California Cities Experimenting With Civilian Responses To Mental Health Crisis Calls

from the fewer-chances-somone-will-be-helped-to-death-by-police-officers dept

More cities are adopting an approach to mental health emergency calls that steers calls away from police officers and towards professionals who are trained to respond to mental health crises with something other than force deployment.

Early results have shown promise in cities like Denver, Colorado and New York City, New York. These response teams are not only better suited to handling mental health calls, but they're less expensive than sending cops and/or needlessly involving the carceral system. Law enforcement agencies command outsized portions of city budgets. Shifting small portions of these budgets to alternatives like these makes better use of these funds, providing residents with options that are far more effective -- and cost effective -- than the usual method of sending more expensive government employees to respond to problems they're ill-equipped to handle.

A couple of cities in California are experimenting with mental health response teams. The teams in use in Sacramento and Oakland were formed by residents in response to the tragic killing of a young man suffering from schizoaffective disorder by police officers.

That day, Miles was having a schizoaffective episode at the family’s home in Walnut Creek, CA, a city a few miles east of Oakland.  

First Miles’ grandmother, and then Taun Hall herself, called 911. Hall wanted to get her son to a hospital where he could receive treatment. She felt her only option was to call the police.

But when the Walnut Creek police officers arrived, the situation escalated quickly.

“[The police officers] were shouting at him and, you know, doing commands,” Hall said. “Someone who is mentally impaired doesn’t respond, doesn’t understand, because they’re not in the same frame of mind.”

Miles Hall ran towards the officers, who first shot him with ‘less-lethal’ ammunition called bean bag rounds. When he continued running, two officers shot him with their handguns. Miles Hall was transported to John Muir Hospital, where he died from his injuries.

MH First Sacramento and MH First Oakland are both part of the same project. The MH stands for Miles Hall just as much as it stands for mental health. Both are offshoots of the Anti Police Terror Project, an advocacy group seeking to end the longstanding use of violence by police officers against people of color. Currently, both response teams are limited to running mental health hotlines on weekends only but both hope to expand on that with the recent COVID wave starting to recede in the state. They're also hoping to secure more funding to expand their operations to offering response teams that can handle mental health calls requiring in-person assistance.

Residents of Oakland will soon have one more option for mental health calls that won't involve law enforcement.

Now, a new pilot project has been funded by the city of Oakland to take even more of the workload off the shoulders of the police.

“A project called MACRO, Mobile Assistance Community Response of Oakland,” explained [Coalition for Police Accountability coordinator Rashidah] Grinage. “And what it does is it says that 911 calls that are not necessarily required to have a police response, namely their low-level calls, they are sometimes mental health crises, but there can be other kinds of incidents as well. Conflicts between neighbors, problems with somebody blocking a driveway, incidents where a police officer is not really a necessary responder, MACRO will provide civilian responses to these kinds of 911 calls for service.”

MACRO is based on the CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) program currently running in Eugene, Oregon. That program has achieved considerable success, not the least of which is the savings of over $6 million a year in public safety spending.

It's too early to tell whether these programs will replicate the successes seen elsewhere. But it is clear more options like these are necessary if we want to keep more people alive. Police officers shouldn't be expected to handle these situations well. They're simply not trained to perform this sort of public assistance. Unfortunately, they're the default option in most cases, which means officers responding to mental health calls will fall back on the training they have received, which mostly involves subduing people and responding to perceived threats -- neither of which tends to work out well for people who are already struggling to maintain their grip on reality.

Filed Under: civilian responses, emergency calls, mental health, miles hall, oakland, police, sacramento, walnut creek

Facebook's Downtime And Why Protocols Are More Resilient Than Centralized Platforms

from the did-you-miss-stuff dept

As you know by now, much of the tech news cycle yesterday was dominated by the fact that Facebook appeared to erase itself from the internet via a botched BGP configuration. Hilarity ensued -- including my favorite bit about how Facebook's office badges weren't working because they relied on connecting to a Facebook server that could no longer be found (also, how in borking their own BGP, Facebook basically knocked out their own ability to fix it until they could get the right people who knew what to do to have physical access to the routers).

