Appeals Court Says California's IMDb-Targeting 'Ageism' Law Is Unconstitutional

News

from the guess-what-your-tax-dollars-have-been-up-to,-Californians dept

The state of California has lost again in its attempt to punish IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) — and IMDb alone — for ageism perpetrated by [checks notes] movie studios who seem to refuse to cast actresses above a certain age in choice roles.

The law passed by the California legislature does one thing: prevents IMDb (and other sites, theoretically) from publishing facts about actors: namely, their ages. This stupid law was ushered into existence by none other than the Screen Actors Guild, capitalizing on a (failed) lawsuit brought against the website by an actress who claimed the publication of her real age cost her millions in Hollywood paychecks.

These beneficiaries of the First Amendment decided there was just too much First Amendment in California. To protect actors from studio execs, SAG decided to go after a third-party site respected for its collection of factual information about movies, actors, and everything else film-related.

The federal court handling IMDb’s lawsuit against the state made quick work of the state’s arguments in favor of very selective censorship. In only six pages, the court destroyed the rationale offered by the government’s finest legal minds. Here’s just a sampling of the court’s dismantling of this stupid law:

AB 1687 is a direct restriction on speech. The law prohibits certain speakers from publishing certain truthful information – information that, in many instances, is supplied by members of the public – because of concerns that a third party might use that information to engage in illegal conduct.

[…]

SAG-AFTRA contends that publication of facts about the ages of people in the entertainment industry can be banned because these facts “facilitate” age discrimination – an argument that, if successful, would enable states to forbid publication of virtually any fact.

The court also pointed out that the law targeting IMDb did nothing to address the underlying problem. In fact, it appeared the state wasn’t even addressing the right problem.

The defendants describe this as a problem of “age discrimination.” While that may be accurate on some level, at root it is far more a problem of sex discrimination. Movie producers don’t typically refuse to cast an actor as a leading man because he’s too old for the leading woman; it is the prospective leading woman who can’t get the part unless she’s much younger than the leading man. TV networks don’t typically jettison male news anchors because they are perceived as too old; it is the female anchors whose success is often dependent on their youth. This is not so much because the entertainment industry has a problem with older people per se. Rather, it’s a manifestation of the industry’s insistence on objectifying women, overvaluing their looks while devaluing everything else.  

The state appealed and the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court is no more impressed than the lower court. (h/t Courthouse News Service)

Content-based restrictions are generally First Amendment violations. So is the targeting of certain speakers and very specific speech emanating from them. From the opinion [PDF]:

On its face, AB 1687 restricts speech because of its content. It prohibits the dissemination of one type of speech: “date of birth or age information.” And, perhaps more troubling, it restricts only a single category of speakers. Thus, AB 1687 “impose[s] direct and significant restrictions” on a category of speech. It does not apply generally.

The state argued that this only affected subscribers to the site who paid to control the information contained in their profiles. The Appeals Court says this doesn’t matter. The law targets more than paid accounts. It forbids the dissemination of age information contributed by third parties.

The statute does not restrict only information misappropriated through the parties’ contractual relationship; it also prohibits the publication of information submitted by members of the public with no connection to IMDb. These restrictions apply regardless of whether an IMDb public profile existed independent of, or prior to, any contractual agreement between IMDb and an IMDbPro subscriber.

Even if money changes hands for paid accounts, the speech being targeted is not “commercial” speech. The site refers to itself as a “database” for a reason. And that nullifies the state’s argument.

These free, publicly available profiles are found in an “online database of information” and are surrounded by content that “includes information on cast, production crew, fictional characters, biographies, plot summaries, trivia and reviews.” The content is encyclopedic, not transactional.

The court also dispenses with the state’s argument that the publication of age information allows other parties to engage in illegal discrimination. And it does so by pointing out the obvious: the target of anti-discriminatory laws should be the entities that actually engage in discriminatory behavior.

If accepted, SAG’s interpretation of Pittsburgh Press would require this court to permit the restriction not only of speech that proposes an illegal activity but also facially inoffensive speech that a third-party might use to facilitate its own illegal conduct. […] Rather than restrict truthful speech, the typical “method of deterring unlawful conduct is to impose an appropriate punishment on the person who engages in it.”

The court also notes that the law appears to have been crafted specifically to prevent one site from publishing age information. That’s not what “narrowly-tailored” means in the First Amendment sense of the phrase. Narrow tailoring can impose speech restrictions that pass the First Amendment test. Targeting one site while leaving others free to publish what the law says IMDb cannot isn’t Constitutional.

