Cy Vance Is So Sure Encryption Is Pure Evil He Thinks Over-The-Air Software Updates Are Just Encryption Backdoors Apple Won't Tell Him About

Say That Again

from the of-all-the-things-even,-this-one-i-can't-the-most dept

Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance is back on his anti-encryption bullshit. A Fast Company profile of his “$10 million cyber lab” for decrypting phones contains some really choice quotes from the DA — quotes that show he’s about as on top of all things “cyber” as former NYC mayor/alleged tweet hackee Rudy Giuliani.

The thrust of the piece is that breaking encryption is time-consuming and expensive. Hey, no one’s arguing otherwise. But the arguments made by Vance and other law enforcement officials in the article are disingenuous and… well… stupid.

Breaking encryption doesn’t scale. Sorry about that, LEOs. That’s a fact you’re all going to have to come to terms with. But it’s not impossible and there are more than a few companies offering to do the dirty work for cyber-strapped agencies that don’t have $10 million on hand to bootstrap their own brute forcing.

We’re also living in the golden age of surveillance, despite the arguments of a few candle bearers primarily interested in wandering around in the dark cursing. Almost everyone carries a tracking device with them wherever they go. Voluntarily. Reams of data are generated every day, a lot of which doesn’t even require a warrant to access. Cops are solving crimes using consumer DNA services, Apple wearables, and always-on smart devices that eavesdrop on conversations law enforcement normally wouldn’t have access to.

But let’s start with some numbers. I’m beginning to think the Manhattan DA’s office is no better at counting locked devices than the FBI is. As you may recall, the FBI spent a few years claiming it was sitting on an exponentially-increasing amount of encrypted devices… right up until it was forced to admit its counting software couldn’t count and it had severely overstated the amount of devices in its possession.

The same thing appears to be happening at the DA’s office. An increase like this is inexplicable. Here’s how many devices Cy Vance was complaining about in 2016:

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. said at a news conference that investigators cannot access 175 Apple devices sitting in his cybercrime lab because of encryption embedded in the company’s latest operating systems.

And here’s what Fast Company is saying in 2020:

On the day I visited the cyber lab, there were nearly 3,000 phones, most related to active criminal investigations, that Moran had not yet been able to access.

Even given Android’s dominance in the market, this seems like an incredibly dramatic increase over the past four years. And it seems even less likely given the fact that multiple vendors are capable of cracking older iPhones and Androids, if not the latest models (for now). Rolling your own decryption doesn’t seem like the most efficient use of resources, especially when time is of the essence, as Vance claims.

“If we seize a phone that is iOS 10 but can’t open the phone, maybe never, but, say, not for another two years, well, that’s not the timeframe in which cases move, particularly cases when they’re in court.”

Plea bargains are the norm, not trials. Even if we discount that depressing fact, pre-trial detention in New York City for felony charges is ~80 days. That’s people being locked up before they’ve even had their day in court (not counting arraignment). Even if Vance wasn’t pretending the city isn’t willing to lock people up indefinitely while his office pokes away at their phones, the fact remains his office could look to outside help to shorten the process. But it doesn’t. And the article (and Vance himself) never explains why.

Let’s move on to Vance and his incredible quotes. Behold the man so clearly convinced that device encryption is solely a middle finger extended to law enforcement, he actually seems to believe over-the-air software updates are proof Apple is lying about its ability to access the contents of encrypted phones.

Vance is skeptical that Apple doesn’t have a secret backdoor. “They get into my phone all the time because they upgrade my operating systems and they send me messages,” he says.

Just a friendly reminder, New Yorkers: this is an elected position. You don’t need to be represented by someone who sounds like an Infowars commenter.

Vance also appears unable to recognize why encryption matters. He claims phone makers used to be super-helpful. Companies like Apple would take a seized phone and return a jump drive full of data and communications a few days later. But that changed after the Snowden leaks revealed widespread, mostly-unchecked domestic and foreign surveillance. Apple and Google didn’t immediately respond, but when they did, they made use of their devices safer for everyone. The “everyone” Venn diagram includes a certain number of criminals. But the important thing was doing all they could to protect customers from thieves (something government officials routinely complained about) and malicious hackers.

It wasn’t about screwing US law enforcement. It was a reaction to the sheer power of governments (not just the United States government) to compromise devices and intercept data and communications.

