No Immunity For Cops Who Used A Field Drug Test To Turn Stress Ball Sand Into Cocaine

from the magic-8-ball-but-for-taking-away-people's-liberty dept

Getting probable cause is easy, especially when you have accomplices. Law enforcement loves drug dogs, which give them the permission they need to engage in warrantless searches. All a dog has to do is "alert"... or almost "alert"... or be presented in sworn testimony as feeling ways about an odor. Permission obtained. Searches permitted.

Another favorite method for securing permission for seizures, arrests, and searches without a warrant is the field drug test. The tests are cheap, which makes them a popular law enforcement tool. They're also notoriously inaccurate. That also makes them popular with law enforcement. Cops aren't interested in successful prosecutions. They're interested in arrests and warrantless searches. And these cheap tests -- which are often wrong about the presence of drugs -- are nearly as popular as drug dogs.

Here's just a short (and very incomplete) list of the conclusions reached by cheap, unreliable field drug tests deployed by cops:

• Donut crumbs are meth.
• Over-the-counter pain medication is crack cocaine.
• Cotton candy is meth.
• A deceased child's ashes are both/either meth/ecstasy.
• Raw honey is meth.
• An undermined substance is heroin/fentanyl.
• Bird poop on a CAR HOOD is cocaine.
• Baking soda is cocaine.
• Tea leaves are marijuana.

Being wrong a lot doesn't stop cops from using these tests. Nor does it stop prosecutors from moving ahead with prosecutions backed by nothing more than a "test" that should be considered as fanciful as anything sold in the back pages of comic books.

It's time to add to field drug test's lousy track record of misidentifying substances. Fortunately, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has sided [PDF] with the person arrested for carrying a legal substance while (allegedly) jaywalking. (via Reason)

Everyone agrees that, on the evening of October 10, 2015, Goldring was walking in Midtown, Atlanta; Officers Henry and Restrepo initially arrested her for jaywalking; they took her to the police station; at the police station, Officer Henry field tested the powdery contents of a stress ball found in Goldring’s purse; and the officers got a warrant for Goldring’s arrest for jaywalking and trafficking in cocaine.

Other facts remain disputed. The plaintiff, Julius Goldring, swears she never jaywalked. Instead, she was waiting on the corner with some friends when the officers approached her.

Here's the undisputed outcome of that interaction:

After the officers stopped Goldring, Officer Restrepo frisked her, searched her purse—to which Goldring consented—and found a stress ball. It was “a regular stress ball” with a metal clip. Goldring told Officer Restrepo that it was just a stress ball and said he could open it. Officer Restrepo cut the ball open, revealing a white “powdery, sandy kind of substance.” The officers suspected that this powder was cocaine but they weren’t sure—in Officer Restrepo’s words, there are “a jillion powders that could be white.” The powder inside Goldring’s stress ball was just sand.

The officers grabbed a NARK II test and attempted to determine whether the stress ball sand was actually something else. This did not go well, according to Goldring.

Goldring witnessed Officer Henry perform the field test. He “looked frustrated,” “huffed and puffed” throughout the test, and shook the pouches containing the powder “with aggression like he was mad.” Although Officer Henry used multiple test kits, Goldring saw that the liquid inside never changed color. She testified that a third officer saw what Officer Henry was doing and “kept telling him that it was nothing” and was “not a drug,” referring to the powder in the test pouches, and told Officer Henry to “[g]ive it up buddy.”

Officer Henry, of course, disagrees with this assessment of his drug test and drug-testing skills.

As to the field test, Officer Henry testified that he performed the test twice—both times crushing the three ampoules simultaneously. The liquid then turned a “bluish-purple.” Officer Henry thought this was a “faint positive,” incorrectly believing that “if it’s darker than pink, then it’s positive,” while “if it just showed pink” it was negative. Officer Restrepo testified that he didn’t watch the test and Officer Henry later told him the result was positive. But in an internal affairs report, Officer Restrepo stated that Officer Henry showed him the test result—a “faint positive.”

Not all that persuasive. At least not to Goldring or the Appeals Court. But it was persuasive enough to Officer Henry that he arrested Goldring and searched her belongings. He got her charged with trafficking cocaine, which led to a $25,500 bail assessment. Goldring couldn't make bail so she sat in jail… for five months. A lab test showed the substance wasn't cocaine November 17, 2015, a little more than a month after the October 10th arrest. But prosecutors didn't dismiss the charges until March 2018, unjustifiably extending her detention in jail for a crime a crime lab said she didn't commit.

