Drug Dogs Don't Even Have To Be Right Half The Time To Be Considered 'Reliable' By The Courts

from the good-news,-K9s:-even-if-you-suck-at-your-job,-you-can-keep-your-job dept

All in all, this motion to suppress evidence worked out for the plaintiff, but it does little to address concerns that drug dogs are basically blank permission slips for inquisitive cops.

The defendant -- Emile Martin -- was in a vehicle driven by another person (simply referred to as "Montgomery" in the opinion). This vehicle crossed the centerline multiple times and was pulled over by Deputy Brandon Williams. The driver could not produce registration or proof of insurance, which led to the issuance of a citation… eventually. But the citation process was unnecessarily prolonged to provide the deputy with a chance to have a K9 unit brought in to sniff the car for drugs.

Based on its findings of fact, the court agrees that the stop was unduly prolonged in order to allow time for the canine and its handler to reach the scene. Prior to the point that the dog alerted, at 3:37 a.m., there was merely a hunch, but neither probable cause nor reasonable articulable suspicion, that criminal conduct was afoot. The lapse of 33 minutes from 3:04 a.m. to 3:37 a.m. for the stop in this case constituted a plainly unjustifiable seizure for that length of time under the Fourth Amendment. As noted above, when Deputy Williams returned to his cruiser with Montgomery’s driver’s license and the Grand Prix title at or shortly after 3:11 a.m., he had everything he needed to begin writing the traffic citations.

However, Williams did not begin writing the citations until 3:21 a.m., and had not completed them when Dul alerted on the vehicle following the open-air sniff at 3:37 a.m. While Deputy Williams spent some time awaiting confirmation from dispatch of the license’s validity and the results of the warrant search, that does not excuse his failure to even begin writing the citations until ten minutes after he could have done so. The stop here was unduly prolonged far beyond the time reasonably required to complete the stop’s mission.

Under the Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision, officers cannot artificially prolong traffic stops in hopes of stumbling across something "better" than a traffic violation. Once the stop's "mission" has reached its conclusion, drivers are free to go, no matter how many more questions -- or dog sniffs -- the officer might wish to pursue.

Still, a drug dog was brought in and it did alert during its "search" of the vehicle. This alert was also challenged, presumably in case the defendant's citation of Rodriguez failed to result in suppression. Data was obtained on the dog's ("Dul") "hit" rate. The data wasn't exactly a confirmation of Dul's superlative skills.

The defendant has not presented any evidence challenging the adequacy of Dul’s training and certification regimen. However, he questions Dul’s reliability based on a review of the dog’s performance record, both in training sessions and in the field. The defendant argues that Dul’s training and field performance records suggest a failure rate of up to 25%. The evidence offered on this phase of the motion is generally undisputed.

Considering law enforcement officers "ask" dogs for permission to effect warrantless searches, one would hope 75% wouldn't be an acceptable success rate. Of course, many arguments were presented by the government as to why being right only three-fourths of the time is nigh unto infallibility. According to law enforcement testimony, there are any number of reasons why a drug sniff might result in a false positive, but none of those are reasons to doubt a dog's assertions.

This is the case because officers are unable to confirm false negatives in the field (as no search is conducted), may fail to find drugs where a dog correctly alerts, and may not realize a dog has alerted based on a residual odor of drugs no longer present.

This would be one thing if law enforcement was alone in finding this acceptable. Unfortunately, the court also finds this lack of accuracy to be of little import when discussing the justification of a search. Dul may only be right 75% of the time, but the bar has been set so low by previous decisions that drug dogs whose intuition is worse than a coin flip are considered to be trustworthy generators of probable cause. (h/t Brad Heath)

Notwithstanding the dispute regarding Dul’s failure rate, the court is satisfied that in conjunction with his training and certification, his performance record amply supports the officers’ reliance on his alert to support probable cause to conduct a search. Dul’s performance record is superior to that of dogs which have been found to be reliable by other courts. See Green, 740 F.3d at 283-284 (affirming district court’s finding that dog with 43% success rate was reliable); United States v. Bentley, 795 F.3d 630, 636 (7th Cir. 2015) (accepting field detection rate of 59.5%); United States v. Holleman, 743 F.3d 1152, 1157 (8th Cir.) (57%).

