DHS, ICE Begin Body Camera Pilot Program With Surprisingly Good Policies In Place

from the exceeding-admittedly-low-expectations dept

Following protests over killings by law enforcement officers, the Department of Justice decided it might be a good idea to equip more police officers with body cameras. In May 2015, it announced the federal government would be spending $75 million over the next three years to purchase body cameras for local law enforcement agencies.

The DOJ saw the potential for body cameras to produce more accountability, lower the chances of deadly interactions, and rebuild some trust with the communities officers served. That's presumably why it opted out of this push for body camera adoption. Five months after it announced the body cam grant program, DOJ reps told local law enforcement that use of body cameras wasn't allowed when partnering with federal law enforcement. Either the cameras stayed home or the local cops did. No exceptions.

It wasn't until five years later that the DOJ finally decided it was ok for federal agents to work with local law enforcement officers sporting body cameras, perhaps realizing the cameras simply weren't going to go away. After all, it had encouraged adoption of the tech with three years of federal funding. But this still meant federal officers were going about their work unobserved, which still seemed problematic given all the advantages the DOJ said these cameras created when it started handing out federal cash in 2015.

It took another year before the DOJ finally decided federal officers should get with the body camera program. Six years after it invested in nationwide distribution of body cameras, federal officers are finally going to start wearing them. The ATF was the first to perform a test run of the cameras. Now, the DHS is following suit.

Agents with an investigative unit of the Department of Homeland Security will wear body cameras for the first time as part of a six-month pilot program that will focus on the costs and benefits of using the technology in federal law enforcement, officials said Tuesday.

The cameras will be used during the test by 55 members of the SWAT-like special response teams at Homeland Security Investigations in Houston, Newark, New Jersey, and New York, an official told reporters.

That's the first wave of adoption for the DHS, albeit not one that guarantees permanent adoption. The second wave will rope in one of the federal government's most controversial agencies.

The senior ICE official, who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity to provide details on the program before the announcement, said the agency expects later to expand the pilot to include officers who conduct immigration enforcement arrests.

Fortunately, this rollout is accompanied by something that often goes missing when the federal government deploys new tech: privacy impact assessments and written policies. In this case, there's both. The DHS has issued a Privacy Impact Assessment [PDF] that contains the guidelines for camera use by officers. This one directly addresses the ICE pilot program.

The rules laid down are actually pretty solid, which is somewhat surprising given the federal government's reluctance to adopt the tech and ICE's roguelike reputation.

ICE personnel must record Pilot enforcement activities at the start of the activity, or, if not practicable, as soon as safely possible thereafter. Once a Body Worn Camera is activated, ICE personnel should only deactivate the Body Worn Camera when their participation or involvement in the enforcement activity has concluded. If ICE personnel fail to activate their Body Worn Camera, or if the recording is interrupted, they must provide a statement detailing the reason why they failed to activate the Body Worn Camera or why the recording was interrupted.

ICE personnel will verbally notify (i.e., provide notice to) individuals that they are being recorded if (or as soon as) it is operationally feasible. This notice should not be construed as a requirement for ICE to obtain consent from the subjects being recorded. The Body Worn Camera will be placed on a visible location on ICE personnel’s outerwear (e.g., on vest or helmet) so that individuals can see the Body Worn Camera.

ICE personnel are prohibited from intentionally making Body Worn Camera recordings in places or areas where cameras generally are not allowed or permissible (e.g., locker rooms, dressing rooms, medical facilities, restrooms, in facilities where recording is prohibited) unless related to an enforcement activity.

ICE personnel should not record encounters with undercover officers, confidential informants, and cooperating defendants.

ICE personnel should not record in a manner that would infringe on activity protected by the First Amendment (e.g., lawful protests).

Body Worn Cameras will not be used during undercover operations or in situations in which it would pose a risk to officer or public safety.

Body Worn Camera recordings will not be used for any facial recognition activities.

All recordings collected during this pilot period will be saved. Anything of evidentiary value will be sorted out. Recordings can (at least theoretically) be obtained with FOIA requests.

Of some concern is the directive forbidding the recording of First Amendment activities. On one hand, you don't want federal agents to engage in surveillance of protected activities. On the other hand, you don't want any interactions between federal officers and protesters to go unrecorded. So, this will have to be refined. It would seem that the rule ordering the recording of all "enforcement activities" would supersede the rule forbidding the recording of First Amendment activities when officers interact with protesters. But it will probably be months or years before the public knows how ICE officers have chosen to interpret these rules.

Still, it's a good set of ground rules. And it gets a little better. ICE officers are expected to record any questioning of individuals (whether in custody or not), as well as any brief detentions or frisks of individuals they encounter. It's also mandatory for all warrant service and searches incident to an arrest.

