Dees Illustration

Joe Wright
Activist Post

Stun guns are coming under attack as two new studies reveal that supposedly non-lethal Tasers do in fact put citizens at a greater risk than without their use.

Electrophysiologist, Dr. Douglas Zipes, published an article for the The American Heart Association which covered 8 cases where a 50,000 volt Electronic Control Device (TASER X26) was used and victims lost consciousness.  His conclusion is that this non-lethal weapon certainly can induce cardiac arrest.

The idea that literally short-circuiting someone’s nervous system could not potentially lead to death is surprising, but now peer-reviewed scientific evidence, as well as lengthy investigation into real-world situations seems to support the many wrongful death claims that have been filed against police departments.

It is a fact that everyone from the elderly, to the deaf, to 10-year-old girls, have been tortured or killed by this Orwellian non-lethal weapon.

An extensive study has now been completed over a four-year period in 7 cities that highlights other troubling conclusions. A Michigan State University study carried out with federal funding from the National Institute of Justice is the most thorough and wide ranging to date.

Researchers set out to examine the effects of having 260,000 Electronic Control Devices being used by 11,500 law enforcement agencies throughout the United States.  By taking a sample from large and mid-size cities such as Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; and Knoxville, Tennessee, some very disconcerting trends were observed.

The overall research was divided into two studies; the first to examine the rate of injury to those apprehended vs. apprehension by standard police methods; and the second study examined the rate of injury to the officer apprehending the suspect.

The conclusions were clear:

the researchers found citizens were injured 41 percent of the time when officers used a stun gun only during apprehension. By contrast, citizens were injured only 29 percent of the time when no stun gun was used (when stun guns were used with another restraint method, such as pepper spray or wresting the suspect to the ground, citizens were injured 47 percent of the time). The study looked at 13,913 use-of-force cases in seven cities. The researchers took into account a host of factors, including the amount of citizen resistance, influence of alcohol or drugs, and officer experience. Injuries ranged from cuts to broken bones. 

In the second study, online now in Police Quarterly, the researchers found officers were injured 5 percent of the time when using a stun gun only. By contrast, officers were injured nearly 10 percent of the time when no stun gun was used. The study looked at 12,455 use-of-force cases in six cities. (Source)

Interesting to note is that a combination of non-lethal weapons is actually more dangerous.

Naturally, law enforcement will cite the second study of officer safety as paramount, but let us not forget that it is the duty of police to serve and protect citizens, not the other way around.

I don’t say this out of lack of compassion for law enforcement put into stressful and dangerous situations, but they chose to serve the public and encounter danger with a degree of integrity and nobility.

The massive increase in the use of non-lethal weapons such as pepper spray, sound cannons, and even directed energy weapons has created a situation where those presumed to be innocent until found guilty may have their right to judge and jury replaced by that of only the executioner.

Now that the Pentagon has decided to offer free military hardware to every police force in the United States under the 1033 program, we should be well aware that when we come into contact with police, there is a serious risk of abuse.

Now that these studies have been made available to law enforcement, they are faced with a stark reality:  if they are knowingly engaging in any activity that has been proven to increase the danger to citizens under their protection, they are in grave dereliction of duty.  As summarized by criminologist and lead researcher for the MSU study, William Terrill:

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‘The findings are quite complex, in that citizen injuries increased but officer injuries decreased,’ Terrill said. ‘Police agencies have to balance the findings. They have to consider whether this is a trade-off they can accept.’

The larger question for citizens in a supposedly free nation is whether or not this is a trade-off WE can accept.

Additional source for this article:
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120501/NEWS01/120501005

Read other articles by Joe Wright here.
You can support this information by voting on Reddit here:
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EFF Urges Court to Respect Judge’s Ruling on Reasonable Bounds

AFP File Image

EFF

San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and ACLU Vermont, urged the Vermont Supreme Court today to reject prosecutors’ demands to override a judge’s instructions and allow a limitless warrant for a computer search.