The only upside here is that the Rodriguez decision will provide a remedy for those whose stops have been artificially extended to bring in drug dogs whose "alert" means nothing more than ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In this case, the extension of the stop resulted in suppressed evidence, not the drug dog's questionable reliability. At some point, drug dogs may start being mentioned in the same breath as other law enforcement pseudoscience -- like bite mark evidence or hair comparison. But until then, dogs that can't even manage a 50% hit rate will still be allowed to give officers permission to perform warrantless searches.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, accuracy, drug dogs, searches

Comcast Cap Blunder Highlights How Nobody Is Ensuring Broadband Meters Are Accurate

from the phantom-charges dept

For years now we've noted that while broadband ISPs rush toward broadband caps and usage overage fees, nobody is checking to confirm that ISP meters are accurate. The result has been user network hardware that reports usage dramatically different from an ISPs' meters, or users who are billed for bandwidth usage even when the power is out or the modem is off. Not only have regulators historically failed to see the anti-innovation, anti-competitive impact of usage caps, you'd be hard pressed to find a single official that has even commented on the problem of inaccurate broadband usage meters.

Enter Comcast, which has, of course, been slowly but surely expanding its usage caps into more and more noncompetitive markets. And given that Comcast continues to have among the worst customer service in any U.S. industry, the combined end result is about what you'd expect. Like users who say they've been repeatedly over-billed for broadband consumption that never actually occurred:

"Oleg received warnings in September and another in October, the latter while he was overseas for a multiple-week vacation with his wife. When they returned home on November 9th, Comcast’s data meter was “showing I used 120 gigs of data, like, while I was gone,” he wrote. Customers can check their usage on Comcast’s website."

...Calls with Comcast customer service agents didn’t clear up the problem. "I called Comcast... and was patronizingly informed that 'it must be somebody stealing your Wi-Fi,'" he wrote. "Possible, but highly unlikely. I’m a software developer, Linux kernel contributor, and I take my home security very seriously."

This being Comcast, the user was ignored when he told the ISP he was being billed for 120 GB of usage that supposedly occurred when he was away on vacation. So the user set about trying to document his problem over at YouTube, noting how he spent a few months using only cellular data to try and prove to Comcast their billing system was broken:Note this is actually a Comcast user with some technical skills; many Comcast users likely wouldn't know they were being over-billed, or if they did, wouldn't know how to measure their own usage. And of course in traditional Comcast fashion, it once again took somebody in the press to get Comcast to fix its screw up. Ultimately, Comcast admitted that it had accidentally swapped the user's MAC address, and was charging the customer for somebody else's usage:

Oleg provided us his full name and address so we could check into his situation with Comcast. The company investigated the problem after being contacted by Ars and confirmed that its meter readings were inaccurate. “We have reached out and resolved this,” a Comcast spokesperson told Ars. “There was a technical error associated with his account, which we have since corrected.”

"Comcast told Oleg that its system had him confused with another customer, he said. “It turns out their system had my modem MAC address entered incorrectly, there was an off-by-one typo that was hard to see so they were counting data from some modem who knows where,” Oleg told Ars.

So yeah, you've got multiple problems at play all creating a supernova of dysfunction. One, Comcast's taking advantage of the lack of broadband competition to impose usage caps (the user above says he'd leave, but has no other choices). Two, Comcast is using these usage caps to give its own content a leg up by exempting it from said caps (zero rating). Three, Comcast's dismal customer service means that even if you can prove you're being over-billed, you may not be able to get it fixed. Four, nobody in government can be bothered to make sure ISPs are metering accurately.

