>That doesn’t make it okay. Being taken into custody is something I’d consider an overreaction and frightening for a person to endure.

Fully agreed. And not just that, the law enforcement officers seized his personal devices (phone + laptop) for 4 weeks and went through them.

Note: I am not sure if both phone+laptop were taken away for 4 weeks, but the article states that both were seized at one point, and explicitly mentions that the laptop was held for 4 weeks before being returned.

I don’t know mate, even if there is only the potential for a dangerous crime, we need to keep these criminals off our communication infrastructure until we know for certain. Perhaps a better idea is a public/private partnership between all the big search engines, social media companies and police organizations who want to join and can pay dues.

Information sharing between members of the federation would reduce crime and spread of violent content. For example, when Google links a visitor to a harmful website, they can ping the local police with basic metadata about that user (could reuse the code from GDPR export). Google can lend its AI to categorize the alerts so local police know to be on the lookout for e.g. support for “The Big Lie” or local militia groups.

This way, the officers can stay aware of any potential threats to the safety of the children in their town, but maintain the ability to act proportionally and in context. Continuing with the example of a violent Google search, the alert might be a “P0”, but the police live in the same community as the suspect. If they’re not familiar with the data subject yet, they can use the alert to get a warrant for more information from Google. Or maybe they know the alert is a false alarm because the suspect is actually a government worker researching misinformation networks, so they instruct the AI to ignore alerts like it in the future.

We need to be on alert. With the proliferation of encryption, protecting citizens from harmful and increasingly dangerous information has never been more critical.

I personally think it's fair enough, the company probably claimed it was secure, therefore he must have hacked them. The police reacted, but when he could show it clearly wasn't secure and exposed to the public, they dropped it. And hopefully gave the company a private ticking off about wasting police time.

In the UK, an arrest under reasonable suspicion gives them the right to search your property for evidence, and to be honest they had reasonable suspicion, he had private company documents.

It's not like that company can cry wolf again, the police will be far more skeptical next time of their claims, having dealt with them before.