Apple Recognizes It Jumped Too Quickly On Its CSAM Detection System; Delays Implementation

from the good dept

Sometimes speaking out works. A month ago, Apple announced a series of new offerings that it claimed would be useful in fighting back against CSAM (child sexual abuse material). This is a real problem, and it's commendable that Apple was exploring ways to fight it. However, the major concern was how Apple had decided to do this. Despite the fact that a ton of experts have been working on ways to deal with this extremely challenging problem, Apple (in Apple fashion) went it alone and just jumped right in the deep end, causing a lot more trouble than necessary -- both because their implementation had numerous serious risks that Apple didn't seem to account for, and (perhaps more importantly) because the plan could wipe away years of goodwill in conversations between technologists, security professionals, human rights advocates and more in trying to seek solutions that better balance the risks.

Thankfully, with much of the security community, the human rights community, and others calling attention to Apple's dangerous approach, the company has now announced a plan to delay the implementation, gather more information, and actually talk to experts before deciding how to move forward. Apple put (in tiny print...) an update on the page where it announced these features.

Update as of September 3, 2021: Previously we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them and to help limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.

It's good that the company has finally realized that it moved too quickly on this and hadn't necessarily understood the ramifications of its decision. It remains to be seen whether the company will actually do more in terms of realizing how dangerous its approach was, or if it will simply look to make a few cosmetic changes to the system.

Notably, this announcement came out just as Scientific American released an interesting article that warns that one of the child safety features -- one that had received less concern than the others -- might harm children more than it helps. This is the "communication safety in messages" feature that would scan iMessages of kids under 13, blur messages that the system deemed sexually explicit, and alert parents if the kid sends or opens such a message.

There were some initial concerns about this -- especially regarding LGTBQ children whose parents might not be understanding. However, many of those initial concerns were quieted by the details of the program -- including the fact that it was opt-in and was designed to be transparent to both the kids and the parents what was happening (so no sneaky surveillance or surprise alerts). It's also specifically designed for child accounts that are set up in Family Sharing.

However, as the SciAm article notes, this system still should raise concerns, because it would make kids think they're always being watched:

In fact, even by having this feature, we are teaching young people that they do not have a right to privacy. Removing young people’s privacy and right to give consent is exactly the opposite of what UNICEF’s evidence-based guidelines for preventing online and offline child sexual exploitation and abuse suggest. Further, this feature not only risks causing harm, but it also opens the door for wider intrusions into our private conversations, including intrusions by government.

We need to do better when it comes to designing technology to keep the young safe online. This starts with involving the potential victims themselves in the design of safety systems. As a growing movement around design justice suggests, involving the people most impacted by a technology is an effective way to prevent harm and design more effective solutions. So far, youth haven’t been part of the conversations that technology companies or researchers are having. They need to be.

Again, there are real concerns here, and parents obviously want to protect their children. But over and over again we've seen the way you do that is by teaching them how to handle dangerous situations, rather than adding yet another layer of surveillance. The surveillance teaches them not only that they have no privacy, but similarly takes away their own agency in learning how to deal with difficult situations themselves.

Filed Under: children, client side scanning, csam, scanning, security
Companies: apple

Sony Music Says DNS Service Is Implicated In Copyright Infringement At The Domains It Resolves

from the first-they-came-for-the-resolvers dept

One of the characteristics of maximalist copyright companies is their limitless sense of entitlement. No matter how much copyright is extended, be it in duration, or breadth of application, they want it extended even more. No matter how harsh the measures designed to tackle copyright infringement, they want them made yet harsher. And no matter how distantly connected to an alleged copyright infringement a company or organization or person may be, they want even those bystanders punished.

A worrying example of this concerns Quad9, a free, recursive, anycast DNS platform (Cloudflare has technical details on what "recursive" means in this context). It is operated by the Quad9 Foundation, a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit organization, whose operational budget comes from sponsorships and donations. In other words, it's one of the good guys, trying to protect millions of users around the world from malware and phishing, and receiving nothing in return. But that's not how Sony Music GmbH sees it:

In June, Quad9 was served with a notice from the Hamburg Germany court (310 O 99/21) stating that Quad9 must stop resolving certain domain names that Sony Music GmbH believed were implicated in infringement on properties that Sony claims are covered by their copyrights. Quad9 has no relationship with any of the parties who were involved in distributing or linking to the content, and Quad9 acts as a standard DNS recursive resolver for users in Germany to resolve those names and others.

