Drug Dog Testing Process Eliminates Handler Bias. Unsurprisingly, Cops Don't Like it.

from the accurate-data-is-fake-news dept

When a cop needs an excuse to search something (but can't manage to talk the citizen into consenting) there's almost always a four-legged cop waiting in the wings to give the cop permission to do what he wanted to do anyway. You will rarely hear testimony given in any court case where a K9 hasn't "alerted" to the smell of drugs. Once this "alert" is delivered, officers are free to override objections to warrantless searches under the theory that a dog's permission is all that's needed.

What's willfully ignored by law enforcement officers is the nature of the beasts they deploy: dogs like pleasing handlers and will react to unconscious cues and/or do the thing they're expected to do: "find drugs." If the dog knows it can perform an act for a reward, it will perform that act, whether or not drugs are present. Unfortunately, there's a deliberate dearth of data when it comes to drug-sniffing dog fallibility. Tracking this data would undercut the dogs' raison d'etre: to act as probable cause for warrantless searches. This lack of data makes challenging drug dog "alerts" in court almost impossible.

Fortunately, someone's actually looking into making drug dogs better -- or, at the very least, providing evidence that drug dogs are no more accurate at detecting drugs than $2 field tests. A program started by a former police K9 trainer is looking to remove the human factor from drug dog performance evaluations.

One organization trying to address handler bias is the Pacific Northwest Police Detection Dog Association. In the U.S., a drug-sniffing dog team — the dog and its handler — has to be periodically retested and certified, usually by one of the many regional K9 associations. Some groups have tougher testing methods than others; the PNWK9 has a method that aspires to scientific levels of impartiality.

"It's a double-blind," says Fred Helfers, the retired police K9 handler and trainer who designed the system. "No outside influence."

In Helfers' tests, nobody in the room knows where the drugs are hidden; not the handler, not even the test administrator. That's to eliminate the possibility of someone unconsciously telegraphing signals to the dog as it gets close to the target.

Why this hasn't been done before is a mystery. (I mean, it's a mystery if we pretend there aren't a million reasons law enforcement agencies prefer the status quo.) As NPR points out, a study published seven years ago showed drug dogs respond more to handler cues than to the presence of drugs. Researcher Lisa Lit's tests found dogs alerting to areas researchers indicated scents would be likely, rather than where scents were actually located. What was presented as a test of drug dogs was actually a test of the dogs' handlers. The dogs failed because their handlers failed.

Needless to say, the study was unpopular in the law enforcement community. Law enforcement K9 trainers denounced the study and refused to provide any more assistance to researchers. Lit calls this study -- one that pointed out the Clever Hans-esque performance of drug sniffing dogs -- a "career killer." This is what happens to research that doesn't conform with law enforcement's self-image.

Helfers' testing process -- in which die rolls determine drug locations and eliminate tester bias -- doesn't conform with officers' apparently misplaced belief in their own "training and expertise."

Occasionally, the dice determine that there will be no drugs hidden at all — sometimes for several tests in a row. He recalls that happening at another certification event.

"There were some new teams that failed that sequence," Helfers says. "Because they didn't trust their dog."

He says those handlers couldn't get past their expectation that drugs should be there. "I think they 'overworked' the car. Instead of going around once or twice and trusting their dog and watching their dog work, maybe they'd seen something that wasn't there," Helfers says.

This shows there's no question drug dogs respond to handlers. If dogs fail to respond, the animals are treated as untrustworthy by the same officers who refer to them as "probable cause on four legs." This is part of the problematic law enforcement mindset. A cop would never stop anyone who isn't a criminal… at least according to cops. This likely isn't a conscious thought, but rather the expected outcome of years of instruction that lead officers to view a wide swath of innocent behavior as inherently suspicious. (See also: too nervous, too calm, moving too much, moving too little, not looking directly at officers, looking directly at officers, traveling on any major highway, driving too fast/too slow/too perfect, ad nauseum.)

There is no room in this mindset for the possibility that the person being questioned isn't a criminal. If a cop can't find anything, it's time for a drug dog to do a few laps around the person's car, luggage, etc. If there's still no "hit," the problem must be the dog rather than the lack of contraband. Why? Because the only reason a cop would be interested in this particular person is because this person is doing something illegal. All other possibilities are discarded. This is clearly and disturbingly illustrated by this statement from another K9 officer:

"There's been cars that my dog's hit on... and just because there wasn't a product in it, doesn't mean the dog can't smell it," says Gunnar Fulmer, a K9 officer with the Walla Walla Police Department. "[The drug odor] gets permeated in clothing, it gets permeated in the headliners in cars."

