California Court Says New Records Law Covers Past Police Misconduct Records

Legal Issues

from the your-tax-dollars-hard-at-work-hiding-stuff-from-taxpayers dept

The battle over public records in California continues. A new law made records of police misconduct releasable to the public, kicking off predictable legal challenges from law enforcement agencies not accustomed to accountability.

These agencies believe the law isn’t retroactive. In essence, they think the passage of the law allows them to whitewash their pasts by only providing records going forward from the law’s enactment. None other than the law’s author, Senator Nancy Skinner, has gone on record — with a letter to the Senate Rules Committee and the state Attorney General’s office — stating the law applies retroactively.

This has been ignored by the state AG, who has stated in records request denials that he believes the law can’t touch pre-2019 misconduct files. This is exactly what agencies challenging the law want to hear. Unfortunately for them, they’ve just been handed a loss by a California court.

A Contra Costa County judge on Friday refused to block public access to records of police misconduct that occurred before California’s new transparency law took effect, the first ruling in a string of police-backed lawsuits filed across the state.

Judge Charles Treat said it seemed unlikely the suing law enforcement unions would prevail on the merits while dumping the unions’ requested injunction. He pointed out the new law has no impact on past misconduct. All it does is make those records available to the public.

“If it was illegal in 2018, it’s illegal in 2019,” Treat said. “It doesn’t change the legal principles applicable to anyone’s conduct.”

This was said in response to the unions’ argument that the release of old records would introduce new liabilities for officers. The availability of records may make it easier to sue officers, but it doesn’t change the fact they were always potentially liable for misconduct. It just used to be a lot easier to hide this misbehavior from the public.

The impact of this bench ruling is muted by Treat blocking his own unblocking for another ten days to allow the union to appeal his decision.

There’s a chance this ruling will be overturned, despite Sen. Skinner’s clarification. And it’s not the only legal battle being waged over the new transparency. Multiple agencies are suing in multiple counties and it’s probably going to take a trip to the state Supreme Court to resolve the issue.

These agencies may state publicly they believe the law isn’t retroactive, but their actions say something different. The Inglewood PD went so far as to get permission from the city council to shred all pre-2019 misconduct records prior to the law’s enactment date. As a local attorney points out, why would they have bothered if they felt the law would only affect records generated after January 1, 2019?

First Amendment and police misconduct attorney Matthew Strugar predicted the unions’ challenge will ultimately fail.

[…]

Cities, too, had expected SB 1421 to disclose existing records, Strugar said. “Why was Inglewood running its shredding machines 24/7 before the New Year?” he asked.

It’s a question no cop or city legislator in Inglewood wants to answer. Thanks to their cooperative effort, the likelihood of the PD being sued over unreleased misconduct is almost nil… easy to do when there’s nothing left to sue over.

Filed Under: california, foia, nancy skinner, police discipline, public records, retroactive, transparency

Report Shows ICE Almost Never Punishes Contractors Housing Detainees No Matter How Many Violations They Rack Up

Legal Issues

from the failing-to-meet-the-super-low-expectations-we-have-for-ICE dept

ICE continues to make its own case for abolishment. The agency busies itself with neglecting detainees when not acting as the extension of major corporations to shut down infringing panties/websites. ICE is too big and it’s getting bigger at a rate it can’t sustain. To achieve the ends the President has set down for it, it’s wearing itself thin trying to find the dangerous immigrants Trump keeps talking about or the bound-and-gagged women he insists are being brought across the border by the truckload.

It seemingly doesn’t have the manpower to even capture just dangerous foreigners. Instead of using its resources more carefully, it’s doing things like setting up fake colleges to capture dangerous criminals immigrants seeking educational opportunities. And it’s continuing to outsource its responsibilities while taking an apparent hands-off approach to third party detention.