On its face, AB 1687 restricts only websites like IMDb.com while leaving unrestricted every other avenue through which age information might be disseminated. This presents serious concerns here because AB 1687 appears designed to reach only IMDb.

[…]

AB 1687 is underinclusive because it fails to reach several potential sources of age information and protects only industry professionals who both subscribe to such service and who opt-in. This malady means that the statute is not narrowly tailored, and thus, is unconstitutional.

And that’s it for California’s extremely bad law.

Unlawful age discrimination has no place in the entertainment industry, or any other industry. But not all statutory means of ending such discrimination are constitutional. Here, we address content-based restrictions on speech and hold that AB 1687 is facially unconstitutional because it does not survive First Amendment scrutiny.

Even if the law had somehow survived a First Amendment challenge, it still wouldn’t have prevented studios from engaging in discriminatory hiring practices. If this was really the state’s concerns, it would have stepped up its regulation of the entertainment industry, rather than a single site that was unsuccessfully sued by an actress, who speculated IMDb’s publication of her age was the reason she wasn’t landing the roles she wanted.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 9th circuit, ab 1687, actors, age, california, free speech, imdb, truthful information
Companies: amazon, imdb, sag-aftra

One Of The World's Largest Web Tracking Companies Leaks Tons Of Personal Info From An Unsecured Server

Failures

from the so-happy-to-have-contributed-to-the-leak-by-using-the-internet dept

Advertisers want to know everything about you. So do sites that buy ad inventory and allow middlemen to let their trackers run free, tracing people from site to site, following them into their email inboxes, and tracking them across platforms and devices if need be.

BlueKai, owned by Oracle, deploys these pervasive trackers, sinking its hooks into a reported 1% of the world’s internet traffic. BlueKai is the kind of clever no one really respects. It’s more along the lines of “devious.” But it is very, very effective.

BlueKai relies on vacuuming up a never-ending supply of data from a variety of sources to understand trends to deliver the most precise ads to a person’s interests.

[…]

BlueKai… uses more covert tactics like allowing websites to embed invisible pixel-sized images to collect information about you as soon as you open the page — hardware, operating system, browser and any information about the network connection.

[…]

BlueKai can also tie your mobile web browsing habits to your desktop activity, allowing it to follow you across the internet no matter which device you use.

All the information BlueKai grabs has to go somewhere so it can be packaged and sold to marketers. Considering how much data BlueKai is able to obtain about the average internet user, you’d think it would place a premium on keeping this data secure — if not for the security of unsuspecting trackees, then to prevent its valuable stash from falling into a competitor’s hands.

Unfortunately for a whole lot of internet users, BlueKai doesn’t seem to believe this information — or the people who generated it — is worth protecting.

[F]or a time, that web tracking data was spilling out onto the open internet because a server was left unsecured and without a password, exposing billions of records for anyone to find.

Security researcher Anurag Sen found the database and reported his finding to Oracle through an intermediary — Roi Carthy, chief executive at cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock and former TechCrunch reporter.

TechCrunch reviewed the data shared by Sen and found names, home addresses, email addresses and other identifiable data in the database. The data also revealed sensitive users’ web browsing activity — from purchases to newsletter unsubscribes.

Oracle’s response was to blame “two companies” for “not properly configuring their services.” The two companies have not been named. Whoever these companies are, they collect data on a wide range of activities. TechCrunch examined the exposed data and found extensive records tied to individuals — an astonishing pool of data that even indicated if a tracked person’s device was in need of a software update. That’s on top of the wealth of purchase and internet history that linked people to purchases, web searches, and other activity. Sitting in with everything else was personally identifiable info like addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses.

Very few people want all of this information in the hands of marketers. (BlueKai says it strips identifiable info before handing it over to its ad-serving customers.) And they definitely don’t want it in the hands of people even more nefarious than ordained spyware pushers like BlueKai. The company has created a one-stop shop for phishers, stalkers, and identity thieves. And then it left the door unlocked for an undetermined amount of time.

Filed Under: cookies, data leak, personal info, privacy, security, tracking
Companies: bluekai, oracle

Police Memo Says Officers Raiding A Journalist's Home Were Instructed To Turn Off Their Body Cameras

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the police-cops-are-truly-an-inspiration-to-us-all dept

No one involved in the search of journalist Bryan Carmody’s house last May is innocent. Every new piece of information shows the San Francisco police officers — as well as any supervisors signing off on their paperwork — knew raiding a journalist’s home to find the source of a leaked autopsy report was going to treat the First Amendment and the state’s journalist shield law as a doormat.