Vance continues to take this personally. And in doing so, he’s developed a lot of blind spots. Here’s Vance stating he doesn’t think US tech companies should be able to decide what’s best for their customers.

In the end, Vance just wants prosecutors to have all the tools available to do their jobs. “You entrust us with this responsibility to protect the public,” he says. “At the same time, they”—Apple and Google— “have taken away one of our best sources of information. Just because they say so. It’s not that some third party has decided, this is the right thing for Apple and Google to do. They just have done it.”

So… third parties — Google, Apple, etc. — have not decided this. Other third parties (I guess the government?) should make this call. I mean, we know that’s what Vance thinks. But this statement makes zero sense. If companies shouldn’t be allowed to protect their customers from threats, who should be doing this? The government? Because I think if the lawmakers in Washington crafted a law designed to protect cellphone users, they’d come to the same conclusion — encryption works — even if it made things a little more difficult for law enforcement.

Let’s not forget the government is operating on power granted to it by the governed, not the other way around. If there’s been a slight decrease in evidentiary uptake since the spread of default encryption, so be it. Very few Americans are willing to trade their device security for incremental law enforcement gains, no matter how many law enforcement officials believe citizens are too stupid to know what’s good for them.

Not all communications belong to law enforcement, warrant or not. Since the beginning of criminal time, people engaged in illegal behavior have taken steps to reduce their exposure. Front businesses. Cranking up radios/TVs so conversations won’t be picked up by bugs. Off-the-grid, face-to-face meetings. And so on. To pretend phones are taking criminals to the next level ignores everything about criminal activity. Smart criminals play it smart. Dumb criminals are still dumb. Compelled decryption is still an unsettled issue, which means cops can roll the dice on court-ordered coercion. Fingerprints, faces, and irises can still unlock phones without much resistance, especially if one of the suspects is dead.

To call Vance’s anti-encryption disingenuous would strip that word of most of its power. Vance has an encryption problem. Maybe. But he doesn’t have an evidence problem. And he’s not making the most of what’s available to him, possibly deliberately. I’m sure he’d prefer an encryption ban or court precedent that makes compelled decryption legal. He probably will see neither of these in his lifetime. But until he’s out of office, he’s going to continue making incoherent complaints. The least publications covering his so-called plight could do is greet him with the skepticism he deserves.

Filed Under: cy vance, encryption, going dark, iphones, over the air updates
Companies: apple

Law Enforcement's New Facial Recognition Toy Scrapes Photos From Websites, Serves Up 'Matches' In Seconds

News

from the be-your-own-worst-enemy dept

The biggest collection of biometric data isn’t housed by any government agency. In fact, it’s not owned by any single private company in the world. It’s the internet itself, which houses multiple billions of face photographs that one company is using to give law enforcement perhaps its sketchiest facial recognition tool yet. Kashmir Hill has the full report for the New York Times.

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.

[…]

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

The scraping of photos presumably continues. There’s a market for this — a growing market filled with law enforcement agencies that like the billions of images and the lower cost of Clearview. They’re no longer limited to government databases or required to sign MOUs with other agencies to obtain access.

The law enforcement agencies that have used it love it. But that ends the list of the app’s fans. Certainly no one concerned about the unreliability of facial recognition tech is going to be pleased there’s an unproven upstart matching faces against the Internet. The multiple sites scraped by Ton-That’s software aren’t happy either, claiming the scraping violates their many Terms of Service.

But that’s something for the courts to decide! (Badly, most likely.) Until the CFAA suits start rolling in, Clearview is capitalizing on the success stories being passed around by law enforcement agencies. Not bad for an app first conceived as a way to vet babysitters or allow hotels to greet guests by name.

In February, the Indiana State Police started experimenting with Clearview. They solved a case within 20 minutes of using the app. Two men had gotten into a fight in a park, and it ended when one shot the other in the stomach. A bystander recorded the crime on a phone, so the police had a still of the gunman’s face to run through Clearview’s app.

They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,” said Chuck Cohen, an Indiana State Police captain at the time.

This is just one example. There are many more in Kashmir Hill’s article. Clearview’s pitch to cop shops talks about identifying sex offenders, John Doe corpses, and identity fraud suspects. The Gainesville, Florida police department ran cold cases against the app and came up with more than 30 suspects.

Clearview’s accuracy is still unproven. That a detective ran the app and created a list of 30 suspects does not mean the Gainesville PD is any closer to solving these cases. But it may be much closer to rounding up innocent people and trying to put them behind bars. Clearview’s AI was not tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in its recent examination of facial recognition tech, but that’s probably a good thing. It would only have made the average results worse.

