DC Court Says Terms Of Service Violations Can't Trigger Federal CFAA Prosecutions

from the forcing-discretion-on-DOJ-prosecutors dept

In a win for researchers and the ACLU, a federal court has ruled that violating a site's terms of service is not a criminal violation of the CFAA.

The ACLU filed this lawsuit in 2016, representing researchers, scientists, and journalists who were looking into whether employment websites engaged in discriminatory behavior. To do so, the researchers needed to deliberately violate the terms of service of the websites they were studying by creating bogus accounts and providing other false information.

Since the CFAA has been the go-to law for companies seeking to silence security researchers and critics, the ACLU and its plaintiffs raised a pre-enforcement challenge, seeking a ruling declaring this work legal before the DOJ had a chance to abuse this terrible law to shut the research down.

The DC federal court doesn't go so far as to extend First Amendment protection to these actions, but it does hold, importantly, that the CFAA does not criminalize terms-of-service violations. From the decision [PDF]:

The Court agrees with the clear weight of relevant authority and adopts a narrow interpretation of “exceeds authorized access.” Without weighing in on the circuit split over employers’ computer-use policies, the Court concludes that violating public websites’ terms of service, as Wilson and Mislove propose to do for their research, does not constitute a CFAA violation under the “exceeds authorized access” provision.

The DOJ tried to argue the plaintiffs had no case because it would never in a million years even think about bringing a CFAA prosecution over terms of service violations. The court says the government's own words and actions contradict its assertions.

The government argues that plaintiffs fail to establish a credible threat of prosecution under the CFAA, contending that (1) plaintiffs’ testimony shows that they do not fear prosecution (and, indeed, already have engaged in such research); (2) past CFAA prosecutions do not establish a credible threat that plaintiffs’ proposed conduct will be prosecuted; and (3) the government’s charging policies and public statements undercut plaintiffs’ attempt to establish a credible threat of prosecution.

[...]

[E]ven assuming the absence of prior prosecutions, but see Sandvig, 314 F. Supp. 3d at 19–20 (discussing two previous prosecutions under the Access Provision), plaintiffs still are not precluded from bringing this pre-enforcement action. When constitutionally protected conduct falls within the scope of a criminal statute, and the government “has not disavowed any intention of invoking the criminal penalty provision,” plaintiffs are “not without some reason in fearing prosecution” and have standing to bring the suit.

It's not enough for the government to declare it probably won't pursue ToS-violation prosecutions, the court says.

[T]he government points to guidance from the Attorney General that “expressly cautions against prosecutions based on [terms-of-service] violations,” as well as statements to Congress by Department of Justice officials, as evidence that plaintiffs face no credible threat of prosecution. Gov’t’s Opp’n at 16–17. But the absence of a specific disavowal of prosecution by the Department undermines much of the government’s argument.

All we're left with is the DOJ's prosecutorial discretion, which is extremely suspect and not backed by any statements from officials that would assure the plaintiffs the government would not choose to take action against them in the future.

Discovery has not helped the government’s position. John T. Lynch, Jr., the Chief of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, testified at his deposition that it was not “impossible for the Department to bring a CFAA prosecution based on [similar] facts and de minimis harm…" Although Lynch has also stated that he does not “expect” the Department to do so, Aff. of John T. Lynch, Jr. [ECF No. 21-1] ¶ 9, “[t]he Constitution ‘does not leave us at the mercy of noblesse oblige...’”

This may keep the DOJ off researchers' backs but it won't shield them from lawsuits from the targeted sites.

The Court concludes that agreeing to such contractual restrictions, although that may have consequences for civil liability under other federal and state laws, is not sufficient to trigger criminal liability under the CFAA.

This at least will deter the DOJ from pursuing these prosecutions in its "home" court. Most CFAA action still takes place in the Ninth Circuit, where most tech companies are located. Opinions on civil CFAA cases have been hit and miss, but at least one major case (LinkedIn v. HiQ) saw the court come down on the side of the party doing the scraping, a violation of LinkedIn's terms of service. This decision is being appealed, but for now, it still stands.

