My on-line profiles barely hit PG-13 (sigh).

(sigh).

No gang signs or racial invective?

How lame.

Interesting. The investigators can't legally access those accounts themselves (officially), so they require the applicant to "share", basically. "Without the applicant logging on, only a subpoena could get the NYPD that much access to the private Web pages."

So any applicant with accounts under an anonymous user name presumably simply doesn't have to tell them about those accounts.

Anyway, clearly this isn't something that any of us would like to see in standard interviewing processes, but when you're going to give someone weapons and whole lot of mostly unsupervised power to exert over individuals, it's probably not a bad idea to find out what you can about their dirty little secrets.

What processes did they use before in background checks?

In other news, Jennifer Hudson?

So voluntarily relinquish those rights to online privacy, or no job?

I too can understand why they would do this, especially in light of all the embarrassing incidents that the NYPD have gotten themselves into lately.

Just a few days ago, a defendant was able to win acquittal on some charges because of some compromising comments one of the arresting officers made on the Internet.

But it is a troubling precedent.

Well, shit; since just about every boss these days wants to know how your downtime urine tastes, no surprise they want to check a police's off-duty web presence. I guess the easy workaround is to say, "No, I don't have a computer," but fuck the NYPD, fuck Facebook, and fuck MySpace for fighting freedom wherever there's trouble.

Also, what about Jennifer Hudson? Red herring, obscurely à propos, or my own density?

Also, what about Jennifer Hudson?

My question exactly. Her photo accompanies the NY Post article, and I can't quite figure out why.

Oh wow, I read the article and that photo just passed by my eyes without registering. That is strange.

Her photo accompanies the NY Post article, and I can't quite figure out why.

It's the New York Post. The people who wrote the article probably can't figure out why her picture is there. But they included it anyway.

(And I skipped that photo too, thinking it was an ad or something.)

The Post is, uhhh, not one of our most distinguished local papers.

Sorry about the confusion.

Don't apologize! I knew it was a screw-up on their end. I just thought it was funny.

(Although after thinking about it more, it's less funny. Given that she's been in the news lately for family violence, I'm wondering if it wasn't as big of a mistake as I initially assumed it was. Maybe it was a golden opportunity to combine "OMG POLICE OUTRAGE" with "YAY CELEBRITY WORSHIP!" In which case, yuck.)