Take Picture Of Your 4-Year-Old Daughter Eating Ice Cream... Get Investigated Under Terrorism Act [Updated]

from the the-new-face-of-terror dept

We've covered plenty of ridiculous stories concerning police going after photographers lately, but this one is a bit different. As a whole bunch of you have sent in, at a mall in Scotland, Chris White took a photograph of his 4-year-old daughter eating ice cream at an ice cream stand. However, the mall apparently has a "no photographs" law, and workers at the ice cream stand were supposedly "suspicious," and called security... who called the police, after White refused to delete the photos on his phone (and noted that they'd already been uploaded to Facebook). The police then questioned him under the UK Terrorism Act, saying that they could confiscate his mobile phone. To everyone's credit, the situation didn't escalate and he was left alone (and not made to turn over the phone). But, just the fact that it went that far seems crazy. How difficult is it to recognize a common scene of a father taking a photo of his daughter eating ice cream?

Of course, the attention that this has received resulted in the mall changing its official policy

Update: Important update to this story. While the mall has apologized, the police are hinting very strongly that White's account is not accurate, and that there was some other (unnamed) activity that was the reason he was investigated...

It is because Mr White chose to seek publicity for his account of events and because of the planned demonstration that we feel compelled to take the unusual step of making our findings public.

“In reaching our conclusions, officers took statements from a number of independent witnesses and viewed the substantial amount of CCTV that was available in the centre.

“On reviewing all of this objective evidence, I have to tell you that we can find no basis to support the complaint which MrWhite has elected to make.

“The members of the public who asked for the security staff to become involved have told us that they did so for reasons which had absolutely nothing to do with him taking photographs of his daughter. They had a very specific concern, which I am not in a position to discuss publicly, that they felt the need to report. It was because of this very specific concern that security staff became involved. They were right to raise their concern and we are glad that they did so.

“The security staff were the ones who asked for police involvement. Again, this was not because Mr White said he had been photographing his daughter, but was due to the concerns that they themselves had regarding this particular incident.

Filed Under: photos, terrorism, uk

FBI Successful In Breaking Up Yet Another Of Its Own Plots To Bomb The US

from the what-an-amazing-track-record dept

We've discussed this a few times in the past, but the FBI's main counter-terrorism initiative these days appears to be centered around creating its own terrorist plots to thwart. First, they find clueless, easily manipulated people (frequently young and Muslim), who have no actual connections with terrorists. Then, they concoct entire terrorism plots, where every other person is an FBI agent, and any tools, "weapons" and money are supplied by the FBI. Finally, they "bust" the guy just before he carries out the plot that never would have happened anyway, because it's not like the FBI would supply the actual weapons. We see this pattern again and again -- and each time the press uncritically hypes up how the FBI successfully stopped a real "homegrown" terrorist.

Of course, it's happened once again, and the basic plotlines are identical to ones in the past. And, of course, the press is describing it like it was an actual terrorist plot, pretending that people was actually at risk. Glenn Greenwald's summary of this and other cases is pretty spot on:

None of these cases entail the FBI's learning of an actual plot and then infiltrating it to stop it. They all involve the FBI's purposely seeking out Muslims (typically young and impressionable ones) whom they think harbor animosity toward the U.S. and who therefore can be induced to launch an attack despite having never taken even a single step toward doing so before the FBI targeted them. Each time the FBI announces it has disrupted its own plot, press coverage is predictably hysterical (new Homegrown Terrorist caught!), fear levels predictably rise, and new security measures are often implemented in response (the FBI's Terror plot aimed at the D.C. Metro, for instance, led to the Metro Police announcing a new policy of random searches of passengers' bags).

Now, I'm sure some will argue that these efforts highlight those who may be pre-disposed to taking part in such activities if given the chance for real. But in the US, I thought we didn't believe in arresting people for crimes that they're pre-disposed to doing if they haven't actually done them. On top of that, with the FBI providing most of the actual plot here, it's difficult to see how this isn't a classical case of entrapment. Finally, it's not clear what good this really does. Putting people who had no real means of attacking the US in jail isn't likely to scare off anyone else.

It also makes you wonder if the FBI shouldn't be spending more time trying to stop actual plots that involve people who have the means to actually hurt people, rather than these plots which have exactly 0% chance of causing any harm.

Filed Under: fbi, plots, terrorism

British Transport Police: Illegal Downloading Kills Babies [Updated]

from the suspiciously-convenient-logic dept

Update: Apparently this is a parody of the actual ad, which is only slightly less ridiculous...

