Desk Jockeying: FBI Puts Out The Call For 'Cyber Security Furniture'

from the bringing-the-war-to-work dept

If you're going to fight in the Cyber Front, you're going to want the most up-to-date office chairs. Here's an unlikely use of federal tax dollars, as spotted by the EFF's Dave Maass: "FBI Cyber Security Furniture."

Disappointingly, the FBI isn't actually looking for something along the lines of Matrix dental exam chairs for office drones to monitor... uh... multiple monitors during crucial cyber operations. Instead, the FBI is looking for standard office furniture to furnish its new Colorado cyber security office.

But the scope of work doc [PDF] indicates not just any office furniture will do. On the FBI's Cyber Titanic, reshuffle-ability of deck chairs is crucial.

The furniture solution for the workspace (individual and team) is expected to be adjustable, adaptable and easily interchangeable into different configurations as required by the work force.

[...]

Technology will be integrated at all levels of the project. Furniture must be adaptable to the continuously changing technology solutions required to maintain a collaborative, mobile, and sustainable work environment.

In total, the FBI is looking for 24 workstations, 30 office chairs, and an out-of-the-box "STEELCASE Private Office" [pictured below].

If any vendors carry something more cybertastic than what's described in the request, they are cordially disinvited from responding. The FBI is going sole-source and pouring federal dollars back into the local economy.

The General Services Administration has a new requirement that it intends to sole source for New Steelcase and Mayline Office Furniture from Officescapes, LLC a local dealer in Colorado.

The sole-source provider won't have it easy, though. The demands for bog standard office furniture are far more rigorous than most demands for off-the-shelf solutions. It needs to do far more than prevent FBI cyber warriors from having to perform their duties sitting on the carpet. The new furniture must also work as a "quality of life patch" for the field office. Here's part of a long list of things purchased furniture is expected to do:

• Improv[e] work/life balance
• Attract and retain the best talent

Hopefully no employees signed with the new Cyber Security office in hopes of being part of the office of the future. Team Cyber (Denver, CO) will be doing its work in the more familiar "office of the present," with all of its boring chairs, workstations, and conspicuous lack of monitor-covered walls.

Filed Under: cyber security furniture, fbi

Moving Beyond Backdoors To Solve The FBI's 'Going Dark' Problem

from the though-it-seems-the-FBI-should-be-doing-more-to-solve-it... dept

Former FBI Director James Comey stated on more than one occasion that he'd like to have an "adult conversation" about device encryption. He wasn't sincere. What he actually meant was he'd like to have all the "smart people" in the tech world solve his problems for him, either by capitulating to his requests for encryption backdoors or by somehow crafting the impossible: a secure backdoor.

Comey is gone, but his legacy lives on. The FBI wants to keep the "going dark" narrative alive. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has already asked Congress for $21 million in "going dark" money, supposedly to help the agency explore its options.

The problem is, the options could be explored for a much lower price. Kevin Bankston offers up a few solutions -- or at least a few improved adult conversational gambits -- for the low price of $free over at Lawfare. The starting point is Comey's "adult conversation" talking point. Bankston points out you can't hold an adult conversation if you refuse to act like one.

Recently in Slate I responded to Comey’s repeated calls for an “adult conversation” on this seemingly endless debate. I replied that an “adult conversation” means moving past any discussion of discouraging or undermining the deployment of unbreakable encryption, in light of the broad consensus outside of the FBI that such a move would be dangerously bad policy. Rather than continuing to argue about whether or how we might force encryption technology to adapt to law enforcement’s needs, our time would be better spent focusing on how we can help law enforcement adapt to the technology.

This is a point many have tried to make, but Comey refused to listen. Let's stop talking about crafting magical backdoors and accept the fact it just isn't possible. Once this is accepted, everyone can move on. Plenty of options remain for law enforcement and, with the exception of the usual post-terrorist attack calls for backdoors, no one is really pushing backdoor legislation. Legislators are well-aware of the fact that weakening encryption causes far more problems than it solves and asks citizens to sacrifice their safety and security for the good of the nation a single federal law enforcement agency.

Bankston moves the discussion forward by discussing three areas the FBI could explore. The first involves lawful device hacking, which uses exploits and/or external hardware/software to access the content of locked devices. This sounds more nefarious than it actually is (vulnerability disclosure concerns aside). Basically, this just means doing what the FBI did to open up the iPhone seized in the San Bernardino shooting case.

