Pentagon Tells Military Members To Steer Clear Of Consumer DNA Testing Kits

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the save-that-saliva-for-the-battlefield,-soldier! dept

Dozens of companies are offering off-the-shelf DNA tests that promise to do everything from settling paternity claims to letting you know what horrible disease is going to end your life. Other companies simply offer you a chance to connect with the roots and outer branches of your family tree by matching your DNA to the thousands of other people in their databases.

What’s not in the marketing pitches are the side effects of tying DNA markers to personally-identifiable info. Some companies are allowing law enforcement agencies to access entire databases with a single warrant. One company (Family Tree) has basically granted the FBI carte blanche access to its entire database.

Then there’s the private sector. Insurance companies and employers may be using DNA tests to deny coverage or raise rates on existing coverage if markers for genetic diseases are found. Nothing’s more personal than your DNA. When it’s tied to you with a bunch of third-party records, it can cause problems.

That’s the general message of a letter sent to US military members by the Department of Defense. Yahoo News obtained a copy of the DoD’s letter [PDF], which warns troops away from using consumer DNA products because of the risks they pose.

What the Pentagon has to say about DNA kits applies to everyone, not just members of the military.

These DTC [direct-to-consumer] genetic tests are largely unregulated and could expose personal and genetic information, and potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission…

[…]

Moreover, there is increased concern in the scientific community that outside parties are exploiting the use of genetic data for questionable purposes, including mass surveillance and the ability to track individuals without their authorization or awareness.

The memo also explains many of those offered have not received FDA approval, which means claims made by the DNA companies have not been verified. If the company’s product doesn’t work as well as advertised, the serviceperson could end up receiving inaccurate statements about health issues (or offspring, apparently).

While it’s not exactly clear how DNA info stored in a database can result in new security risks, there’s something to be said about the negative effects it could have on a serviceperson’s career. A statement given to the Military Times by Pentagon spokesman Sean Robertson says the “unintentional discovery” of markers indicating potential future health risks could negatively affect readiness and, consequently, the soldier’s career. Soldiers are required to disclose any medial issues that might affect readiness and a bad test could result in an erroneous disclosure that takes them off the battlefield, or puts them out of a job. Robertson says this sort of information is best obtained through a healthcare professional, rather than a third party service that hoovers up DNA and PII en masse.

Mass surveillance may not actually be an issue, but the potential for being swept up in a police investigation obviously poses a risk to military members — especially those engaged in sensitive operations and whose involvement could be exposed during the course of an investigation. The increasing use of DNA databases as investigational tools increases the chances of innocent people being viewed as suspects just because their DNA bears some similarity to the sample investigators are working with.

If there are security risks beyond what’s covered in the letter, the Pentagon isn’t willing to discuss them. But there are enough problems with the way this sensitive data is handled by a number of companies that the best bet for most people is to steer clear of those that aren’t transparent about who the data is shared with or sold to.

Filed Under: defense department, dna testing, home dna testing, pentagon, privacy, surveillance

Tracking College Students Everywhere They Go On Campus Is The New Normal

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the normalizing-lots-of-stuff...-including-the-weirdos dept

The latest benefit of an education at an institute of higher learning? Becoming inured to round-the-clock surveillance.

A few months ago, the University of Alabama started penalizing students for leaving home games too early. Coach Nick Saban was apparently angered by students’ refusal to stick around to the end of blowouts. Working with FanMaker, the university instituted a point system that rewarded faithful fans for sitting through entire games by awarding them points that placed them closer to the top of the list for tickets to actually meaningful games.

This mini-surveillance app tracked students’ location during the game. Going outside the range of the stadium’s network before the game was over docked points from the students’ totals, dropping them down the list of ticket buyers.

This surveillance was weird and ultra-specific and motivated by perhaps the most powerful football coach in the nation. Other schools are experimenting with more pervasive tracking, this time tied to class attendance, as the Washington Post reports.

Short-range phone sensors and campuswide WiFi networks are empowering colleges across the United States to track hundreds of thousands of students more precisely than ever before. Dozens of schools now use such technology to monitor students’ academic performance, analyze their conduct or assess their mental health.

[…]

Instead of GPS coordinates, the schools rely on networks of Bluetooth transmitters and wireless access points to piece together students’ movements from dorm to desk. One company that uses school WiFi networks to monitor movements says it gathers 6,000 location data points per student every day.

