California Sheriff's Dept. Tells Journalists It Will Cost $350,000 To Process 48 Use Of Force Cases [Updated]

Legal Issues

from the middle-finger-made-of-dollar-signs dept

California law enforcement’s fight against transparency and accountability continues. Since a new law allowing the public to access police misconduct record went into effect, the following has happened:

• The City of Inglewood allowed the Inglewood PD to shred all of its pre-2019 misconduct records.
• A sheriff’s union asked the state Supreme Court to declare that the new law did not apply retroactively. The court declined the union’s premature request.
• Multiple agencies arbitrarily decided the law did not apply retroactively, prompting a number of lawsuits from public records requesters.
• The author of the law stepped up to point out the law was presumed to be retroactive, clarifying the legislative intent.
• The state’s attorney general ignored the law’s author’s statement — which had been sent to him directly — to claim no agency needed to turn over historical misconduct records until the courts sorted this out.
• The courts began sorting this out. So far, two state courts have handed down rulings coming down on the side of retroactivity.

It doesn’t seem likely the state’s courts are going to side with law enforcement agencies and their desire to whitewash their pasts. The legal battles will continue until every avenue of appeal has been exhausted, but until there’s a definitive, unified ruling on the issue, agencies will continue to play keepaway with public records.

With their dirty pasts in jeopardy of being exposed, law enforcement agencies are turning to another favorite dirty trick: pricing records requesters out of the market.

Sara Libby of the Voice of San Diego says the San Diego Sheriff’s Department wants $246,759.32 to process past use of force records. Comparatively, it’s a bargain. There’s a $100,000 markup on the request filed by KPBS, which is seeking the same records from the agency.

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department estimated it’ll cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to supply police misconduct and use of force records in response to a KPBS request. The agency’s response is the latest development in a battle between law enforcement agencies and media organizations across the state to obtain records recently made available under a new law that took effect January 1.

[…]

A Monday letter from the Sheriff’s Department to KPBS said the $354,524.22 fee will cover the cost to review and redact records from 48 use of force cases. It is still estimating the cost for 28 others, the response said.

This is an insane amount of money to charge for records related to 48 use of force cases. The department claims it will need to obtain special equipment to redact audio and video files, and has decided to pass that entire cost on to KPBS despite the fact the equipment will be used to process records requests for years to come. The Sheriff’s Department’s justification for this move? The law says it can and doesn’t require it to determine whether or not it should.

Unsurprisingly, the law enforcement agency may be wrong about the law.

However, James Chadwick, a partner of the law firm Sheppard Mullin said the court case the agency cites is currently under review by the California Supreme Court.

“So that’s actually not currently a citable precedent,” Chadwick said. “It’s not controlling authority on anything, so their reliance on that single precedent is pretty questionable as well.”

Whatever it takes to keep the public from knowing how many bad cops their tax dollars have paid for, I guess. There have been a few agencies in state acting in good faith since the new law went into effect, but the reaction from most has been to further damage their relationships with the public they serve with antagonism, stonewalling, and deliberate obtuseness.

UPDATE: It appears a little public shaming goes a long way:

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore confirmed to KPBS he will not charge to produce newly available records on incidents of use of force or confirmed cases of sexual assault and dishonesty by a deputy. KPBS previously received estimates totaling nearly $400,000 to remove private information from materials for dozens of cases.

Even better, Sheriff Gore appears to realize exactly what message he sent — intentionally or not — by demanding a ridiculous amount of money for the processing of these files.

“We looked at the perception that it creates that we’re trying to circumvent the law and make it cost prohibitive — that is not the intention of what we’re doing,” Gore said in a phone interview.

The department will absord the costs of the new equipment and hire more people to handle the influx of document requests triggered by the new public records law.

Filed Under: california, fees, foia, san diego, san diego sheriff's department, transparency
Companies: kpbs, voice of san diego

Deputies Sued After False ALPR Hit Leads To Guns-Out Traffic Stop Of California Privacy Activist

Privacy

from the too-important-to-implement-cautiously dept

Law enforcement agencies love their automatic license plate readers. ALPRs do what cops physically can’t: scan millions of plates a year and run them against a number of shared databases. The systems are black boxes. The public is often given little information about how many plate images databases store or for how long. Law enforcement agencies rarely audit the data, providing zero insight on the number of false positives ALPRs return. Non-hit photos are sometimes held indefinitely, creating databases of people’s movements.

