Uvalde PD Continues Stonewalling, Hires Private Law Firm To Block Release Of School Shooting Recordings

Legal Issues

from the thought-law-abiding-people-had-nothing-to-hide? dept

The Uvalde Police Department — recipient of 40% of the city’s budget — botched its response to a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. Rather than rush to the sound of gunfire, the officers stopped making forward progress once they were adjacent to the gunfire. It took another law enforcement agency (a Border Patrol tactical team) to end the killing, which at that point numbered 19 students and two teachers.

As new, and embarrassing, details continue to leak out, the Uvalde Police Department has tried desperately to stop the steady drip. It has decided to simply refuse to respond to nearly every one of the hundred-plus school shooting-related requests it has received. (The PD is also refusing to cooperate with a federal investigation of the shooting, so it’s not just stonewalling taxpayers.)

And it has benefited from an unexpectedly united front. The Texas Department of Safety has come to the defense of the extremely defensive Uvalde Police Department, claiming any information or documents it might have on hand relating to the shooting response (including body cam footage) cannot be released because it might (and I quote) “enable criminals to anticipate weakness in law enforcement procedures.”

The procedure was the weakness, at least as carried out by the Uvalde police officers. Training tells first responders to sacrifice their own safety to protect others during active shooter situations, but that simply did not happen. The department’s immediate statements portrayed officers as heroes, an illusion the PD couldn’t even manage to sustain for 24 hours.

The Uvalde PD clearly does not want to release any information about its botched shooting response. As Jason Koebler reports for Motherboard, the PD has retained private representation to engage in legal warfare on its behalf, spending the public’s money to keep documents out of their hands.

The City of Uvalde and its police department are working with a private law firm to prevent the release of nearly any record related to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in which 19 children and two teachers died, according to a letter obtained by Motherboard in response to a series of public information requests we made. The public records Uvalde is trying to suppress include body camera footage, photos, 911 calls, emails, text messages, criminal records, and more.

“The City has not voluntarily released any information to a member of the public,” the city’s lawyer, Cynthia Trevino, who works for the private law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, wrote in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. The city wrote the letter asking Paxton for a determination about what information it is required to release to the public, which is standard practice in Texas. Paxton’s office will eventually rule which of the city’s arguments have merit and will determine which, if any, public records it is required to release.

Hiring outside counsel isn’t necessarily unusual when plenty of litigation appears inevitable. What is a bit more unusual is the private law firm’s approach to the public records requests. Rather than present reasons why certain documents and recordings might be exempt from disclosure, it has chosen to treat all requests as one inseparable mass to which any or all possible exemptions might apply.

The city says that it has received 148 separate public records requests (including several from Motherboard), and has lumped all of them together, making a broad legal argument as to why it should not be required to respond to many of them. 

That’s the pitch the law firm is making to state Attorney General Ken Paxton, hoping the AG will take its side and declare most of those 148 requests exempt from release. That may work with the AG but it’s certainly not going to work in court when the inevitable lawsuits over denied requests start flowing in.

But that’s the point. It buys the Uvalde PD more time. It forces requesters to spend their own time and money suing for access to records by battling a private law firm being paid with public money to help the Uvalde PD screw the public.

This raises questions about what might be captured in documents and body cam footage. The concerted effort to prevent any information from being released gives the distinct impression this is a cover-up operation. What it’s covering up is left to the imagination of the general public, which is no closer to obtaining access to the stuff the PD is keeping hidden. Are there falsified reports? Cops caught on camera cowering-in-place? Cops mocking the terrified families waiting outside of the school? Confusion? Chaos? Panic? Law enforcement professionals being far less heroic than they believe themselves to be?

Whatever it is, it will come out eventually. This is the PD delaying the inevitable. And the longer it fights, the more irate the public will be. The PD has been dishonest from the outset. Now, it’s using the public’s own money against them.

