California Legislators Want To Make It More Difficult For Records Requesters To Get Documents From The Government

Legal Issues

from the mandated-chain-yanking dept

The California legislature handed the public a win by making police misconduct records obtainable through records requests. The transparency very few law enforcement agencies are welcoming is still being litigated, but going forward it seems clear cops will no longer be able to hide their misconduct behind a wall of government-enabled opacity.

I guess California legislators believe some sort of transparency equilibrium must be maintained. They’ve introduced a bill that will make it more difficult for requesters to obtain documents. (via Dave Maass) The bill amends the state’s public records law to create another hoop for requesters to jump through before they can get a hold of documents the law says are rightfully theirs.

Here’s the key amendment:

Before instituting any proceeding for injunctive or declarative relief or writ of mandate in any court or competent jurisdiction, the person shall meet and confer in good faith with the agency in an attempt to informally resolve each issue. The person or their attorney shall file a declaration stating that this meet and confer process has occurred at the time that proceedings are instituted.

This may seem like a minimal imposition, but it really isn’t. Only a small percentage of public records requesters live close to the agencies they’re seeking to obtain documents from. Even if they are nearby, the law allows agencies to set the agenda. Agencies take as long as they want to set up a meeting, pushing rejected requests past the law’s upper limits for responses.

Even if agencies allow these conferences to happen by phone, requesters are still at the mercy of agencies that are in no hurry to return responses. This is just another way for agencies to stonewall requesters in hopes of deterring them from following through on their requests.

The litigation option is being delayed for no discernible purpose. Few things motivate recalcitrant government agencies like lawsuits. This is a gift to uncooperative agencies, presented as a common sense solution to the costs of litigation. Sure, in a perfect world, these discussions could head off pricey lawsuits. But the world we actually live in requires litigation a great deal of the time because few government agencies are truly responsive to records requesters.

And it’s all going to end up in court anyway. The court will now have to rule first on whether a good faith effort was made prior to the filing, which will result in more expenses incurred by both parties as they attempt to persuade a judge an attempt was or wasn’t made by one party. There’s nothing in the law that punishes agencies for screwing around with requesters and no time limit is placed on the mandated meetings.

Hopefully, this new requirement will never make its way into law. If it does, it should be challenged immediately on the grounds that it violates rights guaranteed by the state. If state legislators are truly concerned about the ever-escalating cost of public records litigation, they should focus their time and energy cracking down on agencies with track records of unresponsiveness, rather than just make it more difficult to force records out of these agencies’ hands.

Filed Under: california, public records, transparency

The NSA Appears To Have Shut Down Its Bulk Collection Of Phone Records

Privacy

from the program-so-valuable-no-one-could-find-a-use-for-it dept

The program considered so “essential” NSA defenders said it couldn’t even be slightly modified is apparently no longer in use. During a recent Lawfare podcast, national security advisor Luke Murry dropped a bit of a bombshell. Charlie Savage summarizes Murry’s comments:

The National Security Agency has quietly shut down a system that analyzes logs of Americans’ domestic calls and texts, according to a senior Republican congressional aide, halting a program that has touched off disputes about privacy and the rule of law since the Sept. 11 attacks.

[…]

Mr. Murry brought up the pending expiration of the Freedom Act, but then disclosed that the Trump administration “hasn’t actually been using it for the past six months.”

“I’m actually not certain that the administration will want to start that back up,” Mr. Murry said.

Murry is referring to the Section 215 bulk data collection. Exposed by the Snowden leaks, Section 215 was modified by the USA Freedom Act, which went into effect June 2015. The biggest modification was where the records were stored. The NSA could no longer collect all phone records from providers and search through the data at its leisure. Instead, it had to provide telcos with lists of targeted numbers. The data remained in the hands of service providers, with the NSA only having access to suspicion-supported phone records.

The alterations to the Section 215 program resulted in the NSA purging a bunch of records that didn’t fit the new parameters. The NSA finally let go of a few of its haystacks, conveniently destroying records integral to multiple lawsuits against the agency. The USA Freedom Act modifications — combined with the NSA’s long history of abusing its collection authorities — seem to have made it impossible for the NSA to continue utilizing its phone records collection program.

