Should Your Self-Driving Car Be Programmed To Kill You If It Means Saving A Dozen Other Lives?

from the I'm-sorry,-Dave dept

Earlier this month Google announced that the company's self-driving cars have had just thirteen accidents since it began testing the technology back in 2009, none the fault of Google. The company has also started releasing monthly reports, which note Google's currently testing 23 Lexus RX450h SUVs on public streets, predominately around the company's hometown of Mountain View, California. According to the company, these vehicles have logged about 1,011,338 "autonomous" (the software is doing the driving) miles since 2009, averaging about 10,000 autonomous miles per week on public streets.

With this announcement about the details of these accidents Google sent a statement to the news media informing them that while Google self-driving cars do get into accidents, the majority of them appear to involve the cars getting rear ended at stoplights, at no fault of their own:

"We just got rear-ended again yesterday while stopped at a stoplight in Mountain View. That's two incidents just in the last week where a driver rear-ended us while we were completely stopped at a light! So that brings the tally to 13 minor fender-benders in more than 1.8 million miles of autonomous and manual driving—and still, not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident."

If you're into this kind of stuff, the reports (pdf) make for some interesting reading, as Google tinkers with and tweaks the software to ensure the vehicles operate as safely as possible. That includes identifying unique situations at the perimeter of traditional traffic rules, like stopping or moving for ambulances despite a green light, or calculating the possible trajectory of two cyclists blotto on Pabst Blue Ribbon and crystal meth. So far, the cars have traveled 1.8 million miles (a combination of manual and automated driving) and have yet to see a truly ugly scenario.

Which is all immeasurably cool. But as Google, Tesla, Volvo and other companies tweak their automated driving software and the application expands, some much harder questions begin to emerge. Like, oh, should your automated car be programmed to kill you if it means saving the lives of a dozen other drivers or pedestrians? That's the quandary researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have been pondering for some time, and it's becoming notably less theoretical as automated car technology quickly advances. The UAB bioethics team treads the ground between futurism and philosophy, and note that this particular question is rooted in a theoretical scenario known as the Trolley Problem:

"Imagine you are in charge of the switch on a trolley track. The express is due any minute; but as you glance down the line you see a school bus, filled with children, stalled at the level crossing. No problem; that's why you have this switch. But on the alternate track there's more trouble: Your child, who has come to work with you, has fallen down on the rails and can't get up. That switch can save your child or a bus-full of others, but not both. What do you do?"

What would a computer do? What should a Google, Tesla or Volvo automated car be programmed to do when a crash is unavoidable and it needs to calculate all possible trajectories and the safest end scenario? As it stands, Americans take around 250 billion vehicle trips killing roughly 30,000 people in traffic accidents annually, something we generally view as an acceptable-but-horrible cost for the convenience. Companies like Google argue that automated cars would dramatically reduce fatality totals, but with a few notable caveats and an obvious loss of control.

When it comes to literally designing and managing the automated car's impact on death totals, UAB researchers argue the choice comes down to utilitarianism (the car automatically calculates and follows through with the option involving the fewest fatalities, potentially at the cost of the driver) and deontology (the car's calculations are in some way tethered to ethics):

"Utilitarianism tells us that we should always do what will produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people," he explained. In other words, if it comes down to a choice between sending you into a concrete wall or swerving into the path of an oncoming bus, your car should be programmed to do the former.

Deontology, on the other hand, argues that "some values are simply categorically always true," Barghi continued. "For example, murder is always wrong, and we should never do it." Going back to the trolley problem, "even if shifting the trolley will save five lives, we shouldn't do it because we would be actively killing one," Barghi said. And, despite the odds, a self-driving car shouldn't be programmed to choose to sacrifice its driver to keep others out of harm's way."

Of course without some notable advancement in AI, the researchers note it's likely impossible to program a computer that can calculate every possible scenario and the myriad of ethical obligations we'd ideally like to apply to them. As such, it seems automated cars will either follow the utilitarian path, or perhaps make no choice at all (just shutting down when encountered with a no win scenario to avoid additional liability). Google and friends haven't (at least publicly) truly had this debate yet, but it's one that's coming down the road much more quickly than we think.