ISPs are incredibly eager to bill like utilities, but they've fought tooth and nail against being regulated as such. And despite all of the ISP hand wringing over net neutrality rules saddling them with draconian "utility regulations," regulators have by and large avoided truly applying most utility-grade regulations and price controls on ISPs. Should Comcast and other U.S. ISPs keep pushing their luck with usage caps, all of that may eventually need to change.

Filed Under: accuracy, broadband meters, data caps
Companies: comcast

DailyDirt: Time, Time, Time. See What's Become Of..

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

With the Apple Watch available now, maybe more people will be interested in wearing fancy watches again -- instead of just relying on their phones. Fancy watches once focused on telling time with extreme accuracy, but then digital watches made it really cheap to keep accurate time that was more than "good enough" for most folks. It used to be annoying to need to adjust clocks for daylight savings and power outages, but as more and more clocks are connected to the internet (except for ovens and some cheap alarm clocks), we barely need to think about how to change the time on a clock (who owns a VCR anymore?). Check out these links on accurate time keeping.

• There's a new atomic clock that's three times as accurate as the last most accurate clock -- losing less than 1 second in 15 billion years. The universe hasn't even been around for 15 billion years, and this clock probably won't last anywhere near that long either. Still, it's nice to have a clock that can measure time dilation effects and other weird phenomena. [url]
• John Harrison designed a clock in the 1700s that was accurate to a second over 100 days -- using a pendulum mechanism. Harrison wasn't able to build a working version of this clock, (and people thought he was crazy when he claimed he could) but modern clockmakers have constructed one from his designs -- and it works. [url]
• The 26th leap second is scheduled to be added to some clocks on June 30th -- at 11:59:60pm. Try not to rely on any computers that might not be able to handle this leap second, if you can. Or join the movement trying to abolish the leap second entirely, but that probably won't happen until 2018. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Filed Under: accuracy, atomic clock, clocks, john harrison, leap second, pendulum clock, time, watches

Turns Out Cell Phone Location Data Is Not Even Close To Accurate, But Everyone Falls For It

from the because-of-course dept

We've frequently talked about law enforcement and the intelligence community accessing and making use of cell site location data, which looks to figure out where people are based on what cell towers they're connected to. Law enforcement likes to claim that it doesn't need a warrant for such data, while the NSA has tested a pilot program recording all such data, and says it has the legal authority to collect it, even if it's not currently doing so.

However, as anyone with even a basic geometry education recognizes, which cell tower you're connected to does not give you a particularly exact location. It can be useful in putting someone in a specific (wide) area -- or, much more useful in detailing where someone is traveling over long distances as they repeatedly switch towers in a particular direction. But a single reading does not give you particularly exact location details. I had naturally assumed that most people understood this -- including law enforcement, lawyers, prosecutors and judges -- but it turns out they do not. A rather depressing story in The Economist notes that, thanks to this kind of ignorance (combined with bogus cop shows on TV that pretend cell site data is good for pinpointing locations), cell site location data is frequently used to convict innocent people. The story opens with a ridiculous example, in which a woman was pressured into a plea bargain based on totally false claims about tower location data:

SOMEONE strangled a prostitute in Portland, Oregon in 2002. The police arrested Lisa Roberts, the victim’s ex-lover, who spent more than two years in custody awaiting trial. Shortly before the trial the prosecutor told Ms Roberts, via her lawyer, that tower data collected by Verizon, her mobile-telephone network, showed precisely where she was at the time of the murder. As her lawyer recalled, the prosecutor said Ms Roberts could be “pinpointed” in a park shortly before the victim’s naked and sexually assaulted corpse was found there. She was told she faced 25 years to life in prison. She accepted a deal to plead guilty and serve 15 years.

But the high-tech evidence against her was bunk. Routinely collected tower data can place a mobile phone in a broad area, but it cannot “pinpoint” it. That would require a special three-tower “triangulation”, which cannot reveal past locations. It took a decade for Ms Roberts’s guilty plea to be thrown out. On May 28th she left prison, her criminal record clean, after nearly 12 years in custody.