The British Transport Police's newest anti-terrorism campaign focusses on… illegal downloading? That seems to be the case, based on this billboard, as tweeted this weekend by @case_hardened: In case you can't see it, the billboard features a picture of a small crowd in an outdoor shopping area - and at the center, a mom with adorable baby. The text of the billboard reads:

"A bomb won't go off here because weeks before the criminal pirating films was caught by monitoring his internet history. Pirating films funds terrorism and organized crime. Report it today.
Confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline
Call 0800 789 321"

The logic is a bit difficult to follow, but the message is clear: if you are against the government monitoring your internet use, you are for killing babies.

We've been hearing for a while that counterfeit goods, including DVDs, software, and even handbags, fund terrorism, but it doesn't follow that an individual illegally downloading movies from the internet is helping terrorists. And it sure doesn't follow that monitoring individuals' internet use for illegal downloads is going to stop terrorists. On the whole, I think this campaign by the British Transport Police may have the opposite of the effect intended - the "Confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline" is going to be bogged down with reports of copyright violations instead of tips about actual terrorist activities.

Filed Under: file sharing, terrorism, uk

Wasn't The PATRIOT Act Supposed To Be About Stopping Terrorism?

from the oh-look dept

The PATRIOT Act was all about stopping terrorism, right? We were told that special provisions that ate away at our civil liberties were needed specifically to catch dangerous terrorists -- and that the reason for such an abdication of our rights had nothing to do with simply giving the government more useful surveillance powers. Aaron DeOliveira points us to a fascinating chart that shows how often law enforcement has been using "sneak-and-peek" warrants. These warrants let officials search private property without letting the target of the investigation know. Again, we were told that these expanded powers were needed to stop terrorism. So what have they been used for? Take a look: Yup. They're all pretty much being used in drug cases. Now some might make the argument that it's important to go after drug dealers -- but that's not how the PATRIOT Act was supposed to be used.

Filed Under: drugs, law enforcement, patriot act, sneak and peek, terrorism

Finnish Police Respond To The Norwegian Tragedy By Increasing Internet Surveillance

from the another-attempt-to-prevent-the-unpreventable dept

In response to the tragedy in Norway, Finland law enforcement has decided to increase its internet surveillance in hopes of picking up "weak signals" that could possibly indicate a terrorist threat. As Cato's Jim Harper points out, this sort of thing just doesn't work:

...random violence (terrorist or otherwise) is not predictable and not "findable" in advance -- not if a free society is to remain free, anyway.

The problem with attacks like the shooting/bombing in Norway is that they are isolated instances. The shock and horror of the event tends to overwhelm the common sense of politicians, law enforcement and the press itself, leading to unfortunate efforts like these, often combined with commentary from ad hoc armchair quarterbacks whose hindsight is endless but whose foresight is severely restricted.

The civil rights of citizens are trampled underfoot by politicians and law enforcement officials wishing to appear to be doing "something" to make their homelands safer. These "somethings" usually combine rush-job legislation with political theatrics, resulting in a hastily applied veneer of safety that extends the government's reach into the personal lives of its citizens.

We've seen it here in the US via the PATRIOT Act and the corresponding growth of the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA. Once a law gets on the books, it rarely gets removed. There may be discussions about oversight issues or possible detrimental effects, but bad legislation tends to be permanent.

The problem with an effort like Finland's is that there is only one guaranteed outcome to this effort: more internet surveillance. In light of Breivik's known interests, this heightened attention means anyone whose gaming choices include Call of Duty or World of Warcraft could possibly find themselves under surveillance. People with strong opinions on major world religions or political organizations could very well be flagged as possible suspects.

No one truly knows what they're looking for when they implement programs like these, and because of that, nearly anything can be considered "suspect." Even worse, this attack was characterized as pro-Islamic by the media before the information surfaced that Breivik was anti-Islamic. Knowing who's actually the "risky" party isn't always so clear, meaning that anyone can be the risky party. When you combine large amounts of speculation with the tendency of politicians to twist laws into vehicles of self-service, the originally well-meaning legislation soon becomes a weapon against any display of political or religious dissent:

As former FBI agent (and current ACLU policy counsel) Mike German advises, any ideology can become a target of the government if the national security bureaucracy comes to use political opinion or activism as a proxy or precursor for crime and terrorism.