All of these negatives are supposed to be outweighed by the fact that cops sometimes catch criminals with ALPRs. How often this happens is anyone’s guess. Officials will tout the tech’s ability to track down criminals, but these anecdotes are usually only provided when government officials start asking questions about the tech — questions they should have asked during the approval process.

Getting tagged as a hit by an ALPR is a frightening experience for innocent drivers. The tech tells cops they have a potentially dangerous criminal on their hands and they react accordingly. Drivers are somehow supposed to prove a negative at gunpoint and their inability to do only ratchets up the tension.

A false hit by an ALPR has resulted in a federal lawsuit [PDF]. And the Contra Costa (CA) Sheriff’s Department quite possibly found the worst person to pull over because a machine told it to.

As chair of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, [Brian] Hofer, 41, has railed against what he describes as the seemingly arbitrary use of Automated License Plate Readers — cameras that ping police and private agencies by matching plate numbers with “vehicles of interest.”

So the irony is not lost on him when he said he and his brother, a 23-year-old political science student at UC Berkeley, were detained, sometimes at gunpoint, on Nov. 25 when a license plate reader near the San Pablo Lytton Casino off Interstate Highway 80 alerted police that they were riding in a stolen car.

Out came the guns, attached to officers sure they had caught a car thief. Hofer and his brother were detained at gunpoint while their rental vehicle was searched. Nearly a half-hour passed before any deputy attempted to determine whether the rental vehicle/contract was legit. Compounded errors are always a potential problem, but they reach critical mass quickly when government power attached to deadly force is involved. Here’s the backstory to the stop — a string of system failures that could have resulted in injury or death.

Turns out though, that while the rental car he was driving had indeed been stolen from San Jose in October, either the police or the rental car agency hadn’t updated the proper authorities that the white Getaround Kia had been recovered and should therefore be removed from the “hot list” database.

The question isn’t necessarily whether or not officers responded to the hot list hit inappropriately. The question is whether this response — which has the potential to see people not only wrongfully detained, but possibly injured or killed — is worth the tradeoff. Law enforcement will always say the errors are worth the labor tradeoff when it comes to ALPRs. Citizens held at gunpoint and warrantlessly searched will always disagree with this assessment.

It’s up to those policing the police — city/county/federal authorities — to make the right call when it comes to ALPRs. Without better data on these devices’ potential for error, government officials are literally trading citizens’ live and liberty for law enforcement convenience.

Filed Under: alpr, brian hofer, civil liberties, contra costa sheriff's department, license plates, police, privacy

Fatal Houston PD Drug Raid Apparently Predicated On Drugs A Cop Had Stashed In His Car

Legal Issues

from the this-is-insane dept

The ugly Houston PD drug raid that resulted in four injured officers and two dead “suspects” just keeps getting uglier.

Officers swore a confidential informant purchased heroin from 59-year-old Dennis Tuttle in the house he shared with his wife of 21 years, Rhogena Nicholas. They swore the CI told them the house was filled with heroin packaged for purchase.

On the strength of this confidential informant’s claims, officers obtained a no-knock warrant and raided Tuttle’s house. The officers claimed Tuttle opened fire on them and that his wife tried to grab a shotgun from a downed officer. This was the supposed reason for SWAT team’s killing of Tuttle and Nicholas.

This was the narrative everyone was given. Not a single officer was wearing a body cam, despite the department possessing dozens of them. The only footage that survived — captured by a neighbor’s security camera — was confiscated by the Houston PD.

Even in this vacuum of information, the PD’s narrative quickly fell apart. No large amounts of heroin were found during the raid — just personal use quantities of heroin cocaine and marijuana. The inventory also included a few guns, which the PD has treated as inherent evidence of criminality despite the fact both Tuttle and his wife could legally own the weapons found in the house. The only criminal history either of them had was an old misdemeanor charge for a bad check.

Now that the PD’s investigation into this raid is underway, it’s becoming clear the official narrative — a daring no-knock raid that took out dangerous heroin dealers — isn’t going to survive. The new narrative already includes multiple lies by police officers and a lot of supporting evidence.

First off, the raid inventory does not include the weapon officers claimed Tuttle fired at them.

