Facebook, Twitter Consistently Fail At Distinguishing Abuse From Calling Out Abuse

from the the-wrong-approach dept

Time and time again, we see that everyone who doesn't work in the field of trust and safety for an internet platform seems to think that it's somehow "easy" to filter out "bad" content and leave up "good" content. It's not. This doesn't mean that platforms shouldn't try to deal with the issue. They have perfectly good business reasons to want to limit people using their systems to abuse and harass and threaten other users. But when you demand that they be legally responsible -- as Germany (and then Russia) recently did -- bad things happen, and quite frequently those bad things happen to the victims of abuse or harassment or threats.

We just wrote about Twitter's big failure in suspending Popehat's account temporarily, after he posted a screenshot of a threat he'd received from a lawyer who's been acting like an internet tough guy for a few years now. In that case, the person who reviewed the tweet keyed in on the fact that Ken White had failed to redact the contact information from the guy threatening him -- which at the very least raises the question of whether or not Twitter considers threats of destroying someone's life to be less of an issue than revealing that guy's contact information, which was already publicly available via a variety of sources.

But, it's important to note that this is not an isolated case. In just the past few days, we've seen two other major examples of social media platforms banning or punishing the victims of harassment and abuse for posting about it, rather than the perpetrators. The first is the story of Francie Latour, as told in a recent Washington Post article, where she explains how she went on Facebook to vent about a man in a Boston grocery store loudly using the n-word to describe her and her two children, and Facebook's response was to ban her from Facebook.

But within 20 minutes, Facebook deleted her post, sending Latour a cursory message that her content had violated company standards. Only two friends had gotten the chance to voice their disbelief and outrage.

The second story comes from Ijeoma Oluo, who posted to Medium about a strikingly similar situation. In this case, she made what seems to me to be a perfectly innocuous joke about feeling nervous for her safety as a black woman in a place with many white people. But a bunch of rabid angry people online got mad at her about it and start sending all sorts of abusive tweets and hateful messages to her on Facebook. She actually says that Twitter was pretty good at responding to reports of abusive content. But, as in the Latour story, Facebook responded by banning Oluo for talking about the harassment she was receiving.

And finally, facebook decided to take action. What did they do? Did they suspend any of the people who threatened me? No. Did they take down Twitchy’s post that was sending hundreds of hate-filled commenters my way? No.

They suspended me for three days for posting screenshots of the abuse they have refused to do anything about.

That, of course, is a ridiculous response by Facebook. And Oluo is right to call them out on it, just as Latour and White were right to point out the absurdity of their situations.

But, unfortunately, the response of many people to this kind of thing is just "do better Facebook" or "do better Twitter." Or, in some cases, they even go so far as to argue that these companies should be legally mandated to take down some of the content. But this will backfire for the exact same reason that these ridiculous situations happened in the first place. When you run a platform and you need to make thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of these kinds of decisions a day, you're going to make mistakes. And that's not because they're "bad" at this, it's just the nature of the beast. With that many decisions -- many of which involve people demanding immediate action -- there's no easy way to have someone drop in and figure out all of the context in the short period of time they have to make a decision.

On top of that, because this has to be done at scale, you can't have a team that is all skilled in understanding context and nuance and culture. Nor can you have people who can spend the necessary time to dig deeper to figure out and understand the context. Instead, you end up with a ruleset. And it has to be standardized so that non-experts are able to make judgments on this stuff in a relatively quick timeframe. That's why about a month ago, there was a kerfuffle when Facebook's "hate speech rule book" was leaked, and it showed how it could lead to situations where "white men" were going to be protected.

And when you throw into this equation the potential of legal liability, a la Germany (and what a large group of people are pushing for in the US), things will get much, much worse. That's because when there's legal liability on the line, companies will be much faster to delete/suspend/ban, just to avoid the liability. And many people calling for such things will be impacted themselves. None of the people in the stories above could have reasonably expected to get banned by these platforms. But, when people demand that platforms "take responsibility" that's what's going to happen.

Again, this is not in any way to suggest that online platforms should be a free for all. That would be ridiculous and counterproductive. It would lead to everything being overrun by spam, in addition abusive/harassing behavior. Instead, I think the real answer is that we need to stop putting the burden on platforms to make all the decisions, but figure out alternative ways. I've suggested in the past, that one possible solution is turning the tools around. Give end users much more granular control about how they can ban or block or silence content they don't want to see, rather than leaving it up to a crew of people who have to make snap decisions on who's at fault when people get angry online.

Of course, there are problems with my suggestion as well -- it could certainly accelerate the issues of self-contained bubbles of thought. And it could also result in plenty of incorrect blocking as well. But the larger point is that this isn't easy, and every single magic bullet solution has serious consequences, and often those consequences fall on the people who are facing the most abuse and harassment, rather than on those doing the abuse and harassment. So, yes, platforms need to do better. The three stories above are all ridiculous, and ended up harming people who were highlighting harassing behavior. But continuing to rely on platforms and teams of people to weed out content someone deems "bad" is not a workable solution, and it's one that will only lead to more of these kinds of stories.

