Voluntary Virus Tracking Apps Seek To Get A Grip On The Coronavirus Problem

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the disrupting-involuntary-mass-surveillance dept

Be the surveillance you don’t necessarily want to see in the world. That’s the plan detailed in this report by Thomas Brewster for Forbes. Dozens of countries are kicking around large-scale privacy violations to track the spread of the coronavirus. A handful of other countries are already doing this, including China, India, and Hong Kong.

But if you’re willing to give up your own privacy to help government entities track the virus and monitor those who are infected, there’s an app for that.

It was only last Friday when a team of 14 software engineers and data scientists at little-known health and nutrition startup ZOE started piecing together what would become the hottest coronavirus app on Apple’s App Store by Wednesday: the COVID Symptom Tracker.

Now claiming to have hit 1.2 million downloads in the U.K. alone, it asks people to upload their rough location and the details of any ailment they’re suffering, whether they’re related to coronavirus or not. Even if they don’t have any, users are being asked to share how they’re feeling. All the data is then anonymized by turning names into nonidentifiable codes, before being handed to a team of epidemiologists at King’s College London and the National Health Service.

A purely voluntary monitoring system is vastly preferable to some of the ideas being tossed around by government officials. Governments have a difficult relinquishing control once they’ve acquired it. There’s also the very real possibility of mission creep which would turn harmless disease tracking into warrantless tracking of people’s movements over a long period of time — something law enforcement would love to have, and these agencies are well-versed in the art of parallel construction.

Promising anonymization of data is a non-starter. With a little effort, nearly anyone can be identified even if their identifying info has been stripped from their location data. Considering most of the efforts being made right now rely on voluntary compliance by citizens (handwashing, isolation, social distancing), the relinquishment of location data should also be opt-in, rather than mandated.

Over in Israel, the government is doing a bit of both. The country’s prime minister has already authorized its national security agency to tap into a massive trove of location data to track the spread of the virus. Somewhat redundantly, the Ministry of Health is offering a voluntary virus-tracking app.

In Tel Aviv, Israeli Under 30 alum Omri Moyal has been overseeing the security and privacy of Ministry of Health app Hamagen (or “Protector”), which promises to let users know if they’ve been near infected citizens. He says he believes it’s now hit well over a million downloads—with at least 500,000 recorded on Google’s Play store alone—which would mean a ninth of the entire Israeli population has downloaded the tool since its release late last week.

The difference here is users don’t share their location data with the government. There’s no anonymization either. Users voluntarily hand over info about where they’ve been. In return, they’re notified if someone who’s been in the same locations they have has tested positive for the virus. Meanwhile, the approved surveillance by the Shin Bet intelligence agency continues to hum along in the background, with the agency notifying citizens if they’ve been exposed.

Voluntary efforts like these have yet to take off in the United States, Brewster reports. An app developed by the MIT Media Lab and Harvard University has less than 50,000 downloads so far. Another app developed by Harvard asks for location information from users, but the site’s stats make it clear very few people are visiting it, much less providing information.

Maybe US citizens value their privacy more than the benefits giving it up voluntarily could create. Maybe citizens believe this is still an abstraction, rather than the looming threat it actually is. Whatever the case is, it’s going to be difficult to persuade millions of Americans to opt into a voluntary tracking system — even when most Americans seem indifferent to the incredible amount of tracking being performed by wireless carriers and social media companies 24/7/365. Even so, I’d rather see under-utilized voluntary options than any mandated harvesting of location info by government agencies. There’s no reason to give agencies a new power they’ll be in no hurry to give up once the pandemic threat has passed.

Filed Under: covid-19, privacy, tracking, virus tracking, voluntary

Jared Kushner's Coronavirus Task Force Is Using Private Email Accounts To Conduct Official Business

Email

from the only-illegal-if-Democrats-do-it dept

If you’re a public official, your communications and documents are supposed to be accessible by the public. That’s not me being an absolutist on open government. That’s the law. And yet, here we are, watching an administration that rode into office on chants of “Lock her up!” once again conducting government business off the grid, using the same sort of private email accounts Trump repeatedly declared should have landed Hillary Clinton in the slammer.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has taken note of the latest violation of multiple laws by the Trump Administration and wants to know what the White House is going to do about it.

