Parler Forced To Explain The First Amendment To Its Users After They Complain About Parler Turning Over Info To The FBI

from the delicious dept

Parler -- the social media cesspool that claimed the only things that mattered to it were the First Amendment and, um… FCC standards -- has reopened with new web hosting after Amazon decided it no longer wished to host the sort of content Parler has become infamous for.

Parler has held itself up to be the last bastion of the First Amendment and a protector of those unfairly persecuted by left-wing tech companies. The users who flocked to the service also considered themselves free speech absolutists. But like far too many self-ordained free speech "absolutists," they think the only speech that should be limited is moderation efforts by companies like Twitter and Facebook.

And, like a lot of people who mistakenly believe the First Amendment guarantees them access to an active social media account, a lot of Parler users don't seem to understand the limits of First Amendment protections. Parler, like every other social media service, has had to engage in moderation efforts that removed content undeniably protected by the First Amendment but that it did not want to host on its platform. It has also had to remove illegal content and that's where its most recent troubles began.

Over the weekend, the resurrected Parler crossed over into meta territory, resulting in an unintentionally hilarious announcement to its aggrieved users upset about the platform's decision to forward Capitol riot related posts to law enforcement. It really doesn't get any better than this in terms of schadenfreude and whatever the German word is for an ad hoc group of self-proclaimed First Amendment "experts" having their second favorite right explained to them.

Here's Matt Binder for Mashable:

The reaction to the news that Parler "colluded" with the FBI in order to report violent content was so strong on the right wing platform, the company was compelled to release a statement addressing those outraged users.

In doing so, Parler found itself unironically explaining the First Amendment to its user base filled with members who declare themselves to be "Constitutionalists" and "Free Speech" advocates.

Parler's statement spells it out: the First Amendment does not protect the speech shared with law enforcement by the social media platform.

In reaction to yesterday's news stories, some users have raised questions about the practice of referring violent or inciting content to law enforcement. The First Amendment does not protect violence inciting speech, nor the planning of violent acts. Such content violates Parler’s TOS. Any violent content shared with law enforcement was posted publicly and brought to our attention primarily via user reporting. And, as it is posted publicly, it can properly be referred to law enforcement by anyone. Parler remains steadfast in protecting your right to free speech.

That's a very concise and accurate reading of the First Amendment and how it applies to the content Parler forwarded to the FBI. It's not covered. But that hasn't stopped a few vocal complainants from telling Parler to try reading the Constitution again and, apparently, decide it means not only hosting violent content, but refusing to pass these threats on to law enforcement.

The core user base being unable to understand the limits of the right it believes allows it to say anything anywhere is partially a byproduct of Parler's promise to erect a Wild West internet playground for bigots and chauvinists who had nowhere else to go. Once it had some users, Parler realized it too needed to engage in moderation, even if only to rid itself of porn and outsiders who showed up solely to troll its stable of alt-right "influencers."

The January 6th insurrection appears to have forced the platform to grow up a little. Of course, some of that growth was forced on it by the leak of thousands of users' posts, which were examined by journalists and forwarded to law enforcement to assist in identifying Parler users who attended the deadly riot in DC earlier this year. Illegal content is still illegal, and being beholden only to the First Amendment doesn't change that.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, fbi, insurrection, public info
Companies: parler

NYT Easily Tracks Location Data From Capitol Riots, Highlighting Once Again How US Privacy Standards Are A Joke

from the watching-you-watching-me dept

First there was the Securus and LocationSmart scandal, which showcased how cellular carriers and data brokers buy and sell your daily movement data with only a fleeting effort to ensure all of the subsequent buyers and sellers of that data adhere to basic privacy and security standards. Then there was the blockbuster report by Motherboard showing how this data routinely ends up in the hands of everyone from bail bondsman to stalkers, again, with only a fleeting effort made to ensure the data itself is used ethically and responsibly.

Throughout it all, government has refused to lift a finger to address the problem, presumably because lobbyists don't want government upsetting the profitable apple cart, government is too busy freely buying access to this data itself, or too many folks still labor under the illusion that this sort of widespread dysfunction will be fixed by utterly unaccountable telecom or adtech markets.