The research can move forward without the threat of government prosecution dangling over its head. That's a start.

Filed Under: cfaa, criminal, doj, research, security research, terms of service
Companies: aclu

Surprise! MIT Study Claims Voatz E-Voting Technology Is A Security Dumpster Fire

from the we've-kinda-been-over-this dept

You'd be pretty hard pressed to find a single respected cybersecurity expert that thinks voting via smartphone is a good idea. There's just too many potential attack vectors as your voting data floats from your personal device, across the internet, and into the final tally repository. Despite this there's an endless chorus of political leaders, cities, and states who continue to insist they know better. From West Virginia to Washington State, the quest for great inclusivity in voting access often results in people ignoring these warnings in the belief that they're helping.

The West Virginia effort has been handed over to internet voting vendor Voatz, whose smartphone voting system had already been criticized for being risky and insecure. Last November, Senator Ron Wyden wrote to the Pentagon to raise concerns about Voatz’s security and to ask for a full audit of the app.

Criticism of the company grew much louder this week after MIT researchers released a paper (pdf) showing how Voatz's technology has some fairly basic problems that would let an attacker intercept votes as they’re transmitted from mobile phones to the voting company’s server -- without anybody being the wiser:

"We find that Voatz has vulnerabilities that allow different kinds of adversaries to alter, stop, or expose a user’s vote, including a sidechannel attack in which a completely passive network adversary can potentially recover a user’s secret ballot. We additionally find that Voatz has a number of privacy issues stemming from their use of third party services for crucial app functionality. Our findings serve as a concrete illustration of the common wisdom against Internet voting, and of the importance of transparency to the legitimacy of elections."

While Voatz has repeatedly complained that its blockchain technology should have protected this from happening, the researchers found said implementation wasn't actually implemented in the way the company claimed, providing no additional security protection to the vote transmissions. On top of those issues, computer science professor Alex Halderman found other issues with the certificate pinning and servers Voatz implemented:

The New York Times, which first reported the research, notes that a copy of the findings had already been submitted to the Department of Homeland Security and the various election officials who've signed off on the platform. Like many e-voting companies, Voatz claims transparency isn't really necessary because it utilizes an array of anonymous experts to audit the company's systems. But the findings of those audits have yet to be made public, even to the officials using the systems. See the problem yet?

For its part, Voatz's response has been to double down on its previous positions while insulting the researchers that disclosed the problem, insisting that server-side protections would thwart the theoretical attack (cybersecurity experts were quick to disagree). The company issued a blog post in which it accused the researchers (MIT's Michael Specter, James Koppel and Daniel Weitzner) of being publicity hounds and attempting to "deliberately disrupt the election process":

"It is clear that from the theoretical nature of the researchers’ approach, the lack of practical evidence backing their claims, their deliberate attempt to remain anonymous prior to publication, and their priority being to find media attention, that the researchers’ true aim is to deliberately disrupt the election process, to sow doubt in the security of our election infrastructure, and to spread fear and confusion."

When every single respected infosec researcher and journalist is telling you e-voting can't be adequately secured and your solution to that problem is flawed and will only make that problem worse, insulting and ignoring researchers isn't a great look. Compounded by the GOP's refusal to pass any election security bills of note, and you can start to see how we're just begging for problems on what could potentially someday be a catastrophic scale.

Filed Under: blockchain, e-voting, mobile voting, research, security
Companies: voatz

Academic Publishers Get Their Wish: DOJ Investigating Sci-Hub Founder For Alleged Ties To Russian Intelligence

from the oh-come-on dept

We've written plenty about Sci-Hub over the years. The service, which was set up to allow free and easy access to academic research that is all-to-often hidden behind insanely expensive paywalls (often, despite being paid for with public funds), is the bane of academic publishers, though the hero to many academics. As we've highlighted, the big publishers keep playing whac-a-mole with the service as they try to take it down around the globe, and each time it just seems to get the site more attention. From the earliest days, it's been clear that Sci-Hub works by getting academics with access to various collections to "donate" their login credentials, so that Sci-Hub can fetch any missing papers not in its collection (if it, and its associated site Libgen, already have it, they make that version available).