The leak originated in the police department, which is where the SFPD should have begun and ended its investigation. Instead, officers misled a judge to get search warrants approved to search Carmody’s home and the contents of seized electronics. A few months later, all five warrants were being tossed by the five judges the cops lied to, who pointed out the SFPD had purposely withheld information that would have identified the warrants’ target as a journalist.

This led to a settlement being paid to Carmody nearly a year after the raid of his home. The city agreed taxpayers should give Bryan Carmody $369,000 for the violation of his rights and lawful protections by the city’s protectors and servants.

Three months later, more damaging news has surfaced, thanks to a public records request filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It looks as though a cover-up was in place from the initiation of the bullshit investigation. It wasn’t enough to lie to judges. Officers were instructed to create no impartial record of the raid of Carmody’s home.

A San Francisco Police Department memo obtained by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press reveals that police were instructed not to use body-worn cameras during last year’s high-profile raid of journalist Bryan Carmody’s home.

In the two-paragraph memo, which the Reporters Committee received through a public records request, Lieutenant Pilar Torres states that he told law enforcement officers conducting the raid “not to utilize our Department issued BWC’s for this operation” because the video footage could compromise the “confidential investigation.”

Whatever. Pretty much every investigation is a “confidential” investigation while it’s still underway. This wording means nothing. And video footage can be redacted if confidential sources might be revealed during idle pre-/post-raid chitchat. Keeping the cameras off allowed officers to carry out the search in a way that best benefited them, eliminating any chance of them being caught doing something they shouldn’t. (I mean beyond lying to judges, ignoring the state’s journalist shield law, walking all over the First Amendment…)

The SFPD refused to comment on this memo, again citing an ongoing investigation — this one targeting the SFPD officers involved in the unlawful raid of Carmody’s home. I imagine this investigation will continue for as long as it has to, ensuring SFPD reps don’t have to answer uncomfortable questions from journalists about their illegal abuse of other journalists.

And when everything has finally wrapped up and the lying officers safely returned to the streets, the report itself will vanish into the file cabinet in the basement until it is summoned by a public records lawsuit. That’s the way this will go, because every step of the way, the SFPD has refused to be honest about its decision to target a journalist — instead of its own officers — in order to hunt down a leak it knew was in-house.

Filed Under: body cameras, bryan carmody, evidence, san francisco, sfpd

New York City Residents Turn City's Traffic Cameras Into Cop-Watching Tools

Privacy

from the eyes-on-the-eyes dept

In New York City, the government’s surveillance tools are being turned against it. This is wonderful news for all citizens who still have the power to inject accountability and transparency into a system that wholeheartedly resists it. To keep tabs on misbehaving cops, activists are using the city’s cameras to watch their watchers. Lorenzo Franceshi-Bicchieari has the details for Motherboard.

A group of activists that runs a free community-owned internet service provider in New York City is now archiving hundreds of gigabytes of the city’s surveillance camera footage in an effort to keep police accountable.

The city’s Department of Transportation has several publicly-accessible cameras on its website. But it’s incapable of tracking anything on its own. Citizens can watch camera feeds, but unless they’re willing to camp out 24/7 to catch cops doing things they shouldn’t, there’s no permanent record of the incident. The activists are using a script to capture feeds and remove the transient nature of the system.

The project works like this: NYC Mesh has written a tool that archives an image from every public camera every time the feed gets updated, which can be between one and 30 seconds. The pictures are then uploaded on Google Drive in bundles organized by hourly folders that have a text file containing information about the camera ID, the borough it is in, and its specific location.

It appears the DOT is aware of this additional activity. Akash Patel, who is contributing to the NYC Mesh project, told Motherboard he’s noticed a significant slowdown at the site. Patel used to be able to download around 200 gigabytes of photos a day. It now appears the DOT is throttling connections to prevent mass downloading of camera images.

There isn’t a system out there that can’t be gamed. The government watches the cameras when it wants to keep tabs on citizens. Citizens have always had the option to ensure the watching goes both ways. A tool that automates the collection of footage is just the forward progress of technology.

License plate readers have removed the manual labor involved in running plates and/or surveilling people’s movements. Facial recognition tech has made it possible for officers to obtain anyone’s ID without actually approaching that person and demanding it from them. And reverse warrants allow cops to obtain a list of suspects and witnesses without actually having to canvass the area where a crime occurred.