During the investigation into an alleged identity theft last year, a detective from the Burlington Police Department applied for a wide-ranging search warrant, which included any computers, compact discs, cell phones, or mobile devices in the home, despite noting it was possible that some of the equipment might be owned by people not suspected in a crime. A judge granted the warrant application after putting reasonable bounds on the search, as well as including basic privacy protections for information and data not connected to the identity theft under investigation.

In response, prosecutors filed a petition for extraordinary relief with the Vermont Supreme Court, asking that the original overbroad warrant be approved. In an amicus brief filed today, EFF argues that the judge was following the law when he limited the search warrant in order to protect basic privacy rights.

“Our personal computers contain a unprecedented amount of highly sensitive personal information — things like medical histories, financial status, political affiliation, and more,” said EFF Staff Attorney Hanni Fakhoury. “If the state of Vermont has its way, all of this data can be collected and retained without any privacy protections. It’s completely reasonable for a judge to act to protect privacy in this case.”

The amicus brief urges the Vermont Supreme Court to reject the state’s petition for extraordinary relief and uphold the limitations placed on the search warrant.

“Judges are charged with upholding constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure. That’s what the judge in this case did,” said Fakhoury. “There’s no reason to block basic privacy protections that don’t interfere with law enforcement investigations.”

For the full amicus brief:
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/vermontsearch/vermontamicus61711.pdf

Katitza Rodriguez
EFF

This Saturday, September 17th, concerned European citizens with the Freedom not Fear movement have decided to take their protest to the capital of the European Union, Brussels. Their slogan: Stop the surveillance mania! For five years in a row, Freedom Not Fear has taken to the streets in several cities in Europe and beyond to demand an end to suspicion-less surveillance measures. These include mandatory data retention laws and other reactionary surveillance measures that have been justified by the rhetoric of fear. Their protest efforts have been among the most meaningful demonstrations for this cause. Previously, Freedom not Fear protests were spread out across various European towns. For the first time, protesters from throughout Europe are descending on Brussels to directly confront the European Union’s policies at its headquarters.

Last week, protests were also organized in Dresden, Vienna, and Berlin. With mottoes such as: “Privacy is not a crime”, “mass surveillance threatens an open society”, and “mountains of data compromise our security”, thousands of people took the streets of Berlin to protest the surveillance of air travelers and to stop any attempt to re-introduce a German mandatory data retention law. A coalition of German activists is also urging fellow citizens to sign a petition against data retention. Its ultimate goal is to persuade the German government to fight for the repeal of the overall European Data Retention Directive.

As the world reflects on the decade following September 11th, Freedom not Fear protesters are attempting to reverse the unfortunate post-911 legacy of online anti-privacy measures. In the wake of 9/11, international government responses had significant impact on Internet privacy. The “war on terror” rhetoric enabled one of the most effective international policy laundering campaigns to quickly enact unpopular and often covert policies with minimal fanfare. Within 45 days of 9/11, then-president George W. Bush already sent his much-wanted surveillance wish list to the European Union. In a letter to the European Commission President in Brussels, the United States sets out a blueprint for privacy erosions the EU could undertake that have sacrificed privacy for little gain in the struggle against terrorism.

The letter called on the EU to eliminate existing privacy protections so that online companies would be free to retain their customers’ online activities: “[r]evise draft privacy directives that call for mandatory destruction to permit the retention of critical data for a reasonable period.” What did this proposed revision mean? One of the key European privacy protections is the data minimization principle. This provision compels companies to limit their collection of personal information to a specific purpose [e.g., billing], and keep their data for only a specific period of time before destroying or irreversibly anonymizing it. This helps prevent online companies from developing sweeping databases on their customers’ activities, while the U.S. Government wished to encourage retention of everyone’s data, whether innocent or not, so investigators will have access to it. The impact of 9/11 on deliberations at the EU was evident at the time:

“We think this new version of the directive sends a powerful signal and it responds to the events of Sept. 11,” said a European Union diplomat involved in the Wednesday meeting who insisted on anonymity. “Since that date there has been a reappraisal of the issue of data retention.”

