that matter.

Or imagine finding yourself abandoned in a foreign country by your closest friends of several years who were actually government agents you met on a holiday you won in a fake competition created by the government, then find out that the company you worked for was also a fake company set up just to try to entrap you in some elaborate plan, so now you are unemployed, and everything you said in your own home or car in the last several years probably exists forever on a government server somewhere. Imagine then opening a newspaper and reading that the police claim to be underfunded...

Imaging what it does to a person to find out that their life for years has been a real life government conspiracy. That their friends, neighbours, co-workers, partner, etc. are not real and that they have had no privacy. It may not even be you they are after, but someone close to you.

These are both real cases, one from the UK where this cop is from and one from Sweden where I'm from, and they are far from unique.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/25/activist-dec...

https://www-aftonbladet-se.translate.goog/nyheter/a/dwwdlO/p...

You don't think you're blowing this one instance out of proportion at all? This is just a one person who works at a hobby computer company.

My objection is not really that they hired him. I believe that people can change and no one is irredeemable, but I don't think they should advertise it like this. It's like hiring an ex-con who used to use your product to victimize others and then bragging about it and getting upset when people are unconformable with it.

If nothing else, I think they should show more respect for people who are victims of the police and state-sponsored surveillance.

What are the fact about this guy? What work did he do that's so objectionable?

I don't know anything about him besides him having been a "Surveillance Officer" for 15 years. I feel the same about that as I feel about someone who has been a member of a crime gang or terrorist organization for that long. As long as the individual joined voluntarily and had the option to leave, I don't think it's unreasonable to judge them for the actions of the organization (or even organization type) without knowing what that individual specifically did.

I don’t think we’re going to agree on this.

No. The concern is they'll continue supporting the widespread abuses law enforcement is known for.

That doesn't seem paranoid to you at all?

Being concerned about a pattern of behavior is paranoia now?

By that same logic, should we be profiling criminals? Or is that problematic?

If "we" is you, go ahead! You're free to judge whomever you want.

This is a fairly simple issue - a community of people who are pro-privacy and anti-surveillance have concerns about a former surveillance officer working for an organization which creates small, portable, popular computing devices.

If you haven't heard about law enforcement abuses of surveillance, here are some helpful links:

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/fbi-nsa-mass-surveillanc...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/police-are-still-abusi...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-12-27/when-poli...

I agree to disagree with this community of 11 users. May they find solace in each other.

It can either feel paranoid or like common sense depending on place in the world in question.

In the West I would say it feels paranoid, but in certain east Asian or Middle-eastern countries (that will remain nameless) I wouldn't ask questions in the first place. Thankfully I'm in the former.

You sound like you're not part of any marginalized, surveilled, or abused communities. Police in some places still arrest people for violating state level sodomy laws even though the SCOTUS ruling nullified them.

No, this is still very much a problem here in the West.

That's obviously not good and we should speak up when these things happen because that sounds unlawful. The point is that we have the freedom here to stand up and say that, and in other countries you wouldn't even have that much. It could be a lot worse.

There are still some places in the general West where law enforcement's reputation isn't completely ruined yet, but it certainly isn't a rule.

Right, it's not perfect, but I know where I'd rather be.