Oversight Report Says Commerce Dept. Investigative Unit Went Rogue, Engaged In Biased, Retaliatory Investigations

from the power-corrupts dept

Years after it was granted too much power, a federal internal investigations unit created during the presidency of George W. Bush is finally having its dirty laundry aired. The Senate Commerce Committee -- years after the fact -- is finally delivering some oversight of an entity created to root out internal threats.

The ITMS (Investigations and Threat Management Service) operated largely under the radar, thanks to its housing within the Commerce Department -- an entity that very rarely raises too many eyebrows. But its reach extended far past the confines of this department. And it was given broad discretion to initiate investigations -- something that led directly to the Justice Department crafting new rules for espionage investigations after a series of failed prosecutions indicated the intel coming from the ITMS was extremely questionable.

It was the ITMS that initiated the investigation of a US citizen of Chinese descent who did nothing more than share publicly-available information with a Chinese government official -- an official who happened to be a friend of Department of Weather Services employee Sherry Chen. Chen's prosecution was just a leading edge indicator of the ITMS's lack of accountability and incredible amount of power.

The report [PDF] released by the Commerce Committee shows the ITMS wasn't as much interested in rooting out internal threats as it was in rooting out government employees of certain nationalities.

Although many investigations targeted legitimate threats, the ITMS appears to have opened cases on a variety of employees for the purpose of exaggerating the unit’s ability to uncover security risks within the civil service. The unit targeted visible employees across the Department, including award-winning professionals whose background investigations had been successfully adjudicated by other agencies. These probes often resulted in suspended or revoked security clearances, although subsequent reviews largely determined that the unit’s allegations lacked merit. The ITMS also broadly targeted departmental divisions with comparably high proportions of Asian-American employees, ostensibly to counter attempts of espionage by individuals with Chinese ancestry. Former and current ITMS employees became subjects as well for challenging the lawfulness of the unit’s practices.

Saying the unit went rogue isn't hyperbole. It's a fact.

Poor management and weak oversight allowed the ITMS to operate outside the norms of the law enforcement community. Deficient policies and procedures outlining the unit’s investigative capabilities led to repeated instances of malfeasance, including the purposeful prolonging of investigations, unauthorized use of secured messaging systems, and overclassification of documents to protect the unit from external scrutiny.

The first bullet point of the report's "Findings" spells it out explicitly.

Investigating threats against the Secretary of Commerce and the Department’s assets without a clearly defined mission ultimately led to the mutation of the ITMS into a rogue, unaccountable police force across multiple presidential administrations.

The ITMS originally had no power of its own. Its power was derived from the US Marshals Service, which provides protection to the Commerce Department and its "critical assets." It's the last term that caused trouble. Authority to protect "critical assets" allowed the ITMS to abuse the poorly-defined term to open investigations and engage in activities that went beyond its original purview, as well as limits placed on the Marshals Service.

This lack of oversight, accountability, and respect for the Constitution led directly to the DOJ dismissing prosecutions originating from ITMS investigations. ITMS investigators engaged in highly-questionable activities, including concealing their identities, seizing government computers and devices to perform warrantless searches, and picking the locks of government offices and personal storage containers owned by government employees. Whenever these tactics were challenged by government employees, these employees soon found themselves subjected to additional ITMS scrutiny.

Tactics the general public never would have condoned were bought and paid for with tax dollars.

Because of inadequate oversight by the Inspector General’s office, the unit’s improper exercises of law enforcement powers likely resulted in preventable violations of civil liberties and other constitutional rights, as well as a gross abuse of taxpayer funds.

In 2005, the ITMS was limited to protecting tangible assets, like federal facilities. This began to morph as it was given discretion to look for threats to intangible "assets," like "U.S. economic advancement" and "Departmental functions." This then expanded to cover anything the ITMS felt was "inadequately protected." As its purview expanded, the ITMS granted itself plenty of new law enforcement powers, despite receiving no permission or direction to do so from Congress, its apparently-absent oversight, or the US Marshals Service.

Once it had expanded its area of coverage to include whatever it wanted to throw resources and Constitutional violations at, the ITMS began doing things like this:

Without a defined meaning of what constituted a critical asset from the Marshals Service, the ITMS conducted investigations typically reserved for domestic law enforcement agencies. Many were conducted in an overzealous manner whereby agents abused steps in the investigative process. In one instance, the ITMS investigated Sherry Chen, an award-winning, Chinese-born hydrologist employed at the Department, on charges of espionage and providing false statements after she allegedly downloaded and distributed unclassified information to a foreign national. Agents reportedly interrogated her for seven hours and told her she could never discuss the interrogation with anyone, including her superiors. In a lawsuit filed against federal officials, Chen said that ITMS agents “ignored exculpatory evidence throughout the interview, reached false conclusions without even a cursory investigation of underlying facts, and reported false results reflecting their racial and ethnic bias.”

And even when the ITMS couldn't find anything substantial to justify its investigations, it still found something to bring to federal prosecutors.

In one document, ITMS officials described to agents a broad range of offenses for which referrals to federal prosecutors could be made. Substantive offenses included racketeering, money laundering, and theft of government property, espionage, economic espionage, and computer fraud. More commonly, however, ITMS agents sought to charge targets of its criminal investigations with offenses such as obstruction, conspiracy, making false statements to federal agents, and resistance to search.