However, the Washington Post is now claiming that the DOJ has been investigating Sci-Hub founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, who started the site as an academic herself who found it nearly impossible to access the research she needed. But here's the twist, apparently the DOJ is alleging that Elbakyan is somehow tied to Russian intelligence.

It’s unclear whether Elbakyan is using Sci-Hub’s operations in service of Russian intelligence, but her critics say she has demonstrated significant hacking skills by collecting log-in credentials from journal subscribers, particularly at universities, and using them to pilfer vast amounts of academic literature.

The investigation has both criminal and intelligence-gathering elements, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing probe.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said he believes Elbakyan is working with Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, the same organization that stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and then provided them to WikiLeaks in 2016.

Given the typical demonization of those who seek to open up access to academic research (see: Swartz, Aaron), I'd take this report with a pretty large grain of salt until some actual evidence is provided.

Some of the accusations -- provided in the article by Elsevier's lawyer, who has worked on cases against Sci-Hub -- claim that rather than academics sharing their credentials willingly, Sci-Hub has resorted to phishing to get them. If true, that would be quite unfortunate. And, at one point in the article, Elbakyan might admit to as much, though it's not clear if the full context of the question or response from her is included in the article:

“We’ve seen phishing, that’s most common,” he said, referring to the use of deceit to trick someone into providing a username and password. “But also password-breaking,” Pitts added, suggesting Elbakyan uses more-aggressive hacking techniques.

“I do not deny that some accounts that Sci-Hub is using were obtained” in such a way, Elbakyan said, but she declined to elaborate on how she comes by credentials.

If true, that would be disappointing. But it still seems like a lot more evidence would be necessary to argue that it's a tool of Russian intelligence.

Filed Under: academic papers, alexandra elbakyan, copyright, doj, hacking, open access, passwords, phishing, research, russia, russian intelligence
Companies: sci-hub

Apple Filed A Silly, Questionable DMCA Notice On A Tweeted iPhone Encryption Key... Before Backing Down

from the copyright? dept

Copyright continues to serve its purpose as a tool for censorship, it seems. This week there was some hubbub over Apple's highly questionable decision to send a DMCA takedown notice over a tweet by a security researcher who goes by "Siguza," and who appeared to publish an iPhone encryption key on Twitter:

Twitter took it down upon receipt of the takedown notice, but later put it back after Apple rescinded the takedown -- either realizing that the takedown was bogus or futile (or, I guess, both).

You can understand (sorta) why Apple would want to protect the key, but copyright seems like exactly the wrong tool for the job. Of course, that's often the case, but copyright is such an easy tool to abuse to try to silence speech that it is often the preferred tool of would-be censors. This is just one example. But it does raise questions. Is an encryption key even copyright-eligible? That seems highly unlikely. Copyright only is supposed to apply to the creative elements of a work, and it would be difficult to argue that an encryption key meets the "creative" level necessary. US courts have already decided that phone numbers are not subject to copyright (even made up numbers), so it seems unlikely that an encryption key would pass muster for getting a copyright.

Potentially Apple could have been making a DMCA 1201 "anti-circumvention" argument as well -- but even that seems silly, and only highlights the problems of the anti-circumvention provisions of Section 1201 of the DMCA. When a single tweet with a single code is seen as "circumvention" then there's a big problem -- and that problem is the law.

It's good that Apple backed down on this, though it still highlights the problems of the DMCA takedown process, and how it can be used unfairly for censorship -- even if that "censorship" completely backfired this time.

