Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here

from the gaming-like-it's-1925 dept

So far, we've featured ~THE GREAT GATSBY~ and The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game in this series of posts about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. Today, we move on the pair of games that were tied as winners in the Best Remix category: Art Apart by Ryan Sullivan and There Are No Eyes Here by jukel.

Both games were obvious contenders for the category, and ultimately it proved too difficult to choose one over the other, because they are so intriguingly similar yet completely different. Both could be described as "art puzzles", and both remix multiple public domain works, but neither clearly rises above the other.

Art Apart is the more straightforward of the two: it's just a plain old jigsaw puzzle game using a series of paintings from 1925 and a fairly unpolished interface. But while this meant our judges didn't expect much from it at first glance, it proved to be a very pleasant surprise: carefully made, easy to use, employing a great selection of paintings complemented by public domain background music, all put together with an elegance that drew people in and had them solving entire puzzles when all they intended to do was poke around for a few minutes. In the process, they got to spend some time closely examining and appreciating five paintings that entered the public domain this year.

There Are No Eyes Here is the more abstract of the two games, which is fitting since it focuses on a single artist: Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract art. Kandinsky's works made an appearance in one of last year's winners, which explored a series of paintings he created in 1924, and this game picks up the following year with five Kandinsky paintings from 1925. While Art Apart is a traditional jigsaw puzzle, There Are No Eyes Here is about custom-made manipulations of its subject works: the player finds the elements of each painting that can be clicked to trigger animations in which Kandinsky's abstract shapes and forms begin shifting around, eventually unlocking the next painting in the series. Our judges noted that, to the artistically-inexperienced, the game was a perfect invitation to study this seminal artist's work with a level of attention to detail they might otherwise never have given it.

So there you have it: two games, both remixing multiple paintings and turning them into puzzles, both doing it completely different ways. One more traditional, one more abstract, both successful at making the player take time to admire and enjoy some of the 1925 work that now belongs to us all — and both well deserving of the Best Remix award.

Play Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to both designers for the win! We'll be back next week with another game jam winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, public domain, winner spotlight

The Best Summary Of Australia's News Link Tax / 'Bargaining Code'

from the the-loser,-as-always,-is-you dept

I've been somewhat amazed at the response to Facebook's decision in Australia to first block news links, in response to a dangerous new law, and then to cave in and cut deals with news organizations to pay for links. Most amazing to me is that otherwise reasonable people in Australia got very angry at me, insisting that I was misrepresenting the tax. They keep insisting it's not a tax, and that it's a "competition" response to "unfair bargaining power." Except, as I've discussed previously, there's nothing to bargain over when you should never have to pay for links. The links are free. There's no bargaining imbalance, because there's nothing to bargain over. And, it's clearly a tax if the only end result is that Google and Facebook have to fork over money because the government tells them to. That's... a tax.

Anyway, that's why I'm happy to see The Juice Media, an Australian outfit that is famous for making hilarious "Honest Government Ads", usually for the Australian government (but sometimes for elsewhere) has put out a new "ad" about the link tax in which they explain how it was a fight to take money from one set of giant rich companies, and give it to another set of giant rich companies, and not to do anything useful in between:

It's worth watching. It also highlights some of the other awful aspects of the "code" which will give news organizations more access to data, as well as advance notice of algorithmic changes that no one else gets -- allowing them to better hijack attention away from anyone else. The whole deal is dangerous and corrupt, and no one should be supporting it.

Filed Under: australia, bargaining code, honest government ads, link tax, rupert murdoch
Companies: facebook, google

Oracle, Which Promised To Protect TikTok User Data From China, Helps Chinese Law Enforcement Snarf Through Lots Of Private Data

from the oh-look-at-that dept

As you'll recall, last summer there was a whole performative nonsense thing with then President Trump declaring TikTok to be a national security threat (just shortly after some kids on TikTok made him look silly by reserving a million tickets to a Trump rally they never intended to attend). Trump and his cronies insisted that TikTok owner ByteDance had to sell the US operations of TikTok to an American firm. The whole rationale about this was the claim -- unsupported by any direct evidence -- that TikTok was a privacy risk, because it was owned by a firm based in Beijing, and that firm likely had connections to the Chinese government (as do basically all large Chinese firms). But how was that privacy risk any worse than pretty much any other company? No one ever seemed to be able to say.