Both officers tried to escape the false arrest and malicious prosecution allegations. The court says they can't.

Officer Restrepo also argues that his interaction with Goldring was limited to her warrantless arrest and he didn’t sign the warrant application. Thus, he maintains that Goldring’s malicious prosecution claim against him fails because he did not initiate a criminal prosecution against her. We disagree. Although Officer Restrepo didn’t remember whether he helped write the warrant application, Officer Henry testified that Officer Restrepo wrote the narrative for the warrant application and spoke to the magistrate judge about it. This is summary judgment evidence from which a reasonable jury could find that Officer Restrepo had assisted in drafting the warrant application and getting it signed by the magistrate judge. Officer Restrepo was involved in initiating the prosecution against Goldring.

As for Officer Henry, he has not advanced any arguments that he did not initiate a criminal prosecution against Goldring. Nor could he because the record is clear that he signed the affidavit supporting the arrest warrant presented to the magistrate judge.

The court says there's not enough evidence at this stage to determine who's telling the truth about the alleged jaywalking. Conflicting narratives should be sorted out later, perhaps even by a jury. The same goes for the drug trafficking charge. Officer Henry says the field drugs tests were positive. The plaintiff says the cops lied about the drug test results on their warrant application and arrest paperwork. No qualified immunity on either court. This goes back down to the lower court for more examination.

Five months is a long time to spend in jail for pre-trial detention. It's absolute insanity for someone to spend four months in jail after a lab test has determined the substance you were arrested for possessing was actually the legal substance you claimed it was. Hopefully, this rejection will lead to a sizable settlement or one of those judicial unicorns: a jury trial. The cops screwed up, made inaccurate claims about what they'd observed, and a prosecutor ran with it. They all need to be held accountable, even if it means the public will ultimately be paying for their actions.

Filed Under: 11th circuit, 4th amendment, cocaine, drug test, field drug test, probable cause, qualified immunity, sand, warrant

Texas Gas Companies Hit Texas Consumers With 'Whoops You Froze To Death' Surcharge

from the frozen-to-death-surcharge dept

If you hadn't noticed, the United States isn't really prepared for climate change. In part because corporations and disinformation mills have convinced countless Americans a destabilizing climate isn't actually happening. But also because we were already perpetually underinvesting in our core infrastructure before the symptoms of an unstable climate began to manifest. It's a massive problem that, as John Oliver highlighted six years ago, doesn't get the same attention as other pressing issues of the day. You know, like the latest influencer drama or the mortal threat posed by TikTok.

Infrastructure policy is treated as annoying and boring... until a crisis hits and suddenly everybody cares. As millions of Texans found out earlier this year when the state's energy infrastructure crumbled like a rotten old house under the weight of heating energy demands, leaving millions without power during a major cold snap. While the state engaged in a lot of performative nonsense in the wake of the breakdown, nothing much changed. Most of the state laws passed to "fix" the problem just punted any meaningful action down the road, while carving out big exemptions for natural gas companies that helped write the laws.

Fast forward nine months and the natural gas companies that refused to upgrade and weather proof their infrastructure, still largely haven't done so. What have they done? Well, recently they decided to hit Texas natural gas customers with a major and obnoxious new $3.4 billion surcharge with the blessing of state regulators:

"Texans will be paying for the effects of last February’s cold snap for decades to come, as the state’s oil and gas regulator approved a plan for natural gas utilities to recover $3.4 billion in debt they incurred during the storm. The regulator, the Railroad Commission, is allowing utilities to issue bonds to cover the debt. As a result, ratepayers could see an increase in their bills for the next 30 years.

So not only did Texas regulators not hold local energy utilities and frackers accountable for not weather proofing their infrastructure after decades of warnings, they're happily signing off on a plan to let them punish consumers for their own incompetence. The dysfunction runs parallel with similar dysfunction in the telecom sector, where companies routinely fail to adequately invest in their networks, yet still somehow punish their captive customers and taxpayers with the blessing of local regulators who rarely hold them accountable for anything. The big difference of course: a broadband outage (usually) won't kill you.

