DEA Wants In On The Fun, Asks DOJ To Give It Permission To Surveil George Floyd Protests

Privacy

from the GTFO-drug-warriors dept

I thought there was still a Drug War being fought in this county. I guess it’s not as important as billions of annual budget dollars would indicate it is. When the going has gotten mildly tougher for US law enforcement agencies, the DEA is there to help out by placing people engaged in First Amendment activities under surveillance.

The demonstrations over George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers have provoked all sorts of responses from government entities. The DEA’s is one of the worst. As usual, it’s FOIA terrorist Jason Leopold who’s managed to obtain a document the DEA probably didn’t want shared publicly.

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been granted sweeping new authority to “conduct covert surveillance” and collect intelligence on people participating in protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to a two-page memorandum obtained by BuzzFeed News.

Floyd’s death “has spawned widespread protests across the nation, which, in some instances, have included violence and looting,” the DEA memo says. “Police agencies in certain areas of the country have struggled to maintain and/or restore order.” The memo requests the extraordinary powers on a temporary basis, and on Sunday afternoon a senior Justice Department official signed off.

The DEA has always been able to engage in domestic surveillance. Most of its targets reside in the United States. Domestic surveillance to engage in drug-related investigations isn’t really the problem here. (This is not to say the DEA’s surveillance efforts aren’t problematic.) This is the DOJ saying it’s okay for an agency that’s supposed to be shutting down drug operations to start snooping on protesters. Even if there has been some criminal activity occurring during demonstrations, in recent days this has been the exception, rather than the rule.

The memo [PDF] notes that the law says the DEA’s law enforcement powers are supposed to be limited to drug enforcement activity. But there’s always a loophole. And that’s what the DOJ is using. The memo admits the “federal crimes being committed in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death are largely not drug-related,” but says the Attorney General can re-task the DEA as the DOJ sees fit. That’s how the DOJ sees it. No further details are discussed in the memo. And the DOJ has nothing to say about what percentage of observed federal crimes to date might have anything to do with drugs.

It appears no one in the DOJ felt the DEA’s assistance was necessary. In other words, the DOJ did not ask the DEA if it would be willing to expend its resources surveilling protests for non-drug-related crime. The DEA asked to do this, suggesting it has some underutilized resources that should be budgeted out of the agency when the next appropriations bill comes up for a vote.

It doesn’t appear many DEA agents think they should be involved in surveilling protests. The DEA only needed 25 volunteers to do god knows what with their drug investigation expertise. It couldn’t get them — not without stripping the tasking of its voluntary nature.

Two sources knowledgeable about the deployment said 15 people from the DEA’s elite Special Response Team and 10 special agents were chosen. Not all 25 volunteered, the sources said.

Kruskall’s email did not describe what specific tasks the detachment would be given. It added that if insufficient numbers of agents volunteered, others would be assigned the job. According to the sources, fewer than 25 agents raised their hands [when asked to volunteer].

Leopold’s DEA sources aren’t happy with the DEA’s actions. Three people who spoke with Leopold said they were “troubled” by the DEA’s desire to send agents to surveil people engaged in protected speech.

And they’re correct. The DEA has no business engaging in “covert surveillance” of protests, especially when there’s no evidence pointing to drug-related federal crimes being committed. The agency also shouldn’t be sending non-volunteers out to help handle protests by “intervening” on regular law enforcement’s behalf or arresting protesters for allegedly engaging in criminal acts.

The DEA saw an opportunity to engage in mission creep, if only for a limited time. A DOJ less in thrall to hypocritical “rule of law” notions would have rejected this naked attempt to put DEA boots on First Amendment ground. But that isn’t the DOJ we have at the moment. And now we have at least 25 DEA agents burning through tax dollars for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Defund the DEA.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, dea, doj, george floyd, protesters, protests, surveillance

Investigation Shows Governor's Claims That Democrats Tried To Hack The Georgia Election Were Bullshit

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the another-unforced-error-by-Brian-Kemp dept

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is very involved with the electorate. Well, perhaps not that involved with the residents of the state, but he does seem to keep a very close — and very partisan — eye on election security. Election security is important, especially as more states move to electronic ballots, but Kemp has spent most of the last four years using election security as a political football to score points with.

When President Obama was still leading the nation, Kemp (while still Georgia’s Secretary of State) claimed the DHS had breached his office’s firewall during its security testing — something he had directly asked it not to do. Kemp claimed his state had already implemented the DHS’s recommendations and had asked to be left out of this nationwide testing. The DHS apparently ignored that, resulting in Kemp making lots of noise about an overreaching federal agency.