It's very hard for anyone in power to respond to a horrific tragedy by doing nothing, but if the track record of post-terrorist-attack legislation is anything to go by, "nothing" would be a refreshing change.

Filed Under: civil rights, finland, internet, norway, surveillance, terrorism

Return To The Days Of Hoover's Enemy List? FBI Raiding Activists As Terrorists

from the shameful dept

Back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover running the FBI and Senator Joseph McCarthy accusing all sorts of people of various "un-American" activities, you ran the risk of being accused of all sorts of things just for disagreeing with the government. It seemed like those days were over, and I'd love to believe those days really are over, but Pickle Monger points us to the unfortunate news that the FBI has been raiding homes of various political activists, claiming that it's part of a terrorism investigation. Many of the targets of the raids seem like unlikely "terrorists," as they include peace/anti-war activists and union organizers. Whatever you think of their politics, we should certainly be worried when there's any sense that political viewpoints are getting wrapped up in any claims of a "terrorism" investigation. It seems like it's so easy to abuse that word to go after anyone who law enforcement doesn't like. You would hope that America would have learned from its past to avoid moves like this, so it's a shame to hear that it may still be ongoing.

Filed Under: activists, intimidation, law enforcement, terrorism

Who's Funding More Terrorism: Downloaders Or Hollywood?

from the questions-to-ask dept

We've written a few times now about the absolutely brilliant SSRC report on media "piracy," and how it's basically a business model problem, rather than a legal one. The report is thorough, detailed and rather complete on a variety of topics related to this issue. And while we might hope that such a fantastic piece of scholarly research could take certain silly arguments off the table, apparently that's wishful thinking. The main guy behind the report, Joe Karaganis, has recently posted some blog posts on the whole "terrorism" issue. You see, it's quite common for people pushing for greater copyright enforcement to make the claim that infringement funds terrorism and organized crime. We've attempted to debunk some of those claims in the past, but the SSRC folks did an amazingly thorough debunking (pdf) of the whole thing. Basically, it argues that, pre-internet, there was likely a connection between counterfeiting CDs/DVDs and organized crime, but that business has pretty much dried up thanks to the internet. So the claims of infringement funding such things is really lacking. A snippet:

Arguing that piracy is integral to such networks means ignoring the dramatic changes in the technology and organizational structure of the pirate market over the past decade. By necessity, evidentiary standards become very loose. Decades-old stories are recycled as proof of contemporary terrorist connections, anecdotes stand in as evidence of wider systemic linkages, and the threshold for what counts as organized crime is set very low. The RAND study, which reprises and builds on earlier IFPI and Interpol reporting, is constructed almost entirely around such practices. Prominent stories about IRA involvement in movie piracy and Hezbollah involvement in DVD and software piracy date, respectively, to the 1980s and 1990s. Street vendor networks in Mexico City--a subject we treat at length in the Mexico chapter--are mischaracterized as criminal gangs connected with the drug trade. Piracy in Russia is attributed to criminal mafias rather than to the chronically porous boundary between licit and illicit enterprise. The Pakistani criminal gang D-Company, far from "forging a clear pirate monopoly" in Bollywood, in RAND's words, plays a small and diminishing part in Indian DVD piracy--its smuggling networks dwarfed by local production.

The US record isn't more convincing in this regard. Jeffrey McIllwain examined the Department of Justice’s IP-related prosecutions between 2000 and 2004 and found that only 49 out of the 105 cases alleged that the defendant operated within larger, organized networks. Nearly all of these were "warez" distribution groups for pirated software--hacker communities that are explicitly and often fiercely non-commercial in orientation. McIllwain found "no overt references to professional organized crime groups" in any of the DOJ's criminal charges (McIllwain 2005:27). If organized crime is a serious problem in these contexts, it should not be difficult to produce a stronger evidentiary record.

And yet... despite all of this, Business Week recently published an MPAA propaganda piece, once again asserting the link. What was even more troubling is that they did this after talking to Karaganis, who explained to them why the MPAA's claims were pure bunk. The reporter ran the story anyway. It's almost as if Business Week and/or the reporter, Mike White, had the story they wanted and it was going to get published no matter what the evidence actually says. Whereas White's report claims:

Lax enforcement and high profit margins have made trafficking in counterfeit DVDs a flourishing side business for drug smugglers and crime rings worldwide. Russian gangsters and Mexican drug cartels such as Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana, Chinese gangs, and even former members of Northern Ireland’s Irish Republican Army have all piled in to the lucrative business in the past decade, according to Robinson. “The scope of organized crime in home-video piracy is enormous,” he says.