The main problem Comey had with this approach is that it wouldn't scale. But that's kind of the point.

[T]he objection that hacking will never give law enforcement as much access as would a backdoor into or a ban on user-controlled encryption misunderstands the problem we’re trying to solve. The societal goal here is not to ensure that law enforcement can access every piece of data it might ever seek, but that it can get enough information to do its job, and hacking is certainly a part of the solution.

This route also involves legislation, both to define the limits of lawful hacking as well as to act as oversight for these activities. Obviously, both of these are things Congress doesn't do all that well: oversight and writing computer laws. So, there will be concerns that need to be addressed, but hacking is a far better solution than legislated backdoors or judicial precedent that does the same thing by allowing a 1789 law to govern access to smartphones and other locked devices.

Another key area Bankston addresses is the tech curve itself. Law enforcement often laments it's losing the Tech War to the bad guys. It's not as though this needs to be a foregone conclusion. Criminal minds are rarely the brightest minds. Even though the same could be said for law enforcement minds, the good guys do have a distinct advantage: the ability to coordinate talent and expertise for the benefit of all agencies. That, and a mostly cooperative bunch of tech companies that still want to help the good guys beat the bad guys.

Another key aspect of upping government investigators’ tech game is making sure that they all know exactly what data they can lawfully obtain from internet companies today, without any new technical mandates. That means we need companies to step up and educate law enforcement and everyone else about the data they have—all of it, and not just the data they typically offer as matter or course in response to legal process.

It's not like there's only one path to data and communications stored on a suspect's phone. Almost everything is backed up somewhere else by service providers. Concerns about users' privacy will need to be addressed by everyone involved, starting with a revamping of the Third Party Doctrine. But tech companies will also need to be more honest with their customers, letting them know exactly what's being stored outside of their devices and what law enforcement needs to have (warrant, subpoena, etc.) before the company turns over information.

[C]omprehensive transparency to law enforcement and the public about what data the companies are creating and storing is the only way that policymakers or the market will ever be able to enforce any real accountability over those practices, and I think (or at least hope) that the overall benefit to consumers’ privacy from that accountability will balance out the harmful effects of giving the government a full menu of data.

The final aspect Bankston addresses is obtaining data and communications stored overseas. Much of this is academic now that jurisdiction limitations have been removed by the recent Rule 41 changes. Unfortunately, there's little positive to note here. Mutual assistance treaties take too long to be of much use (6-12 months for compliance) and there being little direct translation of civil liberties between participating countries makes this even more difficult.

Unfortunately, as Bankston points out, American exceptionalism doesn't seem to be working out in our favor. It appears President Trump is trying to work out an exclusive deal with the UK to make this process easier. But "easier" just means more collateral damage to civil liberties and privacy on both sides of the pond. This may work in law enforcement's favor, but it's hardly the best solution to "going dark," seeing as it ignores 99% of the stakeholders (citizens) to give each government what it wants.

The answers aren't easy and they will involve compromises not everyone will be happy with. But it's far better than taking the FBI's approach, which appears to be demanding concessions from every tech company it might have to deal with. The discussion does need to push forward, with or without the FBI's input. It can't stay hung up where it is now, due to Comey's stubborn refusal to ask for anything but the impossible.

Filed Under: backdoors, encryption, fbi, going dark

There Is No 'Going Dark' Problem

from the to-make-investigative-omelets,-you've-got-to-crack-a-few-phones dept

Former FBI Director James Comey made plenty of headlines with his insistence cellphone encryption would be the end of law enforcement as we know it. Comey's assertions made it seem as though regular police investigative work was no longer of any use and that any and all evidence pertinent to cases resided behind cellphone passcodes.

He insisted the problem would only get worse in the future. If not put to an end by legislated backdoors or smart tech guys coding up "safe" holes in device encryption, we may as well accept the fact that no criminal committing more than a moving violation would ever be brought to justice.

Default encryption does pose a problem for law enforcement, but it's nowhere near as insurmountable as Comey has portrayed it. Multiple FOIA requests handled through MuckRock have shown law enforcement still has several phone-cracking options at its disposal and doesn't seem to be having many problems recovering evidence.