The ITMS went past believing it was a law enforcement agency with zero accountability to believing it was an intelligence agency with a similar lack of accountability. And, like other law enforcement agencies who believe themselves to be intelligence agencies, the ITMS engaged in "investigations" predicated on little more than last names or native language.

Whistleblowers claim, for example, that agents were directed to run ethnic surnames through secure databases even in the absence of evidence suggesting potential risk to national security, indicating that immutable characteristics served as a pre-text for initiating investigations. Documents show that the ITMS also ran broad keyword searches of email accounts using a broad variety of terms and phrases in Mandarin Chinese, such as “state key laboratory,” “overseas expert consultant,” “Ministry of Science and Technology,” “funding support,” “government support,” and “highly secret.” Multiple whistleblowers claimed that the unit worked with officials at the CIA and FBI to devise the list of search terms and review the results.  

[...]

One former senior Commerce Department official described the indiscriminate targeting of Chinese-Americans as a “fine line between extra scrutiny and xenophobia, and one that ITMS regularly crossed.” This official also discovered a case into a Chinese-American employee at the Department left open for four years without any indication of investigative diligence to close the matter, claiming that the ITMS “targeted her purely because of her ethnic Chinese origin.” The official also believes that ITMS leaders directed agents to “launch the investigation for the purpose of raising the heat so high that she became radioactive and would have to leave the Department,” despite no indication that she presented a national security threat after her emails had been pulled and agents surveilled her on Department premises and at her home.

The ITMS also surveilled US citizens who weren't government employees, opening investigations into people associated with foreign visitors to Commerce Department buildings. And it monitored social media accounts that raised questions about the 2020 Census' accuracy, forwarding all flagged posts to the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force. Most of the accounts flagged had less than 100 followers. No threats were determined to be credible, and yet the investigations into these accountholders remained open all the way through the end of 2020.

Abuse of power, retaliation, unjustified investigations, violated rights, racial profiling… all of this overseen by no one and tracked solely by an Excel spreadsheet that provided no way for investigators to attach documentation or submit findings. With no internal tracking or external oversight, millions of tax dollars were misspent and resources utilized to engage in fruitless, pointless, or retaliatory investigations. In the end, the ITMS was mainly concerned about sustaining its own existence.

One former senior official even described the network as a “vanity project” designed to showcase an unusual volume of open cases rather than facilitate a user-friendly system for agents to use in processing them. The official said leadership of the ITMS is more interested in appearing productive to retain the ability to investigate a wide variety of purported threats with broad discretion––and continue receiving funding from Congress––than processing cases within an acceptable period of time.

The entire report is harrowing, showing how much damage a government entity can do when its purview is nearly unlimited and its oversight nearly nonexistent. This report will hopefully result in the ITMS being brought into check, but Commerce oversight still needs to explain why it allowed the ITMS to run rogue for more than a decade before it finally decided to step in and do something about it.

Filed Under: china, commerce department, investigations, itms, senate commerce committee

After 40 Years Of Being Wrong, Texas Rangers Finally Decide Hypnosis Isn't A Viable Investigative Technique

from the when-modern-policing-meets-your-crazy-aunt's-hobby dept

Never let it be said that cops are not open-minded.

Sure, everyone with a darker-than-white skin tone moving around in any part of the city deemed unsafe by the same people charged with keeping it safe are almost always considered de facto criminals, but cops are still very willing to explore alternate avenues when it comes to arresting and criminally charging people.

Let's take a look at cops and their willingness to suspend their disbelief. Anyone accused of a crime is inherently untrustworthy: guilty until proven innocent. This includes people they've killed for doing nothing more than, say, threatening to kill themselves. The only good criminals are those who are willing to work with cops. These criminals have reputations that are unassailable and cops are willing to fabricate the paperwork needed to keep assailing of their reputations to a minimum.

Cops and prosecutors have, for years, relied on "experts" who were often no better than YouTube conspiracy theorists. For years, law enforcement has said things like bite marks, hair samples… even mass-produced clothing should be admitted as damning evidence of criminal acts. And everyone indulged them.

We've finally reached the critical mass needed to turn criticism of cop means and methods into mobilization. Years after it should have been apparent this was abject bullshit, the Texas Rangers are finally abandoning an investigative "technique" that has done little more than propel the storylines of horror movies since its inception.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has ended the controversial practice of using hypnosis to investigate crimes.

A department spokesman said the hypnosis program ended in January 2021, more than forty years after its inception, because its officers are now relying on better investigative practices.

First: FORTY FUCKING YEARS? Really?

Second, "better investigative practices" would seem to be anything but this. A Ranger with a divining rod and a backpack full of healing crystals could presumably turn up better leads than this method -- one that, let's not forget, the Texas Rangers relied on for four decades.

And yet, the Rangers persisted. The last documented case didn't happen sometime during the Satanic Panic of the 80's (something else faith in hypnosis managed to make worse). It happened only months ago.

The Rangers used hypnosis to investigate an attempted kidnapping as recently as October 2020, just two months before the program was ended.

While there may be some therapeutic value to hypnosis, there's almost no evidence supporting the assumption that hypnotizing victims and witnesses will result in usable evidence. "This thing their brain said" should be considered so far removed from "hearsay" as to be completely inadmissible.