[...]

"The dogs are mainly used to confirm what we already suspect," says Fulmer. "When the dogs come out, about 99 percent of the time we get an alert. And it's because we already know what's in the car; we just need that confirmation to help us out with that."

Confirmation bias, plain as day, and yet Officer Fulmar seems completely unaware of the underlying thrust of his statement. Worse, officers like Fulmer remains opposed to tracking of K9 false hits or to the introduction of any form of scientific rigor to the process.

Handlers also point out that scientific neutrality is not something you can reasonably expect during traffic stops, since police are trained to act on their suspicions.

In short, officers want to have free rein to allow their hunches to develop into warrantless searches with the assistance of animals prone to responding to handlers' cues, rather than the existence of contraband. Better an innocent man have his vehicle tossed than an officer admit his K9 partner might be more interested in giving him what he wants (a warrantless search) than in detecting the presence (or non-presence) of drugs.

This mindset permeates the entire process. When testing methods eliminate officers' involuntary cues or point out how frequently dogs respond to their handlers, it's the process that's wrong. Or the dogs. But never, under any circumstances, are the officers wrong. Law enforcement is willingly operating in its own massive blind spot, unable to fathom the slim possibility that the person they thought had drugs on them might not actually possess any drugs.

And this doesn't even address the bottom feeders of law enforcement: officers who knowingly use K9s to skirt warrant requirements, telling citizens the dog "alerted" even when it hasn't or has only done so in response to the officer's prompts. All of this is excused when officers actually find drugs and the times they don't are waved away with tired Drug War cliches about the sacrifice of a few people's rights for the greater good.

What this testing method shows is dogs (and their handlers) aren't to be trusted -- not without more data. If law enforcement can't admit to being wrong, they'll never look for ways to improve. Given what's been shown, drug dogs should not be treated as "probable cause on four legs." At best, they're walking confirmation bias -- self-serving tools of civil liberties circumvention.

Filed Under: accuracy, bias, drug dogs, drugs, evidence, police

ESPN Joins List Of Companies Enforcing Stringent Social Media Policies, Which Is Both Bad And Stupid

from the everything-is-politics dept

In these times in which I have spent many words and more calories lamenting the hyper-partisan uber-politicization of, well, pretty much everything, I have tended to focus on the primary effects of that silliness. It makes for bad elections, and therefore bad democracy. It grinds any kind of progress in government to a halt. It results in too many people making too little time to actualy listen to those that might not think as they do, instead devolving entirely too many conversations into soundbite name-calling, as though we were all participating on some national cable news roundtable.  

But the secondary effects of all of this are both important and terrible as well. An example of this can be found in major media companies responding to this partisanship, and particularly the silly amount of noise being made about how media itself is partisan, by instituting social media policies that are both draconian and stupid on the business side. And, if this sort of thing makes you feel any better, it happens on both sides of the political aisle. In recent weeks, for instance, both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have rolled out social media policies disallowing their respective journalists from publishing anything partisan.

The New York Times waded back into this particular swamp when it introduced an update to its social-media guidelines earlier this month, and reinforced the fact that its journalists are not to express any “partisan opinion” on social. The Times also noted that while reporters might be using these accounts on their personal time, anything said on them is the purview of the paper because of their association with it.

Not to be outdone, The Wall Street Journal this week released an update to its social-media policy. It reiterated the existing prohibition against “posting partisan comments on social networking sites,” and added that the paper’s management believes some reporters and editors “are spending too much time tweeting.”

This is silly for a number of reasons, chief among them that it will not have the desired effect. The New York Times will still be the dirty liberal communist left for those of a certain lean, while the Wall Street Journal won't be suddenly seen as the bastion of the middle ground for those of another. Stifling the social media presence of your media personalities to cultivate some non-partisan moniker is laughable. But it's also bad for business. People follow those media personalities, many of them that do opinion-based work, because they want to know what those personalities think. Slapping duct tape over the mouths of those that are the magnet for a media company's audience is the exact opposite of what they should be doing. For those more on the journalistic side than opinion side of things, it's slightly more understandable for a media property to want to appear politically even, except that we already said that wasn't going to happen.