Granted the dysfunction in Texas doesn't just impact Texans. The regulatory corruption and incompetence has a ripple effect on things like natural gas prices, which impacts users in other states as well, as Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, told The Washington Post back in April:

"The ineptness and disregard for common-sense utility regulation in Texas makes my blood boil and keeps me up at night,” Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, said in an interview. “It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas’s lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country."

This kind of infrastructure corruption and dysfunction is nothing new (again, just look at US telecom, rail travel, or countless other sectors). But climate change is one arena where state/federal corruption and our propaganda problem has congealed into something particularly nasty. It's not clear how many mass-fatality events we have to live through before we embrace meaningful corruption, lobbying, and regulatory reform, but it's apparently going to be a significant number, as America remains utterly allergic to learning anything from history or experience.

Filed Under: climate change, energy prices, surchargers, texas

Company Promises 'Seamless Parking Experience' In Exchange For The Permission To Track App Users All Over The Internet

from the pervasive-tracking?-yeah,-there's-an-app-for-that dept

Paying for parking should be simple. A driver exchanges money for space and time. End of discussion.

But it's never going to be that simple again. Not if tech companies like Metropolis Technologies can help it. Instead of paying for parking, drivers will be expected to allow the company to trail it all over the internet, across devices, and package up all this information and sell it to third parties.

You shouldn't need an app to park a car. Metropolis believes you do. And that's causing some friction in Southern California, where cars are everywhere and parking is limited. A dust up between Trader Joe's customers and a nearby lot began with a shopper being accosted by a lot attendant and ended with the retailer making it very clear it had no desire to make its customers download an app just to park their cars.

Colin Shanahan discovered this during a recent visit to the Trader Joe’s grocery store in Hollywood.

After parking his car in the garage — seldom an easy task, as any SoCal TJ’s customer will attest — he was instructed by an attendant to download an app to his phone, register for service and use that for payment.

“Not wanting to give some random app a ton of personal information, I declined,” the Hollywood resident told me.

The parking-lot attendant, he said, “let me off with a warning that I wouldn’t be so lucky next time.”

The response from Trader Joe's?

“This isn’t a TJ’s thing,” said Tara Miller, a Trader Joe’s spokesperson. “It’s being implemented by the landlord. We are a tenant in the building and are bound by the same parking validation system as other tenants.”

No, it's a Metropolis thing. The Venice, California company was formed in 2017 and offers the promise/threat of "parking reimagined" on its bright, shiny website.

The reimagination begins with the requirement of an app to park cars in lots "serviced" by Metropolis. The demands it makes from users (again, just in exchange for the dubious privilege of paying for parking along with additional "convenience" fees) starts with some expected info: name, phone number, credit card. These are all things that are expected from services requiring payment -- both to obtain the payments and to verify the legitimacy of linked accounts.

Then the list continues: email address, make, model and year of vehicle, license plate number. Again, these might be useful for validating parking and preventing fraud. But they're not strictly necessary. Metropolis believes this information is key and demands it.

The list of demands gets much longer once you install the app.

Metropolis says it may also collect your internet protocol address, which identifies your specific device on information networks, as well as your wireless service provider, browser, operating system and type of phone.

It reserves the right to monitor “pages that you visit before, during and after” using the company’s online parking validation, as well as “information about the links you click” and “information about the services you use.”

[...]

“Your browsing activity may be tracked across different websites and different devices or apps,” the policy says. “For example, we may attempt to match your browsing activity on your mobile device with your browsing activity on your laptop.

All of this to facilitate paying for parking. Obviously, Metropolis doesn't make its money from the "convenience" skim it collects from every transaction. This is where the real money is: pervasive tracking of a person's internet use and other habits across devices… all starting with an app that's just supposed to allow you to pay for temporary use of a parking space.

And it won't just be Metropolis tracking you. The app's 4,000-word terms of service policy also says third parties will be permitted to tag along like digital remora, helping themselves to whatever data comes floating downstream from the parking app produced by Metropolis. That information is also used to by these third parties to track users' activities across apps and devices specifically for the purpose of delivering targeted advertising.

David Lazarus, who wrote this up for the Los Angeles Times, was only able to get more corporatespeak when he asked for an explanation for what all of this has to do with parking.

[T]he spokesperson said the company “collects essential information to facilitate a seamless parking experience.”