The bulk records collection is now in the hands of telcos, resulting in a slimmed-down dataset the NSA didn’t seem particularly enthused to have. Apparently the program is as useless as critics have said it is. The NSA has gone at least six months without asking for data via this authority. This program is due for renewal at the end of this year, but the comments made to Lawfare suggest the NSA may be content to let it expire.

Marcy Wheeler suggests a few underlying motivations for the NSA’s abandonment of the Section 215 collection — and one might be the Supreme Court’s extension of Fourth Amendment protections to cell site location info.

[This] suggests that the problem with the records may not be the volume or the content turned over, but some problem created either by the specific language of the law or (more likely) the House Report on it or by the Carpenter decision. Carpenter came out on June 22, so technically after the NSA claims to have started deleting records on May 23. It also may be that the the NSA realized something was non-compliant with its collection just as it was submitting the 6th set of 180-day applications, and didn’t want to admit to the FISC that it had been breaking the law (which is precisely what happened in 2011 when the government deleted all its PRTT records).

Wheeler says the NSA may have been asking for location data as well to better track the phones it targeted. The IC may have seen the writing on the third-party wall following the Supreme Court’s oral arguments in November 2017. This may account for its plug-pulling a month ahead of the decision’s release.

Or it may be something far less respectful of the Constitution. It could be the NSA has found another way to collect this same data without having to run it by the newly-adversarial FISA court. As Wheeler points out, Section 215 may have been restricted but the powers granted by Executive Order 12333 continue to expand.

Whatever the real motivation, it appears the domestic surveillance program that never prevented a terrorist attack will continue to never prevent terrorist attacks. The upside is we may not be throwing any more tax dollars at a national security program that adds nothing to our nation’s security.

Filed Under: bulk surveillance, ed snowden, mass surveillance, metadata, nsa, phone records, section 215

Missouri Law Enforcement Is Dodging State Forfeiture Laws To Screw Schools And Keep Drugs Flowing Into The State

Legal Issues

from the to-serve-and-protect-their-own-interests dept

The journalists at St. Louis Public Radio are the latest to dig into their state’s asset forfeiture programs. Despite the state receiving a decent grade from the Institute of Justice for the controls it places on state-level forfeitures, the station found plenty of abuse thanks to the federal loophole, which allows law enforcement to bypass all the built-in protections legislators have enacted.

Missouri law around asset forfeiture contains some fairly strong protections. Civil asset forfeiture can only take place after a conviction or a guilty plea in a criminal case. In addition, the money is set aside for schools. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning legal advocacy group, gave Missouri a grade of B+, among the best in the country. In the federal system, however, no criminal conviction is required, and police departments can keep up to 80 percent of the money they seize.

Prosecutors like Tim Lohmar in St. Charles County make the decision whether to handle potential asset-forfeiture cases with state charges, or at the federal level. The vast majority of the time, Lohmar chooses the federal process.

This has resulted in a windfall of over $1 million for local law enforcement agencies. Thanks to federal adoption, the money train never stops, no matter what state laws require. If the forfeiture is tied to criminal charges, the money goes to local schools. Cops aren’t fond of sharing, so only three of the 36 forfeiture cases processed by Lohmar last year included criminal charges for the person the cash was taken from.

The preference to grab cash, rather than drugs, has led to some completely nonsensical defenses of civil asset forfeiture.

“When you seize a thousand pounds of marijuana in the St. Louis area, you’re really not hurting the operations of a drug cartel in Mexico, because the cost to produce that thousand pounds is negligible in the grand scheme of things,” [State Rep. Justin] Hill said.

We’re expected to believe cultivating and processing drugs is a zero cost effort but lost cash can never be replaced. It stands to reason that the production and sales of drugs aren’t going to stop, so the seizure of a few thousand dollars from a random driver is also pretty “negligible in the grand scheme of things.”

And we know cops don’t actually care about stopping the drug flow. They allow the drugs to make their way into St. Louis and camp out on the roads leading away from the city to seize cash they believe resulted from the drug sales they can’t be bothered to stop.

[Sgt. Carmello] Crivello, like most highway interdictors, focuses on the westbound lanes of the interstate, targeting cash, rather than drugs, that comes through Missouri in the eastbound lanes.

