Citizen Is Paying Users To Run The App And Their Mouths At Crime Scenes And Medical Emergencies

from the patron-of-the-arts-I-guess dept

The app formerly known as "Vigilante" is surreptitiously redefining the term "citizen journalist." The new definition will probably be capitalized and trademarked. The crime reporting app that once entertained plans to become part of the law enforcement community by partnering with private security companies is paying users to head out to crime scenes and annoy civil servants.

Want to make $200 a day in New York City? Rush to the scene of a murder, a three-alarm fire or a traffic accident — then pull out your phone and start filming.

That’s the pitch from Citizen, a controversial neighborhood watch app that’s quietly hiring New Yorkers to livestream crime scenes and other public emergencies in an apparent effort to encourage more ordinary citizens to do the same, The Post has learned.

This seems like a bad idea. It's one thing for people to happen upon one of these incidents and start livestreaming. It's quite another to pay people to put themselves at risk in service of an app hoping to increase its user base and repair its reputation. And it's yet another thing to be dishonest about what's happening, as both Citizen and its paid contributors are doing.

In June, the Daily Dot uncovered a Los Angeles Citizen app user who appeared to be a paid content contributor. The user known as Landon1129 just happened to be at the scene of eight separate incidents spanning 30 miles in a single day -- a day that also featured "Landon1129" being interviewed twice by Citizen's own live show. Eight incidents covered by the same user -- a user who frequently reminded viewers that he was "live on the Citizen app." What was probably supposed to look organic looked fake as fuck.

Now, there's some confirmation, albeit obliquely. Citizen claims it has always used "street teams" to expand coverage, generate content, and, I assume, increase brand awareness. But it has never made this explicit and its ads seeking contributors make no mention of the app.

Citizen says that it doesn’t hide its use of paid field team members.

But:

The company also doesn’t post the jobs on its own Web site. And Citizen’s name was not included in a since-deleted job posting Thursday on career board JournalismJobs.com seeking “field team members” to work for an unnamed “tech company with user-generated content.”

It's probably not a good idea for a company with both a literal and figurative background in vigilantism to pay people to head to crime scenes and other emergencies. There are plenty of people who get paid to do that already, and they're better at doing their jobs and not getting in the way of others trying to do theirs than the average respondent to a vague Craigslist ad. Stringers may be interlopers seeking sellable content but at least they have some idea of what to expect when they arrive on the scene and (usually) have cultivated good relationships with the public servants they'll be working with (and around).

To be sure, journalistic efforts shouldn't be restricted by gatekeepers who only believe certain people can perform journalism. But Citizen's history, along with its blatant desire to capitalize on people's fears, makes it a particularly questionable patron of the journalistic arts. If Citizen really wanted to put its resources behind expanding journalistic coverage of newsworthy incidents, it would do it without the use of a third-party contractor bound by an NDA that forbids telling journalists, who hired the contractor to place ads looking for journalists, who may ultimately not be pleased they're now working for an app with a terrible reputation.

Filed Under: citizen journalist, crime scenes, private security, vigilante
Companies: citizen

Citizen Drops Its Plan To Become Private Cops, Claims It Was Never Interested In Forming A Private Security Force

from the that's-not-a-squad-car,-it's-just-a-promo-for-a-nonexistent-service dept

Crime reporting app Citizen has had a pretty wild run in the past couple of weeks. Debuting rather inauspiciously as Vigilante back in 2016, the app was removed from Apple's store less than 48 hours after its first appearance. It relaunched the following spring as Citizen and remained just another competitor in the virtual Neighborhood Watch scene.

That all changed late last month. Citizen users and employees -- urged on by Citizen CEO Andrew Frame -- started a manhunt (with a $30,000 bounty) for an innocent homeless person Frame had decided was an arsonist. As the public was still digesting this news, Los Angeles residents spotted a Citizen-branded patrol car making the rounds. Shortly thereafter, current and former employees confirmed the company was interested in getting into the private security business with an eye on becoming more like cops and less like an informational app.

As all of this was going on, some hackers scraped Citizen's database of recordings and reports, providing a single source for nearly everything uploaded to Citizen, including recordings moderators had hidden from public view. It was also revealed Citizen's foray into public health had resulted in a leak of users' COVID status as well as other personal information.

Following a tumultuous half-week, Citizen announced it was abandoning its plan to move into the law enforcement business, something it had always supposedly planned to do and certainly completely unrelated to the steady stream of bad press.