[T]he company said its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party…

Some of that unpredictability comes from Clearview’s unique “database:” images scraped from all over the internet and “matched” using an unknown set of constraints. With enough pushback from the sites “donating” their users’ images to Clearview, the app would become useless — no better than cops running reverse image searches from security camera footage and hoping for the best. This statement of confidence from the app’s developer is less than reassuring.

“A lot of people are doing it [scraping sites],” Mr. Ton-That shrugged. “Facebook knows.”

Yep. And some of the scrapees might take steps to prevent future scraping. Or any number of competitors can scrape the same sites, dump it into some serviceable AI software, and tell cops they’ve just identified the guy wanted for an unsolved murder from three decades ago. Whether or not that pans out, the cops at least have someone they can talk to, rather than a dusty file no one’s bothered to look at for the last two decades.

Clearview is just another step towards the elimination of privacy in public. And it’s being fed unwittingly by sites and services that offer a way for people to connect. Even Clearview’s CEO seems taken aback by the implications of the software he’s selling to government agencies. But it’s not enough to stop him from doing it.

Filed Under: ai, facial recognition, hoan thon-that, law enforcement, peter thiel, scraping
Companies: clearview ai

Attorney General Barr's Anti-Encryption Efforts Aren't Supported By Many FBI Officials

Say That Again

from the going-to-war-with-the-one-many-army-you-have dept

When Attorney General William Barr speaks, he represents the DOJ and all the agencies it oversees. The problem is that Bill Barr’s recent anti-encryption agitating doesn’t reflect the views of the people he oversees. While Barr is trying to turn the public against Apple by suggesting it protects terrorists and murderers, FBI employees are worried his words and actions will harm them more than help them.

The Wall Street Journal spoke to people in the FBI and DOJ who aren’t convinced Barr’s doing the right thing by taking a hardline stance on encryption. [Non-paywalled version here.]

Some senior FBI officials say privately they are worried that Mr. Barr’s sharp tone could undermine relationships with technology companies they have worked hard to develop, people familiar with the matter said.

The bureau relies on close partnerships with tech firms in a range of investigations, with companies complying with legal requests for data and troubleshooting technical obstacles that agents may struggle with, current and former officials said.

Pushing Apple is unproductive. It damages relationships while gaining absolutely nothing for the DOJ and FBI. Apple has already given the FBI all the information it can pull from the Pensacola shooters’ accounts. Breaking encryption simply isn’t an option — not when it leads directly to reduced security for the rest of Apple’s customers.

Many in the FBI realize this. Barr just doesn’t seem to care. If Barr continues to push his anti-encryption agenda, he not only risks reducing cooperation from tech companies but also the trust of the people who work for him. Barr says Apple’s not doing enough to help investigations. Internally, the FBI disagrees.

Some FBI officials were stunned by Mr. Barr’s rebuke of Apple, the people familiar with the matter said, and believe the Pensacola case is the wrong one to press in the encryption fight, in part because they believed Apple had already provided ample assistance to the probe.

Barr’s ultimate goal may be another courtroom showdown. Others in the FBI would prefer precedent to outside help from phone-cracking companies. Barr has aligned himself with those officials. But the ones pushing for precedent seem unaware of how much collateral damage the FBI itself might suffer if things don’t work out the way Barr wants them to.

[Former DHS Secretary Michael] Chertoff said a court ruling against the Justice Department could limit access to widely available forensic tools that allow investigators to get into phones in some situations, for instance. “It’s not clear to me why this fight is advantageous to anybody,” he said.

Barr and those like them so firmly believe they’re in the right, they’re seemingly incapable of considering the negative consequences of their actions. Precedent that safeguards people’s phones against encryption-breaking efforts works against the government, restricting its access to outside assistance. But even if the FBI gets the precedent it wants, the nation as a whole will be less secure because encryption will be compromised severely and permanently. Barr and his anti-encryption buddies are willing to sacrifice everyone else’s security for their own ends. That’s not just selfish. It’s also dangerous.