The other four items in the inventory are guns: a 20-gauge Beretta ALS shotgun, a 12-gauge Remington 1100 shotgun, a Remington 700 bolt-action rifle, and a .22-caliber Winchester 190 semi-automatic rifle. The list does not include the .357 Magnum revolver that police say Tuttle fired at the officers who broke into his home, shot his dog, and killed his wife.

It also doesn’t include the money the CI paid for the heroin or the weapon he claimed Tuttle was carrying.

Nor does it mention the 9mm semi-automatic handgun that the C.I. supposedly saw in the house the day before, which apparently disappeared along with the heroin and the money.

The PD also claimed the investigation was initiated by an anonymous call claiming the couple were selling drugs from their house. Since that initial press salvo by Chief Art Acevedo, information has come out indicating the “tip” was neither anonymous nor did it reference drug dealing.

A 911 call from the mother of now-deceased suspect Rhogena Nicholas put 7815 Harding Street on police radar. Sources close to the investigation say her mother called reporting the 58-year-old was doing drugs inside her own home.

It only gets worse. According to statements from officers now under investigation, it appears the Houston PD raided a house, shot a dog, and killed two people over drugs a police officer had stashed in his vehicle. (As is pointed out in the comments, the current version of the Chronicle’s article has reworded these two paragraphs slightly. Here’s a link to an archived version containing this pull quote.)

In the original warrant – the one used to justify the raid – [Officer Gerald] Goines wrote that he watched the buy and, along with Bryant, identified the substance as heroin. But when investigators went back to talk to [Officer Steven] Bryant, he admitted that he’d actually just retrieved two bags of heroin from the center console of Goines’ car, at the instruction of another officer.

Though he then took the two bags of drugs for testing to determine that they were heroin, he eventually admitted that he had never seen narcotics in question before retrieving them from the car. That, the investigator noted, contradicts the search warrant affidavit filed before the raid, which indicates that Bryant “recognized the substance purchased by the CI as heroin.”

This is absolutely terrifying. Investigators can’t seem to locate the informant both officers claimed was a reliable source of intel, which suggests this person — relied on in other Houston PD investigations — doesn’t even exist. None of the CIs interviewed by Houston investigators said they’d made the purchase detailed in the warrant affidavit.

How do citizens protect themselves against police officers willing to fabricate every aspect of an investigation in order to perform armed raids of their houses? Legally owning weapons means nothing when cops (and many courts) consider homeowners defending themselves from armed intruders a crime in and of itself. Two people are dead and no amount of late-arriving indictments is going to change that. Officers took a concerned mother’s call about her daughter’s drug use and turned it into a criminal conspiracy involving heroin and dangerous drug pushers armed to the teeth.

We have to grant law enforcement a massive amount of power in order for them to do their job. Time after time, they abuse the powers we’ve given them, wielding them like weapons against the same citizens they’re supposed to answer to. Vast power has been paired with nearly nonexistent accountability to create an atmosphere where officers feel comfortable manufacturing evidence to support their adrenaline habits. This should be nightmare fuel for all Americans. Unfortunately, outside of those already attuned to the miserable state of American policing, this will appear to be nothing more than a couple of bad apples they can safely ignore.

Filed Under: dennis tuttle, gerald goines, heroin, houston, houston pd, no knock warrant, police, rhogena nicholas, steven bryant, swat team

United States Gifted With 33rd National Emergency By President Who Says It's Not Really An Emergency

Failures

from the nation-forced-to-hold-breath-until-president-given-what-he-wants dept

President Trump has declared a national emergency.

This is a thing presidents can do. And they’ve been doing it since 1979 when President Carter responded to a hostage situation in Iran by declaring a national emergency. We’ve spent four decades in perpetual emergency mode. With Trump’s announcement, this makes American subject to 33 concurrent national emergencies, all of which grant the president a bunch of extra (and surprising!) powers, and encourage the government to start clawing back rights and privileges from the American people.

The declaration on the White House website is at least mostly coherent. It says there’s a national security/humanitarian crisis at the southern border because, um, immigrants are still trying to migrate to the United States.

The current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency. The southern border is a major entry point for criminals, gang members, and illicit narcotics. The problem of large-scale unlawful migration through the southern border is long-standing, and despite the executive branch’s exercise of existing statutory authorities, the situation has worsened in certain respects in recent years. In particular, recent years have seen sharp increases in the number of family units entering and seeking entry to the United States and an inability to provide detention space for many of these aliens while their removal proceedings are pending. If not detained, such aliens are often released into the country and are often difficult to remove from the United States because they fail to appear for hearings, do not comply with orders of removal, or are otherwise difficult to locate.