Jared Kushner’s shadow coronavirus task force appears to be violating both the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by using private email accounts with no assurance their communications are being preserved and by meeting in secret, according to a letter sent today by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The failure of the White House to comply with any of the PRA and FACA requirements leaves the public in the dark about the work the shadow task force has done and the influence of private industries on the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.

We the taxpaying people deserve to know what, if anything, Jared Kushner is doing to fight the spread of the virus. Kushner was put in charge of handling the business side of the pandemic response based on his impressive pandemic-fighting resume, which includes marrying Trump’s daughter and spending several years as a slumlord. Sure, this isn’t the first time important government work has been handed over to underqualified sycophants/relatives, but this time there’s actually life and death on the line.

What’s being done with our tax dollars by Kushner’s task force is being hidden from view through its members’ use of private email accounts. We all know history is written by the winners, but history can also remain unwritten by losers whose sole contribution to the effort appears to be making businesses feel better about endangering the lives of their employees and customers. Stashing away official communications on private email servers cuts the public out of the loop.

History is being unwritten as we speak. Here’s a senior White House official’s brutal summary of Kushner’s task force:

We don’t know who these people are. Who is this? We’re all getting these emails.

At least they’re getting the emails. It’s still unclear whether any of us in the general public will. That’s what CREW is trying to find out. Its letter to the White House’s legal rep, Pat Cipollone, reminds the lawyer of the law and the obligation the White House has to the American people.

We recognize the extraordinary emergency our nation faces and the need for the federal government to act quickly and decisively. At the same time, however, the need for transparency could not be greater. Americans need to know that our government is acting in our best interests; they need the kind of reassurance that full transparency in how and what the White House is doing brings. Of equal importance, we must have access in the future to a full record of how the President and his staff handled this crisis to learn from any mistakes made and improve on how we address future pandemics. Now, more than ever, we must be vigilant in complying with laws like the PRA and the FACA that were enacted to protect our nation’s interest in transparency and a full historic record. We therefore respectfully request that you ensure that the shadow task force complies immediately and fully with its statutory requirements under the PRA and FACA.

This is CREW basically telling the White House Counsel, “Hey, we don’t want to tell you how to do your job but, you know, do your damn job!” This would have been inexcusable even if the Trump administration hadn’t used “but her emails” as a platform plank. It’s unforgivable when it’s these hypocrites standing knee deep in a swamp they never intended to drain, running a behind-the-scenes corporate welfare effort under the guise of keeping the nation’s citizens alive and healthy.

Filed Under: coronavirus taskforce, email, jared kushner, pandemic response, secrecy, transparency

How Much Data Does Clearview Gather On People? The Answer (Sadly) Will Not Surprise You.

Privacy

from the hoovering-up-your-entire-online-presence-using-this-1-simple-trick! dept

Clearview’s facial recognition app links to a database of 4 billion pictures. And those photos are linked to all the data that got scraped up with them, culled (without permission) from sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn… pretty much anywhere people post photos and personal information.

There’s no opting-out of this collection either, even as Clearview packages and sells access to this scraped data to law enforcement agencies in the US, as well as government agencies in countries known for their human rights abuses. Fun, fun, fun and all just a click away from exploitation by anyone with an account. That includes demo accounts operated by the super-rich and law enforcement officers told to test drive the software by running searches on friends and family members.

How much does Clearview gather on the average person? It’s tough to tell. Asking Clearview directly — at least in most of the US — will get you nothing. However, California’s privacy law (the California Consumer Privacy Act) mandates the disclosure of gathered personal data to requesters. That’s what Thomas Smith of OneZero did. And here’s what he got back.

The depth and variety of data that Clearview has gathered on me is staggering. My profile contains, for example, a story published about me in my alma mater’s alumni magazine from 2012, and a follow-up article published a year later.

It also includes a profile page from a Python coders’ meetup group that I had forgotten I belonged to, as well as a wide variety of posts from a personal blog my wife and I started just after getting married.