Filed Under: doj, encryption, fbi, going dark, william barr
Companies: apple

Houston Officer Behind Deadly Botched Raid Hit With Two Felony Murder Indictments

Legal Issues

from the some-people-earn-their-indictments dept

Former Houston PD officer Gerald Goines is going to face murder charges. At least he’s alive to face them. The victims of Goines’ botched no-knock raid — Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas — don’t have the luxury of watching justice be done. The residents of the house were killed by police officers performing a raid targeting heroin that never existed, utilizing a warrant filled with lies based on statements made by a confidential informant who didn’t exist, and drugs pulled from a cop car console.

Goines is facing both state and federal charges. And the charges are still coming in. Multiple investigations are still ongoing. Nearly 14,000 cases linked to the now-disbanded Squad 15 (of the Narcotics Division) are under review by the District Attorney’s office and dozens of pending cases have already been dismissed.

The charges brought against Goines late last year are now officially backed by an indictment, as Jacob Sullum reports for Reason.

“Because officers lied, people died,” Harris County, Texas, District Attorney Kim Ogg said today at a press conference where she announced a grand jury indictment of two former Houston narcotics officers who were involved in a January 2019 drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple in their home. The indictment confirms the state charges filed last August against Gerald Goines, who is accused of lying to obtain the warrant for the raid, and Steven Bryant, who is accused of subsequently backing up Goines’ false portrayal of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas as dangerous heroin dealers.

Yes, it’s incredibly easy to obtain a grand jury indictment. But the success rate drops precipitously when it’s a cop being charged. This isn’t a testament to the trustworthiness of grand jury proceedings, but rather an indication of just how irredeemable Officer Goines’ actions were.

It’s impossible to know how many people’s rights were violated by Officer Goines and the PD’s Narcotic Division, but we can say definitively Goines caused the death of two people who had nothing in their house but a small amount of drugs for personal use. They were never dealers and did not use heroin. But Goines used a bunch of lies to turn a couple who had been married for 21 years into dangerous drug dealers, and instigated a no-knock raid that resulted in multiple injured cops and two dead Houston residents.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo took over a troubled police department and promised greater officer accountability. He has failed to turn things around since his arrival in 2007. A narcotics unit doesn’t become a flagrant abuser of rights overnight. It’s something that steadily gets worse in the absence of accountability. Because no one felt compelled to engage in meaningful oversight, 14,000 cases linked to a single squad are now being reviewed for further evidence of illegality and misconduct.

Acevedo failed this test as well. He initially offered his support for an officer now charged with murder. Police officials complain all the time about people drawing assumptions before all the facts are in, but they are the first to offer their support of officers’ actions before all the facts are in. The facts are in. And the facts make the entire department look awful. Goines isn’t an aberration. He’s just the one who got caught.

Filed Under: art acevedo, dennis tuttle, gerald goines, houston, murder, qualified immunity, rhogena nicholas

DEA, TSA Sued For Stealing 79-Year-Old Man's Life Savings From His Daughter At An Airport

Legal Issues

from the take-what-thou-wilt-that-is-the-whole-of-the-law-i-guess dept

The DEA doesn’t really want to stop the flow of drugs into the country. Let’s not kid ourselves. Better yet, let’s not allow the DEA to kid us it’s in the drug enforcement business. It’s in the cash business. It wants to seize cash. It is so cash-focused it hires TSA agents to alert the DEA whenever they see cash in people’s luggage. It also regularly peruses airplane and railway passenger manifests to find targets it feels might be carrying cash.

Forfeiture laws make this easy. They make seizing cash so easy hundreds of law enforcement agencies engage in the same fishing trips for cash, ignoring drugs and seizing money from drivers traveling out of the states they’re supposed to be defending against incoming drugs.

It’s not illegal to travel while carrying large amounts of cash. But it may as well be. The Institute for Justice is representing a 79-year-old man who had his life savings seized by the DEA at an airport — a seizure that has not been followed up with any official accusations (charges, indictments) of wrongdoing.

Terry [Rolin], 79, is a retired railroad engineer born and raised in Pittsburgh. For many years, he followed his parents’ habit of hiding money in the basement of their home. When Terry moved out of his family home and into a smaller apartment, he became uncomfortable with keeping a large amount of cash. Last summer, when his daughter Rebecca was home for a family event, Terry asked her to take the money and open a new joint bank account that he could use to pay for dental work and to fix his truck, among other needs.

Rolin gave his lifetime savings of $82,373 to his daughter. She checked to see if it was illegal to travel with this large amount of cash. She discovered it wasn’t and packed it in her luggage. But a TSA agent spotted the cash and detained her for questioning by Pennsylvania State Troopers. Eventually, she was allowed to leave. But she was stopped by DEA agents when she attempted to board her plane.