And, worst of all, the abusers and harassers know and thrive on this. The guy who got Ken White's account banned gloated about it on Twitter. I'm sure the same was true of the folks who went after Oluo and likely "reported" her to Facebook. Any time you rely on the platform to be the arbiter, remember that he people who want to harass others quickly learn that they can use that as a tool for further harassment themselves.

Filed Under: abuse, free speech, harassment, intermediary liability, moderation, platforms, policing
Companies: facebook, twitter

Voltage Picture's Lawyer Sues Copyright Trolling Participants, Calls Lawsuits Unethical

from the burnt-by-trolls dept

Another copyright trolling operation appears to be headed off the rails. The spectacular disintegration of the porn trolling Prenda Law firm has been a joy to behold, ultimately ending in federal indictments for Paul Hansmeier and John Steele. Where this one is headed, it's too early to say, but it appears one lawyer employed by litigious subsidiaries of Voltage Pictures has had enough. (h/t FightCopyrightTrolls)

An attorney who filed dozens of BitTorrent copyright cases on behalf of Voltage Pictures and Millennium Films has renounced the practice, saying he was duped into participating in unethical copyright “trolling.”

James S. Davis filed suit against his former legal partner and his former clients in San Diego Superior Court in July. In the complaint, he says that he was recruited into the BitTorrent litigation by a former law school classmate, Carl Crowell, who told him he had a “good litigation business opportunity.”

As part of trolling operation's "warm body" legal counsel hiring plan, Davis was plucked from the world of immigration law and put to work filing sloppy complaints against IP addresses on behalf of his new employers. And there are several of those. The complaint [PDF] lists a number of familiar LLCs as defendants, including LHF, Dallas Buyers Club, Cobbler Nevada, and the infamous Guardaley.

The allegations are pretty thin at this point. Davis says the multiple entities withheld information that might have made him reconsider his involvement in the scheme. Thanks to stuff uncovered during recent lawsuits, Davis appears to want out officially and litigiously out before the whole things falls apart.

[I]n the course of preparing his response [to a defendant's motion questioning the plaintiff's claims of copyright ownership], [Davis] began asking questions and uncovering facts that undermined “his belief in the value and ethical propriety” of the copyright suits.

In a separate copyright case in San Diego, Davis says he uncovered additional troubling facts in the course of drafting a response to a judge’s threat to dismiss the case. He says he had a meeting in Santa Monica with the key figures on the plaintiff’s side, after which he “concluded that both the legal and factual basis of the Copyright Litigation campaign were unsound, and that each had been misrepresented to him.”

Davis, who had already filed 58 lawsuits on behalf of the companies, sought more info from those above him. According to his complaint, he has been repeatedly stonewalled by the companies involved in the copyright litigation scheme. Davis also alleges he hasn't been paid for his participation in the litigation -- at least not as much as was agreed to. When you start stiffing your legal reps, things tend to get litigious in a hurry.

Two allegations are particularly direct:

Defendants have been unjustly enriched as a result of Davis rendering services in cases that lacked a valid legal or factual basis and were therefore impossible for Davis to successfully litigate.

[...]

Defendants breached their respective covenants of good faith and fair dealing by, inter alia, refusing to appear at or participate in the Copyright Litigation Campaign when their participation was required by necessity or court order.

So, basically like any other large-scale trolling operations: file tons of lawsuits, hope for enough quick settlements to turn a profit, and duck out of any cases as quickly as possible when defendants push back. It's probably safe to assume any illegal activity by the Voltage Pictures' subsidiaries isn't limited to defrauding one of its legal reps.

Davis is seeking at least $300,000 in damages. He may get it too, if the defendants are looking to steer clear of discovery motions that might expose further malfeasance by the involved companies. This is Davis' second attempt to sue his former employers. The first attempt was filed in federal court but rejected by the judge for a lack of diversity. For now, all the action's taking place at state level in San Diego's Superior Court.

Trolling operations are notoriously sketchy. They start with the worst assumptions (an IP address is a person), bundle suits together wherever possible to save on legal fees, and quickly dismiss cases whenever friction is encountered. The only surprise here is a participating lawyer's opting out via lawsuit before the judicial (or federal) hammer comes down.

Filed Under: abuse, carl crowell, copyright, copyright trolling, dallas buyers club, james davis, the cobbler
Companies: millennium films, voltage pictures

Released Documents Show More Section 702 Violations By The NSA

from the wherein-NSA-PR-does-more-minimization-than-NSA-analysts dept

Always lawful and subject to strict oversight. Those are the NSA's defenses any time someone leaks something about its surveillance programs or obtains documents indicating abuse of snooping powers. It gets a little old when it's document after document showing the astonishing breadth of the NSA's surveillance programs or the continual abuse and misuse of these powers.

The Hill has dug through some recently-released documents and memos from the NSA which show long-term abuse of surveillance programs. The NSA recently ditched part of its Section 702 collection because it just couldn't stop hoovering up Americans' communications. This was "incidental," according to the NSA, and supposedly impossible to stop. But the incidents detailed in these documents suggest a lot of over-collection happened because no one noticed and, if anyone did, no one cared.