Enter the New York Times, which in late 2019 grabbed a hold of a massive location data set from a broker, highlighting the scope of our lax location data standards (and the fact that "anonymized" data is usually anything but). This week, they've done another deep dive into the location data collected from rioting MAGA insurrectionists at the Capitol. It's a worthwhile read, and illustrates all the same lessons, including, once again, that "anonymized" data isn't real thing:

"While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance. In one instance, three members of a single family were tracked in the data."

There's been an endless list of studies finding that "anonymized" is a meaningless term, since it takes only a tiny shred of additional contextual data to identify individuals. It's a term companies use to provide regulators and consumers with a false sense of security that data protection and privacy are being taken seriously, and that's simply not true:

"The location-tracking industry exists because those in power allow it to exist. Plenty of Americans remain oblivious to this collection through no fault of their own. But many others understand what’s happening and allow it anyway. They feel powerless to stop it or were simply seduced by the conveniences afforded in the trade-off. The dark truth is that, despite genuine concern from those paying attention, there’s little appetite to meaningfully dismantle this advertising infrastructure that undergirds unchecked corporate data collection."

The dystopian aspect of this has already arrived, yet this still somehow isn't being taken seriously. Numerous US agencies already buy this data to bypass pesky things like warrants, and the US still lacks even a simple privacy law for the internet despite a steady parade of privacy-related scandals. Instead of having a serious conversation about this or other serious tech policy problems, we spent the last few years hyperventilating about TikTok.

Filed Under: anonymized data, insurrection, location data, privacy
Companies: ny times

Police Chief Demands Holes In Encryption Because Some Cops Decided To Participate In The DC Insurrection

from the sure,-make-this-all-about-us-when-it's-really-just-about-you dept

As more evidence comes to light showing a disturbing amount of law enforcement participation in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, police departments around the nation are finally being forced to face something they've ignored for far too long.

The law enforcement officers who participated in the insurrection attacked officers attempting to defend the building, or, at the very least, did nothing to discourage the lawless actions occurring all around them. The officers that went to DC and engaged in a riot aren't an anomaly. They've been part of law enforcement for as long as law enforcement has existed: bigots with a penchant for violence and a thirst for power.

These officers are finally beginning to be rooted out, but only because they did things no one can ignore. Hundreds of participants produced hundreds of recordings, turning their own celebration of their attempted election-thwarting into the evidence needed to identify them and charge them with federal crimes. Posts made to social media platforms provided more evidence, tying incriminating statements to location data to place off-duty cops on the scene.

Now that agencies are finally confronting their in-house white supremacist/militia problem, they're asking for everyone to be made less secure so they can handle the problem that's been hiding in plain sight for years.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo -- who presides over an agency with more than its share of bad cops -- was asked what officials like himself are doing to confront this problem. In response, Chief Acevedo asked for Congress to do him -- and other law enforcement agencies -- a favor:

Acevedo... said anonymous online platforms on the “dark web” are making such [internal] investigations impossible, even for departments with sufficient resources. He expects the move away from public platforms like Facebook and Twitter to grow rapidly in response to the FBI arrests of those who rioted at the Capitol.

This month, Acevedo was asked by the House Oversight and Reform Committee to explain what actions police chiefs are taking, and responded by asking for help. For years, law enforcement officials have asked for passage of a federal law that would require such platforms to have a “back door” that law enforcement can access if they have “a legitimate investigative need and a court order” to gain entry.

Then he blamed social media platforms for his own inability to police his police, calling them out as the real lawbreakers here:

“Congress’s failure to act has enabled industry giants to flaunt the law and operate with impunity,” Acevedo wrote in response.

First off, if the bad cops are shifting to "dark web" platforms in response to their own opsec failures during the January 6th riot, mandating backdoors that affect "industry giants" isn't going to make it any easier to track down cops who've moved on to "darker" web services.

Second, law enforcement agencies' continuous failure to hold officers accountable or to perform rigorous background checks should not be used as leverage to make services and devices less secure for millions of Americans. Citizens have already had to watch their tax dollars pay the salaries of brutal thugs whose loyalty to each other often supersedes their sworn duties as public servants. They don't need to be punished further just so it's a little easier for cops to perform the occasional internal investigation.

Finally, the encryption offered by device makers and communications platforms also protects cops -- not just from accountability, as Acevedo implies here -- but from malicious hackers and criminals who would love access to cops' devices, communications, and sensitive files. A backdoor for bad cops is a backdoor for good cops -- and a backdoor that strips a layer of security away from everyone who uses these devices and services.