Kemp’s tune changed once Trump was elected. While running for the job of governor against Democrat Stacey Abrams, Kemp — a Republican — generated a lot of bad press for himself by allegedly engaging in voter suppression efforts. He capped this off with a bad judgment two-fer.

First, he insisted the Democratic Party was trying to hack the voter registration system. The only evidence Kemp had for this is that a hacking attempt had been made. He responded to this by opening an investigation into the Democratic Party based on apparently nothing more than his animosity towards it. This was capped off a few days later when Kemp released a ton of absentee voting info, including names, addresses, and the reason they voted absentee.

Two years later, ProPublica — using documents obtained from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) — has published the investigation’s findings. No surprise, GBI’s conclusions don’t agree with Kemp’s baseless and partisan assertions.

“The investigation by the GBI revealed no evidence of damage to (the secretary of state’s office’s) network or computers, and no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data,” according to a March 2 memo from a senior assistant attorney general recommending that the case be closed.

Unlike Kemp’s 2016 assertion about DHS meddling (which was later shown to be routine checks of the state’s firearm database by law enforcement) where it wasn’t asked to, the alleged “failed hacking attempt” seen by Brian Kemp’s office was actually the DHS doing something the state had asked it to do.

The internet activity that Kemp’s staff described as hacking attempts was actually scans by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that the secretary of state’s office had agreed to, according to the GBI. Kemp’s chief information officer signed off on the DHS scans three months beforehand.

Kemp continues to be wrong about election security — something that only seems to concern him when it can be leveraged to (incorrectly in every case) target political opponents. The state’s election system still has security issues. The article points out the site where voters can check their information still contains a “significant vulnerability” that Kemp has been notified of, but refused to acknowledge.

All the bluster worked, though. Kemp was elected governor in 2018 and now has an even bigger platform to be wrong about election security issues. And he — and his former office — were completely wrong about this one. The other alleged hacking his office thought it was witnessing — other than the DHS’s pentest traffic — was nothing more than someone doing what anyone could do: altering site URLs to view other voters’ data.

That’s not hacking. That’s what anyone who knows how websites work can do at any time with zero skill or additional tools. And from that, an entire conspiracy theory was erected by Kemp’s office, resulting in thousands of tax dollars being wasted to pursue Kemp’s politically motivated accusations. There’s some hackery going on here, but it’s only of the partisan variety.

Filed Under: brian kemp, dhs, e-voting, georgia, hacking, politics, voting machines, voting security

Peaceful Protests Around The Nation Are Being Greeted By Police Violence. Remind Me Again How Peaceful Protests Are Better?

Say That Again

from the 'fuck-the-police'---Mahatma-Ghandi-(1940) dept

I have written at least two (admittedly) incendiary posts for this site responding to the response (and — one level further — commenters’ responses) to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Chauvin has been arrested and is now facing a shifting set of charges — some of which are unlikely to be sustained. Minneapolis is still burning. And it will probably burn again once the justice system is done with what’s left of Chauvin and his criminal charges.

In these posts, I openly advocated for the targeted destruction of government property. I do not apologize for that. If the problem is law enforcement, it should be law enforcement’s stuff that burns. Say what you will for peace and reason, but we’re dealing with unreasonable forces that consider themselves soldiers in a warzone, rather than public servants in troubled areas where a little kindness on their part would go a long way.

Peaceful protests can effect change. I’m not arguing that they can’t. But decades of peaceful protests — interrupted occasionally by violent civil uprisings — haven’t changed much in this nation. And that’s just the last 50 years of this on/off cycle. The anger presenting itself now dates back more than 300 years to slavery. And the 300 years following that haven’t been much better. Nearly 100 years after slaves were freed, governments in America — along with the populace supporting them — treated blacks as subhumans only worthy of very limited rights and privileges.

But let’s go with the argument that peaceful protests will bring peaceful resolutions. Here’s how that’s playing out around the nation.

Need more? Plenty can be found here. And Twitter has no shortage of footage showing cops behaving violently in the face of non-violent protests.