Obviously, things like GPS do allow for much more precise targeting of location (which may be why the NSA is focusing on that instead of cell site location data), but too many people confuse cell site location data with GPS. What's ridiculous is that this mistake isn't just being made by random people -- but prosecutors and lawyers responsible for criminal cases that can destroy an innocent person's life.

This really points to a larger issue: people have this tendency to believe that technology can answer all questions. The NSA's fetishism of surveillance via technology is an example of this. There's data there, so it becomes all too tempting to assume that the data must answer any possible question (thus, the desire to collect so much of it). But the data and the interpretations it can lead to are often misleading or simply wrong. And that's especially true when dealing with newer technologies or forms of data collection. That the criminal justice system could go decades without everyone recognizing the basic geometric limits of cell site location data based on a single cell is... both astounding and depressing. But it's also a reminder that we shouldn't assume that just because some evidence comes from some new-fangled data source it's automatically legitimate and accurate.

Filed Under: accuracy, cell site location data, gps, location data, plea bargains, prosecutions

DailyDirt: More Olympic Trivia

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The technology used behind the scenes at the Olympics is getting better all the time. It's not an easy task to measure people moving with extreme accuracy, but it can be done. There are some other tasks that aren't so easy to do as well, and the judges are relying on robots and lasers to get these jobs done. Here are just a few examples of more technology creeping into the games.

• The speed of sound is apparently too slow for the Olympics now, so the starting pistols have been replaced by electronic beeps. Perhaps there shouldn't be a starting pistol at all, and the judges should simply measure when the athletes start and finish? [url]
• Robotic cameras are catching more action at the Olympics. Not too surprising that cameramen can't run alongside Olympic athletes and keep up.... [url]
• The modern pentathlon is using laser pistols instead of real guns this year. No sound effects like "pew pew pew!" will be tolerated from the audience. [url]
• While the testing for performance enhancing drugs has generated some controversy, the testing of athlete gender seems a bit trickier to handle. Does a person with XXY compete in the male or female events? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: accuracy, gender, olympics, robots, testing

As ISPs Look To Charge Per Byte... How Accurate Are Their Meters?

from the not-very... dept

Various ISPs have been pushing for metered broadband for a while now, and we've wondered in the past who will monitor the broadband meters themselves to make sure they're accurate? After all, with things like energy meters, they're carefully regulated and audited to make sure they're accurate. But no such luck with broadband meters, for the most part. Broadband Reports points out that it looks like individuals will be on their own to check on whether or not their ISP is being honest with them concerning how much bandwidth they use.

Filed Under: accuracy, audits, metered broadband

Maryland Testing E-Voting System That Lets People Verify Their Votes Counted

from the experimenting-away dept

For many years, David Chaum has been pushing for a voting system that he claims will be a lot more reliable. Basically, after you vote, you get a coded number, and then after the election, you can go to an election website, punch in your code and make sure that your vote counted, and was for whom you meant to vote. On top of this, there's a system for auditors to check to make sure that votes were counted accurately, with information released publicly so people can "audit" the election without being able to connect voters to their votes. This system tends to generate a lot of controversy (though some of it appears to be from people who just don't like David Chaum, rather than because they really have a problem with his system). However, the system hasn't been really tested in an actual US election... until now. The municipal elections in Takoma Park, Maryland used the system, despite the state recently signing a big deal with Diebold. It's not clear how the overall election went yet -- or how many people actually checked their votes online (approximately 30% in an exit poll said they copied down the code). However, it's good to see that some gov'ts are not just accepting what the big e-voting firms give them, and are willing to explore more sophisticated voting systems that aren't based on pure faith in the e-voting company to get the system right.