And if you thought this was only going on in the arena of traditional news media, you're wrong. ESPN too, in the wake of the Jemele Hill vs. the White House episode, has gone further and required that their personalities not do things that draw any attention to ESPN that it doesn't want. And if you think that sounds vague, that's how the actual policy is written.

ESPN distributed new social media guidelines to its employees Thursday, which reinforced some existing rules about not breaking news exclusively on social media, respecting colleagues, and—oh wait, here’s a new thing: “Do nothing that would undercut your colleagues’ work or embroil the company in unwanted controversy.”

How is the average sports commentator or journalist supposed to know which types of controversy the company might want and which it doesn't? It's worth remembering that ESPN is essentially a marketing company more than it is in the journalism business. It wants attention, generally speaking. More attention, more eyeballs, more money. At least the New York Times and Wall Street Journal had the common decency to list an actual offense to avoid: partisanship. ESPN's guidelines instead puts its employees' employment at the pleasure of whether or not enough of the public will be upset at what they say on social media to warrant "controversy." That's crazy.

And even more so than with straight news media outlets, sports journalism and ESPN are almost entirely opinion-based. So ESPN wants to take people that follow its personalities for their opinions...and tell them not to be opinionated on social media? That doesn't make any sense. And, again, it won't achieve its goal. ESPN is the land of the socialists. We know so because Rush Limbaugh told us as much. No social media policy is going to change that.

The ultimate cure for this is, of course, the normalization of our political discourse, moving it back to the more reasoned discussions we at least think we remember having. These social media policies are a symptom of the problem, not a cure to it.

Filed Under: bias, journalism, opinions, social media
Companies: espn

If You're A Journalist Who Thinks That Pointing Out Lies Shows Bias, You're Not A Journalist

from the you're-a-pr-person dept

For years, we've pointed out the ridiculousness of "the view from nowhere" reporting (a phrase coined by journalism professor Jay Rosen). This is the ridiculous belief that being an "objective" journalist means never challenging what someone says to you, but rather just showing "both sides of the story" and not "taking" any side. But, that's ridiculous. If someone claims that the earth is flat, and you do a story showing the person claiming that, alongside someone else saying it's not, but never point out that the person saying the earth is flat is crazy, then you're not doing your job as a journalist. A journalist should be focusing on getting to the truth, and that means calling bullshit when warranted.

This issue has come up again this week, thanks to NBC talking head Matt Lauer's inability to challenge Donald Trump's blatantly false statement that he was against the war in Iraq. Trump has been saying this throughout the campaign, and it's simply not true. What's more, plenty of journalists have pointed out that it's not true, and any journalist interviewing the candidate, as Matt Lauer did, should have known that and should have pushed back. But Lauer did not, leading to widespread criticism.

What's perhaps even more astounding, however, is that some TV journalists jumped in to defend Lauer, insisting that doing actual fact checking on lies is showing bias:

Political talk-show host Chris Matthews, for example, said after the event that if Lauer had called Trump out for lying, that would be equivalent to expressing an opinion, and moderators are supposed to be neutral.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who is going to be moderating one of the debates between Trump and Clinton, said something similar in an interview. Wallace said it’s not his job to question the factual accuracy of a candidate’s statement during such an event.

“I do not believe it’s my job to be a truth squad,” Wallace said. “It’s up to the other person to catch them on that.”

If that's what they think, then they should all find new jobs. Because they're not journalists. The finding of truth is important, and calling out a candidate (or others in power) for false statements when they make them is part of that important role. It's not "biased" to seek the truth. It's not "biased" to call a false statement a false statement. It's the job of a journalist.

Filed Under: bias, chris matthews, chris wallace, donald trump, fact checking, facts, he said, journalism, matt lauer, objectivity, reporting, she said, truth

Donald Trump Has Freed Up Journalists' Ability To Call Bullshit; But It Won't Last, Nor Extend To Others

from the that's-too-bad dept

If you've been watching the political press at all this election season, you may notice something interesting that's different: the press is now calling bullshit on Donald Trump pretty regularly. Perhaps nothing has made this quite as clear as whoever handles the chyron text for CNN, who seems to take a bit of delight in real time fact checking of Donald Trump in a manner never really seen before: Of course, there are different ways to look at this. If you're Michael Goodwin at the NY Post, you argue that it's yet another example of the horrible biased liberal media, but even worse because now it's dropped all pretenses:

It’s pure bias, which the Times fancies itself an expert in detecting in others, but is blissfully tolerant of its own. And with the top political editor quoted in the story as ­approving the one-sided coverage as necessary and deserving, the prejudice is now official policy.