Here’s what happened then, taken from Rolin and West’s proposed class action lawsuit [PDF] against the TSA and DEA:

Despite Rebecca’s explanation, and without probable cause, the DEA agent seized Terry’s life savings because it was greater than $5,000 and was thus considered a “suspicious” amount under DEA’s policy or practice regarding the seizure of cash from travelers at airports.

DEA has continued to hold Terry’s life savings since August 26, 2019, and has taken actions to permanently keep the money using civil forfeiture.

Neither Terry nor Rebecca has been arrested for or charged with any crime.

The initial and continued seizure of Terry’s life savings since August 26, 2019, has prevented him from replacing his teeth and repairing his truck, among other expenses.

According to the TSA’s own policies, it should not be scanning people’s luggage for “suspicious” amounts of cash. It is only supposed to be concerned with items that threaten airline security, like explosives and weapons. The suit says TSA agents routinely seize cash in contravention of these policies and do so even when it’s been determined the traveler and their belongings pose no security threat.

Instead agents flag any “large” amount of currency, which appears to be in the area of $10,000 or more. This is likely due to multiple law enforcement agencies falsely claiming large amounts of currency are suspicious, if not illegal. The DEA leans heavily on the TSA to perform this extraneous screening for it.

The DEA’s standards for “suspicion” are even laxer than those unofficially followed by the TSA. According to the lawsuit, the DEA will seize any amount over $5,000 whether or not probable cause exists to perform the seizure. Once the DEA has the money, it will eventually begin forfeiture proceedings. Time is of the essence for those fighting to get their money back, but the DEA is never in any hurry because it’s not its money and it has no immediate need for funds.

We already know the DEA is lousy and focused on easy wins, preferably those that involve forfeited funds. But the TSA is part of the problem. It focuses on cash despite it having no statutory authority to seize people simply because they’re carrying cash. The TSA does not prohibit people from carrying cash and has produced no evidence to back up its apparent belief these people are more dangerous or likely to be engaged in illegal activities as other passengers not carrying cash.

The lawsuit seeks a declaration finding the TSA and DEA’s actions unconstitutional and an injunction forbidding either agency from seizing individuals or their belongings solely on the basis of them carrying cash — something that is not actually illegal. If it is granted class status, this will make it much easier — and much less expensive — for others who have been abused by these federal agencies to demand their money back.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, dea, legalized theft, terry rolin, tsa

The FBI Can Get Into The Latest IPhones, So Why Is It Asking Apple To Break Encryption On Older Models?

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the reminder:-the-FBI-still-hasn't-updated-its-locked-device-count dept

The FBI has asked Apple to break the encryption on devices owned by the Pensacola Naval Base shooter. It hasn’t made this request officially — there’s no court order being sought to compel Apple’s assistance — but it’s asking nonetheless.

Attorney General Bill Barr put a little more muscle behind the FBI’s informal request. His statement insinuated that Apple was making the country less safe by refusing to break encryption. He also stated that time was of the essence in cases like this and Apple’s general unhelpfulness wasn’t acceptable.

Apple fired back by again stating it would not break phone encryption for the US government. It also pointed out the FBI did not inform of it a second locked device until a month after the shooting. If the government was concerned about time slipping away, it did not act with alacrity during this latest investigation.

Donald Trump followed Bill Barr’s lead, attacking Apple via Twitter with a particularly stupid tweet that suggests the president is still all about quid pro quo.

The administration is trying to turn public opinion against Apple. This will make it easier to push anti-encryption laws and policies. But the FBI doesn’t seem to need Apple to break encryption for it. It has options it’s apparently decided not to use in this case.

As we’ve noted earlier, a handful of tech companies offer devices that break or bypass encryption to pull data and communications from locked phones. Yes, it’s still an arms race, with companies like Apple patching the flaws these tools exploit, but there’s plenty of money to be made cracking open devices for government agencies.

The FBI isn’t interested in these tools, except when it’s convenient for the agency. Legal precedent compelling phone manufacturers to break encryption is infinitely more useful to the FBI. So, it chooses to ignore these options when it thinks it has a compelling case for encryption backdoors. That’s what appears to be happening here.

Thomas Brewster of Forbes says the FBI has used third-party hacking tools to access the contents of Apple’s latest iPhone.