But in talking to people who were upset about being cut off from Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, it was a good point to remind people that another benefit of a protocols, not platforms approach to these things is that it's way more resilient. If you're using Messenger and it's down, but can easily swap in a different tool and continue to communicate that's a much better, more resilient solution than relying on Facebook not to mess up. And that's on top of all the other benefits I laid out in my paper.

In fact, a protocols approach also creates more incentives for better uptime from services, since continually screwing up for extended periods of times doesn't just mean losing ad revenue for a few hours, but it is much more likely to lead people to permanently switch to an alternative provider.

Indeed, a key part of the value of the internet, originally, was in its resiliency of being highly distributed, rather than centralized, and how it could continue to work well if one part fell off the network. The increasing centralization/silo-ization of the internet has taken away much of that benefit. So, if anything, yesterday's mess should be seen as another reason to look more closely at a protocols-based approach to building new internet services.

Filed Under: bgp, decentralization, downtime, platforms, protocols
Companies: facebook

Investigation: CBP Targeted Journalists, Illegally Shared Info With Mexico, And Attempted To Cover It All Up

from the bad-apples-floating-to-the-top-of-the-barrel dept

A couple of years ago, documents surfaced that showed the CBP was placing journalists, activists, and immigration lawyers on some form of a watchlist, which would allow agents and officers to subject these targets to additional scrutiny when they crossed the border. There were obvious civil liberties implications, ones the CBP seemed largely unconcerned about.

The targeting appeared to be related to the "migrant caravan" that reached the border late in 2018 and performed a mass "incursion" on January 1, 2019. The CBP claimed it had only targeted those people because they had been involved in "violence" near the border late in 2018. It refused to explain what it meant by the word "involved" or how that was enough to ignore First Amendment protections. Nor did it explain why it was deliberately targeting US citizens not suspected to have been involved in any criminal activity. It also did not explain why it shared information on these targets with the government of Mexico, which then assisted in spying on this group of lawyers, journalists, and activists.

The DHS Inspector General opened an investigation [PDF] of these actions. And it has arrived at the conclusion that this all looks pretty bad, but wasn't actually illegal. Read into that what you will.

We did not find that CBP placed lookouts to retaliate against U.S. citizens for performing lawful work related to the migrant caravan. To the contrary, witnesses told us, and contemporaneous emails and documents corroborated, CBP placed lookouts to gain information about suspected illegal activity and then generally sought information consistent with that purpose during the resulting interviews. Although we determined CBP’s lookouts on a number of journalists present at an illegal border crossing were unnecessary, we found no evidence that CBP placed these lookouts to harass the journalists.

But that lead paragraph is misleading. The only thing that still works in context of the rest of the report is "found no evidence."

What this report details is stuff that looks like targeted harassment of individuals -- some of them journalists -- by CBP personnel. And yet, the IG is unwilling -- despite apparent lies from interviewed personnel and deliberate destruction of communications -- to call this what it is: a violation of people's rights for reasons the CBP is unwilling to discuss and actively worked to cover up.

It appears one person was more involved in targeting journalists than anyone else during this time period. This person has also been cleared of wrongdoing by this investigation.

Although we found no evidence in emails or interviews that the EOC [Emergency Operations Center] official who placed these lookouts (EOC Official 1) did so to harass the journalists or for any other ulterior reasons, his subsequent actions, or lack thereof, demonstrate he did not need to place the lookouts.

However, it's hard to believe this official did not order up these lookouts to "harass" journalists or "for any other ulterior reason." There was a stated purpose for these lookouts but this official never bothered to check back in after nominating the targeted journalists for additional harassment by CBP officers.

In one incident, Mexican police identified five American journalists after CBP officials alerted them that CBP officials observed members of the media helping migrants climb a border fence. EOC Official 1 then placed lookouts on the five journalists. The lookouts did not mention the illegal crossing but instructed interviewing officers where to find information about the journalists.

Although EOC Official 1 told us the purpose of these lookouts was to determine whether the journalists had information about the incident, his actions show he actually had no interest in that information. Over the following weeks, all five journalists came back to the United States, and CBP referred them to secondary inspection. Interview records reflect that none of the five journalists were asked about the illegal crossing. In fact, the journalists returned to the United States at various places and times and were therefore interviewed by several different officers. None of the officers asked about the illegal crossing.