It’s a historic mistake and a complete break with the paper’s own traditions. Instead of dropping its standards, the Times should bend over backwards to enforce them, even while acknowledging that Trump is a rare breed. That’s the whole point of standards — they are designed to guide decisions not just in easy cases, but in all cases, to preserve trust.

That makes for a neat media narrative, but it doesn't really make much sense. If it were the case, then we'd see this kind of bullshit calling on lots of conservative politicians. But that's rarely the case. It seems to me that Ezra Klein's take on the same issue, at Vox, is much more accurate. That the media feels freed of its awkward "objective" standpoint by the fact that Trump is just so blatant in his lies. This is not to say other politicians aren't frequently dishonest or wrong. But Trump takes lying to a new level.

"The things Trump says are demonstrably false in a way that’s abnormal for politicians," says the Atlantic’s James Fallows, who wrote the book Why Americans Hate the Media. "When he says he got a letter from the NFL on the debates and then the NFL says, ‘No, he didn’t,’ it emboldens the media to treat him in a different way."

Politicians are not fully truthful. Everyone knows that. But they make a basic effort at being, as Stephen Colbert put it, truthy. The statistics they cite are usually in the neighborhood of correct. The falsehoods they offer are crafted through the careful omission of fact rather than the inclusion of falsehood. They may say things journalists know are wrong — climate change denial is a constant among Republican officeholders — but they protect themselves by wrapping their arguments in well-constructed controversy or appealing to hand-selected experts.

This is part of how political reporting operates. Politicians are allowed to be wrong, but they can’t lie. Trump just lies.

This is a big difference, but one that many people often confuse. Getting things wrong -- because you're misinformed, because you just really want to believe something is true, or because you just made a mistake -- is one thing. But pure fabrication is something different. And it's the outright fabrications that the press feels comfortable calling out.

The question is what does this actually mean for journalism? Goodwin, at the Post, sees this as the downfall of journalism. The fact that the media will actually call someone out on their lies is seen as "bias" because it's not done equally to other candidates. Klein sees this as a temporary state of being -- because most other candidates will return to their truthy wrongness with the press happy to eat that up, with nothing more than a "he said/she said" type of false equivalency when there's some question about the facts.

Another writer, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, more or less agrees with Goodwin that this is somehow freeing the press up to be biased, after noting how much he disagrees with Trump -- but worries about the press feeling emboldened.

I hate Trump, and I hope he loses. But I fear one consequence of his candidacy will be an even more biased press in the future.

Then there's Klein, who thinks that Trump's uniqueness means that this is a unique scenario for the press as well, and one that has many of them uncomfortable:

Covering Trump this way isn’t freeing. It’s uncomfortable, both for individual journalists and for the broader institutions they serve. I think, if anything, the likely reaction will be overcorrection: The press would be so happy to have a semi-normal Republican candidate it could cover respectfully that whoever follows Trump is likely to benefit from a bit of halo effect just by comparison.

Like so much else in this election, what defines the press’s coverage of Trump isn’t that he’s a Republican but that there is something abnormal about him, about his campaign, and about the dynamics surrounding it. Assuming more normal politicians succeed him, more normal forms of coverage will reassert themselves.

I think Klein is probably right here, and this is an unfortunate thing. Because we should want our press to be calling bullshit. It's not bias to call out someone when they lie. It's not bias to point out someone said something that's wrong. We should get over this lame "he said/she said" concept behind the stupidly fake idea of "objective" reporting, and do what reporters should be doing: calling bullshit when there's actual bullshit.

If there's any bias in the media, it's not because they're calling bullshit, but because they're not doing it enough. They should be more aggressive in pointing out not just what's an outright lie, but when a politician says something that's wrong (though they should distinguish between what's just wrong and what's a deliberate lie). Klein is probably right that reporters will go back to their old ways after this election, and Goodwin and Gobry will breathe a sigh of relief, but the reality is that we'll be losing out on a real opportunity to move the media from compliant stenographers to actual journalists.

