Law Enforcement Agencies That Acquire Military Gear Are More Likely To Kill People

from the what-a-surprise dept

Correlation is not causation, but if you gear yourself up like you're going to war, chances are you're going to treat the people you're supposed to serve as enemy combatants.

This is what police departments have been doing for years. The federal government's 1033 program allows local PDs to help themselves to military surplus, which includes armored vehicles, armored vests, assault rifles, and grenade launchers. Cops have stopped looking like cops and started looking like combat units. The end result appears to be deadlier police forces more interested in shock, awe, and escalation than defusing tense situations.

A study of 1033 program use in Georgia by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows the more law enforcement gets from the military, the more often it uses deadly force.

A new AJC analysis of a decade of records across 651 Georgia police departments and sheriff’s offices found departments that took more than $1,000 in 1033 money, on average, fatally shot about four times as many people as those that didn’t. The newspaper’s analysis used the military’s database and paired it with a database of fatal police shootings from across the state, controlling for statistical variables like community income, rural-urban differences, racial makeup, and violent crime rates.

The results paint a troubling picture: The more equipment a department receives, the more people are shot and killed, even after accounting for violent crime, race, income, drug use and population.

Only 7% of Georgia's law enforcement agencies obtained military gear through this program. But that 7% was responsible for 17% of the state's killings by law enforcement officers.

As the AJC points out, this correlation is only a correlation. It doesn't prove the 1033 program is responsible for increased deadly force deployment. It only suggests a relationship between obtained military gear and increased killings. Getting more gear does not increase the number of killings by cops, but the fact remains agencies that have used the program are involved in more killings than agencies that haven't.

Whatever link exists is partially psychological. Acquiring war gear instills a war mindset. Citizens become "civilians." Criminal suspects become enemy combatants. Neighborhoods become war zones. And the rhetoric used by officers and officials reflects this mindset. None of this warfighter mentality reflects what's actually happening in Georgia. The flow of military gear has remained steady, even as criminal activity declines.

From 2009 to 2018, police departments in Georgia received $43.5 million in firearms, vehicles and other gear from the military, a figure that experts believe is deeply discounted because the material is used. All that equipment has been requested despite the fact that violent crime rates in Georgia have dropped by one third over that period, according to FBI crime statistics.

Some may suggest the flow of military equipment to law enforcement agencies has resulted in a better-behaved populace. But there's no correlation between armored vehicles and lower crime rates.

A newly published article by a group of scholars with the Emory University Department of Political Science found no relationship between the presence of surplus military equipment and lower crime rates.

Fortunately, there are some in the law enforcement community who recognize the damage the acquisition of military gear can do to community relationships, even if those items may be occasionally beneficial. Calhoun Police Chief Tony Pyle says he's limited his acquisitions and has worked at reverting the war-like mindset in the department since he took over two years ago.

Pyle said he turned down the offer of a $750,000 armored vehicle, despite the fact that there are dozens of them in departments around the state.

“It was basically a tank with wheels, I said, ‘Absolutely not. We do not want that thing rolling down the streets of Calhoun,’” he said. “In my humble opinion, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

Pyle said he thinks military-style gear and clothing can have an impact on a department. Along with shelving the M14s, Pyle said he ordered officers to wear traditional police uniforms, instead of the navy blue combat fatigues they had worn in the city for more than a decade.

Unfortunately, there are still far too many agencies cultivating an "us vs. them" mindset. And the nearly-free equipment and weapons available from the 1033 program are too tempting to pass up. The streets are full of enemies. It only makes sense to prepare for war. If more "civilians" end up dead, that's just the price they're expected to pay for public safety.

Filed Under: 1033 program, law enforcement, police, police militarization, use of force

Federal Court Says Trump's Law Enforcement Commission Violates Federal Law

from the ignorance-of-the-law-still-working-out-great-for-law-enforcement dept

The "rule of law" Administration is at it again. Ignoring the rule of law by ignoring applicable laws, the Administration decided to cozy up with law enforcement agencies while pretending to be serving the public. (h/t ProPublica)

Formed by executive order, the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice was formed by the DOJ. The Commission promised to tackle several important issues, including the handling of mental illnesses, substance abuse, and homelessness. It would supposedly seek input from education, employment, and mental health services to tackle these problems.

More problematically, the Commission thought it needed to address this perceived "problem:"

What is the cause of diminished respect for law enforcement and the laws they enforce, and how does it affect both police and public safety?

The answer would have been immediately apparent if the Commission had asked anyone else but law enforcement agencies to participate. But it didn't. And now a federal court has found that the Administration violated federal law by forming a one-sided commission unlikely to fairly address any of the issues in front of it. Here's how the court describes the President's new Commission en route to finding it broke the law. From the opinion [PDF]:

The Attorney General stressed the need to hear from “[a] diversity of backgrounds and perspectives” such as “community organizations, civic leadership, civil rights and victim’s rights organizations, criminal defense attorneys, academia, social service organizations, and other entities that regularly interact with American law enforcement.” Despite these stated goals, however, the Commission’s membership consists entirely of current and former law enforcement officials. No Commissioner has a criminal defense, civil rights, or community organization background. And Commission proceedings have been far from transparent. Especially in 2020, when racial justice and civil rights issues involving law enforcement have erupted across the nation, one may legitimately question whether it is sound policy to have a group with little diversity of experience examine, behind closed doors, the sensitive issues facing law enforcement and the criminal justice system in America today.