The only thing seamless here is Metropolis' collection of information, almost all of which is not "essential" to a "seamless parking experience." (And what the hell is a "parking experience?" Your car does most of the "experiencing" and it's inanimate.)

But Metropolis will make inroads despite its illogical, privacy-invading take on parking because people have been trained to assume there's an app for everything, and anything that keeps them from having to open a wallet or purse is probably a net gain in the long run. There will be the doubters and pockets of resistance, but those on the fence who question the need for a parking app will be smacked in the eyes with a 4,000-word terms of use policy that most won't bother reading.

Most people aren't wrong to want or expect frictionless transactions. What's wrong is companies like Metropolis remove the friction in exchange for tons of information most people wouldn't willingly agree to hand over if the companies were upfront about what information they were gathering and what they planned to do with it. Pretending a densely worded novella-length privacy policy is the same thing as transparency is pure bullshit.

Filed Under: data, parking, privacy, tracking
Companies: metropolis technologies

Daily Deal: VidToon 2.0 Animated Video Maker

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

Creating engaging animated videos is child’s play with VidToon 2.0 Animated Video Maker. You can make animated videos within minutes. Use pre-animated avatars, 100 HD backgrounds, text-to-speech capability, and other valuable and easy-to-use features to start creating your own animation. It's on sale for $49.

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

Filed Under: daily deal

Why Are Drug Prices So High? Because Asshole McKinsey Consultants Figure Out Ways To Re-Patent The Same Drugs Over And Over

from the it's-a-scam dept

The House Oversight Committee recently launched an investigation into the giant consulting firm McKinsey, and its role in inflating drug prices as well as pushing opioids at every opportunity.

“Over the last decade, McKinsey & Company—one of the largest consulting companies in the world and a major U.S. government contractor—has engaged in a pattern of conduct that raises serious concerns about its business practices, conflicts of interest, and management standards,” wrote Chairwoman Maloney. “The company’s support for drug companies pushing addictive opioid painkillers and raising prices for life-saving medications, even as McKinsey also advised the federal agency regulating their conduct, may have had a significant negative impact on Americans’ health. McKinsey’s investments through an internal hedge fund—including in companies benefiting from opioid sales—also raise significant concerns about conflicts of interest.”

The opioid stuff is certainly scary, but more interesting to us at Techdirt is that the Committee also released a set of incredibly damning documents, of PowerPoint slides from McKinsey, presented to AbbVie execs about ways to jack up the prices on drugs, especially by bending over backwards to re-patent the same drug over and over again. Going through the slides is an exercise in observing pure evil. For all the talk of internet companies "putting profit over societal benefit" or whatever, these documents show deliberate planning by McKinsey to make sure that AbbVie drugs more or less bankrupt those who take them -- often by blatantly abusing the patent system.

Some of the slides go back about a decade, at a time when the entire pharmaceutical industry was freaking out over its own failures to discover new and useful drugs that it could get monopoly rents over. Rather than building a nice sustainable business with nice sustainable margins, the pharma industry, over the last few decades, has focused on squeezing ridiculous monopoly rents out of the public by abusing patent laws. And, of course, you'll hear that they need to do this to pay for all the research and development, and all the costs of trials and whatnot. Except nearly all those claims are bullshit.

Stories abound about the billions of dollars that it costs to develop a new drug -- except studies have shown those numbers are massively inflated (a drug that the pharma firm claimed cost $1.3 billion to develop actually cost the firm only $55 million). Much of the actual costs (and research and work) are done by universities or through public funding from NIH and NSF. But all of the profits go to the big pharma companies.

But what McKinsey and AbbVie did with Humira is truly nefarious. As the presentations show, AbbVie (and its predecessor, Abbott) was terrified of facing any competition for Humira, a biologic drug that is used by many to treat arthritis, Crohn's disease, and other diseases. Apparently it costs around $84,000 a year, though that link claims that if you're lucky, perhaps insurance will lower that cost to just $60k. That same page claims the reason it costs so much is:

One of the reasons that Humira is so expensive is because it’s a complex medication to make. DNA technology must be used to create proteins for the drug—a process that can’t be replicated, unlike with synthetically manufactured medications.