Filed Under: bias, bullshit, donald trump, hillary clinton, journalism, political reporting, reporting

Congress Questions Facebook About Something It Probably Didn't Do With A Feature That Barely Matters

from the fairness-doctrine? dept

So just a couple of weeks ago, we had a discussion on the Techdirt podcast about whether or not it was appropriate for platforms like Facebook and Google to sway elections. As that discussion noted, while the obvious instinctual reaction is "hell no, that's horrible," the issue is a bit trickier and more nuanced the more you delve into it. Obviously, traditional media regularly present information in ways prompted to influence elections -- even to the point of endorsing candidates. But when things become algorithmic, for some reason, they get more complicated, because people like to think that an algorithm somehow is "neutral" or unbiased -- leaving out the fact that that algorithm is, you know, programmed by people and those people have their own biases and beliefs. But, the simple fact is that there's no such thing as a "neutral" platform in any real sense if there's anything that involves ranking. A ranking system is inherently biased because it needs to be. By definition, it's ranking things.

This week, there's been a big kerfuffle over a claim published at Gizmodo that Facebook's "trending stories" list was somehow biased against conservative sources, and that the humans who maintain the trending list were told not to link to certain sites, such as Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax. This followed on some overwrought and exaggerated reporting about the people who work on the trending news team.

The "Facebook suppressing conservative news stories" hook is attention grabbing and of course is generating a lot of chatter and reactions, some more intelligent than others. But there are a few problems with it. First, and most importantly, it's likely not true. Facebook's trending team boss put out a statement denying the key points and making it sound like whoever Gizmodo's source is took a kernel of truth -- that Facebook employees will check stories to see if they have some sort of factual basis before including them in the trending list -- and twisted that into a claim of bias. Specifically, Facebook says:

There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.

Trending Topics is designed to showcase the current conversation happening on Facebook. Popular topics are first surfaced by an algorithm, then audited by review team members to confirm that the topics are in fact trending news in the real world and not, for example, similar-sounding topics or misnomers.

We are proud that, in 2015, the US election was the most talked-about subject on Facebook, and we want to encourage that robust political discussion from all sides. We have in place strict guidelines for our trending topic reviewers as they audit topics surfaced algorithmically: reviewers are required to accept topics that reflect real world events, and are instructed to disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources.

In short, it sounds like the source for Gizmodo's article may have turned situations in which stories were deemed to have "insufficient sources" and claimed that it was a way to lock out conservative voices. Some will, undoubtedly, claim that Facebook's statement on this is lying, but I don't believe that's the case. I've been talking to a number of people at Facebook, including those close to the Trending Topics folks, and they insist that the story is not even remotely true. Other reporters appear to be hearing the same thing.

And, frankly, this makes sense. I honestly would *never* expect (for example) a Techdirt story to make it into Facebook's trending list, because we're not the kind of site that's likely to get listed there, as we're mostly about opinion, rather than hard news. But I don't think that's some sort of nefarious "bias." I think it's about focusing the trending list on more standard journalism.

The second big issue with this is that I find it difficult to believe that Facebook's trending stories even matter that much. Frankly, I didn't even know it existed and had never even noticed it on my Facebook page until I went and sought it out for this particular story (for what it's worth, I actually assumed it would be in the left column and was surprised to find it in the right). As Nilay Patel rightly points out, the trending news box is "fundamentally unimportant and uninteresting." Facebook works in the news feed, not in the trending topics box. And that news feed is still driven by what kinds of people you're friends with. Remember, this is the same company that can't figure out how to stop blatantly false news stories from spreading virally from feed to feed. Manual edits of the trending news topics is meaningless.

The third thing is that, as a private platform, Facebook does have the right to do what it wants. As John Roberts notes, the law here is pretty clearly established that Facebook has a First Amendment right to structure its trending news feed however it likes.

But, of course, in this politically charged season, politicians will let no good scandal -- no matter how ridiculous -- go unexploited, and thus we have Senator John Thune sending an angry letter to Facebook, demanding answers to a long list of questions around the Gizmodo story, and stating:

If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook's assertion that it maintains a "platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum" misleads the public.