This one-sided panel does not comply with federal law. Nor does its closed-door meetings, which ignore transparency mandates. Here are the requirements of the law that governs the Administration's law enforcement commission:

Passed in 1972, FACA [Federal Advisory Committee Act] requires, among other things, that covered federal advisory committees be “fairly balanced” in the viewpoints represented, that meetings be open and publicly noticed, that a charter be prepared and filed, and that a designated federal officer be appointed to ensure compliance with FACA.

But that's not what happened. After saying some nice things about "diverse viewpoints," Attorney General Bill Barr stocked the commission with 18 former or current law enforcement officials. Barr then unilaterally decided this commission didn't need to comply with federal law.

Further, the memorandum noted, “[t]he Commission serves exclusively to advise the Attorney General and the President” and “is not intended to be subject to either the Federal Advisory Committee Act or Administrative Procedure Act.”

Another brief nod towards transparency was made by the Commission -- a nod that was made even briefer by the Commission shortly after it pretended to care about the public's opinion.

In February 2020, the Commission posted a notice on its website offering interested members of the public the opportunity to submit comments through May 31, 2020 regarding any aspect of the Commission’s work. But at some point between March 13 and March 28, the Commission shortened the comment window by two months, requiring all submissions by March 31, 2020, without posting notice in the Federal Register.

After a lengthy discussion of the government's arguments about whether or not this lawsuit can even be entertained by the court, much less FACA's applicability to its law enforcement commission, the court arrives at this conclusion:

There is no genuine dispute that the government has violated FACA’s transparency and public access requirements by holding closed hearings without timely notice in the Federal Register. And there is likewise no genuine dispute that the Commission has violated FACA’s oversight provisions by failing to file a charter for the Commission, 5 U.S.C. app. 2 § 9(c), and that Attorney General Barr has violated FACA by failing to assign a designated federal officer to the Commission to ensure compliance with FACA…

And the court says there's no dispute the composition of the Commission isn't "fairly balanced." This leads to the court's most damning assessment of the President's law enforcement committee.

The Commission’s function is to improve policing, including relations between law enforcement and the communities they protect. Yet the Commission does not include a single member who represents elements of those communities, rather than law enforcement. Thus, even employing a deferential review, the Court concludes that the Commission’s membership is not “fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the advisory committee.” 5 U.S.C. app. 2 § 5(b)(2). Indeed, the Court is hard pressed to think of a starker example of non-compliance with FACA’s fair balance requirement than a commission charged with examining broad issues of policing in today’s America that is composed entirely of past and present law enforcement officials.

The court says nearly everything about the Commission must change. It must change its composition, supply sufficient advance notice for public comment, and otherwise comply with FACA. Until it can comply, it can't hold any more meetings. We'll see how serious the Administration is about improving the relationship between cops and communities. If the Commission decides to abide by the law and continue its work, maybe the Administration still cares about these issues. If it decides it would rather dump the Commission than comply with the law, we'll see how hollow its "rule of law" statements really are.

Filed Under: balance, commission on law enforcement, doj, executive order, faca, law and order, law enforcement, legal issues, rule of law, william barr

EU Still Asking For The Impossible (And The Unnecessary): 'Lawful Access' To Encrypted Material That Doesn't Break Encryption

from the security-through-encryption-and-security-despite-encryption dept

A few months ago, Techdirt wrote about a terrible bill in the US that would effectively destroy privacy and security on the Internet by undermining encryption. Sadly, that's nothing new: the authorities have been whining about things "going dark" for years now. Moreover, this latest proposal is not just some US development. In an official document obtained by Statewatch (pdf), the current German Presidency of the Council of the European Union (one of the key organizations in the EU) has announced that it wants to move in the same direction (found via Netzpolitik). It aims to prepare:

an EU statement consolidating a common line on encryption at EU level in the area of internal security to support further developments and the dialogue with service providers. It should seek to find a proper balance between the protection of privacy, intellectual property protection and lawful law enforcement and judicial access, thereby stressing security through encryption as well as security despite encryption

In other words, the EU is still chasing the unicorn of "lawful access" to encrypted material without somehow breaking encryption. An accompanying unofficial "note" from the European Commission services lists some of what it calls "key considerations", but these are still chasing that unicorn without explaining how that can be done (pdf):

Technical solutions constituting a weakening or directly or indirectly banning of encryption will not be supported.

Technical solutions to access encrypted information should be used only where necessary, i.e. where they are effective and where other, less intrusive measures are not available. They must be proportionate, used in a targeted and in the least intrusive way.