Filed Under: foia, ken paxton, texas, texas dps, transparency, uvalde, uvalde pd

Texas’ Long Indicted Attorney General Launches Investigation Into Whether Or Not He’s The Biggest Elon Musk Sycophant Yet

Politics

from the answer-points-to-yes dept

Okay, so, it was just a few weeks ago that a teenager went into an elementary school and killed 21 people, including 19 children. You might think there are important things about that which should draw the attention of the state’s top lawyer. Attorney General Ken Paxton is a busy man. He’s running for a third term in the job, while still waiting for the supposed trial on his indictment that happened seven years ago. He also wasted a bunch of time on a bunch of bogus “stop the steal” lawsuits, and led the charge on the ridiculous attempt to force DirecTV to platform nonsense peddler OAN. Oh, and of course, his office is also leading the charge to enforce his obviously unconstitutional social media content moderation bill.

But, even with all that going on, he’s apparently got enough time to try to kiss up to Elon Musk, who proudly moved Tesla’s headquarters to Texas a few years back, and has since cultivated closer and closer ties to the Republican party.

So, on Monday, just hours after Musk filed a letter with the SEC setting up his pretext for backing out of the Twitter deal, Paxton announced that his office was launching an investigation into spam bots on Twitter. I only wish I were joking. But this is an actual thing that an actual elected official is wasting taxpayer money on.

Today Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation against Twitter for potentially false reporting over its fake bot accounts in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act.  

On Twitter, “bots” are automated, non-human accounts that can do virtually the same things as real people: send tweets, follow other users, and like and retweet others’ posts. Spam accounts like these inflate followers and reach, and often push deceptive and annoying activity. Bot accounts can not only reduce the quality of users’ experience on the platform but may also inflate the value of the company and the costs of doing business with it, thus directly harming Texas consumers and businesses.  

Twitter has received intense scrutiny in recent weeks over claiming in its financial regulatory filings that fewer than 5% of all users are bots, when they may in fact comprise as much as 20% or more. The difference could dramatically affect the cost to Texas consumers and businesses who transact with Twitter.  

So, a few things about all this. First, lol, wut? This is not something an Attorney General is supposed to be investigating. This is an even more thinly veiled suck up to Musk than Musk’s thinly veiled pretext for bailing on the Twitter deal. Second, even here, Paxton misstates the issue. The single study that people have been pointing to suggesting 20% spam is studying something different than Twitter’s SEC filings which talk about less than 5% of its daily monetizable daily active users are false or spam accounts. That could still mean that over 20% of the users on the site are spam. The report is just about monetizable daily active users. And Twitter has explained its methodology for this.

To just jump in and compare the 5% number to the 20% number is comparing two totally different things.

Also, once again, this is not something a state AG is supposed to be investigating.

This is clearly a political witch hunt by a state AG, something that happens with alarming frequency these days (on both side so political aisle).

Anyway, Paxton sent a Civil Investigative Demand, which is basically a subpoena, to Twitter. I imagine Twitter will seek to quash or otherwise limit it. I am reminded of the time that the MPAA got then Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to issue a similar CID to “investigate” Google. Google fought it and eventually Hood dropped the whole thing. Chances are this is going nowhere.

Still, this is obvious to basically everyone — whether you support Elon or not — that this is nothing more than a blatant abuse of Ken Paxton’s office and powers in a political manner, to benefit the most wealthy resident in his state in the lead up to his next election. In a just world, the people of Texas would send Paxton packing in November for such a blatant abuse of office. But, in the world we live in today, it’ll probably give him an electoral boost, because instead of trying to help the people of Texas, the people of Texas seem to like it when their Attorney General spends their tax money by vanquishing people he perceives as his political enemies.

Filed Under: abuse of office, elon musk, fake accounts, investigation, ken paxton, spam, spam bots, subpoean
Companies: twitter

Six Republican AGs Try To Pretend OAN Was ‘Censored’ By DirecTV

Politics

from the traditional-conservative-values dept

Last January DirecTV finally decided to kick fantasy and conspiracy channel One America News (OAN) off of their satellite TV lineup, likely dooming the “news” channel. It’s a channel relatively few people watch, and the company simply didn’t figure the controversy to income ratio was worth it, so DirecTV simply didn’t renew OAN’s carriage agreement when the time came.