This is superbly illustrated in documents obtained from the Tulsa and Tuscon (AZ) Police Departments by Curtis Waltman. Tuscon PD documents [PDF] show law enforcement officers are using tools crafted by the same company that provided the hack to the FBI in the San Bernardino case, among several other options. But the real motherlode is the Tulsa PD's log of cracked phones.

The kicker really is how often these are being used - it is simply really hard to believe that out of the 783 times Tulsa Police used their extraction devices, all were for crimes in which it was necessary to look at all of the phone’s data… There are some days where the devices were used multiple times - Tulsa used theirs eight times on February 28th of this year, eight again on April 3rd, and a whopping 14 times on May 10th 2016. That is a whole lot of data that Tulsa was able to tap into, and we aren’t even able to understand the why.

The document contains page after page of cracked phones, ranging from Samsungs to HTCs to LGs… even iPhones (5 and 6). "Going dark" remains a Comey fairy tale, for the most part, if these documents are anything to go by.

And there's apparently very few rules for deployment of cellphone-cracking devices. Only one PD in Arizona returned any guidelines in response to requests and those rules basically state there are no rules. The Mesa PD's Computer Forensic Unit makes the most of its limited resources by limiting its work to… any crime at all.

This is the list of criminal activity the unit provides forensic work for, listed in order of priority.

Homicide
Sexual Assault
Child Crimes (which I assume means "crimes against children," rather than crimes committed BY children)
Aggravated Assault/Robbery
Property Crimes
All other felonies
All misdemeanors

Everything. That would explain the number of cellphones accessed by these PDs. Presumably other PDs are also operating under very loose guidance or none at all.

This sort of intrusiveness should be limited to serious felonies and investigations where it's plainly apparent the best route to evidence runs through the suspect's cellphone. Otherwise, law enforcement agencies are just using these tools because they have them, not because they necessarily need them.

Filed Under: data extraction, encryption, fbi, going dark, jim comey, law enforcement

EFF Sues FBI Over Withheld NSL Guideline Documents

from the we're-sorry,-we-thought-you-understood-the-'s'-stood-for-'secret dept

The EFF has been instrumental in assisting ISPs in their fights against National Security Letters and their accompanying gag orders. To date, thanks to the a change in the law (in response to an NSL lawsuit by the EFF and the implementation of the USA Freedom Act) and entities like the EFF applying pressure, the public is finally getting a chance to see what's contained in these warrantless demands for subscriber info.

Hopefully, the new avenues available to ISPs to challenge gag orders will result in a steady stream of released NSLs. More importantly, maybe the forced transparency will result in the FBI dialing back its use of NSLs -- something it does thousands of times a year and, worse, a way to route around FISA Court rejections.

But the FBI isn't ready to give up its NSL-related secrecy yet. According to the FBI, it instituted new rules for NSLs in 2015, partly in response to the USA Freedom Act. These new rules went into effect in 2016. The problem is we have to take the FBI's word for it. It says it's exercising more oversight and control, but the policy change itself is still hiding somewhere at the back of its filing cabinets.

This is one of several documents the EFF is seeking. The FBI isn't interested in handing these over, so it's decided to issue its standard "no documents here" shrug. Unfortunately for the FBI, the EFF knows its way around an FOIA lawsuit.

Following a ruling in EFF’s lawsuit that NSL gags are unconstitutional, Congress enacted reforms in 2015 that require the bureau to review NSLs to determine whether the gag orders are still necessary, and terminate those that are not. The FBI established procedures under which a record keeping system generates reminders—when an NSL investigation closes or reaches the three-year anniversary of its initiation—that the gag order should be reviewed for possible termination.

EFF sent a FOIA request to the FBI in September seeking records about the number of NSLs reviewed under these procedures, the number of reminders generated, the number of termination notices sent to NSL recipients, and how long it takes for a review to begin after a reminder is generated. In March the FBI said it had no such records. In a complaint filed today in San Francisco, EFF asked a court to order the FBI to disclose the requested records.

It is impossible to believe the FBI has no responsive records. If this is truly the case, the FBI never implemented the new NSL guidelines it claimed it did, much less write them up. And that only explains the alleged lack of paperwork for one of the EFF's requests. In order to take the FBI's entire non-response at face value, one is forced to assume the FBI has no new guidelines for NSL gag order reviews and/or is operating under the old review standards, which were pretty much nonexistent.