Last year, FBI investigators in Ohio used a hacking device called a GrayKey to draw data from the latest Apple model, the iPhone 11 Pro Max. The phone belonged to Baris Ali Koch, who was accused of helping his convicted brother flee the country by providing him with his own ID documents and lying to the police.

If the FBI can get into the newest devices, why does it need Apple to break encryption on the shooters’ phones, which are much older?

Given the models in the Pensacola shooting case are iPhones 5 and 7, it’s unclear why a GrayKey hasn’t proven useful in that investigation. Forbes has previously revealed a GrayKey brochure that showed it worked on older devices, too.

It’s a question the DOJ probably doesn’t want to answer. It will have to, though. Senator Ron Wyden has already asked the DOJ to explain its actions in this case.

The most obvious answer is this: this case pushes all the buttons the administration wants pressed. It involves the shooting of US military members by a foreigner. The San Bernardino shooting was pretty much the same thing: the shooting of government employees by foreigners. These are the only two cases where the FBI has gone public about its desire to force Apple to undermine its own encryption. For everything else, there are third-party hacking tools that actually give the FBI the evidence it wants without undermining the security of millions of iPhone users.

The FBI will only push for precedent when it thinks it has the public’s support. It failed to read the room during the San Bernardino case. It hasn’t gotten any better at gauging public opinion since then. Even with Barr and Trump going on the attack, the public’s mood hasn’t shifted. Compelled encryption-breaking makes everyone less secure, not just the targets of investigations. Trying to parlay dead people’s phones into court precedent is not a good look for the agency. But the agency — and the administration running it — don’t particularly care what the public wants or is best for it.

Filed Under: chris wray, doj, encryption, fbi, going dark, graykey, pensacola, technology, william barr

Turkish Government Finally Lifts Wikipedia Ban

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the you-lost,-losers dept

More than two years ago, the Turkish government blocked all of Wikipedia under the dubious legal theory it was a “threat to national security.” A single offending article that linked the Turkish government to various terrorist organizations was the “threat” Turkey felt it couldn’t withstand.

Wikipedia challenged this blanket ban — which covered all of its domains, not just the Turkish version. It appealed the decision in Turkey and petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to declare the government’s ban a violation of free speech rights.

The ECHR seemed inclined to give Wikipedia what it asked for. But securing a win wouldn’t be enough to lift the ban. Turkey has routinely blown off ECHR verdicts, choosing to keep its human rights violations in place in exchange for periodic fines.

Unfortunately, for Recep Erdogan and his government, another decision was handed down that wasn’t so easily ignored. In late December of last year, the country’s top court ruled the ban was a violation of freedom of expression rights. It took a few weeks for the government to comply with the order, but the Wikimedia Foundation reports the ban has finally been lifted.

Today, on Wikipedia’s 19th birthday, the Wikimedia Foundation has received reports that access to Wikipedia in Turkey is actively being restored.* This latest development follows a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional. Earlier today, the Turkish Constitutional Court made the full text of that ruling available to the public, and shortly after, we received reports that access was restored to Wikipedia.

This win doesn’t mean Wikipedia is dropping its ECHR petition. Even if Turkey is unlikely to comply with an ECHR ruling, another declaration of access to Wikipedia as a basic human right will make it a little more difficult for the Turkish government to institute another ban the next time it’s offended.

So far, the security of the Turkish nation appears to be as intact as it ever was. Considering the government’s unimpaired access to any number of media outlets, it would seem the best thing the country could have done is fight Wikipedia’s speech with speech of its own. But that’s never enough for authoritarians like Recep Erdogan who use a great deal of their power to silence critics under the guise of securing the nation.

Filed Under: ban, turkey, wikipedia
Companies: wikimedia

California's Ban Of Facial Recognition Tech Killed Off San Diego's Mostly Useless Biometric Program

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the nothing-of-value-was-lost dept

California’s ban on use of facial recognition tech by law enforcement showed the state’s government is willing to get out ahead of potential privacy issues. The tech is as popular as it is unproven. Law enforcement agencies strongly believe facial recognition will help it apprehend criminals more efficiently, but the available data simply doesn’t back up this belief.

The tech is still pretty lousy at recognizing faces, kicking out false positives at an alarming rate. This also means it’s not recognizing faces it should be recognizing — the criminals and terrorists government agencies are convinced it will catch. They’re also prone to bias, more likely to misidentify minorities, which results in increased targeting of demographics already heavily over-represented in most law enforcement agencies’ paperwork.