It really, really looks like this official just thought it would be fun to subject journalists to secondary screenings.

EOC Official 1 placed more caravan-related lookouts than anyone else and was in regular contact with the TTRT throughout Operation Secure Line. If he wanted to know whether the journalists had information about this incident or other illegal border crossings, he knew how to contact the TTRT. Additionally, EOC Official 1 removed one of the lookouts after the journalist’s third interview, even though according to the interview record, CBP never asked the journalist about the illegal border crossing. If EOC Official 1 no longer needed information about the illegal border crossing at that point, then he also did not need the information when he placed the lookout 9 days earlier.

That wasn't the only case of inappropriate or unjustified targeting. There were more cases, something the system used by the CBP (TECS) appears to allow even though the policy and CBP statements claim that it doesn't.

CBP may place lookouts “only if illegal activity is suspected. The system will not allow a user to indicate that a ‘non-suspect’ is on ‘lookout.’” This last sentence has two possible interpretations. It could mean officials may place lookouts only on people who are suspects of illegal activity, and not on non-suspects; or it could be a description of how the TECS system works.

The footnote to this paragraph makes it clear this is not how the TECS system works:

While the TECS Directive says CBP may place lookouts only when illegal activity is suspected, it allows CBP to create “TECS records” or “TECS subject records” even when there is no suspicion of illegal activity.

This means a lot of lookouts had no direct connection to suspected criminal activity.

Nearly half of the caravan-related lookouts (25 out of 51) were on people for whom there was no evidence of direct involvement in illegal activity. Instead, those lookouts were based solely on the individuals’ associations with other people who were suspected of illegal activity.

Some links were stronger than others. Some "associations," however, were nearly nonexistent.

In one instance, a CBP official placed lookouts on two attorneys who previously crossed the border with someone who was believed to be an administrator of a caravan-related online chat group on WhatsApp. In another example, after a suspected migrant caravan organizer was seen riding in a vehicle, the EOC placed lookouts not only on the owner of that vehicle but also on someone who crossed the border with the vehicle owner one time, 9 months earlier, well before the migrant caravan started traveling towards the United States.

Almost anything can trigger a lookout. And one official (EOC Official 1) was more trigger-happy than most. This official -- who nominated the most journalists -- also refused to remove people from the lookout list when it became obvious they weren't connected to criminal activity and did not need to be subjected to additional screening when crossing borders. What this person did do, apparently, was lie to IG investigators.

EOC Official 1, who was primarily responsible for placing caravan-related lookouts at the EOC, also told us that many U.S. citizens did not need to be interviewed multiple times. Accordingly, EOC Official 1 claimed he went into TECS and removed caravan-related lookouts after individuals were interviewed, but review of TECS data revealed that EOC Official 1 did not remove any of his lookouts on U.S. citizens following their first border crossings. When presented with this information, he maintained that he tried to remove many lookouts and speculated that a technical glitch may have prevented that from happening, but we confirmed that no such glitch occurred. Instead, the evidence demonstrates that EOC Official 1 did not try to remove 18 of his 20 lookouts that resulted in secondary inspections.

Basically, this one official -- who the IG says did not target journalists for "improper" reasons -- targeted a bunch of journalists until it became too much of an embarrassment to ignore.

In fact, EOC Official 1 did not reevaluate or remove his lookouts when he finished his EOC detail at the end of January 2019. Instead, he and his supervisor transferred at least 31 caravan-related lookouts to other EOC personnel without giving any notice or instruction. One official who inherited several of those lookouts stated he did not even learn he was assigned to those lookouts until CBP officers contacted him as they were about to interview the individuals. He recalled that one of the first times this happened, he reached out to EOC Official 1, who originally placed the lookout. EOC Official 1 told him the lookout was no longer necessary, even though he had transferred it to him just days earlier. Still, after this discovery, the EOC did not systematically review the remaining lookouts. Instead, the lookouts remained in place for 2 more weeks, until a media story calling attention to the lookouts spurred the EOC to review and remove 18 caravan-related lookouts it determined were no longer necessary.