As noted above, this letter is ridiculous for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that Congress has no authority whatsoever to make Facebook change its algorithm, and it's concerning that Senators think they might know a better way for Facebook to present content. But it's made even more ridiculous by the fact that Thune (along with many on the conservative side of the political spectrum who are so upset by this) has been among the most outspoken voices on the horror of "the fairness doctrine," which mandates a sort of "equal time" on news programs for opposing political views. In fact Thune himself cosponsored a bill in 2007 to bar the FCC from bringing back the fairness doctrine (side note: the FCC has expressed zero interest in bringing back the fairness doctrine, yet every so often politicians will accuse it of wishing to do so to score political points).

Oh, and in 2009, during yet another of the bogus "fairness doctrine" freakouts, Thune himself stated:

I believe it is dangerous for Congress and federal regulators to wade into the public airwaves to determine what opinions should be expressed and what kind of speech is 'fair." This undercuts every American's freedom of speech, and I urge my colleagues to reject any renewed institution of the Fairness Doctrine, which is nothing more than government controlled censorship.

Yes, and now the same person who said that, is doing exactly what he was complaining about, and trying to argue that somehow Facebook's editorial decisions are not "fair" enough. Ain't no hypocrisy like Washington DC hypocrisy, folks.

As I said in the podcast, there are very legitimate concerns about large internet companies that may have too much control or too much influence. It's certainly something that should be watched carefully, and there absolutely should be a lot more transparency about how all of this works. Transparency would solve a lot of these issues, frankly. But holding a collective freakout based on a flimsy story that doesn't appear accurate (on a feature that isn't important), leading to Congress suddenly wanting to get involved (even if only for grandstanding purposes), just seems to lessen the ability to focus on real issues when they inevitably arise.

And, of course, having Congress get involved just makes Congress look like a joke.

Filed Under: algorithms, bias, fairness doctrine, john thune, trending, trending topics
Companies: facebook

NJ Legislator Wants State's Cops To Be The New Beneficiaries Of Hate Crime/Bias Laws

from the #copslivesmatterMORE dept

You know what group of the public just hasn't been given enough protections? Law enforcement officers.

To date, all they have is:

• The power to enforce laws as they interpret them, even when said law doesn't actually exist
• Qualified immunity
• "Exigent circumstances" justifications for acts of violence, civil rights violations
• A multitude of weaponry, both lethal and sometimes-lethal
• Strong union representation
• Law enforcement-only bills of (extra) rights
• The constant benefit of a doubt
• Mine-resistant work vehicles
• "Shoot first, be questioned 48-72 hours later after viewing all available evidence" policies
• Massive political clout

It's not enough. It's dangerous out there for cops these days.* So, in the interest of making things even safer for our underprotected boys/girls in blue, a New Jersey politician is introducing legislation that would fold cops in to the state's "hate speech/bias" laws.

* It isn't.

In New Jersey it is a bias intimidation crime when one person threatens another based on race, religion, color, gender, sexual orientation, disability or gender identity. Police officers are not currently protected under the statute, but one Garden State lawmaker said they should be.

He said that threats against a cop should be taken as seriously as the crime that often follows that threat.

“Legislation that I am proposing would expand the bias intimidation/hate speech statute to include law enforcement officers. There needs to be consequences for threatening to target and kill a law enforcement officer,” said Assemblyman Ron Dancer (R-Jackson).

There are consequences, which Dancer seems to have forgotten. True threats and killing law enforcement officers is already illegal under current New Jersey laws. What Dancer wants to do is give a historically well-protected group additional protections meant for historically less-protected citizens.

This sort of cop-favoring legislation is nothing new for Dancer.

Dancer already introduced another bill (A-3611) that would expand the definition of a terroristic threat to include threatening to kill a police officer.

Once again, issuing terroristic threats is already a crime. There's no need to specifically add police officers to the statute… unless you're like Dancer and believe the copacalypse is upon us, powered by hashtags and the general feeling that people just don't love cops the way they used to.

“The recent ambushes and assassinations of our law enforcement officers simply because they wear a blue uniform, that demands action. I recognize and respect that freedom of speech is a constitutional right, but when someone is threatening to kill our law enforcement officers there needs to be strict penalties,” Dancer said.