Better late than never. And a far better set of rules than was expected, given both the federal government's resistance to early adoption and ICE's general unwillingness to welcome examination of its enforcement efforts. Hopefully, the rollout will continue with similar rules in place for other federal agencies. While body cameras aren't a panacea for law enforcement misconduct, they're far better than having nothing but an officer's word for what went down.

Filed Under: accountability, body cameras, dhs, ice, transparency

Senate Inches Closer To Providing Free Access To PACER

from the years-late-but-better-than-never dept

Might a free PACER finally be on the horizon? For years, activists and a handful of Congressional reps have attempted to strip the fees from PACER, the federal court system's antiquated database that provides online access to court documents.

The antiquation doesn't begin with the fees. The system is outdated and hasn't improved much over the years, despite the fact that PACER regularly turns a profit. PACER looks and performs like a holdover from the 1990s. The UI is its own barrier to entry. The search function barely functions, vacillating between drawing a blank or producing several pages of irrelevant search results.

And that's where the fees kick in. PACER operates like a library copy machine, charging users $0.10/page for everything. Search results and dockets are treated like they're being printed out at the central PACER desk. Useless search results are $0.10/page. So are dockets, which may or may not contain the documents. These fees add up before users even locate the documents they're looking for. Those documents are also $0.10/page to download in PDF form, putting price on ones, zeroes, and the fractions of cents needed to generate, store, and transmit the documents.

The US Courts System has blown PACER profit on in-court niceties like new TV screens and furniture. Almost none of the millions PACER generates has gone towards improving PACER itself or lowering access fees. The federal court system has argued it will cost billions to overhaul PACER and provide free access to users.

But according to the Congressional Budget Office investigation and former government technologists, the actual outlay for an improved, free PACER is much less. The CBO says free access would only cost about $1 million a year. Technologists estimate the overhaul would only cost $10-20 million and require less than $5 million a year to maintain.

These facts helped push a bill mandating free access to PACER through Congress late last year. But that's only half the battle. And it's the far easier half of the battle. The Senate still needs to create and pass its own version, meld that with the House of Representatives offering, and drop a cohesive bill on the President's desk.

Well, we're one step closer to that happening, as Nate Raymond reports for Reuters.

A U.S. Senate panel on Thursday advanced a bipartisan bill that would overhaul the federal judiciary's PACER electronic court record system and make the downloading of filings free for the public through the elimination of costly fees.

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send the Open Courts Act of 2021 to the full Senate for its consideration after adopting an amendment that provided for additional funding and addressed the judiciary's concerns on technical issues.

The panel approved the measure on voice vote without any recorded opposition, and in a sign of the bill's support, nearly all of the committee members elected to co-sponsor the legislation by the end of the hearing.

The Administrative Office of the US Courts is still pretending this is far too expensive to accomplish. According to its statement to the Senate, it remains committed to modernizing PACER (which clearly isn't true) and thinks it will run out of money if people who've already paid once for the creation and storage of these documents aren't forced to pay again for access to them.

The Senate bill [PDF] would force the court system to do the thing it pretends it's been doing for years: overhaul the outdated PACER system. To help pay for these initial costs, high-volume users (those accessing more than $25,000 in dockets and documents quarterly) would still be charged PACER fees. For everyone else, it would be free.

The bill is still a few steps away from passing but free access to PACER is closer than it's been in years. And there's really no reason the government needs to continue charging taxpayers for access to documents they've already paid for. One wonders why the federal courts are so resistant to this change, considering the only thing at stake here is other people's money. Free access will still be taxpayer-funded. All this means is the court system won't have as large a slush fund to spend on office furniture and TVs -- items that do nothing to improve public access to court documents, which was the point of PACER all along.

Filed Under: congress, courts, fees, pacer, transparency

YouTube Copyright Transparency Report Shows The Absurd Volume Of Copyright Claims It Gets

from the turn-the-hose-off dept

Any cursory look at Techdirt for stories involving YouTube and copyright issues will give you a very accurate impression of the state of all things copyright for the platform: it's a complete shitshow. You will see all kinds of craziness in those posts: white noise getting hit with a copyright claim, labels claiming copyright on songs in the public domain, and all kinds of issues with automated systems like ContentID causing chaos. That really is a sample platter rather than the whole meal, but it's also worth noting that YouTube knows this is a problem.

To that point, the platform recently put out its first "Copyright Transparency Report" that teases out all kinds of numbers for copyright claims on YouTube videos. As with any statistical report, how you view it is going to come down to how you want to slice and dice the numbers. For instance, it's worth noting that over 99% of the copyright claims YouTube receives comes from ContentID, an automated system. More to the point of this particular post, you will likely also witness copyright enforcement advocates focus on numbers like this from YouTube's own report.