Filed Under: autonomous vehicles, code, dilemmas, ethics, trolley problem

Should People Be Told Key Results Of Genetic Tests They Never Took?

from the ethical-dilemmas dept

The population of Iceland is unusual in a number of ways. Icelanders are descendants from a relatively small group of early settlers that remained isolated for hundreds of years. They have unmatched genealogical records that allow the family tree of many Icelanders to be traced back a thousand years, and thus for familial interrelationships on the island to be established with unprecedented completeness. Put those together, and you have a population that offers unique advantages for studying human genetics. That fact led to the founding of the Icelandic company Decode, which was set up in the hope that it would be possible to use Iceland's population to pinpoint genes associated with medical conditions, and then come up with new ways of diagnosing, treating and preventing them.

That didn't work out, and in 2012, Decode was bought by Amgen. But technology has advanced hugely since Decode's founding in 1996. The cost of sequencing the human genome has fallen dramatically, allowing the DNA of thousands of people to be compared -- something prohibitively expensive 20 years ago. The New York Times reports on research by Decode that has resulted in the sequencing of the genomes of 2,636 Icelanders, the largest collection ever analyzed in a single human population. Because of the completeness of Iceland's genealogical records, Decode's scientists were able to do something rather remarkable: work out the full genomes of another 100,000 Icelanders, a third of the entire country, without collecting any of their DNA.

With a technique called imputation, the researchers say they are able to ascertain the full genomes of people they have not even examined. Dr. Stefansson said that means that his firm could generate a report for genetic disease on every person in Iceland.

Once those "imputed" genomes have been constructed using computers, they can be interrogated in novel ways:

With the push of a button, for instance, the firm can identify every person with the well-known BRCA2 mutation, which dramatically raises the risk of breast and ovarian cancer -- even if they have not submitted to genetic testing themselves.

Currently, that information is withheld from Icelanders, but Dr. Stefansson hopes that the government will change its policy. “It’s a crime not to approach these people,” he said.

That raises an interesting ethical question. Should people who have never had their genome sequenced be told the results of this kind of computer-based analysis? Although the Icelandic case might seem unique, it is only a matter of time before sequencing costs fall so far that millions, rather than thousands of individuals can be sequenced within a population. And the more genomes that are available, the more imputed genomes that can be calculated, making the ethical dilemmas faced in Iceland something that people in other countries will soon have to confront too.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: data, ethics, genetic tests, information, privacy
Companies: amgen, decode

DailyDirt: GATTACA, Here We Come

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The time to debate the merits and risks of genetically engineering our children is nearly over-ripe. The technology to select physical traits for animals exists for breeding custom single-celled organisms, laboratory rats and desirable farm animals. It wouldn't be a technological feat to apply gene editing techniques to humans, but it certainly raises some serious ethical questions over whether such activities should be allowed or under what circumstances they would be permitted.

• Biologists who have developed various gene editing processes (eg. Crispr, zinc fingers, TAL effectors) are calling for a moratorium on altering human genes that would be passed on to future generations. We could prevent certain genetic diseases or make more kids with blond hair and blue eyes... but before we start creating designer babies, we might want to think about some of the ramifications first. [url]
• Getting the child you always wanted is never guaranteed -- even when you go to a sperm bank and specifically request a certain kind of donor. Mistakes will be made. We haven't decided how to handle some of the simplest errors yet, but the courts will work it all out. [url]
• A dozen countries (not the US) already ban human germline engineering. Research is currently being done on primates in many labs, so human gene editing could be a practical procedure in a few decades or less. [url]

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

Filed Under: biotech, crispr, designer babies, ethics, eugenics, gattaca, genetic engineering, genetics, germline, gmo, tal effectors, zinc fingers

Former Head of GCHQ Warns Of 'Ethically Worse' Kinds Of Spying If Unbreakable Encryption Is Allowed

from the is-that-a-threat? dept

In their attempts to kill off strong encryption once and for all, top officials of the intelligence services are coming out with increasingly hyperbolic statements about why this should be done. Here's another, this time from a former head of GCHQ, Sir David Omand:

Sir David, who was director of GCHQ from 1996-97, said: "One of the results of Snowden is that companies are now heavily encrypting [communications] end to end.