The company began offering the service in Los Angeles last month as a pilot program. During the trial, the service, which included a company-branded squad car, was only available to company employees. For the service, Citizen partnered with a private firm called Los Angeles Professional Security, which describes itself as a provider of "subscription law enforcement."

But on Tuesday, Citizen ended the program, stating it has no plans to launch a similar service elsewhere.

"This was a small 30-day test that is now complete," a Citizen spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch. "We have no plans to launch our own private security force and no ongoing relationship with LAPS."

But Citizen did have plans, at least according to sources Motherboard spoke to.

"The broad master plan was to create a privatized secondary emergency response network," one former Citizen employee told Motherboard. Motherboard granted multiple sources anonymity to protect them from retaliation from the company.

"It's been something discussed for a while but I personally never expected it to make it this far," another Citizen source told Motherboard.

So, this reversal seems to be a reversal, not simply the end of a test run. And if the company has no plans to launch a private security force, why waste the time and money equipping a squad car and sending personnel out to "patrol" Los Angeles? This sounds more like a plan being abandoned because the Overton Window didn't open quite as far as expected.

Filed Under: crime reporting, private cops, private security, vigilante
Companies: citizen

Citizen Continues Its Push To Become Cops-For-Hire By Leaking Sensitive Data... Twice

from the another-confidence-boosting-PR-debacle dept

The bad news keeps coming for Citizen, the app that really wants to be a cop.

Not only is its desire to become some sort of private party/law enforcement hybrid generating it some bad press, but its prior incarnation as "Vigilante" suggests it has always wanted to be in the business of taking down bad guys, with or without the requisite lawfulness.

The former "Vigilante" proved true to its past moniker following a wildfire in California, promising a $30,000 bounty to any user or employee who took down the bad guy identified by Citizen. Well… misidentified. After calls from CEO Andrew Frame to "GET THE FUCKER," Citizen had to offer up a bunch of apologies for turning an innocent person into a prime suspect.

Coming on the heels of all of this bad news is even more bad news. First off, as Joseph Cox reported late last week, Citizen leaked a bunch of users' COVID-related data following its expansion into contact tracing late year under the name "SafePass."

Crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen, which also launched a COVID-19 contact-tracing feature and broader citywide COVID surveillance program, exposed users' COVID-related data to the public internet, allowing anyone to view specific users' recent self-reported symptoms, test results, and whether their device had recorded any close contacts with other people using the feature. The information is directly linked to a person's username, which often is the person's full name.

Hacker collective Anonymous was able to access the data and pointed Motherboard in its direction. The exposure of this data runs contrary to Citizen's security claims.

The feature's privacy policy says that "We have specific systems to control data access, and all access is logged and regularly audited." The SafePass website says "Data is private and encrypted" and that contact tracing data is deleted after 30 days (some of the data in the exposed cache dates from earlier than 30 days ago).

Citizen fixed its leak shortly thereafter, claiming the exposure only affected a limited number of users. But that set the stage for a larger breach and another successful hacking of Citizen's databases.

A hacktivist has scraped a wealth of data from the crime and neighborhood watch app Citizen and posted it on a dark web site, Motherboard has learned. The data includes a huge amount of data related to 1.7 million "incidents"—events that Citizen informs users about concerning crime or perceived crime in their area—such as the GPS coordinates of where the incident took place, its update history, a clip of the police radio that the incident relates to, and associated images.

Posted with the accompanying slogan of "Fuck snitches, fuck Citizen, fuck Andrew Frame and remember, kids: Cops are not your friends.", the data appears to contain plenty of what's already publicly-available through Citizen's online portal. The difference here is it's all in one place, which makes it much easier for researchers and journalists to parse the data for patterns and analyze user behavior.

And there's also some stuff Citizen doesn't make available to users and site visitors in this data dump.

The list appears to include videos that have been marked for removal from public consumption on the app by Citizen's content moderation team, with some including the tag "Moderator Blocked Stream," according to the hacker and Motherboard's viewing of the files. These videos are still accessible if visited with the direct link included in the scrape.

Not exactly a confidence booster, especially when the app's founder wants Citizen to become a crucial part of the law enforcement experience, if not actually law enforcement itself. But a combination of PR blunders and data breaches sounds about par for the (government) course, so maybe this is just Citizen inadvertently laying the groundwork for its move into the public sector.