California’s new ban affects mobile tech used by state agencies. This includes body cameras, smartphones, and tablets. That was enough to kill the San Diego’s multiple facial recognition programs. The San Diego PD used 1,300 cameras to build a database of 65,000 images over the course of seven years. These images were matched against a much larger database run by the San Diego Sheriff’s Department

The program went into effect without the public being informed.

Introduced in 2012 by the countywide San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) without any public hearing or notice, the Tactical Identification System (TACIDS) gave law enforcement officials access to software that focuses on unique textures and patterns in the face—ear shape, hair, skin color—using the distance between the eyes as a baseline. In less than two seconds, the software compares those unique identifiers to a mugshot database of 1.8 million images collected by the San Diego County Sheriff’s office.

The San Diego PD used this database more frequently than any other agency with access to it, which included federal agencies like ICE. According to the PD, its increased access rate was mostly altruistic.

[T]he department used facial recognition scans more than 8,000 times in 2018, almost double the number in 2016, which it says was largely due to the formation of a new division, Neighborhood Policing Division (formed in March of 2018), aimed at addressing the issue of homelessness. SDPD equipped officers in the new division with TACIDS devices to help identify homeless people, who often do not have identification.

The SDPD did not say whether this use of the database actually resulted in correctly-identified homeless people. But the statement it did give Fast Company suggests its thousands of queries were mostly dead ends.

“While facial recognition could be a useful tool, we do not foresee the three-year moratorium on mobile face recognition use by law enforcement as having much of an impact on our department,” says Lieutenant Justin White, media relations director for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department.

This statement is far more telling. While certain California law enforcement officials are bemoaning the ban, the San Diego PD must have already known the tech was over-hyped. If it worked as advertised, the local law enforcement agencies would have delivered a steady stream of success stories. But when something is a constant disappointment — and you’ve decided you’re going to use it anyway — you avoid creating a paper trail.

Lieutenant White of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said they have not been tracking TACIDS successes in arrests and prosecutions, so they do not have any statistics. Neither does the SDPD, according to spokesperson Lieutenant Shawn Takeuchi.

That’s the burial of bad news. There’s no reason to give critics of sketchy surveillance programs any more ammunition than they already have to work with. The moratorium will have almost no effect on law enforcement in the state — something that few agencies are willing to publicly acknowledge. They want the tech even though it has proven — over the course of seven years — to have added nothing to their ability to do their job.

Filed Under: biometrics, california, facial recognition, san diego, surveillance

City Of Dallas Shuts Down Business Of Man Who Called Cops Over 100 Times In 20 Months To Deal With Criminals Near His Car Wash

Legal Issues

from the damned-if-you-call,-damned-if-you-don't dept

Let’s talk about nuisance abatement laws. These are laws cities can use to shut down businesses that appear to draw more than their fair share of the criminal element.

If you’re a fan of asset forfeiture, you’ll love nuisance laws. By abdicating their law enforcement responsibilities, cities can have their lower cost cake and eat your property too. It’s win-win for cities, who love to use laws like this to effectively seize property from citizens who have the misfortune to operate legitimate businesses in high crime areas.

Here’s how it works in Dallas, Texas. The city says business owners must pay for their own security devices and personnel to keep their businesses free of criminals. No business will be compensated for these additional costs. All cops need to do is throw a couple of placards at the business and the city takes it from there. Criminal activity in the area is now the responsibility of businesses in the area. Can’t get criminals to get off your property? Too bad. It’s the city’s property now.

The Dallas police chief has a new tool in her arsenal to force home and business owners to address crime on or near their properties: shame.

On Wednesday, the Dallas City Council passed a “nuisance abatement” ordinance allowing Police Chief U. Renee Hall to identify properties that tolerate criminal activity and try to get the owners to address it.

The new ordinance allows city officials to slap a sign on properties identified as sites of “habitual criminal activity.”

The first efforts involve shaming the business owners for things they likely cannot control. This isn’t the only step taken, though. The placards are the beginning. If the city feels the business owner isn’t doing enough to control crime in the area (surely that’s a law enforcement job?), it can shut the business down and keep fining it for anything and everything it can think of until the business owner is insolvent and has to sell the property.