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, dmca, encryption key, jailbreaking, research, security, siguza
Companies: apple, twitter

It's Time For The Academic World To See The Positive Side Of Negative Results

from the go-on,-take-a-chance dept

Techdirt has written many times about the need to move from traditional academic publishing to open access. There are many benefits, including increasing the reach and impact of research, and allowing members of the public to read work that they have often funded, without needing to pay again. But open access is not a panacea; it does not solve all the problems of today's approach to spreading knowledge. In particular, it suffers from the same serious flaw that afflicts traditional titles: a tendency to focus on success, and to draw a veil of silence over failure. As a new column in Nature puts it:

Scientists have become so accustomed to celebrating only success that we've forgotten that most technological advances stem from failure. We all want to see our work saving lives or solving world hunger, and I think the collective bias towards finding positive results in the face of failure is a dangerous motivation.

That's true, though hardly a new insight. People have been pointing it out for years. But the fact that it still needs to be said shows how little progress has been made in this regard. For example, back in 2015, Stephen Curry, a professor of structural biology at London's Imperial College, wrote a column in the Guardian entitled "On the importance of being negative", which explains why negative results matter:

Their value lies in mapping out blind alleys, warning other investigators not to waste their time or at least to tread carefully. The only trouble is, it can be hard to get them published.

Curry noted that Elsevier was aiming to address that problem with the launch of the catchily-named journal "New Negatives in Plant Science", which was "a platform for negative, unexpected or controversial results". Unfortunately, looking at the journal's Web page today, we read: "The Publisher has decided to discontinue the journal New Negatives in Plant Science." Maybe papers about negative results were simply a bit, well, negative for many people. Undaunted, Cambridge University Press (CUP) is launching its own title in this space:

Experimental Results will offer a place where researchers can publish standalone experimental results "regardless of whether those results are novel, inconclusive, negative or supplementary to other published work." The journal will also publish the outcome of attempts to reproduce previously published experiments, including those that dispute past findings.

Some journals publish full-paper negative or inconclusive results, but published stand-alone results are a rarity, said CUP.

That's a welcome move, because the academic world effectively discards huge quantities of knowledge, often hard-won, about things that don't work, don't reproduce the results of others, or are simply unclear. Those may be messy and less glamorous than the big successes that hit the headlines and win prizes, but they are valuable nonetheless.

It's instructive to compare the world of academic publishing with what happens in Silicon Valley. There, failure is celebrated as proof that entrepreneurs have been willing to try new things, and acknowledged as a valuable learning experience. It's added to CVs with pride, not glossed over like some shameful secret. It's time to bring some of that enthusiastic willingness to take risks to the rigorous but rather timid world of academia. -- and to reward it accordingly.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: academia, failure, journals, open access, research

Elsevier Says It's Infringing To Link To Sci-Hub; Hypocrite Elsevier Links To Sci-Hub All The Time

from the because-of-course dept

Academic publishing giant Elsevier really, really, really hates Sci-Hub, the site that offers up access to lots of academic research. Elsevier has sued the site directly and tried many times to get it blocked (which, to date, seems to have only helped it get more attention). Last week, Elsevier got all legal-threaty against Citationsy, a site that helps scholars create citations. Elsevier claimed that Citationsy was infringing its copyright by linking to Sci-Hub.

But, here's the issue: as Martin Paul Eve pointed out, Elsevier, itself, points to Sci-Hub pretty damn often.

That said, the more entertaining fact is that scholarly publishers frequently end up linking to Sci-Hub. Here’s one I found on Elsevier’s own ScienceDirect site:

One might also consider this article on ScienceDirect, which in earlier versions contained a now-removed Sci Hub link:

The list goes on. Consider this Elsevier article:

Heck, I found too many examples to list them all, but this accepted manuscript (published online by Elsevier on their site YESTERDAY) contains a Sci-Hub link:

As Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing points out, it shouldn't be at all surprising that tons of academic research links to Sci-Hub:

It's also not hard to understand this. You see, the researchers who write the papers that Elsevier publishes are scientists, not private-equity-backed looter/profiteers, so they are more interested in science and scholarship than ensuring that Elsevier continues to rake in billions. And since Elsevier doesn't pay for any of the work it publishes, it's hard for them to exert pressure to end this practice.