Filed Under: data breach, leaks, private law enforcement, snitching, vigilante
Companies: citizen

Private Security Company Thinks It Should Be Able To Take People To Jail Just Like Real Cops

from the Uber-but-for-vigilantes dept

A snitch app called Citizen is angling for the position of Local Law Enforcement®. Going a step further than hotbeds of bigotry like Ring's Neighbors or Facebook-but-for-racism Nextdoor, Citizen is actually trying to create a private law enforcement agency that provides "security" and other services for app users.

A marauding cop-like patrol vehicle emblazoned with the Citizen logo (and some branding for another private security company) was spotted roaming Los Angeles last week. The desire to create a private cutout in public law enforcement space was confirmed by current and former Citizen employees, as well as documents shared with Motherboard and Joseph Cox.

It's not just theoretical. It appears some employees of this private company really want to convert Citizen into a law enforcement agency. (Supporters of this move may also contain members of the Los Angeles Police Department, which called Citizen's move towards patrolling the streets a "game changer.") Then there's this new twist, which indicates Citizen's partner in patrolling -- Los Angeles Professional Security Services -- really would prefer to be an actual law enforcement agency, rather than the private security company it actually is.

In a self-described “documentary” on the Los Angeles Professional Security YouTube, the company's CEO and founder James Caspari explains after detaining two tresspassers that the company wants the power to make arrests and take people to jail.

“We’re going to waste police resources because we can’t drive them to the police station,” he said. “The security guard manual says we have to wait and a peace officer has to take them. That’s just a waste. If we’ve already cleared it... why can’t we just take ‘em to jail?”

Flow my tears, the fake policeman said. Why? WHY?? Because you're a goddamn rent-a-cop. You're not the real thing. You don't get to start depriving people of freedom just because you're dressed in black cop-adjacent garb and employed by a private security firm. No one has granted you the right to arrest people because that's limited to publicly-funded government agencies that are (in theory) more accountable to taxpayers than a private company that only answers to paying customers.

"Private security has zero authority on a public space," he later laments.

Go be a cop then. If it's killing you that you can't violate rights as a private citizen, go get an actual cop job where you can violate rights on the taxpayers' dime. Sure, this seems a bit backwards but that's how it works. The government gets to do certain things with the implicit consent of the governed. Los Angeles citizens have not agreed to allowing private citizens to start throwing other private citizens into faux cop cars in order to take them to jail. What standard is LAPS applying to itself when it affects an arrest? There are rules in place, backed by the Constitution. And, while these rules may be violated with alarming frequency by government agencies, they're still rules. Private companies don't have to adhere to the Constitution. And that's why they shouldn't be getting into the business of violating the rights of others. (And, before certain commenters start trying to turn this statement into something about social media, no one's rights are violated when a company refuses to provide you a platform for expressing yourself.)

Going from bad to arguably worse, the CEO of a private security firm actually believes it's capable of responding to mental health calls with its staff of people who apparently couldn't cut it as real cops or first responders.

Caspari explains in the video that LAPS believes it can remove trespassers and respond to mental health calls. “We are in a position to respond in force to effectively anywhere in the city to remove any negative element that a client of ours is threatened with,” Caspari said in the video.

And even in its own video, which it had the chance to edit before publishing it, the private security company's employees are given the "what even the fuck" treatment by the partners Citizen and LAPS really want to have on board: the Los Angeles Police Department.

After searching an abandoned building, LAPS employees cuff the two people they find there and wait for the LAPD to arrive. Caspari explains this is all cool and legal: a "private person arrest" supported by California law. After lamenting the "waste of time" that is waiting for actual law enforcement to show up, he's greeted with LAPD officers wondering why the private security firm is patrolling abandoned buildings that appear to be outside of its contractual obligations with its customers.

At one point, the LAPD does turn up. A seemingly surprised LAPD officer asks Caspari, "Is that your normal protocol, you guys just go search the building?"

"On your own, or? Just curious, I've never dealt with you guys before," the LAPD officer continues.

It's a legitimate question. If the private security company wasn't asked by the owners (and "abandoned" suggests no real owner exits) to patrol the building, why the hell are they entering it? At that point, the security personnel are just as guilty of trespassing as the people they detained.

Since there are no good answers to that question, the CEO moves on to complain the LAPD doesn't have enough resources to harass the homeless, leaving people "pushing two shopping carts down the road" free to annoy Caspari.

If nothing else, Caspari has the right mindset for law enforcement. The people who should be rounded up first are hanging out in abandoned buildings or irritating the locals with their homelessness. Nothing in the video suggests the security firm is stumbling across serious or violent criminal activity that's not being handled by the LAPD. Instead, the CEO complains his company has its hands tied, unable to remove homeless people, trespassers, and the mentally ill from the street without having to bring the LAPD into it.