"Intelligence agencies are not going to give up trying to get the bad guys. They will have to get closer to the bad guys. I predict we will see more close access work."

According to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which reported his words from a talk he gave earlier this week, by this he meant things like physical observation, bugging rooms, and breaking into phones or computers. Omand went on:

"You can say that will be more targeted but in terms of intrusion into personal privacy -- collateral intrusion into privacy -- we are likely to end up in an ethically worse position than we were before."

That's remarkable for its implied threat: if you don't let us ban or backdoor strong encryption, we're going to start breaking into your homes. And it's striking that Omand regards eavesdropping on all the Internet traffic flowing in to and out of the UK, or collecting thousands of sexually-explicit webcam pictures, as less reprehensible than a tightly-targeted operation against a few suspects. His framing also implies that he thinks those pesky civil liberties groups will protest more about the latter than the former. In fact, what defenders of privacy and liberty generally want is simply a proportionate response with judicial oversight -- something that is straightforward with targeted "close access" work, but impossible with the blanket surveillance currently employed.

The good news here is that Omand has indirectly confirmed that the current strategy of rolling out strong encryption as widely as possible is the right one. Provided it is not derailed by any government moves to weaken crypto, it will increase the cost of online surveillance, and force intelligence services to return to targeted spying -- which is what they should have done in the first place.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: david omand, encryption, ethics, gchq, spying, surveillance

This Post Is Not About GamerGate

from the it's-about-ethics-in-journalism dept

1. Okay, let's get this out of the way first: as you'll quickly see, there is no way to write this post without someone accusing us of being hypocritical -- so we're going to just get it out of the way upfront and note that that's absolutely true, as the article we'll be linking to also admits that such hypocrisy is occasionally necessary in reporting. We hope that the reasons for why we're doing this post are clear in the text below, so going hogwild in the comments claiming hypocrisy won't be particularly productive. We know. We get it.
   
   
2. This post really is not about GamerGate. It is really about ethics in journalism (I know, I know). We have no real interest in writing about the whole GamerGate thing at all, because almost none of it is interesting and almost all of it is incredibly, mind-bendingly stupid, no matter what position you're arguing. So, I'm really hoping -- while recognizing this hope will likely not be realized -- that the comments on this post won't actually be about GamerGate or any sort of debate about the merits of one side or the other, but rather about what this article is really about, which is the journalism coverage.

With that out of the way, as noted, we haven't been covering "GamerGate" at all, in part because the whole thing is just kind of ridiculous. There are a lot of wild accusations being thrown around on all sides, and a lot of really bad actions and statements by a lot of people, leading to lots of other wild accusations. Some of the accusations are true, some are not true, many are wildly misleading. But the other reason we haven't been covering it is because it's covered to death everywhere else -- to an almost insane level. And that's what we're talking about today, based on a great article by Jason Koebler over at Vice's Motherboard, noting that so much of the coverage exists because writing something about GamerGate appears to drive a ton of traffic. And in the stupid click-driven world that many publications live off of these days, you do what brings in the traffic (disclaimer: see point 1 at the very top of this post):

The dirty secret here is that, unlike a story about Ebola or Monica Lewinsky or basically anything else anyone writes about, writers and editors can be assured that their GamerGate coverage gets a disproportionate amount of traffic. As far as online journalism gambling goes, it's one of the safer bets you can make.

That's because GamerGate story readership isn't the general public: It's the people who are in the movement itself. For proof of this, look at the fact that the vast majority of GamerGate coverage have hundreds and even thousands of comments—almost all of them from people in the movement.

But it's not just about GamerGate. It's about the way that online news has developed into this traffic-whoring stage, with lots of publications all rushing to cover "the thing that will bring traffic."