In the end, there's no complete absolution for this official. But neither is there any recommendation to discipline this person for using the lookout process as a form of harassment, something the IG report asks readers to infer from paragraphs like these:

Based on our review of all available evidence, we were unable to determine why CBP did not remove unnecessary caravan-related lookouts. We found no direct evidence that CBP kept lookouts active to harass, intimidate, or retaliate against caravan associates. However, EOC Official 1’s vague explanation for not removing lookouts, and the EOC’s disinterest in the repeat interviews, suggest it may not have been entirely accidental. Regardless of whether the EOC intended to punish or dissuade U.S. citizens from traveling between Mexico and the United States, subjecting them to repeated unnecessary inspections can have that effect, as the individual who was referred to secondary inspection four times explained.

Outside of this particularly problematic official, there were other signs the CBP used the lookout list as a way to make things difficult for people officers didn't like.

We found that, in December 2018, a CBP official asked Mexico to deny entry to 14 U.S. citizens affiliated with the migrant caravan, including one individual who was subsequently denied entry into Mexico. CBP may restrict Americans’ rights to travel internationally in certain circumstances, but CBP could not articulate any genuine basis for sending this request and in fact later admitted that the reasons provided to Mexico were not true.

And if the IG didn't find any communications indicating these nominations were done for improper reasons, it's probably because any communications pertaining to possibly illegal targeting were never memorialized, so to speak.

We found that on eight other occasions, CBP officials improperly sent Mexico the names and sensitive information of dozens of additional U.S. citizens, and some of those individuals were later denied entry into Mexico. However, because these CBP officials did not comply with CBP policies on sharing information with foreign entities and did not retain communication records, we cannot determine whether the officials asked Mexico to deny entry to those Americans.

It's harassment.

FOB Official 1 could not offer any reasons to us for asking Mexico to deny entry to the 24 individuals listed in his email. He could not recall anything about most of the 24 individuals, other than he did not think they were involved in illegal activity. In fact, FOB Official 1 initially denied that he ever asked Mexico to reject any individuals and insisted he did not remember this email until we showed it to him. FOB Official 1’s concerns about the 24 individuals could not have been particularly serious, because when we interviewed him, he could not recall what the concerns were or why they prompted him to ask Mexico to deny entry to those individuals, even though he said this was the first and only time he ever sent such a request.

And it was covered up.

Also, in January 2019 another FOB official (FOB Official 3) used his official CBP email account to send unencrypted SPII of six U.S. citizens to a Mexican intelligence official’s Yahoo email address. FOB Official 3 told us he sent the email so the Mexican official could provide information to help prevent a “very serious” threat from occurring. Yet, FOB Official 3’s email does not request any information from the Mexican official, and instead of mentioning a future threat, the email says the six individuals may have been involved in a past event. We were unable to clarify this inconsistency or determine the true reason FOB Official 3 sent this email, because he admitted deleting contemporaneous WhatsApp messages with this Mexican official.

More on the coverup, including the use of WhatsApp as a tool for opacity.

The CBP officials’ inability to recall key details about their communications with Mexican officials, or in some cases, whether they even shared information about U.S. citizens with Mexican officials, raises questions about whether there were other instances of Mexican and CBP officials’ sharing information about American caravan associates. Complete WhatsApp records would have shown whether CBP officials shared U.S. citizens’ SPII with Mexico on other occasions.

The fact that none of these officials retained their WhatsApp messages, and the various ways in which that happened, highlights the challenges of satisfactorily upholding recordkeeping responsibilities when CBP employees use WhatsApp. This is particularly troubling given the widespread use of WhatsApp during Operation Secure Line. Numerous CBP officials, across various offices, regularly used WhatsApp to communicate both with individuals and in various WhatsApp groups, some of which contained up to hundreds of U.S. and Mexican officials. Yet, these officials did not consistently retain their WhatsApp messages or copy or forward them to their official CBP accounts.

At the end of all of this, there are recommendations to clarify policy and better document lookout nominations and interviews. Nowhere in the report are there recommendations to punish anyone involved in this or forbid the use of self-destructing communications to preemptively erase evidence of misconduct or rights violations. So, unless the CBP is willing to step up and discipline those involved in this targeting, it will happen again and again and again. And since we can count on the CBP to take a hands-off approach to internal oversight, we can expect history to repeat itself.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, activists, cbp, immigration, journalists, lawyers, retaliation, surveillance, watchlist

Daily Deal: The JavaScript DOM Game Developer Bundle

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

The JavaScript DOM Game Developer Bundle has 8 courses to help you master coding fundamentals. Courses cover JavaScript DOM, Coding, HTML 5 Canvas, and more. You'll learn how to create your own fun, interactive games. It's on sale for $30.