A South Dallas car wash owner has been fighting the city on and off for most of three decades over its application of nuisance laws. The city has already shut down Dale Davenport’s car wash. City council members claim Davenport is to blame for the crime that surrounds his business. It also claims he’s done next to nothing to solve a problem he didn’t create.

Davenport fought back. He demanded the city turn over 911 call records linked to his business in order to show the problem isn’t his, but the Dallas Police Department’s. After several months of being stonewalled, he has finally obtained the documents he needs to show the city it’s not doing all it can to combat crime. Jim Schutze of the Dallas Observer has been following this fight for years and has the details.

After a two-year tooth-and-nail battle with the city, Davenport’s lawyer, Warren Norred, recently forced City Hall to cough up the official record of 911 calls Davenport has been making all along, begging police to come to his place of business.

It’s not just a few calls scattered over several months. Davenport called the cops constantly, asking them to come deal with the criminal element that seemed to feel it could just hang out at his place of business. The city says crime is Davenport’s fault. The record(s) [PDF] show this is a failure of city agencies, most notably the Dallas PD.

On and on the 911 reports go for 414 single-spaced pages… And that covers only 20 months from 1/5/18 to 9/25/19. Dale Davenport and his father, Freddy Davenport, have been calling the cops to their property for 27 years.

Davenport is suing the city and the hundreds of pages of 911 calls are vital to his litigation. The city wants to take his property, claiming he hasn’t fulfilled his obligations as a citizen and business owner. 414 pages of 911 calls says otherwise. Davenport (and his father before him) have been pleading for the city to clean up a crime-infested area filled with drug houses and the criminal element drawn to this area by the (apparently) unchecked drug trade.

The PD’s newly-formed Nuisance Abatement Team doesn’t appear to have made any impact here, other than posting placards on businesses it believes aren’t doing enough to fight the crime the Dallas PD should be fighting. Paying taxes should entitle you to city services, but only thing Dallas wants to give Davenport in exchange for his involuntary contributions is all the blame for the crime that surrounds him.

Fourteen years ago, a state committee investigation [PDF] found Dallas’ nuisance laws had been abused severely and regularly.

Sworn testimony before the house committee described specific cases of misuse of the statute by city officials such as:

• Targeting of a few, select businesses in high-crime areas, while ignoring more serious crimes occurring on surrounding properties;
• Directing businesses to hire certain security personnel with the clear suggestion that hiring these select individuals would diminish the city’s threatened enforcement of nuisance abatement;
• Parking a large number of police cars in the parking lot of a business owner as a retaliatory act toward that owner, who had challenged the city’s nuisance action against him and had testified in court on behalf of an individual who was acquitted of charges for resisting arrest while on the business’ property;
• Using calls to police requesting assistance by the business as marks against that business in the city’s criteria for evidence of nuisance abatement violations;
• Directing a hotel property owner to run criminal history checks on all guests, which is a possible violation of the guests’ civil rights and could potentially subject the business to legal liability; and
• Sanctioning a local car wash owner because marihuana was found in the pants pocket of a person working on the property. It was suggested by the city legal department that the owner needed to conduct random pat-down searches of persons working on the property on a regular basis — an act prohibited by law even for law enforcement officers.

To sum up:

[T]he committees are gravely concerned that the problems stemming from Dallas’ use of the nuisance laws are the result of a unique and incorrect interpretation of those laws by city officials — wrongly taking the laws to mean that fighting crime is no longer the city’s responsibility but has instead now become primarily the responsibility of private citizens and businesses; and that private citizens can be held strictly liable for crimes that take place on or near their property even when they are not involved in that crime, have taken affirmative steps to prevent the crime, are themselves victims of that crime, and have reported the crime, requesting the assistance of law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, the body of evidence available to the committees also strongly suggests that the city uses the nuisance laws to intimidate, promote cronyism, and inappropriately use law enforcement personnel, specifically uniformed police and code enforcement officers, to deliver not-too-subtle messages of coercion and retaliation to legitimate businesses and property owners who refuse to submit to such tactics.

It’s 2020. Nothing has changed. The city continues to shrug off its responsibilities and put private business owners in the impossible position of clearing out nearby crime without relying on the law enforcement services the city is supposed to provide to taxpayers. I guess the city believes it’s only obligation to business owners like Davenport is to staff 911 call centers. Other than that, they’re on their own until the city shuts them down.

Filed Under: crime, dale davenport, dallas, law enforcement, nuisance abatement