What's likely the case is the FBI has performed a deliberately inadequate search of the database least likely to hold the requested documents. The FBI maintains several data silos -- something that forces FOIA requesters to know the intricacies of the agency's multiple search methods if they hope to lay their hands on FBI documents.

Hopefully the court will smack the FBI around for its refusal to perform a thorough search and order the agency to turn over this information to the EFF. The government will probably put up a bit of fight, as a ruling in the EFF's favor would both expose its new NSL guidelines to the public (potentially making it much easier to trigger a review) and the labyrinthine underpinnings of its document search systems.

Filed Under: fbi, foia, guidelines, nsl
Companies: eff

Trump Lawyer Threatens To Report A Former FBI Employee To The Inspector General

from the IT-GOES-ALL-THE-WAY-TO-THE-TOP dept

President Trump served up plenty of responses to former FBI director James Comey's testimony before the Senate. Some he served up himself, like his contradictory claim Comey was lying about everything, but somehow vindicating Trump at the same time. Some were served up by his legal representation, which weren't much better despite being composed by an actual lawyer and not being limited to 140 characters.

The most extraordinary thing to come out of the hearing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held Thursday may not be former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony, but the baffling, typo-riddled response to that testimony issued by Donald Trump’s personal attorney Marc Kasowitz.

Perhaps the most irresponsible aspect of Kasowitz’s press release was the suggestion that Comey might have violated the law by relaying his account of unclassified conversations with Trump to the press, via a friend. As a veritable chorus of legal scholars, including our own Steve Vladeck, have already observed, this is arrant nonsense. Indeed, it is so clearly false that it’s hard to see how a minimally competent attorney could have made it in good faith——though it will doubtless make perfectly serviceable chum for the cable news shows.

This only scratches the surface, however. The whole document is so remarkable for both its sloppiness and disingenuousness that it’s worth going through paragraph by paragraph.

...Which Julian Sanchez then does. I wholeheartedly encourage you to click through and read the entire evisceration, which shows Trump's lawyer denying claims Comey never made and conflating private conversations with classified documents.

That leads to another one of Trump's lawyer's more ridiculous assertions. It wasn't covered directly in the press release, but apparently Trump (and his lawyer) believe they can somehow punish someone Trump has already fired.

President Donald Trump's outside counsel will file a leak complaint regarding former FBI Director James Comey's leaked memos with the Department of Justice, a source close to the outside legal team tells NBC News.

Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz will file the complaint with the DOJ's Inspector General and the Senate Judiciary Committee after Comey testified Thursday that he allowed a personal friend to leak an unclassified memo of his conversations with the president to news outlets in hopes it would trigger the appointment of a special counsel.

Cue the laughter. If Kasowitz wanted this threat to have any weight, he probably should have pulled the trigger before Trump fired Comey. At best, an investigation might make it harder for Comey to return to the FBI, something I doubt Comey has any interest in doing.

Furthermore, the underlying conceit -- that's there's anything to file a formal complaint about -- is severely flawed.

“Any complaint on what Jim testified yesterday, in my opinion, would be frivolous for the following reason,” said [Lawfare Editor Benjamin] Wittes in an interview with Yahoo News Deputy Editor Daniel Klaidman. “First of all, Comey was very clear that the memo that he wrote was intentionally written in unclassified form so that it would not be bound up in classification rules. So if the claim is that he’s admitted to leaking classified information, that’s simply factually false.”

[...]

“The real issue is whether the president has a reasonable expectation of confidentiality when he fires somebody and then lies about the circumstances in which he did that, and that strikes me as a matter in which to ask that question is also to answer it,” said Wittes. “The proper answer to Mr. Kasowitz’s complaint is laughter."

As any law enforcement official can tell you, privacy expectations in shared conversations only stretch as far as the other participants are willing to take them. Even in an executive branch setting, an informal conversation does not instantly become classified or top secret or whatever it is the president wishes it was the moment it ends.

There also is no leak. Comey's personal memorializations of conversations with someone unrelated to an ongoing investigation are not the sort of thing that can be leaked -- at least not in the context being used by Trump's lawyer. Comey can hand out copies of these memos to whoever he wants, because they're his recollections, not FBI investigative documents.