The ugliness that permeates law enforcement needs to be rooted out. But the security of millions of Americans shouldn't be weakened just because those policing the police haven't done much of this policing for decades. They've had open access to evidence for years and rarely used it. Now that their sins are too big to ignore until the next news cycle hits shouldn't be the impetus for backdoor mandates.

Filed Under: art acevedo, backdoors, encryption, going dark, insurrection, washington dc

Telecoms Paused PAC Spending To Insurrectionists, But Their Umbrella Lobbying Orgs Didn't

from the bad-faith-bullshit dept

Like many companies, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon recently made a big stink about how they were pausing all PAC spending in supposed disgust at the insurrectionists in Congress whose bullshit resulted in a fatal riot at the Capitol. As noted already, that doesn't mean all that much. PAC spending is usually paused after an election to help get the lay of the land. Also, pausing PAC spending for a bit doesn't really justify the four years they spent enabling and normalizing fascism and bigotry just to nab merger approvals, deregulatory favors, and massive, pointless tax breaks.

Granted while Comcast and friends paused direct PAC spending to the alt-reality, anti-democratic bullshit artists in Congress, it's worth noting that their umbrella lobbying and policy organizations didn't. Sure, Comcast temporarily suspended PAC spending, but the NCTA, which largely represents cable giants like Comcast, didn't:

"NCTA – The Internet & Television Association counts as a member Comcast, which said it would cut off objectors indefinitely. The trade group’s PAC donated the maximum $10,000 to the joint fundraising committee of McCarthy, as well as other objecting Republican House members: $6,000 to Jim Jordan of Ohio, $4,000 to Elise Stefanik of New York, and $2,000 to Rep. Greg Pence of Indiana. NCTA’s president and CEO Michael Powell tweeted during the riots, “This is a sad and deeply disturbing moment for our nation…”, but did not respond to a tweet from a Virginia constituent of objector Rep. Morgan Griffith about the group’s future donations to objectors."

It's a lovely example of how much of this opposition is performative nonsense that obscures these companies' and groups' culpability in normalizing, enabling, and profiting off of a historically corrupt authoritarian and obvious bigot. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, the only remaining major wireless players after Trump's FCC greenlit job and competition killing industry mergers, also put on a show about how they had paused PAC spending, only to have umbrella trade organizations like the CTIA continue funding politicians its membership pretends to be outraged by:

"CTIA – The Wireless Association includes Verizon, which is pausing donations to objectors through 2021, and AT&T, pausing indefinitely to the objectors, and the group has not yet published a statement about the Electoral College challenge on its website or Twitter account. The group’s PAC contributed $2,000 to McCarthy’s campaign and $4,000 to Rep. Steve Scalise of Oklahoma, as well as $1,500 to Rep. Jordan and $1,000 to Sen. Rick Scott."

Of course this isn't just happening in telecom. Countless companies engaged in the same PAC spending theater only to have their primary trade and lobbying organizations continue on happily as if these opportunistic lawmakers aren't culpable for the death of five (technically seven if you include post-event suicides) people. Even then, most of these companies will reboot normal PAC spending the very millisecond they detect that the public outrage has minimized or shifted even slightly, which you can almost already feel occurring.

Either we're serious about punishing lawmakers who used bullshit to encourage insurrection or we aren't, and there's every indication that most of these efforts are more public relations patty cake than serious contrition.

Filed Under: campaign funds, election finance, insurrection, lobbying, political donations, telcos
Companies: at&t, comcast, ctia, ncta, verizon

Parole Violator Who Raided Senate Building Sold Out By The GPS Unit Attached To Him For Previous Parole Violations

from the GOP-might-not-be-attracting-the-best-and-brightest dept

Here's the latest stupid way pro-Trump rioters are getting arrested for their participation in the Little Insurrection That Couldn't. Surprisingly, the inauguration went off without a hitch, but no one could have seen that coming a couple of weeks ago, when Trump fans raided the Senate building in an attempt to prevent election results from being certified.

Opsec was the last thing on many invaders' minds. Providing great content for Parler followers or whatever seemed to be more important. The fierce opposition to wearing masks for health reasons carried over to a reluctance to wear masks for "committing federal crimes" reasons. Plenty of public posts to various social media services have made it exceedingly easy for investigators to track down perpetrators without having to leave their desks.