This statement may be coherent, but it’s also mostly untrue. Southern border apprehensions are down to a quarter of the peak they reached in 2000. There have been increases in recent years of families seeking entry, but how that translates to a national security emergency is anyone’s guess. The claim that immigrants blow off hearings is completely false. The DOJ’s own data shows that 60-75% of non-detained immigrants show up for court appearances.

The other fudged claim — somewhat muddied in the White House statement but somehow made more clear during the President’s rambling press conference — is the assertion that a porous border without The Wall/Fence is allowing drugs and trafficked humans to come pouring into the United States. The DEA has repeatedly stated that most drugs make their way into the US through legal points of entry. Why? Because it’s way more efficient to move drugs with large vehicles, rather than a handful of mules walking through unguarded areas.

President Trump completely undercut his own national emergency declaration during his Rose Garden press conference. Trump said he didn’t actually need to declare an emergency to secure border wall funds, but thought this would be faster than the usual appropriations process.

“I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

We are subject to a national emergency that isn’t an emergency, based on assumptions made by a president who refuses to listen to the government agencies he’s involving in his manufactured crisis. On top of that, this is only the second declared national emergency that actively involves the military. This should be of great concern to all Americans, including Trump supporters, as it involves the siphoning of resources usually deployed elsewhere in the world and directs them towards a domestic crisis that isn’t actually a crisis.

The only other national emergency to involve the US military was the one George W. Bush issued three days after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. We’ve all witnessed the explosive expansion of government power flowing from this declaration and other Congressional responses to the terrorist attacks. Here we are with no attacks, living in an era of unprecedented safety, and the president of the country has just invoked expansive powers to deal with an immigration influx that has been trending downward for nearly two decades.

Filed Under: donald trump, executive power, fence, immigration, military, moral panic, national emergency, wall

Georgia Gov't Employee Somehow Manages To Get Criminally Charged For Violating Public Records Laws

Legal Issues

from the protections-for-records-requesters-no-longer-listed-as-'NIB' dept

In an event rarer than the stripping of qualified immunity from a police officer, a public official is being criminally charged for violating open records laws.

The press secretary for former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed has been cited for allegedly violating the Georgia Open Records Act in the first-ever criminal complaint filed in connection with the law, the state attorney general’s office announced Monday.

Jenna Garland, 34, the press secretary during Reed’s second term, is accused of ordering a subordinate in the city’s watershed department in March 2017 to delay handing over public records that contained information damaging to Reed and other city officials. The records were requested by Channel 2 Action News.

Both misdemeanor charges are potentially worth $1,000 in fines and a year in jail, but we’re probably not going to see anyone locked up for screwing the public. We’ve only seen one other case like this in the history of Techdirt, and there’s nothing indicating any of the politicians indicted for public records law violations have been jailed for breaking the law. In fact, one felt so unthreatened by the charges, she filed for re-election while still under indictment.

In this case, a pair of records requests led to the criminal charges. The first request was for water billing records, filed by journalists at Channel 2. The second request — filed by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution(AJC) and Channel 2 — sought communications discussing the water billing records request. The second request was a goldmine for journalists and the impetus for criminal charges against Jenna Garland.

In March 2018, the AJC and Channel 2 published text messages Garland sent a year earlier to then-watershed spokeswoman Lillian Govus.

[…]

In the messages, Garland instructed Govus to “drag this out,” “be as unhelpful as possible” and to “provide the information in the most confusing format available.”

Garland later instructed Govus to “hold all” records until a Channel 2 producer contacted Govus for an update.

The records originally sought showed large amounts owed to the city’s water department by a number of city politicians, including a councilwoman attempting to run for mayor. Those records were finally released to Channel 2 after it threatened to sue the agency.

There may be more charges coming, based on what’s been seen in the text messages AJC obtained. Garland didn’t work alone to withhold requested documents and quite possibly was following instructions from those above her when she started telling city employees to violate open records law.

This sort of thing should be happening more frequently, but it’s difficult to convince prosecutors to go after fellow government employees. The laws themselves usually aren’t much help, snaring only the most egregious violators. Still, it does show it’s not impossible to punish government employees for violating open records laws, which should generate at least some minimal deterrent effect.