These initial U.S. efforts to facilitate a permissive data retention regime evolved to something worse: a mandatory Data Retention Directive adopted by the EU in 2006. Mandatory data retention is an extreme measure that the U.S. government has perennially tried–and failed–to pass through Congress. It was reintroduced by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee once again this year, in a bill that will require any commercial providers of Internet access to keep, for at least 12 months, a record of which users were assigned to particular network addresses at particular times.

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As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we should reflect on the way in which a climate of fear has been exploited to advance Bush’s controversial proposals into international policies and practices. The fear of ‘imminent threats’ has made rational assessments aimed at achieving actual security and privacy difficult. Ten years later, the rhetoric of threats continues to pervade the dialogue.

As James Bamford said, in his recent op-ed, Post-9/11, NSA ‘enemies’ include us “somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.” Bamford is right, but the problem isn’t limited to the U.S. In many countries around the world ordinary people morphed into potential criminals and governments took free reign to invade their privacy. If we allow the tragic attacks of 9/11 to create a cloud of fear, confusion and paranoia, we give in to the terrorists, and threaten the very freedoms that make open societies great. Freedom not Fear’s bold march into Brussels and across the European Union brings hope that the political climate is shifting and that we can re-establish our privacy rights and the principle of data minimization in the face of a decade’s worth of massive civil liberties breaches.

Visit and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation to preserve and protect Internet freedom.

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Jennifer Lynch
EFF

EFF just received documents that reveal additional post-9/11 Defense Department misconduct, including attempts by the Army to investigate participants at a conference on Islamic law at the University of Texas Law School and Army-issued National Security Letters (NSLs) to telecommunications providers in violation of the law.

EFF received these documents in response to a 2009 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that we filed against the DoD and a half-dozen other federal agencies involved in intelligence gathering. In the lawsuit, we demanded the immediate release of reports about potential and actual agency misconduct, and the agencies have since released thousands of heavily-redacted pages, some of which we have discussed here, here, here and here.

Now, thanks to a recent Supreme Court case, we have more. In March 2011, after the DoD released most of its records to EFF, the Supreme Court decided an important FOIA case called Milner v. Department of Navy, 131 S.Ct. 1259 (2011). The case involved one of the exemptions to FOIA, 5 U.S.C. §552(b)(2), that allows agencies to withhold information “related solely to the internal personnel rules and practices of an agency.” A 1981 case from the DC Circuit Court of Appeals interpreted this exemption broadly to cover “predominantly internal” materials whose disclosure would “significantly ris[k] circumvention of agency regulation or statutes,” and since that time agencies, including and especially the DoD, have relied on this broad interpretation of (b)(2) to withhold a ton of important information. In March, the Supreme Court overturned this reading of the exemption and held (b)(2) is limited solely to records relating to employee relations and human resources issues.

The Milner decision is important for our case because the DoD and other agencies withheld a significant amount of information under the broader interpretation of (b)(2). As our case is still in litigation, the agencies are now required to release that previously-withheld information to us (or determine it can be exempted under another section of the FOIA).

The small amount of re-released documents we’ve received so far fills in some of the holes in the picture of the federal government’s post-9/11 intelligence violations, just as it raises more questions. Here’s what the records reveal, with the graphics comparing the first government disclosures with the newly released records.

In 2004, an Army Special Agent issued three NSLs (pdf) for customer phone records directly to a communications company. The NSL statute, 18 U.S.C. §2709, only authorizes the FBI to issue NSLs, and specifically prohibits NSL recipients from telling anyone, including the customer, about the request. As the Army does not have the authority to issue NSLs, this Special Agent clearly violated the law. The Army did not discover the illegal requests until after the Agent received customer records from the communications company. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the story is that, according to the report;

neither the Army unit nor the FBI Field Offices [with which the Army agent was working] were aware that these requests had to be made by the FBI.

If we can’t rely on our government employees to know and understand the law, how can we rely on them to apply it appropriately?