Now, in theory, the referees, peer reviewers, editorial boards and advisors for each journal could lay down the law on this stuff and ban links -- but they're also all volunteers who are not paid a dime by Elsevier.

The reality is that scholarly publishing corporations contribute virtually nothing to scholarship (that's a peer-reviewed, empirical finding -- not a statement of opinion). Indeed, they are so lax and inattentive, with so much of their efforts focused on rent-seeking, that they don't even notice when they themselves violate their own signature policies.

Of course, expecting Elsevier to recognize how hypocritical it's being is a fool's errand as well. Elsevier is not in the business of actually understanding how academics work. It's in the business of squeezing as much cash as possible from universities.

Filed Under: copyright, research, science
Companies: elsevier, sci-hub

Why Carl Malamud's Latest Brilliant Project, To Mine The World's Research Papers, Is Based In India

from the sci-hub-to-the-rescue-again dept

Carl Malamud is one of Techdirt's heroes. We've been writing about his campaign to liberate US government documents and information for over ten years now. The journal Nature has a report on a new project of his, which is in quite a different field: academic knowledge. The idea will be familiar to readers of this site: to carry out text and data mining (TDM) on millions of academic articles, in order to discover new knowledge. It's a proven technique with huge potential to produce important discoveries. That raises the obvious question: if large-scale TDM of academic papers is so powerful, why hasn't it been done before? The answer, as is so often the case, is that copyright gets in the way. Academic publishers use it to control and impede how researchers can help humanity:

[Malamud's] unprecedented project is generating much excitement because it could, for the first time, open up vast swathes of the paywalled literature for easy computerized analysis. Dozens of research groups already mine papers to build databases of genes and chemicals, map associations between proteins and diseases, and generate useful scientific hypotheses. But publishers control -- and often limit -- the speed and scope of such projects, which typically confine themselves to abstracts, not full text.

Malamud's project gets around the limitations imposed by copyright and publishers thanks to two unique features. First, Malamud "had come into possession (he won't say how) of eight hard drives containing millions of journal articles from Sci-Hub". Drawing on Sci-Hub's huge holdings means his project doesn't need to go begging to publishers in order to obtain full texts to be mined. Secondly, Malamud is basing his project in India:

Over the past year, Malamud has -- without asking publishers -- teamed up with Indian researchers to build a gigantic store of text and images extracted from 73 million journal articles dating from 1847 up to the present day. The cache, which is still being created, will be kept on a 576-terabyte storage facility at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi.

India was chosen because of an important court battle that concluded two years ago. As Techdirt reported then, it is legal in India to make photocopies of copyright material in an educational context. Malamud's contention is that this allows him to mine academic material in India without the permission of publishers. But he also believes that his TDM project would be legal in the US:

The data mining, he says, is non-consumptive: a technical term meaning that researchers don't read or display large portions of the works they are analysing. "You cannot punch in a DOI [article identifier] and pull out the article," he says. Malamud argues that it is legally permissible to do such mining on copyrighted content in countries such as the United States. In 2015, for instance, a US court cleared Google Books of copyright infringement charges after it did something similar to the JNU depot: scanning thousands of copyrighted books without buying the rights to do so, and displaying snippets from these books as part of its search service, but not allowing them to be downloaded or read in their entirety by a human.

The fact that TDM is "non-consumptive" means that the unhelpful attitude of academic publishers is even more unjustified than usual. They lose nothing from the analytical process, which is merely extracting knowledge. But from a sense of entitlement publishers still demand to be paid for unrestricted computer access to texts that have already been licensed by academic institutions anyway. That selfish and obstructive attitude to TDM may be about to backfire spectacularly. The Nature article notes:

No one will be allowed to read or download work from the repository, because that would breach publishers' copyright. Instead, Malamud envisages, researchers could crawl over its text and data with computer software, scanning through the world's scientific literature to pull out insights without actually reading the text.