“The westbound, generally speaking, are the profits from the drug sales,” said Crivello in an interview, “… so stopping westbound (is) more likely to hurt drugs … (You) hurt the cartels more than you hit the pocketbooks.”

Repeating the same fallacy doesn’t make it true. Law enforcement agencies like cash and the federal loophole that allows them to keep 80% of what they seize. What they don’t like is the work that comes with actually dismantling drug cartels which, at some point, has to involve drug seizures and arrests, rather than pocketing cash and sending drivers on their way.

The state’s law enforcement agencies have a chance to do some truly great things with forfeiture money. As was noted earlier, adding arrests to seizures routes funds to the state’s public school system. Rather than be an active contributor to their communities — both by funding schools and actually taking drug runners off the street — cops are seizing cash and asking the feds to launder the proceeds so they can bypass local schools and any pretense of stopping the flow of drugs into the state.

Of the $19 million collected in asset forfeitures over the past three years, $340,000 has gone to schools. That’s less than 2 cents on the dollar. Most of the rest of the money went to law-enforcement agencies for new equipment, squad cars, weapons, ammunition and jail cells.

Legislators enacted reforms almost two decades ago. Law enforcement immediately found a way to circumvent these restrictions. For a brief moment a few years ago, the federal government closed the escape hatch. That has been reopened and it certainly won’t be closing again while Trump is in office. Fortunately, state legislators are aware of what’s happening and are attempting to close this loophole.

Missouri State Rep. Shamed Dogan, R-Ballwin, has tried unsuccessfully during recent legislative sessions to pass a reform measure that would reduce the number of forfeitures that go the federal Equitable Sharing route and thus circumvent state law. Opposition from law-enforcement groups has kept the proposal bottled up in committee.

Dogan is considering two forms of the bill. One would bar officers from sending forfeitures of less than $100,000 to the federal program. An alternative, more palatable to law enforcement, would set the cap at $50,000. In other words, the small seizures would have to comply with state law, while the big seizures could go the federal route.

Doing this would force state cops to play by the rules set up in 1991 — the ones that gave the state residents some of the best protections in the country. It would make them focus on actually stopping the drug trade, rather than directly profiting from it.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, forfeiture, missouri, schools

DOJ Moving Ahead With Its Attempt To Prosecute Julian Assange; Subpoenas Chelsea Manning

Legal Issues

from the all-the-bad-precedent-it-can-get dept

The DOJ is still moving ahead with its plan to attack free speech protections. More than eight years in the making, the attempted prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing leaked documents forges ahead slowly, threatening every journalist in its path.

Wikileaks isn’t the only entity to publish leaked documents or shield their source. Multiple US press entities have done the same thing over the years. It seems the DOJ feels it’s ok to go after Assange and Wikileaks because it’s not a US newspaper. But once you set foot on a slope this slippery, it’s pretty tough to regain your footing — especially when the Executive Branch has housed people hellbent on eliminating leakers and whistleblowers for most of the last 20 years.

It appears the government wants Chelsea Manning to testify about her relationship with Wikileaks and Julian Assange. The demand Manning received may be deliberately vague, but it’s pretty easy to connect the dots, as Charlie Savage does for the New York Times.

The subpoena does not say what prosecutors intend to ask her about. But it was issued in the Eastern District of Virginia and comes after prosecutors inadvertently disclosed in November that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been charged under seal in that district.

Ms. Manning, who provided a copy of the subpoena to The New York Times, said that her legal team would file a motion on Friday to quash it, arguing that it would violate her constitutional rights to force her to appear. She declined to say whether she would cooperate if that failed.

It would seem like Manning already cooperated when she was being prosecuted. During that hearing, she took full responsibility for her actions and stated Wikileaks/Assange did not direct her actions. But if the DOJ can’t get Manning to talk, it apparently has other options.

A former WikiLeaks volunteer who was also personal friends with Manning was subpoenaed last May. But unlike Manning, he did not fight the subpoena. He accepted an immunity deal offered by prosecutors.