Except, these internal documents from McKinsey tell a very, very, very different story. McKinsey and Abbott knew that other competitors entering the market would cut the price of Humira significantly:

The project was pitched as a way to assess this competitive threat and to look for ways to limit it, but throughout the report you see winks and nods towards abusing patent law to stop the competition, as well as pretending that biosimilar competition was somehow unsafe:

Note that the two items that actually might benefit the public: lowering prices and competing... are at the bottom of the list.

But what McKinsey really seems to love is this idea of "formulation change" to both extend the effective patent life of a drug... and to boost the cost, claiming that these "innovations" allow them to jack up the cost:

And, if you think maybe that doesn't matter because the earlier version will go off patent, the way the scam works is that you get the pharma company to phase out entirely the older formulation a few years before the patent runs out, forcing patients to move onto the newer formulation. Thus, when the patent runs out on the earlier version, Pharma tells everyone that it would be a "step backwards" to go with a generic or biosimilar of the "earlier" formulation.

From there, the slides shift to a year later, when McKinsey is really all in on trying to find ways to reformulate Humira and extend the patent life (and the ability of Abbott to jack up prices). The slides make little attempt to hide the fact that this is all about protecting Abbott's profits, not making anyone's lives better. The presentation shows that McKinsey set up an internal incentive program to try to get various Abbott scientists to suggest any kind of ideas for how to patent new formulations of Humira to extend the patents covering it:

They don't even hide the fact that this is entirely an effort to "broaden our Humira patent estate in response to Biosimilars." It's got nothing to do with improving things for customers. It's about keeping drug prices high way beyond the expiration of the original Humira patents.

And what do Abbott/AbbVie scientists get for selling their soul and deliberately keeping prices of life-saving drugs way too high for most people? Apple devices. This is why they pay McKinsey the big bucks. They set up a program in which Abbott scientists would get an iPhone if they had an idea on how to extend Humira's patents, an iPad if those ideas turned into an actual patent applications, and (yup) you'd get a Mac computer if the patent was actually granted:

There's much more in the presentation, and Tahir Amin from I-MAK Global has an even more in-depth Twitter thread about this nonsense.

And... in an interesting bit of timing... just a week or so after the House Oversight Committee released these incredibly eye-opening documents, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review released a big report detailing how recent US drug price increases are not supported by new clinical evidence. And guess which drug tops their list of the drug price changes having (by an order of magnitude) the most impact on how much people had to spend? Humira.

The report shows that because of unsubstantiated price increases on Humira, Americans spent an unnecessary extra $1.4 billion on Humira, thanks to a 10% increase in net price on a drug that a decade ago everyone (including Abbott and McKinsey) knew was facing the expiration of its patents, as well as expected competition from biosimilars.

As ICER noted in its release, in other countries, where Humira is actually facing biosimilar competition, prices are falling:

“While prescription drugs continue to arrive in the US with increasingly high launch prices — often not aligned with those therapies’ ability to improve patients’ lives — year-over-year price increases have slowed considerably since ICER began issuing these UPI reports,” said David Rind, MD, ICER’s Chief Medical Officer. “However, there remain many high-cost brand drugs that continue to experience annual price hikes, even after accounting for their rebates. The most extreme of these is Humira, with an ever-escalating US price that contrasts starkly to its falling price in every country where Humira currently faces biosimilar competition. Even more concerning, several of these treatments have been on the market for many years, with scant evidence that they are any more effective than we understood them to be years ago when they cost far less."

To McKinsey consultants and AbbVie scientists: were those iPhones worth it?

Filed Under: competition, consultants, drug prices, humira, patents
Companies: abbvie, mckinsey

Biden FCC Green Lights Yet More Telecom Consolidation With Verizon Tracfone Merger

from the meet-the-new-boss dept

For literally 30 years telecom regulators have, with the occasional rare exception, rubber stamped a steady parade of mergers, resulting in a consolidated, less competitive overall market. The end result of these decisions are everywhere, from terrible customer service and high prices, to routine apathy to consumer privacy and spotty overall telecom coverage. And while regulators occasionally affix merger conditions designed to limit these harms, these conditions are usually either pathetic (often because they're volunteered by the companies themselves) or they're just not enforced in any meaningful capacity (outside of the rare and laughable fine).