A 2004 Army intelligence violation report (pdf) noted that two Army lawyers attended a conference on Islamic law at the University of Texas Law School without disclosing their military affiliation. Some conference participants discovered who they were and challenged why they were there. The Army lawyers, believing that the conference participants had asked “inappropriate questions,” decided to investigate them. Without any investigative authority or jurisdiction (the military’s authority to investigate civilians in the United States is very limited), two Army Special Agents went to UT to ask about three conference attendees. The Army’s internal investigation into the matter concluded that the Special Agents had;

improperly conducted investigative activity directed against three civilians within the U.S., who were outside Army counterintelligence investigative jurisdiction and failed to refer the matter to the FBI as they were required to do.

This report confirms once again that the US government has been improperly targeting Muslims in the United States. As we reported previously, records we received from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) noted that in 2008, DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis improperly collected intelligence (pdf) about a non-violent Muslim conference in Georgia, including details about conference speakers who were Americans, and in 2007, DHS I&A improperly investigated (pdf) the U.S.-based religious organization the Nation of Islam. And just last week, Wired reported that the FBI “is teaching its counterterrorism agents that “main stream” [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers.”

Finally, several pages (pdf) refer to joint missions between the FBI and DoD, including a Joint FBI/National Criminal Investigations Service (NCIS) counterespionage operation in which an NCIS “asset” apparently went undercover into a US organization. This violates a DoD regulation that severely limits the ability of DoD employees to participate in US organizations’ activities without disclosing “their affiliation with the intelligence component . . . to an appropriate official of the organization.” Based on earlier releases, we already knew that several components of the DoD conducted surveillance on US organizations, including Planned Parenthood and anti-war groups, and we already knew the DoD worked together with the FBI on investigations, so it’s unclear why the DoD felt it was so important originally to redact this information.

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The release of these documents shows just how broadly the DoD was applying the (b)(2) FOIA exemption to prevent the public from knowing what went on in post-9/11 America. None of the information above should have been redacted under even the broadest, pre-Milner interpretation of (b)(2), and we can only assume these redactions are representative of how the DoD has applied other FOIA exemptions to its records as well. The DoD and other agencies should proactively release the rest of the records withheld under (b)(2). If they don’t, we will address this along with other exemption issues as we move forward with litigation in our FOIA case this fall.

Attachment
DoD_ASTDIO_Summaries-b2_high-re-look.pdf 626.63 KB

Visit and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation to promote Internet freedom and privacy.

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Susanne Posel, Contributor
Activist Post

The UK Home Office (UKHO) has British officials surveying its citizens as part of the government’s annual legislative program.

This is an extensive expansion of the current laws to allow the MI5 data securitization.

UKHO claims they are not snooping through private emails and messages, but rather deciphering where the communications are originating from, who sent it, its length and format.

The 4 billion hours of phone calls, 1 million emails and 130 billion text messages that are expected to be prime source information.

The proposed bill, if passed would place massive amounts of personal data into the hands of the British government. How they use that data is purely at their discretion.

David Davis, senior Tory backbencher said: “It is not focusing on terrorists or on criminals. It is absolutely everybody. Our freedom and privacy has been protected by using the courts by saying ‘If you want to intercept, if you want to look at something, fine, if it is a terrorist or a criminal go and ask a magistrate and you’ll get your approval'”.

An average Briton’s private and daily habits would be open-source to potentially be used against them.

Internet companies will have to install hardware enabling GCHQ – the Government’s electronic “listening” agency – to examine “on demand” any phone call made, text message and email sent, and website accessed in “real time”.

“We’re really entering a whole new phase of analysis based on the data that we can collect,” said Gerald Kane, an information systems expert at Boston College. “There is quite a lot you can learn.”

Cell phone and service providers would be obliged to hand over customer data to the government.

Assessing location through communications gives the UK government access to information about their citizens that was previously unavailable.

Smartphones and social media can also be used to engage otherwise unknown material about whomever the authorities want to survey. All of this data is conveniently stored on most modern cell phones.

Ken Altshuler, of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers admitted that: “One name, one phone number that’s not on our client’s radar and our curiosity is piqued.” This data mining software allows previously unattainable evidence to be entered into court proceedings.