And there are strict penalties! Uttering terroristic threats is punishable by 3-5 years in prison and a $15,000 fine. Dancer wants threatening cops to be a more severe criminal act than threatening any other citizen. His proposal would make threatening cops a second degree crime, with penalties increasing to 5-10 years/$150,000 fine, along with the presumption of incarceration. (Third degree crimes often result in non-custodial sentences like probation.)

Dancer has also proposed an automatic death penalty for killing law enforcement officers, again citing the (nonexistent) War on Cops.

“While irresponsible groups promote rhetoric that threatens police officers, it is crucial we support our peace keepers,” Dancer said. “We need a strong deterrent for targeting our men and women behind the badge.”

Worse than Dancer's fear-based, fact-free bloviating is the additional commentary of Kevin McArdle, who wrote the story for NJ101.

Cops could use all the protection they can get. According the Officer Down Memorial Page 26 police officers have been shot and killed in the line of duty in 2015...

Statistics show that the current pace for killed cops will put the number at 35 by year's end, the second-lowest total in almost six decades. Cops don't need more protection. The perception has changed, but the number of deaths is historically low. Cops are safer than they've been since the mid-1950's, back in the good old days of Sheriff Andy Griffith and the possible peak of the public's worship of law enforcement officers. The only thing taking a beating these days (other than tons of "civilians") is law enforcement's public image. And despite high-profile police-involved shootings being swiftly followed by high-profile protests, cops are still being "targeted" and killed at an incredibly low rate.

Adding prison time and fines to existing penalties solely because of the target's profession is just more favoritism that places cops further above the people they serve. It's stupid and it does nothing to address the so-called "war on cops," which at this point, is still 99% misperception and 100% misinformation.

Filed Under: bias, free speech, hate speech, new jersey, ron dancer

DailyDirt: Computers Are Editing Our Double-Plus-Ungood Content

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

More and more digital media is being edited and prioritized in datacenters by intangible algorithms. As usual, this can be good and bad, depending on how the technology is used. On the one hand, algorithms can do laborious tasks that humans don't want to do. But at the same time, algorithms might introduce all kinds of errors or inadvertent biases on a scale that no group of humans could ever accomplish without automation. Here are just a few links on bots tinkering with online content.

• The Los Angeles Times reported on an earthquake in about 3 minutes -- thanks to an algorithm that collected data from the US Geological Survey and automagically created an article about the seismic event. This robotic reporting isn't exactly a new thing, but the robotic "scoop" can't be matched by human writers. [url]
• About half of all the edits on Wikipedia are made by bots. Algorithms keep spam links from flooding the site, and they also create whole entries based on online data, as well as perform tedious tasks such as grammar and spelling corrections. Not surprisingly, the biggest bot job on Wikipedia is detecting vandalism. [url]
• Algorithms aren't free of bias; they can actually amplify biases. Humans can also trick algorithms by gaming their inputs and biasing results, so computer-produced content isn't necessarily more objective than the writings of humans (not that anyone here would have assumed that). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: algorithms, artificial intelligence, automation, bias, bots, earthquakes, journalism, labor, media, scoop, wikipedia

Major Media Bias Towards NSA Defenders

from the and-they-attack-others? dept

One of the more ridiculous arguments against Glenn Greenwald (and others, but mainly Greenwald) concerning the Snowden NSA revelations is that Greenwald is somehow "biased," rather than an objective reporter. Of course, there's this myth of the objective reporter out there, which in practice tends to not actually do journalism (the search for truth) but stenography (repeating what someone tells you). Too often "objective journalism" means he said/she said journalism, where equal weight is given to all kinds of ideas, no matter how ludicrous. If you're actually searching for truth, then there's no problem calling out something as being wrong when it is, in fact, wrong. But, even more ridiculous is that the claims of "objective media" also whitewash the fact that those media players are clearly extremely biased as well.

Take, for example, the episode of Face the Nation, which aired on Sunday, November 3rd. A major point of discussion? The Snowden NSA revelations. The guests to discuss it? Senator Dianne Feinstein, Rep. Mike Rogers, and former NSA boss Michael Hayden. Basically, those three are the biggest defenders of the NSA outside of current NSA employees. To argue that this isn't a clear "bias" is ridiculous. But at least Greenwald is clear where he stands. CBS and Face the Nation still pretend that they're objective.

