Government Pays $18k To Journalists Whose Tank Plant Photos It Deleted
from the just-put-it-on-our-civil-liberties-tab dept
A handful of deleted photos taken of a public structure is going to cost taxpayers $18,000. (via Poynter)In what was seen as a victory for First Amendment rights, the U.S. government agreed Thursday to pay The Blade $18,000 for seizing the cameras of a photographer and deleting photographs taken outside the Lima tank plant last year.The two journalists were apprehended by security staff at the Lima, OH, manufacturing center while taking pictures of the outside of the building. Despite there being plenty of photos of the tank parked proudly in front of the facility, as well as others detailing the interior of the plant, the security guards decided the journalists' activity was Terrorism Lite™ and deleted the photos from the camera. They also made derogatory comments about journalist Jetta Fraser's perceived lack of femininity and threatened to "go under her bra" to… well, I don't know what exactly, but given the context of the comments, apparently to "prove" for themselves that she was indeed female.
In turn, The Blade agreed to dismiss the lawsuit it filed April 4 in U.S. District Court on behalf of photographer Jetta Fraser and reporter Tyrel Linkhorn against Charles T. Hagel, then the U.S. Secretary of Defense; Lt. Col. Matthew Hodge, commandant of the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center, and the military police officers involved in the March 28, 2014, incident.
Like most settlements, there's no admission of wrongdoing to be found in the government's offer. Somewhat bizarrely -- considering the photos were apparently deleted -- the settlement demands pictures taken that day never be published.
Plaintiffs agree not to publish, distribute, reproduce, sell or share any of the photographs taken of the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima, Ohio on March 28, 2014.The Toledo Blade and its journalists offer no explanation for agreeing to these particular terms. The only logical explanation is that the photos could not be recovered, making this largely a moot point. Even so, this concession allows the censorious plant staff to salvage a partial victory from defeat and does nothing at all to prevent future abusive actions.
In fact, in its non-apologetic letter to the plaintiffs, the US Army pretty much vows to make the same "mistake" repeatedly in the future.
The letter, dated Feb. 25 and signed by Col. Ronald J. Shun, chief of staff for the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command... states that the Army “takes seriously its obligation to protect its military installations” and “acknowledges the important role that the press serves in a free society.”But not that interested. The letter goes on to say that the US Army -- and representatives from its tank plant -- will only entertain press requests for statements and photos, so dropping by to snap pictures while in the area (as The Blade's journalists did) is still unwelcome and will likely result in extra attention from the plant's security. So, the First Amendment isn't really being protected here. It's just being humored.
“The Army is interested in a positive relationship with The Blade, its employees, and all members of the media,” Colonel Shun wrote.
The public embarrassment -- rather than the settlement -- will likely have more of a deterrent effect on plant personnel. Armed with the knowledge that snapping photos of the outside of the Lima plant is protected speech may lead to other photographers informally "polling" the plant's security staff in the future. But in the end, it's always the same. The government -- whose grasp of laws and rights should be better than its constituents -- will put on its "terrorist" blinders to violate more rights and allow taxpayers to pick up the tab.
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Filed Under: journalism, lima, ohio, photographs, tanks
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So, did they publish the photos?
Unless you take extraordinary methods, the photos would still be on the memory cards, even if the card was formatted. There are lots of tools to recover deleted files, a lots of 'em specifically for retrieving deleted photos.
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Re: So, did they publish the photos?
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Re: So, did they publish the photos?
That is, unless something overwrote those sectors. On a platter drive, that data can still be recovered. There's leftover magnetic traces that can be detected and recovered. This is why programs like Darik's Boot and Nuke have an option to overwrite a drive 36 times.
Flash drives, however, aren't magnetic storage. Once a bit is re-written, that original data is gone. A few bits here or there aren't a problem, so it's still possible to recover most of the file and not notice the missing peaces, but if someone actually wiped the card, it's not recoverable.
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Re: Re: So, did they publish the photos?
Also, wear-leveling algorithms in solid-state drives' firmware lets them remap which sectors of the flash memory are reported as what to the OS, so even if you tell an SSD to write to a particular sector, internally it may choose to write the data to somewhere different.
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Re: Re: Re: So, did they publish the photos?
Any decent wiping program would ether take that into account, or just keep writing random data to a file until the drive is full. Ether way, fully wiping a flash drive is not hard.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: So, did they publish the photos?
“Recovering Evidence from SSD Drives in 2014: Understanding TRIM, Garbage Collection and Exclusions”, Forensic Focus, Sep 23, 2014
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Re: Re: So, did they publish the photos?
The card's circuitry does 'wear leveling', so you never really know where your data is being written/overwritten. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling
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Re: Re: So, did they publish the photos?
That's a myth and it's easy to disprove;
If it were possible to overwrite data on a drive and still recover it, hard drive manufacturers would be using it to double the storage capacity of their drives.
Want more proof?