The profile contains the URL of my Facebook page, as well as the names of several people with connections to me, including my faculty advisor and a family member (I have redacted their information and images in red prior to publishing my profile here).

Based on the request process — which involved some emailing back and forth before Clearview asked Smith to upload a photo of himself to run against its database — Smith estimates it only took about a minute or so for Clearview to run the search and retrieve his profile.

No one knows how often Clearview crawls the web to gather new info, but what’s already been gathered is impressive enough. Unfortunately, there’s no one vetting this data, so it’s up to end users to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. The end users are (most often) law enforcement agencies, who don’t really place a premium on ensuring innocent people don’t get swept up in their secondhand surveillance nets.

Perhaps most worrying is the fact that some of Clearview’s data is wrong. The last hit on my profile is a link to a Facebook page for an entirely different person. If an investigator searched my face and followed that lead (perhaps suspecting that the person was actually my alias), it’s possible I could be accused of a crime that the unknown, unrelated person whose profile turned up in my report actually did commit.

Or vice versa. The negative possibilities are endless. And all of this starts with a photo of someone’s face. No other input is needed. Clearview’s algorithm — which hasn’t been independently tested or examined — does the rest.

And there’s more bad news. As Smith points out, Clearview’s proprietary system is just it standing on looking over the shoulders of tech giants. If Clearview can do this, anyone similarly motivated can do it. One homegrown surveillance company crashing and burning from negative press just clears the way for more competitors. The bag is open and the cat is long gone. It was gone long before Clearview drifted into the public eye. A large number of companies offer social media monitoring services and plenty of other surveillance tech companies routinely scrape publicly-available data for their government agency users.

The difference is Clearview packaged its offering in an app and handed it out to whoever wanted to take a look at it. If Clearview goes down, something else will take its place. For now, it’s the most visible villain. But it’s not the only one. And as long as it operates, residents of California (as well as European residents under the GDPR) can demand Clearview show them how much of their data it’s gathered. So, those who can should take advantage of that to let others know this is a very real threat to their privacy, not just some theoretical threat that should only cause concern for criminals.

Filed Under: data, data collection, facial recognition, privacy
Companies: clearview, clearview ai

Appeals Court Says No Immunity For Cops Who Shot A Man Standing Motionless With His Hands In The Air

Legal Issues

from the try-being-actually-reasonable-for-once,-officers dept

Federal judges continue to trip over themselves in their hurry to extend qualified immunity to law enforcement officers. No matter how egregious the violation — and how simply wrong it appears to reasonable human beings — cops can usually escape judgment by violating rights in new ways, ensuring there’s no precedent that would make them aware they shouldn’t do things like destroy someone’s house after they’ve been given permission (and a key!) to enter.

This decision [PDF] from the Fifth Circuit (and the Fifth Circuit can be the worst about protecting the government from citizens it has aggrieved, stinging dissents from Judge Willett notwithstanding) involves officers who shot a man holding a knife. Given that judges seem to believe any weapon real or perceived that “threatens” an officer makes ensuing homicides wholly justifiable, this refusal by the court to bless the actions of reasonably-scared cops is more surprising than it should be.

The description of the events leading up to the shooting would seem to be laying groundwork for a QI-based dismissal:

In 2015, after a domestic dispute between Flores and his wife at Flores’s mother’s home, Flores’s mother called 9-1-1 for assistance. According to the 9-1-1 call transcript, Flores’s mother told the dispatcher that Flores beat up his wife and had “gone crazy”. Deputies Vasquez and Sanchez were dispatched to the residence in separate vehicles. While in route, dispatch advised Vasquez and Sanchez that Flores was upset, and that Flores wanted to commit “suicide by cop.” Vasquez was also informed that Flores had a knife.

The next paragraph, however, points to subverted expectations:

Twelve minutes elapsed between Vasquez’s arrival and the officers’ fatal shots at Flores. During those twelve minutes, the deputies had a number of encounters with Flores, and ultimately deescalated the situation. It was only after Flores was standing nearly thirty feet from the deputies, motionless, and with his hands in the air for several seconds that the officers looked at each other and then decided to shoot Flores. The officers each fired a shot, and Flores fell to the ground.