The thing is, if anyone were by any chance interested in reading the full text, there's an obvious place to turn to. After all, the mining is carried out using papers held by Sci-Hub, so…

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: academic papers, carl malamud, copyright, india, journals, research, science, tdm, text and data mining
Companies: sci-hub

The Impossibility Of Content Moderation: YouTube's New Ban On Nazis Hits Reporter Who Documents Extremism, Professor Teaching About Hitler

from the so-that's-all-working-well dept

So just as the recent big content moderation mess was happening on YouTube, the company announced that it had changed its policies to better deal with violent extremism and supremacism on the platform:

Today, we're taking another step in our hate speech policy by specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status. This would include, for example, videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory. Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.

The timing of this announcement was seen as curious (or, at the very least, poorly timed) as it came basically hours after they had refused to take down Steven Crowder's account (see the earlier post linked above), even though that wasn't an identical situation -- though analogous enough that tons of people commented on it.

In making the announcement, YouTube correctly noted that this new bit of line drawing could represent some problems, including among those tracking hate and extremism:

We recognize some of this content has value to researchers and NGOs looking to understand hate in order to combat it, and we are exploring options to make it available to them in the future. And as always, context matters, so some videos could remain up because they discuss topics like pending legislation, aim to condemn or expose hate, or provide analysis of current events. We will begin enforcing this updated policy today; however, it will take time for our systems to fully ramp up and we’ll be gradually expanding coverage over the next several months.

But within hours of the new policy rolling out, we were already seeing how difficult it is to implement without taking down content that probably deserves to remain up. Ford Fischer, a reporter who tracks extremist and hate groups, and whose work is regularly cited, noted that his own channel had been demonetized.

Fischer than discusses the specific videos that YouTube says is the reason for this -- and it does include holocaust denialism, but for the sake of documenting it, not promoting it:

And this gets, once again, to the very problem of expecting platforms to police this kind of speech. The exact same content can mean very different things in different contexts. In some cases, it may be used to promote odious ideology. In other cases, it's used to document and expose that ideology and the ignorance and problems associated with it.

But how do you craft a policy that can determine one from the other? As YouTube is discovering (truth is, they probably already knew this), the answer is that you don't. Any policy ends up creating some sort of collateral damage, and the demands from well meaning people mean that the direction this tends to go in leads to greater and greater takedowns. But, if in the process of doing this we end up sweeping the documentation under the rug, that's a problem as well.

Here's another example: right after YouTube's new policy was put in place, a history teacher found that his own YouTube channel was banned. Why? Because he hosted archival footage of Hitler:

“My stomach fell,” Allsop told BuzzFeed News via email. “I’m a history teacher, not someone who promotes hatred. I share archive footage and study materials to help students learn about the past.”

Once again, it often sounds easy to say something like "well, let's ban the Nazis." I'd even argue it's a reasonable goal for a platform to have a blanket "no Nazis" policy. But the reality is that the implementation is not nearly as easy as many people believe. And the end result can be that archival and documentary footage gets blocked. And that could have serious long term consequences if part of our goal is to educate people about why Nazis are bad.

Of course, none of this should come as a surprise to anyone who's been dealing with these issues over the past couple of decades. Early attempts to ban "porn" also took down information on breast cancer. Attempts to block "terrorist content" have repeatedly taken down people documenting war crimes. This kind of thing happens over and over and over again and believing that this time will magically be different is a fool's errand.

Filed Under: content moderation, content moderation at scale, documenting, learning, nazis, policing speech, reporting, research
Companies: youtube

Study: The 'War On Cops' Is Pure Bullshit

from the it-keeps-the-money-rolling-in-though dept

The "War on Cops" is a belief system that's currently being preached to the converted. Evidence abounds that it's safer to be a cop now than it's ever been, and yet, officers still claim they're being targeted and use these unfounded fears to obtain military equipment and qualified immunity rulings.