They detail specific violations that the NSA or FBI disclosed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the Justice Department's national security division during President Obama’s tenure between 2009 and 2016. The intelligence community isn't due to report on compliance issues for 2017, the first year under the Trump administration, until next spring.

The NSA says that the missteps amount to a small number — less than 1 percent — when compared to the hundreds of thousands of specific phone numbers and email addresses the agencies intercepted through the so-called Section 702 warrantless spying program created by Congress in late 2008.

This is about the only place where any American can become part of the "one percent:" as the unwitting subject of NSA surveillance. NSA spokesman Michael Halbig says evidence of misuse is a sign the oversight is working. But oversight is also supposed to aid in prevention, not just detection of past misuse. And the NSA's internal oversight isn't nearly as "robust" as Halbig attempts to portray it.

The Hill reviewed the new ACLU documents as well as compliance memos released by the NSA inspector general and identified more than 90 incidents where violations specifically cited an impact on Americans. Many incidents involved multiple persons, multiple violations or extended periods of time.

For instance, the government admitted improperly searching the NSA’s foreign intercept data on multiple occasions, including one instance in which an analyst ran the same search query about an American “every work day” for a period between 2013 and 2014.

The NSA also passed on intel to the FBI and CIA without properly minimizing it and made other dissemination errors. The documents show the NSA was also slow to inform other agencies of its minimization failures. Notification is supposed to made within five days of discovery, but in some cases it took the NSA more than three months to inform intel recipients of the error.

This information has been released at a critical time for the NSA. Section 702 powers are sunsetting this year and could be subject to additional modifications prior to their renewal. The FBI --perhaps even more than the NSA -- is looking for a clean reauthorization of Section 702 programs. This administration favors a clean re-auth, which means complaints about a 1% violation rate aren't likely to change anyone's mind. But 1% of several hundred million yearly searches is still a very large number of violations. If Google or Microsoft suffered a breach affecting the privacy of 1% of its users, it would be a huge problem even if the number of affected accounts amounted to a rounding error.

Former House Intelligence Committee Chair Pete Hoekstra -- a former surveillance state cheerleader -- now worries the NSA's collection powers have increased far past the point of reason. As he points, 1% simply isn't an acceptable failure rate.

“One percent or less sounds great, but the truth is 1 percent of my credit card charges don’t come back wrong every month. And in my mind one percent is pretty sloppy when it can impact Americans’ privacy.”

Filed Under: abuse, nsa, privacy, section 702, surveillance

Our Response To Titan Note Sending A Frivolous Takedown Notice Over Our Critical Coverage

from the censorious-thuggery dept

We've written two separate stories about the Titan Note -- a small recording/transcription device that was originally sold via a crowdfunding project at IndieGogo. It was an interesting device, that immediately generated a fair bit of press -- though that included some reasonable skepticism about whether or not the product could really do what it claimed it could do (especially since many other larger companies couldn't seem to produce similar voice recognition capabilities, despite putting tremendous resources towards it). I still backed the project hoping that maybe it was legit. The good press still beat out the few skeptical posts and the campaign initially raised over $1 million dollars. However, soon after the project closed, IndieGogo canceled the campaign (perhaps due to a group of online skeptics contacting them) and refunded everyone's money, saying that that Titan Note had violated its terms. We reported on this not because of the project being canceled, but because in discussing the cancellation, the Verge also noted that Titan Note had sent a bogus DMCA notice over its skeptical story -- and writing about censorious DMCA takedowns is pretty common around here.

Last week we wrote about Titan Note again, following what the company did after IndieGogo shut it down. Our post highlighted a number of other sketchy moves by the company, including blaming IndieGogo (and promising to sue the company for unspecified reasons). Then there was the second crowdfunding platform that also canceled a Titan Note campaign. And the fact that Titan Note kept deleting the fairly innocuous questions I asked on its Facebook page, which were just about trying to understand the real reasons for getting kicked off IndieGogo (and for sending the bogus DMCA notice). As part of this I also sent Erik Jansson, the guy behind Titan Note, an emailed list of questions.

Rather than respond... he sent a DMCA takedown notice to us in response.

In that last post, we included screenshots of Titan Notes' comments on Facebook. We showed the screenshots specifically because Titan Note had a history of deleting others' Facebook comments, and I feared that the company might delete its own embarrassing statements. Similarly, we posted a closely cropped image of Titan Note's own website to show the questionable claim it makes about how the product raised over $1.1 million with 12,000 backers via crowdfunding. That claim is highly misleading, given that the project was canceled and Titan Note never received that money. Its website certainly appears to imply otherwise.

The DMCA notice claims that all of these screenshots are infringing:

The website https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?company=titan+note is using our images without our permission. All of the images in the article are stolen from our Facebook page and our website. They are also using our trademarked name "Titan Note" without our permission. The have also stolen many quotes and paragraphs from our Facebook page and included that in the article. This is a clear violation of the law and we urge you to remove the link immediately.