Slightly more detail about the options is found in another unofficial note exploring "Technical solutions to detect child sexual abuse in end-to-end encrypted communications" (pdf). Most of the solutions involve installing detection tools on the user's device. That can be circumvented by using devices without the detection software, or using a service that does not install them. Perhaps the most interesting technical approach involves on-device homomorphic encryption with server-side hashing and matching:

In this solution, images are encrypted using a carefully chosen partially homomorphic encryption scheme (this enables an encrypted version of the hash to be computed from the encrypted image). The encrypted images are sent to the [online service provider] server for hashing and matching against an encrypted version of the hash list (the server does not have the homomorphic encryption keys).

But this only works for services that implement such a scheme, and it only applies to existing images, not general messages or even videos. Moreover, the technology to implement such an approach is still under development.

Essentially, the EU, like the US, is telling people to "nerd harder", and come up with a solution that allows lawful access, but does not break encryption. Since hard nerding for many decades has failed to produce a way of doing that, maybe it's time for the authorities to accept that it just can't be done. The good news is that doesn't matter. Techdirt has been explaining why for years: there are encryption workarounds that mean law enforcement and others can get what they need in other ways. Indeed, one of the EU papers mentioned above provides perhaps the best example of this approach (pdf):

The recent dismantling of the EncroChat network in a joint investigation coordinated by Eurojust and Europol shows the degree to which those involved in criminal activity utilise all available technology, such as crypto telephones, which go well beyond publicly available end-to-end encrypted services.

Although it cites the case of EncroChat -- a Europe-based encrypted mobile network widely used by organized crime there -- in an attempt to prove how serious the problem is, it actually does the opposite. As the detailed explanation of how EU police managed to hack into the network and place malware on handsets explains, breaking the encryption proved irrelevant, because the authorities found a workaround.

The EncroChat bust demonstrates something else that is generally overlooked. It is already clear that far from going dark, the authorities today have access to unprecedented quantities of useful information that can be used to track down suspects and prevent crimes. That's from things like social media and e-commerce sites. But as the EncroChat materials show, when criminals use closed, encrypted channels to communicate, they paradoxically open up, speaking freely about their past, present and future crimes, naming names, and giving detailed information about their activities. That means it's actually in the interest of the authorities to allow criminals and terrorists to use encrypted services. When workarounds are found, these hitherto secret channels provide greater quantities of high-quality intelligence than would ever be obtained if people knew their communications had backdoors and were therefore not safe.

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

Filed Under: encryption, eu, going dark, law enforcement, lawful access

Portland Passes Ban On Facial Recognition Use By City Agencies And Private Businesses

from the FOR-HOME-SECURITY-USE-ONLY dept

Portland, Oregon has now joined parts of Massachusetts and all of California in protecting its residents from the sketchy surveillance method known as "facial recognition." For something that's supposed to recognize faces, it's usually pretty bad at it and gets worse when it has to deal with minorities. Of course, the same can be said about the law enforcement agencies deploying it, which might explain their love of tech that gives them more people to arrest but rarely the probable cause to do so.

Portland's ban is more restrictive than others already in place. It doesn't just affect the local government.

In addition to halting city use of the surveillance technology, the new rule prevents "private entities in places of public accommodation" in Portland from using it, too, referring to businesses that serve the general public — a grocery store or a pizza place, for instance. It does not prevent individuals from setting up facial-recognition technology at home, such as a Google Nest camera that can spot familiar faces, or gadgets that use facial-recognition software for authenticating users, like Apple's Face ID feature for unlocking an iPhone.

This means no one gets to use it but private citizens surveilling their own doorways. Sure, that's going to capture people moving up and down the street, but unlike law enforcement agencies, private citizens can't deprive someone of their freedom just because the tech thought it recognized someone.

The hit to businesses doesn't take effect until 2021. The rest of it starts immediately. Portland is still in the throes of civil unrest -- something that started in late May and shows no sign of letting up, no matter how many federal officers the Administration throws at the "problem." There's the obvious concern facial recognition is being used to identify people engaged in First Amendment activity for reasons unknown to anyone but those deploying the tech. The local cops will be blocked from doing this going forward (if they were ever doing it at all) but it will have no effect on facial recognition deployment by federal officers.

It seems inevitable some business owners will challenge the law. This tech allows internal security to keep an eye out for banned individuals and suspected shoplifters. But private tools don't appear to be any better at identifying people than the tech being sold to government agencies. Allowing private companies to use the tech puts law enforcement only a phone call away. And it can lead to the same results (false positives, bogus arrests) despite being owned and operated by non-government entities. It's a bold move by the city of Portland. But it's probably also a necessary one if you're serious about protecting residents from unproven tech that has the latent ability to destroy lives.

More bans are sure to come, especially now that everything law enforcement-related is under the microscope. Portland has set the ban bar pretty high. Other cities that believe they're serious about keeping their residents safe from surveillance creep now have something to shoot for.