While there's a bit more awareness and opposition to mindless mergermania coming from the left, when it comes to regulators and politicians, this obsession with embracing mergers and consolidation is bipartisan. This week, the Biden FCC announced it would be greenlighting Verizon's $6 billion merger with Tracfone. Tracfone, currently owned by América Móvil, largely caters to low-income Americans. Consumer groups initially balked at the deal, arguing that Verizon's long history of nickel-and-diming made it likely the company would inevitably nickel-and-dime those financially precarious users as well.

But Verizon, a company with a long history of not living up to merger promises, made some promises... and now the Biden FCC says it's approving the deal. Verizon has promised to try and keep prices the same for a while, make 5G devices available to these users, continue participation in the FCC's low-income Lifeline program for a while, and generally not be a predatory ass. All overseen by what the FCC calls "strong, independent, enforcement mechanisms":

"The Commission also adopted strong, independent mechanisms for enforcing these conditions and ensuring that the transaction does not harm low-income or other consumers. These enforcement mechanisms include both an internal and an independent compliance officer who are empowered to proactively monitor conditions, ensure that low-income consumers are not being harmed, and facilitate consumer complaints about potential violations."

I'm sure the FCC thinks they've fixed the deal by extracting conditions. The problem is we've been through this rodeo before, and there are 40 years of history showing that these pinky swears are frequently meaningless. Verizon has a long, rich history of nickel and diming consumers and tap dancing around obligations, usually with minimal to no penalty. They're simply responding to pressure to maximize shareholder value within the framework of limited competition and regulatory capture. Claiming they're not going to nickel and dime consumers this time because you hired compliance officer or extracted a few pinky swears is like claiming water won't flow downhill.

The vast majority of the time the FCC lacks the resources, interest, or attention span to follow up after deals like this to ensure meaningful compliance. And if there is a failure to adhere to conditions, the worst that happens is a few million in fines, which is piddly couch change to a giant like Verizon. And as the FCC shifts leadership during elections and falls under Republican control, there's even less incentive to hold Verizon accountable for failures than there is under the historically inconsistent and feckless Democratic party.

It's extremely rare that regulators just... shoot down mergers like this. In large part because companies like Verizon are trusted, patriotic participants in our domestic surveillance efforts. Between that and their deep campaign contributions and political pull, upsetting them by simply blocking more consolidation is frequently just not even considered. So policymakers approve the deal, convince themselves that they've extracted meaningful conditions, and fool themselves into thinking that this time will surely be different. Until it isn't, and the regulators who approved the deal are nowhere to be found.

The same regulators that approve greater telecom consolidation will, with their very next breath, often complain about things like the "digital divide," as if the former isn't directly causing the latter. It's a big dumb loop, and any time there's an effort to appoint the kind of regulators that might break the cycle, these massive, consolidated telecom giants just throw more cash and influence around to block reform and perpetuate the profitable dysfunction.

Filed Under: broadband, competition, consolidation, fcc, telcos
Companies: tracfone, verizon

Helicopter Footage Obtained By The ACLU Shows Pervasive Surveillance Of Peaceful Anti-Police Violence Protests

from the because-of-course-it-does dept

Thanks to a trove of public records, the ACLU can provide some insight on how the California Highway Patrol engaged in surveillance of anti-police brutality protests. While one would expect police helicopters to fly over protests to keep an eye out for any illegal activity, it appears the officers manning the surveillance cameras were more interested in trying to identify protesters who weren't breaking any laws.

Some lowlights of the aerial footage can be seen in this video produced by the ACLU:

Here's how the ACLU describes what it observed in the recordings liberated from from the CHP:

In Sacramento, CHP closely zooms in on a protester as they sit alone on a fountain next to a Black Lives Matter poster. An hour later, when people peacefully assemble in front of the fountain to hear an organizer speak, CHP continues to hover and record, zooming in closely on people’s faces and signs.  

In Placerville, CHP captures detailed footage of several dozen protesters peacefully assembled in front of the El Dorado County courthouse. The video captures an organizer thanking and hugging participants as they hold up signs. CHP also recorded a Riverside County courthouse protest described as a “vigil... so quiet that the loudest sound was helicopters overhead.” In the CHP recordings, police cameras zoom in on faces and linger over people speaking at vigils, handing out water, making signs, participating in die-ins, and even dancing.

This is the Press-Enterprise's recounting of the peaceful protest in Riverside not-so-quietly observed by CHP helicopters:

The demonstration ended peacefully in the mid-afternoon, after protesters took a symbolic nine-minute knee in front of the Riverside Historic Courthouse. The vigil was so quiet that the loudest sound was helicopters overhead.