Obviously, our use of these images and the Titan Note name is fair use. It's not even remotely in question. The images were not "stolen" -- we took screenshots to include with significant commentary for the purpose of news reporting. This is exactly what fair use is designed to cover. The only reason to send this kind of takedown notice is to try to intimidate or silence critical reporting of Titan Note. Indeed, with a third critical article written by someone else also receiving a DMCA takedown over screenshots, it seems that Titan Note is repeatedly trying to abuse the DMCA to censor criticism.

If you are still backing Titan Note (now doing pre-sales on its own site), I would suggest considering whether or not you trust a company that feels the need to send bogus takedown notices to anyone even moderately critical of its products or actions.

In the meantime, we've retained lawyer Ken "Popehat" White to handle this matter, and he has responded to Jansson's takedown notice as follows:

Dear Mr. Jansson,

This firm is litigation counsel to Floor64, Inc., which owns and operates the site Techdirt.com (“Techdirt”). I write in response to your email of May 26, 2017 to Mike Masnick of Floor64.

I will ignore the procedural deficiencies in your purported DMCA notice and address the lack of substance. Your assertion that Techdirt has violated Titan Technologies, LLC’s (“Titan”) intellectual property rights is astoundingly frivolous and represents a transparent attempt to suppress negative news coverage through vexatious legal threats. It will fail. Techdirt’s coverage of Titan’s conduct is clearly protected by applicable law.

Even assuming for the sake of argument that Titan has a protected intellectual property interest in its public Facebook comments, Techdirt’s coverage is classic fair use protected by Title 17, United States Code, section 107. Techdirt has reported and displayed those comments for the purposes of criticism, comment, and news reporting. Your claimed trademark violation is equally meritless. Techdirt has used Titan’s name not to compete with Titan, but to identity Titan in order to report on its conduct. That’s self-evidently nominative fair use. New Kids on the Block v. News Am. Pub., Inc., 971 F.2d 302, 307 (9th Cir. 1992).

Your bogus claims, threatened to deter news coverage, are exactly the sort that lead to courts awarding attorney fees to defendants. Should you file an action, you should expect me to seek attorney fees, win them, and pursue you personally for them wherever you may retreat. Floor64 also reserves its right to seek damages for abuse of the DMCA under, for instance, Title 17, United States Code, section 512(f).

Please direct any further communications, including further bumptious legal threats, to me.

Very truly yours,

Ken White

Filed Under: abuse, censorship, copyfraud, copyright, dmca, erik jansson, ken white, notice and takedown, titan note, trademark
Companies: indiegogo, titan note

Latest FISA Court Order Details Why NSA Didn't Get Any 702 Requests Approved Last Year

from the hint:-a-datacenter's-worth-of-noncompliance dept

The latest document dump by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) -- which contains several documents pried loose by an ACLU FOIA lawsuit -- explains why the NSA ran through the entirety of 2016 without an approved Section 702 request from the FISA court. The short answer is a whole lot of noncompliance. So's the long answer:

After submitting its 2016 Certifications in September 2016, the Department of Justice and ODNI learned, in October 2016, about additional information related to previously reported compliance incidents and reported that additional information to the FISC. The NSA also self-reported the information to oversight bodies, as required by law. These compliance incidents related to the NSA’s inadvertent use of U.S. person identifiers to query NSA’s “upstream” Internet collection acquired pursuant to Section 702.

Pursuant to statutory requirements, the FISC was required to complete its review of the 2016 Certifications within 30 days of submission. See 50 U.S.C. § 1881a(i)(1)(B). Thus, the FISC had until October 26, 2016, to issue an order concerning the 2016 Certifications. However, after the October 2016 report to the FISC regarding improper queries, the FISC twice extended its time to consider the 2016 Certifications – first until January 31, 2017, and then until April 28, 2017 – in order to receive additional information about the compliance incidents and the Government’s plan to address them. See April 2017 Opinion at 3-4. The previous year’s certifications remained in effect during these extension periods.

Of note here is the fact that the court allowed 2015's certifications to remain in place despite even more reports of noncompliance by the NSA. Section 702 has been steadily abused, inadvertently or deliberately, since its inception in 2008 as part of the FISA Amendments Act.

Because the court was extremely hesitant to approve new searches under this authority, the agency apparently undertook a comprehensive overhaul of the program. The end result was the shutdown of the "about" collection -- an upstream dragnet for email communications that tended to grab a bunch of US persons' communications -- ones the NSA supposedly couldn't figure out how to separate from its non-domestic data.

The latest FISC opinion [PDF] -- roughly a month old at this point -- finally gives the NSA a 702 court order it can include in its next transparency report. The opinion doesn't spend much time chastising the agency for its long-running compliance issues but at least provides more examples of how little the NSA has done to prevent internal abuse of its collections. This abuse also includes the FBI, which has access to the NSA's raw, unminimized 702 data.

Since 2011, minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collection under Section 702. The October 26, 2016 Notice informed the Court that NSA had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court… The government reported that the NSA IG and OCO were conducting other reviews covering different time periods, with preliminary results suggesting that the problem was widespread during all periods under review.

At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government's failure to disclose those IG and COO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional "lack of candor" on part and emphasized that "this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue."