Citizens should strive to streamline their watching of watchers whenever possible. Using the DOT’s cameras to keep an eye on errant cops just makes sense. After all, it’s their tax dollars that are being spent to outfit the city with hundreds of cameras and provide the infrastructure to support it.

Filed Under: nyc, surveillance, traffic cameras, watching police

Appeals Court Judge: Supreme Court Needs To Unfuck The Public By Rolling Back The Qualified Immunity Doctrine

Legal Issues

from the louder-for-the-cops-in-back dept

It’s not often you see a sitting judge condemn years of case law, especially when some of it is case law he likely helped convert into circuit precedent. But with everyone’s eyes currently on brutal cops and the system that has encouraged lawless behavior by law enforcement, very few people are sitting on the sidelines of the ongoing discussion. The killing of George Floyd by a police officer has resulted in demonstrations around the country, giving very few politicians, judges, and police representatives an opportunity to remain silent.

Perhaps the spiciest current take on qualified immunity — the Supreme Court-created legal doctrine that allows lots of cops to escape civil rights litigation — belongs to Judge Don Willett, who dissented from Fifth Circuit Appeals Court opinion with this devastating indictment of this extra right.

To some observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly.

[…]

Section 1983 meets Catch-22. Plaintiffs must produce precedent even as fewer courts are producing precedent. Important constitutional questions go unanswered precisely because those questions are yet unanswered. Courts then rely on that judicial silence to conclude there’s no equivalent case on the books. No precedent = no clearly established law = no liability. An Escherian Stairwell. Heads defendants win, tails plaintiffs lose.

This take, published by the Washington Post, features Fourth Circuit Appeals Court judge James A. Wynn Jr. calling out the system he helped perpetrate. Starting with George Floyd’s death, Wynn calls qualified immunity a “subversion” of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, which Congress erected to provide plaintiffs with an avenue to seek justice for rights violations committed by state officers. (h/t UnlawfulShield.com)

Qualified immunity has made seeking justice nearly impossible. That’s just the opening of his op-ed. From there, Wynn goes after the Supreme Court for continuously raising the bar plaintiffs must meet to establish a rights violation. (And even if they do establish one, it only helps plaintiffs who follow in their exact footsteps. It does nothing for them since it was not “clearly established” before this ruling.)

When the Supreme Court decided lower courts only needed to look at whether something was “clearly established,” it eliminated any examination of the Constitutionality of the act itself, allowing officers to walk away from rights violations because no other officer prior to them had violated rights in this exact way. Dismissals proceed determinations, eliminating the determinations needed to hold more cops accountable.

In effect, those who allege that police officers have used excessive force are trapped in a never-ending self-fulfilling prophecy: They cannot sue officers who harm them because the harmful conduct has never been “clearly established” as a constitutional violation in a factually similar case. But because so many cases are dismissed without addressing whether the challenged conduct was in fact a constitutional violation, it is rarely “clearly established” that there was a violation.

The Civil Rights Act was supposed to be a deterrent. And perhaps it was for a while. But the Supreme Court’s decision to conjure up a new legal protection for police officers neutered established law, turning courts into enablers of police misconduct. But SCOTUS makes the rules and the lower courts are obliged to follow them, even if the new rules invert Congressional intent.

Wynn doesn’t like it, but he’s in no position to do much about it, unfortunately. But he can point out that the Supreme Court’s qualified immunity construct screws the public the courts are supposed to protect from abuse perpetrated by other branches of the government. With QI, the courts are failing the public.

In my work as a judge, I follow the decisions of the Supreme Court because judges apply the law as it is, not as they believe it should be. The Framers embodied that concept by carefully and thoughtfully drafting each of the Constitution’s 7,600 words with the intention and expectation that the judiciary — the branch constitutionally entrusted and obligated to interpret the Constitution — would give effect to each and every one. We, as judges, must uphold that obligation. When we fail to do so, our communities bear the consequences.

Public statements like these may eventually move the Supreme Court to examine its qualified immunity case law and the decisions that have led to streamlined rejections of civil rights complaints. But for now, the nation’s top court still seems uninterested in reexamining its legal theory, much less the dozens of cases appealing immunity rulings piling up at its doorstep. At some point, it will be too much to ignore. But for now, it’s business as usual for the court that gave cops implicit permission to violate rights as long as they come up with creative ways to abuse the people they’re supposed to be serving.