Apple announcing an iPhone is news, sure. But Apple announcing an iPhone and breathlessly writing 50 blog posts and a ~live blog~ and an instant analysis and hot takes is when reporting stops being reporting and starts becoming the journalistic equivalent of putting chips on every single number in roulette hoping Reddit or Facebook or someone else picks your story to win that day’s internet traffic lottery.

And, you know, it's not just tech journalism either:

The side effect of this is that the world starts thinking that every time the  House votes to repeal Obamacare or every time Congress holds a hearing about Benghazi or every time John Oliver TOTALLY EVISCERATES someone every time a fringe scientist says climate change isn’t real or every time a normal person or government agency joins Twitter or every time a celebrity gets plastic surgery or every time some internet nerds can rile up a Gawker writer on Twitter is capital-I Important.

They're all attempts to "win the social media lottery" to have a story go "viral" and suddenly have a lot more traffic.

Frankly, this is stupid. And it's something (again, disclaimer above) we mostly try to avoid. There are a few of our regular critics who accuse us of being traffic whores ourselves (and I imagine a few of them may be rushing to comment as such on this article). They claim that we write what we write to get traffic. But here's a dirty little secret for you: if you want a lot of traffic, writing about intellectual property law, free speech, international trade agreements and regulatory capture isn't the best way to get it. We've never covered a big Apple event. While we'll occasionally attend an event, we tend to write about it a day or two later, after we've had a chance to let things sink in. And we try (though we don't always succeed) to provide a different take on things. We add our opinion (or, as the critics explain, we "spin" or report things in a "biased" way). We try to only write about stories that we actually think are interesting (and, even then we only get to about a third of the stories we actually think are interesting).

As a result of that, I hope that the people who read this site tend to be more loyal and actually more interested in what we have to say (and often more willing to join in the discussion and join the larger community). But, that's not how many media publications work today. It's all about the "metrics" -- the number of visitors, and with the social media firehose so big, the focus has been moving aggressively towards that viral lottery. That's not to say we don't keep tabs on our own traffic -- because of course we do. But we know that getting a big story on Reddit means a flood of people who visit for 30 seconds and move on. Our loyal readers are the ones who stick around, and hopefully it's because we're not providing one of fifty different stories about the same damn thing with the same "journalistic" take (i.e., without any color, without any opinion and without any heart). Our position may not be great for advertisers. I've had discussions with potential advertisers, explaining how we have a really loyal community, and most of them don't seem to care. They just want bigger numbers, even if those bigger numbers are meaningless, because the audience doesn't give a shit. I would think that having a loyal, interested and committed community would be a lot more interesting to advertisers, but so many play the same stupid numbers game, and that leads so many publications to do the same.

There are a few publications that have clearly recognized that the hamster wheel chase of rewriting the identical story over and over again while adding nothing new is not worth it. It's been great to see and I've been encouraged by some publications that have really focused on building a loyal audience through doing something different and providing more value. But, for many, it's all about a single metric: traffic. Then it starts to feel a lot less like journalism or something socially valuable. It just feels like... well... a game.

For years, we've talked about how few seem to recognize that real journalism is about the community, not about "the news." I'm hopeful that more people begin to recognize this. And for all the hypocrisy in this post (disclaimer 1), consider part of this hypocritical post to be an attempt to share why we do what we do -- and why we don't do certain other things that we'd consider to be just cynical clickwhoring.

If we want to have a discussion about "ethics in journalism" perhaps it should start with a discussion about all of this.

Filed Under: advertising, clickbait, community, ethics, gamergate, hypocrisy, journalism, traffic

FISA Court Judges Keep Buying Verizon Stock; Wonder What They Know...

from the foia-ftw dept

Lee Fang, over at Vice, has quite a revelation based on some FOIA requests. It seems that the various judges on the FISA Court who keep approving the NSA's requests for bulk data from the telcos... also seem to keep buying Verizon stock.

On May 28 last year, Judge James Zagel, a FISA Court member since 2008, purchased stock in Verizon. In June of this year, Zagel signed off on a government request to the FISA Court to renew the ongoing metadata collection program.