Some of the compliance issues could be traced back to the NSA's querying system, which seemed built to ensure as many compliance issues as possible.

The January 3, 2017 Notice stated that "human error was the primary factor" in these incidents, but also suggested that system design issues contributed. For example, some systems that are used to query multiple datasets simultaneously required to "opt-out" of querying Section 702 upstream Internet data rather than requiring an affirmative "opt-in," which, in the Court's view, would have been more conducive to compliance.

The report also details further issues with the NSA and its data-sharing, including a heavily-redacted retelling of compliance issues at the FBI concerning dissemination of unminimized US persons' info (including to government contractors). While steps have now been put in place to prevent a recurrence, the court notes the government has routinely dragged its feet providing notice of misuse of surveillance databases.

Too often, however, the government fails to meet its obligation to provide prompt notification to the FISC when non-compliance is discovered. For example, it is unpersuasive to attribute -- even "in part" -- an eleven-month delay in submitting a preliminary notice to efforts to develop remedial steps… when the purpose of a preliminary notice is to advise the Court while investigation or remediation is still ongoing… The Court intends to monitor closely the timeliness of the government's reporting of non-compliance regarding Section 702 implementation.

And so it goes for 99 pages. Multiple compliance violations, multiple promises to do better next time by the government, and a handful of mild admonitions by the FISA judge. The most useful thing to come of this is the voluntary step the NSA took to end its "about" collection program, thus narrowing the number of incidentally-collected US persons' communications. While the court approves of this move, its approval means very little should the NSA decide to revive the program. Considering its lengthy run of compliance issues, it seems unlikely the agency will be in any hurry to defend a rollback of its rollback in a court that's heard about nothing but misuse and abuse of domestic communications for most of the last decade.

Filed Under: abuse, fisa court, fisc, nsa, section 702, surveillance

The Ousting Of Trump's National Security Advisor Shows Just How Dangerous 'Lawful' Domestic Surveillance Is

from the we-got-dirt-on-millions-of-Americans dept

Those who thought the domestic surveillance Ed Snowden exposed was perfectly acceptable and lawful are finding it much harder to stomach with Trump in charge. The Lawfare blog, which routinely hosts articles supportive of government surveillance activities, has taken on a new tone over the past few months. The lesson being learned: if a power can only be trusted in certain people's hands, then it really can't be trusted in anyone's. This belated realization is better than none, but one wonders if the drastic change in tone would have followed an election that put Hillary Clinton in the White House.

That's not to say the first month of Trump's presidency has borne any resemblance to a "peaceful transition of power." The federal government isn't just leaking. It's hemorrhaging. Underneath the recent ouster of Mike Flynn, Trump's former National Security Advisor, is something disturbing.

What's disturbing isn't the surveillance -- although in "normal" circumstances it might be. Flynn was dumped because recorded phone calls captured him discussing sanctions with Russian officials. This domestic surveillance isn't unheard of. The fact that this information -- including the content of the calls -- was leaked to the public is more notable.

Calls to foreign officials are fair game for US surveillance efforts. The last-minute removal of restraints on sharing unminimized US persons data/communications by the Obama administration just served to ensure Flynn's calls would end up in the hands of multiple federal agencies. The timing of the loosened restrictions is worth noting though, as Marcy Wheeler does in this post about the Flynn ouster.

Finally, remember that for a great deal of SIGINT, FBI wouldn’t need a warrant. That’s because Obama changed the EO 12333 sharing rules just 4 days after the IC started getting really suspicious about Flynn’s contacts with Russia. That would make five years of intercepts available to FBI without a warrant in any counterintelligence cases, as this one is.

But what Lawfare's Adam Klein is concerned with isn't the sharing of unminimized communications between agencies. As he points out in his post, all of that's perfectly legal. What he's more concerned with is the actions of the intelligence community, which has made all of this public.

[T]his case illustrates why surveillance law treats U.S.-person information with the same healthy fear we associate with nuclear waste and biohazard material—that is, with the vigilance reserved for things that are inherently dangerous if not closely guarded. As Eli Lake wrote this week in Bloomberg View, selective leaking of U.S.-person information “gives the permanent state” (or political appointees entrusted with the information) “the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity.” Even if not leaked to the press, such information can be misused: J. Edgar Hoover and his subordinates infamously used salacious information gleaned from FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr., to pressure King to retreat from public life.

That's what's happening and that's a cause for concern. The NSA and others have always had these powers, but we were assured they wouldn't be abused. In this case, the abuse isn't in the collection or dissemination (all of it now "lawful"), but in the use of leaked information to kick out a National Security Advisor.

Trump has made few friends in the intelligence community since he became president, comparing the CIA to Nazis and making comments about unprofessional behavior. The problem for Trump is he's fighting with agencies particularly well-armed to take him down. But that's not what we want from our intelligence agencies. They're not tools of government accountability. They're tools for totalitarianism restrained only by oversight and a rigorous set of rules. (I mean, in theory...) But the IC appears to be ignoring the checks and balances put in place to guard against the destruction of the government's head by its body.