Eventually, after Trump blocked both Microsoft and Walmart from doing the deal, he "approved" a non-sale, but "hosting" deal with Oracle, whose founder/chair, Larry Ellison, and CEO, Safra Catz, were both big Trump supporters. It quickly came out that TikTok's investors deliberately went hunting for a company that they knew Trump liked, and that's why they asked Oracle.

But, part of the announcement of the "deal" was that Oracle would make sure that US TikTok users had their data protected, and that Oracle would keep that data outside the hands of the Chinese government. That seemed somewhat rich, considering that Oracle's initial rise to being a tech giant was built almost entirely on its close connections to the US government, and specifically the intelligence agencies. But it's become even more rich now that the Intercept reports that Oracle actually has a lucrative business helping repressive law enforcement in China do surveillance work. The long story is absolutely full of totally shocking -- but somehow not surprising -- details. It starts off by noting that Oracle hosted a presentation on its own website, literally describing how it helped police in Liaoning province better sort through all of the surveillance data they collected:

Police in China's Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense of it all, they needed sophisticated analytic software. Enter American business computing giant Oracle, whose products could find relevant data in the police department’s disparate feeds and merge it with information from ongoing investigations.

So explained a China-based Oracle engineer at a developer conference at the company’s California headquarters in 2018. Slides from the presentation, hosted on Oracle’s website, begin with a “case outline” listing four Oracle “product[s] used” by Liaoning police to “do criminal analysis and prediction.” One slide shows Oracle software enabling Liaoning police to create network graphs based on hotel registrations and track down anyone who might be linked to a given suspect. Another shows the software being used to build a police dashboard and create “security case heat map[s].” Apparent pictures of the software interface show a blurred face and various Chinese names. The concluding slide states that the software helped police, whose datasets had been “incomprehensible,” more easily “trace the key people/objects/events” and “identify potential suspect[s]” — which in China often means dissidents.

And, yes, if you're wondering, apparently Oracle is helping police in Xingjiang, where there has been ongoing genocide happening against Uyghur Muslims.

In marketing materials, Oracle said that its software could help police leverage information from online comments, investigation records, hotel registrations, license plate information, DNA databases, and images for facial recognition. Oracle presentations even suggested that police could use its products to combine social media activity with dedicated Chinese government databases tracking drug users and people in the entertainment industry, a group that includes sex workers. Oracle employees also promoted company technology for China’s “Police Cloud,” a big data platform implemented as part of the emerging surveillance state.

Several Oracle materials imply that the company has gone substantially further than marketing to Chinese police, which operate as part of the country’s Ministry of Public Security: One presentation detailing Oracle’s database and data security products contains a slide titled “Oracle and the national defense industry.” That title is followed by a list of multiple Chinese military entities, including the People’s Liberation Army, China National Nuclear Corporation, and China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. Defense entities are also the apparent target for two additional Oracle Chinese-language presentations, the most recent of which is dated 2015, and for events called the “People’s Armed Police Force–Oracle Cloud Computing Exchange Forum” and the “Oracle Xi’an Aviation and National Defense Industry Informatization Seminar” listed in Chinese on Oracle’s site.

Yikes.

So the whole blasted pitch about taking control over TikTok was about keeping the data away from the Chinese, while at the very same time, the same company is helping Chinese law enforcement scan through tons of surveillance data to better suppress its people?

If you're wondering how Oracle responded to the report, it had a spokesperson claim that the examples in these documents were "theoretical" pitch decks to show how the technology could be used, not how they were being used. But as the article notes, that appears to not be true, and the presentation makes it clear that it's talking about an actual case study, and even points out that the police supplied their own data, which they then analyzed with Oracle's technology.

The article is quite long, but turns up a shocking number of smoking guns:

Some of the Chinese-language presentations on Oracle’s site are labeled “CONFIDENTIAL,” despite being publicly available. It is easy to see why someone might have wanted to keep them hidden. Taken together, they show an extreme willingness to aid in the construction of the surveillance state. One Chinese-language presentation, for example, promotes “Oracle’s recommendation: a more complete platform to meet the needs of public security big data processing.”

[....]