With a nation watching them — including the hundreds of cameras present at any protest — police officers are acting as though nothing matters. They have responded to accusations of excessive violence with excessive violence. They have greeted non-violence with violence. And it doesn’t appear to be slowing down. Empathy and self-awareness are apparently traits considered to be weaknesses by our nation’s law enforcement agencies. Proving protesters right isn’t helping the cops win. But leaving it up to ineffective and cowardly legislators isn’t ending the cops’ winning streak either. The cops claim fear provokes every violent reaction they have. But when they have nothing to fear, they engage in violence anyway.

Let’s not abandon peaceful solutions. But let’s not pretend they’re more effective than violence targeting the objects of state oppression.

Filed Under: change, civil rights, defund the police, police, police brutality, police violence, protests

Chicago Mayor Says City's Police Officers Will Be 'Stripped Of Their Powers' If They Turn Off Their Cameras

Bleeding Edge

from the much-much-more-of-this-please dept

Civic leaders are finally at least talking tough about reforming the police departments they’ve barely overseen for years. Protests — some of them violent — have erupted all over the nation, ensuring very few law enforcement agencies can consider themselves above the fray… or above reproach.

We’ll see how much of this talk remains tough (or turns into action) once the heat dies down a bit, but for now, it’s good to see political leaders stepping up to call out their law enforcement agencies as part of the problem.

Chicago has one of the nation’s worst police forces — one that has taken full advantage of the historically-corrupt political system in that city. Add to that another problematic entity that’s found almost everywhere — police unions — and you have a bunch of officers who fear no reprisal, no matter what behavior they engage in.

The internal investigation process for cops accused of criminal acts and misconduct is a black hole where complaints go in but almost nothing comes out, even years after the investigations have closed. This lack of accountability is enforced by the city’s contract with police unions, who have fought every minimal reform effort with gusto.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot knows this. She headed the Chicago Police Board, another oversight effort made mostly toothless by union interference and the police department’s lack of interest in allowing anyone to police it.

So, her comment to NPR doesn’t exactly tell anyone what they’re not already aware of. But it does show Mayor Lightfoot is willing to directly address the root cause of multiple accountability issues.

“Unfortunately, in history in our city, and I think the history of other cities, unions are extraordinarily reluctant to embrace reform and that’s a current state of affairs here,” Lightfoot said in an interview Saturday with NPR’s Weekend Edition. “We have had to take them to arbitration to win very modest reforms, and that’s a shame of the history of collective bargaining where there hasn’t been an emphasis on reform and accountability.”

She also pointed out there needs to be a change in culture if any reforms are going to take hold. That’s a key element that sometimes gets overlooked. Chicago cops have long disliked being watched by anyone, even their own recording devices. The killing of Laquan McDonald by a Chicago police officer could have been observed by any number of dashcams, but it was only captured by one of the four responding vehicles and that recording had no sound. Public records requests uncovered the fact that 80% of the PD’s dashcams did not record sound due to “operator error or intentional destruction.”

The Mayor’s next public statement addressed this history directly. And it adds a level of accountability the Chicago PD has never placed on its own officers.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called out police officers who turn off their body cameras Friday, stating they will be stripped of their “police powers.”

There’s more. Officers who make other efforts to exempt themselves from recognition or responsibility will be similarly professionally disgraced.

“Officers who choose to do those things, or to tape over their badges, or to turn off their body-worn cameras – all things that violate very clear directives of the Chicago Police Department – if you are one of those officers, we will find you, we will identify you, and we will strip you of your police powers. Period,” Lightfoot said.

The police union has yet to respond directly to Lightfoot’s commandeering of officer discipline procedures. When it does finally respond, it won’t offer any contrition on behalf of the officers it represents or agree that officers need more discipline. After all, it’s headed by a thug cop who was elected to his position by officers presumably supportive of his career.

[John] Catanzara is one of the most frequently-disciplined officers in the history of the Chicago Police Department. He is believed to be the first police union president ever elected while stripped of his police powers.

Any incremental increase in accountability is almost always greeted by officer resistance, usually led by their union reps. This will be no different. But if Lightfoot can get it to stick, there are going to be a lot of cops with no cop powers. This will keep them from abusing the power they no longer have, but this corrective action apparently won’t harm their budding police union careers.

The head of the union represents the body. This is who Chicago PD officers wanted representing them. That says a whole lot about why the Chicago PD is in the shape it is today. A few small changes won’t reverse its course. But it may provide a foothold for bigger changes in the future.