He's not the only one. We filed a request to the courts for the personal finance statements for all of the FISA Court judges. About a month ago, federal judges began turning in their disclosures, which cover the calendar year of 2013. The disclosures show that FISA Court Judge Susan Wright purchased Verizon stock valued at $15,000 or less on October 22. FISA Court Judge Dennis Saylor has owned Verizon stock, and last year collected a dividend of less than $1,000. The precise amount and value of each investment is unclear—like many government ethics disclosures, including those for federal lawmakers, investments amounts are revealed within certain ranges of value.

While this may not be a true sign of corruption, it at least raises some basic ethics questions. As Fang notes, ethics rules say that judges need to recuse themselves from cases where they have a financial stake in the outcome. But, it's not as clear cut, since the telcos aren't actually parties to the cases brought by the DOJ to the FISA Court (there are no other parties, generally, it's just the government). And even if there isn't anything fishy here, just the appearance of a potential bias seems problematic.

"I think prudence would suggest that a FISA judge would not acquire investments in these telecommunication stocks," says Professor William G. Ross, an expert on judicial ethics at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law in Alabama. "I'm not saying there is a conflict of interest, which my impression says there's probably not," Ross says, adding, "this is between what's improper and what's prudent."

And, indeed, there definitely appears to be a conflict of interest here. As you may recall, it's been reported that the telcos were given over $100 million for "volunteering" to hand over customer records. While that may be peanuts overall to a major telco's bottom line, it's not nothing.

Filed Under: conflict of interest, ethics, fisa court, fisc, foia, section 215, surveillance
Companies: verizon

Facebook Messed With The Emotions Of 689,003 Users... For Science

from the and-maximum-creepiness dept

As you may have heard (since it appears to have become the hyped up internet story of the weekend), the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) recently published a study done by Facebook, with an assist from researchers at UCSF and Cornell, in which they directly tried (and apparently succeeded) to manipulate the emotions of 689,003 users of Facebook for a week. The participants -- without realizing they were a part of the study -- had their news feeds "manipulated" so that they showed all good news or all bad news. The idea was to see if this made the users themselves feel good or bad. Contradicting some other research which found that looking at photos of your happy friends made you sad, this research apparently found that happy stuff in your feed makes you happy. But what's got a lot of people up in arms is the other side of that coin: seeing a lot of negative stories in your feed appears to make people mad.

There are, of course, many different ways to view this: and the immediate response from many is "damn, that's creepy." Even the editor of the study, admits to the Atlantic, that she found it to be questionable:

"I was concerned," she told me in a phone interview, "until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it—and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people's News Feeds all the time... I understand why people have concerns. I think their beef is with Facebook, really, not the research."

Law professor James Grimmelmann digs deeper into both the ethics and legality of the study and finds that there's a pretty good chance the study broke the law, beyond breaking standard research ethics practices. Many people have pointed out, as the editor above did, that because Facebook manipulates its news feed all the time, this was considered acceptable and didn't require any new consent (and Facebook's terms of service say that they may use your data for research). However, Grimmelmann isn't buying it. He points to the official government policy on research on human subjects, which has specific requirements, many of which were not met.

While those rules apply to universities and federally funded research, many people assumed that they don't apply to Facebook as a private company. Except... this research involved two universities... and it was federally funded (in part) [Update: Cornell has updated its original story that claimed federal funding to now say the study did not receive outside funding.]. The rest of Grimmelmann's rant is worth reading as well, as he lays out in great detail why he thinks this is wrong.

While I do find the whole thing creepy, and think that Facebook probably could have and should have gotten more informed consent about this, there is a big part of this that is still blurry. The lines aren't as clear as some people are making them out to be. People are correct in noting that Facebook changes their newsfeed all the time, and of course Facebook is constantly tracking how that impacts things. So there's always some "manipulation" going on -- though, usually it's to try to drive greater adoption, usage and (of course) profits. Is it really that different when it's done just to track emotional well-being?