ICE’s Inspector General released a report last summer stating the agency was failing to inspect detention facilities often enough or well enough. It found contractors performing government work were doing the job poorly. Detainees weren’t being interviewed properly or given translators to overcome speech barriers. In some cases, detention personnel were not giving detainees access to services like phone calls to the ICE officers handling their cases. In some facilities, dangerous detainees were intermingled with non-criminals. In almost every case, ICE issued a waiver for deficiencies it actually observed. As far as the OIG could tell, dozens of deficiencies went unnoticed thanks to ICE’s inability (or unwillingness) to perform mandatory inspections.

There’s more bad news coming from the OIG’s office about ICE’s use of contractors to handle detainees. The latest report [PDF] delves into ICE’s apparent unwillingness to hold anyone accountable. ICE can’t be trusted to police itself, so it obviously can’t be trusted to police its contractors.

This is the Inspector General’s ultra-dry summary of the problems it discovered:

ICE does not adequately hold detention facility contractors accountable for not meeting performance standards. ICE fails to consistently include its quality assurance surveillance plan (QASP) in facility contracts. The QASP provides tools for ensuring facilities meet performance standards. Only 28 out of 106 contracts we reviewed contained the QASP.

That’s only the beginning of it. From this missing paperwork, ICE moves even further away from anything resembling accountability. As was detailed in the last report, the IG points out ICE’s “solution” to the few deficiencies it does decide to do anything about is the issuance of waivers, which magically make deficiencies acceptable protocol. ICE calls this a “multilayered” approach. The IG calls it nonexistent.

Between October 1, 2015, and June 30, 2018, ICE imposed financial penalties on only two occasions, despite documenting thousands of instances of the facilities’ failures to comply with detention standards. Instead of holding facilities accountable through financial penalties, ICE issued waivers to facilities with deficient conditions, seeking to exempt them from having to comply with certain detention standards. However, ICE has no formal policies and procedures about the waiver process and has allowed officials without clear authority to grant waivers. ICE also does not ensure key stakeholders have access to approved waivers.

To be more precise, ICE only imposed financial penalties twice, despite observing a jaw-dropping 14,003 deficiencies over the course of three years. ICE is blowing taxpayer money and expecting nothing in return. What’s detailed in this report — along with the IG release from last year — is an agency repeatedly abusing the public’s trust.

Our review of the corresponding payment data identified about $3.9 million in deductions, representing only 0.13 percent of the more than $3 billion in total payments to contractors during the same timeframe. ICE did not impose any withholdings during this timeframe.

When the agency whitewashes bad behavior by contractors, there’s no paper trail. There’s no follow up. And everyone involved seems to have no idea what’s going on other than no one’s going to be held responsible for their actions.

We analyzed the 68 waiver requests submitted between September 2016 and July 2018. Custody Management approved 96 percent of these requests, including waivers of safety and security standards.

Despite this high approval rate, ICE could not provide us with any guidance on the waiver process. Key officials admitted there are no policies, procedures, guidance documents, or instructions to explain how to review waiver requests. The only pertinent documents that ICE provided were examples of memoranda that Field Office Directors could use to request waivers of the detention standards’ provisions on strip searches. However, the memoranda did not acknowledge the important constitutional and policy interests implicated by a facility’s use of strip searches. ICE officials did not explain how Custody Management should handle such waiver requests when a contrary contractual provision requires compliance with a strip search standard.

ICE is handing out waivers for private companies to violate Constitutional protections afforded to detainees. These waivers are almost always indefinite. Each waiver is supposed to be followed up on to ensure the “deficiency” has been eliminated by the contractor. ICE has performed zero reviews or reassessments of these waivers.

The waivers have approved unconstitutional strip searches, as detailed above. They’ve also approved the commingling of violent criminals in general population, and the use of a chemical ten times more toxic than pepper spray to subdue detainees. As the report notes, detainees are being seriously harmed by the lax standards deployed by contractors, and ICE’s response has been to shrug and issue waivers.

ICE is an active partner in the dehumanizing of immigrants, allowing private contractors to treat the human beings they’re supposed to be taking care of like pieces of meat to be exchanged for cash. It’s no better than ICE treats detainees itself, but a federal agency should be ensuring its very existence isn’t a cancerous growth on the soul of this nation.