OAN, of course, quickly tried to spin itself as a victim of censorship, first by attacking a Black AT&T board member in “news” coverage that pretended DirecTV’s business decision was politically and racially motivated. And last week, the company filed a lawsuit claiming that DirecTV was leveraging its “unchecked influence” to stifle a “family-run business”:

“This is an action to redress the unchecked influence and power that Defendants have wielded in an attempt to unlawfully destroy an independent, family-run business and impede the right of American television viewers to watch the news media channels and programs of their choice.”

Trying to claim DirecTV, which itself is losing subscribers hand over fist to streaming, has “unchecked influence and power” is fairly amusing. In reality, DirecTV made a fairly boring business decision to not renew a channel very few people, despite all the sound and fury, actually watch:

Now Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has, for some bizarre reason, injected himself into the dispute. In a letter (pdf), Paxton and the GOP AGs of Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, and South Carolina demand DirecTV renew its carriage agreement with OAN, and insist the decision to kick the conspiracy channel to the curb is “clearly viewpoint discrimination and an attempt to silence conservative voices”:

“My fellow attorneys general and I strongly recommend that you reconsider your present course and renew your contract with OAN in April. Your failure to do so will not only cause you to lose millions of dollars in business, but also drive many millions of Americans to simply cancel your services outright, as President Trump and other leading figures have already called for.

I’m old enough to remember that a core GOP platform used to be that government shouldn’t involve itself in routine business decisions without exceptional cause. Yet here, six AGs took the time to take DirecTV to task simply for booting a channel from its lineup that not many people watched.

As with most modern GOP claims of this type, it’s largely performative victimization porn to keep the base angry. What the Trump GOP routinely calls “censorship” is usually just baseline levels of accountability for dumb behavior (like, say, falsely claiming in “news reports” that COVID was created in a South Carolina lab). The real goal here, as it is with the Section 230 fracas, is really to mandate that the internet and cable programming be inundated with alternative reality propaganda favorable to the GOP.

As we’ve noted previously, while AT&T originally funded and came up with the idea for OAN, the company was forced to spin DirecTV off in partnership with TPG Capital, which was likely less interested in catering to conspiratorial GOP gibberish — at least when it wasn’t making them money. Cable and broadcast executives will air anything that makes money if they can legally get away with it.

Even if this was a viewpoint-based decision by DirecTV, there’s absolutely nothing requiring that DirecTV maintain anything resembling “viewpoint neutrality.” There’s just no foundation for any complaint here. There’s nothing illegal. Again, it was a boring business decision made because the channel wasn’t making DirecTV money in ratio with the headaches (like the lawsuits over bogus claims of election fraud).

Paxton and his friends are clearly upset that the ongoing effort to create an entire alternate reality news ecosystem saw a minor setback with OAN being dumped from DirecTV, relegating the channel out of the mainstream and back into a highly competitive scrum of conspiratorial influencers and other gibberish-spewing Trump orbit hopefuls.

Of course, the Trump base will never see alternative viewpoints pointing out Paxton’s involvement here is self-serving, performative bullshit, which is the entire point of the propaganda ecosystem folks like Trump and Paxton are hoping to embolden and protect as they foist their authoritarianism on the planet.

Filed Under: disinformation, gop, ken paxton, lawsuit, propaganda, radicalization, speech, trump
Companies: directv, oan, oann

Google's Efforts To Be Better About Your Privacy, Now Attacked As An Antitrust Violation

Privacy

from the wait,-what? dept

We’ve talked a lot in the past about how almost no one seems to actually understand privacy, and that leads to a lot of bad policy-making, including policy-making that impacts the 1st Amendment and other concepts that we hold sacred. Sometimes, it creates truly bizarre scenarios, like the arguments being made by Texas’s Attorney General in the latest amended antitrust complaint against Google.

As you’ll likely recall, back in December, Texas’s Attorney General Ken Paxton — along with nine other states — filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. There were some bits in the laws that suggested some potentially serious claims, but the key pars were heavily redacted. Of the non-redacted parts there were really embarrassing mistakes, including claiming that Facebook allowing WhatsApp users to backup their accounts to Google Drive was giving Google a “backdoor” into WhatsApp communications.