Filed Under: body cameras, chicago, chicago police, lori lightfoot

In Response To George Floyd Killing, Minnesota Schools Dump Contracts With Minneapolis PD

Surprises

from the rest-in-swill,-coppers dept

We can disagree (vehemently and at length) about the most effective means of societal change. But we’ve seen a blend of tactics that no one unanimously agrees are helpful or harmful, but are still pushing legislators and other government officials towards meaningful change.

Maybe we’ll never fully understand what motivates society as a whole. (And yet we live in one.) Let’s celebrate the steps forward — especially one that have occurred despite certain government officials (including our President) declaring almost any anti-government action to be stupid, criminal, and useless.

No one asked for cops in schools. At least, very few students did. Maybe some parents did. To be sure, a whole lot of school administrators did because it meant they could offload every disciplinary problem — no matter how small — to cops trained to handle serious criminal acts rather than underage acts of defiance. It made things easier for administrators who used this void they’d created in their own responsibility to enact a number of “zero tolerance” policies that relieved them of the pressure of using common sense and restraint when dealing with troublesome students. The end result was objectively awful.

Now, with law enforcement agencies having proven themselves objectively awful by badly reacting to a cop-created problem, Minnesota schools are deciding to kick cops to the curb.

The city’s public school board unanimously approved a resolution on Tuesday night that will end the district’s contract with the Minneapolis police department to use officers to provide school security. The Minneapolis superintendent said he would begin work on an alternative plan to keep the district’s more than 35,000 students safe in the coming school year.  

“We cannot continue to be in partnership with an organization that has the culture of violence and racism that the Minneapolis police department has historically demonstrated,” Nelson Inz, one of the school board members, said. “We have to stand in solidarity with our black students.”

Hopefully this will spring a sizable leak in the school-to-prison pipeline, allowing the tax dollars no longer required for the receiving end to be routed to the future of America and those tasked with teaching them.

But it’s not just minors being protected from cops. It’s also a number of adults.

In a statement Wednesday evening, University of Minnesota President Joan Gabel announced changes in the school’s relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department.

U of M will no longer contract with MPD for additional law enforcement support needed for large events. This includes football games.

The school will also no longer use MPD for specialized services such as K-9 Explosive detection units.

As extraneous cop opportunities dry up, so should their funding. This will make it easier for legislators to remove police from situations where their dubious expertise has done more to harm than to help. What used to be just a libertarian fever dream is now a few steps closer to reality. Members of the Minneapolis City Council are actually considering at least a partial dismantling of the city’s police force.

Several members of the Minneapolis City Council this week have expressed support for drastic overhauls to the way the city handles law enforcement, ranging from calls to defund the department, to suggestions that social workers, medics or mental health professionals should be sent to some calls currently handled by police.

Council member Jeremiah Ellison, son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison — who is leading the case against the officers involved in Floyd’s death — took a more radical approach.

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when we’re done, we’re not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response. It’s really past due,” Ellison wrote on Twitter Thursday.

Council President Lisa Bender joined Ellison’s call to dismantle the department.

“We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and replace it with a transformative new model of public safety,” Bender wrote on Twitter Thursday.

The police likely won’t be disbanded, no matter who’s vowing to do what. And the Council — at this point – isn’t threatening to deprive the PD of its funding until it gets its problems sorted out. But the state’s Department of Human Rights has sued the PD, demanding a host of changes and a partial blockade on certain enforcement activities until the PD agrees to its demands for increased accountability. This is nothing new for the Minneapolis PD, which was hit with similar demands by the DOJ back in 2003. It appears the federal effort didn’t actually result in better officers so more drastic reforms are in the works.

While legislators may not be able to dismantle the PD and rebuild it from the ground up, they are taking steps to steer cops away from situations they’ve proven they can’t handle, like welfare checks and calls relating to mental health issues. Too often when cops are faced with situations they don’t completely comprehend, they respond with force, mostly of the “deadly” variety. If these reforms are pushed through, calls like these will turn EMS units and mental health professionals into first responders, giving these at-risk residents a better chance of surviving their encounter with the government.

Things are changing. This is good news. But let’s not be dismissive of all the bad news that led us to this point — including demonstrations (violent and otherwise) that demonstrated law enforcement’s inability to properly serve the public they owe their jobs to.