I hesitate to call this the peak of January 6th related stupidity. There's always a chance this will be topped. But this is just gobsmackingly idiotic. As we're all painfully aware, cellphones generate a ton of useful (to investigators) location data that can track movements and tie people to criminal activities.

It's one thing to forget your cellphone is an omnipresent snitch. It's quite another to forget you're wearing a device specifically designed to deliver your current location data to law enforcement. May I introduce to this fucking guy:

Bryan Betancur is one of dozens of people that have been arrested in the wake of the insurrection at the Capitol. He was arrested on Sunday, and is expected to make his first court appearance in D.C. on Monday afternoon.

A screenshot of Betancur's Instagram account allegedly shows him outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 flashing a sign linked to white supremacist groups.

Screenshots are good. Precise location data is better. And Betancur delivered that to investigators in a way few others involved in the half-assed insurrection have. Behold this galaxy brain at work.

Investigators say their case relies in part on location data produced by the GPS unit that the man was wearing for a prior offense.

Someone who committed some crimes and committed another crime by violating his parole decided to commit more crimes -- all while wearing something that was supposed to encourage him to commit fewer crimes by informing law enforcement of his whereabouts at all times.

And, while Betancur originally admitted he had been in the Capitol and was on the receiving end of tear gas dispensed by Capitol police, he walked some of those statements back when questioned further. Unfortunately, he couldn't walk back his previous footsteps inside the Capitol building, which means he too will likely be facing charges beyond (yet another) parole violation.

Filed Under: bryan betancur, capitol, gps, insurrection, parole violator

Disingenuous, Lying, Whining, Bloviating, Insurrection Encouraging Senator Josh Hawley Given Pages Of Major Newspaper To Explain How He's Being Silenced

from the oh-fuck-off dept

In Netflix's recent release, "Death to 2020," Lisa Kudrow does an absolutely pitch perfect parody of whiny "conservative" upset about non-existent "cancel culture" over "conservative views." Kudrow, playing the role of a Trump campaign spokesperson/conservative commentator, talks about how she has to keep saying that "Conservative Voices Are Being Silenced," including on a variety of popular media interviews and, of course, a NYT best-selling book by the same title:

Of course, it's becoming harder and harder to create satire and parody these days when you have terrible people like Senator Josh Hawley making such parody obsolete within days. We've already talked about how Hawley, a lying demagogue, who apparently has been plotting how to run for President since he was a child, threw an absolute shit fit when Simon & Schuster told him it no longer wanted to publish his book. Hawley, who was (briefly) a constitutional law professor, has a law degree from Yale, and clerked at the Supreme Court for Chief Justice Roberts, ridiculously claimed that a private enterprise deciding it didn't want to do business with him was an attack on his 1st Amendment rights. It was not. And, of course, within a few days, he had a new publisher.

But, Josh Hawley is going to Josh Hawley, which means never letting a chance to play the whiny, disingenuous victim go to waste. He's now been given column space in one of the most well known newspapers in the country, the NY Post, to whine about how he's being "muzzled." And, of course, as soon as that was published, he immediately ran to his Twitter account, which has over half a million followers, to post a link to this op-ed in a major American newspaper, to whine about how he's been muzzled.

I wish I were so muzzled.

Nearly everything about the article is bullshit. Josh Hawley, who is trying to restore his reputation after he was, correctly, seen as a key instigator of the insurrectionist mob at the Capitol, clearly has no compunction about just making shit up in an attempt to change the narrative. He wants to blame everyone, but refuses to take any responsibility. He's the antithesis of every stupid "conservative talking point" he spent decades spewing. He's refusing to take responsibility for his own actions. He's demanding government action to stop the free market. He's attacking actual free speech when it criticizes him.

I'm not going to quote any of it, because that's sinking to the level he wants. If you want to read it, you can see it above, but Prof. David Karpf's hilarious thread critiquing it as if it were a draft handed in by a student is basically all you need to see:

Oh yeah. Also, it seems worth noting that Josh Hawley, for all this bullshit about how he's being censored, silenced, muted and whatnot, actually... refused to grant an interview to the newspaper in Missouri that did a front page story on him this weekend. I almost called it his "hometown" newspaper, since he is "the junior Senator from Missouri," but that would be misleading, since he doesn't actually live in Missouri, and (while complaining about voter fraud) may have violated voter registration laws by claiming his sister's home as his Missouri residence for the last election.