The Fifth Circuit says too many factual disputes remain unresolved. And one of the disputed facts is the officers’ own testimony, which says something a cellphone camera recording of the incident does not: that officers were in danger of being attacked when they decided to shoot Flores as he stood motionless thirty feet away with his hands in the air.

Most significantly, the officers assert that “Deputies Vasquez and Sanchez were in imminent fear of death or serious bodily injury by the actions of Gilbert Flores at the time of the fatal shots.”

But the officers can’t explain how they were in “imminent fear” when nothing about Flores’ actions at the point he was shot indicated he was an imminent threat.

Flores had a knife, not a gun; was several feet away from the officers, the house, and the vehicle; had his hands in the air in a surrender position; and stood stationary in the officers’ line of sight. Under these facts taken in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, we conclude that the district court correctly identified material factual disputes as to whether the officers violated Flores’s Fourth Amendment rights.

There is no automatic grant of qualified immunity because these officers should have known killing someone in a situation like this would be unlawful.

A reasonable officer would have understood that using deadly force on a man holding a knife, but standing nearly thirty feet from the deputies, motionless, and with his hands in the air for several seconds, would violate the Fourth Amendment.

With this rejection, there’s probably a settlement on the horizon for the survivors of the shooting victim. The district court refused to dismiss the suit and the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court says the lower court’s reasoning is sound and the right of citizens to not be killed by cops when they don’t pose a threat is clearly established. Chalk up a win for the citizens, who, far too often, come out on the losing end when qualified immunity is in play.

Filed Under: 5th circuit, immunity, police shooting, qualified immunity

EU Parliament Told Predictive Policing Software Relies On Dirty Data Generated By Corrupt Cops

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the junk-data,-garbage-outcomes dept

Predictive policing efforts continue to expand around the world. Fortunately, so has the criticism. The data witchcraft that expects a bunch of crap data created by biased policing to coalesce into actionable info continues to be touted by those least likely to be negatively affected by it: namely, law enforcement agencies and the government officials that love them.

The theory that people should be treated like criminals because someone else did some crimes in the area in the past is pretty specious, but as long as it results in temporary drops in criminal activity, fans of unreasonable suspicion will continue to use these tools that still have no long-term proven track record.

It’s not just a US problem. It’s a problem everywhere. The European Parliament has been asking for feedback on predictive policing efforts, which is more than most agencies in the US are willing to do. The Executive Director of the AI Now Institute, Andrea Nill Sanchez, recently testified during a public hearing on the issue, using the Institute’s 2019 report on predictive policing to highlight everything that’s wrong with turning law enforcement over to modeling algorithms. (via The Next Web)

The point of Sanchez’s testimony [PDF] is this: we can’t trust the data being fed to these systems. Therefore, we definitely can’t trust the predictions being produced by them. Dirty cops create dirty data.

Despite what the term may suggest, predictive policing is neither magic nor a precise science that allows us to see into the future. Instead, predictive policing refers to fallible systems that use algorithms to analyze available data and aim to produce a forecasted probability of where a crime may occur, who might commit it, or who could be a victim.

Left unchecked, the proliferation of predictive policing risks replicating and amplifying patterns of corrupt, illegal, and unethical conduct linked to legacies of discrimination that plague law enforcement agencies across the globe.

This is drawn from AI Now’s report, which pointed out some of the most corrupt police forces in the nation were feeding data from biased policing into systems that were now destined to generate nothing but more of the same corruption.

(1) Chicago, an example of where dirty data was ingested directly into the city’s predictive system; (2) New Orleans, an example where the extensive evidence of dirty policing practices and recent litigation suggests an extremely high risk that dirty data was or could be used in predictive policing; and (3) Maricopa County, where despite extensive evidence of dirty policing practices, a lack of public transparency about the details of various predictive policing systems restricts a proper assessment of the risks.