But while the Texas Rangers have finally decided to abandon hypnosis in favor of literally anything not so ridiculously stupid, doesn't mean other law enforcement agencies are following suit. The Rangers may have made the first move, but others are so sure it works they're not willing to give up this ultra-specious investigative method.

Even without the program, local police departments may still be using hypnosis to investigate crimes. More than 800 law enforcement officers statewide have been approved to use hypnosis as an investigative tool since the 1980s, and Dallas and Houston once boasted the most hypnotists on staff.

Can you even imagine making such a boast? It's like telling people you've got the most Tarot readers on hand for their fortune-adjacent law enforcement needs. Step right up and get your fortune told! Oh, sorry, the cards say you've committed some crimes or whatnot. Sometimes it just works out that way. Let's get you processed.

But the acolytes are having a hard time letting go of this bogus investigative technique, especially those who were getting paid to make the Texas Rangers dumber.

Marx Howell, one of the chief practitioners of police hypnosis in Texas, said he was not aware that the Department of Public Safety ended the program and expressed disappointment in the decision

“It is a viable investigative technique under certain circumstances in certain types of cases where you don’t have any other leads,” Howell told The News. “If DPS has stopped it, that will be a major effort to use hypnosis that has gone away.”

So, when you have no other leads, you just do whatever the fuck? Is that the thought process at Ranger HQ? Toss science out the window and scatter tea leaves on the breakroom table just because an investigation has been dead-ended? Jesus. That's worse than just plain sad. That's self-induced delusion so strong one wonders how many times Howell has stood in front of a mirror telling himself he's getting sleepy.

At least the Rangers have dumped this. Hopefully, other agencies will join them in abandoning a technique that offers almost zero investigative benefits but plenty of ways to deprive people of their rights and freedoms.

Filed Under: evidence, hypnosis, investigations, texas, texas rangers

Kansas City PD Presentation Says Every Shooting Investigation Is Handled The Same Way... Unless It Involves A Cop

from the no-bias-here-if-you-don't-count-the-bias-towards-cops dept

The Kansas City Police Department has managed to turn a few heads -- and not in the good way -- with an internal PowerPoint that may as well have been titled "So, You've Killed Someone." The document was obtained during discovery in a wrongful death suit against the KCPD. Back in 2019, Officer Dylan Pifer shot and killed Terrance Bridges, claiming he thought Bridges was trying to pull a gun from his sweatshirt pocket. No gun was found on Bridges.

The presentation [PDF] obtained from Bridges' family's lawyer by the Kansas City Star advises cops of two things: police shootings should be handled like routine criminal investigations to eliminate claims of bias. And police shootings should be handled nothing like routine criminal investigations because they involve cops.

The opening slide makes it clear what the priority is in investigations of shootings by cops: preserving the narrative. It even has the number one next to it.

Upon completion of this block of instruction, the participants will, with the use of handouts and notes, be able to:

1. Identify the best defense again [sic] claims of bias or favoritism in the investigations of officer involved shootings.

You know what's not a top priority? Preserving evidence. That comes behind officer safety.

Supervisors should consider the preservation of evidence as secondary to the safety of the public and department personnel.

The presentation points out that shootings are controversial and claims "police critics" will often claim investigations -- which routinely clear officers of wrongdoing -- are "biased and that police receive special treatment." So, the best defense is a good offense:

The best defense to these claims is CONSISTENCY in how we conduct ALL criminal investigations.

[...]

The best way to do this is to treat the investigation into officer involved shootings LIKE EVERY OTHER CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION.

All well and good, except the presentation spends most of its running time explaining how this sort of investigation won't be treated like a regular criminal investigation.

Does this look like the sort of thing cops offer to non-cops involved in shootings?

Don’t engage the member in detailed conversation about the incident, but you are encouraged to talk with them like you would on any other day.

Make sure that all requests (bathroom, food, drinks, cigarettes) by the involved members are met as soon as possible.

Forget about preserving evidence:

If their recording system is active, have the member mute the mike and mute yours. They will be making calls to FOP [Fraternal Order of Police] and spouses and family. They may be in an excited state and hyperverbal.

And start hiding stuff from journalists:

Park somewhere that responding media will not be able to film the involved member.

But that of course only means the involved cop. The non-cop will have any and all possibly incriminating information immediately forwarded to local media, along with any mugshots the PD happens to have on hand. Information about the involved officer will be much slower in arriving. Much slower than even the involved officer's statement to investigators:

Generally, the member will be permitted up to forty-eight (48) hours to complete such statement…

The presentation then spends a bit of time bemoaning the public's confidence in law enforcement, which isn't at an all-time high. It blames the media (again) for misrepresenting shootings by officers and, again, stresses doing everything by the book to combat this perception. But the book for officers is very different from the book for citizens. And until law enforcement agencies are willing to change that, the rest of what bothers the presenter about public perception isn't going to change.

And this is about the worst possible way you could end an instructive presentation on handling shootings by officers:

There is nothing wrong with being glad to be alive and being okay that you were the winner in a competition in which the winning prize was your life.

Law enforcement isn't a competition with winners and losers. It's a job, an important one, but one that has apparently been handed to people who believe members of the public are enemy combatants and that shootings are just games to be won.