Filed Under: accuracy, david chaum, maryland, takoma park, voting

Latest Techno Moral Panic: Texting Is 'Rewiring Young Brains'

from the mmm-hmm dept

There have been a whole series of alarmist studies that get lots of press lately, with titles about how social networks or other technologies are somehow negatively impacting people's brains. Nearly all of these didn't hold up under much scrutiny, as they almost all took things out of context or greatly extrapolated a finding and misinterpreted the results. The latest to add to the pile? A report claiming that texting may be "rewiring young brains." The evidence? Kids who used mobile phones a lot finished a variety of tests much faster, but tended to be "less accurate." That's about it. From there, the guy who did the study concludes that it must be the fact that many mobile phones use "predictive texting" that's training kids to be fast, but inaccurate, assuming something else will come in and fix the mess. Now, perhaps that's true, but it seems like the study doesn't actually show that at all. Also, it's not clear from the report what sort of mistakes are being made. The article talks about spelling mistakes, which are common in texting, but the real question is whether or not that really matters? It may very well depend on context. In a text message, a spelling mistake isn't a big deal. In a resume, it's a different story. But where on that spectrum did these tests land? But more importantly, even if we grant the premise that kids who text a lot are a lot sloppier on certain tests... how do you go from that to immediately concluding that their brains are being wired differently? It sounds a lot more like what they've been trained to do, rather than any serious neurological shift.

Filed Under: accuracy, moral panic, speed, technopanic, texting

More Votes Lost By Diebold; Discovered By Unique Voting Transparency Project

from the reliable,-huh? dept

For years and years Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions) had always vehemently denied that its e-voting or optical vote scanning machines had any problems -- despite mounds and mounds of evidence of problems. We were shocked, this past summer, when the company finally admitted to a glitch with some of its machines, but the company still downplayed the significance of this, claiming that it didn't believe the glitch (which loses votes) had actually impacted any elections.

Yet, even after this glitch was officially revealed, in the election just last month, we're now finding out that Diebold machines caused 200 lost votes in an election in California. Even worse, no one would even know about this at all if it weren't for a highly ambitious and very unique program set up by some voting activists to ensure there was real transparency. They convinced the local government to let them scan every single ballot and put it online for anyone to view. It was that separate process where they discovered the ballot counts didn't match, and that Diebold seemed to show absolutely no records of the missing ballots, despite having scanned them.

Makes you kinda wonder how many other areas lost votes that absolutely no one knows about because they didn't have such a system in place, huh?

Filed Under: accuracy, california, e-voting, elections, lost votes, transparency
Companies: diebold, premier voting

Making Sure Bets On Online Prediction Markets

from the psst-i-have-a-tip dept

Online prediction markets like Intrade have started to make a name for themselves in this year's exciting political arena. By trading futures on political outcomes like the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations, the idea is that the efficiency of the market will ultimately serve as a better predictor of outcome than traditional methods like exit polls. However, as some traders are starting to find, prediction markets still have many inefficiencies in their current state, allowing shrewed traders to make tidy profits as a result. In the Intrade market, a political future is worth $10 if the political outcome occurs, and $0 if it does not occur. Therefore, a $5 market price on a particular future is supposed to correlate with a 50% prediction of that future to occur. However, in practice, certain factors push these prices out of the range of their realistic probability. For example, contracts for Ron Paul's predicted as high as a 9% chance of him being selected as the Republican nominee, when in reality, his chances were probably closer to nil. Perhaps driven by a small cadre of Paul supporters, the Intrade market was able to be swayed by a small number of trades. Even today, Intrade shows Paul at a 1.2% -- which is a great opportunity for someone to make money on taking the short side of that contract. On the Democratic side, Al Gore supporters have put a 1% chance on his head, who never even appeared on the ballot -- wishful thinking indeed. That said, the limited amount of volume on these contracts precludes anyone from actually making a crazy amount of money on them, but it does remind us of an important fact about markets -- while they do tend to come up with the right answer in the long term, in the short term, they are incredibly susceptible to very human factors like optimism and group think.

Filed Under: accuracy, politics, prediction markets