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

Rethinking Facebook: We Need To Make Sure That 'Good For The World' Is More Important Than 'Good For Facebook'

from the these-things-matter dept

I'm sure by now most of you have either seen or read about Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen's appearance on 60 Minutes discussing in detail the many problems she saw within Facebook. I'm always a little skeptical about 60 Minutes these days, as the show has an unfortunately long history of misrepresenting things about the internet, and similarly a single person's claims about what's happening within a company are not always the most accurate. That said, what Haugen does have to say is still kind of eye opening, and certainly concerning.

The key takeaway that many seem to be highlighting from the interview is Haugen noting that Facebook knows damn well that making the site better for users will make Facebook less money.

Frances Haugen: And one of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is -- optimizing for content that gets engagement, or reaction. But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it's easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions.

Scott Pelley: Misinformation, angry content-- is enticing to people and keep--

Frances Haugen: Very enticing.

Scott Pelley:--keeps them on the platform.

Frances Haugen: Yes. Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they'll click on less ads, they'll make less money.

Of course, none of this should be surprising to anyone. Mark Zuckerberg himself said as much in an internal email that was revealed a few years ago, in which he noted in response to a suggestion to make Facebook better: "that may be good for the world but it's not good for us."

Over the last few years that line has stuck with me, and I've had a few conversations trying to think through what that actually means. There is one argument, which partly makes sense to me, that much of this actually falls back on the problem being Wall Street and the (false) idea that a company's fiduciary duty is solely to its shareholders above all else. This kind of thinking has certainly damned many companies that are so focused on making quarterly numbers and quarterly results that it makes it impossible to focus on long term sustainability and how, in the long term, being "good for the world" should also be "good for the company." So many companies have been destroyed by needing to keep Wall Street happy.

And, of course, it's tempting to blame Wall Street. And we've certainly seen it happen in other situations. The fear of "missing our numbers" drives so many stupid decisions in corporate America. I'm still nervous about how Wall St. is pressuring Twitter to make some questionable decisions. However, blaming Wall Street conveniently leaves Facebook off the hook, and that would also be wrong. As Haugen admits in the interview, she's worked at other internet companies that weren't like that.

I've seen a bunch of social networks and it was substantially worse at Facebook than anything I'd seen before.

So what is it about Facebook that leads them to believe that, when given the choice between "good for the world" and "good for Facebook," it must lean in on "good for Facebook" at the cost of the world? That aspect has been less explored, and unfortunately Haugen's revelations don't tell us that much about why Facebook is so uniquely bad at this. I think some of it may be tied to what I wrote last week: Facebook's internal hubris about what the company can and cannot accomplish -- including a belief that maybe it can walk the fine line between pleasing Wall Street and beating its numbers... and not supporting genocide in Myanmar.

Part of me, though, wonders if the problem is not just the drive to meet Wall St.'s numbers, but that Zuckerberg, senior management, and (perhaps more importantly) Facebook's Board actually believe that short term fiduciary duty to shareholders really is more important than being good for the world. Looking at Facebook's Board, it's not exactly composed of anyone who you'd think would step up to highlight that maybe "doing the right thing for society" outweighs keeping Wall Street happy. And that's particularly disappointing given that Zuckerberg doesn't need to keep Wall Street happy. The corporate structure of Facebook allows him to basically do what he wants (within certain limits) and still retain pretty much full control. He could come out and say that Facebook is going to stop worrying about its growth and focus on being better stewards. But he doesn't seem interested in doing so.

This is obviously armchair psychologizing someone I do not know, but one of the most interesting traits that I've observed about Zuckerberg is that -- more than just about any other CEO since Andy Grove -- he truly seems to have internalized Andy Grove's mantra that "only the paranoid survive." I've talked before about how Facebook really seems to have completely bought into the idea of the Innovator's Dilemma, and how competition can come from unexpected places and completely overwhelm incumbents before they even realize it. That has very clearly explained Facebook seeming to "overpay" for Instagram and WhatsApp (and then desperately try to buy out Snapchat, TikTok and others).