It’s the second person in Assange’s broader orbit publicly known to have cooperated with prosecutors in their nearly decade-long pursuit of WikiLeaks.

The former volunteer is David House. House has been subpoenaed twice, according to The Daily Beast’s Kevin Poulsen. House was uncooperative with the first, but far more accommodating the second time around, after being granted immunity for testifying.

House spoke briefly with prosecutors and then testified for about 90 minutes in front of the grand jury, he said. “They wanted to know about my meetings with Assange, they wanted to know broadly about what we talked about,” he recalled. Prosecutors seemed particularly interested in the potential for collateral damage in some of Assange’s leaks.

If the DOJ is really going to re-litigate the harms of Manning’s leaks, it might want to refresh its memory about the damage they did. A classified Defense Department report said the leaked docs did no serious damage to personnel or American interests. This reiterated findings by the US military dating all the way back to 2013 which said the same thing: no Americans were harmed or killed as a result of the leaks. Unfortunately, the reality we’re faced with is this: the DOJ is threatening First Amendment protections over some hurt feelings and embarrassment.

Filed Under: chelsea manning, david house, doj, indictment, journalism, julian assange, leaks, subpoenas
Companies: wikileaks

Seventh Circuit Ignores Two Supreme Court Decisions To Hand Out Bad Precedent On Cell Site Location Info

Legal Issues

from the doing-nothing-would-have-been-more-useful dept

The Seventh Circuit Appeals Court has issued a dubious ruling [PDF] on cell tower dumps — one that appears to ignore the Supreme Court’s decision declaring warrants are needed to obtain cell site location info. The criminal conduct leading to this questionable finding clearly shows robbing cellphone stores is a particularly bad idea. (h/t Orin Kerr)

[Lawrence] Adkinson and others, in July 2015, robbed a T-Mobile phone store in Clarksville, Indiana, and then a Verizon store in Kentucky the next day. With handguns drawn, they stole approximately 100 cell phones and other items. They later robbed nine additional stores, including three more T-Mobile stores.

T-Mobile investigated the first robberies. As part of its investigation, T-Mobile conducted “tower dumps”: it pulled data from cell sites near the first two victim stores to identify which phones had connected to them—and thus were close to the crimes. From these dumps, T-Mobile determined that only one T-Mobile phone was near both robberies and that Adkinson was an authorized user on that phone’s account.

T-Mobile shared this information with law enforcement, leading to Adkinson’s arrest and conviction. Adkinson sought to suppress the evidence law enforcement obtained from T-Mobile, citing the Carpenter decision. If the appeals court had simply pointed out the Carpenter decision does not apply retroactively and moved on, it would have avoided the number of issues it has created with this published opinion, which will set precedent for the circuit.

The least troubling holding is this: T-Mobile did not act as a government agent when it forwarded the results of its internal investigation to law enforcement.

The government responds that the Fourth Amendment was not violated, and we agree for three primary reasons. First, T-Mobile is a private party, and Adkinson has not shown that it was the government’s agent. “A search or seizure by a private party does not implicate the Fourth Amendment” unless the private party “is acting as an instrument or agent of the government.” United States v. Shahid, 117 F.3d 322, 325 (7th Cir. 1997) (internal quotation omitted). To demonstrate agency, Adkinson must establish either that T-Mobile agreed to act on the government’s behalf and to be subject to its control or that the government ratified T-Mobile’s conduct as its own. United States v. Aldridge, 642 F.3d 537, 541 (7th Cir. 2011) (citing RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF AGENCY §§ 1.01, 4.01 (2006)). T-Mobile, however, acted in its own interest to prevent more robberies of its stores and recover its property when the company furnished data to the government; there is no evidence that it expected to receive any benefit from the government. Providing that data did not transform T-Mobile into an agent of the state.

When a private party hands info to the government, the government doesn’t need a warrant to look at whatever has been provided. As long as the government isn’t actively encouraging this sharing of information with promises of payments or perks, the Fourth Amendment won’t be violated.

But the court goes further than that, suggesting the Carpenter decision doesn’t cover tower dumps.