As the report notes, we see low levels of disputes relative to total claims, particularly within tools that use automatic detection. In the first half of 2021, fewer than 1% of all Content ID claims were disputed.

Sounds great, right? Even with some couched language, this looks for all the world like even YouTube is acknowledging that a tiny fraction of the copyright claims are disputed and is therefore a system that is working well. You might even decide to assume that this translates to 99% of copyright claims made at YouTube are accurate and valid.

Except that that is absurd. Vast numbers of people either lack the time, interest, or bravery to dispute a copyright claim like this. Many others may not even realize it's something for which there is a process to take action on such disputes.

And besides all of that, when you dig into the actual raw numbers rather than percentages, it becomes very clear that YouTube does indeed have a copyright enforcement problem.

Over 2.2 million YouTube videos were hit with copyright claims that were later overturned between January and June of this year, according to a new report published by the company today. The Copyright Transparency Report is the first of its kind published by YouTube, which says it will update biannually going forward.

2.2 million claims were overturned in favor of the uploader in a six month period. Let that wash over you for a second and then realize that, while this represents a tiny percentage of the overall claims, it's still a huge number. And when you factor into all of this both that there is zero chance that the actual numbers of invalid copyright claims aren't much higher and the fact that YouTube creators have long complained that this is a massive problem from a process standpoint, well, it again becomes obvious that YouTube has a copyright enforcement problem.

Though mistaken copyright claims are a drop in the bucket on a larger scale, YouTube creators have long complained about how the platform handles claims, saying overly aggressive or unjustified enforcement can lead to lost income. Copyright claims can result in videos being blocked, audio being muted, or ad revenue going back to the rights owner. This new report gives shape to a problem that YouTube itself has acknowledged needs updating.

In 2019, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in a blog post that the company heard the concerns from creators and that YouTube was “exploring improvements in striking the right balance between copyright owners and creators.”

We most certainly haven't reached that balancing point yet. I anticipate that YouTube is releasing this transparency report as part of a broader and longer term plan to alleviate the problems this is all causing. If not, then all YouTube appears to be doing is telling on itself with this report, which is not the kind of corporate action I would expect.

Meanwhile, thanks to overly restrictive copyright enforcement, YouTube's valuable creator base is left waiting for help.

Filed Under: contentid, copyright, dmca, false claims, overblocking, takedowns, transparency
Companies: google, youtube

Washington Post Forgets It Fought (And Won) Legal Battle Against Mandatory Transparency; Now Demands Internet Co's Face The Same

from the psst,-editorial-board,-speak-to-your-lawyers dept

A few years ago the Washington Post (and a bunch of other newspapers) fought and won a fairly important 1st Amendment lawsuit to strike down as unconstitutional a Maryland law that required news organizations to publicly post information about the political ads they chose to carry. The district court and then the appeals court found that the law was pretty clearly unconstitutional:

As the district court noted in a lengthy and thoughtful opinion, Washington Post, 355 F. Supp.3d at 272-306, the Act is a content-based law that targets political speech and compels newspapers, among other platforms, to carry certain messages on their websites. In other words, Maryland's law is a compendium of traditional First Amendment infirmities.

Specifically, the court found that the compelled speech aspect of the law was particularly problematic:

Taken together, the Act's publication and inspection requirements ultimately present compelled speech problems twice over. For one, they force elements of civil society to speak when they otherwise would have refrained. Time and again, the Supreme Court has made clear that it makes little difference for First Amendment 515*515 purposes whether the government acts as censor or conductor. Indeed, the "freedom of speech `includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.'" Janus v. Am. Fed'n of State, Cty. & Mun. Emps. Council 31, ___ U.S. ___, 138 S. Ct. 2448, 2463, 201 L.Ed.2d 924 (2018) (quoting Wooley v. Maynard, 430 U.S. 705, 714, 97 S.Ct. 1428, 51 L.Ed.2d 752 (1977) (internal quotation omitted)). It is the presence of compulsion from the state itself that compromises the First Amendment. The Amendment extends "not only to expressions of value, opinion, or endorsement, but equally to statements of fact the speaker would rather avoid." Hurley v. Irish-Am. Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Grp. of Boston, 515 U.S. 557, 573, 115 S.Ct. 2338, 132 L.Ed.2d 487 (1995).