This is only one of several problems. First, almost every system used by law enforcement agencies is a closed system, unable to be inspected by anyone outside the companies that sell them and the agencies that use them. There’s nearly no way for outsiders to vet data or outcomes. They can only judge the systems by the results. And those results are withheld or released pretty much at the sole discretion of the agencies using predictive policing software. If it’s not producing decreases in crime rates, citizens will be the last to know.

Second, the data used is both tainted and selective, skewing the output towards the selective enforcement agencies already engage in.

[P]redictive policing primarily relies on inherently subjective police data, which reflects police practices and policies—not actual crime rates. Law enforcement exercises enormous discretion in how it carries out its work and collects data, including the crimes and criminals it overlooks.

Finally, there’s no way to cleanse the systems of dirty data. Police departments are unable to recognize that their own biases might taint inputs. And citizens are powerless to challenge the data that’s being used to target them for increased law enforcement scrutiny. With pushback effectively neutralized — both by police practices and the secrecy surrounding proprietary algorithms — agencies are just going to continue engaging in the same biased policing, only with the justification that the software told them to do it.

Since life and liberty is on the line for citizens put at the mercy of software being fed junk data, Sanchez suggests the following should be instituted (at a bare minimum) before predictive policing software is deployed:

As a first step, agencies considering using predictive policing tools should undertake Algorithmic Impact Assessments that include the following: (1) a self-assessment evaluating the system’s potential impacts on fairness, justice, and bias; (2) a meaningful external review process; (3) public notice and comment; and (4) enhanced due process mechanisms to challenge unfair, biased, or other harmful effects.

But that’s just the start. The whole system has failed for years and reform from the ground up is needed before this software can be trusted in the hands of the police. Sanchez calls for the entire criminal justice system to be reformed, since it’s the source of institutional racism and the enabler of some of the worst law enforcement behavior.

The negatives far outweigh the positives when it comes to predictive policing. The EU is taking the right step by asking for public input. Here in the US, public input is still an afterthought — something that only happens after enough damage has been done. Turning law enforcement over to tainted data and proprietary algorithms poses a genuine threat to life and liberty. Hopefully, someone in the US will take a cue from the EU Parliament’s actions and start asking law enforcement agencies tough questions about their predictive policing programs.

Filed Under: eu, junk data, law enforcement, predictive policing

Washington State Legislators Pass Bill Blocking Use Of Facial Recognition Tech Without A Warrant

Privacy

from the over-the-sobbing-of-law-enforcement-agencies dept

We all like a good facial recognition ban, and the state of Washington is the latest to (sort of) tee one up.

The Washington state legislature passed a bill establishing new guardrails on government use of facial recognition software.

The bill cleared both chambers of the state legislature Thursday, hours before the session ended, positioning Washington as one of the first states in the nation to regulate facial recognition, a key component in the larger legal debate over artificial intelligence. The bill now awaits Gov. Jay Inslee’s signature.

Unfortunately, it’s not a true ban. But it lays down a set of guidelines that will at least control its use by state agencies. The bill [PDF] requires regular reporting on use and intermittent testing for “fairness and accuracy.” It also introduces something most states haven’t: a warrant requirement for facial recognition use. This means facial recognition tech can’t be an “always on” option for law enforcement.

The bill recognizes the threat facial recognition tech poses to the public.

Unconstrained use of facial recognition services by state and local government agencies poses broad social ramifications that should be considered and addressed. Accordingly, legislation is required to establish safeguards that will allow state and local government agencies to use facial recognition services in a manner that benefits society while prohibiting uses that threaten our democratic freedoms and put our civil liberties at risk.

It also mandates the development of data retention policies and the implementation of reporting and controls of other, non-state agency use of facial recognition tech owned by state entities. State agencies are also required to deliver the equivalent of Privacy Impact Assessments for any tech deployed.

A description of any potential impacts of the facial recognition service on civil rights and liberties, including potential impacts to privacy and potential disparate impacts on marginalized communities, and the specific steps the agency will take to mitigate the potential impacts and prevent unauthorized use of the facial recognition service.