Filed Under: defund the police, minneapolis, minnesota, police, police violence, school resource officers

#NoRightsMatter: US Postal Service, Law Enforcement Team Up To Seize 'Black Lives Matter' Facemasks

Failures

from the guaranteed-but-also-fungible-I-guess dept

In this time of coronavirus and social unrest, you’d think the government — at all levels — would engage in a little more care not to make either problem worse. Of course they haven’t. Cops are arresting journalists and tear-gassing peaceful protesters as the President himself calls for domestic military action targeting US citizens. Dystopian fiction writers have been put on notice: the usual shit just isn’t going to sell anymore. The ideas you thought wouldn’t sustain suspension of disbelief are swiftly becoming reality.

Stepping into the breach for reasons it will probably never be able to fully explain is the federal government, using nationwide protests as a reason to suspend as many rights as possible until everyone agrees the government is not an oppressive force — even when personified as a white cop strangling a black man to death by putting his knee on his neck.

Good luck with that. The government needs all the goodwill it can collect. It has apparently failed to realize the importance of harvesting goodwill in difficult times. And when the lawsuit inevitably gets filed, it will have to explain why it chose to do this massively stupid thing. Ryan Reilly reports for the Huffington Post about an apparent First/Fourth Amendment double-punch.

Law enforcement agents have seized hundreds of cloth masks that read “Stop killing Black people” and “Defund police” that a Black Lives Matter-affiliated organization sent to cities around the country to protect demonstrators against the spread of COVID-19, a disease that has had a disparate impact on Black communities.

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) spent tens of thousands of dollars on the masks they had planned to send all over the country. The first four boxes, each containing 500 masks, were mailed from Oakland, California, and were destined for Washington, St. Louis, New York City and Minneapolis, where on May 25 a white police officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old handcuffed Black man, setting off a wave of protests across the country.

Here’s the original post detailing the apparent seizure of free speech d/b/a protective face masks:

This was multiple levels of fucked up, both in terms of what happened and who was involved. It’s not clear which law enforcement agency seized the masks but it all started with the US Postal Service’s “inspection” unit (USPIS), which apparently flagged the items as somehow illegal and/or dangerous.

The masks Rene Quinonez of Oakland’s Movement Ink created never made it any further than the postal depot. The only thing unusual about the face masks — millions of which have traversed the country unmolested in recent months — were the slogans they bore.

Heads up, government agents: slogans printed on face masks are protected speech. And deciding to make off with a citizen’s personal property because you just don’t like what’s printed on it doesn’t just violate their First Amendment rights. It also violates their Fourth Amendment right to be free of unjustified molestation by the government.

“Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech…” And it hasn’t! Which makes this seizure unlawful. Lot of people who swore to uphold the Constitution are now wandering around acting like rights are privileges that can be completely suspended if stuff starts going sideways. Sure, there’s lots of executive power to throw around and everything Congress has handed itself to use during wartime, but civil unrest across the nation isn’t the bar for the suspension of guaranteed rights.

When anti-government demonstrations are widespread, it’s speech the government doesn’t like that needs the most protection. And here, the government (on a number of levels), has failed.

UPDATE: The federal government — acting incredibly strangely — has now released the masks and refunded Movement Ink’s shipping costs. Sounds like the entities involved were hoping no one would talk about this and are trying to fix things on the sly now that this bullshit has been exposed.

An organizer involved in producing the masks, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they received a call from a USPIS employee on Friday morning, hours after HuffPost’s initial story on the seizure ran. What was strange about the call, the person said, is that they weren’t the person who mailed the boxes or the point of contact.

The organizer who received the call said the USPIS official said there would be a refund for the cost of express shipping since the boxes wouldn’t be arriving on time, which would have allowed them to be used by protesters on Thursday night and this evening.

All’s well that ends well and all that, I guess. But there’s still a civil rights lawsuit in here and Movement Ink should go after the government for its decision to violate multiple rights just because no one involved was willing to end this unconstitutional process before it could cause any harm.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 4th amendment, asset seizure, black lives matter, covid-19, face masks, george floyd, law enforcement, seizure, uspis
Companies: movement ink

Nextdoor Is Courting Cops And Public Officials Using All-Expenses-Paid Trips To Its Headquarters

Failures

from the lobbying-for-a-worse-America dept

A COP IN EVERY HOUSE: that’s the American dream. Maybe they can’t enter the home, what with the Fourth Amendment and all, but they can be invited to every online get-together thrown by apps that promise neighborhood unity while asking law enforcement to get in on the action.