It's one thing to cheer for the public flailing of a President you don't like. It's quite another to cheer on the dangerous, easily-abusable network of domestic surveillance that makes it possible.

So, the issue here is more the leaks than the surveillance. The surveillance has its own problems, but the willingness to leak information damaging to US persons -- even if it prevented someone who possibly shouldn't be a National Security Advisor from keeping his job -- is a disturbing indicator of just how much power these agencies (at least 16 of them) now wield, thanks to information sharing.

The other problem is the hypocritical way Trump and his supporters are dealing with the leaked info. Trump wants an investigation to uncover the source of the leaks. Fair enough (albeit somewhat hypocritical, given his love of Wikileaks...). But the House Oversight Committee and Trump himself have no interest in taking a deeper look into the allegations against Mike Flynn. Nonsensically, House Oversight Committee head Devin Nunes said the recording of the phone calls was itself "disturbing." This is something someone involved in intelligence oversight should already know is a perfectly lawful interception under statutes he helps shape and define.

It's a dangerous time to be a whistleblower, as the administration appears far more interested in going after leaks it doesn't like than potentially-illegal behavior by its own staff. And it's just as dangerous to be the target of intelligence committee animosity. No more dangerous than it's always been, but in recent days, we've been given a pretty clear picture of how quickly lawful surveillance can ruin a person's life.

Filed Under: abuse, domestic surveillance, mike flynn, nsa, politics, surveillance

Oversight Board Spares NYPD's Feelings By Softening Language In Taser Complaint Report

from the say-a-prayer-for-the-people-in-power dept

The NYPD's estranged relationship with its oversight continues. The Civilian Complaint Review Board -- put into place after it became apparent the NYPD wasn't interested in policing itself -- has noticed the department is vocally supportive of better policing, but has no interest in actually making any changes to the way it disciplines its officers.

The NYPD has yet to see a civilian complaint it can't make disappear and has almost always recommended a lesser punishment for misconduct than the Board has recommended. In controversial "chokehold" cases, the Board found the NYPD was completely uninterested in doing anything about officers' use of a tactic it has outlawed.

In those cases where CCRB substantiated chokeholds, recommended Administrative Charges, and DAO became involved, none of the substantiated cases ever went to trial before a NYPD Trial Commissioner. Instead, DAO departed from CCRB’s recommendation every time. Rather than pursue the more serious Administrative Charges, DAO recommended lesser penalties or no discipline whatsoever.

Despite being shown no respect by the NYPD, the CCRB has decided to protect the badged-and-armed delicate flower of the department by softening the language in its Taser use report before publication.

In the spring, an oversight agency for the New York Police Department circulated a draft report on the use of Taser stun guns. The report highlighted “troubling” findings and issued stern recommendations: The police should create an annual report on the use of Tasers and prohibit their use on handcuffed suspects.

But the latter recommendation was removed from the final version of the report, quietly released in October by the agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, with no formal announcement. The other was removed from the executive summary and relegated to the report’s final page.

The agency also removed language highlighting what police reform advocates and civil liberties groups later said was the board’s central finding: In most Taser encounters reviewed, officers used the stun guns on people who were unarmed.

What the CCRB found wasn't encouraging. The NYPD already has a troubled history of Taser misuse. Not much is made of it because Taser deployment in the force is severely limited. But the NYPD's ability to make even a small number of civilian complaints vanish into the ether remains unchanged. The New York Times highlights the report's findings, which are disturbing and have remained unaltered.

Over the period studied in the report, from 2014 through 2015, the board’s investigators conducted full investigations of 51 of the 153 complaints filed and substantiated only three of them.

The other 102 fell by the wayside because the complainants failed to cooperate with the investigation. Perhaps some of them felt the outcome would be no different than the 94% that did make it all the way through the process. Perhaps some had outstanding warrants, unpaid tickets, a general disinterest in interacting with law enforcement, or whatever. But with only six percent of complaints being substantiated, the outcome of the NYPD's internal efforts are par for the course: lots of complaints, almost zero repercussions.

But just as disheartening is the fact that the CCRB edited its report to ensure the NYPD wouldn't even feel the weight of PRINTED WORDS.

The alterations to the report run throughout and appear to play down the findings — which remain unchanged — and remove language that could be considered charged or critical of the Police Department.

This is an organization with an inordinate amount of power -- both over the people it serves as well as the politicians that ostensibly control its budget and activities. Specific edits were made to turn the report into something as proactively exonerative as statements made by the NYPD itself in the wake of excessive force allegations. Police brass say things like "the officer's gun discharged." The CCRB -- post-editing -- says things like this:

[T]he draft report found that “there is also evidence” that Tasers were being used in response to unruly or obstinate behavior by suspects. That phrase was changed in the final version to say that “there is concern.”

Also excised was the Board's "troubling" finding that Taser deployment often occurred when suspects were already in custody. The stat -- 30% of the time -- remains. The word "troubling" is nowhere to be found. Another sentence was removed completely, apparently out of concern the NYPD might react badly to it.

"[A] review of several of the police custody complaints supports the perception that the Tasing may have occurred unnecessarily."