Filed Under: contractors, ice, punishment, violations

California AG Steps Up To Help Cops Pretend New Public Records Law Doesn't Apply To Past Misconduct Docs

Legal Issues

from the bros-before-accountability,-as-they-say dept

The bullshit debate over California police misconduct records continues. A new law granting the public access to police misconduct records for the first time in decades has resulted in a slew of public records requests. It’s also resulted in a slew of refusals and legal challenges.

Some law enforcement agencies (and their unions) have chosen to believe the law erases their past misdeeds. Although the law says nothing limiting access to records created prior to January 1, 2019, some agencies have decided the lack of specific language allows them to draw this inference from the missing words. Multiple lawsuits have hit the California court system, which may soon force the state’s Supreme Court to deal with this miss, even if it took a hard pass on one law enforcement union’s attempt to get a preemptive declaration that past misconduct records are off-limits.

If these law enforcement agencies were truly seeking clarity, they were given a crystal clear explanation of the legislative intent from none other than the law’s author, Senator Nancy Skinner.

[I]t is my understanding in enacting SB 1421 that the change in the law applies to all disclosable records whether or not they existed prior to the date the statute went into effect…

This isn’t the answer cops wanted. They wanted someone to tell them they could whitewash the past and stonewall the future. Instead, the law’s author told them the law applies retroactively. If they missed their opportunity to destroy these records prior to the law’s enactment, that’s on them.

But they’re getting a little help from the state’s top cop. State attorney general Xavier Becerra has decided retroactivity is still an open question, despite Sen. Skinner’s statement on the issue.

The attorney general’s response to a public records request seeking that information references some superior court challenges to the law’s application to past records brought by police unions.

“We will not disclose any records that pre-date January 1, 2019 at this time,” Mark Beckington, supervising deputy attorney general, said in a response last Friday to a request from freelance reporter Darwin BondGraham.

This sentence follows a very dubious assumption by the attorney general’s office.

[U]ntil the legal question of retroactive application of the statute is resolved by the courts, the public interest in accessing these records is clearly outweighed by the public’s interest in protecting privacy rights.

Oh, really? But whose privacy rights? The public may want to protect their own privacy rights, but I doubt they’re more concerned about protecting the “privacy” of public servants who committed misconduct on the public’s dime.

AG Becerra is deliberately confused by the retroactivity non-question. Sen. Skinner, the law’s author, is honestly confused.

“I find the AG’s interpretation puzzling considering that we have law enforcement agencies up and down the state, including our California Highway Patrol, releasing records…”

Also confusing: the AG was sent a copy of the same letter Skinner sent to the Senate Rules Committee clarifying the law’s retroactive powers.

Cops have a friend in high places. With this action, he’s the best friend a bad cop could have. But he’s only delaying the inevitable. These records will be in the public’s hands. If the courts somehow find in favor of law enforcement agencies, this only keeps the past a secret. Unless police misconduct is somehow also only a thing of the past, California cop shops will still be generating a whole lot of publicly-accessible documents.

Filed Under: california, foia, nancy skinner, police, police discipline, retroactive, transparency, xavier becerra

After No-Knock Raid Goes Horribly Wrong, Police Union Boss Steps Up To Threaten PD's Critics

Say That Again

from the garbage-in,-garbage-out-apparently dept

Four Houston police officers were shot — allegedly by now-dead suspects — while serving a no-knock warrant on a Houston residence. The no-knock warrant was supposed to make everything safer for the officers, giving them a chance to get a jump on the suspects and prevent the destruction of evidence/officers. But as anyone other than cops seems to comprehend, startling people in their own homes with explosives and kicked-in doors tends to make everything more dangerous for everyone.

Operating on a tip that from someone claiming to have purchased heroin from the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, the Houston PD SWAT team secured a no-knock warrant and kicked in the door roughly five hours later. No heroin was found. Some guns and an apparently small amount of cocaine and marijuana were recovered. According to cops, the 59-year-old Tuttle opened fire on officers and his wife tried to take a shotgun from a downed officer, resulting in her being killed as well. The married couple are now dead, having amassed a combined 21 years of marriage and a single criminal charge — a misdemeanor bad check charge — between them before this raid ended their lives.