The case did not invalidate warrantless tower dumps (which identified phones near one location (the victim stores) at one time (during the robberies)) because the Supreme Court declined to rule that these dumps were searches requiring warrants. 138 S. Ct. at 2220. Adkinson also relies on policy guidance from the Department of Justice about cell-site data. But that policy guidance, by its own terms, “is not intended to and does not create any right, benefit, trust, or responsibility.”

But that’s not what the Supreme Court said. The court said cell site location info is protected by the Fourth Amendment. It did not stick a time limit on historical cell site data, declaring collections over x amount of days to be a search under the Fourth Amendment. Instead, it simply noted the obvious: cellphones are tracking devices people carry with them everywhere they go. This vast amount of precise location info should not be only a subpoena away from the government’s possession.

[W]e hold that an individual maintains a legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements as captured through CSLI.

There was no carve-out for tower dumps in the Supreme Court’s decision. There’s one now in the Seventh Circuit.

More troubling is the court’s declaration that — contrary to the Supreme Court’s finding — clicking OK on a EULA somehow waives the privacy protections the Supreme Court extended to cell site location info.

Adkinson’s Fourth Amendment rights were still not violated because Adkinson consented to T-Mobile collecting and sharing his cell-site information. A defendant can voluntarily consent in advance to a search as a condition of receiving contracted services. See Medlock v. Trustees of Indiana Univ., 738 F.3d 867, 872 (7th Cir. 2013). As a condition of using a phone serviced by T-Mobile, Adkinson agreed to T-Mobile’s policy that T-Mobile could disclose information when reasonably necessary to protect its rights, interests, property, or safety, or that of others. And T-Mobile, in accordance with its policy, shared information with law enforcement after one of its stores was robbed at gunpoint.

If this is what the court wants to believe, then the Carpenter decision no longer exists in the Seventh Circuit. Every cellphone owner agrees to have information collected when they purchase a phone and use the provider’s phone service. They may agree this information can be handed over to law enforcement, but the Supreme Court clearly said this does not negate their privacy interest in the information shared with service providers.

As Orin Kerr points out, this ruling also ignores precedent set by another recent Supreme Court ruling. In Byrd, the court held that people who rent cars have a privacy interest in the rented vehicle, one that isn’t overcome by the driver not being “authorized” by the rental agreement. In both cases, the court stated that contractual agreements with private companies are not enough to eliminate citizens’ Fourth Amendment protections.

What could have been an open-and-shut case reaffirming two obvious conclusions — the lack of inherent retroactivity in the Carpenter decision and the inability of private searches (T-Mobile’s investigation) to violate Fourth Amendment protections — is instead a mess of precedential hot takes that directly contradict two recent Supreme Court decisions. Citizens residing in this circuit have just been informed their Fourth Amendment isn’t worth as much as it is elsewhere in the country.

Filed Under: 7th circuit, cell site, csli, location info, privacy, supreme court

Pissed Consumer Exposes New York Luxury Car Dealer's Use Of Bogus Notarized Letters To Remove Critical Reviews [UPDATE]

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the brand-management-yo dept

UPDATE: I spoke to former employee of Luxsport who claims Stephanie Lynch’s notary stamp was stolen by Lance Ludkin, the founder of LuxSport. This theft was reported to local law enforcement but Stephanie and this employee were told there was really nothing they could do about it. I am seeking more confirmation on this and other details about Ludkin’s self-styled reputation management efforts and will be providing another update once I have more information in hand.

Pissed Consumer has uncovered more fraudulent behavior by companies hoping to scrub critical reviews from its site. The site first uncovered the use of bogus court orders to delist content — something Eugene Volokh and Paul Levy have turned into a small-time crusade. These fraudulent court documents resulted in some genuine legal action. Questionable reputation management firms are now facing lawsuits from Pissed Consumer and the attorney general of Texas.

The latest twist in reputation management also includes forged legal documents. The stakes are a bit lower because no one’s directly defrauding a court or forging a judge’s signature. But the underlying tactic is still comparable: the misuse of fake legal documents to remove criticism from the internet.

Every once in a while, people would post a review or a comment here and there about Luxsport Motor Group. From time to time we received notarized letters from the posters who wanted to remove their reviews posted by mistake. Nothing suspicious. Until fraud was discovered.

Fraud involving notarized letters is the subject of this article.

