White House Pushing Proposal That Would Subject Mentally Ill People To Increased Surveillance

from the people-with-mental-problems-will-definitely-respond-positively-to-this dept

The White House has decided we're going to power through our mass shooting crisis by aiming our surveillance apparatus in the direction of the mentally ill. In addition to claiming we might be able to find the next mass shooter by tracking fitness trackers, the administration is pushing for a mental health-based "solution" that would increase the stigma of not being "normal."

The White House is considering a controversial proposal to study whether mass shootings could be prevented by monitoring mentally ill people for small changes that might foretell violence.

Former NBC Chairman Bob Wright, a longtime friend and associate of President Trump’s, has briefed top officials, including the president, the vice president and Ivanka Trump, on a proposal to create a new research agency called HARPA to come up with out-of-the-box ways to tackle health problems, much like DARPA does for the military, say several people who have briefed.

HARPA (a takeoff of the military's DARPA project) stands for Health Advanced Research Projects Agency. HARPA's webpage says things about uncured diseases and promises to "put patients first," but the administration's commandeering of its resources pretty much guarantees more law enforcement officers lacking the training to address mental health issues will be put in contact with people with mental health issues more frequently. Perhaps the Trump administration thinks we can avoid a mass shooting by increasing the number of people shot by cops one at a time.

A three-page proposal from HARPA contains a clunky acronym and some very scary ideas. The route to a mass shooting-free America runs through millions of devices owned by millions of US citizens.

Advisers to Wright quickly pulled together a three-page proposal — called SAFEHOME for Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes — which calls for exploring whether technology like phones and smartwatches can be used to detect when mentally ill people are about to turn violent.

No one has any idea how this is supposed to work. No one seems to know whether it can even be done. Administration officials, however, aren't asking the only question that matters: should this be done?

In addition to generating a massive amount of false positives for law enforcement and HARPA analysts to sort through, there's the very real concern that such a program would put tons of people under surveillance and still not do anything to solve the problem it's supposed to be addressing.

Most concerning, [Marisa Randazzo] said, is that the proposal is based on the flawed premise that mental illness is directly linked to mass shootings. “Everything we know from research tells us it’s a weak link at best,” said Randazzo, who spent a decade conducting such research for the Secret Service and is now CEO of a threat assessment company called Sigma.

There is violence associated with mental illness, but not the violence this administration is targeting. Suicide is the problem going unaddressed. But since Trump believes mass shooters are all mentally ill, that's what HARPA will likely focus on. Unfortunately, it will be working against available data.

[S]tudies of mass shooters have found that only a quarter or less have diagnosed mental illness. Researchers have noted a host of other factors that are more significant commonalities in mass shooters: a strong sense of grievance, desire for infamy, copycat study of other shooters, past domestic violence, narcissism and access to firearms.

It also runs contrary to the government's own research work. A Pentagon study on mass shootings said simply that prediction-oriented programs don't work. Threat assessment is far more productive than amassing a bunch of biometric data and hoping to find a pattern that indicates someone's going to engage in mass murder.

But this is what the administration wants to pursue: widespread surveillance based on the faulty assumption that this will produce anything other than negative results.

Filed Under: gun violence, mass shootings, mental illness, pre-crime, surveillance

White House Now Thinks Harvesting Fitness Tracker Data Could Stop The Next Mass Shooting

from the no-conceivable-downsides-no-sir dept

In the wake of more mass shootings, everything coming from up top has been bat shit insane. The Trump Administration has a bunch of suggestions, and they're no better than those offered by a bunch of policy makers who think pulling the plug on certain areas of the internet will somehow reduce the frequency of mass shootings in the US.

Despite being able to do actually useful things at the federal level, Trump has decided preventing gun violence should be everyone else's job. First, he declared it's time for social media companies to engage in even greater vetting of users' posts, apparently in hopes of finding the next mass shooter before they start shooting.