But that same thinking might easily apply to some of its other decisions as well, including a belief that if you're not growing, you're dying. And, as the NY Times notes, some of the recently leaked documents show real cracks in Facebook's monolithic facade:

But if these leaked documents proved anything, it is how un-Godzilla-like Facebook feels. The documents, shared with The Journal by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, reveal a company worried that it is losing power and influence, not gaining it, with its own research showing that many of its products aren’t thriving organically. Instead, it is going to increasingly extreme lengths to improve its toxic image, and to stop users from abandoning its apps in favor of more compelling alternatives.

You can see this vulnerability on display in an installment of The Journal’s series that landed last week. The article, which cited internal Facebook research, revealed that the company has been strategizing about how to market itself to children, referring to preteens as a “valuable but untapped audience.” The article contained plenty of fodder for outrage, including a presentation in which Facebook researchers asked if there was “a way to leverage playdates to drive word of hand/growth among kids?”

It’s a crazy-sounding question, but it’s also revealing. Would a confident, thriving social media app need to “leverage playdates,” or concoct elaborate growth strategies aimed at 10-year-olds? If Facebook is so unstoppable, would it really be promoting itself to tweens as — and please read this in the voice of the Steve Buscemi “How do you do, fellow kids?” meme — a “Life Coach for Adulting?”

So if you've been brought up to believe with every ounce of your mind and soul that growth is everything, and that the second you take your eye off the ball it will stop, decisions that are "good for Facebook, but bad for the world" become the norm. Going back to my post on the hubris of Facebook, it also feels like Mark thinks that once Facebook passes some imaginary boundary, then they can go back and fix the parts of the world they screwed up. It doesn't work like that, though.

And that's a problem.

So what can be done about that? At an absolute first pass, it would be nice if Mark Zuckerberg realized that he can make some decisions that are "good for the world, but bad for Facebook" and he should do that publicly, transparently, and clearly explaining why he knows that this will harm their growth or bottom line, but that it's the right thing to do. To some small extent he tried to do something like that with the Oversight Board, but it was a half measure, with limited power. But it was something. He needs to be willing to step up and do more things like that, and if Wall Street doesn't like it, he should just say he doesn't care, this is too important. Other CEOs have done this. Hell, Jeff Bezos spent the first decade or so of Amazon's life as a public company constantly telling Wall Street that's how things were going to work (people now forget just how much Wall Street hated Amazon, and just how frequently Bezos told them he didn't care, he was going to build a better customer experience). Google (perhaps somewhat infamously) launched their IPO with a giant middle finger to Wall Street in noting that they weren't going to play the bankers' games (though... that promise has mostly disappeared from Google, along with the founders).

Of course, in doing so most people will dismiss whatever Zuckerberg decides to do as a cynical nothingburger. And they should. He's not done nearly enough to build up the public trust on this. But if he can actually follow through and do the right thing over and over again, especially when it's bad for Facebook, that would at least start things moving in the right direction.

There are plenty of other ideas on how to make Facebook be better -- and Haugen actually has some pretty good suggestions herself, first noting that the tools most people reach for won't work:

While some have called for Facebook to be broken up or stripped of content liability protections, she disagrees. Neither approach would address the problems uncovered in the documents, she said—that despite numerous initiatives, Facebook didn’t address or make public what it knew about its platforms’ ill effects.

That is, breaking up the company won't make a difference for reasons we've discussed before, and taking away Section 230 will only give Facebook way more power -- since smaller companies will be wiped out by the lack of liability protections.

Instead, Haugen notes, there needs to be way more transparency about how Facebook is doing what it's doing:

In Ms. Haugen’s view, allowing outsiders to see the company’s research and operations is essential. She also argues for a radical simplification of Facebook’s systems and for limits on promoting content based on levels of engagement, a core feature of Facebook’s recommendation systems. The company’s own research has found that “misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent” in material reshared by users and promoted by the company’s own mechanics.