Sony Music is not alleging that Quad9 is infringing on copyright directly, but that its DNS service allows people to access a Web site that has links to material on a second Web site that infringes on copyrights. On this basis, the Hamburg Court has used Germany's law on indirect liability to order Quad9 to cease resolving the names of those sites. But as the Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte explains, there's a crazy twist here. Under German law:

[Internet] service providers who provide access to unlawful information or transmit such information are expressly no longer liable for damages or responsible for removal, nor can an injunction be granted against them. However, the Hamburg Regional Court assumes that Quad9 cannot invoke this liability privilege because it does not itself route the copyright-infringing information from A to B, but merely provides indirect access to it. This understanding of the law leads to the contradictory result that Quad9 is deemed liable for copyright infringements precisely because it has even less to do with the copyright infringements than Internet access providers, who are equally not involved in copyright infringements but at least do transmit the data in question.

Quad9's FAQ on the case points out that if allowed to stand:

this would set a dangerous precedent for all services used in retrieving web pages. Providers of browsers, operating systems or antivirus software could be held liable as interferers on the same grounds if they do not prevent the accessibility of copyright-infringing websites.

The past history of media companies suggest that, given such a capability, they would indeed go after all of these incidental operators, as part of an insane quest to put every aspect of the Internet at the service of copyright.

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

Filed Under: copyright, dns, germany, infrastructure, recursive dns, resolving
Companies: quad9, sony music

Colorado Transportation Officals Asked Navigation App Providers To Plant False Information. Worse, The Providers Complied.

from the slippery-slope-of-faking-slippery-slopes dept

Well, this isn't cool. Colorado transportation officials fed bogus information to map apps to make an open road appear to be closed.

Hoping to keep traffic from rerouting to a smaller road after a larger highway was closed due to rockslides, the Colorado Department of Transportation did this:

[T]he Colorado Department of Transportation marked the road as closed on its travelers update site http://www.cotrip.org because of a “safety closure due to mudslide,” and Pitkin County Undersheriff Alex Burchetta said Wednesday afternoon the county sent out an alert about 3:30 p.m. as such, based on that information.

However, there were not any mudslides and the messaging “evolved” and was changed by CDOT, Burchetta said. A CDOT spokesperson confirmed there were no slides.

That affected the DOT's own site, which is itself problematic. Drivers depend on that information being accurate. Falsifying reports for the purpose of controlling traffic flow shouldn't be considered acceptable.

But that wasn't the only travel information outlet affected by the DOT's shady traffic shaping.

Gregg Miller, a CDOT business process architect, was tasked with contacting the navigation services when agency officials were desperately trying to prevent motorists from flooding Highway 82 during the closure of Interstate 70 through Glenwood Canyon because of mudslides and the ensuing damage.

Traffic levels were hitting an estimated 7,000 to 9,000 vehicles per day during the week of Aug. 1 compared to a normal load of 1,000 vehicles per day, one official estimated.

John Lorme, CDOT director of maintenance and operations, directed Miller via email on Aug. 4 at 11:49 a.m. to get the roads closed on the navigation services.

“I need this to show closed to traffic on the mapping apps, soonest,” Lorme wrote. “I will assume responsibility. All locals understand what’s going on. It’s the (commercial vehicle) and (recreational vehicle) traffic that is creating hazardous conditions.”

CDOT is a "trusted partner" with multiple navigation app providers, allowing it to directly feed traffic information to these companies. But there's nothing trustworthy about feeding false information to popular consumer apps. It seems if the DOT wanted to close a road or limit its traffic, it had plenty of options that didn't involve delivering false information to drivers via map apps and the DOT's own website.

Making this worse was the DOT's decision to maintain the illusion of a road closure on consumer apps while updating its own site to reflect the actual facts.

Miller was successful in getting Google, Waze, Apple and TomTom to show Highway 82 as closed on Aug. 4. However, CDOT executive director Shoshana Lew insisted that evening that the agency keep Highway 82 marked as open on cotrip.org, the agency’s real-time road status app.

This doesn't fix the problem. Drivers are more likely to rely on navigation apps than government websites when dealing with travel complications. Efforts like this diminish trust -- both of the apps drivers use and the government that's supposed to be serving them.