As Chris Dixon notes, doing basic a/b testing is common for lots of sites, and he's unclear how this is all that different. Of course, many people pointed out that manipulating someone's emotions to make them feel bad is (or at least feels) different, leading him to point out that plenty of entertainment offerings (movies, video games, music) also manipulate our emotions as well -- though Dixon's colleague Benedict Evans points out that there's a sort of informed consent when you "choose" to go to see a sad movie. Though, of course, a possible counter is that there are plenty of situations in which emotions are manipulated without such consent (think: advertising). In the end, this may just come down to being about what people expect.

If anything, what I think this does is really to highlight how much Facebook manipulates the newsfeed. This is something very few people seem to think about or consider. Facebook's newsfeed system has always been something of a black box (which is a reason that I prefer Twitter's setup where you get the self-chosen firehose, rather than some algorithm (or researchers' decisions) picking what I get to see). And, thus, in the end, while Facebook may have failed to get the level of "informed consent" necessary for such a study, it may have, in turn, done a much better job of accidentally "informing" a lot more people how its newsfeeds get manipulated. Whether or not that leads more people to rely on Facebook less, well, perhaps that will be the subject of a future study...

Filed Under: consent, emotions, ethics, informed consent, newsfeed
Companies: facebook

Cops Subject Man To Rectal Searches, Enemas And A Colonoscopy In Futile Effort To Find Drugs They Swear He Was Hiding

from the a-vulgar-display-of-power dept

This post is going to be very short on commentary because the hideous abuse of justice has basically rendered me near speechless.

David Eckert, a resident of Deming, NM, was pulled over by police officers after failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. For whatever reason, the officers decided Eckert was hiding something, or perhaps they were unsatisfied that a routine stop hadn't blown up into something bigger.

They asked him to step out of the car and then searched his vehicle (without his consent). Another officer brought in a drug dog which reacted (a relatively worthless indication of anything -- drug dogs can easily be "alerted" by their controlling officers) to the driver's seat. (Eckert's lawyer calls into question this dog's training, presenting documents that claim to show it hadn't received the proper field training and recertification. See exhibits listed under docket item 27.) Then the officer "observed" that Eckert was standing "erect with his legs together" and his "buttocks clenched." This was all the justification the Deming police needed to subject Eckert to the following horrific chain of events at a hospital in neighboring Silver City.

1. Eckert's abdominal area was x-rayed; no narcotics were found.
2. Doctors then performed an exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
3. Doctors performed a second exam of Eckert's anus with their fingers; no narcotics were found.
4. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
5. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a second time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
6. Doctors penetrated Eckert's anus to insert an enema a third time. Eckert was forced to defecate in front of doctors and police officers. Eckert watched as doctors searched his stool. No narcotics were found.
7. Doctors then x-rayed Eckert again; no narcotics were found.
8. Doctors prepared Eckert for surgery, sedated him, and then performed a colonoscopy where a scope with a camera was inserted into Eckert's anus, rectum, colon, and large intestines. No narcotics were found.

At no time did Eckert give his consent to these searches. The police did obtain a warrant to rectally search Eckert but that warrant itself was problematic. For one, it was severely lacking in probable cause. For another, it was valid only for Luna County but the searches were executed in Grant County. Third, the warrant was only valid for four hours, up until 10 pm that night. Eckert was held for 14 hours and, according to medical records, prep for the colonoscopy didn't even commence until 1 am the following day.

Why the venue shift? Because the doctor at the Deming hospital told officers the proposed search was "unethical." Drs. Robert Wilcox and Okay Odocha of the Gila Regional Medical Center apparently had no qualms about forcibly "searching" Eckert eight times.

There's more in Eckert's complaint, including the fact that the second x-ray was of his chest, an area completely unrelated to the region where he was supposedly "concealing drugs." In addition to what can be proven from medical records and police reports obtained by Eckert's attorney, there are additional allegations that the officers Chavez and Hernandez mocked him and made derogatory comments about his "compromised position." They also allegedly moved the privacy screen repeatedly to expose him to others in the hospital hallway. This verbal abuse apparently continued during Eckert's ride back to the Deming police station. Understandably, Eckert now claims to be "terrified to leave the house" and does so "infrequently."