Ring, Amazon’s doorbell/camera company, has made the relationship between neighborhood “sharing” and law enforcement explicit. It’s right there in the term sheets. While Ring takes the PR reins to steer the official discourse, it’s offering cops steeper discounts on Ring cameras they can hand out to citizens in exchange for pushing citizens to sign up for Neighbors, Ring’s snitch app. Once attached to the app, Ring makes sharing of camera footage seamless and encourages homeowners to report suspicious people and activities. Unsurprisingly, many of the suspicious people reported are minorities.

It’s not just Ring and Neighbors, as Citylab has discovered. Nextdoor — a hyperlocal Facebook clone (and hotbed of bigotry) — is courting cops as forcibly silenced partners in its plans to increase its user base.

Charles Husted, the chief of police in Sedona, Arizona, couldn’t contain his excitement. He had just been accepted into the Public Agencies Advisory Council for Nextdoor, the neighborhood social networking app.

“You’re the best!!! A great Christmas present,” he wrote in a December email to Parisa Safarzadeh, Government Relations Manager for Nextdoor.com Inc., obtained by CityLab through a public records request.

The invitation was too good to turn down: an all expenses paid trip to Nextdoor’s headquarters in San Francisco. The company covered the costs for all invitees. In exchange for their participation, Nextdoor picked up the estimated $16,900 tab. And it swore participants to silence with a non-disclosure agreement.

Unfortunately for Nextdoor, this doesn’t cover public records, which is what Citylab used to uncover this unseemly relationship between the social media company and US law enforcement. Chief Husted has no regrets — or at least none he’s willing to share publicly, possibly because of the NDA he signed. From what he can see, this isn’t questionable. It’s just a step in the right direction.

Husted says that leaning on social media — not just Nextdoor, but also Facebook or Twitter — in the line of duty is an inevitability of the current age. “It’s naive to think as public safety folks that we can keep doing our work the same as we have for years and years,” he said. “We have to evolve with the times, and the times have to do with social media: That’s where our communities are at. We have to find a way to be there too.”

He’s right. Social media can’t be ignored. But Nextdoor isn’t inviting anyone from its largest group of stakeholders: members of the public. Instead, it’s paying for government employees and officials to travel to San Francisco to hear its pitch for greater government involvement in a private company’s communications platform. Nextdoor may claim to be connecting locals with each other, but its efforts are focused on roping in the people who are supposed to be serving its users: public servants.

Robbie Turner, a senior city strategist with Nextdoor, wrote to Husted that when expanding Nextdoor’s reach to Canada, the company was using “the same strategy we used when we first launched in the U.S. — recruit the major Police Departments and have them help us grow membership and engagement quickly.”

That’s the bottom line: bumps in usage and users. Turning public entities into tools of corporations is seldom a good idea and it’s certainly a bad idea when Nextdoor’s user base appears to be willing to turn themselves into snitches at the drop of a hyperlink. If cops want to break bias patterns, they need to steer clear of unsubstantiated reports from biased Nextdoor users. Instead, Nextdoor is encouraging police to embrace the platform and all the problems inherent in its “see something, say something” nudges.

As for other public officials who took advantage of Nextdoor’s all-expense-paid offer, they’re having a problem seeing a problem with any of this. Never mind the optics. Officials want everyone to focus only on the letter of the law, which contains enough loopholes to drive an entire junket through.

Several public officials who were part of the Public Agencies Advisory Council say that the trip didn’t conflict with any city policies. Lara Foss, a corporate communications marketing consultant for the City of Austin, told CityLab that since the trip was work-related, it did not violate the city’s gift policy. Sedona’s Husted also said there were no endorsement regulations that prohibited him from participating. Katie Nelson, social media and public relations coordinator for the Mountain View Police Department in California, said that because the city’s policy prohibits taking paid trips on clocked time, she took a few days off from work to participate in the San Francisco meet-up.

Being wined and dined on a corporate tab makes people more receptive to their pitches. Everyone knows this. And that’s why nearly everyone thinks things like this reek of buying off cops and politicians. Everyone, that is, but the cops and politicians being seduced by a whirlwind trip to a tech company’s headquarters.

Once the dirty has been done, it’s time to let what happened at Nextdoor HQ stay at Nextdoor HQ. This isn’t so much a slogan as it is an existential lawsuit threat. Shut up, says Nextdoor, or it will be more than an un-invite to future events. It will be your proverbial ass in a litigation sling. Public officials owe a duty of transparency to their constituents. But Nextdoor is appending a whole lot of asterisks to the duties of public officials. The exceptions include a completely separate arm of the government.