Just as worrying was these companies' agreement to participate in the ruse. Communications obtained with public records requests appear to show Google and Apple knew they were being asked to plant false information in their map offerings.

The next morning, Miller wrote to his supervisor, CDOT chief engineer Stephen Harelson, to express his concerns. Miller said maintenance and operations personnel had directed him to contact Google, Waze and Apple the prior day to ask them to “show Independence Pass closed for traffic routing purposes for the entire month of August.”

“We are currently listed as a ‘trusted partner’ with these services and while they questioned this (request), I explained to them that CDOT is concerned about the traffic levels on the road and they need to be closed,” Miller wrote. “They did it but questioned why COTRIP showed Independence Pass as open.”

Google's statement appears to indicate it's willing to plant fake information if asked to do so by government agencies.

"When official changes are made to restrict certain routes, we update our directions accordingly.”

Apparently that includes showing a road is closed when it actually isn't and listing a nonexistent hazard (mudslide) as the reason for the (fake) closure.

Obviously, nothing can really prevent government officials from straight up lying about road conditions to map app providers. But this fiasco involved not only the planting of false information by government officials, but the active participation of navigation app providers. This is a huge abuse of trust by all parties involved -- something that could very well lead to drivers ignoring road closure warnings in the future and putting themselves in danger.

Filed Under: cdot, colorado, fake information, navigation, traffic, traffic routing, transportation
Companies: apple, google, tomtom, waze

Daily Deal: Trio 3-in-1 Aluminum Desktop Charging Stand

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

Who wants to work on a messy desk? Focus on your productivity and not on tangled wires with this Trio 3-in-1 Aluminum Desktop Charging Stand. This stand holds your phone vertically or horizontally for the perfect angle to read messages, watch videos, listen to music and play games. It also has two other slots for your smartwatch and wireless earphones. With built-in cable management, this stand helps organize your cables to avoid knotting. Each slot has enlarged anti-scratch rubber cushions to prevent your devices from slipping and scratching. It comes in 4 different colors and is on sale for $20.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

The Challenge In Content Moderation And Politics: How Do You Deal With Bad Faith Actors?

from the don't-treat-bad-faith-actors-like-they're-good-faith-actors dept

We talk a lot about the various challenges of content moderation all the time here on Techdirt, but there's one aspect that really comes up all the time and is rarely addressed: how do you deal with bad faith actors? So much of the debate around content moderation tends to be based on the idea that there is merely a legitimate difference of opinion on what is and what is not appropriate -- or what is and what is not "misinformation." And there are important debates to be had about all that.

However, one of the biggest challenges regarding content moderation is that things that might make sense when dealing with those acting in good faith make no sense at all when dealing with those acting in bad faith. An example of this is the question of requiring (or even just demanding) that any website give a clear explanation of what rule was violated and how. This feels perfectly sensible. And when your content is taken down for reasons you legitimately feel were mistaken, the inability to know why is genuinely frustrating (ask me how I know).

But, turn that around and apply it to someone who is purposefully pushing the boundaries and gaming the system, whether trolling for lols or grifting gullible suckers, and suddenly you realize how such a request creates even more problems. Because the bad faith actor doesn't care. They don't actually want to learn what they did wrong to be better. They want to (1) cause problems for the site and (2) collect information so that next time, they can exploit that knowledge to engage in further bad acts without getting caught.

I was thinking about this after reading a great Daily Beast article by Wajahat Ali, acknowledging a similar issue in politics. So many of the norms of politics (and political journalism) are based on the idea that -- even if you're disagreeing with people -- they're acting in good faith and there's simply a disagreement of assumptions or how you interpret those assumptions. But, as Ali has pointed out, all too frequently, that's not true any more in the political sphere, and treating bad faith jackasses as if they're acting in good faith cannot lead to any good outcome.

What will it take for the American majority to stop being hijacked by the bad-faith politics of an increasingly radicalized GOP that will stop at nothing to promote death and achieve minority rule?

Most of us in this country, who have chosen life during a pandemic, are asked to coddle the unhinged temper tantrums and violent extremism of a conservative base that continues supporting the Jan. 6 violent insurrection and attacking our voting rights, and is willing to sacrifice our children as canaries in the COVID coalmine to fuel their endless culture war during a pandemic that has killed over 600,000 Americans.