What's more, the fact that the Act compels third parties to disclose certain identifying information regarding political speakers implicates protections for anonymous speech. Requiring the press itself to disclose the identity or characteristics of political speakers is a problematic step. See Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, 709, 92 S.Ct. 2646, 33 L.Ed.2d 626 (Powell, J., concurring) (noting that newsmen faced with a grand jury subpoena are not "without constitutional rights with respect to the gathering of news or in safeguarding their sources"); id. at 725, 92 S.Ct. 2646 (Stewart, J., dissenting) (requiring the press to disclose its sources risks "annex[ing] the journalistic profession as an investigative arm of government"). This country, moreover, has "a respected tradition of anonymity in the advocacy of political causes." McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n, 514 U.S. 334, 343, 115 S.Ct. 1511, 131 L.Ed.2d 426 (1995). Much as our forebears elected to hash out the architecture of this nation under the pseudonyms of "Publius" and "Agrippa," many political advocates today also opt for anonymity in hopes their arguments will be debated on their merits rather than their makers. See id. at 343, 343 n.6, 115 S.Ct. 1511. To be sure, this tradition of anonymity is anything but absolute. But revelations of executive misconduct throughout our history have often been anonymously sourced. And when the government enlists the press to disclose the sources of political speech, thus potentially exposing those speakers to identification and harassment, First Amendment protections and values come into play. See Pac. Gas & Elec. Co. v. Pub. Utils. Comm'n of Cal., 475 U.S. 1, 14-15, 106 S.Ct. 903, 89 L.Ed.2d 1 (1986) (plurality opinion).

Apparently, the editorial board of the Washington Post is wholly unfamiliar with this lawsuit and the fact that its own publication won this lawsuit just two years ago. Because in a new opinion piece, the Editorial Board of the Washington Post calls for nearly identical requirements for internet companies. Really.

Specifically, the Washington Post endorses the extremely problematic recommendations from the Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder:

The report starts, as any study aimed at restoring trust and truth ought to, by acknowledging reality: “In a free society, a certain amount of misinformation will always exist.” The hope isn’t to punish every exaggeration, piece of propaganda or flat-out lie but to home in on the most egregious damage caused by specific types of mis- and disinformation — by discouraging people from spreading falsehoods and minimizing the fallout when they do. This is easiest in “empirically grounded” areas, in which facts can most clearly be found: public health and election integrity foremost among them.

How do we do it? Some steps are obvious, such as mandating more transparency from technology companies. Platforms should be required, for instance, to publish data about the content, source, targeting and reach of posts seen by large audiences, as well as produce standardized archives of the material they remove or otherwise moderate.

That "obvious" step is exactly what the Washington Post fought in court against and won just two years ago. And, it should be noted that in fighting that Maryland law, the Washington Post trotted out Section 230 as a reason that the law should be pre-empted, but the court went past that and didn't even bother with the 230 issues, noting that the 1st Amendment was the issue, and it didn't even need to bother with Section 230.

In some ways, this isn't surprising. For reasons I don't fully understand, newspapers seem to have a weird blindspot for the very laws and constitutional rights that protect themselves when there are attacks on those rights on internet companies. The more conspiratorial will insist that this is because news organizations are jealous of the success of internet companies -- with whom they often compete for ad dollars. But I think it's likely to be somewhat more fundamental than that. Institutionally, too many news organizations take such a dismissive view of the internet and the communities created on it, and look at themselves as the "defenders of truth" (hell, the Washington Post's own bizarre slogan, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" is trumpeted on every damn page). To them, the internet and social media are riff raff -- enabling the people who are too stupid for their own good to wallow in disinformation.

And, thus, the only answer must be to mandate these kinds of rules that could and should never apply to the pure giant news orgs. It's disappointing and hypocritical, but hardly surprising.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, compelled speech, disinformation, editorial independence, section 230, transparency
Companies: aspen institute, washington post

Lots Of Big Media Companies Had Access To The Facebook Files; Only Gizmodo Decided To Put In The Work To Make Them Public

from the good-for-them dept

Over the last month or so, you've probably heard a lot about the Facebook Files or the Facebook Papers, which are the documents shared by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen with the media, starting with the Wall Street Journal, and then a rather reluctant "consortium" of seventeen big name US-based news organizations. The reluctance was apparent in the name of the Slack group created for all of the reporters working on the project: "Apparently We're A Consortium Now."

While I've been skeptical of some of the framing of the reporting on the papers, I still do generally believe it was a good thing to get this research out to the world -- even if I have little confidence that the media could ever do a good job conveying the story.

As news of the consortium broke, many people called out the fact that all of these big journalism organizations weren't actually releasing the documents they were going through themselves, often only describing them or quoting parts of them. Given that in a few cases where we've been able to see the full documents, it has appeared that some of the reporting was misleading or confused, this was a concern. And, of course, there were other concerns about the makeup of the consortium, and the fact that it was entirely based in the US.