That may be just one example, but a new study by the Columbia Journalism Review showed that major media sources were uniformly biased in favor of the government. They scoured the four largest newspapers in the US: the NY Times, USA Today, the LA Times and the Washington Post. They had a list of pro- and anti-surveillance words that they used to determine whether or not the general tone of coverage in these newspapers was to support the NSA or to be critical of it. It won't surprise many around here to find that it was overwhelmingly supportive of the government. The major newspapers apparently aren't that big on speaking truth to power.

USA Today led the pack, using pro-surveillance terms 36 percent more frequently than anti-surveillance terms. The LA Times followed at 24 percent, while The New York Times was at 14.1 percent. Even the Washington Post, where Barton Gellman was the first US journalist to break the news of the NSA’s surveillance, exhibited a net pro-surveillance bias in its coverage of 11.1 percent. Although keyword frequency analysis on its own is not always conclusive, large, consistent discrepancies of the kind observed here strongly suggest a net media bias in favor of the US and UK governments’ pro-surveillance position.

As CJR points out, this finding also suggests that the claim from NSA defenders that all of the hubbub over spying is merely a "media creation" may not be true either. The major media is leaning towards the NSA's side of the debate.

Filed Under: bias, face the nation, journalism, media, nsa

Court Tells Journalist Barrett Brown He And His Lawyers Can't Talk To The Press Any More

from the that's-insane dept

We just wrote about the ridiculousness of Barrett Brown's case, in which he's been in jail and facing a very long sentence mainly for copying a URL from one place to another, but also because the feds have been seeking a media gag. Tragically, the court has now granted that gag order. Neither Brown nor his legal team is allowed to speak to the media:

No person covered by this order shall make any statement to members of any television, radio, newspaper, magazine, internet (including, but not limited to, bloggers), or other media organization about this case, other than matters of public record, that could interfere with a fair trial or otherwise prejudice Defendant, the Government, or the administration of justice....

This gag order seems somewhat ridiculous. The idea that having Brown or his legal team talking to the press would somehow unfairly bias the jury in his case is ridiculous. It's perfectly reasonable to expect Brown and his legal team to try to draw attention to the ridiculousness of the case, and the only purpose of this sort of gag order is to silence the press and keep the story from getting the kind of attention it deserves, as yet another example of prosecutorial overreach by the DOJ.

Filed Under: barrett brown, bias, free speech, gag order, journalism

Former RIAA VP Named 2nd In Command Of Copyright Office

from the revolving-door dept

We've talked in the past about how unfortunate it is that the US Copyright Office seems almost entirely beholden to the legacy copyright players, rather than to the stated purpose of copyright law. That is, instead of looking at how copyright can lead to the maximum benefit for the public ("promoting the progress of science") it seems to focus on what will make the big legacy players -- the RIAA and MPAA -- happy. Part of this, of course, is the somewhat continuous revolving door between industry and the Copyright Office. Just a few months ago we wrote about how the Copyright Office's General Counsel, David Carson, had jumped ship to go join the IFPI (the international version of the RIAA).

Last night the news came out that the US Copyright Office had now named Karyn Temple Claggett as the Associate Register of Copyright and Director of Policy & International Affairs. While Temple Claggett has actually been at the Copyright Office for a little while as Senior Counsel for Policy and International Affairs, not too long ago she was a hotshot litigator for... the RIAA. In fact, an old bio of hers, from when she was at the RIAA (as VP, Litigation and Legal Affairs), notes that she was instrumental in their ever-present legal campaign against pretty much any innovative technology that comes along:

While at the RIAA, Ms. Temple-Claggett has worked on some of the most high-profile copyright cases brought by copyright owners in recent years, including the Supreme Court Grokster litigation, as well as litigation against LimeWire, XM Satellite Radio and Usenet.com

I'm sure she's a fine person and a good litigator, but it's difficult to think that she'll be anything but a pure maximalist in favor of expanding copyrights and copyright enforcement, and against any innovation that challenges the status quo. It's hard not to be cynical when you see this kind of revolving door. And, of course, it's always entirely one-sided. Could you imagine the Copyright Office naming a top EFF litigator as second in command? Exactly the point. How is it possible to take the Copyright Office seriously as an advocate for what's best for the public, when the connections there are to industries who lean heavily on keeping out innovation and promoting an old business model through aggressive litigation and regulation?

Filed Under: bias, copyright office, david carson, karyn temple claggett, lobbyists, revolving door
Companies: riaa