Filed Under: 4th circuit, james wynn, police, qualified immunity

Federal Court Says ICE Can No Longer Enter New York Courthouses Just To Arrest Alleged Undocumented Immigrants

Legal Issues

from the why-isn't-ICE-abolished-yet? dept

Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York isn’t one to suffer the federal government’s many fools. Five years ago, Rakoff resigned from the DOJ’s rigged forensics committee — one supposedly formed to tell the DOJ what it was doing wrong when analyzing and testifying about forensic evidence. Rakoff received a personal call from the DOJ’s Deputy Attorney General who told him the Commission would not be examining the handling of pre-trial evidence. In other words, the Commission could not make any recommendations about disclosures about means and methodology used by forensic investigators to defendants prior to trial. Rakoff resigned, calling out the government for its “trial by ambush” practices.

More recently, Judge Rakoff demanded to know why every single one of the DEA’s 179 reverse sting operations targeted minorities. The stings involve the DEA telling targets a shipment of drugs is coming in and how to intercept it. There are no real drugs arriving and the DEA swoops in to arrest people for attempting to make off with nonexistent drugs. It then uses the imaginary amount of drugs to recommend prison sentences. Somehow, the fake amount always clears the bar needed to demand a mandatory minimum 15-year sentence.

Judge Rakoff is back and he’s still angry. He’s been handling litigation over ICE’s nasty practice of camping out at courthouses to arrest people for immigration violations. ICE figures this is a great place to find people because they’re compelled to show up. Immigration agents aren’t just picking up accused criminals. They’re also hauling off witnesses and crime victims. (h/t Courthouse News Service)

The lawsuit was filed by the New York State Attorney General, who sought an injunction blocking ICE agents from trolling state courthouses for undocumented immigrants. ICE has been blocked, and Judge Rakoff wastes no time excoriating the agency for its actions. From the opening of the decision [PDF]:

Recent events confirm the need for freely and fully functioning state courts, not least in the State of New York. But it is one thing for the state courts to try to deal with the impediments brought on by a pandemic, and quite another for them to have to grapple with disruptions and intimidations artificially imposed by an agency of the federal government in violation of long-standing privileges and fundamental principles of federalism and of separation of powers.

The ruling points out ICE never used to be this way. But Trump’s Executive Order, released shortly after he was elected, gave ICE the idea its earlier reluctance to look completely evil was going to limit its ability to aggressively pursue the foreign baddies the US president clearly wanted removed. Arrests at New York state courthouses leapt from 28 in 2016 to 161 in 2017. In 2019, the total was 173 arrests.

The judge says ICE has been completely disruptive to the judicial process.

Plaintiffs have also submitted substantial evidence indicating that these arrests, in addition to their impact on litigants, undermined the orderly functioning of New York courts themselves. Because ICE arrested aliens as they were entering court for scheduled proceedings, the agency forced courts to adjourn proceedings at the last minute, wasting scarce judicial time and resources. Similar results occurred when ICE failed to produce a criminal defendant for a scheduled conference. Even worse were those occasions when ICE conducted an arrest in the courthouse itself, resulting in “complete chaos,” as well as physical damage, Finally, ICE further undermined the interests of justice by arresting and deporting criminal defendants who were appearing in court in connection with their own cases, thereby ensuring that these defendants never faced justice for their crimes.

After discussing the Executive Order and previous laws governing ICE enforcement activities, Judge Rakoff says there’s nothing in any of it that suggests it’s lawful to interrupt court proceedings to perform arrests for civil violations, much less prevent crime victims and witnesses from participating in the justice system.

[F]or all the reasons previously explained, courthouse civil arrests are not lawful, because they contravene the common-law privilege, which the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] is best read to incorporate, that protects courts and litigants against these intimidating and disrupting intrusions. Regardless of what ICE may have believed, then, the Executive Order in fact did not compel the agency to undertake its vast broadening of the scope of courthouse arrests. To the contrary, by its use of the term “lawful,” it effectively forbade such unlawful intrusions.

These arrests are illegal, Judge Rakoff says. And ICE has offered nothing in defense of its increased presence in state courtrooms that says otherwise.

[ICE] has effectively offered no rationale other than its misguided reliance on the Executive Order for its consequential decision to expand its agents’ authority to conduct courthouse arrests. Although the Directive itself makes conclusory references to the “reduce[d] safety risks” of conducting arrests in a place where people are screened for firearms, and the “unwillingness of jurisdictions to cooperate with ICE in the transfer of custody of aliens from their prisons and jails,” the record contains no explanation of how the agency balanced any such benefits against the harms of the policy discussed above.