Beware Josh Hawley's attempt to rehabilitate his reputation with this nonsense. He's a lying demagogue who appears unwilling to ever accept any personal responsibility for his role in inspiring a literal insurrection and mob that ended with five people dead.

Filed Under: conservative voices are being silenced, disingenuous liar, insurrection, josh hawley, snowflake
Companies: ny post

Adding To Its Long List Of Arrested Deputies, Polk County Sheriff Arrests Deputy For Capitol-Related Threats

from the pro-trump-euphoria-will-fade-long-before-the-sentence-ends dept

Another law enforcement officer has lost his job after being unable to accept the outcome of a national election. Lots of officers around the nation are under investigation for their participation in the Capitol Hill raid earlier this month. There's another name to add to that long list -- one who used to work for one of the worst law enforcement officials in the county, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd. (h/t WarOnPrivacy)

Trump repeatedly made it clear he preferred cops to the people they served and would be willing to overlook almost any sin they committed, as long as they did it with a uniform on. Trump claimed not liking cops was "wrong" and that he would fix it. He praised extrajudicial killings by federal officers and encouraged beat cops to beat arrestees.

That love for cops is paying dividends. But probably not paying enough to offset the loss of a law enforcement salary. A Polk County deputy has been fired for threatening messages about the January 6 raid on the Capitol.

Judd said another deputy reported the action, making threats in connection with violence against the U.S. Capitol, to a lieutenant.

"Our deputy that reported this is a hero," Judd said, adding that the reporting deputy was also investigated but cooperated fully and is not in trouble.

The suspect is accused of a "mass shooting or act of terrorism" threat, Judd said.

Judd said Heneen had made comments such as "Need to make the streets of D.C. run red with the blood of the tyrants" and "should have dragged the tyrants into the streets and executed them."

The screenshots made public by Sheriff Judd show Deputy Peter Heneen stating he'll "fucking kill bitches," "slit the throats" of any federal officer who "touches his family," and promising to "make them suffer."

Now, Heneen is not only out of a job, but he's been arrested and charged. This is something that seems to happen to an alarming number of Grady Judd's deputies. Here's a recent sampling:

August 2013: Deputy Mark Hicks arrested for sending lewd messages and images to a 17-year-old girl. (This is especially ironic given Grady Judd's numerous stings utilizing deputies who pretend to be minors and engage in sexual conversations with adult targets.)

January 2014: Deputy Julio Garcia arrested and charged after sexually propositioning arrestees.

September 2015: Deputy Consuelo Gallego-Bias arrested for assaulting her husband.

July 2017: Deputy David Clark arrested for driving under the influence after crashing his car into a utility pole.

September 2017: Deputy Russell Hilson arrested for assaulting his girlfriend.

April 2018: Deputy Thomas Strickland arrested and suspended for assaulting his wife.

March 2018: Deputy Silvia Lara arrested for aggravated stalking, burglary, and misuse of the drivers license database.

October 2018: 19-year veteran Scott Walker arrested on sexual battery charges after groping and digitally penetrating a deputy trainee.

November 2019: Detective Dennis Jones, Jr. arrested and charged with 22 counts of falsifying records and forgery.

February 2020: Deputy Seth Morozowski arrested for driving while intoxicated.

May 2020: Deputy Alfredo Marenco arrested for driving under the influence.

May 2020: Detention deputy Yessenia Turcios arrested for domestic violence.

September 2020: Sheriff's Office employee Candace Lewis arrested for domestic battery and filing a false report.

So, there are a couple of ways of looking at this. The more positive take would be that Sheriff Judd doesn't tolerate criminal acts or misconduct and moves swiftly to charge and remove troublesome deputies. The more negative view would be that Judd's department attracts and hires thugs, miscreants, and people with self-control issues. It can also be both! Counter-productive, if true, but the job still pays the same whether you're making things better or just looking busy.

Filed Under: capitol, insurrection, peter heneen, police, polk county

Trump's Support Of Cops Pays Off: Multiple Police Officers Under Investigation For Illegal Invasion Of The Capitol Building

from the enjoy-those-federal-building-sentence-enhancements,-lawboys dept

At the beginning of his term, President Trump promised he'd turn regular America into police-loving America:

President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform and will support their mission of protecting the public. The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.