School administrators are all over this. The thousands of data points provide comprehensive tracking of student movements. The focus is classroom attendance, assisted by hundreds of tiny electronic hall monitors. Instructors can be notified of missing students and send text messages or emails to their phones in hopes of getting them to class.

But there are more disturbing aspects as well. How anyone is supposed to determine a student’s mental health by non-stop location tracking isn’t explained, but the article says schools are adding “risk factors” like, um, not going to the library enough. A whole bunch of tracking isn’t going to make any of these risk factors less risky. The mere fact that students know they’re being tracked could discourage them from visiting on-campus mental health services or participating in events or gatherings that are critical of school policies or administration.

Inevitably, these trackers are going to be weaponized to keep tabs on only certain students… like maybe the browner or blacker students administrators might feel are less academically-inclined. And by “inevitably,” I mean it’s already happening and the company doing it thinks that’s a pretty cool thing.

[SpotterEDU] has experimented with ways to make the surveillance fun, gamifying students’ schedules with colorful Bitmoji or digital multiday streaks. But the real value may be for school officials, who [company CEO Rick] Carter said can split students into groups, such as “students of color” or “out-of-state students,” for further review. When asked why an official would want to segregate out data on students of color, Carter said many colleges already do so, looking for patterns in academic retention and performance, adding that it “can provide important data for retention. Even the first few months of recorded data on class attendance and performance can help predict how likely a group of students is to” stay enrolled.

SpotterEDU utilizes Bluetooth connections to track students. According to the Post article, it’s already being used by at least 40 major colleges. Competitors like Degree Analytics use WiFi to do the same job, tracking students through their connections to the school’s network. That’s another 20 state universities and 200,000 students being followed everywhere they go by surveillance tech.

The companies producing this tech believe pervasive surveillance is the best solution for both class attendance issues and any number of other personal issues students might be dealing with. It’s a brave new world where students can be watchlisted for skipping out on lunch or simply deciding to change their habits. Degree Analytics says its algorithms will detect changes in students’ “behavioral states” and alert administrators and other staff.

Universities buying into these programs are pushing students to homogeneity, which is pretty much what everyone’s been saying about most education services for years now. The system isn’t there to provide the nation with independent free thinkers. It’s there to provide the nation’s industries with cooperative employees who won’t rock corporate boards after they’ve climbed onboard.

A classifier algorithm divides the student body into peer groups — “full-time freshmen,” say, or “commuter students” — and the system then compares each student to “normal” behavior, as defined by their peers.

[..]

The students who deviate from those day-to-day campus rhythms are flagged for anomalies, and the company then alerts school officials in case they want to pursue real-world intervention.

The other added benefit of regressing outlying students to the mean is getting them used to the level of surveillance they’ll be dealing with in the real world, where employers track employees’ internet use and vet their social media accounts before making a hiring decision. It also lets them know that they’re numbers, rather than people. And whenever there’s a deviation in the narrative, the tech will be believed before the individual tracked by it.

Several students said they didn’t mind a system designed to keep them honest. But one of them, a freshman athlete at Temple University who asked to speak anonymously to avoid team punishment, said the SpotterEDU app has become a nightmare, marking him absent when he’s sitting in class and marking him late when he’s on time.

[…]

He then had to defend himself to campus staff members, who believed the data more than him.

Are the tradeoffs worth it for students? That’s a question no one seems to be asking — at least no one buying or selling the tech. Seemingly forgetting the fact these students are paying for the privilege of attending these schools, administrators are acting like it’s the students who owe the school some sort of allegiance, rather than the other way around.

By all means, the school should pay close attention to those it’s paying for — the ones there on athletic or academic scholarships. But the rest of the student body is there, voluntarily exchanging money for further education. It’s on them if they don’t show up in class. Tracking students everywhere on campus makes no sense if the primary concern is class attendance.

It doesn’t make any more sense if the plan is to recognize at-risk students and intervene before problems get worse. Establishing a baseline using “normal” students will only help school staff more swiftly ostracize those wandering too far from the algorithmic norm, ensuring those with issues that probably should be addressed with professional help will become more adept at camouflaging their red flags.

Relying on pervasive surveillance to police things will only make things worse for everyone involved. Universities have long looked at students as nothing more than paychecks. Reducing them to data points further removes their humanity and agency, which makes it far less likely their concerns and issues will be addressed in any meaningful way.