If Trump is seeking someone to blame for Comey's actions, he has no one to blame but himself. It's become apparent Comey was fired for not pledging his allegiance to Trump, rather than for any genuine misdeeds related to his job as FBI director. Once Trump unceremoniously shitcanned Comey, any hope Comey might keep his conversational memos secret was lost forever. These statements by Trump's lawyer are legal grandstanding. There's nothing in them of substance. But there doesn't have to be. The assertions appeal to Trump's base, and to President Trump, that's all that really matters.

Filed Under: doj, donald trump, fbi, inspector general, james comey, leaks, mark kasowitz

How Document-Tracking Dots Helped The FBI Track Down Russian Hacking Doc Leaker

from the just-metadata-things dept

The surprising story that quickly followed the somewhat-less-surprising Intercept leak was the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner for the leak of the document. It was an incredibly fast leak investigation that apparently began when The Intercept reached out for comment after obtaining the document on May 30th.

There's been a lot of talk that The Intercept acted carelessly when speaking to government officials and burned its source. But the evidence trail laid down by the FBI's affidavit suggests Winner did most of the burning herself. The document given to The Intercept was either an original printout or a scan of it. It showed telltale creases where it had been folded and placed into an envelope by the leaker.

More importantly, the document contained something else: data that indicated where and when the document had been printed. This made it much easier to link Winner to the posted document. Rob Graham of Errata Security walks through the steps he took to decipher the physical metadata created by the NSA printer used by Winner. Printers -- and not just those owned by secretive government agencies -- can help rat out leakers.

The problem is that most new printers print nearly invisibly yellow dots that track down exactly when and where documents, any document, is printed. Because the NSA logs all printing jobs on its printers, it can use this to match up precisely who printed the document.

Using a paint program to invert the document's color scheme and the EFF's handy spy-in-the-printer tool, Graham obtained the following information using only the auto-printed dots on the Intercept document:

The document leaked by the Intercept was from a printer with model number 54, serial number 29535218. The document was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20. The NSA almost certainly has a record of who used the printer at that time.

Very definitely it does have such records, as do a great many entities not heavily involved in national security. Many documents in many companies are considered "uncontrolled" if printed, and built-in document tracking allows them to track down employees who may have jeopardized nothing more than their own employment.

However, this does bring everything back around to the "just metadata" argument. The government has often claimed the wholesale collection of metadata is harmless, because it's nothing more than transactional records. Obviously, metadata can be quite damaging. Winner's decision to print the document ended her very short stint as a leaker.

Conversely, the government also claims -- when raising the "going dark" specter -- that metadata and other transactional records aren't nearly as useful as intercepted communications and/or device contents. To some extent, that's true. But it's obvious that metadata/transactional records aren't nearly as useless as they're portrayed by law enforcement handwringers. Either way the government spins the metadata argument, it's insulting the intelligence of Americans.

Filed Under: dots, fbi, leaks, metadata, nsa, printers, reality winner, tracking dots

EFF Sues FBI For Refusing To Turn Over Documents About Its Geek Squad Informants

from the best-buys,-best-friends dept

A child porn indictment in California has led to a full-fledged examination of the FBI's use of "private searches." Private searches, performed by citizens, can be used to instigate investigations and obtain warrants. In this case, the private searches were performed by Best Buy Geek Squad members, who came across alleged child porn images while fixing the defendant's computer.

Private searches during computer repairs are normal. But they're not roughly analogous to searches performed with a warrant. Companies that repair electronic devices are legally required to report discovered child porn to law enforcement. What they're not supposed to do, however, is dig through devices they're repairing in hopes of finding something illegal.

Most techs don't go looking for child porn. But the FBI's close relationship with Best Buy turned private searches into searches performed by paid informants. Once government money is introduced into the equation, the search can no longer be considered "private." The introduction of cash rewards also skews the incentives, possibly encouraging Geek Squad members to spend more time looking for illicit images than focusing on the repair job at hand.

Documents uncovered in this case strongly suggest the FBI has been using Best Buy repair center techs as confidential informants, paying them for their discoveries while claiming these warrantless, secondhand searches are nothing more than completely legal "private searches."

The EFF wants to know what the FBI knows about its long-running Best Buy partnership. The FBI isn't nearly as interested in making this information public. It sent a FOIA request to the FBI in early February. The FBI's first response was a Glomar. From the EFF's FOIA lawsuit [PDF]:

By letter to Plaintiff dated April 18, 2017, the FBI denied EFF’s request for agency records. The FBI stated, inter alia, that “it is the FBI’s policy to neither confirm nor deny the existence of any records which would tend to indicate or reveal whether an individual or organization is of investigatory interest to the FBI.”