The cops have vouched for the reliability of their confidential informant despite there being a huge discrepancy between what the CI told them and what was actually found in the house.

According to the affidavit, the informant said he bought the powder from the middle-aged man, who called it “boy,” a street name for heroin. The informant also said that the man carried a gun, and that there was more of the brown powder at the house, “packaged in a large quantity of plastic baggies.” The author of the affidavit wrote that the informant had “proven to be credible and reliable on many prior occasions” and he asked a municipal court judge “to enter the suspected place and premises without first knocking and announcing the presence and purpose of the officers executing the warrant.”

The dead couple cannot provide a narrative, so the one we’re stuck with comes from the Houston PD.

“Once the officers breached the door and the gunfire began from the suspects, one of the suspects actually retreated momentarily to the back of the room and then that suspect came back and again engaged the officers in gunfire,” Acevedo said at a Monday evening news conference.

Maybe some footage survived the shootout…

[Chief Acevedo] said none of the officers was wearing a body camera.

It’s not that the Houston PD doesn’t have cameras. It’s just that officers wear them when they want to and activate them only when they want to. It appears no one in the department has stepped up to hold officers accountable for failing to follow policy. So, only one story survives this shooting: the PD’s account.

There might have been a second version covering some of the raid, but the PD took care of that as well.

[K]HOU, the CBS affiliate in Houston, reports that the house had no security cameras, although “a house next door to the Tuttles’ home does have surveillance video,” and “police took that footage for evidence.”

As is to be expected, this deadly raid has led to criticism of the police department and its tactics. It started with a CI tip about an illegal substance that wasn’t found during the search and ended with four cops wounded and two people with no criminal history shot dead in the home they had lived in for twenty years.

The criticism is well-earned. But the head of the city’s police union believes the police have done no wrong — not in this case and possibly not ever.

Houston Police Department Union president Joe Gamaldi went a step further, calling out people who criticize the police. “We are sick and tired of having targets on our back,” Gamaldi said at a press conference on Monday night outside of the hospital where the injured officers were being treated. (All four survived their injuries.) “We are sick and tired of having dirtbags trying to take our lives when all we’re trying to do is protect this community and protect our families. Enough is enough. If you’re the ones out there spreading the rhetoric that police officers are the enemy, well just know we’ve all got your number now. We’re going to be keeping track on all of y’all, and we’re going to make sure to hold you accountable every time you stir the pot on our police officers.”

This statement says a lot about the mindset of law enforcement. Officers appear to believe that because they do a job few people want to, they shouldn’t be criticized for how they do it.

But the statement says something much more worrying about how police officers and their representation respond to criticism. Gamaldi’s statement suggests the Houston PD will be keeping tabs on its critics. He’s basically saying the government agency employing the people he represents is willing to retaliate against protected speech. That’s not something the Houston PD can do (at least not legally) and it’s something it shouldn’t do, even if some officers feel they might be able to get away with it. If the PD is willing to violate the Constitution when it’s publicly criticized, it’s probably willing to do it during its more private ventures. Ultimately, this statement says more about the PD than its critics, and what it does say is pretty ugly.

Filed Under: dennis tuttle, houston, houston pd, houston police, joe gamaldi, no knock, no knock raid, police, police killings, rhogena nicholas, swat, warrants

Sheriffs' Union Boss Says Officers Have No Reason To Do Their Job If They Can't Score Forfeiture Cash On The Side

Legal Issues

from the checkmate...-I-guess dept

Civil asset forfeiture is an abomination loaded with perverse incentives for law enforcement. Investigations and convictions are too much work. Seizing cash from random motorists or residents is so much easier than legitimate police work. The laws barely governing this practice allow the agency performing the seizure to keep all or most of what’s seized, which has led directly to the widespread abuse we see around us today.

The practice always has its defenders. Most of those defenders come from the same agencies that are directly profiting from asset forfeiture. They say the expected stuff about fighting the good Drug War — that taking $500 from a random motorist somehow creates a ripple effect felt all the way at the top of the drug distribution chain. Everyone knows they’re full of shit, but there are enough true believers in most state legislatures that the practice remains largely unaltered across the United States.