Filed Under: college, students, surveillance, tracking

Police Departments Are Using Swatting Registries To Help Protect Swatting Targets From Police Officers

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the yeah-it's-weird dept

Swatting isn’t going away. Neither are SWAT teams. And the amped-up, guns-out tactics these teams use all but ensure a violent end for targets of bogus 911 calls.

“Swatting” is a cheap and efficient way to terrorize anyone you want terrorized, whether it’s a gamer, journalist, online critic, celebrity, activist, or just someone’s whose personal info has ended up on the wrong website. Why hire a hitman to take out your enemy when cops are willing to do it for free?

The downside is limited. Even if caught, “swatting” perpetrators are charged with a grab bag of crimes that combined rarely add up to the attempted murder a swatting actually is. The rare exception is serial swatter Tyler Barriss, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for making the bogus 911 call that ended in the death of Andrew Finch at the hands of the Wichita, Kansas police department.

There isn’t much being done to deter future swattings — at least not in terms of additional training or policy changes at law enforcement agencies. It’s almost impossible to tell if a 911 call is legit until officers are on the scene, but it does seem these situations could be approached with a little more caution and little less reliance on immediate lethal force deployment.

There are some other efforts being made to limit future tragedies resulting from swatting attempts, as Olivia Solon and Brandy Zadrozny report for NBC. Changes are being made to 911 services in a few US cities that have already shown some positive results.

In June 2018, a Seattle resident who feared a Wichita-style tragedy asked the department to pre-register his address as a swatting risk. The request gave Whitcomb the idea for a city-wide registry, and the registry became part of a unique three-pronged protocol. In September, the police department also established the swatting advisory committee, which includes police, prosecutors, and 911 dispatchers, as well as gamers and tech workers from the city’s large tech community.

[…]

The most innovative part of the protocol, the registry, lets members of the public pre-register their addresses and contact details in an online database via a secure portal. To date, the city has registered 57 profiles of people who believe that they may be swatted. So far, four of them have been targeted by swatters.

This registry idea has already been co-opted by other cities around the nation, which will hopefully insulate some swatting targets from the full force of a SWAT deployment. The article discusses a couple of attempts targeting Seattle activist Ijeoma Oluo. Because she was on the registry, responding officers were advised the calls might be bogus and acted with more restraint.

Six officers, four of whom were armed with rifles, still showed up at Oluo’s home at 6 a.m. But because they knew the address was a swatting risk and had spoken to Oluo, they came to the door without their rifles drawn. They asked her son Malcolm some questions and swept the house to verify no one had been killed. It was all over within minutes.

The second swatting attempt targeting Oluo went the same way:

Again, Seattle police reacted cautiously, sending plain-clothed police officers to the venue to determine whether the threat was real without creating panic. No real threat was detected, but the incident was referred to a federal law enforcement agency.

The registry is a good idea and will save the lives of innocent people. But it does raise the question of why more anonymous reports of violent crimes (active shooters, multiple murders, etc.) aren’t subject to the same sort of restraint and caution seen in these two instances.

A member of Seattle’s Swatting Mitigation Advisory Committee says swatting “weaponizes” police forces against private citizens. Yes, it does. But part of the problem is the teams sent to deal with calls like these. SWAT teams are weapons. That’s pretty much all they offer, at least in their current incarnation. There’s no “weaponizing” needed. Swatting would result in death or injury far less often if cops responded to anonymous tips like these with the same restraint shown in the responses to the two calls targeting Oluo.

It seems that officers headed towards potentially-deadly confrontations would want as much information as possible before entering the supposed crime scene. In far too many cases, the actions of officers during swatting attempts shows the opposite, as if everything can wait to be sorted out until after the bullets stop flying.

This isn’t to say law enforcement officers are the real problem here. This is only to say that the general law enforcement mindset that sees neighborhoods as war zones and residents as enemy combatants has made something truly terrible even worse.

The real assholes, though, are the ones necessitating all of this in the first place. The people who think it’s okay to try to get other people killed or, at the very least, turn their lives into a cop-filled hell for a few hours. And all because a person killed them in a video game, or said something they disagreed with, or embrace different religious and/or political beliefs.

Filed Under: militarized police, police, swatting

NIST Study Of 189 Facial Recognition Algorithms Finds Minorities Are Misidentified Almost 100 Times More Often Than White Men

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the white-dudes-score-another-unearned-perk dept

The development and deployment of facial recognition tech continues steadily, but the algorithms involved don’t seem to be getting much better at recognizing faces. Recognizing faces is pretty much the only thing it’s expected to do and it can’t seem to get the job done well enough to entrust with it things like determining whether or not a person is going to be detained or arrested.