Filed Under: investigations, kansas city, police, police shootings

Trump Appointee Who Wanted To Turn Voice Of America Into Breitbart Spent Millions Of Taxpayer Dollars Investigating His Own Staff

from the holy-shit dept

Remember Michael Pack? That's the Steve Bannon protégé who Trump appointed last year to head the US Agency for Global Media. USAGM is the organization that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting and the Open Technology Fund. It was an open secret that Pack was appointed to turn those widely respected, independent, news organizations into pure Breitbart-style propaganda outfits. He wasted little time causing a huge fucking mess, firing a ton of people in a manner so upsetting that even Republican Senators were concerned. It also turned out that many of the people he fired... he legally had no right to fire.

In the fall, things got even more ridiculous as it came out that Pack had been investigating VOA journalists to see if they were "anti-Trump" and then moved to get more power to directly dictate how VOA should be reporting. One of President Biden's first official acts in office... was to fire Pack, who laughably claimed that his being fired was "a partisan act" that would harm the credibility of USAGM.

Meanwhile, the latest story, as revealed by NPR, is that Pack spent millions of tax payer dollars investigating staff throughout the various organizations to try to come up with reasons they could be fired. This was in response to the courts pointing out he couldn't just randomly fire people in these organizations.

Last summer, an appointee of former President Donald Trump was irate because he could not simply fire top executives who had warned him that some of his plans might be illegal.

Michael Pack, who was CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media that oversees Voice of America, in August suspended those top executives. He also immediately ordered up an investigation to determine what wrongdoing the executives might have committed.

Instead of turning to inspectors general or civil servants to investigate, Pack personally signed a no-bid contract to hire a high-profile law firm with strong Republican ties.

The bill — footed by taxpayers — exceeded a million dollars in just the first few months of the contract.

And hiring an outside law firm is an abuse of his position, according to the Government Accountability Project, which discovered the details of this contract via a FOIA request:

"The engagement constitutes gross mismanagement, gross waste of taxpayer dollars and abuse of authority," David Seide of the Government Accountability Project, wrote in a letter Thursday to Congressional committees with oversight of the committee.

"The 'deliverables' provided by McGuireWoods are — always were — of questionable value," he wrote. "The investigations produced nothing that could justify the kind of discipline Mr. Pack sought to impose on current USAGM employees he did not like — he wanted them fired (they have since been reinstated). Investigations of former employees also yielded nothing."

It seems almost cartoonish what Pack did here:

The group's analysis of the new documents, shared with NPR, found the law firm McGuireWoods charged more than $320 per hour for 3,200 billable hours from August through October alone. It devoted five partners, six associates, two lawyers "of counsel," two staff attorneys, seven paralegals, three case assistants, 14 other timekeepers, and 11 "outsourced attorneys" to the work.

[....]

The invoices reflect that McGuireWoods' legal team, among other duties, reviewed social media posts, "news articles relating to Michael Pack" and an "[Office of Inspector General] audit on Hillary Clinton's email breach."

It truly is insane how obsessed Trumpists are over Hillary's emails.

But the main crux of the "investigation" appears to have been to cook up any reason at all to justify Pack firing all the non-Trump people he wanted to fire:

The nonprofit group's review found the McGuireWoods team spent nearly 2,000 hours in a massive review of documents and emails, 400 hours on fact investigation, and nearly 700 hours on what was labeled as "analysis/strategy." The records also show the legal team conducted voluminous legal research on federal ethics regulations and U.S. statutes. Such tasks for federal departments are typically, though not exclusively, undertaken by government attorneys, inspectors general, and human resources employees.

Incredible.

Filed Under: donald trump, intimidation, investigations, michael pack, propaganda, taxpayers, usagm, voice of america
Companies: voice of america

So Much For Going Dark: FBI Using Social Media, E-Commerce Sites To Track Down Suspects (Including Non-Lawbreakers)

from the where's-the-darkness dept

You know the drill, right? The FBI keeps insisting that it has a "going dark" problem due to encryption making it impossible to access key evidence of supposedly criminal behavior, in theory allowing crime to happen without recourse. The problem, though, is that nearly every single bit of this claim is false. It's kind of stunning.

• It appears that, in practice, the FBI almost never runs into encryption.
• In the rare cases where it has (and we don't know how many because since the FBI admitted it over exaggerated how many "locked" devices it had, and then has since refused to provide an updated count), there do appear to be ways to get into those devices anyway.
• But the key issue, by far, is that the opposite of going dark is happening. Thanks to our increasingly electronic lives, the government actually has way more access to information than ever before.

Two recent articles highlight this in practice, with regards to the FBI trying to track down the rare cases of criminal activity happening around some of the protests. The local ABC affiliate in Philadelphia has the fairly remarkable story of how the FBI used Etsy, Poshmark and Linkedin to track down someone suspected of torching two Philadelphia police cars. How would those sites be useful? Well:

In amateur photos given to authorities, she is seen wearing a T-shirt that says, "Keep the immigrants, deport the racists."

They were able to trace the T-shirt back to an Etsy shop, where a review was left by a user that displayed a Philadelphia location.