Another pitch depicts a broad array of sensitive citizen data being converted into ones and zeros, including DNA, mental illness records, and other medical information. Still other documents from China boast that Oracle technology can help police trawl internet activity to “analyze potential suspected criminal behavior among hundreds of millions of netizens,” capture license plate data from “tens of thousands of cameras,” and analyze call records to build out criminal networks, then link them to fingerprint and facial recognition images.

Of course, it's not clear if the Oracle TikTok deal will ever happen. It seems that no one was much interested in it beyond the headlines, and the Biden administration doesn't seem keen on enforcing the executive order that created the need for Oracle to step in. And, honestly, after reading this report, perhaps that's much better for the privacy of Americans using TikTok.

Filed Under: china, law enforcement, police, privacy
Companies: bytedance, oracle, tiktok

India's New Cyber Law Goes Live: Subtracts Safe Harbor Protections, Adds Compelled Assistance Demands For Intermediaries

from the out-with-the-good,-in-with-the-bad dept

New rules for social media companies and other hosts of third-party content have just gone into effect in India. The proposed changes to India's 2018 Intermediary Guidelines are now live, allowing the government to insert itself into content moderation efforts and make demands of tech companies some simply won't be able to comply with.

Now, under the threat of fines and jail time, platforms like Twitter (itself a recent combatant of the Indian government over its attempts to silence people protesting yet another bad law) can be held directly responsible for any "illegal" content it hosts, even as the government attempts to pay lip service to honoring long-standing intermediary protections that immunized them from the actions of their users.

Here's a really bland and misleading summary of the new requirements from the Economic Times, India's most popular business newspaper:

The guidelines propose additional responsibilities on social media companies. These include verifying users through mobile numbers, tracing origin of messages required by a court order and building automated tools to identify child pornography and terror-related content. All these requirements come under the ambit of under due diligence.

This sounds like pretty reasonable stuff. But it isn't because it goes much farther than what's summarized here and turns a whole lot of online discourse into potentially illegal content.

(a) belongs to another person and to which the user does not have any right to;
(b) is grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, libellous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling, or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever;
(c) harm minors in any way;
(d) infringes any patent, trademark, copyright or other proprietary rights;
(e) violates any law for the time being in force;
(f) deceives or misleads the addressee about the origin of such messages or communicates any information which is grossly offensive or menacing in nature;
(g) impersonates another person;
(h) contains software viruses or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer resource;
(i) threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order, or causes incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence or prevents investigation of any offence or is insulting any other nation.
(j) threatens public health or safety; promotion of cigarettes or any other tobacco products or consumption of intoxicant including alcohol and Electronic Nicotine Delivery System (ENDS) & like products that enable nicotine delivery except for the purpose & in the manner and to the extent, as may be approved under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 and Rules made thereunder;
(k) threatens critical information infrastructure.

The new mandates demand platforms operating in India proactively scan all uploaded content to ensure it complies with India's laws.

The Intermediary shall deploy technology based automated tools or appropriate mechanisms, with appropriate controls, for proactively identifying and removing or disabling public access to unlawful information or content.

This obligation is not only impossible to comply with (and is prohibitively expensive for smaller platforms and sites/online forums that don't have access to AI tools), it opens up platforms to prosecution simply for being unable to do the impossible. And complying with this directive to implement this demand undercuts the Safe Harbour protections granted to intermediaries by the Indian government.

If you're moderating all content prior to it going "live," it's no longer possible to claim you're not acting as an editor or curator. The Indian government grants Safe Harbour to "passive" conduits of information. The new law pretty much abolishes those because complying with the law turns intermediaries from "passive" to "active."

Broader and broader it gets, with the Indian government rewriting its "national security only" demands to cover "investigation or detection or prosecution or prevention of offence(s)." In other words, the Indian government can force platforms and services to provide information and assistance within 72 hours of notification to almost any government agency for almost any reason.

This assistance includes "tracing the origin" of illegal content -- something that may be impossible to comply with since some platforms don't collect enough personal information to make identification possible. Any information dug up by intermediaries in support of government action must be retained for 180 days whether or not the government makes use of it.

More burdens: any intermediary with more than 5 million users must establish permanent residence in India and provide on-call service 24/7. Takedown compliance has been accelerated from 36 hours of notification to 24 hours.