Filed Under: facial recognition, law enforcement, police, portland, surveillance

Bill Barr Says DOJ Prosecutors Should Bring Sedition Charges Against Violent Protesters

from the what-even-the-fuck dept

If Attorney General Bill Barr is ever gifted with superlatives, the one that will stick will be "worst."

After presiding over some civil liberties violations under Bush I, Barr has returned to AG work under Trump and seems dead set on making everyone forget his first reign of far-more-limited terror. Barr wants encryption backdoors, the end of Section 230 immunity, and law enforcement officers promoted to the rank of demigod. The public will be expected to absorb the collateral damage.

Bill Barr does know how to deliver a good speech, whether he's preaching to the converted or, in this recent speech, preaching to some developing converts. Speaking to Hillsdale College students during their Constitution Day event, Barr said he's trying to build a kinder, gentler DOJ.

In exercising our prosecutorial discretion, one area in which I think the Department of Justice has some work to do is recalibrating how we interpret criminal statutes.

In recent years, the Justice Department has sometimes acted more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice based on clear and sensible legal rules. In case after case, we have advanced and defended hyper-aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong and we must stop doing it.

[...]

To be clear, what I am describing is not the Al Capone situation — where you have someone who committed countless crimes and you decide to prosecute him for only the clearest violation that carries a sufficient penalty. I am talking about taking vague statutory language and then applying it to a criminal target in a novel way that is, at a minimum, hardly the clear consequence of the statutory text.

This is definitely something that could use improvement. The DOJ has engaged in plenty of bad-faith, overly-aggressive prosecutions. Almost anything involving the CFAA comes to mind.

But Barr can't lead this reform. He doesn't even really want it. As he was delivering this speech about prosecutorial discretion, news broke detailing the contents of a phone call Barr had with DOJ prosecutors:

Attorney General William Barr expressed frustration with some local and state prosecutors' handling of riot-related crimes, telling top Justice Department prosecutors that he wants them to be aggressive in bringing charges related to protest violence, including exploring using a rarely used sedition law, according to a person familiar with the matter.

This isn't discretion. This is [checks Barr's Constitution Day speech] a "hyper-aggressive extension of criminal law," the "taking" of "vague statutory language and applying it to a criminal target in a novel way." Barr's not going to practice what he preached at Hillsdale College and he doesn't want his prosecutors engaging in restraint either.

Proving sedition is difficult. That's why we haven't historically charged violent protesters with sedition. There are a bunch of other federal and local statutes that capably address acts of violence or vandalism. There's no reason federal prosecutors should start pretending violence or vandalism occuring during/adjacent to anti-police brutality protests is a conspiracy to overthrow the government or "oppose by force" federal laws and statutes. There has only been one successful sedition prosecution in the last 25 years. It seems unlikely using this law to ensure protest-related prosecutions are federal is going to work.

But that's not all. Barr also wanted DOJ prosecutors to find some way to go after Seattle's mayor over her handling of protests in her city.

Attorney General William Barr asked Justice Department prosecutors to explore charging Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan (D) over a protest zone in the city, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Barr asked prosecutors in the department's civil rights division to explore charging Durkan during a call with prosecutors last week, the Times reported citing two people briefed on those discussions.

Barr's nice words about dialing back aggressive prosecutions were aimed solely at DOJ prosecutors who have made the mistake of going after Trump or his underlings in the administration. Barr doesn't care about the victims of over-prosecution who don't have connections to the White House. Those people are still on their own and still subject to the whims of prosecutors who have been given free reign to interpret the law for maximum prosecutorial efficiency. Barr said the quiet part loud later in his Hillsdale speech:

Rather than root out true crimes — while leaving ethically dubious conduct to the voters — our prosecutors have all too often inserted themselves into the political process based on the flimsiest of legal theories. We have seen this time and again, with prosecutors bringing ill-conceived charges against prominent political figures, or launching debilitating investigations that thrust the Justice Department into the middle of the political process and preempt the ability of the people to decide.

On one hand, this is a sickening display of sycophancy. On the other hand, it will save the taxpayers some money. No sense wasting time prosecuting someone Trump's just going to pardon.

Barr's day of awfulness finally came to end with this unbelievably hot take in response to a student's question about COVID-19 lockdowns. There's no way to really brace yourself for his response:

"You know, putting a national lockdown, stay at home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history," Barr said as a round of applause came from the crowd.

The Greatest Intrusion. Well. OK then.

Bill Barr can no longer be satirized. He'd be an unsubtle farce capable of gathering only the cheapest laughs if he wasn't actually in charge of the goddamn Department of Justice. This makes him frightening, rather than pitiable.

Filed Under: doj, law enforcement, protests, sedition, william barr

Government's 'Reverse' Warrant Rejected By Two Consecutive Federal Judges

from the kind-of-hard-to-show-particularity-when-you're-asking-for-everyone's-dat dept

The government doesn't always get what it wants. A novel twist on mass surveillance -- the so-called "reverse" warrant -- is becoming more popular now that law enforcement has realized Google maintains a stockpile of cell location data.