Tragically, Facebook has been going in the other direction and trying to make it harder for researchers to understand what's going on there and study the impact.

I think there are some other structural changes that would also have some impact (a bunch of which I'll lay out in an upcoming paper), but getting Zuckerberg, the Board, and the senior management team to be okay with focusing on something other than short term growth would be a huge step forward. Years back I noted that human beings have an unfortunate habit of optimizing for what we can measure and downplaying what we can't. Engagement. Revenue. Daily average users. These are all measurable. What's good for humanity is not measurable. It's easy to prioritize one over the other -- and somehow that needs to change.

There have been a few external steps in that direction. The Long Term Stock Exchange is an interesting experiment in getting companies past the "meet the quarterly numbers" mindset, and two big tech companies recently listed there -- including Asana, which was founded by Zuckerberg's co-founder and former righthand man, Dustin Moskovitz. That's not a solution in and of itself, but it does show a direction in which we can look for solutions that might get past the constant focus on growth at the expense of everything else.

In the end, there are many complicating factors, but as noted earlier, Facebook seems pretty extreme in its unwillingness to actually confront many of these issues. Some of that, no doubt, is that many people are complaining about things that are unfixable, or are blaming Facebook for things totally outside of its control. But there are many things that Facebook does control and could do a much better job in dealing with. Yet, Facebook to date has failed to make it clear on a companywide basis that "good for the world, but bad for Facebook" is actually okay, and maybe it should be the focus for a while.

This is not to say that there aren't people within the company who are working on doing such things -- because there clearly are. The problem is that when a big issue needs a decision from the top, the end result is always to choose what's good for Facebook over what's good for the world. And however that can change, it needs to change. And that's really up to one person.

Filed Under: frances haugen, good for the world, growth, mark zuckerberg, quarterly numbers, short term thinking, wall st.
Companies: facebook

Company That Handles Billions Of Text Messages Quietly Admits It Was Hacked Years Ago

from the whoops-a-daisy dept

We've noted for a long time that the wireless industry is prone to being fairly lax on security and consumer privacy. One example is the recent rabbit hole of a scandal related to the industry's treatment of user location data, which carriers have long sold to a wide array of middlemen without much thought as to how this data could be (and routinely is) abused. Another example is the industry's refusal to address the longstanding flaws in Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signaling System 7 in the US), a series of protocols hackers can exploit to track user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations.

Now this week, a wireless industry middleman that handles billions of texts every year has acknowledged its security isn't much to write home about either. A company by the name of Syniverse revealed that it was the target of a major attack in a September SEC filing, first noted by Motherboard. The filing reveals that an "individual or organization" gained unauthorized access to the company's databases "on several occasions." That in turn provided the intruder repeated access to the company's Electronic Data Transfer (EDT) environment compromising 235 of its corporate telecom clients.

The scope of the potentially revealed data is, well, massive:

"Syniverse repeatedly declined to answer specific questions from Motherboard about the scale of the breach and what specific data was affected, but according to a person who works at a telephone carrier, whoever hacked Syniverse could have had access to metadata such as length and cost, caller and receiver's numbers, the location of the parties in the call, as well as the content of SMS text messages."

Amazingly enough the hack began in 2016 but was only discovered this year. How much data was accessed? Why did it take so long? Was it a Chinese or Russian sponsored attack? Why was there absolutely no transparency about the breach until now? Why aren't Syniverse or any wireless carriers being clear about what happened? Have government officials been compromised? Have those officials been notified by anybody? Good questions!:

"The information flowing through Syniverse’s systems is espionage gold," Sen. Ron Wyden told Motherboard in an emailed statement. "That this breach went undiscovered for five years raises serious questions about Syniverse’s cybersecurity practices. The FCC needs to get to the bottom of what happened, determine whether Syniverse's cybersecurity practices were negligent, identify whether Syniverse's competitors have experienced similar breaches, and then set mandatory cybersecurity standards for this industry."

Between this and the SS7 flaw alone you have to inherently assume that most global wireless communications has been significantly compromised for a long while in some fashion. And like most hacks, the scale of this will only get worse as time goes by. Security and privacy at massive international scale isn't easy, but these kinds of repeated scandals don't have to happen. They're made immeasurably worse by our lack of even a basic internet-era privacy law, intentionally underfunded and understaffed U.S. privacy regulators, and our failure to hold companies accountable in any meaningful way for repeated and massive screw ups. Mostly because doing any of these things might put a dent in quarterly revenues.