By analyzing your text messages, the government will know the sleeping habits of British citizens. “You can figure somebody’s sleep patterns, their weekly pattern of work,” said Tony Jebara, a Columbia University machine learning expert.

The information Jebara supposes has been an interest of credit card corporations for years.

By seeing when a call or text message is responded to can create a picture of how a person views others; including authority figures. Jebara, with Columbia colleges, created the term “automated social hierarchy detection” whereby they can determine who a person views other by how quickly they answer phone calls, text messages and emails.

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Intelligence agencies could also use this information by creating flowcharts to understand their subject. Jebara remarked: “If you piece together the chain of influence, then you can find the central authority. You can figure that out without looking at the content.”

By using cell phone programs to determine the density of communication with specific persons, authorities can identify who are friends, family, acquaintances and classify them as such for further analysis.

The big brother style surveillance being prosed in Briton will expand authorities reach from social networking sites where users “volunteer information” to actual spying techniques where a constant flow of information is readily available.

By asserting that the UK government will implement safeguards to protect from abuse of power, they claim that the digital trails being left behind by people are shifting the rights to privacy, which legitimizes their use of that information against their own citizens.

Susanne Posel is the Chief Editor of Occupy Corporatism. Our alternative news site is dedicated to reporting the news as it actually happens; not as it is spun by the corporately funded mainstream media. You can find us on our Facebook page .

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrTYhGSYzQc]

Rainey Reitman

EFF

We could be celebrating the New Year by ripping out the fiber optic cables that are sending copies of all our emails to the National Security Agency. But instead, Congress is planning on ringing in 2013 by re-authorizing parts of the FISA Amendments Act, the controversial 2008 bill that allows Americans speaking to people overseas to be surveilled without warrants.

The House of Representatives has already passed a five-year extension on the Act with no reforms. Now the Senate has only a few days left to consider the matter, and our contacts in DC say the Senate is planning on reauthorizing the bill for 5 years without any meaningful amendments to protect privacy or increase transparency, much less allow Senators to debate its merits.

The FISA Amendments Act allows the NSA warrantless access to Americans communicating with a “target” overseas as long as the conversation deals with “foreign intelligence information”—a broad term that can mean virtually anything. And unlike regular warrants, FISA Amendments Act orders can target whole groups of people—so one order could potentially affect thousands of Americans—and don’t require probable cause that a crime has been committed.

Many believe that the government uses this law to justify receiving a fire hose of information about how Americans use the Internet. Whistleblower evidence (PDF) provided by AT&T technician Mark Klein and former NSA employee William Binney show that the NSA has installed equipment in AT&T facilities, creating a copy of all Internet traffic flowing through facility—including our domestic and international emails and web browsing data—and sending that data to the government.

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This is exactly the type of government spying on our private lives that the authors of the Constitution banned when they wrote in the Fourth Amendment that we should be “secure in our papers” .

In October, President Obama appeared on The Daily Show where John Stewart asked about the Bush-era warrantless surveillance program (which Obama had soundly criticized as a candidate in 2008). Rather than promise meaningful reform, Obama vaguely claimed that the program has been “modified” and that they had “built a legal structure and safeguards in place that weren’t there before on a whole range of issues.”

We aren’t sure what “issues” the President is talking about, but one thing hasn’t seen any public reform: warrantless wiretapping of our Internet communications.

The nation was shocked when revelations about the NSA’s widespread surveillance program were first unearthed more than 5 years ago, including President Bush’s admission he was violating the surveillance law by spying on selected Americans without warrants. EFF hasgathered and presented evidence that the actual spying was much broader, including millions of innocent Americans. EFF’s evidence includes testimony from three former NSA employee whistleblowers as well as schematics and photographs from inside AT&T’s San Francisco facilities where millions of Americans’ communications are being copied to the government and three former NSA employee whistleblowers.

But rather than dismantle this illegal program, Congress gave at least part of it a sheen of legality by passing the FISA Amendments Act in 2008.