The EFF immediately appealed this determination. Since then, the FBI has yet to respond. The EFF's lawsuit seeks a better response to its FOIA request, as well as a ruling finding in favor of its requested fee waiver. The EFF's decision to move forward with a FOIA lawsuit is the unfortunate result of the government's disinterest in fulfilling its FOIA obligations. There's hardly any action a citizen can take to speed up this process. Lawsuits are only marginally better than firing off reminder emails. Unfortunately, they're also a lot more expensive.

There's a good chance these documents -- should they ever be released by the FBI -- will show this sort of thing isn't limited to Best Buy repair centers.

We think that the FBI's use of Geek Squad informants is not an isolated event. Rather, it is a regular investigative tactic law enforcement employ to obtain digital evidence without first getting a warrant as the Fourth Amendment generally requires.

This bears watching. The FBI loves parallel construction and law enforcement in general loves anything that allows it to bypass obtaining warrants. Turning repair crews into informants serves these interests well.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, fbi, foia, geek squad, informants, private searches
Companies: best buy, eff

FBI Insider Threat Program Documents Show How Little It Takes To Be Branded A Threat To The Agency

from the see-something-say-something-but-for-cubicles dept

Jason Leopold has obtained the FBI's training slides for its "insider threat" program. This would be the same program the FBI refused to discuss in detail with the Senate, walking out of the briefing when asked how the program would avoid sweeping up legitimate whistleblowers.

The federal government acts as though it's receptive to whistleblowing, but then undermines that sentiment with pretty much everything else it does. These insider threat programs have only become more severe after the Snowden leaks, asking federal government employees to treat normal, everyday behavior as inherently suspicious.

The Defense Department's insider threat program declared such innocuous things as visiting foreign countries and being in debt as warning signs. Worse, anything less than full support for US government policies was considered threatening behavior.

The FBI's presentation [PDF] isn't much better. FBI employees are encouraged to say something if they see something… and there are a lot of observable "somethings" on the list.

According to the training material, potential insider threats include federal employees who brag about what they know, work odd hours, travel overseas without a good reason, or ask their co-workers about classified information without a "need to know." Workers who consume alcohol, use drugs or have “psychological conditions” may also be insider threats, as are those facing disciplinary action or job termination.

[...]

Another slide says leaks occur because leakers are “disgruntled” and are motivated by “ego,” “financial gain,” and “divided loyalty.”

Some of these factors can be indicative of someone considering engaging in espionage. Unfortunately, a lot of these may also apply to whistleblowers. The FBI presentation spends a great deal of time comparing its lists of insider threat traits to those the government has successfully prosecuted but spends zero time discussing whistleblowers and their traits/motivations.

Considering the FBI's leaky status, especially in recent months, the document feels inconsistent at best. It feels like a good way for FBI employees to get rid of coworkers they don't like and a great way to foster an atmosphere of corrosive suspicion in FBI offices.

FBI employees will distrust each other, FBI officials will distrust nosy politicians… and, in a surprising revelation by Leopold, politicians will have even less reason to trust the FBI. As was noted earlier in this post, the FBI chose to walk out of a briefing rather than answer Sen. Chuck Grassley's question about whistleblower protections under the FBI's "insider threat" program. Thanks to the efforts of a media company (BuzzFeed) and a private citizen (Leopold), Grassley now has a copy of documents the Senator asked for months ago.

Grassley asked the FBI to send him its insider threat training material. He received a couple of videos and a brochure. But a spokesperson for Grassley told BuzzFeed News that the senator did not receive the training slides until BuzzFeed News sent a copy.

The documents released here don't answer Grassley's questions either. But recent history shows us the FBI is not a whistleblower-friendly agency. It seems to have no problem with very selective leaking, but isn't nearly as kind to those who use the official channels to report wrongdoing. An insider threat program like this doesn't help. Giving agents and employees sketchy reasons to distrust each other will only serve to deter whistleblowers before they even have a chance to experience the agency's unofficial retaliation program.