Reverse warrants are just that: completely backwards. Cops don't have a suspect to target. All they have is a crime scene. Using location data allows them to work backwards to a list of suspects. Officers geofence an area around the crime scene and head to Google to ask for all information on cellphones in that area during the time the crime was committed. This treats everyone in the area as a suspect until investigators have had a chance to dig through their data to narrow down the list.

Warrants are supposed to have a certain amount of particularity. These warrants have none. All they have are some coordinates and a clock. Fortunately, as the EFF reports, some judges are pushing back.

Two federal magistrate judges in three separate opinions have ruled that a geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements. Two of these rulings, from the federal district court in Chicago, were recently unsealed and provide a detailed constitutional analysis that closely aligns with arguments EFF and others have been making against geofence warrants for the last couple years.

The unsealed order [PDF] -- written by Magistrate Judge M. David Weisman -- deals with a stolen pharmaceuticals investigation. Judge Weisman has a big problem with the vast amount of data this would give investigators and the lack of limits they're willing to apply to themselves.

The warrant presented in this matter suffers from two obvious constitutional infirmities. First, the scope of the search is overbroad, and second, the items to be seized are not particularly described. As to the scope of the warrant, the government is seeking all of the data of the cellular telephones that accessed Google applications or use Google's operating system in the three requested geofrances. In this affidavit, the government asserts that approximately 97% of smartphones in the world use Google applications or Google's operating system. Moreover, the area covered by each of the geofences is large, and a majority of the area sought encompasses structures and businesses that would necessarily have cell phone users who are not involved in these offenses. Each geofence encompasses 7.7630627 acres of land. Despite the geographic and practical reach of the geofences, the government's evidence of probable cause is solely focused on one user of a cellular telephone. As to the particularity of the items for which the government can search, the warrant application is completely devoid of meaningful limitation. The application indicates the agents will be searching for "evidence or instrumentalities of" the listed offenses, but nothing more.

The judge points out the area covered by each of the three geofences is roughly the same as Wrigley Field. These geofences are being laid down in a "densely populated city" near restaurants, a large residential complex, "various commercial establishments," and medical offices.

There's no case on point the government can cite in support of this overly-broad demand for information on potentially thousands of non-suspects. What it does cite is efforts it isn't actually making, choosing instead to deploy a dragnet and work backwards to establish something resembling probable cause. The judge says the government is better off doing those things, rather than asking the court to bless a Google-aided fishing expedition.

If the government believes that the information it seeks from Google can be obtained by a grand jury subpoena (or some other process), then it should proceed in that manner. But the government seeks a search warrant and offers no justification for jettisoning the tradition standards of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence…

The government claimed that because it does not receive identifying info with the bulk batch of location records in the geofence, the warrant is still valid. Investigators use this "anonymized" data to compile a list of "suspect" devices and only then asks Google for identifying info. Therefore, according to the government, the thousands of innocent people swept up in the broad request will most likely be discarded before the hunt for suspects resumes. (This doesn't always happen.) The court doesn't agree with this assertion at all.

This argument fails on multiple levels. First, it is factually untrue. There is no objective measure that limits the agents' discretion in obtaining information as to each cellular telephone in the geofence. For example, the warrant does not limit agents to only seeking identifying information as to the "five phones closest to the center point of the geofence," or some similar objective measure of particularity.

In support of this baseless argument, the government cited the Playpen investigation, where malware was distributed by the FBI and returned identifying info from every computer that visited a dark web child porn site. The judge says targeting people who visited a site that was clearly serving up child porn is vastly different than demanding info on people who were simply working, visiting, or existing in an area where a crime was committed. The government has no right to collect data on everyone and using that as a starting point to search for suspects.

Judge Weisman rejected this application on July 8th. The government decided to edit a few things on its warrant application and run it by another magistrate. Judge Gabriel Fuentes is no more impressed than Judge Weisman. [PDF]

While the government said the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision does not apply (since it's not interested in tracking one person's movements via cell site location data), the court disagrees. Carpenter does apply because the underlying message from that decision is that the "reasonable expectation of privacy" applies to cell site location info.

[T]here is much to suggest that Carpenter’s holding, on the question of whether the privacy interests in CSLI over at least seven days, should be extended to the use of geofences involving intrusions of much shorter duration. As far as the third-party doctrine is concerned, the record before the Court suggests that device users connect to Google’s location services, or to Google applications that cause them to reveal their location information to Google, with great regularity. The Court finds it difficult to imagine that users of electronic devices would affirmatively realize, at the time they begin using the device, that they are providing their location information to Google in a way that will result in the government’s ability to obtain – easily, quickly and cheaply – their precise geographical location at virtually any point in the history of their use of the device.

This is also far more intrusive than the data at stake in Carpenter.