Thankfully, a group of bipartisan senators including Ron Wyden, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee have placed a hold on the bill. They’re asking for debate and time to consider amendments that would increase privacy protections and add transparency requirements. And they’re asking that the government answer questions about the scope of domestic spying questions the Department of Justice refuses to answer. Senator Wyden is planning to do his best to block the FISA Amendments Act reauthorization until there’s real debate, an honest accounting of how the government is using surveillance powers, and meaningful reform. EFF and other civil libertarian groups are joining up with Senator Wyden in calling for sunlight and reform around FISA.

Please use our action center to contact your member of Congress and urge them to oppose a rubber-stamp of the FISA Amendments Act.

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And please also tweet a message to Senator leadership to ensure they don’t rush a vote on this issue without even time for a meaningful debate.

Hey @McConnellPress and @SenatorReid: Don’t ram through a 5-year extension on FISA before the end of the year. https://eff.org/r.2asn

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Trevor Timm
EFF

The 113th Congress was sworn into office last week and will start regular business later this month. They’ll have a huge, and perhaps unprecedented, slate of Internet-related legislation in the next year, including potentially taking up a dangerous new Internet surveillance bill—which we will detail in the coming days and weeks.

But before they do, they should take a lesson from the 112th Congress on how not to conduct business. In their final official week of existence—and the cover of holidays—the 112th Congress used underhanded and undemocratic tactics to pass two bills that have terrible effects on your online privacy.

Back in November, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed important reform to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the main privacy law governing email. The law, which was written in 1986 before the world wide web even existed, allows all sorts of things that make no sense today, such as letting the government get emails over 180 days old without a warrant.

But the bill came with a caveat: to get it out of committee, the Senators attached a Netflix-supported amendment which would weaken the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA), that would make “frictionless” sharing of videos on social networks easier. EFF stated our opposition to such a compromise, and the connection of the two meant that the weakened video privacy part—passed in 1988 with strong bipartisan support after Robert Bork’s video rental records were publicized in his bid to be a Supreme Court Justice—got little attention. Ultimately, though, getting such important protection for email remained an unequivocally good thing.

But then, under the cover of Christmas, the Senate inexplicably dropped the whole section of the bill devoted to ECPA reform, and just voted on the VPPA bill, weakening our video privacy, while refusing to improve our email privacy.

They were hoping no one would notice they used a disingenuous negotiation process to help weaken arguably America’s strongest privacy law at the behest of a company and leave ordinary Americans with less privacy.

And now, Congress is already floating an even worse compromise for ECPA reform in 2013: a ominous data retention bill that would force companies to keep your text messages for years—even if you delete them—for law enforcement to access.

Then, after they barely had time to break for Christmas, the Senate returned to session a few days later to undermine your email privacy even more. On December 27th, the Senate held one rushed day of debate on the controversial FISA Amendments Act, a 2008 law that allows for warrantless wiretapping of your overseas communications.

The bill, which was passed in 2008 and allowed the Bush administration to sweep the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal under the rug, was set to expire on December 31, 2012.

Despite having months to vote on the bill, the Senate waited until four days before the bill was going to expire to bring up a vote on it, creating a contrived time crunch, that the bill’s supporters used as cover to advocate that they shoot down all of the privacy and transparency amendments that were so vitally needed.

For years, there’s been ample evidence that the law has been abused, that purely domestic US communications have been collected by the NSA, and the government admitted that the secret FISA court ruled they violated the Fourth Amendment on at least one occasion. You can go here to read the Supreme Court Justices themselves explain how the law allows for the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

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To Congress, apparently, none of these facts mattered.

Before they passed the warrantless spying bill 73-23, they had the chance to pass an amendment would merely have given them general information on how many Americans were being spied on. Yet they voted to be kept in the dark. Another amendment would have merely provided redacted FISA court opinions so the American public could know how the public law was being interpreted by the government. Instead, the Senate voted to uphold secret law.

Neither of these amendments would have drastically affected the NSA’s powers. They were much more modest than the amendments that then-Senator Obama voted on (but didn’t pass) in 2008. And they were specifically written to give the utmost deference to national security concerns.