We're headed to pre-crime territory, with the feds in tow. Working together, these entities can be expected to create a massive mess -- one that criminalizes words and will result in plenty of non-dangerous people spending more time interacting with federal agents. This isn't going to solve the problem. It's only going to create a new set of problems, waste limited law enforcement resources, and deprive people of their rights and liberties.

So, of course, the Trump administration is out there trying to make a bad situation even worse. Working backwards from a stillborn idea to come up with a catchy acronym, the White House brain trust is planning on inflicting this on America:

Last week, the Washington Post reported that the White House had been briefed on a plan to create an agency called HARPA, a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA. Among other initiatives, this new agency would reportedly collect volunteer data from a suite of smart devices, including Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echos, and Google Homes in order to identify “neurobehavioral signs” of “someone headed toward a violent explosive act.” The project would then use artificial intelligence to create a “sensor suite” to flag mental changes that make violence more likely.

According to the Post, the HARPA proposal was discussed with senior White House officials as early as June 2017, but has “gained momentum” after the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. The latest version of the plan, reportedly submitted to the Trump administration this month, outlined the biometric project called “SAFE HOME,” an acronym for “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes.”

Jesus Christ. Doesn't take long for dystopia to take hold. We already knew every fitness tracking device is, first and foremost, a TRACKING device. They generate the sort of data cops and terrorists alike like getting their hands on. Now, the administration is suggesting this data will be able to stop killers before they kill by looking for elevated pulse rates or, I don't know, heart conditions common to mass shooters. Or whatever.

Somehow, this patchwork of "volunteer data" will be Frankensteined into a "multi-modality solution" that can provide the government with "early diagnoses of neuropsychiatric violence." Ok, then. But can it even do this? Or will analysts pore over tons of garbage data looking for patterns that don't actually exist -- all while being pressured to prevent mass shootings? If so, the desire to show the program works might overwhelm the desire to proceed in a scientific manner, leading to garbage outputs more aligned with numerology enthusiasts and that Timecube guy.

Expecting anything "advanced" from a fitness tracker is asking for trouble. As Emily Gorecenski points out on Twitter, a FitBit can somehow detect the heartbeat in the breast from a chicken that's been killed, butchered, processed, packaged, sent to a grocery store, and purchased by a consumer.

These are the tools we're going to use to do pre-crime? This is the scientific wonder that's going to track down mass shooters before they can kill anybody? If we're lucky, we'll all live long enough to regret this.

Once you get past the HARPA buzzwords and the shininess of the tech toys, you're left with the unpleasant feeling this is going to result in people being hustled off the street by black-clad government agents and rushed to the nearest reeducation center.

“Creating a watchlist of citizens who most likely will never act violently based on their mental health is a very dangerous proposal with major ethical considerations,” Emma Fridel, a doctoral candidate at Northeastern University specializing in mass murder, told Gizmodo in an email. “Doing so to predict the unpredictable is utterly absurd.”

This system will be little more than an efficient generator of false positives. Adopting as much intrusive surveillance as possible as quickly as possible is bound to result in a few prevented crimes. So would random house searches and 24-hour police checkpoints. Backing into this with a catchy acronym, technobabble, and a bunch of junk science isn't acceptable. The government may feel obligated to do something about mass shootings, but everything it has come up with so far has been resolutely terrible, if not terrifying.

Filed Under: data, fitness trackers, guns, mass shootings, school shootings, surveillance, trump administration

FBI Serves Incredibly Broad Warrant To 8chan, Demanding Info On All Users Who Responded To A Shooter's Post

from the not-how-probable-cause-works dept

Internet hellhole 8chan has been hit with a federal search warrant. The site, created to serve those who felt 4chan's nearly-nonexistent moderation was too restrictive, has been front and center recently due to its hosting of manifestos by mass shooters who apparently frequented the site.