Contact ANY data recovery service and tell them that you have a drive where the data was overwritten once, and ask how much they'll charge to recover everything. They'll tell you not to waste your money, your data is gone. Here's a company that charges thousands of dollars to recover data, they want your business and even they will tell you it's hopeless if the data has been overwritten.
Under certain ideal conditions, it may be possible to pull a few bits of data at the edge of the tracks that wasn't 100% erased, but it's not like you're going to recover entire files. And as for the leftover magnetic traces, that doesn't work if the sector has been written to more than twice. If there are more than two magnetic patterns, there's no way to separate them, so it's all just jumbled together. Even with only two, the techs usually need to know what one of the patterns was so that they can separate out the other.
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Throwing it open to all...
Runners-up (which is everybody else) get a free ride in a government vehicle. But one lucky winner takes home the $18,000 jackpot!
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Re: Throwing it open to all...
Google "Joint Systems Manufacturing Center lima ohio" and click on Images and see top secret sensitive photos of the facility!
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Re: Throwing it open to all...
(and bail money)
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Re: Re: Throwing it open to all...
Why would you carry that with you, as doing so only enriches the cops when they seize it and accuse it of being involved in an illegal act.
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Re: Re: Re: Throwing it open to all...
From a couple hundred yards away.
;)
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Re: Throwing it open to all...
Oh wait, don't, the focused energy of all those weapons could destroy the place.
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I'll volunteer to be next
As the amount of information that 12 year old me gathered is staggeringly superior to what the Blade staff had to surrender, I would like to invite their security staff to come and intimidate me. I'm a bit doughy in spots, so my masculinity could be assailed, and so long as the eventual settlement is large enough I could be coerced to hand over some grainy Polaroids featuring the non-classified assembly areas and proving grounds.
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Deadly photo rays
Apparently our government has taken the perspective of quantum mechanics whereby merely viewing an object changes it. The question they haven't answered (at least to my satisfaction) is, is that change actually harmful? Does shooting a photo of a tank really render it harmless? If it does then all our enemies need to buy cameras instead of more lethal weapons.
Or are they really insisting that photos of publicly viewable landmarks present such a severe violation of security that it warrants violating the first amendment under national security color? If this is so, then they should purchase sufficient land as to make such landmarks unviewable (a 6' tall person can see 16 miles to the horizon, so if the site or the viewer is on a hill...) Will there be any non-government land left if they take this thought seriously?
Secondly, we should really do something about losers of lawsuits (even when settling) ability to make statements where they take no responsibility for the behavior that caused the suit in the first place. Make them 'man up' so to speak.
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Re: Deadly photo rays
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Re: Deadly photo rays
Way easier to just... build a fence.
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This explains the difference between "in-bedded" and "out-bedded" reporters. Journalists who develop a history of writing pro-government stories can ask for a tour, and be granted exclusive access, interviews, the "whole nine yards."
On the other hand, reports who are not proven "team players" -- or worse yet, those who write critical stories -- can expect to see the other end of the carrot-stick continuum. Like Al Jazeera.
It's how the U.S. government maintains the illusion of a free press, to brag to the rest of the world about, when in reality it's anything but free.
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What are the going to do!
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Re: What are the going to do!
Lenses are not like electronics. A lens that has enough zoom to take a detailed photo from a mile away is not getting significantly cheaper. And a higher resolution sensor only gets you so far, because packing so many pixels on a tiny sensor actually runs into problems with the size of photons, which cannot be solved, so you need a much bigger sensor, which is a lot more expensive to manufacture... there's a reason expensive cameras and lenses are expensive.
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$18,000, pfah!
And none of the individual defendants had to pay a cent.
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Re: $18,000, pfah!
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Re: Re: $18,000, pfah!
Not to by cynical, but that sounds like a standard 30% attorney fee to me...
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Re: Re: Re: $18,000, pfah!
So, "donated".
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Re: Re: Re: Re: $18,000, pfah!
(*) FTLA: Four-letter TLA(**).
(**) TLA: Three-letter acronym.
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Bribe, not settlement
The inclusion of this term means that it's not a settlement, it's a bribe.
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Re: Bribe, not settlement
It really is legalese for, "I did it, I'm glad I did it, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat".
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Cognitive Dissonance Here
" seizing the cameras of a photographer and deleting photographs "
" Plaintiffs agree not to publish, distribute, reproduce, sell or share any of the photographs taken of the Joint Systems Manufacturing Center in Lima, Ohio on March 28, 2014."
So, yeah... they have to agree to not publish any of the photos which were deleted. Okay....
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A full victory would be the realisation of the stupidity BEFORE the act
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When $.03, $3,000 and $30,000 are all interchangable
If the answer is 'No', then once again they have been shown that they can do anything they want, because when it comes down to it, it's not their money that gets paid out, but that of the taxpayers, so why should they care how big or small the settlements come out to be?
Make those in positions of authority or public servants personally liable with regards to settlements and fines, and then, and only then, will lawsuits like this actually serve as deterrents.
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