That doesn't mean that it made sense to freely release all the documents to the public. There are plenty of reasonable concerns about privacy when you have a giant cache of internal documents. That's why it's a good thing to find out that Gizmodo has now taken on the task of making the Facebook Papers public, and doing so in partnership with a bunch of independent experts who will help Gizmodo's reporters sift through the documents and make sure that they're okay to be released:

Today, we see a strong public need can be served by making as many of the documents public as possible, as quickly as possible. To that end, we’ve partnered with a small group of independent monitors who are joining us to guide our work in preparing the papers for public release. The mission is to minimize any costs to individuals’ privacy or the furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest.

As Gizmodo notes, there are many reasons to carefully review the documents before releasing them:

More than for privacy, the documents require extra review to ensure we aren’t just handing groups of criminals and spies a roadmap to undermining the controls Facebook does have in place to detect propaganda aimed at spreading lies, hate, and fear. That would undermine any benefit the world stands to reap from this act of whistleblower justice.

The work is just beginning but we’re eager to start releasing documents as as possible. The first batch will likely consist of documents that warrant the least amount of redactions, just to get the ball rolling.

This is all good news. But it's a bit crazy that it's Gizmodo doing all this work. Gizmodo wasn't even a member of the original consortium and only joined after the first batch of stories went out. Also, Gizmodo is way smaller and with way fewer resources than many of the other members of the consortium, which includes the flush NY Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN, the Associated Press, Politico, Wired and more.

The fact that it took a month for any of the members, let alone one of the smaller ones, to actually decide to put together the effort to release the papers is a damning statement on how many members of the consortium see their role in the media to be a gatekeeper to information, rather than providing the public access to information.

Filed Under: facebook files, facebook papers, reporting, transparency
Companies: facebook, gizmodo

NYPD Continues To Screw Over Its Oversight By Denying Access To Bodycam Footage

from the long-extended-middle-finger-of-the-law dept

The NYPD's war on its oversight continues. The secretive law enforcement agency has spent years fighting accountability and transparency, making up its own rules and engaging in openly hostile actions against public records requesters, city officials, internal oversight, and the somewhat-independent CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board). Journalists say the NYPD is worse than the CIA and FBI when it comes to records requests. The FBI and CIA say it's worse than a rogue state when it comes to respecting rights.

The NYPD probably doesn't wonder why it houses bad cops. In fact, it probably doesn't not even consider the worst of its ranks to actually be "bad" cops. Making things worse on the accountability side, the NYPD answers to two very powerful law enforcement unions, which makes it all but impossible for the department to punish bad cops, even if it wanted to. And while it's subject to public oversight via the CCRB, it has the power to override the board's decisions to ensure cops engaged in misconduct aren't punished too harshly for violating rights and destroying the public's trust.

The NYPD began wearing body cameras in 2017 as part of comprehensive reforms put in place by consent decrees issued by federal courts presiding over civil rights lawsuits over the NYPD's surveillance of Muslims and its minority-targeting "stop and frisk" program.

But body cameras continue to be mostly useful to prosecutors and of negligible value to the general public that was supposed to benefit from this new accountability tool. As ProPublica reports, even the civilian oversight board can't get the NYPD to hand over footage crucial to investigations of misconduct.

In some instances, the NYPD has told CCRB investigators no footage of an incident exists, only for the CCRB to later learn that it does. For example, during one investigation of an incident for which the NYPD said there was no footage, an officer later told investigators that she had her camera on.

Other times, the NYPD has acknowledged footage exists but refused to turn it over, citing privacy issues. In one case, an officer slammed a young man into the pavement, sending him to the hospital with a brain bleed. Seven body cameras worn by officers captured parts of the incident. But the NYPD withheld almost all the footage from CCRB investigators, on the grounds that a minor’s face could be seen in some of it.

This stonewalling is detailed in the NYPD Inspector General's latest report [PDF], which finds yet again that the NYPD has zero interest in holding its officers accountable. The NYPD is supposed to be subject to its oversight, but the reality is the oversight is subject to the NYPD.

The agency must rely on NYPD to produce BWC footage that is responsive to a request, making the progress of investigations dependent on NYPD’s capacity and discretion. As mentioned above, and discussed further below, capacity and manpower issues at NYPD have caused extensive delay in the past, and easily could again. But the problems are also substantive. For example, an NYPD searcher may consider certain tags to be not relevant or responsive even if the requesting CCRB investigator would have disagreed. This is problematic since only the investigator has complete knowledge of the investigation, and therefore is best suited to know what may be relevant. In such a case, not only might relevant BWC footage be withheld, but the CCRB investigator would never even know that such footage existed in the first place.