But cops kept being cops and the "dangerous anti-police atmosphere" continued. Actually, it escalated. When a Minnesota cop pressed his knee into the neck of an unarmed black man until the man was dead, the country exploded.

Voters decided Trump was no longer worthy of leading the nation. In response, Trump claimed the election had been stolen and insinuated the only way to keep America great was to overthrow anyone who stood in the way of Trump being President for another four years -- even if the electoral college vote and the popular vote said otherwise. Following an incendiary "rally," Trump supporters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Building to stop VP Mike Pence and the Senate from certifying the election results.

Fans of peaceful transitions of power were horrified. Trump supporters overran the Capitol, stole documents, took selfies, destroyed property, attacked Capitol police officers, planted explosive devices, and otherwise made it clear that opposing Trump meant inviting violence.

Some people disingenuously speculated that this was the boiling-over point for disenfranchised (mostly white) Americans who felt beltway insiders and coastal elites had sold them out to special interests and political correctness for years, elevating the plight on non-white Americans and foreign interests ahead of their own constituents.

The attendees of this rally-turned-raid likely included some of the supposedly disenfranchised. But it also included -- in large numbers -- the same sort of "elites" and "special interests" the allegedly disenfranchised were warring against in their proxy, Pyrrhic war on the Capitol.

They were business owners, CEOs, state legislators, police officers, active and retired service members, real-estate brokers, stay-at-home dads, and, I assume, some Proud Boys.

[...]

The members of the mob that attacked the Capitol and beat a police officer to death last week were not desperate. They were there because they believed they had been unjustly stripped of their inviolable right to rule. They believed that not only because of the third-generation real-estate tycoon who incited them, but also because of the wealthy Ivy Leaguers who encouraged them to think that the election had been stolen.

This wasn't an uprising by the downtrodden. This was a mass tantrum led by people with plenty of power and/or money.

Let's not forget that five people died during this "protest" over electoral college votes -- the same electoral college Trump supporters claimed was sacrosanct when it handed him a victory over Hillary Clinton, despite Trump losing the popular vote. This is what led to five deaths. And this is what will likely lead to increased domestic surveillance and has already converted Washington, DC into a war zone patrolled by the military.

This is apparently the America Trump supporters want. And some of the biggest Trump supporters are the same people we pay (and trust) to keep the peace. Trump spent four years unabashedly supporting law enforcement, no matter how awful their acts and violations. In return, police officers showed Trump they had his back… by breaking the law and assaulting [checks the goddamn tape] police officers.

Several police departments across the country have opened investigations into cops among their ranks to find out if they were involved in the siege on the U.S. Capitol on Washington, D.C. on January 6th.

The growing number of probes follows an announcement from the Seattle Police Department on Friday that two of its officers have been put on administrative leave pending an investigation into allegations that they were in the nation’s capital during the raucous events.

Seattle wasn't anomalous. It was indicative. Similar investigations have been opened in Texas, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire.

And those four states aren't an anomaly. Here's The Appeal with updated numbers:

[Update, Jan. 14, 5:15 p.m., Eastern time: One more law enforcement officer has been reported as having attended the Jan. 6 rally, bringing the total to 29 officers from 13 states.]

There's a spreadsheet tracking law enforcement officers' involvement in violating federal laws. It includes officers who have been reassigned, suspended, or are still under investigation for their participation in this half-assed attempt to overthrow the part of the government these officers don't like. It also includes federal officers, including at least one Secret Service officer who made public Facebook posts encouraging the attack on the Capitol Building.

And it's not just the "left-wing" media reporting this. Here's an article from pro-cop site The Police Tribune.

Two Rocky Mount police officers have been federally charged for being inside the U.S. Capitol at the time of the Jan. 6 riot.

A veteran Houston police officer is also expected to be charged for the same behavior, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told KTRK on Wednesday.

And this report from BuzzFeed is fucking unreal. It's not often a cop tells another cop the beatings will continue until morale improves.

The [Capitol police] officer even described coming face-to-face with police officers from across the country in the mob. He said some of them flashed their badges, telling him to let them through, and trying to explain that this was all part of a movement that was supposed to help.

“You have the nerve to be holding a Blue Lives Matter flag, and you are out there fucking us up,” he told one group of protesters he encountered inside the Capitol. “[One guy] pulled out his badge and he said, ‘We’re doing this for you.’ Another guy had his badge. So I was like, ‘Well, you gotta be kidding.’”