[…]

As stated above, we accepted several notarized letters from the authors of the reviews about Luxsport Motor Group. They looked legitimate at a first glance as they were handled separately at different times and by different managers of our company.

In order to remove a review, the reviewer has to send a notarized letter retracting the review — one containing a sworn statement the review was inaccurate when it was posted. This helps prevent companies from impersonating users in order to remove their criticism.

By spacing out these bogus letters, Luxsport went undetected for awhile, slowly cleaning up its review history at Pissed Consumer. But things changed last March. Another notarized letter arrived but was missing some of the required statements. Pissed Consumer spoke to the person who had written the review they now wanted removed… only to find out this person hadn’t sent a notarized letter.

This happened again in October. Another review was removed with a notarized letter. Shortly thereafter, Pissed Consumer was contacted by the reviewer wondering why their review had been removed. The site dug into the stack of notarized letters it had received targeting negative reviews of Luxsport and discovered a whole mess of suspicious oddities:

4 notarized letters according to which we removed the reviews about Luxsport Motor Group were notarized by one and the same notary public from New York – Stephanie Chrysten Lynch

coincidentally, Luxsport Motor Group is headquartered in New York

interestingly, the posters whose letters were notarized by the same New York notary public, Stephanie Chrysten Lynch, posted their reviews not just from different parts of the US but from different continents

when we checked correspondence we received from, allegedly, the authors of the above-mentioned 4 notarized letters – it turns out that it was their 2nd notarized letter that was accepted in 3 cases; we did not accept the initial notarized letters and wrote them about it, they did not respond and then some time later the second “good” notarized letter came in.

Pissed Consumer confronted Luxsport about the suspicious letters and was treated to a lot of blustery bullshit suggesting the company was completely offended by the mere insinuation it might have engaged in questionable behavior. It claimed Pissed Consumer was trying to damage its brand and destroy its business with these claims. But in all of its defensive statements, it never sounded confused or baffled by the accusations, suggesting it wasn’t completely surprised to be hearing about its sketchy reputation management efforts. It may very well be that a representative of Luxsport didn’t craft these letters or have them notarized, but it’s not unimaginable it’s hired a terrible rep management firm to do whatever it takes to clean up its internet presence.

Bogus reputation management efforts rarely pay off. Luxsport only managed to temporarily shore up its questionable reputation before being found out. All of the reviews it wanted gone have been reinstated and Pissed Consumer’s blog post has drawn more eyes to its shady behind-the-scenes behavior. The Streisand Effect is nearly 15 years old, but there are entities still discovering the term’s definition — and consequences — in the year of our lord two thousand nineteen.

Filed Under: bogus letters, critical reviews, notarized letters, reputation management, reviews, takedowns
Companies: luxsport motor group, pissed consumer

FBI, DA's Office Open Investigation Of Fatal Houston PD Drug Raid

Legal Issues

from the this-is-not-an-anomaly dept

The Houston Police Department has a huge problem. A recent no-knock drug raid ended with two “suspects” killed and four officers wounded. The PD says no-knock entrances are safer for officers, not that you’d draw that conclusion from this raid.

The problem the PD has is its drug warriors are dirty. The raid was predicated on a tip from a confidential informant who doesn’t appear to exist. The warrant contained sworn statements about a heroin purchase that never happened and a large quantity of heroin packaged for sale that was not among the things seized from the dead couple’s residence. The heroin central to the raid appears to have been taken from the console of an officer’s squad car and run to the lab for some very unnecessary testing.

Houston police officer Gerald Goines is the person behind this completely avoidable chain of events. After initially backing his officers, Police Chief Art Acevedo has reversed course in the face of contrary evidence he’s unable to ignore. His initial defense of officers who participated in a drug raid that only turned up personal use amounts of cocaine and marijuana was perhaps understandable, given his position. But it went against the image he’d made for himself as a reformer — someone who would clean up the department and repair its reputation.

A leaked recording of Acevedo speaking to officers after the killing of an unarmed, mentally ill man seemed to make it clear there was zero tolerance for the usual cop bullshit. Acevedo criticized his officers for needlessly escalating interactions, bullying citizens for failing to show the respect officers feel is owed to them, and teaming up on post-incident paperwork to ensure most bad deeds went unpunished.