Investigators say open searches for the username led them to a Poshmark user by the name of lore-elisabeth. Open searches for a Lore Elisabeth in Philadelphia led investigators to a LinkedIn profile for a woman who was employed as a massage therapist.

And, then they checked the website of her employer, which... included a few videos of a woman who matched the photographs of the woman lighting the cop car on fire.

None of that would have been possible in that way pre-internet. The FBI doesn't have a "going dark" problem at all. They have more light than ever before. Indeed, it seems a bit more darkness and privacy would be useful, because in some cases, the FBI seems to completely overreacting to otherwise fine (or, in some cases, joking) social media posts.

And that brings us to the second story, from NBC News, detailing the FBI trawling social media to arrest protesters they claim tried to incite riots at various (mostly peaceful) protests. Of course, the details suggest that the FBI may have an itchy trigger finger in freaking out about what people are posting, as the story details many of the charges are being dropped after the facts come in and the overzealous FBI appears to have overreacted. Indeed, it looks like they're arresting people entirely based on social media posts, which raises some pretty significant 1st Amendment questions. Or at least it would, if prosecutors didn't realize what a mess they'd caused and dropped the charges quickly.

Avery is one of four known people across the United States indicted on charges of incitement to riot solely on the basis of social media posts, according to federal court records. One man was charged for posting a crude napalm recipe that is widely available online. His charges were dropped several days later. Another man was questioned by the FBI for jokingly tweeting that he was the local head of antifa — a loose anti-fascist and left-leaning political movement with no clearly-defined organization, structure or leadership.

Taken together, the cases offer some insight into how federal law enforcement continues to monitor online speech related to social movements and pursue what legal experts say is a fairly aggressive approach to prosecution.

The charges against Avery were suddenly dropped without explanation Wednesday.

In other words, the problem does not appear to be "going dark." The problem appears to be so much sunlight that the FBI is finding "crimes" where none actually exist...

Filed Under: arrests, fbi, investigations, social media
Companies: etsy, facebook, linkedin

Richard Burr Steps Down From Intel Committee Following FBI Warrant; Feinstein Talks To FBI, While Loeffler Won't Say

from the insider-trading dept

Following the news that the FBI got a warrant and seized Senator Richard Burr's phone as part of its investigation into his alleged insider trading, Burr has announced that he's stepping down from being the chair of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, where he's long been one of the biggest boosters of the surveillance state.

Of course, some are now wondering if that's part of the reason why the Trumpian wing of the GOP have come out against Burr. Because the Senate Intel Committee has released a report confirming that Russia tried to help Trump win in 2016. The report is not particularly surprising, highlighting many widely known points. However, in Trumpland, no one seems to be able to handle the nuanced differences between the campaign directly "colluding" with Russia (for which the evidence is more limited) with the idea that Russia independently sought to boost Trump (for which the evidence is overwhelming). So, Trump supporters have been clamoring for Burr's head on a platter for merely stating facts, which are not allowed in this world where pointing out that The Emperor is Naked is somehow deemed to be heresy.

Given Attorney General Barr's recent decisions to more fully weaponize and politicize the Justice Department, it can't be dismissed out of hand that there are political reasons for the FBI's sudden interest in Burr, but it still seems like a stretch. Sooner or later it's likely that there will be some fallout from which one can better assess the validity of the warrant, and whether or not Burr was engaged in insider trading.

One point that a few people have raised is to look at whether or not the FBI is looking into any of the other Senators who sold notable chunks of stock just before the pandemic hit, though as we explained in that original story, the situations and fact patterns with each of the other Senators is at least somewhat different than Burr's case. For what it's worth, there are reports that the FBI questioned Senator Dianne Feinstein, who also sold some stock during this period. However, as we pointed out in the original post, there's little indication that her sales were COVID-19 related, especially since it was mostly selling off biotech stocks (exactly the kind of stocks you'd think would go up in a pandemic).

The other Senator's selloff behavior that looked at least somewhat sketchy was Senator Kelly Loeffler, whose actions look worse and worse, as she denies things more vociferously. Just recently, she went on Fox News (natch) to claim that "this is 100% a political attack." Huh? What? You're the one who sold the stock. She also (get this) tried to blame socialism because why not?

This gets at the very heart of why I came to Washington, to defend free enterprise, to defend capitalism. This is a socialist attack.

Who knew that insider trading was "free enterprise"?

Either way, while Burr has had to hand over his phone and Feinstein had to answer questions from the FBI... Loeffler simply refuses to say whether or not the FBI has reached out to her. If it does turn out that the FBI has investigated the others, but left Loeffler entirely alone (whether or not her sales were aboveboard), that's certainly going to be some evidence to add to the pile that the focus on Burr was just as much political as it was about the legal issues at play.

Update: After this story was completed, Loeffler's office announced that she had handed documents over to the SEC and DOJ along with the Senate Ethics Committee. It's unclear if the DOJ/FBI asked for anything or if she just did this proactively. Just a few days ago, there was a report saying that her team was considering doing exactly this as a "hail mary" to try to get out ahead of this story that she can't seem to get rid of, and which appears to be having an impact on her campaign to retain the office that she was gifted a few months ago.