The proposed geofences in the Amended Application would establish the person’s physical location with far greater precision. The government did not provide a square-footage estimate, but at one location, the geofence is to be drawn around a specific business establishment and extends to the sidewalk and street outside it and to at least three residential floors above it; at the second, the geofence encompasses a business establishment and the parking lot next to it, along with at least one set of lanes of a very busy thoroughfare. The government would therefore learn precisely where the devices were used, not just within a city block or a two-mile-long stretch of that block, but within and outside of a single business establishment or set of residences on that block. The information to be generated by the proposed geofence warrant would not be an “all-encompassing record” of a person’s movements, but it is a record of almost exactly where that person was at a particular time.

The government's amended warrant -- which shrunk the geofences a bit and limited what investigators could do with the data received from Google -- still fails. It fails because it turns a bunch of innocent people into suspects, which isn't what warrants are supposed to do.

Because the proposed warrant here seeks information on persons based on nothing other than their close proximity to the Unknown Subject at the time of the three suspect shipments, the Court cannot conclude that there is probable cause to believe that the location and identifying information of any of these other persons contains evidence of the offense.

[...]

[T]he proposed warrant would grant the government far greater discretion, namely, to sort through the location information and derivative identifying information of multiple people to identify the suspect by process of elimination. This amount of discretion is too great to comply with the particularity requirement, and the proposed warrant thus suffers from the same fatal particularity flaw as did the proposed warrants in the first two applications.

This kills one geofence warrant. There are plenty more out there. Given the lack of published pushback, it appears magistrates feel these "reverse" warrants are fine because they're warrants. But those who have approved "reverse" warrants should pay more attention to Supreme Court precedent. A warrant is not a permission slip to search everyone who happens to be in a location targeted by a search warrant. Here's the EFF's summation of the Supreme Court ruling cited by Judge Fuentes:

Notably, the court looked back to the Supreme Court’s decision in Ybarra v. Illinois (1979), a case that famously established that a warrant to search a bar and a bartender didn’t give police the power to search every person who happened to be in the bar.

In essence, the geofence warrants allow the government to grab everyone in the area, seize their devices, and take a look at their location history. That the government is doing this via Google doesn't make it any less of Constitutional violation.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, law enforcement, location data, reverse warrant, surveillance

It's Time To Start Dismantling One Of The Nation's Oldest Racist Institutions: Law Enforcement

from the Blue-Line-flags-are-pretty-much-Confederate-flags-tbh dept

For as long as cops have been poorly-behaved, people have talked about defunding the police. This talk has gotten louder in recent years and almost deafening in recent weeks as protests over police brutality erupted around the nation in the wake of the George Floyd killing.

But what does it mean to defund the police? In most cases, it doesn't mean getting rid of police departments. It means taking some of the millions spent on providing subpar law enforcement and spreading it around to social services and healthcare professionals to steer people trained to react with violence away from people who would be better served with social service safety nets or interventions by people trained to handle mental health crises.

Those opposed to defunding police departments (that's most police officials and officers) say it can't be done without ushering in a criminal apocalypse. Police departments demand an inordinate amount of most cities' budgets but law enforcement officials refuse to agree money should be steered away from them even as cities prepare to redirect some calls cops normally handle to other city services.

Cops believe they're the "thin blue line" between order and chaos. They believe they're the only thing standing between good people and criminals. But that's just something they say to make themselves feel better about the babysitting and clerical work that consumes most of their working hours. Josie Duffy Rice's excellent article about the long racist history of American law enforcement brings the receipts. What's standing between us and supposed chaos is barely anything at all.

New Orleans has the fourth highest murder rate in the nation but clears only 35 percent of homicide cases. In 2018, the city’s police cleared only 2 percent of all rapes. The country at large isn’t much better. Last year, the Washington Post launched an investigation into murder clearance rates in 50 cities over the course of 10 years. The results were bracing. “Despite a nationwide drop in violence to historic lows,” the Post reported, “34 of the 50 cities have a lower homicide arrest rate than a decade ago.” In St. Louis, during the period the Post studied, it calculated that 54 percent of all homicides resulted in no arrest. In Baltimore, during the period it studied, the Post calculated that only 35 percent of all homicides resulted in an arrest. In Chicago the rate was 26 percent. The “line” isn’t just thin and blue—it’s porous and arbitrary.

What was a handy way to keep slaves (and then former slaves) in line evolved into the law enforcement community we have today. We may no longer send out police officers to round up slaves but we do allow a bunch of racist garbage data to decide where they should focus their efforts. Predictive policing is impossible to differentiate from the low-tech policing of yesteryear. In both cases, enforcement efforts focus on poor residents and minorities.

And, like employees everywhere in every business, far too many cops look for the path of least resistance. Meaningful busts that actually reduce criminal activity are the exception. Low-level BS busts are better. They kill time, look busy, and turn citizens into junk content for the justice system. Clickbait churn but for human beings.

It's the sort of thing that led to Charleston resident Henry Earl becoming a late night talk show punchline and the subject of nationwide ridicule. Earl was arrested more than 1,500 times -- almost always for public intoxication. Every two or three days, cops would pick up Earl and toss him in jail for three to five days. This happened over and over again for fifty years. And for what? What was the societal net gain of arresting the same man 1,500 times for a low-level violation? Well, it kept the cops paid and they got to look like they were doing something to earn their paychecks.