The War on Cops continues.

This isn't irony. It's hypocrisy. Too bad it's a human trait and we have to rely on the human race to staff our law enforcement agencies. It would be nice to see the police align with the populace in the event of an actual revolution. But this wasn't a revolution. And it featured cops siding with themselves, willing to stomp any other law enforcement officer standing in the way of them invading and looting a federal government building to prevent a lawful election from being certified.

Yet another reason we should never trust cops. When push comes to shove, police officers will push, shove, and assault anyone who stands between them and their goals -- even if it's another law enforcement officer. Cops don't just dislike the people they serve. They dislike anyone who keeps them from doing what they want.

Filed Under: capitol, donald trump, insurrection, police, riot

Sheryl Sandberg Makes Disingenuous Push To Argue That Only Facebook Has The Power To Stop Bad People Online

from the oh-come-off-it dept

While Twitter is opening up to have the difficult conversation about how content moderation and the open internet should co-exist at a time when the President of the US has inspired an insurrection, Facebook, perhaps not surprisingly, has taken another approach. It's one that is condescendingly stupid, and simultaneously self-serving.

Sheryl Sandberg went public to say both that most of the planning for the invasion of the Capitol was not done on Facebook, and that only Facebook was big enough to prevent such things from happening.

She says:

"I think these events were largely organized on platforms that don’t have our abilities to stop hate, and don’t have our standards, and don’t have our transparency."

Even if that's true (and that's unclear, and we'll get back to that...) it's a very short-sighted and silly thing to say. At a time when the company is literally facing two major antitrust cases, to run around trying to argue that you're the only one who can handle this issue is just painfully dumb. On top of that, there's no way that anyone can totally stop people from spreading these messages on any platform, no matter what abilities/standards/transparency you have -- and pretending that your moderation efforts are somehow perfect is the kind of stupid thing that (1) will come back to bite you and (2) is easy to disprove.

In fact, it was quite easy to prove that Sandberg's claims are not even remotely true. The Washington Post has detailed how bogus that claim is:

A growing body of evidence shows Facebook played a much larger role than Sandberg suggested.

The #StopTheSteal hashtag was widely used on the service until Monday, when a search on Facebook reported that 128,000 people were talking about it and in many cases using it to coordinate for the rally, according to Eric Feinberg, a vice president with the Coalition for a Safer Web.

And two dozen Republican Party officials and organizations in at least 12 states posted on Facebook to coordinate bus trips to the rally, according to research by the left-leaning media watchdog group Media Matters for America, which published screenshots of the fliers and memes.

“BUS TRIP to DC … #StoptheSteal. If your passions are running hot and you’re intending to respond to the President’s call for his supporters to descend on DC on Jan 6, LISTEN UP!” wrote the Polk County Republican Party of North Carolina in a Facebook post that is no longer publicly available.

Oooof. Meanwhile, even after Facebook and Sandberg said that Facebook had taken down the militias and that it had the "ability to stop hate," it wasn't difficult for a Buzzfeed reporter to find "Stop the Steal" groups still active!

A search on Facebook for the words "Stop the Steal," a rallying cry that the mob who forced Congress to flee chanted, turned up dozens of places where new plots could be coordinated. There are at least 66 groups dedicated to the slogan, the largest of which has over 14,000 members. That group is private, meaning nonmembers can’t access the content, but its description is unambiguous: “to make aware the issues of fraudulent voting practices and Fraudulent ballot counting. also, to make these issues transparent for all!”

Several of these groups were created after the election. The 14,000-member group was created on Nov. 6. Another, with nearly 10,000 members, was started on Nov. 29, and another that has 8,000 members on Dec. 10.

This is the nature of content moderation. You're always going to make mistakes. Big ones. Small ones. Medium ones. You're going to make mistakes. Pretending that you won't is silly and will backfire. And here it's especially stupid given the circumstances.

I'm saying this as someone who has spent plenty of time in the last week explaining to people why it's silly to blame Facebook for what happened at the Capitol. If people didn't plan on Facebook (and, of course, they did), they would have planned this elsewhere. But, it's just gaslighting people to pretend that Facebook has the power to moderate away all bad behavior, and even dumber to pretend that no such planning happened on your platform. I'm sure that plenty of the planning happened elsewhere, but of course some of it happened on Facebook.