Yet their elected leaders and mouthpieces, like Rep. Steve Scalise, are still treated as credible sources and normalized by being invited on news channels and by papers of record to criticize President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a cartoonishly hardcore Trump loyalist, and ridiculous pseudo-intellectual Ben Shapiro, whom The New York Times once referred to as “the cool kid’s philosopher” and whose Daily Wire is hugely influential in pushing vaccine misinformation on Facebook, still get coveted platforms in Politico.

This is also true in the content moderation debates. Many of those pushing for new rules or changes to Section 230 are not making good faith arguments about how things should work. They're bad faith actors, simply seeking any advantage by changing the rules in their own favor. They are trying to scam the system by pretending to have serious concerns, when their only concern is "how can I keep being a deceitful jackass online."

Now, as with anything in content moderation (and perhaps in politics), it is often difficult to judge who is a good faith actor who might just be massively ignorant or confused, and who is just a bad faith actor looking to abuse the system. And that is a real concern -- and there can be problems when legitimately ignorant people who mean well are dismissed or judged as bad faith trolls. And, of course, there is a legitimate concern about what happens when good faith individuals are dismissed as being in bad faith without considering what they say. But at some point people need to recognize that you can't seriously bother debating with those acting in bad faith. They're not there to be convinced. They're not there to consider actual points.

They're just trying to be attention-getting assholes and they win just by the very process of engaging with them as if they have something worth saying.

Filed Under: bad faith actors, content moderation, politics, transparency, trolls

Study Suggests Assholes Online Are Routinely Assholes Offline

from the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall dept

A new study published in the American Science Review found that that if you're an asshole troll online, there's a pretty good chance that you're the same way in the brick and mortar world. The researchers used representative surveys and behavioral studies from the U.S. and Denmark to try and figure out if it the novel and relatively new internet was somehow making normal human beings more hostile. But as the researchers point out on Twitter, they found no real evidence for that:

In short if you're a hostile person online, you're probably a hostile person offline. And while Facebook has a lot of obvious problems on a wide variety of fronts, it's not inherently responsible for somehow creating human dysfunction that already existed. The researchers told Engineering and Technology that online debates seem more hostile because the hostile players simply have a bigger bullhorn, and the resulting chaos they create has much broader visibility than it would in the offline world:

"Our research shows that the reason many people feel that online political discussions are so hostile has to do with the visibility of aggressive behaviour online. Online discussions occur in large public networks and the behaviour of an internet troll is much more visible than the behaviour of this same person in an offline setting,” said Michael Bang Petersen, professor of political science at the university."

Obviously none of this is to say online platforms don't have responsibility to do a better job protecting users from violence, hostility, racism, or general jackassery. Nor does this mean the ad-based internet ecosystem -- be it the press or social media -- doesn't have a problem with amplifying inflammatory bullshit, resulting in numerous business models where inflammatory bullshit is more profitable than boring old factual reality.

But it does suggest that terrible people are inherently terrible, in contrast to the claim on some fronts that the internet is magically creating them. As Gizmodo notes, research fairly consistently suggests "toxic online political discussions are disproportionately driven by malicious individuals taking advantage of the megaphone offered":

"One study published in the Personality and Individual Differences journal in 2017 found that the most aggressive online trolls may tend to be high in cognitive empathy, which allows them to identify when they’re pushing someone else’s buttons, but low in affective empathy, enabling them to avoid feeling bad or internalizing the suffering they cause. Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard affiliate and data engineer Devin Gaffney wrote for Bennington Magazine that as platforms have “optimized for connectedness, they have negligently optimized for the growth of mob-like communities connecting around noxious yet identity-defining goals.” One 2018 study in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research found a bleed-over effect in which nasty online comments “increase perceived bias in a news blog post to which they are connected,” essentially dragging down the whole discussion with them."

Again, the internet clearly creates a wide swath of new problems we'll need to overcome through scientific and democratic processes with the hindsight of experience. And it's abundantly clear that process is going to be downright ugly at times. But again, it's not the internet mystically creating armies of assholes; it's just a broader window into -- and amplifier for -- the parades of assholes that were already there.

Filed Under: anonymity, assholes, behavior, trolls

Indie Game Dev Decides To Leave Industry Due To Steam Returns On Short Game

from the predictable dept

It has now been over six years since Valve finally put in a refund policy for video games purchased on its Steam platform. At the time of its announcement, I was very much in favor of this move by Valve, given how previously the prospect of buying games on the platform was laughably tilted in favor of publishers and developers. On top of that, a whole bunch of the outcry from publishers and developers over the policy seemed to mostly center around it existing at all, meaning such concerns were mostly just requests to go back to the one-sided policies that favored them. Some developers even saw large numbers of refunds as a good thing, arguing that those refunds were likely largely from people that never would have tried their games out if a potential refund weren't in place.