The NYPD needs to be subjected to strong language that draws attention unavoidably to its use of excessive force. This is the sort of thing the NYPD finds to be "appropriate" Taser use.

Mr. Sells said in an interview that during the discovery phase of the lawsuit, he learned that two separate officers used Tasers on Mr. Paul, striking him a total of 13 times — six by one officer; seven by the other — over the course of 41 seconds.

Anthony Paul is dead. He was 29 years old when he died in NYPD custody. The NYPD brushed off accusations of excessive force with the above "appropriate" statement, as well as the excuse that the Tasers failed to deliver even more electricity to the eventual corpse of Mr. Paul.

"...not all of the “activations” resulted “in actual electrical circuit charge transmissions.”

A government entity that has the power to kill civilians who do not immediately subject themselves to an arrest is apparently too weak to handle direct criticism of its actions. The Board has wiped any implications from its findings, leaving the stats to speak for themselves. The facts aren't pretty, but the NYPD has no problem ignoring hard numbers and incontrovertible facts. But it must be protected from any insinuations that its use of force is sometimes too much… or occasionally unjustifiable.

Filed Under: abuse, ccrb, nypd, oversight, police, taser

Yes, Police Are Snooping Through Criminal Databases For Personal Reasons All The Time

from the as-long-as-zero-fucks-are-given,-nothing-will-change dept

The more journalists and other FOIA enthusiasts gain access to public records, the more we discover that a combination of access and power tends to result in abuse. Even as this abuse goes unaddressed, law enforcement agencies are striving to add more personal information to their databases, extending far past the usual "name/last known location" to encompass a vast array of biometric data.

Privacy watchdogs have been fighting against these for good reason: very little is known about the contents of these databases or the controls put in place to protect the info from inappropriate access. What is known is that these databases are misused by law enforcement officers routinely. What's also been discovered is that this routine misuse is rarely ever punished to the extent the law allows. Warnings about possible jail time are meaningless when the usual punishment usually ranges from nothing at all to short suspensions.

The Associated Press has obtained another pile of documents from public records request that show little has changed. Abuse of access is still a common occurrence, as is the lack of meaningful consequences. There's no almost no oversight and no federal law enforcement body holding agencies accountable for misuse of databases under their control.

No single agency tracks how often the abuse happens nationwide, and record-keeping inconsistencies make it impossible to know how many violations occur.

But the AP, through records requests to state agencies and big-city police departments, found law enforcement officers and employees who misused databases were fired, suspended or resigned more than 325 times between 2013 and 2015. They received reprimands, counseling or lesser discipline in more than 250 instances, the review found.

Unspecified discipline was imposed in more than 90 instances reviewed by AP. In many other cases, it wasn't clear from the records if punishment was given at all. The number of violations was surely far higher since records provided were spotty at best, and many cases go unnoticed.

What was uncovered from the incomplete set of records is the expected behavior. Give someone access to a wealth of other people's personal information and it will be used for personal reasons. Law enforcement officers have misused the databases to stalk and harass exes, look up women they find attractive, and to search for something to discredit journalists and other critics.

Violations frequently arise from romantic pursuits or domestic entanglements, including when a Denver officer became acquainted with a hospital employee during a sex-assault investigation, then searched out her phone number and called her at home. A Mancos, Colorado, marshal asked co-workers to run license plate checks for every white pickup truck they saw because his girlfriend was seeing a man who drove a white pickup, an investigative report shows.

In Florida, a Polk County sheriff's deputy investigating a battery complaint ran driver's license information of a woman he met and then messaged her unsolicited through Facebook.

Officers have sought information for purely personal purposes, including criminal records checks of co-workers at private businesses. A Phoenix officer ran searches on a neighbor during the course of a longstanding dispute. A North Olmsted, Ohio, officer pleaded guilty this year to searching for a female friend's landlord and showing up in the middle of the night to demand the return of money he said was owed her.

Most abuse of law enforcement databases goes undiscovered. The systems generally have no way to tell appropriate use from inappropriate use. Officials who did agree to speak on the record noted that the usual indication of misuse tends to be complaints filed by those targeted by the illegal searches. And that generally only happens when officers perform other illegal or abusive actions, like the previously-mentioned stalking and harassment.

Any attempt to quantify these illegal searches is likely fruitless for the time being. The police haven't shown much interest in policing themselves, and the DOJ has never floated the idea of collecting data on database misuse. Violations are not required to be reported to the FBI. That agency performs spot checks of database requests, but uses a small sampling and the audits are far from comprehensive. Even when records do exist, law enforcement agencies are reluctant to release them. Several records requests by the AP were denied.

On top of that, laws covering access to law enforcement databases vary from locality to locality, and even at the federal level, the issue of illegal vs. inappropriate still hasn't been conclusively determined. The DOJ often displays tremendous enthusiasm when wielding the CFAA against citizens for "unauthorized access," but seems far less willing to do so when law enforcement officers use criminal databases for personal reasons.

It's almost impossible to deter inappropriate behavior when nearly everyone involved takes a hands off approach to the issue. Trying nothing obviously isn't working. And the more that's harvested by the government under the auspices of law enforcement, the more data there is available to be abused.