That makes the latest amended complaint even more bizarre. It attacks Google for doing more to protect its users’ privacy. As you remember, a couple weeks ago, Google noted that as it got rid of 3rd party cookies in Chrome, it wasn’t going to replace it with some other form of tracking. This is, clearly, good for privacy. It is, also, good for Google, since it’s better positioned to weather a changing ad market that doesn’t rely on 3rd party cookies tracking you everywhere you go.

So the new amended complaint takes a move that is clearly good for everyone’s privacy and whines that this is an antitrust violation.

Google?s new scheme is, in essence, to wall off the entire portion of the internet that consumers access through Google?s Chrome browser. By the end of 2022, Google plans to modify Chrome to block publishers and advertisers from using the type of cookies they rely on to track users and target ads. Then, Google, through Chrome, will offer publishers and advertisers new and alternative tracking mechanisms outlined in a set of proposals that Google has dubbed Privacy Sandbox. Overall, the changes are anticompetitive because they raise barriers to entry and exclude competition in the exchange and ad buying tool markets, which will further expand the already dominant market power of Google?s advertising businesses.

Google?s new scheme is anticompetitive because it coerces advertisers to shift spend from smaller media properties like The Dallas Morning News to large dominant properties like Google?s. Chrome is set to disable the primary cookie-tracking technology almost all non-Google publishers currently use to track users and target ads. A small advertiser like a local car dealership will no longer be able to use cookies to advertise across The Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle. But the same advertiser will be able to continue tracking and targeting ads across Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail?amongst the largest sites in the world?because Google relies on a different type of cookie (which Chrome will not block) and alternative tracking technologies to offer such cross-site tracking to advertisers. By blocking the type of cookies publishers like The Dallas Morning News currently use to sell ads, but not blocking the other technologies that Google relies on for cross-site tracking, Google?s plan will pressure advertisers to shift to Google money otherwise spent on smaller publishers.

No good deed goes unpunished. Yes, it is true that Google’s move will undoubtedly harm companies that rely on intrusive 3rd party cookies. But that’s good for privacy. And it’s funny that this is coming in the very same antitrust lawsuit that whines that one of Google’s antitrust problems is that it snoops on WhatsAspp (when it doesn’t). Here, Google is clearly taking a stand — the same stand that Mozilla and Apple took earlier — against creepy and problematic 3rd party cookies, and it gets spun by Texas’s AG as an attack on “small advertisers.”

I’m kind of curious what the AGs bringing this lawsuit are aiming for here. Yes, I get that the entire point is just to attack Google, but if they win, do they want to require Google to be worse about privacy? Because that’s ridiculous.

The complaint does try to argue that Google’s Privacy Sandbox isn’t really about privacy, and that it’s all a “ruse.” It even (selectively) quotes an old EFF blog post that rightly calls out some of the problems with the Privacy Sandbox approach. But the EFF blog post is not — as the amended complaint implies — suggesting that Google should allow more 3rd party cookie tracking. It’s just calling out some of the other problems of the Privacy Sandbox. No one is arguing that Privacy Sandbox is a panacea for privacy issues. And no one is arguing that Google is magically all “good” for online privacy — indeed there are plenty of legitimate reasons to be concerned about Google’s impact on privacy. But the announcement it made recently was, quite clearly, a step in the right direction for privacy, and while it may make life difficult for intrusive advertisers who rely on other methods of advertising, that’s really on those advertisers to be better.

There are other things in these lawsuits that may be damning for Google and its practices. I’m still really interested in learning about the redacted sections, which might reveal actual bad practices. But, it’s not encouraging at all that Texas’s AG is taking a step towards better protection of user privacy as some sort of evidence of nefariousness — and doing so in the very same complaint arguing that part of the reason Google violates antitrust laws is that it “violates the privacy” of Android users (via the WhatsApp backup feature).

Filed Under: 3rd party cookies, advertising, antitrust, ken paxton, privacy, privacy sandbox, texas, tracking
Companies: google

Embarrassing: New Antitrust Suit Against Google Confuses WhatsApp Encrypted Backup Option With Giving Google A Backdoor

Say That Again

from the guys,-guys,-guys dept

Look, I get the fact that people are concerned about big technology companies. I’m very concerned about big technology companies too, and think it’s important that we figure out ways to build more competition, and to get away from reliance on many of these companies. But the way in which so many assume that antitrust is the only way to get there is problematic. And it’s even more problematic when the antitrust lawsuits they file seem to be mostly based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting certain things with totally innocuous explanations. That keeps happening.

The DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Google is embarrassingly weak, and seems to confuse who has market power (e.g., claiming that Google paying billions to Apple is some sort of proof of its own dominance). The FTC and nearly all states’ antitrust suits against Facebook are fundamentally stronger than the DOJ’s case against Google, but still, astoundingly weak in terms of actual evidence of antitrust violations.

This week, there are two new entrants. One lawsuit was just announced today, and we’ll explore that one later, but yesterday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who was one of the earliest Attorney Generals who spoke out in favor of going after Google, has now done so, with a an interesting antitrust lawsuit against the company, done with the support of 9 other states, all with Republican Attorneys General. Notably, some of the states (though not all) also signed onto the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit.

This lawsuit takes a different approach from the DOJ’s lawsuit, which focused on the market for general search services and search advertising. This one focuses on general display advertising. And maybe there’s an argument that Google is doing something bad in how it handles the display advertising market. Indeed, some of the complaint (though heavily redacted), suggests some potentially sketchy behavior on the part of Google, to block competition in the ads space. If that’s proven, that would be bad, and it would be good if the lawsuit forced Google to change those practices and enable more competition.

There’s also a heavily redacted section, that hints strongly that Google and Facebook worked out some sort of agreement to keep Facebook from competing as directly with (and undercutting the pricing of) Google’s display ads business. And that does sound like a potentially huge deal — one that very well might truly be anticompetitive. But the details and what’s redacted are important.

It would be great if the lawsuit focused on things like those two points. But it also includes other things that seem to suggest a near total and fundamental misunderstanding of how technology works, which does not provide much confidence that the Attorneys General know what they’re talking about in the other parts. Notably, there’s this scary bit that started making the rounds on Twitter, with people asking what the fuck was going on:

Google also has violated users? privacy in other egregious ways when doing so is convenient for Google. For instance, shortly after Facebook acquired WhatsApp, in 2015, Facebook signed an exclusive agreement with Google, granting Google access to millions of Americans? end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files.

That raised many eyebrows, because, if true, that’s huge news. Most of the details here are redacted as well, but the complaint calls this a “fundamental breach of privacy.” But, this seems like a giant misunderstanding by the lawyers who wrote the lawsuit. What they appear to be referencing is a deal from 2015 in which Google allowed WhatsApp users to easily back up their encrypted data to Google Drive. That’s a useful feature, and not at all nefarious. The content is still encrypted, so Google doesn’t get access to anything more than the encrypted blob. Google even has this integration as a Google Cloud case study.

That’s not exactly the behavior of a company that has a nefarious deal to snoop on everyone’s WhatsApp messages. Notably, that integration is a totally voluntary opt-in feature that is really useful. It lets you restore your WhatsApp if you’re switching phones, or just make sure you don’t lose all your messages if you lose or break your phone. It’s a good thing — not some evil attack on privacy, as the lawsuit suggests.

There is some more redacted content around this, suggesting that Facebook shared some kind of information with Google that it shouldn’t have, but the non-redacted parts seem to misunderstand the technology, which seems problematic. It also seems emblematic of lawyers looking to twist anything against the company, rather than looking for actual violations.

As for the rest, much of it seems to misunderstand the ad market. In particular there’s a long discussion on header bidding, and how Google did not like header bidding and wanted to kill it:

Finally, Google wanted to eliminate header bidding to foreclose any competition with its publisher ad server monopoly. The companies involved with header bidding would have a foothold on a key function of Google?s ad server: routing a publishers? inventory to exchanges. With that, a major header bidding player like Amazon or Facebook was well-positioned to eventually compete directly with Google?s monopoly ad server. Without control over publishers? inventory, Google would lose the ability to block exchange competition and tilt trading to Google.

I’m a publisher. And, every freaking day, we get approached by some new online ad firm that wants us to sign up to use their ads because of their use of header bidding. There must be hundreds of ad providers now offering header bidding. Honestly, as a publisher, at this point, it’s almost impossible to put ads on your site that don’t make use of header bidding.