But there are some outliers. Some people see the perverse incentives asset forfeiture creates and say perverted cops are the best cops.

Jarrod Bruder, the executive director of the South Carolina Sheriff’s Association who frequently lobbies for law enforcement interests at the Statehouse, said that without the incentive of profit from civil forfeiture, officers probably wouldn’t pursue drug dealers and their cash as hard as they do now.

If police don’t get to keep the money from forfeiture, “what is the incentive to go out and make a special effort?” Bruder said. “What is the incentive for interdiction?”

I don’t know… how about IT’S YOUR FUCKING JOB. This is a law enforcement professional who actually thinks cops won’t do cop work unless they can periodically seize cash from people they interact with. Hey, Mr. Bruder, if cops can’t solicit bribes or extort protection money from local businesses, why should they be bothered to patrol neighborhoods or respond to robbery calls?

If Wells Fargo account reps can’t sign people up for accounts without their knowledge or permission, why should they even show up to help people open accounts or deal with banking issues? If an entrepreneur can’t rope investors into a pyramid scheme, why even bother getting out of bed at 4 am to bathe in the glow of inflated self-worth? Come on, Bruder. How can you be so obtuse?

There’s nothing quite like a law enforcement union rep telling the public the police are only willing to work when they can directly profit from their efforts. That’s the kind of word-of-mouth advertising asset forfeiture reform efforts need… courtesy of a union rep who doesn’t want the practice ended, much less altered.

That’s the stupidest thing said in defense of asset forfeiture in this article from the Greenville News, which gathers law enforcement responses to its investigation of the unsavory tactics deployed by state agencies. Even victims of crime aren’t off limits. Local cops will take money right off the kitchen counter when investigating murders and claim the $43 pocketed was the result of criminal activity.

But it’s not the only stupid thing said by law enforcement reps defending forfeiture.

Clemson Police Chief Jimmy Dixon said if police didn’t get to collect forfeiture money, it would hamper the department’s ability to conduct long-term drug surveillance.

“It could potentially shut down our K-9 unit,” he said. “Overall, our ability to conduct undercover narcotics operations could be stifled.”

Lt. Jake Mahoney with the Aiken Police Department said they’d have to divert money from the budget to cover drug enforcement.

Greenwood Police Chief Gerald Brooks said it would “sharply curtail our drug enforcement activities.”

Sounds like another set of cops with motivation problems. But even if you believe they’re not like the union rep quoted above them, they’re still complaining about possibly not being able to do something they’re not legally allowed to do.

Forfeiture proceeds are not meant to be written into a budget or counted on for recurring expenses, but should be treated as a supplement to provide for extra training or equipment, according to the law and legal opinions.

Those are the arguments in favor of asset forfeiture: cops won’t do their job if they can’t earn cash on the side and budgets, that aren’t supposed to include forfeiture funds, will experience shortfalls because chickens cops aren’t supposed to count will no longer be hatched. Nice work, so-called drug warriors. It isn’t — and never has been — about dismantling the drug trade. If law enforcement ever made a serious dent in crime, the extra money would dry up. And that’s something they’re just not going to allow to happen.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, corruption, incentive, jarrod bruder, legalized theft, police, south carolina, stealing

Australian Government Agencies Already Flexing Their New Encryption-Breaking Powers

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the sure,-cops-are-right-on-top-of-this-law-and-its-implications dept

Claiming the nation was beset on all sides by national security threats and rampant criminality, the Australian government hustled an encryption-breaking law through Parliament (and past concerned members of the public) at the end of last year. The law compels companies to break encryption at the drop of a court order to give government agencies access to data and communications they otherwise can’t access.

Supporters of the law did everything they could to avoid using the term “backdoor,” but backdoors are what they’re expecting. How this will all work in practice is anyone’s guess, as each demand for “exceptional access” will likely collide head-on with quality assurance processes meant to prevent the creation of security flaws in software and hardware. Agencies that want exceptional access will either have to bring a majority of a company’s personnel on board (and hope no one leaks anything to the public) or risk having their “not a backdoor” rejected after the code is submitted for approval.