Filed Under: criminal charges, foia, georgia, jenna garland, public records

FBI's Internal Investigations Of Shootings By Agents Clears Agents 98% Of The Time

Failures

from the BONUSES-ALL-AROUND! dept

An agency that investigates itself will almost always clear itself. The FBI, which still allows interviews of suspects to be “memorialized” with pen-and-paper recollections by the interviewer, is allowed to handle its own internal investigations of deadly force deployment. Unsurprisingly, FBI agents are rarely found to have acted inappropriately.

New FBI data obtained exclusively by NBC News shows the bureau found fault with the actions of agents five times in 228 shooting incidents from 2011 to the present. Eighty-one were intentional shootings involving people or objects, 34 were intentional shootings of animals, and 113 were accidental discharges.

The large number of cleared incidents quite possibly includes this list of questionable shootings:

• In August, an FBI agent was acquitted of federal criminal charges that he lied about firing his weapon in a 2016 standoff with right-wing extremists in Oregon. The FBI declined to comment on any disciplinary investigation.

• In June, an FBI agent — off-duty but armed with a handgun — accidentally shot someone in a Denver nightclub after he did a backflip that dislodged his weapon. He pleaded guilty to third degree assault and was sentenced to two years probation. The FBI would not discuss his status at the bureau.

• In 2016, an FBI agent shot a 31-year-old man during a military-style raid to serve a warrant on a different person. The FBI says the man was armed; his family, which has filed a wrongful death lawsuit, disputes that and adds that he was blind in one eye and disabled. The FBI declined to comment on the case.

• In 2015, the FBI terminated an agent who fired his weapon from a second-story apartment in Queens, shooting an unarmed man as he tried to burglarize the agent’s car on the street below.

It’s impossible to say if any of these might be one of the five incidents the FBI found problematic. The agency refused to comment on any of these shootings when questioned by NBC.

Very little information can be obtained by those seeking to hold the FBI responsible for wounding them or killing their loved ones. Even as the FBI has tentatively encouraged other law enforcement agencies to be more proactive in releasing information about officer-involved shootings, it hasn’t applied the same level of transparency to its internal investigations. What has been released is heavily-redacted, giving readers little to work with but a few raw numbers.

This is especially of concern to Junior Valladares, whose father was shot by an FBI agent during a hostage situation in Houston, Texas. His father was the hostage. According to the FBI, an agent poked a gun through a window to try to shoot the man holding Junior’s father hostage. The gun was grabbed by someone in the room, resulting in the agent firing two shots into the room. One of those two bullets struck and killed Ulises Valladares, who was tied up on the couch.

The hostage was the only person in the room, and the FBI went on record as stating it was the hostage who grabbed the rifle. It seems like an unlikely thing for a bound hostage to do, but the FBI has stuck to this story. Houston police chief Art Acevedo — who is dealing with the fallout from a botched raid himself — stated at a news conference last fall he no longer believes the FBI’s narrative. It’s unclear what Acevedo has seen that has changed his mind, but at this same news conference he called out the FBI for allowing the investigation to drag on for months, denying Valladares’ son any closure.

Law enforcement agencies have proven time and time again they can’t be trusted to police themselves. The FBI is no exception.

Filed Under: fbi, internal investigations, shootings

ICE Set Up A Fake College To Bust Immigrants For Trying To Legally Stay In The Country While They Earned Degrees

Failures

from the ridding-the-country-of-dangerous-degree-holders dept

We already know ICE can’t find enough dangerous immigrants to satisfy President Trump’s absurd fantasies of a nation overrun by foreign murderers, rapists, and terrorists. But it appears the agency has completely given up on its “worst of the worst” targeting. According to an unsealed indictment and recently-released ICE emails, the agency blew a lot of man hours and taxpayer money on rounding up [squints at court documents] immigrants attempting to further their educations.

The Department of Homeland Security set up a fake university in Farmington Hills to target foreign students who wanted to stay in the U.S. without proper authorization, according to federal indictments unsealed in Detroit on Wednesday.

Eight people were arrested and indicted in an immigration fraud case for conspiracy to commit visa fraud and harboring aliens for profit, said the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Matthew Schneider.

Six of them were arrested in metro Detroit, one in Florida and another in Virginia. The students enrolled at the fake university with the intent to obtain jobs under a student visa program called CPT (Curricular Practical Training) that allows students to work in the U.S., said prosecutors.