Filed Under: dianne feinstein, doj, fbi, insider trading, intelligence community, investigations, kelly loeffler, politics, richard burr, russia, russian election interference, senate intelligence committee

Puerto Rico's Justice Department Demanded Info From Facebook About Journalists Who Livestreamed Protests

from the not-how-that-works dept

Historically, the DOJ hasn't really let the First Amendment stand in the way of its investigations. In very recent history, the FBI has targeted journalists to hunt down leakers, and has impersonated journalists during investigations. While the DOJ and FBI have dealt with some limited repercussions due to their targeting of First Amendment activities (which includes targeting Muslims because they're Muslims), it really hasn't promised to stop doing this. Nor has it been told to stop doing this. Instead, the DOJ has simply made it slightly more difficult for investigators to violate people's rights.

The Intercept has done some investigating of its own and discovered the FBI actively engaged in First Amendment violations for years during its partnership with Puerto Rican law enforcement agencies.

For decades, Puerto Rico’s police department operated an intelligence unit dedicated to spying on dissidents. With the knowledge of the FBI, police officers created a file, known as a carpeta, for anyone who could be construed as a supporter of Puerto Rican independence or other environmental or labor causes. Officers recruited neighbors, friends, and relatives to collect information about those targeted, and planted rumors that led to divorce, job loss, and irreparable discord within communities and families.

75,000 of these files were created. This secret surveillance was finally revealed in 1987 and was ruled unconstitutional in 1988 by a Puerto Rican court. That should have ended it. Instead, the surveillance of First Amendment-protected activities is alive and well, headed by the island's Justice Department. Seven students are facing charges related to a nonviolent anti-austerity protest held in 2017. To locate the suspects it wanted to charge, the Justice Department targeted the student publications that streamed footage of the demonstration.

The documents released to defense attorneys provide... evidence of a broad and invasive hunt for prosecutable crimes related to the protests. An agent from the cybercrimes unit of Puerto Rico’s Justice Department sought a search warrant for the records of virtually every Facebook interaction over a 72-hour period with the three publications that livestreamed the protest. The agent obtained private messages with the publications’ followers and detailed information about the student journalists who managed the pages.

The warrant demanded everything. It asked Facebook to hand over searches performed by page administrators, any content that had been deleted, GPS coordinates for posts, IMSI numbers from associated phones, and billing records. The agent working for the Justice Department claimed this was a normal thing to do during an investigation of an incident where no one was arrested, saying all this was needed to collect "evidence" of supposed criminal activity.

Again, the protest being investigated resulted in only a small amount of property damage and zero arrests. Only in hindsight did Puerto Rican law enforcement decide some people needed to be prosecuted and, bizarrely, decided to start this investigation by demanding information about journalists who did nothing more than record the demonstration.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing seems to be increasing, rather than being relegated to law enforcement agencies' pasts. The protests that greeted Trump's inauguration did result in property damage and violence, but the investigation started with broad demands for data on the 1.2 million visitors to a protest group's website.

This investigation also involved a protest, one that lasted only a half-hour, and resulted in a broken glass door and some damaged furniture. This led to an investigation where 1,553 pages of information about student journalists were handed over to the Justice Department by Facebook. And for what? To investigate people who weren't even participating in the protest? To give the government evidence it doesn't even appear to be interested in using in this case?

Collateral damage to rights is something to be taken seriously. Targeting one First Amendment activity (protesting) through the Facebook pages of another First Amendment activity (journalism) is pretty much the worst way to investigate anything. In this case, the obvious problems were made worse by the government's inability (or unwillingness) to narrow the scope of data demands. And the demand for info should never have been approved by any level of oversight (judicial or otherwise) without more restrictions being put in place.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, doj, fbi, investigations, journalism, privacy, protests, puerto rico, surveillance
Companies: facebook

DOJ's Latest Child Porn Site Takedown Shows Encryption Isn't Really Stopping The Feds From Fighting Child Porn

from the welcome-to-basic-detective-work dept

The DOJ just delivered a counterargument to its own anti-encryption rhetoric. Attorney General William Barr, Deputy AG Jeffrey Rosen, and FBI Director Chris Wray recently spent some time decrying the increasing use of encryption to secure personal communications.

The latest attack on encryption was prompted by Facebook's announcement that it would be adding end-to-end encryption to its Messenger service. Three governments (US, UK, Australia) joined forces to tell Facebook it was wrong. They promised Facebook's inability to snoop on its users' messages would allow thousands of child porn producers and consumers to escape justice.

And yet the DOJ, FBI, and others are still managing to track down and arrest criminal suspects -- all without having access to encryption backdoors or compromised communication services. As Jason Koebler reports, another child porn investigation has led to the takedown of a dark web site.

The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that it has seized and shut down Welcome to Video, one of the world’s largest dark web child porn websites in a worldwide law enforcement action.

Law enforcement has arrested 337 alleged pedophiles in 38 countries around the world and has rescued 23 children from abusive situations as part of the operation, the DOJ said in a press conference on Wednesday.

No backdoors were needed to track down the owner of the server or hundreds of the site's visitors. For that matter, the FBI didn't even need a warrant. The FBI did not deploy its infamous NIT (Network Investigative Technique) to track down site users. The flaw was the payment system linked to the site. Users may have thought their Bitcoin transactions couldn't be traced back to them, but they were wrong.