Very few companies will be able to comply with most of these directives. No company will be able to comply with them completely. And with the government insisting on adding more "eye of the beholder" content to the illegal list, the law encourages pre-censorship of any questionable content and invites regulators and other government agencies to get into the moderation business.

Filed Under: censorship, content moderation, filters, free speech, general monitoring, india, intermediary liability, social media

Daily Deal: The Learn to Code 2021 Bundle

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Learn to Code 2021 Bundle has 13 courses to help you kickstart your coding career. Courses cover Ruby on Rails, C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and more. You'll also learn about data science and machine learning. The bundle is on sale for $35.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: Recent Examples Of Misunderstanding Context

from the masnick's-law dept

I've said over and over and over again that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and one of the biggest reasons for this is that it's difficult to understand context. Indeed, I've heard that some content moderation policies explicitly suggest that moderators don't try to take context into account. This is not because companies don't think it's important, but the recognition that understanding the context behind every bit of content, would make the process so slow as to be absolutely useless. Yes, it would be great if every content moderator had the time and resources to understand the context of every tweet or Facebook post, but the reality is that we'd then need to employ basically every human being alive to be researching context. Low level content moderators tend to only have a few seconds to make decisions on content, or the entire process slows to a crawl, and then the media will slam those companies for leaving "dangerous" content up too long. So tradeoffs are made, and often that means that understanding context is a casualty of the process. And, of course, that leads to some ridiculous (and hilarious) results. Here are three recent ones that came across my radar. First, someone marketing a tabletop roleplaying game discovered that when they tried to purchase ads on Facebook and Instagram marketing their TTRPG, they had their entire account shut down because they used the word "supplement."

The confusion here is not hard to figure out. First off, lots of roleplaying games have "supplements," or variations/adjustments/add-ons. However... "supplements" also refer to dietary supplements, a market filled with often highly questionable things that people put into their bodies with promises of... well... all sorts of things. And, making matters even worse (as I just discovered!) there's actually a dietary supplement called "RPG" so the Google searches are, well... complex.

And, to make matters even more complex, you may recall that a decade ago, the Justice Department got Google to hand over $500 million for displaying ads for non-approved drugs and supplements. So, I'm sure that both Facebook and Google are extra sensitive to any advertisement that might contain sketchy drugs and supplements -- and thus the rules are designed to be overly aggressive. To them, it's worst case, you shut down an account advertising a role playing game... which is better than having the DOJ show up and confiscate $500 million.

That's not to say this is a good result -- but to explain what likely happened on the back end.

Next up, we have Kate Bevan, who wrote about another content moderation fail on Facebook:

Again, the context here seems fairly obvious. Commenting about a picture of a cat and saying "beautiful puss" is... um... referring to a cat. Not anything else. But, again, in these days when companies are getting sued for all kinds of "bad" things online, you can see why a content moderator having to make a decision in seconds might get this one wrong.

Finally, we've got one that hits a little closer to home. Many of you may be familiar with one of our prolific commenters, That Anonymous Coward (or TAC, for short) who also is a prolific Twitter user. Or was until about a week ago when his account got suspended. Why did his account get suspended? Because of a reply he made to me! Chris Messina had tweeted following the news that Facebook had blocked news links in Australia, by noting that angry Australians were giving bad reviews of Facebook's app in the Australian Apple iOS App Store. And I tweeted, wondering if anyone actually looks at the reviews for apps like Facebook:

If you look below that tweet there are a few replies, including this:

What kind of reply could have possibly violated the rules? Well, here is the offending tweet from TAC:

Reading that in context, it's not at all difficult to see that TAC is mocking people who believe all of those nonsense conspiracy theories. But, right now, Twitter is extra sensitive to conspiracy theories on the site, in part because reporters are highlighting each and every "Q" believer who is allowed to spout nonsense as if it's a moral failing on the part of the companies themselves. So it's perhaps not surprising, even if ridiculous in context, for Twitter to say a tweet like that must violate its rules, and demand that TAC remove it, claiming it violated rules against spreading "misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19."

In this case, TAC appealed... and was (surprisingly quickly) told that his case was reviewed... and the appeal was rejected.