No details have come to light (yet!) about companies being approached to punch holes in their own products, but it appears the Australian government has wasted no time putting its new powers to use.

Federal law enforcement and national security agencies have started using encryption-busting powers passed by parliament in December last year, and state-based police are set to be trained in using the powers this month.

This conclusion comes from the Department of Home Affairs’ first report [PDF] on the new compelled access powers. The introduction contains several paragraphs about the new law and the Department’s supposed oversight of its roll out. It concludes with this statement:

The Department continues to work closely with law enforcement and national security agencies and industry to facilitate the implementation of the Act. This will support the key measures in the Act, including the industry assistance measures in Schedule 1, so that they are being used consistently and appropriately. The Department has also been advised by Commonwealth law enforcement and national security agencies that the powers in the Act have been used to support their work.

The report also continues the fine Australian government tradition of denying the law has anything to do with encryption backdoors. Here’s the latest lingo dodge, which comes from a list of amendments made in response to recommendations from Australia’s intelligence committee.

[Introduces] a definition for ‘systemic weakness’ and ‘systemic vulnerability’ to clarify and prohibit those proposed requirements in a request or notice which will lead to unlawful and systemic intrusions into devices and networks. This enhances the operation of existing safeguards that prevents the creation and implementation of ‘backdoors.’

The Department’s new definition of these terms appears to limit encryption breaking to single devices/users, rather than entire communications platforms or operating systems.

The selective introduction of a vulnerability or weakness, as it relates to a target technology connected with a particular person is allowable. The definition of target technology further reinforces the specificity and precision through which interaction with electronic protections such as encryption is permissible. This definition takes each likely item of technology, like a carriage service or electronic service, which may be supplied by a designated communications provider, and reinforces that a weakness or vulnerability may only be introduced to the particular technology that is used, or likely to be used by a particular person. For example, a single mobile device operated by a criminal, or likely to be used by a criminal, would be classified as a target technology for the purpose of paragraph (e) of that definition. However, a particular model of mobile devices, or any devices that are not connected with the particular person, would be far too broad to fall within the definition. This ensures that the services and devices enjoyed by innocent parties or persons not of interest to law enforcement and security agencies remain out of scope and unaffected.

This could reduce the scope of what can be targeted with assistance requests, but nothing in the report suggests the government should abandon requests that fall outside of these definitions. If accessing a single target’s communications can only be done by introducing a systemic vulnerability, it’s safe to say the government will find a way to make the requested assistance adhere to the definitions its provided — anything to avoid having to use the phrase “backdoor” anywhere in reports or public statements.

This assurance that the government won’t demand full-fledged backdoors isn’t very assuring, especially since it appears the government still doesn’t know what requests meet the constraints built into the law.

Home Affairs said it was also in the process of sourcing technical and judicial assessors and experts that can be used to determine whether an agency request is permissible or not.

Cool. Some requests have already been issued and Home Affairs hasn’t gotten any further than begin the process of sourcing experts to help decide whether these requests are even lawful.

Filed Under: australia, backdoors, encryption, security

Ex-NSA Personnel Spied On Americans And Journalists For The United Arab Emirates

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the all-the-'good-guys'-doing-all-the-bad-stuff dept

When former NSA employees and contractors decide to start working for a journalist-murdering authoritarian, they should feel sick. Instead, after targeting journalists, dissidents, and other people the United Arab Emirates government doesn’t like, they felt exhilarated.

Working together with managers, Stroud helped create a policy for what to do when Raven swept up personal data belonging to Americans. The former NSA employees were instructed to mark that material for deletion. Other Raven operatives would also be notified so the American victims could be removed from future collection.

As time went on, Stroud noticed American data flagged for removal show up again and again in Raven’s NESA-controlled data stores.

Still, she found the work exhilarating. “It was incredible because there weren’t these limitations like there was at the NSA. There wasn’t that bullshit red tape,” she said. “I feel like we did a lot of good work on counterterrorism.”