Even when the CCRB obtains footage, it could be redacted into abstraction by NYPD liaisons, who everyone has to assume are acting in good faith, even when it appears apparent they aren't.

When only NYPD has seen the unredacted footage, the redaction analysis, legal or otherwise, is impaired because NYPD has sole discretion regarding handling of the footage, but incomplete information as to the facts of the investigation and its procedural posture. This is especially problematic when the grounds asserted by NYPD for redaction are disputed or otherwise in doubt. Given the information disparities, the requesting investigative agency may find it difficult to effectively challenge the redactions, which can produce inaccurate or unnecessary redactions, cause additional delay, or force the requesting agency to make disclosures that may infringe on the independence or confidentiality of its investigations.

And, instead of things improving as time goes on, the NYPD's cooperation with its oversight appears to be getting worse.

CCRB reported that in the second quarter of 2019, 99 percent of BWC video requests remained open for 20 or more business days, or longer than one month. From the beginning of 2018 through the second Quarter of 2019, the percentage of footage returned redacted grew from six to 63 percent. CCRB also reports that there were occasions in which it was not notified that video had been redacted, nor was it provided an explanation for such redactions.

Since the NYPD retains control of all body worn camera footage, it can claim no relevant footage exists, even when it does. And there's no way for the CCRB to challenge this claim unless it comes up with evidence elsewhere that points to the existence of footage the NYPD claims is nonexistent.

Moreover, current (pre-MOU-implementation) procedures have resulted in a number of “false negative” returns. False negatives are defined as instances in which NYPD reports there is no relevant footage for a particular search, yet CCRB later learns that a pertinent video does exist. CCRB reports learning about false negatives through other police documents, during interviews, or via footage provided to the media, and attributes these false negatives in part to potential incompleteness of NYPD search criteria, incomplete tagging of videos in the system, as well as lack of geotagging of footage. Due to the inability to conduct its own searches, CCRB cannot be certain how many negative search results are accurate.

The solution is -- as the IG suggests -- that CCRB be given direct access to body camera footage. Quite obviously, the NYPD will never agree to this. And, since it runs its footage through Evidence.com -- Axon's proprietary portal -- the NYPD will be able to stonewall future requests by pointing to the fine print in Axon's contract or simply refusing to provide CCRB with access licenses.

Unless the city is willing to give the CCRB some teeth, it will continue to be nothing more than the illusion of oversight. The NYPD has to answer to the public, and it has shown it's unwilling to do that on any level. New York legislators need to be willing to stare down the blue-uniformed 800-lb gorilla in its midst. If it can't, the NYPD will continue to be as awful as it has been for decades.

Filed Under: bodycams, nypd, oversight, transparency

Report: US ISPs Aren't Transparent About Prices And Speeds, And Regulators Generally Don't Care

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

By now we've well established that regional monopolization, limited competition, and the (state and federal) corruption that enables both (aka regulatory capture) are why US broadband is spotty, expensive, and slow. With neither competent regulatory oversight nor meaningful competition to drive improvements, regional dominant broadband providers simply... don't bother. The end result goes beyond high prices to substandard customer service, privacy violations, net neutrality violations, and unnecessary surcharges, usage caps, and fees they often don't clearly disclose.

A recent report from the Institute For Local Self Reliance took a look at how transparent U.S. ISPs are about broadband prices, line restrictions, and hidden surcharges. And the results are about what you'd expect. As in, most U.S. ISPs do a fairly terrible job (quite intentionally) of making it clear how much you'll pay for broadband, what your upstream and downstream speeds are, and whether there's any hidden restrictions or fees you'll face once you sign up.

Why? For one, big ISPs don't like making it easy to do direct price comparisons, lest people clearly understand the real impact of limited competition and regional market failure. They also routinely engage in false advertising where they advertise one lower price, then hit you with a bunch of bullshit fees. Big ISPs also tend to hide anything that doesn't make them look good or could showcase their network underinvestment, such as pathetic upload speeds:

This is, the report notes, much less of a problem with local community broadband networks. Previous studies out of Harvard had noted community broadband generally offers lower, more transparent prices than large ISPs, and that's showcased again here:

Again, this isn't just a failure of competition, but a failure of regulatory oversight and telecom policy. The FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules included a provision requiring that ISPs be transparent about pricing and line restrictions. And while the net neutrality aspect of their 2015 order was repealed by the Trump FCC, the transparency component was not. Still, despite the transparency rule having now existed for six years under two different political parties, the report notes how nobody at the FCC has bothered to enforce it:

"The Transparency Rule, however, is largely unenforced. It is commonly accepted that without effective government regulation or competitive market pressure, ISPs are in a position to abuse their power. The Internet access industry is governed neither by regulation nor market pressure in most communities. Because providers don’t have to answer to regulation or worry about their customers switching providers if they offer less than satisfactory service, providers are rarely held accountable for information that is missing or hard to find. Were providers held accountable for making accessible disclosures, customers could less easily be exploited.