While an outright ban (or at least a moratorium) would have been preferable, this is a positive development. It shows legislators recognize the multiple issues this tech poses and its tendency to exacerbate existing inequality problems by being seemingly incapable of accurately identifying anything other than white males.

If this bill becomes law, Washington will join a handful of cities (and one state!) around the country taking measures to protect residents from unproven tech that is swiftly becoming ubiquitous. Facial recognition tech is no longer the latest “rule of law” darling. It’s increasingly being viewed as a threat to civil liberties — not just by privacy advocates/activists, but by the people who actually can prevent their constituents from the steady creep of government surveillance.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, facial recognition, law enforcement, warrants, washington

Apple Helps China Censor Citizens By Pulling The Plug On A Keyboard App That Encrypted Text Messages

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the don't-be-Big-Brother's-little-brother dept

China keeps being China, despite all the problems it has at home. The coronavirus traces back to Wuhan, China, and it has become clear the Chinese government is doing what it can to suppress reporting on the outbreak.

The country has a fine-tuned censorship machine that works in concert with its overbearing surveillance apparatus to ensure the government maintains control of the narrative. “Ensures” is perhaps too strong a term because, despite its best efforts, information always leaks out around the edges.

Citizens of China have found numerous ways to dodge censorship and surveillance over the years. But they’re not being helped much by American companies, which have more often than not complied with government demands for apologies, takedowns, and other efforts that ensure access to the Chinese market at the expense of their Chinese users.

The latest news is more of the same. A clever keyboard app that encrypted messages has been nuked from the Chinese app store by Apple following a takedown demand from the Chinese government.

Apple yesterday removed Boom the Encryption Keyboard, an app that allowed Chinese internet users to bypass censorship, from the China app store, according to its developer.

[…]

According to an email sent by Apple to [app developer] Wang Huiyu, the app was removed because it contained “content that is illegal in China.” The app is still available in other regions, including Hong Kong, he said.

Boom encrypted messages by changing the originating English or Chinese to a blend of emoji, Japanese, and Korean characters. To decrypt the messages, users simply copied the characters sent to them, which were reverted to their original state on the keyboard below. Not enough to thwart targeted surveillance, but more than enough to dodge blanket censorship efforts like keyword blacklists.

The app’s developer suspects Boom was targeted by the Chinese government because it was being used to spread an article about the virus that was censored by the government shortly after its publication.

The article in question is an interview with Ai Fen, a Wuhan doctor who said she was reprimanded for alerting other people about the novel coronavirus. The article, published on March 10 by China’s Ren Wu magazine, was deleted within hours of its publication. Various versions of the article, including those reproduced in emoji, English, and even Hebrew, emerged after the deletion as people scrambled to save Ai’s story…

This is the sort of information American companies should be helping to spread, not shutting down at the behest of the parties who want to see this information buried. If this were a one-off, it would be worrying. But it’s just another data point in a long string of incidents where American tech companies have endangered users in foreign countries, seemingly for the single purpose of maintaining market share.

Filed Under: app store, boom, censorship, china, codes, content moderation, emoji, encryption, keyboard
Companies: apple

VPN Review Site Creates Live Digital Rights Tracker To Compile Coronavirus-Related Surveillance Efforts

Privacy

from the invaluable-resources-in-these-super-screwed-up-times dept

Since lots and lots of (mostly government) people seem to agree these particularly desperate times call for particularly privacy-invading desperate measures, it only makes sense someone should be tracking the trackers. Enter Samuel Woodhams of Top10VPN, who has compiled a handy list of who’s hoovering who to keep tabs on COVID-19 cases and coronavirus carriers.

Woodhams says not everything listed here in Top10VPN’s “Digital Rights Tracker” is necessarily bad. It’s just that a lot of it is.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, governments around the world have implemented a range of digital tracking, physical surveillance and censorship measures in a bid to slow the spread of the virus.

Some of these may well be proportionate, necessary and legitimate during these unprecedented times. However, others have been rushed through legislative bodies and implemented without adequate scrutiny.

There’s a lot to keep track of. Woodhams points out 14 new digital tracking efforts have been introduced in March alone, with Europe responsible for half of that number.