But going way back to that first post over its announcement, one concern brought up by developers seemed legit. Given that the refund policy required the buyer to have bought the game within the past two calendar weeks and to have not played more than two hours of it, well, what about very short games that can be completed well within that timeframe?

That exact scenario has now impacted one indie developer such that it is quitting the game development industry altogether.

Summer of ’58 is the latest first-person horror title from indie developer Emika Games, which was released in July and features a video blogger investigating an abandoned and supposedly haunted Russian children’s camp – which of course goes very badly indeed. At £6.19/$6.92 on Steam it’s a cheap purchase even full-price, and it’s currently 23% off.

The game’s Steam page makes it very clear that Summer of ’58 only has an average play-time of around 90 minutes. However, according to Emika Games, Summer of ’58 has received “a huge number of returns” – despite being rated ‘very positive’. The developer blames this on the fact that its game “does not reach two hours of playing time” – under Steam’s return policy, any game under two hours can be refunded.

As a result, Emika Games announced on Twitter that it is leaving the games industry entirely for an "indefinite time".

Now, we could have a discussion about whether this is an overreaction or not. We could talk about how Steam's refund policy is completely public, meaning that Emika Games knew what it was getting into when it put its 2 hour game on the platform. We could talk about business models and all the other ways the game could have been sold to the public other than via Steam, or other ways the developer could have made money from it.

But whatever side of those arguments you'd want to come down on, it wouldn't change the simple fact that this is an obvious flaw within Steam's refund policy. And, frankly, it's one that developers and industry commentators saw coming a mile away. Hell, in my first post on the announcement, I managed to come up with a simple solution to this myself.

It might be an even better solution to simply allow game-makers to have options on the game-time of their refund policy. Say, two hours, five hours, or thirty minutes. Then consumers could decide for themselves if less game-time was worth the risk of purchase. I imagine that would create more administrative work on Steam's end, but it ought to keep the indies happy.

It seems Steam decided not to keep the indies happy. And now one of them is leaving not just Steam, but the entire industry. Why? Because Steam caters primarily to the AAA publishers? That's probably part of it. Because Steam didn't want to give up that kind of control over its policies and platform to developers? Probably another part of it. Because this would have created work for Steam that it didn't want to do? Likely yet another part of it.

But whether it is one of those explanations or the trifecta, a good indie gaming scene means this policy has to be altered to make it workable for those making shorter games.

Filed Under: return policy, returns, steam, video games
Companies: emika games, valve

Error 403: Syrians Blocked From Online Learning Platforms

from the don't-punish-victims-of-regimes dept

Individuals in dictatorships need more freedom not less. Syrians have for years been unable to work remotely or pay for remote services, even educational ones. Do we want to do the same now to Afghans, who are already in fear of the Taliban? Examining in detail the experiences of Syrians, can maybe lead us to a better solution.

Major online distance learning platforms based in the US, such as Coursera, that have emerged as crucial tools during the pandemic, are partially or fully blocked in Syria because of U.S. sanctions. While intended to weaken the Syrian government, the sanctions have also restricted access to an online learning universe that could offer critical opportunities to ordinary Syrians trapped in difficult circumstances.

With a global audience of 87 million learners, Coursera offers free lecture courses from universities around the world, including many top-tier American schools such as University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Northwestern.

But in the war-torn country, people are unable to take advantage of the online high quality courses.

Coursera is not alone: Its competitor, Udacity, is also banned in Syria. Of the major online learning platforms, the only one operating in Syria is edX, the nonprofit platform founded by MIT. However edX only offers a few courses. This is particularly problematic for a country that has often relied on these courses to innovate and create new job opportunities.

But why is Syria sanctioned?

Syria has been the target of economic sanctions imposed by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) since 1979, when the Carter administration added Syria to the State Sponsors of Terrorism list. The program includes trade embargoes, import and export restrictions, investment bans, asset freezes, and travel bans.

President Bush further expanded the U.S. Syria sanctions program in 2004 as part of the ongoing ‘War on Terror’ under the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 (SAA).