ICE is now frozen — blocked from entering New York courtrooms to grab potential detainees. Rakoff says the policy — as enacted by ICE since 2017 — is illegal. It not only prevents ICE from entering courtrooms to effect arrests but also prevents ICE from detaining people traveling to state courthouses as parties or witnesses to civil lawsuits. ICE will probably appeal this because it seems to believe inflicting misery is part of its directive, but, for now, it will have to limit itself to raiding dozens of other places to grab people suspected of civil violations.

Filed Under: courthouses, deportation, ice, immigration, jed rakoff, new york, undocumented

Report Says CIA's Hacking Unit — Home To The Vault 7 Exploits — Deployed Almost No Internal Security Measures

Failures

from the no-one-would-dare-cross-the-CIA...-would-they? dept

More details about the leak of CIA hacking tools are coming to light. And they’re not making the CIA look any more deserving of its “Intelligence” middle name.

The “Vault 7” leak detailed the CIA’s exploits — ones targeting cellphones and a variety of smart devices. Encryption still works, though, but devices have to remain uncompromised by exploits. Since they aren’t, encryption won’t stop agencies like the CIA from intercepting communications or inserting themselves into private conversations.

The prosecution of the accused Vault 7 leaker has been a nightmare of its own, with the government having difficulty pressing its case even as it uncovers evidence the leaker continued to leak sensitive information after being incarcerated.

The latest report, by Ellen Nakishima and Shane Harris of the Washington Post, shows the CIA was far more interested in developing tech weapons than ensuring its hoard of exploits remained in its possession.

The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers “prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,” according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the current director.

[…]

The October 2017 report by the CIA’s WikiLeaks Task Force, several pages of which were missing or redacted, portrays an agency more concerned with bulking up its cyber arsenal than keeping those tools secure. Security procedures were “woefully lax” within the special unit that designed and built the tools, the report said.

Information wants to be leaked, apparently. Maybe not innately, but when the culture says the best defense is a good offense, chances are sensitive tools and tech are going to go wandering off.

The CIA knows how exploitable pretty much everything is. That it deployed nearly no security measures to ensure its exploit stash remained on the premises is an indictment of every bureaucracy that thinks merely being a big government agency will deter people — both on the inside and outside — from screwing with it. According to this report, the CIA didn’t even employ bush-league, mom-and-pop-store-level security measures. There was no compartmentalization of tech exploits, no prevention of sharing of administration-level passwords, and no controls placed on use of removable media. There was also no monitoring of this network, which has prevented the CIA from determining the size of the breach or enumerating what was actually taken.

This crucial job was outsourced, which apparently contributed to the problem. The job was too important to be left undone. But the CIA apparently didn’t feel it was important enough to handle itself so it gave it to someone else, resulting in this:

The computer network was maintained by contractors, the former official added. “There was a misunderstanding between the people who ran the unit and people who ran and maintained the network.”

Give an agency more money than oversight and it can perform any task poorly. Exploits are truly useful but they’re only useful if they remain undisclosed and unpatched. Treating security cavalierly has paid off about as well as anyone outside the agency would have imagined. The tools were leaked. Only after that did anyone decide to check the latches on the Vault’s doors. Proactive is better than reactive, as any intel operative should know. While this may be a great way to inadvertently comply with the Vulnerability Equities Process, it’s no way to run an intel agency’s tech black ops program.

Filed Under: cia, hacking tools, security, vault 7, vault7

Trump's 'Safe Policing' Executive Order Does Nothing To Address The Root Causes Of Police Misconduct

Overhype

from the admin-staff-apparently-paid-by-the-word dept

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order in response to protests around the nation triggered by the cold-blooded killing of a black man by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

To be fair, it’s much more restrained than the law enforcement-focused directive Trump released shortly after being elected. That one — sent out under the misleading title “Law and Justice” — basically told America disliking cops was wrong and possibly per se Unamerican. Here’s a direct quote from the administration’s opening shitpost, which has since been disappeared from the White House’s site:

President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform and will support their mission of protecting the public. The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.

True to his word, President Trump has continued to honor America’s cops, even when America’s cops have shown they don’t deserve the public’s undying (or dying as it were…) support, much less the Leader of the Free World’s. But the administration must know the public isn’t buying what Trump is pushing on the cop front. It has buried this page and hit the archived version with a transitional popup directing users away from the Internet Archive’s saved versions. Nasty stuff indeed and something that shows the administration will back the blue the most when the blue isn’t embarrassing itself (and the administration) publicly.