We've covered how safe police work is here before. But the narrative coming from the law enforcement community refuses to change, despite evidence to the contrary. Research is piling up, exposing law enforcement agencies' claims of cops being targeted by a vengeful populace as a self-serving lie. At best, these claims are merely wrong. But given the easy access to law enforcement officer death data, a refusal to see the stats for what they are is incredibly disingenuous at best.

Adding yet more documentation to the pile is a study released by researchers from three American universities. The study [PDF] shows policing just keeps getting safer.

The number of line-of-duty deaths has declined dramatically over the last five decades. Policing is a much safer profession now than it was 50 years ago. Despite a 75% drop in deaths, however, there has been remarkable stability in geographic-, temporal-, and incident-level characteristics. Also, several notable changes over time reflect favorably on improved safety in policing, such as declines in deaths resulting from aircraft crashes and accidental gunfire. Other trends are troubling, though, such as the stability in deaths during auto pursuits and a two-fold increase in deaths from vehicular assaults. Currently, the “war on cops” thesis is not supported by any evidence, and we apply the 50-year lens in this study to provide important context for understanding recent trends in officer deaths.

The number of deaths continues to drop despite a few high-profile incidents in which cops were targeted and killed. What's interesting is officers' lack of concern for their own safety, as is evidenced by the numbers of deaths related to vehicle pursuits.

Interestingly, deaths occurring during automobile pursuits remained stable over time (5% to 6%) despite policy changes adopted by departments to restrict and control pursuits (Alpert, 1997).

In addition, significant shifts in cause of death occurred among nonfelonious cases. The most common cause was automobile/motorcycle accidents, and the proportion increased significantly over time from 37.9% in 1970–1979 to 52.0% in 2000–2016.

There's nothing "interesting" about this. Departments have regularly enacted policies meant to curb the use of high-speed pursuits to capture criminal suspects. Just as regularly, officers have ignored these policies. There is also an observed tendency for officers to drive aggressively when responding to calls, increasing the chance of accidents, injuries, and death.

Aggressive action by officers -- not just in terms of driving, but also in terms of interactions with the public -- appears to be greeted in kind.

Researchers have also documented an association between aggressive patrol style and greater rates of assault (Kaminski et al., 2003; Morrison & Meyer, 1974; Regens et al., 1974; but see Wilson & Zhao, 2008). Fridell et al. (2009: 550) concluded that “agencies that have a culture of aggressiveness will likely ‘produce,’ not just more force against subjects, but also violence against police.”

Escalation remains a problem. De-escalation could save lives, as could simply treating the suspects like human beings, rather than punching bags or bullet receptacles. Aggressive tactics are making cops less safe in an era of unprecedented officer safety.

Another unsurprising finding is that the so-called "Ferguson effect" is pure bullshit.

A handful of scholars has sought to test elements of a “Ferguson Effect” directly, particularly as it relates to crime rates and depolicing. In regard to allegations of a “war on cops,” Maguire and colleagues (2017) found no evidence that the events in Ferguson (and after) led to an increase in felonious killings of police officers. By focusing on a time period spanning January 2010 through March 2016 and by using an intervention of August 2014, they found that anti-police rhetoric was not associated with a rise in the number of police officers murdered across multiple interrupted time-series estimation techniques. The analyses and their findings were robust, indicating no evidence of either an abrupt or gradual increase in felonious homicides post–Ferguson.

How can law enforcement officials who still push this rhetoric explain their refusal to accept the facts? It's not as though researchers are juking a proprietary data set to come to these conclusions. The data set used in this case comes directly from law enforcement reporting, collected by a pro-law enforcement entity: the Officer Down Memorial Page, run by a nonprofit that says it's "dedicated to honoring America's fallen law enforcement heroes."

If anyone's still pushing a "War on Cops" narrative in the face of these facts, they've got something to sell. The public isn't buying it, but that hardly matters when there's a captive audience just dying to hear how unappreciated they are even as they march fearlessly into the face of certain death mild antagonism.

Filed Under: evidence, police, research, war on cops