Karaganis retorts with what the evidence actually shows, that the "high profit margins" in that business have been eroded by the internet and the criminals are leaving this business in droves:

Much closer to the truth would be that they piled out of the business in the past decade as profit margins on pirated CDs and DVDs collapsed. We see no evidence that DVD piracy is still a high margin business, nor does the story provide any. Rather, our work documents that pirate prices have fallen dramatically as burners became cheap in the early 2000s and, more recently, as non-commercial internet-based file sharing began to displace DVD piracy. In this context, Mexico has one of the most competitive pirate DVD markets documented in our study, with widespread, small-scale cottage industry production and retail DVD prices routinely under a dollar. Criminals, as we’ve noted more than once, now have to compete with free.

Then we have the second Karaganis blog post, in which he notes that the Gadhafi family (mainly via Muamar's son Saadi) has invested about $100 million in big Hollywood movies, including the Adrian Brody/Forrest Whittaker film, The Experiment. This would be the same Saadi Gadhafi accused of ordering Libyan soldiers to shoot protesting civilians. Not surprisingly, this whole "shooting civilians" thing is causing some problems for the Hollywood folks relying on his money.

If we're going to worry about movie money going to fund questionable activities, wouldn't it make sense to focus on the actual connections, rather than the mythical ones the industry has dreamed up?

Filed Under: infringement, movies, terrorism

Wikileaks Leak Suggests Hollywood Is Better At Preventing Terrorism Than The TSA

from the winning-the-hearts-and-minds dept

While it seems like US politicians keep insisting that Wikileaks' release of State Department cables has put people in harm's way -- despite a lack of evidence to support that -- some are pointing out that at least some of the cables actually show that some of what the US is doing in the Middle East has been quite effective. Prashanth points us to the news that one of the leaks showed that American TV and movies in Saudi Arabia are actually "are doing more to dissuade young Muslims from becoming jihadists than virtually anything else." As the cable noted: "Saudis are now very interested in the outside world and everybody wants to study in the US if they can. They are fascinated by US culture in a way they never were before."

Of course, the same politicians blasting Wikileaks as a "terrorist" organization can't admit that some of the leaks are actually showing that some of what the US is doing is working quite well. As Prasanth notes in his own blog post, if US politicians were smart, they'd use cables like this to play up evidence that they're doing some things well:

I feel like this is along the lines of winning the people's "hearts and minds". The reason why this works is because as opposed to state-sponsored propaganda (which is pretty obvious when shown), this more subtly shows what's so great about the US.

Finally, I think this report is a great send-up of all the politicians who are equating Wikileaks with terrorism. Quite the contrary: while a lot of what it shows is what we've done wrong (and of course these politicians will hypocritically call for press freedom in other countries yet repress it here), it also shows a lot of what we've done right. Why not publicize that more?

Filed Under: entertainment, hearts and minds, hollywood, saudi arabia, terrorism, wikileaks
Companies: wikileaks

FBI 'Thwarts' Another Of Its Own Bomb Plots

from the that-sounds-like-fun dept

visual77 alerts us to the news of a guy arrested in Baltimore for a bomb plot. As you dig into the details, though, it looks quite similar to the case in Portland, where it appears that the entire "plot" was created with the help of the FBI. The guy was arrested for trying to blow up a military recruitment center -- with a fake bomb that was provided by the FBI. Obviously, it's not good to have people who are willing to blow stuff up, but with so many of these stories, you have to wonder if the FBI wouldn't be better off focusing on those who not only want to harm Americans, but who actually have the ability to do so. As it stands, it looks like the FBI is fabricating "plots" to thwart, rather than dealing with real threats.

Filed Under: fbi, plots, terrorism, threats

Terrorism And Risk Assessment In Comic Form

from the it's-funny-because... dept

Here's a quick one, via Julian Sanchez, who sums the following Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic up perfectly: "A short lesson on terrorism, risk assessment, & the availability heuristic" There are trade-offs to everything we do, and we're still way too focused on this idea of perfect security, while at the same time ignoring the much higher risks in other areas of our lives. This doesn't mean that you ignore risks such as terrorism, but you don't overreact to them. You look for effective solutions, not theatrical solutions.

Filed Under: risk assessment, statistics, terrorism