There are many lawsuits filed where most details are alleged. This isn't one of them. Most of what's "alleged" by Eckert is documented by the routine paperwork that accompanies medical procedures and search warrants. And, to add insult to injury, KOB4's news team states that the Gila Regional Medical Center is billing Eckert for the invasive, non-consensual medical procedures and has threatened to take him to collections for non-payment.

The only question that remains is why no one involved on the "law" side ever thought that anything past the first step on the list above might be excessive. These officers, along with two shamefully compliant doctors, went as far as they could to humiliate and violate someone simply because they could -- in a collective effort that looks far more like making Eckert pay for the "crime" of making the cops look stupid than any sort of legitimate law enforcement effort.

Filed Under: abuse, cavity searches, david eckert, doctors, drugs, ethics, law enforcement, war on drugs

DOJ Scrambles To Try To Explain Why It Never Investigated Systematic Misrepresentations By NSA To FISA Court

from the er,-um,-er,-because! dept

So, yesterday, we wrote about DOJ spokesperson Brian Fallon's email exchange with USA Today investigative reporter Brad Heath, insisting that he (Fallon) was holding back answers to Heath's questions in an attempt to convince him not to publish a story, and promising that he'd instead reveal those answers to a competing reporter to make Heath look bad later. As Ken White rightfully noted, this was a story that showed the government's contempt for the public.

As promised, Heath did in fact publish his story, and it's a big story, which is well-researched and supported, highlighting how based on the quotes from FISC judges, the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (basically the DOJ's ethics watchdogs) had an absolute responsibility to investigate what happened, and even possibly take action against people for blatantly misrepresenting facts about the NSA's surveillance effort to the FISA court. Remember, the declassified ruling stated plainly:

The Court is troubled that the government's revelations regarding NSA's acquisition of Internet transactions mark the third instance in less than three years in which the government has disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.

A substantial misrepresentation by the DOJ to the FISA court should be a big deal. Three times in three years should be an even bigger deal, and one where you'd think the ethics office would get involved. In fact, Heath spoke to a previous attorney at OPR who said exactly that:

Those opinions were sufficiently critical that OPR should have reviewed the situation, even if only to assure the department that its lawyers were not to blame, former OPR attorney Leslie Griffin said. "There's enough in the opinions that it should trigger some level of inquiry," she said.

Instead, as the FOIA response indicated, the DOJ OPR did absolutely nothing. There was no investigation. No one was reprimanded for repeatedly misrepresenting the NSA's surveillance program to its one major oversight body, the FISA court. That's a big story, and you can see why the DOJ didn't want it out there. So, now we're supposed to see the "answers" that Fallon promised to leak to other reporters that would undercut this argument. But we're still waiting. Fallon's initial response (in Heath's article) is weak beyond belief:

Justice spokesman Brian Fallon said in a statement Thursday that the department's lawyers "did exactly what they should have done. They promptly and appropriately reported compliance issues upon their discovery within the executive branch as well as to the Court and Congress. The court's opinions and facts demonstrate that the department attorneys' representation before the court met the highest professional standards."

That doesn't seem to undermine Heath's story at all. It strengthens it. If the DOJ is allowed to misrepresent the NSA's activities so frequently, and that's okay because it "meets the highest professional standards" isn't that a problem?

In another interview, this time with Politico, Fallon continued to attack Heath, but failed to actually show that the story was inaccurate or not newsworthy at all. Instead, he makes it pretty clear that this is more about a coverup of the DOJ's failings.

"Brad is reporting on the lack of an OPR inquiry, but that only seems newsworthy if one might be warranted in the first place. It isn’t," he wrote. "For the last several days, we asked Brad to exercise discretion rather than write a story that leaves a false impression that there was any evidence of misconduct or basis for an inquiry. We proposed putting him in touch with people who could independently explain why no inquiry was warranted in hopes it might persuade him. When it became clear he intended to publish his story regardless, there was no point in asking any of those people to reach out."