In 2011, President Obama imposed new sanctions against Syria in response to the Assad regime’s targeting of civilians in pro-democracy uprisings. The 2011 sanctions targeted the Syrian oil sector, freezing the assets of Syrian individuals and entities, prohibiting petroleum imports and investments, and prohibiting the sale of services to Syria.

What does this mean for Syrians?

The restrictions seem more symbolic than effective. IP address bans are notoriously easy to work around — to access the blocked websites, Syrians often resort to VPNs that mask their location. The problem is that VPNs are often unreliable and may interfere with the interactive experience offered by the platforms.

Even if Syrians manage to access free online learning classes via a VPN, they are unable to obtain certificates of completion, since those require a fee as and no online payment methods are available from within the country due to these same sanctions.

The same scenario applies to language tests. Syrians are unable to take TOEFL and IELTS, the two main English language proficiency tests accepted across the world, as payments made from within Syria are not accepted.

The easiest option is to take these tests in neighboring countries, such as Lebanon, but the costs of travelling are too high for the large majority of Syrians (80% live in poverty, according to UN data released in March 2021).

An alternative to IELTS and TOEFL is the Duolingo English Test, which became available in late 2020 after Duolingo managed to receive a special exemption from OFAC. While the exam can be taken online while in Syria, the fee must be paid from outside Syria. As such, people have to ask friends and relatives living in other countries to make the payment for them, a significant obstacle due to the difficulty of conducting wire transfers in the country.

Computer science students and software engineers are also unable to access some essential services offered by Microsoft's GitHub, the world's most-used tool for software development.

On top of all that, at a moment when much of the rest of the world is relying on digital tools to survive a pandemic, Syrians are also unable to access other online services, such as Amazon Books and Zoom, that have been crucial for online learning elsewhere.

We Need Better Legal Frameworks

People under military rule are essentially "Stateless" and should be provided opportunities to integrate into the global economy rather than kept out. The rationale for comprehensive sanctions seems to be that any money flowing into a country with a military dictator will end up in the dictator's hands. However, this is not always the case - and allowing people a way to make a living and to educate themselves, independent of the ruling class, is likely to be in everyone's interests in the long run.

Raise the Voices is an International human rights project that supports victims and their families.

Filed Under: ofac, online education, oppression, sanctions, syria
Companies: coursera

Miami Beach PD Blocks Enforcement Of New Law Miami Beach Cops Abused To Arrest People For Filming Them

from the [fox-overseeing-henhouse]:-goddamn...-this-thing-is-full-of-foxes dept

In May, the Miami Beach city council passed an ordinance that basically made it illegal to come within 20 feet of cops.

The Ordinance prohibits any person, after receiving a warning from a law enforcement officer not to do so, to approach or remain within twenty (20) feet of a law enforcement officer engaged in the lawful performance of any legal duty with the intent to: (1) interrupt, disrupt, hinder, impede or interfere with a law enforcement officer's ability to perform such duty; or (2) provoke a physical response from a law enforcement officer; or (3) directly or indirectly harass a law enforcement officer.

This law was supposedly needed because occasionally law enforcement is a bit more difficult to perform, like during occasions when there are more people in Miami Beach than usual. But there was some concern this meant Miami Beach officers would be able to arrest people for filming them. That point was raised by one city commissioner during the vote on the ordinance and quickly dismissed by the city attorney.

[Commissioner David] Richardson to Rafael Paz, the acting city attorney: “Is there anything in this provision ordinance that would prohibit someone from videotaping? Because I know that with George Floyd there were some questions about bystanders videotaping the officers, and I know that’s been a topic of conversation over the last year on whether or not that’s permissible activity, so is there anything in this that would prohibit it? Would that be considered harassment?”

Paz: “Commissioner that would not be considered harassing and videoing of our law enforcement officers is legal and permissible under the law.”

LOL. Well, I guess Miami Beach officers have agreed to disagree with the city attorney's interpretation.

Thirteen people have been arrested under the ordinance, according to arrest data provided by police. At least eight of those arrests were of people who’d been using their phones to record officers. All 13 were young Black men or women. Most of them still face a potential criminal trial, including [Mariyah] Maple.

Here's what happened to Maple:

[A] previously unreported video [showed] how police pepper sprayed a 27-year-old New York tourist, Mariyah Maple, after she had been peacefully recording a traffic stop in the 600 block of Collins Avenue on July 25.