Filed Under: fbi, insider threat

Trump Allegedly Wants FBI To Look Into Locking Up Journalists Who Publish Leaks

from the because-of-course-that-would-be-his-solution dept

It's been another busy week for our president. Following on the heels of his revelation that he fired FBI Director James Comey over the ongoing Russian ties investigation (and following on the heels of Trump's tweeted threat about secret recordings of conversations with Comey), the FBI's acting director said the investigation is still ongoing, a special counsel was picked to oversee the investigation, and people close to Comey hinted the FBI might have some recordings of its own that undercut the president's narrative.

President Trump asked the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, to shut down the federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, in an Oval Office meeting in February, according to a memo Mr. Comey wrote shortly after the meeting.

“I hope you can let this go,” the president told Mr. Comey, according to the memo.

It's a record, of sorts, if not an actual recording. And it's done the way the FBI prefers to memorialize things (including testimony and "custodial interviews") -- on paper, rather than with other, less-biased recording devices. And, again, this is hearsay on top of hearsay: unnamed people claiming they read a piece of paper purporting to be a record of a conversation between Comey and the president. Grains of salt and all that, and despite what many are claiming all over the internet, really not a strong indicator of actual instruction, which could be an impeachable offense.

Mr. Comey shared the existence of the memo with senior F.B.I. officials and close associates. The New York Times has not viewed a copy of the memo, which is unclassified, but one of Mr. Comey’s associates read parts of it to a Times reporter.

Buried way, way down in the New York Times story is some more hearsay. This time it's Trump allegedly suggesting something should be done about that pesky press he's always complaining about. But, like the scenario above, it still sounds very much like something President Trump would say in a personal meeting he thought wouldn't be turned into an office memo.

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

James Comey was no fan of the press, but he did at least defend journalists (sort of) at a recent hearing. He doesn't like seeing leaks published, but pointed out to legislators more interested in shooting the messenger that the person leaking the documents is the criminal, not the press, at least in the eyes of the DOJ.

But the DOJ is no longer the DOJ, so to speak. It's now being run by someone who wants to turn back the clock to the mid-1980s and start the drug war all over again. It's apparently engaged in twisting the law into a Wikileaks-prosecuting pretzel, despite Comey's assurances about messengers not being shot. And the administration has made it clear it's in the business of hunting down leakers, perhaps with the goal of unseating President Obama at the top of the "most whistleblowers prosecuted" list.

At this point, it's all just secondhand (Oval) office chatter. But considering the animosity Trump has shown towards the press and free speech in general, it's worth noting. And it always seems like every Trump denial or assertion has been followed by a leaked document to the contrary, so I'd be surprised if Comey's memo isn't made public within the next few days -- either by being leaked to journalists or presented at the hearings Comey has been asked to attend. This administration's contempt and hatred for the press has been undisguised. Donald Trump may be unable to change the Constitution, but that doesn't mean he and his handpicked agency heads won't spend the next few years making journalists' lives miserable.

Filed Under: donald trump, fbi, free press, free speech, james comey, journalists, leaks

FBI Releases 'Study' Of Law Enforcement's Persecution Complex

from the less-work,-more-griping dept

In what may be an attempt to bolster now ex-FBI director James Comey's oft-derided "Ferguson Effect" claims, the FBI has released a "study" that gathers facts feelings from law enforcement officers around the US and attempts to build a narrative somewhere between "life is unfair" and "there's a War on Cops." It's not a study. It's an opinion poll with the word "study" appended to it.

In short, the Ferguson Effect theory is this: cops are afraid to do their jobs because they're undergoing intense scrutiny in the wake of controversial shootings. It's bullshit, but there are plenty of law enforcement officials willing to stake their reputations on assertions that portray their officers as cowards. Faced with heightened public scrutiny, officers are apparently deciding to do less work than before, supposedly to head off any misrepresentation of their tactics.

The FBI's study involved interviewing officers and supervisors at agencies where an officer had been killed in the line of duty. It studied the background of the assailants, but that appears to be the end of any factual basis for claims made. What these stats show is most attacks on officers involved a person who didn't want to be arrested. A smaller percentage of attacks were motivated by a desire to hurt cops.