I truly do not understand Facebook's continued failure to comprehend how it, and its senior leadership, keep shooting themselves in the foot time after time.

Filed Under: content moderation, impossibility, insurrection, policies, sheryl sandberg, stop the steal
Companies: facebook

More Bad Ideas: Congressional Rep Suggests Participants In The Attack On The Capitol Building Be Added To The No-Fly List

from the we-need-less-of-this,-not-more dept

Proving that 2020 wasn't done with us yet, January 6, 2021 added a new horror to the long list of things that showed "may you live in interesting times" is a curse, rather than a blessing. Urged on by the guy less than ten days away from being escorted from the premises by security and his favorite legal advocate -- one that advocated for "trial by combat" over the election results -- Trump supporters invaded Washington, DC, hoping to somehow nullify the election through intimidation and violence.

This violent debacle (and it was violent -- five people dead and two explosive devices recovered) has resulted in a lot of backlash. The most immediate backlash will be felt by some of the red-hatted crowd that broke into the Capitol building in hopes of preventing election certification. An executive order signed by Trump -- one targeting "violent, left-wing extremists" -- will instead be used to enhance the prison sentences of violent, right-wing extremists. Perhaps the worst president in history will exit the office with his supporters feeling the brunt of this incredible self-own. MAGA, indeed.

But it's back to business as usual, now that things have settled down. An attack on the election process has resulted in calls for action. And calls for action prompted by singular events with almost no chance of being repeated almost always result in things being made worse for millions of citizens who did nothing more than watch in horror as events unfolded.

The 9/11 attacks resulted in an expansion of the surveillance state. The tragic attack was leveraged to take power away from the people and give it to their government instead. The same thing appears to be happening now, with President-elect Joe Biden demanding a War on (Domestic) Terrorism. And other legislators are demanding more be done now, ignoring the dire repercussions of their demands in favor of inflicting pain on people who didn't vote for them. (h/t Sam Mintz)

Flight attendants felt disturbed by the presence of Capitol Hill invaders on flights out of DC. This is fine. And, as private companies, airlines can certainly refuse to allow certain people to board their planes. But this private objection is being made public, courtesy of Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. He wants these private complaints to become public by adding alleged "insurrectionists" to the incredibly expansive no-fly lists maintained by the federal government.

Given the heinous domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol yesterday, I am urging the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use their authorities to add the names of all identified individuals involved in the attack to the federal No-Fly List and keep them off planes. This should include all individuals identified as having entered the Capitol building—an intrusion which threatened the safety of Members of Congress and staff and served as an attack on our Nation.

We already saw reports of ‘unruly mobs’ in the air on the way to Washington, D.C. It does not take much imagination to envision how they might act out on their way out of D.C. if allowed to fly unfettered. This is an action that TSA and the FBI, by law, are able to take but, to my knowledge, have not yet taken. Alleged perpetrators of a domestic terrorist attack who have been identified by the FBI should be held accountable.

Lots to unpack here.

First, the TSA should not be given any permission to do anything, given that it's done almost nothing with the vast amount of leeway it's already been granted.

Second, no-fly lists are an unconstitutional mess. Even given the massive amount of deference judges grant to "national security" arguments, courts remain unconvinced that forbidding someone from flying (and then refusing to even acknowledge this fact, much less given them a chance to challenge this determination) isn't a violation of their rights.

Adding a bunch of people to the no-fly list isn't a good idea, especially when the government has plenty of power to deal with the perpetrators of this Capitol Hill invasion without deciding they're no longer allowed to board airplanes. As Rep. Thompson says, perpetrators should be held accountable. There are plenty of laws on the books -- and one recent executive order -- that will help federal prosecutors achieve this goal. Banning perps from flying doesn't change anything about the prosecutorial matrix.

And if someone can be identified and added to a no-fly list, chances are they can be identified, arrested, and prosecuted. So the watchlist is just punitive damage with almost zero recourse. Let the law take its course. Leave the no-fly list out of it. If airlines want to refuse to serve suspects facing prosecution for the Capitol raid, they can do so. The government doesn't need to be involved. Federal agencies can BOLO suspects without putting them on a watchlist that severely curtails their ability to travel. And that's all it should do at this point, since we're supposed to presume innocence before determining guilt.

Filed Under: bad ideas, bennie thompson, due process, insurrection, no fly list, riots, tsa