That feels a bit ridiculous, but again highlights the impossibility of content moderation at scale. Technically TAC's tweet is repeating the kinds of disinformation that social media websites are getting attacked over. Of course, it should seem fairly obvious to anyone reading the tweet that he's mocking the people who make those false conspiracy theory claims. But, how do you write a policy that says "unless they're referring to it sarcastically"? Because once you have that in place, and then you get to a point where you have terrible, terrible people saying terrible, terrible things, and then when called on it, they claim they were just saying it "sarcastically."

Indeed, when the "style guide" for the Nazi propaganda site "The Daily Stormer" was leaked, it explicitly told writers to write horrific things with plausible deniability: "it should come across as half-joking." And later in the same document: "The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not."

That's not to excuse the decisions made here, but to explain how we get to this kind of absurd result. Obviously, it seems to me that all three of these cases are "mistakes" in content moderation, but they're the kind of mistakes that get made when you have to do moderation on millions of pieces of content per day, in a short period of time, or else governments around the world threaten to impose draconian rules or massive fines on you.

Filed Under: content moderation, content moderation at scale, masnick's impossibility law
Companies: facebook, twitter

Study Shows California Telcos Are Simply Letting Their Networks Fall Apart

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

On the one hand, it's understandable that US phone companies companies don't want to maintain aging copper phone networks in the wake of sagging usage. On the other hand, traditional phone networks are very much still in use (especially among vulnerable elderly populations), many of these DSL lines remain the only option consumers can get thanks to spotty US broadband deployment, and much of the phone and DSL infrastructure was heavily subsidized by American taxpayers. Oh, and as Texas just realized, many of these older copper phone lines still work during disasters, when internet voice services don't.

As such, there are numerous regulations that prevent these companies from just severing these lines completely. But US telcos, tired of traditional phone and residential broadband service, want to shift focus. So instead of a responsible transition plan (one that might mandate even coverage of wireless or fiber broadband upgrades they don't want to perform), many of these companies are simply letting the networks fall apart. And refusing to repair the lines when they fail. In large part because they know US state and federal regulators will (usually) be to chickenshit to actually do anything about it.

In California, a report requested by the government found the same thing throughout the state. The April 2019 report, only just released after regional incumbents AT&T and Frontier tried to block it, found that as customer rates skyrocketed for both AT&T and Frontier, both companies increasingly cut back on infrastructure upgrades, repairs, and maintenance over the last decade. The report also found that AT&T has increasingly engaged in "redlining," or the act of failing to meaningfully upgrade lower income and minority communities at the same rate as more affluent neighborhoods:

"...AT&T's investment policies have tended to favor higher-income communities, and have thus had a disproportionate impact upon the state's lowest income areas. For example, the weighted average 2010 median annual household income for... areas that had been upgraded with fiber optic feeder facilities to support broadband services was $72,024, vs. only $60,795 for wire centers without such upgrades. Using 2010 US Census data, we find a clear inverse relationship between household income and all of the principal service quality metrics. Wire centers serving areas with the lowest household incomes tend to have the highest trouble report rates, the longest out-of-service durations, the lowest percentages of outages cleared within 24 hours, and the longest times required to clear 90 percent of service outages. The opposite is the case for the highest income communities."

This lack of reliability of infrastructure, combined with steadily skyrocketing prices, runs in stark contrast to what we should actually be doing in the face of a global pandemic and climate destabilization. And of course it's far from the first time these two companies have been found to be utterly neglecting their networks. It's why a 90 year old man just had to take out a $10,000 newspaper ad just to get AT&T to finally upgrade his aging DSL line to fiber. And it's far worse in places like West Virginia, where Frontier's apathy toward its own customers (or basic upgrades and maintenance) is fairly legendary.

Again, this is what natural monopolies do in the face of limited competition and regulatory capture. Obtain a regional monopoly, do the bare minimum to keep that business afloat (while you focus on other ambitions like mindless media mergers), then throw a few thousand in PAC donations at local politicians so they pretend that none of this is happening.

The answer now is: what will California regulators actually do about it? And even in one of the most "progressive" states in the nation, the answer will be jack shit. It's fairly trivial for AT&T and Frontier to simply claim these networks don't matter because they're old, or to try (as AT&T does in the link above) to insist any data that suggests they're anything less than the pinnacle of corporate responsibility is fraudulent.