Despite these conclusions, the FBI's study pushes forward with an officer-driven narrative that follows the War on Cops/Ferguson Effect: supposedly-increased violence towards cops (not supported by line-of-duty death statistics) and "de-policing." I supposed the FBI's "impartiality" restrained it from challenging contradictory and false assertions provided to it by officers. From the study [PDF]:

Since 2014 multiple high-profile police incidents across the country have occurred that law enforcement officials believe influenced the mindset and behaviors of the assailants. Specifically, the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, MO, in 2014, and the social disturbances that followed, initiated a movement that some perceived made it socially acceptable to challenge and discredit the actions of law enforcement. This attitude was fueled by the narrative of police misconduct and excessive force perpetuated through politicians and the media.

This narrative has apparently risen unbidden. It couldn't possibly have been the result of multiple DOJ civil rights investigations and the rise of non-police-controlled cameras. In other words, it couldn't possibly be the result of verifiable evidence, rather than hurt feelings of police officers who fear they're no longer viewed as minor deities.

Law enforcement agencies also complained they're no longer able to provide the only narrative after incidents of abuse or violence.

Due to the coverage of the high-profile police incidents, it appears that immediately following the incidents, assailants were constantly exposed to a singular narrative by news organizations and social media of police misconduct and wrong-doing. In many cases, this singular narrative came from the subject's friends and family, and witnesses to the incident who often knew the subject, long before law enforcement provided their findings to the public.

Reading this is like asking a four-year-old for their opinion on current events. This is so self-centered, self-pitying and bereft of awareness, it's ridiculous. The standard M.O. following the killing of someone by a police officer is to get the dead person's rap sheet into journalists' hands as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the officer's agency will refuse to provide any information on the officer involved (in most cases, not even the officer's name) until everything is thoroughly investigated, which means weeks or months will pass before law enforcement is ready to tell its side of the story.

Both of these bogus assertions lead to a third: the inability of law enforcement to control the narrative has "emboldened" arrestees, making them less compliant, more argumentative, and more likely to engage in violence. The officers surveyed also threw out the following, which is so unmoored from reality, it calls their judgment into question:

Across the country, law enforcement officials link the de-criminalization of drugs to the increase in violent attacks on law enforcement.

If this were even remotely true, the number of officers killed in the line of duty should have dropped dramatically during the late 80s and early 90s when new, extremely-harsh statutory minimums were put into place in response to the crack epidemic. And those numbers should be on the rise in recent years, as marijuana legalization and sentencing reform efforts have taken hold. None of what's asserted by officers is reflected in killed in the line of duty stats. If anything, it shows deaths have decreased as legalization efforts have increased.

And, as officers have felt less support from non-cops and been subjected to unprecedented scrutiny (i.e., more than none), they've felt less and less like doing the job taxpayers are paying them to do.

The above-referenced factors have had the effect of "de-policing" in law enforcement agencies across the country, which the assailants have exploited. Departments - and individual officers - have increasingly made the conscious decision to stop engaging in proactive policing. The intense scrutiny and criticism law enforcement has received in the wake of several high-profile incidents has caused several officers to (1) "become scared and demoralized" and (2) avoid interacting with the community.

Let's just repeat this simple fact: being a law enforcement officer is not compulsory. If you no longer feel you can do the job, or don't like the working conditions, leave. Find something else to do. Taxpayers aren't interested in being under-served by officers who can't stand the heat but are unwilling to leave the kitchen.

I realize this is a facile response. Leaving a job, much less a career, is a very difficult thing to do. But these are facile answers. And they're being given by officers who are finding out they need to do their jobs better in the future, but are clearly unwilling to improve themselves or their agencies. Instead, they'd rather blame everyone outside of law enforcement for their problems, when years of opacity and unquestioned authority have turned them into the officers and officials they are.

We usually see the worst of law enforcement when it comes to the media. But we generally see the worst of all members of the public when filtered through this narrow lens. Police work is a customer service job, albeit one that grants employees an incredible amount of leeway to perform their duties.

The worst will be what's remembered. That may seem unfair, but that's just the way it is. United Airlines may fly millions of passenger miles without complaint, but it will be remembered for a long, long time as the airline that booted a paying passenger from its plane using law enforcement as the stick. (There was no carrot.) The same goes for law enforcement agencies.

The FBI's study contains no indication officers are willing to surmount the challenges of this era of policing. There's no sign officers are interested in making the effort needed to change the public's perception. Instead, it's an open airing of grievances that may have had limited therapeutic value for responding officers, but does nothing to repair the relationship between law enforcement and the public.

Filed Under: fbi, ferguson effect, law enforcement