This is how the "thin blue line" actually operates. And it bears no resemblance to the lofty statements they make in defense of their own profession. Most police work is busywork. But in this nation, the busywork tends to negatively affect certain people the most. This is the fact cops and law enforcement officials can't admit to themselves:

It would be at least honest if we said that enduring arbitrary harassing, beating, tasing, and strangulation by the state was the price of being “associated with reduction in violent crime relative to control areas.” That we don’t say this, and that we only imply it for certain classes of people, exposes the assumptions built into American policing. It’s those assumptions that, on the one hand, allow Henry Earl to be arrested more than a thousand times, and on the other offer a sporting chance for anyone who’d like to try their hand at murder or rape.

Given the history and the current state of policing, it makes sense to start stripping law enforcement down to its basic components and rebuild it to serve the public, rather than its own interests.

Filed Under: defund the police, law enforcement, police, racism

Documents Show Law Enforcement Agencies Are Still Throwing Tax Dollars At Junk Science

from the made-from-the-finest-snakes dept

Recently, 269 gigabytes of internal law enforcement documents were liberated by hacker collective Anonymous -- and released by transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets). The trove contained plenty of sensitive law enforcement data, but also a lot of stuff law enforcement considers "sensitive" just because it doesn't want to let the public know what it's been spending their tax dollars on.

The documents highlighted in this report by Jordan Smith of The Intercept show law enforcement agencies are spending thousands of dollars to maximize the Dunning-Kruger effect. People are still peddling junk science and discredited techniques to law enforcement agencies and We the People are picking up the tab.

The training session was billed as “cutting edge,” and dozens of law enforcement professionals signed up to learn about “New Tools for Detecting Deception” from a human lie detector who calls herself “Eyes for Lies.” Her real name is Renee Ellory, and she claims that she’s one of just 50 people identified by scientists as having the ability to spot deception “with exceptional accuracy.”

[...]

Training participants would learn how to “identify anger, contempt, and disgust before words are even spoken.” Course objectives were broad: Learn to differentiate between “real” and “fake emotional displays”; “recognize hidden emotions”; identify the “ways our subconscious brain leaks information when we lie”; “analyze body language that indicates deception”; gain tips to use when interviewing a psychopath; “identify the key features of expressions that reveal danger for you!”

Big if true. But it isn't. And Renee Ellory herself would probably recognize that fact if her career didn't depend on her remaining ignorant of scientific studies directly contradicting the claims made in her courses. But she's been able to do a lot of damage to a lot of law enforcement officers, who now believe -- with zero facts in evidence -- they can detect lies just looking for "universal facial expressions" and fleeting "microexpressions" on subjects' faces.

Ellory proudly touts her selection as one of only 50 "truth wizards" who can "spot deception with exceptional accuracy" in her marketing materials [PDF]. This is based on the Wizards Project (I am not making this up) run by Paul Ekman and researchers at the University of California. This "wizard" designation is as worthless as the pseudoscience behind it.

While the theory of universal expressions dates back to Charles Darwin, research has been mixed, and Ekman’s work in this area has been repeatedly challenged by scientists in recent years as unreliable, in part because of methodological issues.

Where microexpressions are concerned — also an area of Ekman’s studies — subsequent research has found them “rare and nondiagnostic,” Kukucka said, and that training individuals to see them doesn’t actually work.

It's still just a coin toss, no matter how much training officers receive. This is the same junk science the TSA thinks will help it catch terrorists. The problem here is trainees believe they're actually better at detecting lies after having their heads filled with unproven assertions all day long by someone who fervently believes they can detect lies better than 99.9999999% of the population. Years of training can't make these results replicable. A day or two of training does nothing more than make officers believe they can do something they actually can't: detect lies just by looking at facial expressions.

When reached for comment, Ellory offered several -- most of them defensive But this one's remarkable in its level of self-regard:

“I find at times with my gift, it’s akin to seeing color in a world where other people live in a colorblind world. Seeing color is ‘real’ but trying to convince a color blind person color exists is nearly impossible,” she wrote. “I tell people in my classes what I teach will be common knowledge in 100 years, but we are still in the dark ages when it comes to understanding human behavior and deception,” she continued. “At a point, I learned, I can’t change the world alone. But I can educate those who are open to learning and they have thanked me endlessly."

Renee Ellory isn't the only "expert" telling cops they can detect lies using techniques never proven to detect lies. Steven Rhoads, former police chief and, um, "retired Christian rodeo clown," heads the very sketchy-sounding "Subconscious Communication Training Institute." Documents [PDF] contained in the DDoSecrets stash show Rhoads and his acolytes have been infecting everyone from local cops to ICE agents with his proprietary brand of pseudoscience bullshit.