According to an indictment, law enforcement was able to track users of the site on the blockchain not because of the design of Bitcoin itself, which is pseudonymous, but because “virtual currency exchanges were required by US law to collect identifying information of their customers and verify their clients’ identities.”

Many financial records are third-party records. No warrants needed. Investigators sent Bitcoin to the child porn site's wallet multiple times, managing to suss out the wallet's owner. Somewhat conveniently, the owner's phone number and email account were listed with the exchange. Investigators then began digging up info on other users who were sending Bitcoin to the same wallet, using the mandated data collection to unmask site visitors. Coinbase was handed a subpoena and Coinbase handed over users' info.

The DOJ's overwrought anti-encryption arguments aside, there's another concerning aspect of this investigation -- one the DOJ is far less willing to discuss. As Koebler points out, the DOJ apparently let the site operate for months, if not years, to track down as many site visitors as possible.

The indictment [PDF] indicates investigators were aware of the site's existence since 2015. At some point between then and the operator's arrest in March of 2018, investigators purchased site credits and downloaded child porn. The indictment does not say when the DOJ took control of the site and/or shut it down. It doesn't appear the FBI or any other law enforcement agency continued to run the site after its seizure (as the FBI has done in other cases), but it is disturbing multiple law enforcement agencies felt it was better to leave the site up and running -- and victimize more children in the process -- than shut it down as soon as possible with the understanding some site visitors might escape prosecution.

The facts of this case undermine the DOJ's assertions about the necessity of encryption backdoors to successfully investigate and prosecute child porn producers and distributors. This case even undercuts its arguments about cellphone encryption, as the FBI's testimony [PDF via Cyrus Farivar] shows it didn't have to make any effort at all to access the contents of an arrestee's phone.

Q. Did he have a cellphone on him at the time you encountered him?

A. Yes.

Q. Did you seize that?

A. Yes.

Q. Did he voluntarily provide the password --

A. Yes.

Q. -- passcode to it?

A. Yes.

Encryption isn't the roadblock the DOJ's rhetoric makes it appear to be. It may make some investigations more difficult, but it certainly doesn't make them impossible. The DOJ can still protect children without making communications less secure for millions of people. It's not zero sum. It's a tradeoff -- something the DOJ is familiar with. It trades the continued exploitation of children for a few more prosecutions when it takes on child porn sites. If it's willing to allow children to be hurt to save children, you'd think it would be a bit more cautious when suggesting the public should give up its security in exchange for the DOJ's idea of "public safety."

Filed Under: child porn, doj, encryption, fbi, investigations
Companies: welcome to video

Insurance Companies Are Destroying People's Lives And Cops Are Being Paid To Help Do It

from the all-hail-your-corporate-law-enforcement-overlords dept

Insurance claims result in investigations. This much is a given. Sometimes it involves both insurance companies and law enforcement agencies, depending on what's being investigated. But in many cases, insurance companies are doing the investigative work for law enforcement agencies and pushing prosecutors towards bringing fraud charges against claimants just trying to be compensated for valuables damaged or lost.

The combined power of these two forces is enough to obliterate lives and livelihoods. Kendall Taggart's report for Buzzfeed is a long, horrifying read. It details the close relationship between insurance companies and cops -- one that extends so far as companies paying cops, prosecutors, and expert witnesses to turn valid insurance claims into insurance fraud charges.

A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that Erie, State Farm, Farmers, and other giant home and auto insurers around the country have co-opted law enforcement to intimidate and prosecute their own customers — tactics that can help companies boost their profits and avoid paying claims.

Insurance companies provide financial incentives to scores of police departments, prosecutors, and other public agencies to encourage them to focus on insurance fraud, a crime that has traditionally not been a priority for local law enforcement. In some cases, insurance giants even cover the salaries of dedicated prosecutors, detectives, and investigators whose caseloads consist primarily of referrals from those same companies.

The result is that dozens of premium-paying customers across the United States have faced jail for doing nothing more than filing insurance claims for damages to their property.

In one particularly horrendous case, State Farm destroyed a man's construction business. A 2006 hailstorm in Indiana resulted in 50,000 claims being filed with the insurer. State Farm wasn't happy with the uptick in business, which resulted in hundreds of complaints being filed against the insurer with the state's Department of Insurance.

From all appearances, the insurer decided to scapegoat Joe Radcliff, a contractor who was very busy performing hail damage inspections. Two years after the hailstorm, police arrested Radcliff, telling him he was being charged with 14 felonies.

The insurance company accused Radcliff of deliberately damaging shingles and siding, presumably in hopes of being hired to repair the damage once the insurance check came in. After losing almost all of his customers over the bad press, Radcliff found out State Farm was behind the criminal investigation. The railroading began in earnest one year prior to his arrest, shortly after he spoke to a TV reporter about State Farm's foot-dragging.

State Farm went after Radcliff's customers to try to build its case… but not by asking them if they'd noticed any possible criminal activity. No, State Farm TOLD them they had observed criminal activity and that it would fuck them up too if they refused to help put the contractor away.

State Farm tried to pressure at least four of those homeowners into accusing Radcliff of fraud — telling three of them it would pay for the repairs only if they filed police reports alleging that it was the contractor who had damaged the roofs. In another case, State Farm reversed its own determination that a homeowner’s roof was damaged in the storm after it learned Radcliff was involved, locating new experts who now claimed the contractor had vandalized the property.