Maple, who was later charged under the ordinance, can be seen recording as a police sergeant asked her to leave and, before she could respond, whipped his bicycle around like a shield, struck her hand and immediately deployed pepper spray. Sgt. Vincent Stella has been assigned to administrative duty while the department reviews the incident.

As the Miami Herald notes, this is at least the third time in the past few weeks that recordings of incidents resulting in the enforcement of this new law contradict officers' claims and arrest reports. And two arrests that occurred within hours of each other made national news. Miami Beach officers arrested New York resident Khalid Vaughn as he filmed them beating a handcuffed arrestee. His friend, Sharif Cobb, was arrested shortly after as he filmed officers preparing to transport Vaughn to jail.

Fortunately, those charges have been dropped by the State Attorney's office. These charges, however, still remain active:

In the aftermath, five Miami Beach police officers wound up charged with misdemeanor battery after prosecutors said they used excessive force in making arrests.

Since the cops can't seem to get the law right, the law is being taken away from them.

The department announced that it had paused enforcement of the law on Thursday, the same day the Miami Herald reported on an additional incident involving the ordinance in which police pepper sprayed and arrested a woman from New York who had been filming a traffic stop in South Beach in late July. A spokesman said the directive was actually issued late last month, after a series of troubling arrests.

On July 26, Chief Richard Clements “verbally” ordered his deputy chief to suspend the enforcement of the ordinance, according to department spokesman Officer Ernesto Rodriguez.

Officers will now undergo additional training on the "nuances of the ordinance." But there's no nuance to be had. The city attorney says it's legal to film police officers. Police officers don't want to be filmed. So they arrested people using this new law until someone made them stop. That's why vague laws that expand police power are so dangerous. If a law can be read as a new way to abuse people and infringe on their rights and protections, it will be.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, filming police, free speech, miami, miami beach, miami beach pd

A Guy Walks Into A Bra

from the women-in-technology dept

A recent and surprisingly unpleasant professional encounter found me thinking again about an experience I had in the late 90s during my earlier career as a web developer before I went to law school. I'd gotten involved with a group that put on monthly meetings on topics of interest to the local community of Internet professionals. After the meetings a bunch of us would typically go out for dinner to chat and catch up. I did know some women from the organization, but I think most of the time the friends I went out with afterwards were men. It has never really bothered me to be in situations where I am outnumbered by men, so long as I'm treated with the respect of an equal. And I had no quarrel with my male friends on that front. But that evening drove home a reason why it was not good for women not to be better represented in technology in general.

Out at dinner we began "talking shop" almost immediately, discussing, in those early days of the Web, the importance of e-commerce to businesses and what sort of web presences companies needed to have in order to be able to profit from the Internet. We started listing stories of successes and failures, but the conversation ground to a halt once I offered my example:

"I have a bra I really like, and I'd like to buy another, but I can't seem to find a web site for the brand that would allow me to order one."

(Men, I am assuming that you will keep reading the rest of this post, so that I can make my point. But based on my friends' reaction I wouldn't be surprised if you've already slammed down the lid of your laptop, or tossed aside your phone, and run away. In which case, if that's your inclination, it's even more important that you keep reading.)

The example I raised was a perfectly reasonable one. I was sharing an example of a significant e-commerce opportunity being left untapped for no good reason. The essential facts were indisputable: many women wear bras, bras don't last forever, women would probably like to replace their worn-out bras with ones they know they like, and women will pay money to a bra manufacturer to get the bra they want. Therefore, any bra manufacturer not using the Internet to facilitate this purchase was leaving money on the table.

The same would be true for plenty of other goods as well, and I'm sure if I'd swapped the word "women" for "men" and instead listed a product specific to the latter my friends would have readily agreed that it needed to be sold online. After all, at least one of them had an MBA, and they were some of the biggest Internet commerce evangelists I knew. But that the product example was something specific to women's bodies completely shut them down. They practically squirmed out of their seats, desperate for the subject to be changed.

It was an uncomfortable moment for me, too, realizing that an ordinary reality of the female existence could be so unwelcome in a professional conversation. Was it too immodest to discuss undergarments with work colleagues? In an era when Viagra commercials were already running on broadcast television it would hardly seem so. If there was no compunction against discussing the commercialization of such intimate matters for men, why could that same clinical detachment not be afforded to similar topics important to women? After all, this wasn't second grade; no one was going to catch cooties talking about a specific form of underwear common to many women. The bottom line is that women are people and peers and professionals and deserve not to be regarded with the adolescent squeamishness that all too often keeps us apart from the world.