The broadband component of the recently-passed infrastructure bill added some additional language requiring that ISPs provide a sort of "nutrition label" for their connections clearly disclosing all restrictions and sneaky fees. But again, rules are only useful if they're enforced, and the FCC historically under both parties... just hasn't bothered doing so. Big ISPs like AT&T aren't just politically powerful campaign contributors, they're effectively tethered to law enforcement and intelligence systems, reducing any incentive to hold them accountable for pretty much anything of note.

Filed Under: competition, false advertising, fcc, prices, speeds, transparency

Transparency Activists Dump 1.8 Terabytes Of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage

from the you've-let-us-down,-Dr.-Whirlington-Spinblade dept

Let's just get right into this and let Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) harvest some accolades and encouragement to continue to deploy its particular brand of intrusive transparency on historically secretive entities.

The transparency activist group Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, posted a 1.8-terabyte trove of police helicopter footage to its website on Friday. DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that her group doesn’t know the identity of the source who shared the data and that no affiliation or motivation for leaking the files was given. The source simply said that the two police departments were storing the data in unsecured cloud infrastructure.

The lesson here (one of many) is that if you can't adequately protect your secrets, maybe you don't deserve to have them. And there are plenty of secrets to be had here. It's not that people aren't aware police helicopters are circling overland at all hours of the day. Episodes of COPS and YouTube collections of high-speed chases have made that fact common knowledge.

The DDoS release shows law enforcement agencies aren't just deploying choppers to keep an eye on suspects in motion. They're also using them to engage in extended surveillance of people suspected of nothing, hovering over large gatherings and deploying infrared cameras to peer inside of buildings just for the fuck of it.

Putting your stuff in the cloud means opening up additional attack vectors for those seeking your secrets. That appears to be the root source of this new leak. What a time to be alive!

I mean, sure there's more surveillance than ever. But the reliance on (apparently unreliable) private contractors means government secrets are only a hack away with being shared with everyone on the planet. That's definitely good news for the policed, who often have no say in how they're surveilled and are routinely denied access to information about government surveillance tech.

There's an amazing amount of irony contained in this latest DDoS release. Just a couple of months ago, the Dallas PD was being raked over the coals by pissed off city officials for inexplicably deleting more than 22 terabytes of data. According to the cops, the city IT employee handling the transfer of data from the cloud to Dallas PD servers screwed things up, resulting in the mass deletion. Some of it was recoverable. Most of it wasn't. At best, 7.5 terabytes were permanently lost during the botched transfer.

Good news is in the eye of the beholder. Transparency enthusiasts will obviously love this new set of leaks from Distributed Denial of Secrets. And this new leak may allow the Dallas PD to recover more of the data it thought it had lost forever, as David Lee points out for Courthouse News Service.

Data transparency activists released a massive 600-hour leak of mostly Dallas Police Department helicopter footage, raising more questions about the city’s data security protocols three months after DPD admitted to a 22-terabyte deletion of case data that resulted in the release of criminal defendants awaiting trial.

I hate to laugh at the turntables, but try and spin this, DJ DPDPR. RAISE ALL THE QUESTIONS!

If an entity wants to be entrusted with the power to deploy warrantless surveillance provided it has enough downwash, it should be expected to protect the hundreds of hours of footage it's gathered. And if it can't manage a data transfer with losing at least a third of its 22 TB of data, it should probably allow transparency activists to perform its archival duties for it, considering how much better they are at preserving data and making it easily accessible.

Filed Under: dallas pd, helicopter video, police surveillance, surveillance, transparency
Companies: distributed denial of secrets

Public Records Plumb The Depths Of Illinois Law Enforcement's Accountability Black Hole

from the regular-rogues-gallery-of-[lol]-public-servants dept

The Chicago Police Department isn't willing to police itself. That much is apparent from the actions of its officers, which includes the department setting up an inner city "black site" where arrestees were separated from the rights and representation in order to coerce confessions.

Nonexistent oversight has led directly to horrific outcomes, like unjustified killings and -- in just one jaw-dropping stat -- 100 misconduct accusations resulting from a single SWAT team raid of a wrong address.

Will it ever get better? It seems unlikely. In Illinois, police accountability isn't even an afterthought. Some reforms were passed earlier this year but with a large concession to police departments: a partial burial of officers' misconduct records.