First of all, that makes no sense. Clearly, if someone gave a logical and detailed reason why no investigation was necessary, that would have likely made Heath rethink the entire story. So it makes no sense to say that he no longer wanted people to reach out to Heath. The only narrative that holds together is the one where the DOJ is totally embarrassed by its own failings and doesn't want the story published because of that. In the meantime, despite all these statements from Fallon, he's yet to reveal the magic answers that actually explain why no investigation was warranted. In fact, he's told Huffington Post that he's said everything he has to say already. And so far that's basically nothing that disputes the story.

And that just leaves a lot of people more convinced that not only was an investigation warranted, the DOJ's inability to recognize that, even today, calls into serious question the ability of the DOJ's ethics operations to, you know, be ethical. And let's not even begin to discuss the "ethics" of a DOJ spokesperson telling a reporter that he was withholding information (which now appears to not exist) that proves a story was incorrect.

Filed Under: brad heath, brian fallon, doj, ethics, fisc, investigation, nsa, nsa surveillance, office of professional responsibility, opr

Two Famous Journalism Institutions Shame Themselves By Not Standing Up For Basic Fair Use

from the awful dept

Two of the most respected and forward looking schools for journalism are the Knight Center for Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and the Poynter Institute. I've long been a fan of both, but I'm now quite disappointed in both of them too. Last week, we had a few stories concerning a woman named Teri Buhl, who (to put it mildly) had some "unique" (and, by that we mean "totally wrong") legal theories concerning whether or not someone could quote her public statements on Twitter, as well as basic copyright and fair use rules. By the end of the week, she was threatening to sue us and others as well.

We are familiar with our fair use rights, and we think such rights are an important part of the law. In fact, fair use is frequently cited by courts as one of the key "safety valves" that ensures copyright does not violate the First Amendment. Fair use is of utmost importance in the act of journalism, and historically, news organizations have been some of the most zealous defenders of fair use. Section 107 of the Copyright Act explicitly calls out "news reporting" as one of the key areas where fair use applies. Given that, one would hope that these two giants of journalism education would stand up for fair use.

But last week, both failed to do so.

Both the Knight Center and Poynter wrote stories about the whole Teri Buhl saga. Both of them included the key screenshot of her Twitter profile, where she declares that "no tweets are publishable." However, both Knight and Poynter have since modified the image in their own postings, with both admitting that they did so after Buhl told them that the image in her profile was covered by copyright and that they did not have permission to publish it. This is hogwash. The whole point of fair use is that you do not need permission. That's what fair use means. If you needed permission, you are not making use of your fair use rights. And yet, both the Knight Center and Poynter caved immediately.

This is problematic in a number of different ways. First, many journalists look to both the Knight Center and Poynter for leadership on ways in which journalists should act. Providing this kind of example runs entirely counter to the kinds of things they should do and the kinds of things they should stand for. They are teaching the wrong lesson. They're teaching a lesson that says "journalists should give up their fair use rights." Second, they are giving Buhl more ammunition. In various comments around the web, she has been pointing to these moves as some sort of evidence that she is correct and those using the image are violating her copyright. She is wrong. For respected journalism institutions like Knight and Poynter to cave and give her this kind of ammo is simply shameful.

Yes, there may be bigger or more important fights, and lots of organizations decide to cave in the face of bogus legal threats, rather than have to deal with them at all. But, people look to Knight and Poynter for leadership, and this is case where both failed to provide leadership on a key issue that impacts the First Amendment in a very real way. As someone who has had tremendous respect for both organizations, they both have lost a lot of credibility with me. If they're unwilling to stand up for our basic rights on something like this, what else will they cave on? Perhaps it's time for other journalism institutes, which actually have some principles, to step up and take the mantle as true leaders on these issues for journalists, because Knight and Poynter have failed to live up to their own principles.

Filed Under: copyright, ethics, fair use, free speech, journalism, teri buhl
Companies: knight center, poynter institute