This is just another item in a long list of law enforcement abuses that has gone unaddressed for decades now -- either internally or by the federal government. Trust is something that's earned. Trust shouldn't just be handed over, and that level should deteriorate as abuse is exposed, rather than remain unchanged. But that's not what has happened over the years. Instead, law enforcement agencies benefit from a perpetual benefit of a doubt. The end result is obvious: agencies and their employees have no problem abusing trust because they've expended no effort in "earning" it.

Filed Under: abuse, databases, law enforcement, police, privacy, spying

Twitter Suspends YouTube Phenom PewDiePie For Making A Stupid ISIS Joke

from the giant-circle-of-stupidity dept

Most of the time, you can say pretty much whatever you'd like on Twitter without the company actually bothering to enforce its harassment and online abuse policies. Think it's funny to threaten to rape somebody? Twitter this week informed Medium software engineer Kelly Ellis this was perfectly ok. Want to hurl racist threats like a lobotomized halfwit? Cool! Is flinging anti-semitic insults more your cup of tea? No problem! Over the last year, you'd be hard pressed to find somebody not talking about how inconsistent and arbitrary Twitter's ban hammer is.

Swedish YouTube phenom PewDiePie found this out the hard way this week after his account -- followed by 47 million Twitter users -- suddenly up and disappeared briefly from the social networking service without explanation:Well, not entirely. According to one of his videos he unverified his own account to protest the admitted pointlessness of the verified process, which itself is often arbitrary.But before that video explanation was posted, a parody Sky News account (unverified, for whatever it's worth) proclaimed that the Youtube star had been unverified because he joined ISIS:That in turn resulted in the "star" making the joke that he'd joined the violent extremist group (has this gotten stupid yet or is it just me?):All told, it's believed this Tweet, possibly combined with the parody reference, somehow triggered the suspension at Twitter, which speaks volumes about Twitter's threshold for suspension as it tries to crack down on ISIS' influence on social media. Last month Twitter proclaimed it had shut down 360,000 Twitter accounts for being tied to terrorism, but this latest flub again raises questions about whether the company actually has a solid handle on what it's doing.

Twitter refuses to comment on this or any of its other seemingly-drunk enforcement behaviors, but the company's inconsistency on this front has been on proud display for some time, and the message being sent is anything but clear. Something about how it's ok to threaten to rape and kill women and people of color, but don't joke about ISIS, and whatever you do -- don't post animated gifs of the Olympics:If Twitter doesn't want to begin rivaling some of the great arbitrary shitshows of our age (like oh, Apple's app store approval process) the company needs to get ahead of the problem quickly. Sources told Bloomberg last week that the company was consulting with "an outside council of anti-harassment groups" as it experiments with keyword filters the company hopes gives users more control of violent vitriol aimed in their direction. It also hopes to offer an announcement on improvements to its harassment policy and enforcement.

In the interim, to be safe, you may just want to avoid humor entirely.

Filed Under: abuse, arbitrary, jokes, pewdiepie, suspensions, terrorism
Companies: twitter

Twitter Suspends Hundreds Of Thousands Of Terrorist Accounts, Gives Everyone Its 'Quality Filter'

from the today-twitter-settles-all-its-business dept

Twitter's had a bit of a busy day. It made two big announcements within an hour, first saying that it had suspended 235,000 accounts since February for "promoting terrorism." It followed that up by announcing that it was opening up its "quality filter" for everyone. The quality filter used to only be available to "verified accounts" and was apparently one of the few actual benefits for being a "verified" account. Here's how Twitter explains it:

When turned on, the filter can improve the quality of Tweets you see by using a variety of signals, such as account origin and behavior. Turning it on filters lower-quality content, like duplicate Tweets or content that appears to be automated, from your notifications and other parts of your Twitter experience. It does not filter content from people you follow or accounts you’ve recently interacted with – and depending on your preferences, you can turn it on or off in your notifications settings.

From people who have it, they've indicated that it can do a decent, but not perfect, job in blocking purely trollish behavior. However, I still think that my own suggestion from last week makes more sense: rather than building a universal algorithm like this, give every user the tools to build their own quality filters (and to share the "recipes" of those filters). Not everyone has the same determination of what "quality" is. It's fine if Twitter wants to offer its own such filter, but why not open it up and let anyone create quality filters to use and share?

As for the removal of terrorist accounts, this still feels kind of pointless. Twitter talks about how it's getting faster at removing these accounts, and they're not able to build up many followers before they're shut down again, making Twitter a less useful platform for terrorist or terrorist supporters to use. But, again, if we think about Twitter as a protocol like email or a system like the telephone, this feels... weird. No one's clamoring for "we must stop ISIS from making phone calls." Besides, the intelligence community has said, repeatedly, that they get good intel from watching ISIS' social media activity. Shutting down their accounts may seem like a good thing (no one wants ISIS using their technology...), but what if it's actually making it more difficult for the intelligence community to track them?

Filed Under: abuse, isis, quality filter, social media, terrorism, trolls
Companies: twitter