Filed Under: data breach, hack, privacy, security, ss7, text messages
Companies: syniverse

Hacked Data Exposes Law Enforcement Officers Who Joined Far-Right Oath Keepers Group

from the more-transparency-inflicted-on-secretive-groups dept

Some more unsettling news about law enforcement's close relationship to (or at least professional tolerance of) far-right groups linked to the January 6th raid of the Capitol building has come to light, thanks to transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets.

Email accounts linked to several key members of the Oath Keepers -- four of whom are currently facing charges for their participation in the attack on the Capitol -- have been hacked, exposing communications between the Oath Keepers and law enforcement officers seeking to join the group.

The law enforcement officers described what they could offer the Oath Keepers:

“I have a wide variety of law enforcement experience, including undercover operations, surveillance and SWAT,” one wrote on the membership application.

"Communications, Weapons, K9 Officer for local Sheriffs office 12 years to present," another wrote.

“​​I am currently working as a deputy sheriff in Texas,” a third typed.

These men, who had sworn to uphold the law, signed up to join an armed, extremist, anti-government group.

The five gigabyte trove of data includes emails, chat logs, and lists of donors and members. According to USA Today's examination of the data, more than 200 current and former law enforcement officers approached the group to become members. At this point, it only appears 20 of those are still employed as officers. Another 20 retired at some point after joining the group.

The Oath Keepers have long courted law enforcement officers and military members, finding some sort of solidarity with government employees who also swear oaths and carry guns. But joining the Oath Keepers requires members to swear a new oath -- one that conflicts with their other oaths and, presumably, supersedes their ongoing obligations to the public at large. On the list of things to be sworn to are promises to never disarm citizens, refusal to recognize state of emergency declarations, and a longer list of fresh-off-the-crack-pipe assertions like never assisting the government with putting American citizens into concentration camps.

The oath also says Oath Keepers will engage in a bloody revolution if the government decides its should start doing any of the things on the list.

If you the people decide that you have no recourse, and such a revolution comes, at that time, not only will we NOT fire upon our fellow Americans who righteously resist such egregious violations of their God given rights, we will join them in fighting against those who dare attempt to enslave them.

Somehow, this group decided the Trump Administration was the government they could trust, leading to some federal charge-accumulating Revolution Lite at the US Capitol. This same group of insurrectionists -- ones known to be supportive of police officers -- decided even cop lives didn't matter when it came to stealing back an election Donald Trump claimed was stolen.

That's all very concerning. Even prior to the Oath Keepers presence during the DC raid, the oath promising to turn on the government the moment it threatened certain freedoms should have warned officers of the law that joining this group would be extremely problematic. And yet, it managed to attract a couple hundred potential members who didn't see any conflict between sworn oaths, even if it theoretically meant they'd be killing their own brothers in blue if Obama finally sent someone for the guns.

Officers verified to be two-timing the rule of law with the Oath Keepers unsurprisingly don't want to talk about it. Eben Bratcher, operations chief for the Yuma County Sheriff's Office, claimed the group didn't do much for him other than clog up his email inbox and stated he "did not recall specifics." Fortunately, the Oath Keepers' server remembers.

A note attributed to Bratcher on the sign-up list reads, "We have 85 sworn officers and Border (of) Mexico on the South and California on the West. I've already introduced your web site to dozens of my Deputies."

Another officer, Michael Lynch of the Anaheim Police Department, claimed his membership lapsed years ago. However, he's now being investigated by his department for (at least temporarily) joining the group -- something he did while touting his years of undercover and SWAT team experience.

This is a clear conflict of interest. Cops like these can either remain cops and fulfill their obligations to the American public or they can join a group that aligns itself with an imagined version of the Constitution -- one that comes with conspiracy theories and implicit threats of violence attached. That the Oath Keepers would want cops in its ranks is unsurprising. Sadly, the fact that some cops would feel right at home with an unhinged paramilitary group is equally unsurprising.

Filed Under: insurrection, law enforcement, oath keepers, police