For instance, Singapore’s government has released a tracking app that uses Bluetooth connections to identify people who have been “in close proximity” of COVID-19 patients. Poland’s government has also released an app that tracks people self-quarantining by prompting users to send periodic geolocated selfies to the government.

All across Europe, mobile providers are in discussions with governments to utilize the location data they’ve harvested to track patients, possible carriers, and the general spread of the virus.

But it’s not just data. It’s also physical tracking of citizens around the world. Multiple governments have deployed drones to enforce lockdowns, curfews, and social distancing. Meanwhile, Russia and China continue to be Russia and China, only with a thin veneer of actually giving a shit if their citizens live or die.

On Friday, 21 February, Reuters reported that Moscow’s mayor had announced the use of facial recognition to help ensure people remained at home.

According to the article, the mayor wrote on his website: “Compliance with the regime is constantly monitored, including with the help of facial recognition systems and other technical measures.”

[…]

Since the outbreak of the virus, the Chinese regime has used a host of surveillance measures to try and stem the spread of the disease.

This has included, and not limited to, the use of drones, facial recognition cameras and mobile phone monitoring.

Two of the country’s largest state-owned telecommunication operators, China Unicom and China Telecom, asked citizens in Wuhan to provide the personal information in order to link them to their devices and allow more effective monitoring.

Top10VPN’s tracker also tracks censorship — something that has gone hand-in-hand with the virus’ spread from Wuhan, China to other countries with governments similarly desirous of controlling the narrative. China has censored local reporting and kicked out foreign journalists. Its reach extends to Hong Kong, where it has managed to bury research linking game meat markets to SARS and COVID-19.

Egypt has revoked press credentials from two foreign journalists and Singapore’s government has blocked local access to States Time Review’s Facebook page — one run by Alex Tan, a prominent critic of the Singaporean government.

There’s much more covered here, including internet shutdowns in several countries and restricted internet access in regions where governments are seeking to control access to reporting. You may as well bookmark this page as it’s going to be continuously updated as more reports of tracking/surveillance/censorship roll in.

A crisis is an opportunity for government expansion. This pandemic is opportunity knocking on hundreds of doors simultaneously. If we’re not careful, many of us are going to end up with the surveillance state we never wanted and the always-on tracking we never deserved.

Filed Under: coronavirus, covid-19, laws, privacy, surveillance, tracking

DOJ Says Coronavirus Emergency Justifies Indefinite Detention Of Arrested People

Legal Issues

from the not-enough-dystopian-hellscape,-say-Justice-reps dept

With the administration no longer able to ignore the threat posed by the coronavirus, it’s decided to secure some additional powers for itself while the nation’s defenses are low. As Betsy Woodruff Swan reports for Politico, the DOJ is seeking to add “indefinite detention” to its list of criminal justice perks as courtrooms around the nation undergo significant operational restrictions.

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the novel coronavirus spreads throughout the United States.

Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department’s requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and prosecutions.

The DOJ has refused to comment on this power grab. Not all of it is unusual. Plenty of cases already in progress are going to be delayed because of restrictions on courts meant to stem the flow of the virus. But this goes beyond cases that are already underway. This would affect people who’ve only been accused of criminal acts and have yet to receive even a single day in court.

The proposal would also grant those top judges broad authority to pause court proceedings during emergencies. It would apply to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings,” according to draft legislative language the department shared with Congress.

Judges already have some power to control proceedings during emergencies, but this asks judges to treat cases where only an arrest has occurred as events that can be strung out indefinitely. With so many lives already disrupted by the shutdown of businesses and services, putting an accused person’s life in indefinite limbo is only going to cause more harm to a population that is already suffering plenty of it.

Fortunately, this has already been shot down by members of Congress. And it’s not just along party lines. Riley Beggin reports for Vox that the rejection of the DOJ’s power move is bipartisan.

Legal experts and politicians on both sides of the aisle quickly condemned the request. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) tweeted “OVER MY DEAD BODY;” Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY) wrote, “Two Words: Hell No;” and Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted “Absolutely not” — a sentiment Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) chief strategist, Doug Stafford, agreed with.

