Some of you may remember the NZ politician who resigned over a shoplifting scandal. I made a thread about it. You may have posted in it. Don't post in it now. That would be gravedigging.
She was found guilty. Actually, she might have plead guilty. I don't remember. Doesn't matter right now.
A week or two, an ex-MP was described as facing allegations of shoplifting. It quickly turned out to be the same MP. You're probably rushing to your keyboard to write an impassioned defence of her mental health. Don't.
Turns out what happened is the supermarket staff noticed her putting her shopping in the bag she brought (nb NZ banned plastic bags at supermarkets years ago), accosted her and before she had an opportunity to either pay for or steal the shopping, she left the supermarket.
Somehow this information ended up in the hands of the police. Somehow, months later, it ended up in the hands of the media. Cue both the original reporting, the impassioned (and defamatory??) defences and, eventually, the real scandal: how in the seven hells does anyone even know this happened?
Enter Auror.
The Herald has since revealed Foodstuffs, which owns Pak’nSave, did not directly complain to police but recorded the incident involving goods worth less than $150 into the Auror retail crime platform along with around 20,000 other incidents each year.
And, yeah, it really does appear to be named after the dark wizard catchers from Harry Potter, the famous novel series from the mind of noted Scottish-ish TERF JK Rowling. I base this information off a Reddit user who said they couldn't find any evidence Rowling didn't coin the word Auror. I did look at Auror's "Our Story" page or whatever it was specifically (I've forgotten already) and they didn't explain the name.
Oh, and by the way, it's coming to America! Slash might already have a presence in the US (and Canada and the UK... Five Eyes goes Private!!!!!!!!!!!)
And for all you ACAB people:
In 2022, the Herald revealed police had invented crimes to get around Auror’s rules so officers could track cars using its automatic licence plate recognition system. The Herald also revealed police went into what Auror calls a “partnership” without carrying out a proper privacy assessment.
Both quotes from the same article: Privacy Commissioner digs into Golriz Ghahraman shopping incident
And while I think the read story with Ghahraman is basically:
- convicted shop lifter is identified by over-zealous supermarket employees
- incident is recorded on Auror as is routine (even though there is absolutely no reasonable basis to describe the event as shoplifting)
- NZ Police either scroll through Auror or run checks against it on a systematic level for known crooks, thus identifying Ghahraman absent a report
and there's plenty of issues you can take with that third point, it's the existence of Auror and the second point which I think is the real story.
Like, I know I've stuck "surveillance state" in the title here but I'm just quoting the article. The description of "private surveillance state" is kind of nuts, right? I suggest the only reason the phrasing exists is because of decades and decades of authors that posited the dystopia would be caused by the state. Whereas all evidence suggests that the real dystopia is corporate. It's hard to break that kind of cultural training.
That being said, I don't really have a problem with the existence of Auror. There is no mechanical difference between Auror and a bunch of supermarket staff from different supermarkets discussing shoplifters with each other. I mean, I don't think there are many supermarket staff that would do that but mechanically. The issue is that there's clearly no accountability whatsoever regarding what's put in Auror. I mean, it's possible the people involved with accosting Ghahraman and then entering the incident they manufactured into Auror have been reprimanded, but retroactive accountability doesn't help, does it? Auror itself, if it's to be a useful service, should have a way of flagging these kinds of incidents as false accusations.
However, what say ye, NSG? What do you think of Auror (and presumably its competitors, which I assume exist)?