Forced into doing something else than donning a Blue Lives Matter cheerleader outfit, Trump and his team have released a new executive order — one promising to reform police departments from the outside using [checks Order] some paperwork cops will probably never fill out completely.

First, the order says cops are mostly good:

Law enforcement officers provide the essential protection that all Americans require to raise their families and lead productive lives. The relationship between our fellow citizens and law enforcement officers is an important element in their ability to provide that protection. By working directly with their communities, law enforcement officers can help foster a safe environment where we all can prosper.

Then it says some (but not very many!) are bad:

Unfortunately, there have been instances in which some officers have misused their authority, challenging the trust of the American people, with tragic consequences for individual victims, their communities, and our Nation. All Americans are entitled to live with the confidence that the law enforcement officers and agencies in their communities will live up to our Nation’s founding ideals and will protect the rights of all persons. Particularly in African-American communities, we must redouble our efforts as a Nation to swiftly address instances of misconduct.

So, how does the administration plan to address these instances of misconduct? Through reporting, mostly. There’s nothing in here that’s even remotely daring — not like the Democrats likely-doomed plan to end qualified immunity and increase the likelihood of success when prosecuting bad cops.

The order says cops must have more credentials. Specifically named are de-escalation procedures and and use-of-force techniques. This doesn’t include a chokehold ban, but that’s likely because this sort of ban would have to be implemented at state level. However, it does make federal funding reliant on a chokehold ban, but it leaves a large loophole for cops to exploit.

…[P]rohibit the use of chokeholds — a physical maneuver that restricts an individual’s ability to breathe for the purposes of incapacitation — except in those situations where the use of deadly force is allowed by law.

Enter the “reasonably scared” cops who are too paralyzed in fear to do anything but choke someone to death. Not exactly the deterrent the current situation calls for.

But it does include a carrot, even if the administration isn’t willing to cut a switch. Local departments will only be able to obtain certain federal funds if they are implementing these directives or “in the process” of seeking approved credentialing. The latter suggests cop shops can get federal money just by filling out procedural paperwork in lieu of actual credential work in perpetuity (or until the next regime change anyway).

A database of police misconduct will also be constructed, but it will be of very limited public utility.

The database described in subsection (a) of this section shall include a mechanism to track, as permissible, terminations or de-certifications of law enforcement officers, criminal convictions of law enforcement officers for on-duty conduct, and civil judgments against law enforcement officers for improper use of force. The database described in subsection (a) of this section shall account for instances where a law enforcement officer resigns or retires while under active investigation related to the use of force.

Here are the caveats. It won’t be searchable. All information will be sanitized by the DOJ before publication, ensuring officers are separated from their misdeeds.

The Attorney General shall regularly and periodically make available to the public aggregated and anonymized data from the database…

Again, federal funds are tied to participation, but federal funds can be acquired in other ways that don’t involve police departments sending out aggregated data for DOJ rinsing every so often. And while police departments will continue to release mugshots and personal info of those only accused of crimes, citizens won’t be able to see even “anonymized” data on cops accused of crimes until they’re “afforded fair process.”

The order also won’t demand cops decouple themselves from social problems they’re ill-equipped to solve. There’s no defunding proposal here, only a requirement that cops may eventually have to participate in some more training on handling these problems.

The Attorney General shall, in consultation with the Secretary of Health and Human Services as appropriate, identify and develop opportunities to train law enforcement officers with respect to encounters with individuals suffering from impaired mental health, homelessness, and addiction…

The funding for this is discretionary but involves a tug-of-war between the Department of Health and Human Services and the DOJ. Who would win? The department the president thinks is partially responsible for the supposed coronavirus “panic?” Or the “law and order” side Trump always takes when the general sad state of policing is highlighted in the press?

The only confirmation you need that this mild “reform” effort won’t actually do any serious reforming is the Sergeants Benevolent Association’s (SBA) show of support for the new executive order. The administration burned a few hundred words budging the dial hardly at all and the SBA — backer of the worst of the worst NYPD officers — is happy to hear it. The SBA “commends” the White House for invoking a police-friendly dialog that suggests cops aren’t really bad, they’re just a little under-trained and underfunded.

This won’t change anything. And that’s exactly what this administration wants. The Trump Administration realized doing nothing wasn’t an option. So it did as little as possible. Cops are still safe from accountability and transparency. All that hangs in the balance are unenumerated federal funds they can probably get by without. Business as usual with the veneer of change: that’s the DC way.