This is ICE’s take on the arrests. What actually happened here is something bordering on entrapment.

The students seeking to attend the fake university had expiring visas. They were allowed to stay in the US and work as long as they continued their education. As long as these students continued working towards approved degrees, they were allowed to stay in the country. A limited supply of H-1B visas means attending school or exiting the country for most of the immigrants involved.

The government portrays this as “staying in the US without proper authorization.” But the university offered proper authorization under this immigration program. Rather than do nothing and sweep up students whose visas were expired, ICE decided to set up a bogus university as a honeypot for foreign students working against the clock to get their stays extended.

The emails obtained by the Detroit Free Press show an ugly, calculated move by ICE to both rob immigrants of their money and their chance to stay in the United States. The agency went so far as to obtain bogus accreditation from a national accreditation agency in order to better dupe unaware immigrants.

Here’s a partial list of the deception ICE engaged in to round up foreign students.

Undercover investigators with the Department of Homeland Security registered the University of Farmington with the state of Michigan as a university using a fake name.

At the request of DHS, a national accreditation agency listed the University of Farmington as being accredited in order to help deceive prospective students.

The university was also placed by federal investigators on the website of ICE as an university approved by them under a government program for foreign students known as SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Program)

All of this led prospective students to believe they were dealing with a real university offering programs that would allow them to stay, study, and work in the US legally. In addition to taking $100 application fees from over 600 students, ICE also hoovered up an untold amount of tuition fees.

“I was told by the students, that the university reassured them that classes would be held and everything would be fine and that they are following the immigration laws,” said Prashanthi Reddy, an attorney in New York City. “The students paid them the tuition fees and were trapped once they realized that classes were not being held, as some didn’t have the money to transfer and pay tuition at another university.”

Students were told by ICE’s fake university they were complying with immigration laws by applying for continuing education. This was buttressed by the bogus accreditation obtained by the agency. Students thought they were taking the next step to extend their stays in the US — all of it completely legal — until it became apparent the fake university would never be holding classes or handing out degrees.

While there may have been a few people taking advantage of immigrants by either lying to them about their visa status or charging fees to route them into another university, a majority of those swept up in ICE’s sting were following the law. If the government says you can stay and work in the country as long as you continue your education, students applying to ICE’s bogus university were in full compliance. All told, 149 duped students were arrested, but only eight of them are actually facing charges for what’s detailed in the indictment.

This is a horrific abuse of trust — aided and abetted by a national accreditation agency. The government lied repeatedly to people trying to follow the law, took their money, and basically arrested them for failing to figure out it wasn’t a real university.

Filed Under: accreditation, dhs, fake college, fake university, ice, immigrants, visa

Google, Apple Called Out For Hosting Saudi Government App That Allows Men To Track Their Spouses' Movements

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the not-a-good-look dept

Seems like this would be something that would go without saying: if you’re an American tech company, don’t willingly assist oppressive regimes in the oppression of their populace. Twitter is forever helping the Turkish government silence critics and journalists. Facebook has allowed governments to weaponize its moderation tools, quite possibly contributing to government-ordained killings.

Now, Ron Wyden is calling out both Apple and Google for making it easier for Saudi Arabian men to treat their spouses (and employees) like possessions, rather than people.

Apple and Google have been accused of helping to “enforce gender apartheid” in Saudi Arabia, by offering a sinister app which allows men to track women and stop them leaving the country.

Both Google Play and iTunes host Absher, a government web service which allows men to specify when and how women can cross Saudi borders, and to get close to real-time SMS updates when they travel.

There’s really no reason either company should be hosting this app in their app stores. If Absher’s creators want to distribute an app that prevents certain Saudi citizens from being treated as equals, they’re free to host it on their own site. It’s not like the developers don’t have the clout to go it alone. The app is developed and supported by none other than the Saudi government.

This isn’t the sort of thing American companies should be giving platform space to, even if it technically meets the inconsistent standards both companies apply to app submissions.

As critics have pointed out, both companies have policies against apps that “facilitate threats and harassment.” Absher may have some benign functions built in (like paying parking tickets) but the overall point of the app is to allow Saudi men to dictate when and where their wives can travel, as well as be alerted to any movements suggesting their spouses are trying to escape the horrible abuses allowed by this country’s laws. Threats and harassment are all but guaranteed, and that’s without even delving into the app’s ability to provide employers with 24-hour surveillance of their employees.