That critical failure hasn’t slowed down deployment by government agencies. There are a handful of facial recognition tech bans in place around the nation, but for the most part, questions about the tech are being ignored in favor of the potential benefits touted by government contractors.

Last year, members of Congress started demanding answers from Amazon after its “Rekogition” tech said 28 lawmakers were criminals. Amazon’s response was: you’re using the software wrong. That didn’t really answer the questions raised by this experiment — especially questions about the tech’s disproportionate selection of minorities as potential perps.

This has been a problem with facial recognition tech for years now. Biases introduced into the system by developers become amplified when the systems attempt to match faces to stored photos. A recent study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found that multiple facial recognition programs all suffer from the same issue: an inordinate number of false positives targeting people of color.

Asian and African American people were up to 100 times more likely to be misidentified than white men, depending on the particular algorithm and type of search. Native Americans had the highest false-positive rate of all ethnicities, according to the study, which found that systems varied widely in their accuracy.

The faces of African American women were falsely identified more often in the kinds of searches used by police investigators where an image is compared to thousands or millions of others in hopes of identifying a suspect.

As usual, the group most likely to be accurately assessed by facial recognition tech is also the group that most often promotes and deploys facial recognition systems.

Middle-aged white men generally benefited from the highest accuracy rates.

That this study was performed by NIST makes it a lot tougher to ignore. While other studies could be brushed off as anomalies or biased themselves (when performed by civil rights activist groups), a federal study of 189 different facial recognition algorithms submitted by 99 companies isn’t as easy to wave away as unsound.

One of the more adamant critics of facial recognition tech critics is Amazon. It’s the company that told the ACLU it was using the system wrong after the rights group took the system for a spin last year and netted 28 false positives using Congressional reps’ photos. Amazon had a chance to prove its system was far more accurate than the ACLU’s tests showed it was but it chose to sit out the NIST trials.

The problems found by NIST exist in both “one-to-one” and “one-to-many” matching. False positives for “one-to-one” matching allows unauthorized access of devices, systems, or areas secured with biometric scanners. “One-to-many” mismatches are even more problematic, as they can result in detentions, arrests, and other infringements on people’s freedoms.

The number of participants show this problem can’t be solved simply by switching service providers. It’s everywhere and it doesn’t appear to be improving. The DHS wants to subject all travelers in international airports to this tech as soon as possible, which means we’ll be seeing the collateral damage soon enough. A few lawmakers want to slow down deployment, but they remain a minority, surrounded by far too many legislators who feel US citizens should beta test facial recognition tech in a live environment with real-world consequences.

Filed Under: bias, facial recognition, minorities, nist

Austrian Hotel Drops Libel Lawsuit Against Guest Who Complained About Pictures Of Nazis In The Lobby

Defamation

from the calling-a-nazi-a-nazi-still-protected-expression-(but-just-barely) dept

Some sanity has finally prevailed in Austria, where libel laws are anything but sane. Earlier this year, a guest of the Ferienhof Gerlos hotel in Austria was sued by the hotel after posting reviews that mentioned the unexpected presence of a photo of a man in a Nazi uniform by the front entrance.

The guest — referred to in court documents only as “Thomas K” — said a few things the hotel didn’t like in his reviews. This:

At the entrance they display a picture of a Nazi grandpa.

And this:

This made us wonder what the hotel owners are trying to tell us with this image. This incident speaks volumes about the current state of affairs in this region of Austria.

The hotel owners claimed the photo was not of a “Nazi grandpa,” but rather the only photo they had of this relative who was definitely not a Nazi. The owners claimed the person had never been a member of the Nazi party, but rather only a member of the military force controlled by the Nazi government. Checkmate, I guess.

Except that wasn’t actually true. The reviewer being sued did his research and discovered the person in the picture had been a member of the Nazi party. So, an actual “Nazi grandpa,” not just a “Nazi-adjacent grandpa.”

Despite all of this, the Austrian court sided with the hotel owners. It granted a preliminary injunction, stating that the hotel owner’s interest in “protecting her reputation took precedence over the guest’s right to freedom of expression.”

Having actual evidence backing Nazi claims is no defense to libel accusations by someone who wants to “protect” their reputation, I guess. Fortunately, the court reconsidered this decision and decided that maybe having proof that the Nazi being called a Nazi by a hotel guest is actually a Nazi might tip the scale back in favor of freedom of expression.