The company couldn't get any of Radcliff's customers to testify against him. So it took the info it did have to the state's insurance industry/law enforcement liaison. And it left out everything customers said that refuted the allegations State Farm was making against Radcliff. It took Radcliff until 2013 to clear his name. All charges were dropped when it became apparent State Farm had deliberately withheld exonerative information.

But the damage was done. A business destroyed by a much larger business that didn't want to do the thing it's actually in the business of doing: selling insurance and paying out claims.

It's not so much that insurance companies work with law enforcement during investigations. That's to be expected. But there needs to be a clear line dividing the two and there isn't. The surreptitious purchase of witness testimonies and the direct funding of fraud investigators is only part of the problem. Various government bodies are mixing public and private entities, allowing them to intermingle freely, much like the attendees of the annual insurance fraud conferences they hold.

The public may pay the salaries of public servants, but when it comes to insurance fraud, insurance companies are paying the salaries of investigators and prosecutors.

Insurance company officials make up the majority of [Pennsylvania's Insurance Fraud Prevention Authority] board, which last year doled out $14 million in targeted grants to fund the work of roughly 100 prosecutors, investigators, and support staffers across the state dedicated exclusively to rooting out insurance fraud.

Those law enforcement officials collected $5.6 million in restitution from people accused of insurance fraud in 2018, money that went back to the insurance companies. According to the IFPA’s annual report, the most commonly investigated cases don’t involve sophisticated organized crime rings, but individual policyholders ages 18 to 34 with no prior criminal record.

The incentives are skewed in favor of everyone but the premium payers. Paying customers are being dragged to court, arraigned on charges, and otherwise made miserable simply because they asked for what's owed to them. Rather than just being blown off by shitty customer services reps, they're having their lives ruined by companies that withhold exculpatory evidence and law enforcement personnel who are only too happy to carry their courtroom water for them.

Filed Under: insurance, investigations, police

Homicide, Sexual Assault Cases On The Line After Crime Lab Discovers Tech Using The Wrong Tools For The Job

from the more-faith-than-science-in-the-forensic-science-community dept

When life and liberty are on the line, law enforcement lab techs are there to turn hard science into a roulette wheel. Once you get past the fact that a lot of forensic investigative techniques are little more than junk science, you run directly into the failures of the humans staffing forensic/drug testing labs.

In the state of Massachusetts alone, more than 30,000 cases are in the process of being tossed due to lab tech misconduct. One lab tech faked most of her work, speeding through her workload by faking tests and test results. Another used the drug lab as her own personal drug stash, using whatever substances she wanted from incoming evidence and replacing it with filler.

Forensic science is plagued with incompetence and overconfidence, which is an incredibly bad combination when people's freedom is on the line. Only in recent years has the DOJ instructed forensic experts to stop overstating the certainty of their findings. But that hardly fixes the problem. Outside debunkings have led to zero changes in law enforcement forensic work -- a fact so disheartening a judge very publicly resigned from a committee seeking to fix these problems when it became apparent the committee wasn't actually supposed to fix anything.

Here comes more bad news on the forensic front, via criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast.

The Houston Forensic Science Center has fired a crime scene investigator who violated policy by using unapproved equipment that resulted in false negatives for biological evidence in at least two sexual assault cases, officials said Friday.

Lab officials, who fired investigator Tammy Barette Thursday, said they may never know the full impact her actions may have had on other cases.

Well, sure, you may "never know" if you don't go looking. To be on the safe side, you could consider everything this investigator ever touched tainted. That would cover the "full impact" with some to spare. But if this is handled like any other case of lab misconduct, it will take a court to force a full accounting of the damage.

From what's been uncovered so far, it appears the lab tech used her own equipment to identify the presence of bodily fluids that contain DNA. Her personal tool didn't meet the lab's requirements, making any results of hers suspect. A lab supervisor found 19 cases in which the inadequate tool was used. Even in this limited sample, there were serious problems.

Out of 19 cases where Barette used the improper light source, including the case that sparked the investigation, only four had evidence available to retest, agency spokeswoman Ramit Plushnick-Masti said. Two of those were wrongfully marked as negative for the presence of biological fluids, when they should have yielded positives.

15 more cases "might have had a different outcome." That's not very comforting, considering this lab usually handles violent crimes like homicide and sexual assault.

The lab has responded in the most government of ways: by rewriting a policy that was already in place forbidding the use of personal equipment. The language has been toughened up to make it clear the violation that was always a violation is a policy violation. The single addition is the requirement for investigators to write down the model number of the equipment they use to perform tests. That should certainly prevent any future misconduct. [Gathers rolling eyes from under desk.]

The good news is the lab immediately fired the investigator. The bad news is the problem went undiscovered long enough to do some serious damage. Most of the damage is reputational, providing criminal suspects with ammo to challenge lab findings. If one tech can perform unauthorized tests, surely other accidents and misdeeds have been overlooked. When the lab itself can't say how many cases were affected -- or even how many tests might have been handled with inadequate equipment -- the potential fallout could couple the jailing of innocent people with the release of actually guilty prisoners.

Filed Under: evidence, houston, houston forensic science center, investigations, lab tech, massachusetts, tammy barette, texas