Filed Under: california, competition, copper networks, decay, infrastructure
Companies: at&t, frontier

Fifth Circuit Says Tasing A Person Soaked In Gasoline And Setting Them On Fire Isn't An Unreasonable Use Of Force

from the fucking-system-burns-him-to-the-ground dept

So, here's where we're at in the Fifth Circuit: cops can literally set a person on fire and walk away from it.

Judge Don Willett's incendiary comments opposing qualified immunity notwithstanding, civil rights litigation still remains a sucker bet in the Fifth Circuit, where cops are granted judicial forgiveness more frequently than they are in any other judicial circuit.

Here's the latest depressing read from the Appeals Court, which can't talk itself into removing this shield from officers who tased a suicidal man after he covered himself in gasoline, turning a potential suicide into an actual homicide.

Some cops seem to feel suicide threats should be converted into self-fulfilling prophecies. The cops involved here -- all Arlington, Texas police officers -- turned a distress call from a family member into the very thing the family members were hoping to prevent. From the opinion [PDF]:

On July 10, 2017, Gabriel Anthony Olivas called 911 and reported that his father was threatening to kill himself and burn down their house. Corporal Ray, Sergeant Jefferson, and Officers Scott, Elliott, and Guadarrama of the Arlington Police Department responded.

Behold the thin blue line that stands between suicide and threats to burn a house down.

Guadarrama and Elliott, at least, and maybe Jefferson as well, noticed that Olivas was holding some object that appeared as though it might be a lighter. Guadarrama, followed in short succession by Jefferson, fired his taser at the gasoline-soaked man, causing him to burst into flames. Corporal Ray and Officer Scott arrived at the scene at about this time. When they entered the house, they found Olivas engulfed in flames.

The fire spread from Olivas to the walls of the bedroom, and the house eventually burned to the ground. The officers at the scene were able to evacuate the family members who had remained in the house, but Olivas was badly burned and later died from his injuries.

With results like these, it's a wonder why anyone bothers calling the cops. If the family wanted their father dead and their house burned down, they could have accomplished that by doing nothing. Hell, they might possibly have prevented it. After all, the family had more at stake and would have been more willing to de-escalate. But the cops got involved and the rest is QI history.

The question comes down to what a "reasonable" officer would have done under these circumstances. But the court decides in favor of the less-reasonable officers, despite them being warned against doing this by other, more reasonable officers at the scene.

Upon entering, Officer Guadarrama detected the odor of gasoline. A woman directed the officers to a corner bedroom on the east side of the house. There they found Gabriel Eduardo Olivas (“Olivas”) leaning against a wall and holding a red gas can. After turning his flashlight on Olivas, Officer Elliott allegedly shouted to Sergeant Jefferson and Officer Guadarrama, “If we tase him, he is going to light on fire.”

The court says it doesn't matter than the man was burned to death as a result of being tased. The only thing that matters is whether or not he deserved to be tased. The court says the dead man earned his tasing. The unfortunate byproduct of his tasing -- his death, the family home burning down -- can't be held against the officers who set him on fire.

Olivas posed a substantial and immediate risk of death or serious bodily injury to himself and everyone in the house. He was covered in gasoline. He had been threatening to kill himself and burn down the house. He appeared to be holding a lighter. At that point, there were at least six other people in the house, all of whom were in danger.

Under this line of thought, the force deployment was reasonable. That at least one other officer on the scene felt otherwise doesn't matter.

The fact that Olivas appeared to have the capability of setting himself on fire in an instant and, indeed, was threatening to do so, meant that the officers had no apparent options to avoid calamity. If, reviewing the facts in hindsight, it is still not apparent what might have been done differently to achieve a better outcome under these circumstances, then, certainly, we, who are separated from the moment by more than three years, cannot conclude that Guadarrama or Jefferson, in the exigencies of the moment, acted unreasonably.

Even if it could reasonably be foreseen that tasing a man covered in gasoline would result in serious injury or death, it was not unreasonable to tase him because of the threat he posed. That following through on this act turned the threat into a reality apparently has no bearing on the outcome. The only thing that matters is whether it was legally permissible to tase him. Everything else is just noise, according to the Fifth Circuit.

Filed Under: 5th circuit, police, police brutality, setting people on fire, unreasonable use of force