That quote comes from a disturbing account of UAE “counterterrorism” work performed by a unit of Americans linked to the NSA published at Reuters. That “bullshit red tape” is, for the most part, known as the Constitution. The quote comes from Lori Stroud, who worked with a unit of hackers known as Project Raven, targeting whoever the UAE felt needed targeting. She is the only person from that unit willing to publicly-out her identity. Everyone else involved either spoke anonymously or refused to say anything at all. Here’s the deafening silence that accompanied the Reuter’s article:

An NSA spokesman declined to comment on Raven. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. A spokeswoman for UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment. The UAE’s Embassy in Washington and a spokesman for its National Media Council did not respond to requests for comment.

Lori Stroud’s work with the NSA dates far enough back that it includes a stupendous irony: she recommended the NSA add Ed Snowden to her Booz Allen contracting team. A few months later, Snowden was gone, taking with him a pile of documents that Stroud’s recommendation had helped him gain access to.

Hacking for the UAE meant hacking American targets and British journalists.

One of the program’s key targets in 2012 was Rori Donaghy, according to former Raven operatives and program documents. Donaghy, then 25, was a British journalist and activist who authored articles critical of the country’s human rights record. In 2012, he wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian criticizing the UAE government’s activist crackdown and warning that, if it continued, “those in power face an uncertain future.”

This is what counterterrorism looks like in UAE. This is what it can look like anywhere, once mission creep sets in and the government decides criticism is suspicious behavior. But this was done by US intelligence personnel who took better-paying offers to spy for a nation we somehow consider an ally, despite its stances on pretty much everything being antithetical to ours.

The quote opening this post was from the aftermath of an indiscriminate deployment of a virus that infected every visitor of a targeted Islamist forum. It swept up plenty of communications from Americans, but even with safeguards in place to remove inadvertent collections, it was clear UAE did not consider Americans’ communications off-limits.

It should have. The UAE claims to be a partner in the War on Terror, citing its positive relationship with the United States as an intelligence partner. Even though Project Raven was run by the UAE using former US intel personnel, the NSA still was supposed to be notified before operation deployments or prior to presentations that might discuss classified techniques. What’s published here shows either the NSA was cut out of the loop by UAE or that the NSA appears to have made no effort to keep tabs on operations run by its surveillance partner.

The UAE government took the project in-house, using a local tech contractor to create a company called DarkMatter that severed any ties the project might have with the US Intelligence Community. To their credit, at least eight former US intelligence analysts left when it became apparent targeting dissidents, journalists, and American citizens was going to be a large part of their work.

Lori Stroud eventually realized targeting Americans was a feature, not a bug.

When she questioned the apparent targeting of Americans, she received a rebuke from an Emirati colleague for accessing the targeting list, the emails show. The target requests she viewed were to be processed by “certain people. You are not one of them,” the Emirati officer wrote.

Days later, Stroud said she came upon three more American names on the hidden targeting queue.

Those names were in a category she hadn’t seen before: the “white category” — for Americans. This time, she said, the occupations were listed: journalist.

“I was sick to my stomach,” she said. “It kind of hit me at that macro level realizing there was a whole category for U.S. persons on this program.”

But sick or not, it was the UAE government that removed her from DarkMatter, terminating her employment when she kept objecting to the targeting of Americans. She was met by the FBI when she returned to the US. The entire operation is now under FBI investigation, but not necessarily for the illegal targeting of Americans. The FBI appears to be more concerned about possible leaks of classified surveillance techniques. It also wants to know if any US “systems” were targeted, suggesting it will be looking at attacks against US government entities and domestic corporations. It appears spying on journalists and Americans isn’t worthy of an investigation.

Filed Under: journalists, lori stroud, mercenaries, nsa, project raven, surveillance, uae, united arab emirates
Companies: darkmatter

New Study Says The Removal Of Craigslist Erotic Services Pages May Be Linked To An Increase In Murdered Females

Studies

from the for-the-good-of-the-many-or-whatever? dept

Under the guise of targeting sex traffickers, FOSTA has both done damage to Section 230 protections and sex workers’ literal lives. The law has yet to result in any credible, sustained damage to human trafficking, but that hasn’t stopped the bill’s supporters from trotting out debunked numbers anytime they need a soundbite.