And as far as our discussion was concerned, the subject of selling bras online was a perfectly salient example to cite, just as any male-specific product would have been. In fact, from the larger perspective of e-commerce, it had to get raised by someone. But it seems to take someone with experience with these ideas to bring them to the fore, which means that without having women involved in the decision making they are going to be forever overlooked by the men in charge, who all too easily can regard such topics as icky and esoteric, or outright ignorable, rather than worthwhile business problems to solve.

In the twenty-odd years since that dinner bra manufacturers did eventually discover the web. Yet two decades later, we are still talking about women in technology – including the relative lack thereof. And it's an absence that hasn't stopped mattering.

I've never been one who wanted to believe it might matter. As I said earlier, I've never generally been bothered by being one of the few or only women in a situation, because I didn't think it should matter. To me, true equality means that men and women should essentially be interchangeable, with all of us passing through life based on our merit as people. And I've always worried that if we focused too much on gender issues it might overly dwell on our differences, end up being divisive, and thus keep us from ever getting there.

But the reality is that we aren't there, at least not yet. While there are lots of women in technology, albeit more in some sectors than others, we're not a point where we exist in numbers on par with our male counterparts. And as with any other demographic where inclusion doesn't come easily or equivalently, that lack of representation has consequences.

First, as the bra example illustrates, it leaves out of the technology conversation the insights and additions that women can bring. Although in every way that matters women are equal to men, the reality is that there can be some differences in our physical construction and, moreover, in our lived experiences. These differences shape our perspectives, awareness of issues others might overlook, and perhaps also our acuities. As a result, as with all people from the diverse fabric of humanity, they give us something extra to contribute that is valuable, and that should be valued.

But also, sometimes it is our absence itself that is what makes our lives different, and not in a good way. Because when women are not at the table it teaches everyone that women do not belong at the table. Which makes it really hard to then come along as a woman and try to sit at the table and be treated as the equal that we are.

About a year before the dinner described above I had a different job developing websites at a start-up. It was not a great job for a number of reasons, including that my boss didn't actually know how to make websites. So he tended to give me instructions that were, at best, infeasible. One day I explained that we couldn't do what he asked because we had to use the web-safe color palette or else the page would not render well. Back then, limitations in computer monitor technology meant that web sites were effectively limited to 216 colors in order to render predictably, and I was correct to point out the need to adhere to this common web design practice. But I was a woman dropping this knowledge on a man. He didn't believe it until he looked across at my male colleague who confirmed it.

It was such a stark wake-up call that it didn't necessarily matter how good I was at my job. For some men I would never be good enough simply because I wasn't one of them. And it is among those sorts of attitudes that I am supposed to somehow carve out my career.

On the other hand, ever watch re-runs from earlier decades? In many important ways things are significantly better for women than they used to be. Including that there are plenty of men who welcome us as full equals at the table. But that doesn't mean that things are totally fine – in fact, far from it. Many challenges remain, and one of those challenges is implicit (and sometimes explicit) sex bias, which, even if it only comes up in a minority of situations, still ends up being an issue in quite a few situations. And part of why we need to contend with it is because it can be subtle. While it should hopefully be clear to everyone by now that no one should ever have to deal with the sort of verbal and physical harassment that prompted the #metoo movement, too many men seem to think that simply not outright abusing their female colleagues somehow absolves them of being sexist. But that's hardly the benchmark.

Instead, as that recent unpleasant experience reminded me, there are other questions that need to be asked. Such as: are women as welcome to contribute to the best of our capacity as our male counterparts are? Or is our presence just merely tolerated because at this point it might have to be? When we speak, are we heard like our male colleagues are heard? Or are we tuned out like my friends did to me when I shared a perspective they didn't want to hear or, worse, like my former boss did when I tried to speak with authority and expertise?

Obviously no woman is going to be right on everything, just as no man would be. We're not even going to always agree among ourselves. But if we're not generally regarded as having equivalent ethos as an equally-positioned man, and therefore denied the opportunities to be in an equal position, then that's a problem. It's a problem for women, it's even a problem for men, and it's a problem for any industry that drives our contributions away.

Filed Under: harassment, men, sexism, technology, women