Filed Under: donald trump, executive order, police, police brutality, safe policing

Minneapolis City Council Votes Unanimously To Disband Its Police Department

News

from the if-you-want-to-kill-people,-you'll-have-to-do-it-on-your-own-time dept

In response to one of its own officers killing an unarmed, cuffed black man by kneeling on his neck until he was long past dead, the Minneapolis City Council pledged to defund the police department. It did this as the city burned and protests erupted around the nation. It maintained this pledge as city schools said “no thanks” to offers of assistance from police officers seeking to bring this level of violence to public schools and state colleges.

At that point, it was all talk. But it was talk the Council could back up. It had a veto-proof majority willing to disassemble the system that hadn’t worked for years and replace it with something new. But it was still talk until it was put into action. And it has now been put into action, as Scott McClallen reports for The Center Square.

The Minneapolis City Council unanimously passed a resolution intending to disband their police department and create a new model of public safety in response to the death of George Floyd.

The resolution states the Council will start a year-long process of research and community engagement to discover a replacement.

City Council President Lisa Bender said that the resolution “advances our shared commitment to transformative change in how Minneapolis approaches public safety so that every member of our community can be truly safe.

How will this work? It’s still up in the air. But there’s a lot to work with. Cops are asked to police everything, including many things they aren’t specifically trained to handle, like misbehaving school kids, people suffering mental health crises, and a variety of other societal issues like homelessness, interpersonal relationships, and wayward house pets.

The police department hoovers up an inordinate amount of the city’s annual budget, leaving it little to address underlying causes of crime and providing almost no support for city residents who need it most. Instead of help, they get guys with guns and a shitload of training that tells them all hand movements are furtive and any failure to comprehend conflicting shouted orders a sign of violent resistance.

The resolution [PDF] lays it out very clearly: Minneapolis residents aren’t getting their money’s worth from their local law enforcement agency.

Whereas, the adopted 2020 budget allocated $193 million to the Minneapolis Police Department, which represents over 36% of the City’s General Fund of $532.3 million, and is more than twice as much as the combined City budgets for workforce development, building affordable housing, homeownership support, small business support programs, environmental sustainability, race equity, arts and culture, violence prevention, family and early childhood support, youth development, senior services, lead poisoning prevention, infectious disease prevention, and protection of civil rights…

Render unto Cop Caesar 36%. And unto man whatever is left over. Under-funding social services to ensure cops have the budget to beat every problem into submission isn’t working. It hasn’t worked for years. But it took three cops — one with his knee on a black man’s neck — to drive that point home. The city can’t afford to wait around for the department to fix itself. It has no desire to do this. So, the city will move forward without the department and make the changes the PD has resisted for decades.

While still a little short on details, the resolution does lay down the next steps in the defunding process. It does not involve disbanding the PD, but it does severely curtail its responsibilities. A lot of committee work will precede the actual reformation of local law enforcement.

Research and engagement to inform the potential creation of a new City Department of Community Safety with a holistic approach to community safety, including a review and analysis of relevant existing models and programs and practices that could be applied in Minneapolis;

Recommendations that advance the work of the 911 working group and other strategies for transitioning work of the Minneapolis Police Department to alternative, more appropriate responses to community requests for help and identifying the resources needed to perform this work in City departments, other agencies, and/or community partners while the work of creating a new public safety system is in progress…

Hopefully, this means calls for help won’t always be greeted by cops trained to view almost everything as a threat. With some budget rerouted to social services, perhaps there won’t be as many calls for help, since there will actually be a safety net for residents whose health and well being used to be a law enforcement problem.

The unanimous vote is veto-proof. This is important because the city’s mayor still believes the police department can be “reformed” through less drastic measures. This argument has been advanced without a shred of evidence being supplied by the city’s leader. Reform can work, but most reform efforts end up being neutered by police unions and legislators unwilling to look “soft” on crime. It’s unlikely to work as well as the council’s proposal, which trims the PD back to its law enforcement roots and reroutes the leftover money towards improving the lives of underserved communities.

This is a momentous event in the city’s history. Unfortunately, it took an untold number of abuses by police officers to make it happen, culminating in the very disturbing killing of a resident by cops in broad daylight in front of several cameras to make the city take its problem seriously. Hopefully, other locales won’t wait for daylight murders by cops to address their own law enforcement problems.

Filed Under: defund the police, minneapolis, police