But in the three years since that recording leaked, it appears little has changed. Officer Goines’ willingness to fabricate a story to engage in a no-knock drug raid — a narrative that included a nonexistent informant and drugs not purchased from the raided residence — shows he had little worry of being outed by other officers, much less criticized for his lawless behavior. Here’s how defense lawyer Mark Bennett phrased it after it was discovered Goines used a fictional informant and drugs from his own vehicle to craft a search warrant:

If you can’t read/see the tweet, it says:

This doesn’t happen if the cops don’t feel safe doing it.
They don’t feel safe doing it if there are honest cops around.
They always feel safe doing it.

Incidents like these aren’t isolated. It’s not a rare bad apple. You don’t get to this point if you’re surrounded by good cops. You get to this point because no one cares about smaller violations of trust or bent rules. The cops who get caught are the ones who have everything come off the rails at once. That happened to Goines: his drug raid produced death and injuries, resulting in a ton of public scrutiny and whole lot of questions Goines and the officers that enabled him aren’t going to be able to answer satisfactorily.

And there will be questions. The FBI has announced it will be investigating the fatal drug raid. If Goines doesn’t want to go to jail for lying to federal agents, he’s going to have to provide truthful answers that will possibly see him jailed for other charges.

There’s also a chance a whole lot of lawsuits will be filed against Goines and the Houston PD in the near future. The Harris County District Attorney says it’s going to be looking into every criminal investigation Goines touched during his years as a law enforcement officer.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office has launched a review of more than 1,400 criminal cases spanning Houston Police Officer Gerald Goines’ 34-year career.

Twenty-seven of those cases are active.

“Our duty is to see that justice is done in every case,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said. “Although the criminal investigation of Officer Goines is ongoing, we have an immediate ethical obligation to notify defendants and their lawyers in Goines’ other cases to give them an opportunity to independently review any potential defenses.”

One case may have already been dismissed simply because Officer Goines was present during the arrest. His fellow officers, who were unwilling to step up and report Goines for previous misconduct, will now see their work undone as the DA’s office makes it way through Goines’ three decade paper trail. Current prosecutions are likely to end up dismissed and any ongoing investigations he was involved in will probably be put on hold. Any one of the 1,400 cases being looked at could result in litigation that could drag his fellow officers into court to defend themselves against civil rights violation allegations.

Does this mean everything Goines did was illegal? Of course not, but the ease with which he fabricated a narrative to support a deadly drug raid suggests he’s been coloring outside the lines for a long time and receiving zero pushback or criticism for doing so.

Filed Under: art acevedo, da, drug raid, fbi, gerald goines, houston, police

EU Law Enforcement Preps To Start Sharing Sensitive Data With A Number Of Human Rights Abusers

Privacy

from the gotta-destroy-lives-to-save-lives-I-guess dept

The EU Commission made a lot of noise about protecting the data of European citizens, resulting in the passage of a law that’s almost impossible to avoid breaking. I guess those protections won’t be extended to anyone a number of governments consider to be threats to national security. Even worse, this data will be shared with governments known for executing their critics. (h/t War On Privacy)

European Union officials have begun talks with counterparts in several Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt and Turkey, about proposed data-sharing deals that would allow Europol to exchange personal information about suspects with local law enforcement authorities.

In some circumstances, the deals could allow the transfer of data concerning a person’s race and ethnic origin, their political opinions and religious beliefs, trade-union memberships, genetic data and data concerning their health and sex life.

The deals are being sought by the EU as part of efforts to bolster counter-terrorism policing across the continent despite concerns being raised about the human rights records of the countries by the bloc’s own data protection watchdog.

When someone starts talking about terrorism and national security, all rational thought goes out the window. The EU will share data with Egypt, which recently made the news for executing nine people who claimed their “confessions” were tortured out of them.

Turkey isn’t much of an improvement, seeing how its government also likes to jail critics — going so far as to use other countries’ laws against foreigners to punish non-Turkish citizens for insulting the president.