Seems like the easy decision would be to pull the app. What’s the potential downside? An oppressive regime complaining about a slight dip in oppression?

Filed Under: absher, app stores, ron wyden, saudi arabia, surveillance
Companies: apple, google

Minnesota Judges Spent Only Minutes Approving Warrants Sweeping Up Thousands Of Cellphone Users

Privacy

from the redefining-bulwark dept

Tony Webster, writing for MPR News, has obtained court documents showing Minneapolis, Minnesota law enforcement agencies are deploying “reverse warrants” in hopes of tying suspects to crime scenes. A normal warrant targets a known object. Reverse warrants are loaded with unknowns — an attempt to wrangle cell site location info into something that might lead police to a suspect. That’s what these agencies are trying to do, but the approved warrants guarantee a sizable number of non-criminals will be swept up in the data haul.

Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a “reverse location” search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans.

This new brand of warrant was first spotted last spring. Later that year, it was confirmed the feds were also using reverse warrants. These warrants are becoming more common, urged on by a private company pitching investigative methods and tools to law enforcement agencies.

[Brooklyn Park Deputy Police Chief Mark] Bruley said detectives learned about the potential value of the practice and how to write the warrant applications at an August training seminar held by ZetX, an Arizona-based company that teaches police about cellphone investigations, and sells software called TRAX that generates legal documents and maps cellphone data to assist in analysis. The company holds trainings all across the country.

[…]

The week after detectives attended the ZetX training in the Twin Cities, they wrote up their first three reverse location search warrants. By the next month, they had a dozen, each ordering Google to turn over information on devices located in the vicinity of crimes.

The warrants [PDF] demand Google turn over a bunch of data on every phone that happened to wander into a geofenced area around the time a crime was committed.

This warrant is directed to Google LLC, headquartered at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California, and applies to (1) GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth or cellular sourced location history data generated from devices that reported a location within the geographical region bounded by the following latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, dates, and times (“Initial Search Parameters”)…

[…]

For each location point recorded within the Initial Search Parameters, Google shall produce anonymized information specifying the corresponding unique device ID, timestamp, coordinates, display radius, and data source, if available (the “Anonymized List”).

As Webster notes, the warrants likely don’t give judges any idea how many people will be swept up in these data requests. The warrants contain GPS coordinates but no map of the area covered. It’s unlikely a judge can visualize the area covered just by looking at four coordinates. Judges may be able to enter those points into Google Maps to get some idea how much area is covered, but it doesn’t appear any of the judges approached did anything more than briefly browse the warrants before signing them.

Here’s how long it took to approve one requested by the Brooklyn Park PD:

No map was provided in the application to illustrate the area or accuracy level to the judge. This warrant was also issued within about 10 minutes of the detective requesting it.

Things moved even faster for Edina investigators:

About four minutes after the detective signed the application — which included no map of the targeted area — the judge approved it.

Webster has provided the maps the police wouldn’t, which illustrate exactly how big an area is being covered by these reverse warrants. (Click through for a larger version.)

Given the scope of the area covered and the imprecise nature of location data, each warrant has the potential to generate a ton of false positives — people who happen to live, work, or travel through these busy areas. If a map had been provided, there’s a good chance judges would have taken a little longer considering these requests.

Or not.

Of the 22 reverse location search warrants issued in Hennepin County, only three times did the warrant applications include map demonstrating the geographic area being targeted by the warrant. And yet, the time difference between an officer signing a warrant request, and a judge approving it, was sometimes just a few minutes.

There’s not a lot of good news from the law enforcement perspective either. Most of the reverse warrants failed to generate possible suspects. They also failed to generate false positives either, so that’s a (very limited) plus. But I don’t think a lack of success will deter investigators from seeking these warrants. Reverse warrants allow officers to perform a virtual canvassing of the neighborhood for possible suspects without expending much in the way of time or manpower.

Google appears to be pushing back when requests are excessive. This is all well and good, but Google’s a one-stop shop for law enforcement thanks to its expansive data harvesting over the years. The initial pushback should be coming from judges, not the private sector. When it’s up to a data-hungry megacorp to provide the first layer of protection for cellphone users’ privacy, the judicial system is failing to do its job.

Filed Under: general warrants, hennepin county, location info, minneapolis, police, reverse warrants
Companies: google