In this case, an investigation into a shooting at a California mosque has led the FBI to the pages of 8chan. Postings at the site -- along with some at Facebook -- have linked the shooter to the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand. According to the affidavit [PDF], the FBI believes the California mosque shooter was "inspired and/or educated" by the New Zealand's shooters manifesto and actions.

The Poway shooter is already in custody, so the value of the information sought here is questionable. While the info may have some value in establishing the shooter's state of mind, as well as his connection to other crimes, the warrant does bear some resemblance to a fishing expedition.

From the affidavit, it appears the feds have no shortage of evidence to use against the shooter:

Using various search methods, Whitney Buckingham an SDSD system data miner, found a manifesto on Pastebin.com written by a person identifying himself as John Earnest. In the manifesto, which he named "An Open Letter", Earnest made many anti-Semitic and anti-muslim statements. One such statement which is a direct quote is, "As an individual, I can only kill so many Jews." He states he is not a terrorist but that he hates anyone who he sees as a threat to his country. Earnest took credit for a fire that had been set at mosque in Escondido a few weeks earlier. His exact statement was "I scorched a mosque in Escondido with gasoline a week after Brenton Tarrant's sacrifice and they never found shit on me. Additionally, he wrote "I spray-painted on the parking lot. I wrote 'For Brenton Tarrant -t./pol/."

Tarrant is the New Zealand shooter Earnest apparently tried to emulate. Obviously, the threat of copycat killers is always a concern following mass shootings, but what the government is demanding here has the potential to sweep up dozens of users who did nothing but reply to threads involving the arrested shooter.

Agents seek IP address and metadata information about Earnest's original posting and the postings of all of the individuals who responded to the subject posting and/or commented about it. Additionally, agents seek information about any other posting coming from the IP address used by Earnest to post the subject posting.

This seems like a lot of people to be investigating for just being in the wrongest place on the internet at the wrong time. The justification for this is speculation that others who viewed the post will either become shooters themselves or somehow conspired with the shooter to carry out this horrible crime in which Earnest was the only shooter.

As discussed above, Earnest made a posting in which he thought to draw attention to his forthcoming attack on the Chabad of Poway, share his views through his open letter, and offer people the opportunity to observe the attack itself. Several people responded, both individuals who were taken aback about the posting as well as people who were sympathizers. As a result, some of the individuals may be potential witnesses, co-conspirators and/ or individuals who are inspired by the subject posting. Based on agents' training and experience, following attacks such as those conducted by Earnest, other individuals are inspired by the attacks and may act of their own accord.

By its own admission, the FBI is seeking information about posters "taken aback" by Earnest's post -- users unlikely to be "inspired" by the shooting or his co-conspirators. Apparently, the FBI doesn't trust 8chan to make that assessment, so it's asking for everything so it can sort through it and draw its own conclusions, engage in its own "non-custodial" interviews, subpoena a number of other service providers for more info, etc.

In fact, the FBI would prefer Ch.net -- the host for 8chan -- just hand over everything demanded by the warrant without getting involved at all.

In order to accomplish the objective of the search warrant with a minimum of interference with the business activities of Ch.net, to protect the rights of the subject of the investigation and to effectively pursue this investigation, authority is sought to allow Ch.net to make a digital copy of the entire contents of the accounts subject to seizure.

However you may feel about 8chan and its denizens (and I hope those feelings are mostly negative), this is not a justifiable demand for information. The FBI wants everything on everyone in that thread, even as it states some of the users it's targeting were appalled by what they were seeing. This makes everyone in the thread a suspect and treats anonymous users of this site as inherently suspicious, no matter what their posts actually say.

Filed Under: brenton tarrant, christchurch, fbi, fishing expedition, john earnest, mass shootings, poway, warrant
Companies: 8chan, ch.net

New Florida Bill Seeks To Bury Recordings Of Mass Shootings

from the screwing-the-public-to-save-the-government dept

Florida legislators are thinking about handing some opacity back to Florida law enforcement agencies in the wake of the Parkland school shooting. The tragedy of the event was compounded by on-site law enforcement's response: that is, there wasn't any. Faced with increased scrutiny over a handful of mass shootings in the state, at least one legislator's response has been to bury the bad news under a new public records exemption. [h/t War on Privacy]

In less than three years, Florida has seen the second-deadliest mass shooting – Pulse nightclub – and the second-deadliest school shooting – Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. One gunman killed five at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Another killed five at a Sebring bank.