In the terms of Nextdoor’s NDA, advisory council members are not allowed to release public statements about the partnership without the consent of Nextdoor, nor are they able to follow a court order to disclose any information deemed confidential by Nextdoor without alerting the company first.

And Nextdoor has made it easy for its snitchiest users to bring the government in on conversations other Nextdoor users might have thought were private. The platform can’t allow users to file actual police reports but it does give users an option to screw other users over. A feature called “Forward to Police” allows users to send copies of private conversations to officers monitoring accounts. This feature is activated by police departments themselves, so those willing to further demonstrate their indifference for the people they serve can give people an one-click solution for all their snitching needs.

Sure, any participant in a private conversation could take screenshots and hand them to law enforcement. Removing the minimal tech hurdles, however, encourages people to use this option anytime they come across something that bothers them. It’s a “speak to the manager” button, but one that potentially involves government-blessed use of deadly force. If people don’t even have to leave their chairs to engage in SWATting-adjacent activities, they won’t. Giving them a button just increases the chance someone’s going to get hurt or killed.

At the end of the day, it’s problematic all over. Public officials are endorsing a platform that paid to have them feel good about it — both by covering their trip to San Francisco and by giving them the impression they are doing something to make their communities better by making them members of a private company’s “Public Advisory Council.”

Filed Under: law enforcement, nextdoor, police, social media, surveillance
Companies: nextdoor

Facebook Shareholders The Latest Group To Ask Facebook To Drop Its Encryption Plans

Say That Again

from the but-the-biggest-shareholder-still-has-most-of-the-votes dept

Facebook is implementing end-to-end encryption in its Messenger service. This has made a number of government officials unhappy. Claiming this will lead to an increase in child sexual exploitation, multiple governments (including our own) have pounded their respective tables in Facebooks’ direction, demanding the company not give its users secure communications.

Now, it’s more than just government officials. The BBC reports some of Facebook’s shareholders have been swayed by the international table-pounding.

Investors at Facebook’s annual stockholder meeting will vote on a proposal to postpone the firm’s plans for end-to-end encryption.

The firm says it wants to make the measure the default option across its messaging platforms to protect privacy.

But activist shareholders say this would make it nearly impossible to detect child exploitation on Facebook.

The group wants the company to delay the move until after its board of directors studies the risk further.

The shareholders’ proposal [PDF] copy-pastes a lot of anti-encryption talking points about the supposed impossibility of tracking down users trafficking in child pornography. First, the proposal chastises Facebook for doing such a great job working with authorities to tackle the problem.

The New York Times reports Facebook Messenger was responsible for “nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of” CSAM in 2018…

Then it moves on to passing on threats from US legislators to backdoor encryption or otherwise regulate Facebook out of the encrypted communications market.

Facebook may face significant regulatory risk if it cannot curb child sexual abuse on existing platforms or on encrypted messaging. Senate Judiciary Committee member Marsha Blackburn stated in a December 2019 hearing that Facebook and peers need to “get your act together, or we will gladly get your act together for you.” Most of the Committee supported that sentiment.

The shareholders are asking for a delay until at least February of next year before implementation so the Board of Directors can compile a report on the negative aspects of implementing end-to-end encryption in Messenger. This demand confuses the issue, claiming this is about privacy rather than security.

Shareholders request that the Board of Directors issue a report by February 2021 assessing the risk of increased sexual exploitation of children as the Company develops and offers additional privacy tools such as end-to-end encryption.

While it’s true additional security measures will be a net benefit for users’ privacy, the key issue is the security of the communications, rather than ensuring Facebook isn’t able to see the content of users’ messages. Privacy has slider bars when it comes to users and their dealings with both Facebook and the government. Security either is or isn’t. It’s not something you can sort of have.

This table-pounding likely isn’t going to go anywhere. These shareholders are in the minority. Even if it was all of Facebook’s investors, Mark Zuckerberg still controls a majority of Facebook’s voting shares. Unless he can be talked out of it, the measure isn’t going to pass. And Zuckerberg appears to want Messenger to be as secure as WhatsApp — another frequent target of government outrage.

Encryption is coming to Messenger. And about the only thing that can stop it — or at least severely hamper it — is legislation like the EARN IT Act, which disingenuously targets both encryption and Section 230 immunity under the guise of protecting the children.

Filed Under: encryption, end-to-end encryption, shareholders
Companies: facebook