There will likely be no studies performed by the government to determine FOSTA’s actual impact on sex trafficking, but plenty of academics are offering evidence that pushing sex work further underground is endangering the lives of sex workers. This is just the icing on the stupid, life-threatening cake as multiple law enforcement agencies — including the DOJ itself — pointed out passing FOSTA would make it more difficult to hunt down traffickers.

A study released in 2017 showed the introduction of erotic services section on Craiglist tracked with a 17% drop in female homicides across many major cities. Craigslist spent a few years being publicly vilified by public officials — mainly states attorneys general — before dumping its erotic services section (ERS). This didn’t stop sex work or trafficking, but it did shift the focus away from Craiglist as everyone affected found other services to use.

A newly-released study [PDF] (via Sophie Cull) shows there’s been a corresponding increase in female homicides since the point Craigslist dumped ERS. Online services — enabled by Section 230 — helped sex workers stay safe by reducing or eliminating a few of the more dangerous variables.

In the context of prostitution, online clearinghouses have the potential to improve safety by redirecting exchange through the clearinghouse and replacing more risky outdoor face-to-face transactions and/or other intermediaries (e.g., pimps) with indoor, direct transactions (Bass, 2015a,b). Matching online through the clearinghouse enables both sides of the market to discern the quality of the match ex ante, through such activities as informal screening, circulated black and white lists, and online reviews (Cunningham and Kendall, 2011b; Grant, 2009). This may provide the ability for sex workers to identify and screen out violent clients, law enforcement, and scammers.

The wholly expected happens when you take these safeguards away by eliminating online services, like Craigslist did in 2010.

[W]e find evidence that ERS significantly reduced female homicide rates by as much as 10-17 percent. We do not find evidence that this was a more general reduction in homicide, as ERS is unrelated to male murder, females killed by an intimate partner, or manslaughters. This strengthens our assessment that ERS-driven changes in sex markets were the primary driver of the reduction in female murders.

The study pulls from a number of data sets (including the FBI’s annual crime reports), but notes there are still some limitations that prevent this from being an exact determination. For one, most homicide reports don’t note whether the person killed was a sex worker. For another, the data lags because homicide reports date from the time the body was found, rather than the time the person was actually killed. From this underreported and laggy data, some inferences can be drawn, even if it’s impossible to say for certain what percentage of female homicides involved sex workers. If anything, the buggy data may point to an even greater reduction in violence against sex workers via the introduction of online marketplaces.

Are these magnitudes plausible? It is difficult to answer this question given that the true incidence of prostitution homicides is unknown. Most datasets do not record whether a female victim of a homicide was a sex worker, and those that do suffer from severe underascertainment biases built into the data collection methods. To our knowledge there is only one study that has attempted to estimate the incidence of prostitution homicide as a share of female homicides (Brewer et al., 2006). The authors concluded that 2.7 percent of all female homicides are prostitution deaths by clients. But this study has significant limitations. It is based on select data only from Chicago, St. Louis, Washington state, North Carolina, the SHR, 33 urban counties for one cross-section, and Colorado Springs. The issue of underascertainment bias would conceivably hold, and maybe moreso, for this select sample. Thus we interpret their estimates to be, at best, a lower bound. Our estimate of a 10 percent reduction in female homicides does suggest, though, that ERS created an overwhelmingly safe environment for female sex workers — perhaps the safest in history.

This is not to suggest government officials and lawmakers pushing laws like FOSTA don’t care about people’s lives. But I’m not sure what counterargument they can provide for legislation that not only results in increased harm to (mostly) women, but also undercuts the immunity that has allowed the internet to thrive. I guess the old adage is being spun to read “It’s better for dozens of sex workers to die than for third-party service providers to go free.”

Filed Under: ads, fosta, homicides, murder, sex workers
Companies: backpage, craigslist