Yet Senate Bill 186 would create an exemption to the state’s public records law for all photographs and audio and video recordings that relate to the “killing of a victim of mass violence.” The bill defines mass violence as the killing of at least three people, not including the perpetrator. Violation would be a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.

Senator Tom Lee's bill is a gift to the government at large, even if law enforcement agencies and schools will be the most direct recipients of this largesse. If this "privacy protection" had been in place a few years ago, the public would have had no idea how badly the Broward County Sheriff's Department botched its response to the school shooting. Not only would that have kept the BCSD relatively free of criticism, it would have shielded its oversight -- state legislators -- from being asked what they were doing to prevent school shootings and/or ensure better response from those expected to serve and protect the public.

Supporters of bills like these claim it's all about protecting the privacy of crime victims and their families. But as the excellent Sun Sentinel op-ed points out, most requests to block release of recordings originates with governments and businesses rather than the victims and their loved ones. These requests have prevented the public from accessing key details in everything from Dale Earnhardt's Daytona crash to an inmate's death at the hands of jailers.

The law already blocks the release of recordings containing the death of a law enforcement officer. This addition could be read to cover any deadly incident in which more than one person is killed. Any whistleblower releasing recordings to show the public what really happened -- rather than the official narrative -- will now face felony criminal charges for doing the right thing. This isn't going to restore confidence in government agencies and their response to deadly incidents. All it will do is drive a wedge between them and the people they serve.

Filed Under: florida, mass shootings, recordings

Former Bush Press Secretary Says The Answer To Mass Shootings Is... More Domestic Surveillance

from the because-of-course dept

The tragic shootings in San Bernadino earlier this week have created a political field day for the usual idiotic partisan arguments -- which tend to have little to nothing to do with whatever actually happened. You have people on one side using it to call for gun control and folks on the other side using it to spark fears of "domestic terrorism." And, of course, it didn't take long for someone to pop up with using it as an excuse to call for greater surveillance. That was the argument that former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer took on MSNBC yesterday when asked what should be done in response. MSNBC Kate Snow asked if this could lead to bipartisan support for gun control (ha ha!) and Fleischer turned it around to say the answer is more surveillance.

Well, I hope there will be bipartisan support to really increase our surveillance. If you want to fight terrorism -- what happened in Paris and what apparently now happened in California -- the answer is not gun control or pipe bomb control (they also had 12 pipe bombs). The answer is more surveillance, tougher surveillance at home, so we can detect these attacks before they go off and protect people. We've done it many times in the past. We have the techniques. We need to make sure we're using those techniques.

Almost all of that is complete bullshit of course -- not that Snow calls him on it, because that's not what cable news hosts do. Fleischer repeats the same line a few more times after this, saying over and over again "surveillance stops terrorism." Except, there's been little proof of that. Over and over again, it's been shown that the domestic surveillance programs have failed to stop a single domestic terrorist act.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time until someone tries to connect the fact that the NSA's bulk collection of domestic phone records "ended" (and the quotes are there on purpose) this past weekend with the shooting this week. But, of course, that leaves out that the system was in place leading up to this and no one apparently knew a damn thing.

Once again, it's fairly astounding how these surveillance state cheerleaders will use any situation -- even their own failures -- to argue it means we just need greater surveillance.

But, really, for all of Fleischer's bullshit talk about how this is a moment for America to "come together," doesn't that include respecting things like the 4th Amendment?

Filed Under: ari fleischer, grandstanding, gun violence, kate snow, mass shootings, surveillance, terrorism