If the LAPD has to use its resources to handle more serious crime and leave this sort of "crime" unaddressed, good. But that's not an invitation for private companies to fill this perceived void. Providing security for paying clients is fine, but wanting to be a cop just so you can round up a bunch of non-threatening, non-violent people makes you worse than the actual cops. This is just a bunch of people cosplaying and wishing their cardboard props were real. And it's going to do serious damage to Los Angeles residents if companies like this continue to believe they should have the right to violate the rights of others.

Filed Under: arrests, law enforcement, private cops, snitching, vigilante
Companies: citizen, la professional security services

We Don't Have A 'Wild West' Internet Now, But We Will If SOPA Or Similar Is Passed

from the exactly-wrong dept

Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, has the sad distinction of being in the vanguard when it comes to really bad ideas concerning the Internet. On his initiative, France became the testing-ground for the three-strikes approach of throwing people off the Internet upon multiple accusations of copyright infringement, without the need for proof or a court order, known there as HADOPI. He also helped put into circulation a view that is much in vogue at the moment:

"Internet is a new frontier, a territory to conquer. But it cannot be a Wild West, a lawless place"

That's what he said in 2010, during a speech he gave in the Vatican. Since then, the "Wild West" Internet has become the standard justification for bringing in harsh new laws like SOPA and PIPA. After all, the argument goes, just as the Wild West had to be tamed in order to become civilized and productive, so must the Internet.

Of course, this overlooks the fact that the Internet is already subject to a whole host of laws in every country. Indeed, often it is subject to multiple jurisdictions because of its global reach and complicated legal position. But there's an even deeper sense in which the idea that the Internet is a Wild West that needs far-reaching laws like SOPA and PIPA imposed upon it is exactly wrong.

To see why, consider one of the key ideas of SOPA in the original version:

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the companion bill to the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act, would further privatize adjudication and punishment. Title I of that law (dubbed the E-PARASITE Act) creates a “market-based system to protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” It achieves this by empowering copyright owners who have a “good faith belief” that they are being “harmed by the activities” of a website to send a notice to the site’s payment providers (e.g. PayPal) and Internet advertisers to end business with the allegedly offending site.

The payment providers and advertisers that receive the notice must stop transactions with the site. No judicial review is required for the notice to be sent and for the payments and advertising curtailed -- only the good faith representation of the copyright owner. Damages are also not available to the site owner unless a claimant “knowingly materially” misrepresented that the law covers the targeted site, a difficult legal test to meet. The owner of the site can issue a counter-notice to restore payment processing and advertising but services need not comply with the counter-notice.

That was removed in December, but another section granted immunity to service providers for taking voluntary action to stop infringement. As we noted back then, in many ways that was even worse. Not only would sites on the receiving end of a notice claiming infringement have a huge incentive to take that voluntary action, rather than risk losing immunity, but there were also no counternotice rules, or anything requiring any process for those cut off to be able to have any redress whatsoever.

What both of these approaches and France's HADOPI have in common is that they all seek to institute a system that is extra-judicial, with no requirement for proof of any kind, and which is hard or impossible to appeal against. It is the very definition of arbitrary vigilantism, where private actors get to be judge, jury and executioner. In other words, far from taming a "lawless place" online, SOPA and its ilk would create one where there is none currently.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: pipa, sopa, vigilante, wild west

Man Wins Lawsuit Against Online Vigilante Mob In China

from the the-mob-can-go-too-far... dept

The fervor with which online mobs can take on an issue is well-known, but in China "mob justice" has been taken to a new level, and over the past few years it's become a pretty big issue. While grassroots campaigns to right a wrong can be effective, it's not uncommon for a mob to falsely target someone or to simply go too far. In one such case, a Beijing court has now ruled that the recipient of such mob justice from an online vigilante crowd was wronged and is owed damages from the guy who kicked off the mob response. The case involved a guy who's wife committed suicide. A schoolmate of the wife started posting excerpts from the woman's diary, where it was noted that the guy had had an affair months before the suicide. The mob then basically went nuts -- getting the guy fired from his job and preventing him from getting another job, vandalizing his parents house and posting his photo and contact info all over the internet. The guy who posted the diary is responsible for paying damages, though it's unclear from the article how involved he was in inciting the rest of the mob.

Filed Under: china, mob justice, vigilante