At the same time that the 2021 law expanded the information in the misconduct database and required local departments to check it, a last minute amendment closed the database to the public and courts.

That loophole is on pg. 669 of the text. It reads: “The database, documents, materials or other information in the possession or control of the Board that are obtained by or disclosed to the Board pursuant to this subsection shall be confidential by law and privileged and shall not be subject to discovery or admissible in evidence in any private civil action.”

That's a pretty big loophole. There's a workaround, but it requires parties to approach individual law enforcement agencies to obtain these records, rather than simply get them from the state's Training Standards Board, which is charged with collecting them from all over the state. A little secrecy goes a long way. Records can still be obtained, but it all but makes it impossible for outsiders to quantify how much misconduct is being reported across the state or how much of that misconduct is resulting in punishment.

That's the way the police like it. Cops in the state -- especially in Chicago -- are tough on crime… unless it's criminal acts or rights violations committed by officers. The Pulitzer Center has obtained a number of records from across the state via public records requests, which shows how often officers walk away from sustained allegations and criminal charges.

Eighty-one Chicago police officers lost their badges over the past 20 years, but only after being investigated for 1,706 previous offenses – an average of 21 accusations per officer.

When law enforcement agencies say some horrible thing in the news is the result of a "bad apple," they're referring to officers like these ones. But agencies are obviously fine with having bad apples floating around their barrels. Bad apples create more bad apples. The simplest thing to do would be to send these officers packing when it becomes apparent they can't be trusted. Somehow, it is always anyone but police officials pointing out the worst of the worst, months or years after sustained damage has been done.

This is what Illinois residents' tax dollars are paying for:

From 2000 to 2020 law enforcement officers in Illinois kept their badges even if they engaged in domestic abuse, sexual harassment, racism, perjury, most misdemeanors and other offenses unbecoming of a police officer.

Over the entire year of 2020, Illinois decertified two officers – one for theft and the other for an offense labeled “other,” an ambiguous category occasionally used in the state’s decertification records.

From Jan. 1, 2000, to Jan. 1, 2021, Illinois decertified 347 officers, an average of fewer than 17 a year.

But that's not even the worst of it. This is:

[Norberto] Rodriguez held on to his police license for almost a decade after he went to prison on a 52-month sentence for transporting four kilos of heroin. The state decertification board said Chicago officials failed to notify them of the conviction.

Chicago police investigated Rodriguez for domestic abuse three times during the 1990s and he was suspended or asked to take an unpaid leave for a total of 48 days. In 1992, the department investigated him for assault/battery, an allegation the department sustained.

In 1997 prosecutors charged him with the attempted murder of his wife, Irma, for shooting her in an argument. These charges were dropped, but the department fired him.

[...]

Rodriguez killed his wife, Irma, in 2009, and a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder in 2017.

The twist? His police certification wasn't revoked until two years after he murdered his wife. And he held onto it for nine years after he pled guilty to federal drug charges and for twenty years after he was fired by the PD.

The Chicago PD has employed two officers who murdered their spouses.

[Rafael] Balbontin was decertified in 2007 for a “felony.” Before this, Chicago police investigated him for “murder/manslaughter” in 2005, which the department later changed in its final complaint category to a “domestic altercation,” for which it fired him.

The “domestic altercation” was in 2005 when Balbontin stabbed his wife, Arcelia, to death in her home. He was later convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

The PD can't even bring itself to acknowledge the actual crime committed by its officer. A "domestic altercation" can result in murder, but murder is never just a "domestic altercation"... unless it has to be documented in an officer's employment record.

And bad cops (there are plenty listed in this report) were free to bounce around the state, infecting other agencies after being (in very rare cases) fired or forced to resign. It wasn't until this year that the state's law enforcement agencies were required to perform background checks and verify prospective officers were still certified. Agencies were always free to approach the state's law enforcement training board to check on officers' certifications. But they never did.

In response to a FOIA request, the board acknowledged it had no record of a local department requesting the certification status of an officer from 2000 to 2019.

The board excused this lack of interest in its certification records by pointing out agencies could get the same information from the Professional Misconduct Database that was created in 2019. Most agencies couldn't be bothered to do that either.

This database was used 48 times in its first year of operation but never by the Chicago Police Department as of December 2020, according to a FOIA request.

Don't ask, don't tell: law enforcement edition. This is how the Chicago PD (and others in the state) came to employ (for years on end) rapists, fraudsters, extortionists, domestic abusers, actual murderers, and officers with misconduct rap sheets longer than the criminal records of the people they arrested. If accountability begins at home, the state's police agencies stepped out to buy a pack of smokes shortly after formation and never looked back.

Filed Under: chicago pd, foia, illinois, public records, transparency