Then they returned to the park and dispersed, with some demonstrators cleaning up the streets as they went.

There were no arrests. “Very peaceful. No issues reported,” Riverside Police spokesman Officer Ryan Railsback said.

But despite there being no signs of criminal activity, the helicopters continued to circle the protest while camera operators zoomed in on faces for reasons that went undocumented in the reports obtained by the ACLU. That lack of information implies the apparent attempts to photograph or identify protesters fell outside the stated purpose of the surveillance and was deliberately left out of CHP reports.

That's not the only troubling aspect of the CHP surveillance footage. It also appears the CHP took particular interest in anti-police protests, allowing other large protests to go unobserved by its eyes in the sky.

We asked CHP whether it had any surveillance footage of other protests last year, including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated shelter-in-place orders. But in hour after hour of footage provided by CHP, what we saw were protests against police violence, not protests of pandemic policy.

There are several reasons a law enforcement agency might find anti-police brutality protests more "worthy" of extended surveillance than other protests over other issues. Very few of those reasons are excusable. At best, it would be safe to assume that anti-police protests are more volatile because they historically have been. But when no criminal activity is observed, the CHP should maintain its distance. When it's clear it's a peaceful protest, the CHP has no business targeting individual protesters.

The rest of the reasons suck. The CHP targeted the protests because the protests targeted law enforcement. A majority of protesters in these protests (as compared to COVID-related protests) were persons of color. The eyes in the sky weren't so much about keeping the peace as reminding protesters law enforcement is omnipresent and its eyes can be pretty much anywhere at all times. Circling over peaceful protests with police helicopters is a form of intimidation. Destroying a nine-minute silent tribute to a black man killed by a white cop with whirling rotors and engine noise is a feature, not a bug, of this form of surveillance.

This implicit ugliness will, of course, be denied by law enforcement officials. Just like they've denied all sorts of evidence of biased policing pretty much since the inception of their respective law enforcement agencies. But everyone can see it's still there. The footage obtained here says what police officials are unwilling to confront: that cops go after minorities whenever possible and still feel very comfortable singling them out for whatever form of surveillance they happen to have on hand.

Filed Under: blm, california, chp, helicopter, protests, surveillance

BookTok Shows How Fans Can Power Sales; Imagine What Could Be Done Without Copyright Anxiety

from the let-your-fans-market-for-you dept

A little while back, the Guardian covered the rising literary power of BookTok – short videos on TikTok devoted to the pleasures and pains of reading. As well as plenty of background information about the BookTok phenomenon, it has the following perceptive comment from Kat McKenna, a marketing and brand consultant specializing in children's and young adult books:

“These ‘snapshot’ visual trailers are making books cinematic in a way that publishers have been trying to do with marketing book trailers for a really long time. But the way TikTok users are creating imagery inspired by what they are reading is so simple, and so clever. It’s that thing of bringing the pages to life, showing what you get from a book beyond words.”

Attracting new – and especially new young – readers is something that publishers have long been striving for. And now, free of charge, BookTok creators are doing this for them, driving huge sales in many cases, as the Guardian explained:

Adam Silvera’s 2017 novel They Both Die at the End is one of the books to have benefited from the BookTok effect. Users recently started filming themselves before and after reading the book, sobbing as they reached the finish line. In March, it shot to the top of the teen fiction charts, selling more than 4,000 copies a week. The book has sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK, with well over half of those coming belatedly in 2021, after thousands of posts about it (#adamsilvera has been viewed 10.8m times).

BookTok is a wonderful demonstration of the power of user-generated content. Because it is made by ordinary people for ordinary people, it speaks directly in a way that no slick marketing campaign can hope to match. But inevitably, hanging over all such exciting experiments with the digital medium there will be “copyright anxiety” – a fear that during your explorations you might cross some invisible line that means you are breaking the law.

Think how many more sales of books, music, art, and films could be driven by new kinds of BookTok, appearing on multiple platforms, if only copyright allowed this kind of material to be used without the risk of legal threats, or of accounts being blocked. Ironically, it turns out that companies demanding stringent enforcement of copyright's unreasonable rules are ultimately harming themselves.

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

Originally posted to the Walled Culture blog.