The trainings feature lessons in how body language — including “facial gestures and human emotions,” “eye movement and gaze behavior,” and “gestures involving the torso” — can be used in interrogations and reveals not only deception but danger for officers. “As a very general rule of thumb the left side of the body is more apt to reveal known deception than is the right side of the body,” reads material for a 2018 training called “Subconscious Communication for Detecting Danger,” found in files connected to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center.

Rhoads says his system is scientific because, unlike Ellory's, it relies on a baseline. Cops can't just walk up to a perp and stare down the left side of the detainee's body until it starts confessing. Cops have to establish a baseline for emotions, expressions, and responses. But that takes only about 20 questions. You know, like a polygraph machine -- that other "science" that has repeatedly proven to be highly inaccurate.

It's sadly unsurprising pseudoscience purveyors are still finding willing buyers of their bullshit in the law enforcement community. Cops are just as susceptible to cognitive biases as the people they police. They believe they're smarter than the people they deal with. Training like this only increases their self-deception. Even if the trainers and their methods were legit, it would still be a problem. You can't crank out experts in human behavior over the course of a couple of 8-hour sessions. But the Dunning-Kruger effect also affects those doing the training and selling this junk science: they appear to believe they can.

All of this adds up to worse policing. When reasonable suspicion involves judgment calls based on secondhand bad science, peoples' rights are being violated by officers who now believe they're capable of detecting lies just by looking at a person.

Filed Under: blue leaks, junk science, law enforcement

Las Vegas Police Are Running Lots Of Low Quality Images Through Their Facial Recognition System

from the that's-going-to-end-badly dept

Even when facial recognition software works well, it still performs pretty poorly. When algorithms aren't generating false positives, they're acting on the biases programmed into them, making it far more likely for minorities to be misidentified by the software.

The better the image quality, the better the search results. The use of a low-quality image pulled from a store security camera resulted in the arrest of the wrong person in Detroit, Michigan. The use of another image with the same software -- one that didn't show the distinctive arm tattoos of the non-perp hauled in by Detroit police -- resulted in another bogus arrest by the same department.

In both cases, the department swore the facial recognition software was only part of the equation. The software used by Michigan law enforcement warns investigators search results should not be used as sole probable cause for someone's arrest, but the additional steps taken by investigators (which were minimal) still didn't prevent the arrests from happening.

That's the same claim made by Las Vegas law enforcement: facial recognition search results are merely leads, rather than probable cause. As is the case everywhere law enforcement uses this tech, low-quality input images are common. Investigating crimes means utilizing security camera footage, which utilizes cameras far less powerful than the multi-megapixel cameras found on everyone's phones. The Las Vegas Metro Police Department relied on low-quality images for many of its facial recognition searches, documents obtained by Motherboard show.

In 2019, the LVMPD conducted 924 facial recognition searches using the system it purchased from Vigilant Solutions, according to data obtained by Motherboard through a public records request. Vigilant Solutions—which also leases its massive license plate reader database to federal agencies—was bought last year by Motorola Solutions for $445 million.

Of those searches, 471 were done using images the department deemed “suitable,” and they resulted in matches with at least one “likely positive candidate” 67% of the time. But 451 searches, nearly half, were run on “non-suitable” probe images. Those searches returned likely positive matches—which could mean anywhere from one to 20 or more mugshots, all with varying confidence scores assigned by the system—only 18% of the time.

Fortunately, low-quality images seemingly rarely return anything investigators can use. (Although that 18% is still 82 "likely positive matches...") If the system did, we'd be seeing far more bogus arrests than we've seen to this point. Of course, prosecutors and police aren't letting suspects know facial recognition software contributed to their arrests, so courtroom challenges have been pretty much nonexistent.

Although most of the information in the documents is redacted -- making it difficult to verify LVMPD claims about the software's contribution to arrests and prosecutions -- enough details remained to provide a suspect facing murder charges with information the LVMPD had never turned over to him or admitted to in court.

Clark Patrick, the Las Vegas attorney representing [Alexander] Buzz, told Motherboard that neither the LVMPD nor the Clark County District Attorney’s office ever informed him that investigators identified Buzz as a suspect using, at least in part, facial recognition technology. The Clark County District Attorney’s office did not respond to an interview request or written questions.

Had this information been given to Buzz and his attorney at the beginning of the trial, he likely would not have waived his right to a preliminary evidentiary hearing. If this had taken place -- along with knowledge of a private company's contribution to the investigation -- prosecutors may have had to produce information about the tech and the surveillance footage it pulled images from.

The documents don't appear to show a reliance on low-quality images to make arrests, but they do show investigators will run nearly any image through the software to see if it generates some hits. The precautions taken after this matter most. If investigators are only considering matches to be leads, it will head off most false arrests. But if investigators take shortcuts -- as appears to have happened in Detroit -- the outcome is disastrous for those falsely arrested. A person's rights and freedoms shouldn't be at the mercy of software that performs poorly even when given good images to work with. The use of this software is never going to go away completely, but agencies can mitigate the damage by refusing to treat matches as probable cause.

Filed Under: facial recognition, las vegas, law enforcement, police