If the all powerful Google set out to quash header bidding, holy crumb, did it fail.

There are elements (again, too much redacted) in the complaint that do seem concerning. And if the end result of this lawsuit is to force Google to play more fair with display ads, that would be a good thing. So I’d be happy if that were the result here. But I’m concerned by what appears to be a clumsy misunderstanding of the technology, and the status of the advertising market today.

Filed Under: antitrust, cloud backup, competition, display ads, encryption, ken paxton, messages, privacy
Companies: facebook, google, whatsapp

Judge Leaning Strongly Towards Tossing Pimping Charges Against Backpage Executives

Legal Issues

from the when-all-you-have-is-a-grandstand... dept

Because there doesn’t seem to be a politician out there that can interact with Backpages without grandstanding, the attorneys general of two states — California’s Kamala Harris and Texas’ Ken Paxton — combined forces to have company executives arrested on pimping charges.

The criminal complaint somehow tried to portray the fees charged by Backpage as profiting from prostitution. While it should have been explicitly clear Backpages was immune from prosecution thanks to Section 230, the two AGs decided to close their eyes, ears, and brains and press forward.

It’s likely nothing will come of this misguided prosecution — one that appeared to be instigated almost solely for the press it would generate, rather than for its legal merits. The California court handling the case has pretty much thrown the whole thing out.

It’s a tentative ruling that doesn’t have the full force of a published opinion behind it, but it does give the solid impression that any dreams of being able to prosecute site owners for third-party content will have to be taken to Congress, rather than local courts — though, the judge has said he’ll allow the parties to present more arguments before making a final decision. As it stands now, Section 230 prevents the sort of thing these two AGs are pursuing.

From the opinion [PDF]:

Backpage’s decision to charge money to allow a third party to post content, as well as any decisions regarding posting rules, search engines and information on how a user can increase ad visibility are all traditional publishing decisions and are generally immunized under the CDA. In short, the victimization resulted from the third party’s placement of the ad, not because Backpage profiting from the ad placement.

This does some pretty severe damage the state’s argument that charging for ads means profiting from sex trafficking. The last paragraph of the ruling similarly upholds Backpage’s Section 230 immunity, even as it moved content from site to site.

Here, the People allege that Defendants “created” content and are not entitled to immunity. However, on the face of the allegations, Defendants have, at most, republished material that was created by a third party. The People allege that the content was taken from ads placed by Backpage Escort users and posted onto EvilEmpire.com. The declaration in support of Defendants’ arrest warrant states that the ads placed in EvilEmpire.com were “essentially identical” to the ads placed by the third party on Backpage.com and that EvilEmpire was an “additional platform for Backpage Escort ads.” This demonstrates republication, not content creation. Republication is entitled to immunity under the CDA. (Barrett v. Rosenthal (2006) 40 Cal.4th 33, 63.)

To make the charges stick, the state would have to prove that the Backpage actually participated in sex trafficking — something no one has even alleged at this point. Instead, those fighting Backpage have simply chosen to attack the most visible target, rather than those posting ads and/or exploiting underage prostitutes.

The ruling says there’s only one way to have the supposed immunity “problem” addressed and that’s to push Congress into doing something about it.

As stated above, Congress stuck a balance in favor of free speech in that Congress did not wish to hold liable online publishers for the action of publishing third party speech and thus provided for both a foreclosure from prosecution and an affirmative defense at trial. Congress has spoken on this matter and it is for Congress, not this Court, to revisit.

No one should be in any hurry for Congress to take another look at Section 230 immunity. Right now, it does a very solid job protecting websites and social media platforms from the speech and actions of their users. Without it, the internet would be a much smaller, more-locked down venue for communication and nowhere near as useful for disseminating information. Anything Congress would do at this point would only harm it.

Politicians and prosecutors need to stop taking the easy route and go after those actually breaking the law. If cops want to track down sex traffickers and haul them to court, fantastic. But it does no one any good to pursue baseless pimping charges against site owners, rather than those actually engaged in criminal activity.

Filed Under: cda 230, intermediary liability, kamala harris, ken paxton, pimping, section 230
Companies: backpage