Filed Under: advertising, booktok, copyright, culture, fans
Companies: tiktok

NSO Made Millions Selling Phone Hacking Tools To The Princes And Kings Of The United Arab Emirates

from the handing-more-power-to-the-unassailably-powerful dept

NSO Group can't get a break. Too bad. It really doesn't deserve one. The inability of the Israeli exploit purveyor to escape this endlessly negative news cycle is entirely its own fault. And each passing day seems to uncover something new and nasty about the tech company, which has built its business by seemingly selling to whoever wants to buy, no matter how morally repugnant.

The company's malware has been deployed by a variety of repeat human rights offenders to target journalists, critics, dissidents, religious leaders, opposition parties, and the occasional heads of state of their allies. To its own critics, NSO has issued contradictions: it is not responsible for how its customers use its products and that it does everything it can to prevent misuse of its products. The contradiction is baked in: NSO says it pulls access for misuse while claiming it has no "visibility" into its customers' activities.

It also says it does not sell its powerful malware to private entities. But the fine line between public and private entities is never finer than in the United Arab Emirates, where the allied rulers of the area are also private citizens -- kings and princes with access to a whole lot of wealth and a whole lot of power.

A prince can claim to be a government official and still behave like a private citizen. Take Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai. He's the king of Dubai. He's also in the middle of an extremely messy, somewhat public divorce from Princess Haya bint al-Hussein. His access to NSO's most popular phone exploit (Pegasus) allowed him to hack phones belonging to his ex, along with phones belonging to her legal reps.

But he's not the only UAE figurehead with NSO contracts. Israeli news agency Haaretz reports NSO has sold to other kings and princes who control parts of UAE: men who have plenty of private business that could benefit from a bit of phone hackery using tools obtained under the auspices of Official Government Business.

The Israeli cyber firm NSO sold its Pegasus mobile-phone hacking software to two different leaders of the United Arab Emirates – Abu Dhabi ruler Mohammed Bin Zayed and Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Makhtoum.

TheMarker has learned that the price each of these clients paid in dollars is a seven- to eight-figure number.

It's not that UAE doesn't have national security and law enforcement agencies that would make better homes for phone hacking tools. (I mean comparatively…) The UAE has a federal police force and a joint national security agency that's supposed to handle the sorts of things (serious crime, terrorist activity) NSO swears up and down its customers are using its exploits to combat.

So, why sell the princes and kings, who have few obligations to the people they rule over… you know, since they're rulers rather than elected officials? Apparently, the answer is because they have millions to spend on phone hacking tools and a company willing to exchange goods and services for money while pretending to hold its nose, cover its eyes and ears, and act all defensive when people ask the why in the almighty fuck are they selling exploits to the United Arab Emirates, much less its literal ruling class?

NSO says publicly (and a lot more frequently in recent months) that it takes a hard line on the abuse of its products to violate human rights. But it says that after years of selling to rulers with long histories of extremely severe human rights violations. Both things can't be true. And a cursory Google search would give NSO all the due diligence it needs to refuse to sell to rulers (and government agencies) located in places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. (Not to mention others with the same cavalier attitude towards life and liberty.)

Recent revelations are forcing NSO to put its money where its mouth is. With every new report of violations and use by human rights violators, the company is now obligated to yank access and cancel contracts. I cannot imagine how uncomfortable it will be for the company to approach rulers who preside over areas where executions and disappearances of critics are commonplace. But suck it up, NSO. The best way to avoid having to tell brutal rulers their business is no longer welcome is to never welcome it in the first place.

Worse, the country NSO calls home may be partly to blame.

In some cases, including the sale of two systems to two separate rulers in the UAE, the Pegasus system was only sold following heavy pressure from the Israeli government, as part of the diplomatic warming between Israel and the UAE. Yet the system’s irregular use embarrassed NSO and caused the third bout of bad publicity the company has sustained since being blacklisted by the U.S. last week.

So, if the Israeli government feels any complicity in the current state of NSO affairs, it probably should send a couple of diplomats along to ensure the revocation of hacking power by NSO not only actually happens, but happens without part of the NSO sales force being disappeared for having the audacity to tell these half-patriarchy/half-oligarchy rulers to take their business elsewhere.

Filed Under: dubai, israel, malware, pegasus, spyware, surveillance, uae
Companies: nso group