The court rolled back the injunction in November, citing the evidence showing the accused Nazi was a literal Nazi. With the injunction gone, the hotel owners have decided it’s probably not a good idea to keep suing.

The owners of an Austrian four-star hotel who took one of their visitors to court over his online review criticising the portrait of a “Nazi grandpa” in its lobby have dropped the case because the guest managed to unearth evidence showing their relative had in fact been a member of the Nazi party.

I wonder how much a visit to the German National Archives costs?

The hotel’s owners, who say they had not been aware of their relatives’ party membership, will likely have to pay their former guests’ legal costs of about €10,000 (£8,350).

The hotel owners could have done a little research before engaging in litigation, but that same thing could be said about lots of plaintiffs in bogus defamation suits. Careless litigation tends to do more damage to reputations than anything defendants have said. The decision to place a photo containing a person wearing Nazi symbols at the entrance of a hotel was a terrible judgment call by the owners. A simple apology and an explanation would have been far better than this expensive mess it made for itself.

Filed Under: austria, defamation, nazis, reviews, thomas k, truth
Companies: ferienhof gerlos

Alabama Lawmakers Think The Time Is Right To Make Assaulting A Cop A 'Hate Crime'

Legal Issues

from the let's-do-the-stupid-thing-again dept

Another stupid, pointless effort to turn protectors and servants into professional victims is being mounted in Alabama. Cops can barely be bothered to educate themselves on the laws they’re enforcing, but they’re usually all over the ones that allow them to turn things they don’t like into criminal activity.

It’s (yet another) “blue lives matter” law being foisted upon citizens by legislators who are altogether too certain they’re in the right. Here’s the backer of the proposed law that would turn cops into a protected group making a claim that’s proven false before the end of the article at PoliceOne.

“Everyone agrees that it should be a hate crime to shoot a police officer,” said state Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, and chairman of the Alabama State Senate Judiciary Committee where the hate crime legislation is reviewed. “I don’t know anyone who opposes that. The question is, ‘What gets tacked on?’ Yes, you can find a bipartisan solution.”

Everyone?

[Sen. Vivian] Figures said she favors “of doing everything we can to protect our law enforcement officials.” But she said she’s unsure if a hate crime law is the right vehicle.

The bill, written by Senator Chris Elliott, is his second attempt to push a cop-friendly hate crime bill through the legislature. Elliott possibly figures he’ll have a better chance this year because more cops have been killed in Alabama than usual. There have been six law enforcement officers killed by residents this year, which puts the state towards the top of the killed in the line of duty list.

The senator who spoke for everyone (while being wrong about what “everyone” agreed with) doesn’t want this bill tainted with riders that would provide similar hate crime protections for others more deserving of these protections. Sen. Figures (who does not agree with Ward’s assertion that “everyone agrees”) may have been responsible for the death of Elliott’s previous effort when she added an LGBTQ amendment to his 2018 “blue lives matter” bill. That’s the sort of “tacking on” Ward is hoping to prevent here, in order to give cops more protections while leaving more vulnerable residents less protected.

Adding to the stupidity is the fact that police already benefit from a law that provides an extra deterrent to killing cops.

In Alabama, killing a law enforcement while they are on the line of duty is an aggravating factor that is punishable by the death penalty.

These proposals have made periodic appearances in the years following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting was a flash point in police-community relationships. With the current federal administration strongly pro-law enforcement, state-level legislators perhaps feel emboldened to pursue legislation that does little to protect cops, but everything to put more distance between law enforcement and the people they serve.

These proposals are reactionary in the worst sense of the word. They’re legislative affirmations that might makes right and the people with most might will continue to consolidate power. There’s little evidence that suggests these laws are justified at any level. Most killings of cops are impromptu, not planned assaults inspired by an insatiable hate for law enforcement.

The general public receives zero benefit from these laws. All that happens is a very well-protected group of government employees gets even more protections. The laws become vehicles for abuse and there’s only so much courts can do to protect citizens if their “representatives” decide to serve fellow government employees rather than their constituents.

The upside here is these proposals — at least here in Alabama — can be neutralized by adding amendments that would extend protections to people who don’t wear the blue — especially members of the public that far too many legislators don’t feel are worthy of any protection.

Filed Under: alabama, blue lives matter, hate crime, police