It’s hard to see how all of the data being shared is relevant to multi-national terrorism investigations. In fact, much of what would be shared seems more like blackmail material than evidence tying people to terrorist groups or acts. Why else would the EU include data about targets’ sex lives?

In normal countries under normal circumstances, data about political and religious affiliations would be off limits, as would medical information and trade union memberships. This isn’t a case of creeping totalitarianism. This is full-blown enabling of existing totalitarian states, weaponizing the massive amount of data European law enforcement agencies collect on investigation targets.

The EU Commission claims this set of very personal data will only be disclosed if Europol believes it should be. Not very reassuring.

“The transfer of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade-union membership, genetic data and data concerning a person’s health and sex life by Europol shall be prohibited, unless it is strictly necessary and proportionate in individual cases for preventing or combating criminal offences as referred to in the Agreement and subject to appropriate safeguards,” the directives say.

The same EU government that condemned Egypt’s ongoing human rights abuses has no problem giving it data ammo to use against critics, dissidents, and activists. It seems like the claims about “appropriate safeguards” will be ignored if Europol feels the data it could obtain from other countries necessitates increased quid pro quo. Whatever oversight Europol has is probably no better than any other massive law enforcement/counter-terrorist agency, which usually ranges from slim to none.

Human rights abuses aren’t going to stop as long as major nation-states continue to treat abusive governments as equals on the national security playing field. Just as certainly as Turkey has weaponized US-based social media moderation tools to silence critics, other governments seeking to permanently silence critics will weaponize this proposed data sharing to achieve the same ends. The world won’t be any safer, but it might be just a bit more silent.

Filed Under: data sharing, egypt, eu, law enforcement, personal information, privacy, turkey

FBI Debuts 'First And Only' Police Shooting Database That Is Neither 'First' Nor 'Only'

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the now-with-70-percent-less-data! dept

The FBI — late to the party — proudly announces it’s the first guest to arrive. (via Axios)

The FBI has launched the nation’s first and only database that collects information about police-involved shootings and use-of-force incidents.

Most of this announcement is incorrect. The Washington Post has been collecting data on shootings by cops for a few years now. The Guardian put a couple of years into this project before dropping it. Fatal Encounters has been around since 2012 — the side project of former newspaper editor D. Brian Burghart… one that now requires 10 hours a day to maintain. There’s even a database of dogs killed by police officers, something no one in the government has ever offered to track.

So, the FBI is far from the first. It’s not even the “only.” But it could have been both.

The FBI had a head start. The DOJ’s been charged with collecting this data for more than 15 20 years now. Its efforts on this front have been nonexistent. The DOJ decided the best way to obtain compliance from the nation’s law enforcement agencies was to do nothing at all. Reporting was completely voluntary, putting the FBI well behind private parties unwilling to wait for law enforcement agencies to pass along data on shootings.

After 15 years of nothing, the FBI vowed to redouble its efforts. It overhauled the voluntary reporting system in 2015 and replaced it with a brand new voluntary system. Now, after having done nearly nothing to track shootings and nudge the dial towards accountability, the FBI is announcing it has the “first and only” database of its type.

Even its own truncated (and recorded!) statement makes it clear this won’t be the most or first anything:

Halpern: The repository has the support of law enforcement agencies across the country who voluntarily submit the data.

Halvorsen: It kicked off on January 1, 2019, and as of February 2019, we already have approximately 4,600 law enforcement agencies that are participating in this collection.

4,600. Wow. Oh wait.

According to the DOJ’s 2013 statistics, there are 15,388 law enforcement agencies in the nation. The almighty FBI has managed to secure 30% compliance with its voluntary reporting project. Spectacular.

What this database will have that others won’t is information on use of force incidents that don’t involve an officer killing someone. That data will be useful. But it will also be woefully limited, seeing as it won’t include 70% of the nation’s law enforcement agencies.

While it is much better than the decade-plus of the nothing the FBI traded our tax dollars for, it’s simply not acceptable for the agency to believe 30% compliance is worth announcing publicly. Unfortunately, it will probably take an act of Congress to make this reporting mandatory. Until this happens, the public is being better served by journalists reporting on killings by cops, rather than waiting around for cops to tell on themselves.

Filed Under: database, doj, fbi, police shootings