This isn’t quite the same thing as being shot down in the halls of Congress itself, so there’s still a small chance the DOJ will get its way. But this doesn’t bode well for its opportunistic move, which seems more punitive than useful, especially when putting more people behind bars increases the odds of the virus spreading. Quarantine is almost impossible in jails and prisons, and even if you don’t care about accused criminals, the people staffing jails aren’t able to perform their duties without mingling with a possibly infected population.

The DOJ is also asking for a prosecution pause button while court proceedings are on hold, allowing it to bypass the statute of limitations for cases originating during this national emergency. It would give the DOJ at least a two-year pass, covering both current cases and any developing within a year of the “end” of the national emergency. There’s nothing wrong with asking for this, since doing otherwise would basically give criminals a free pass for federal crimes committed during the national emergency. But it does suggest it’s far more than the economy that’s going to be disrupted for months (or years) to come.

If there’s anything positive in this last request, it’s that it may result in better prosecutorial discretion. With manpower limited and courts mostly closed for business, the DOJ will have to pick and choose which cases it wants to pursue. This will hopefully lead to less effort wasted prosecuting people for things like lying to feds or being talked into being terrorists by FBI informants.

Filed Under: congress, covid-19, doj, due process, indefinite detention

Ring Continues To Insist Its Cameras Reduce Crime, But Crime Data Doesn't Back Those Claims Up

Failures

from the any-spin-necessary dept

Despite evidence to the contrary, Amazon’s Ring is still insisting its the best thing people can put on their front doors — an IoT camera with PD hookups that will magically reduce crime in their neighborhoods simply by being a mute witness of criminal acts.

Boasting over 1,000 law enforcement partnerships, Ring talks a good game about crime reduction, but its products haven’t proven to be any better than those offered by competitors — cameras that don’t come with law enforcement strings attached.

Last month, Cyrus Farivar undid a bit of Ring’s PR song-and-dance by using public records requests and conversations with law enforcement agencies to show any claim Ring makes about crime reduction probably (and in some cases definitely) can’t be linked to the presence of Ring’s doorbell cameras.

CNET has done the same thing and come to the same conclusion: the deployment of Ring cameras rarely results in any notable change in property crime rates. That runs contrary to the talking points deployed by Dave Limp — Amazon’s hardware chief — who “believes” adding Rings to neighborhoods makes neighborhoods safer. Limp needs to keep hedging.

CNET obtained property-crime statistics from three of Ring’s earliest police partners, examining the monthly theft rates from the 12 months before those partners signed up to work with the company, and the 12 months after the relationships began, and found minimal impact from the technology.

The data shows that crime continued to fluctuate, and analysts said that while many factors affect crime rates, such as demographics, median income and weather, Ring’s technology likely wasn’t one of them.  

Worse for Ring — which has used its partnerships with law enforcement agencies to corner the market for doorbell cameras — law enforcement agencies are saying the same thing: Ring isn’t having any measurable impact on crime.

“In 2019, we saw a 6% decrease in property crime,” said Kevin Warych, police patrol commander in Green Bay, Wisconsin, but he noted, “there’s no causation with the Ring partnership.”

[…]

“I can’t put numbers on it specifically, if it works or if it doesn’t reduce crime,” [Aurora PD public information officer Paris] Lewbel said.

But maybe it doesn’t really matter to Ring if law enforcement agencies believe the crime reduction sales pitch. What ultimately matters is that end users might. After all, these cameras are installed on homes, not police departments. As long as potential customers believe crime in their area (or at least their front doorstep) will be reduced by the presence of camera, Ring can continue to increase market share.

But the spin is, at best, inaccurate. Crime rates in cities where Ring has partnered with law enforcement agencies continue to fluctuate. Meanwhile, Ring has fortuitously begun its mass deployment during a time of historically-low crime rates which have dropped steadily for more than 20 years. Hitting the market when things are good and keep getting better makes for pretty good PR, especially when company reps are willing to convert correlation to causation to sell devices.

Filed Under: crime, doorbells, ring, surveillance