The 112th Congress should be ashamed by how it rushed to weaken Americans’ privacy in their final week. Let’s hope the 113th Congress has a little more respect for Americans privacy rights and the democratic process.

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Youtube
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MkzIdKmeWo]

To make matters worse, the woman who filmed this violation of property rights Malia “Kim” Bendis was arrested on eavesdropping charges.  How many violations of rights can Illinois authorities pull off in one day? Read the story here.

H.R. 983 seeks to reform outdated Electronic Communications Privacy Act

image source

Rainey Retiman
EFF

Wednesday, Representatives Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Ted Poe (R-Texas) and Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) introduced legislation (H.R. 983) that would ensure law enforcement obtains a warrant before accessing our private electronic communications or location data. This bill, while not a complete fix, is trying to provide a much-needed update to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) of 1986.

Though forward-thinking when it was first introduced, ECPA unfortunately was written for the technologies of the ’80s – long before the advent of cloud storage, modern webmail, and location-aware tablets and phones. ECPA’s outdated language has left loopholes which the government has attempted to exploit by arguing that they can access your old emails and documents you store in the cloud without going to a judge and getting a court-issued warrant.

Honestly, we think that’s an absurd argument and runs totally contrary to the principles of the Fourth Amendment. In fact, we’ve fought in court again and again for user privacy when it comes to their digital documents and electronic communications. But even as we continue to fight this issue in the courts, we’re asking Congress to step in and update ECPA to make sure that the Department of Justice knows they can’t read our emails, rummage through our Google documents, or track our cell phones without a warrant.

One of the best parts of H.R. 983 pertains specifically to government collection of location data. The bill says:

No person may obtain the geolocation information of a person for protective activities or law enforcement or intelligence purposes except pursuant to a warrant…

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So what happens if the government disregards this rule and collects location information anyway? That information can’t be used as evidence in court – thus ensuring law enforcement is incentivized to get a warrant before tracking our locations.

Protecting the privacy of users’ location data is an issue we’ve long championed in court, submitting numerous amicus briefs arguing for a search warrant requirement in cases involving cell phone location records [PDF] and GPS devices. It’s also a fundamental component of our ECPA activism campaign.

For the last couple years, we’ve been advocating for ECPA reform through a petition on our website. And last year, the Senate Judiciary Committee responded by passing ECPA reform out of committee – a huge step forward to getting these reforms codified into law. We’re also pleased to see states taking up this issue, including proposals in Texas and California.

We’re pleased to see Representatives Lofgren, Poe, and DelBene take up this crucial issue, but the current draft isn’t a perfect solution to all ECPA woes. For example, the bill has room for improvement on the issue of evidence suppression for email content collected without a warrant. We hope this already promising bill can be further improved through amendments.

By introducing this reform bill, the 113th Congress has an opportunity to enact powerful protections for everyday Internet users – which would be particularly appreciated, since all too often Congress uses its power to try to undermine our digital civil liberties.

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If you agree that the government shouldn’t be snooping through inboxes without a warrant, then please sign our petition, which will automatically send an email to Congress demanding they reform ECPA.

Read the bill here (PDF).

Please visit The Electronic Frontier Foundation for more privacy news and action items.

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Jennifer Lynch
Electronic Frontier Foundation

New documents released by the FBI show that the Bureau is well on its way toward its goal of a fully operational face recognition database by this summer.

EFF received these records in response to our Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for information on Next Generation Identification (NGI)—the FBI’s massive biometric database that may hold records on as much as one third of the U.S. population. The facial recognition component of this database poses real threats to privacy for all Americans.

What is NGI?

NGI builds on the FBI’s legacy fingerprint database—which already contains well over 100 million individual records—and has been designed to include multiple forms of biometric data, including palm prints and iris scans in addition to fingerprints and face recognition data. NGI combines all these forms of data in each individual’s file, linking them to personal and biographic data like name, home address, ID number, immigration status, age, race, etc. This immense database is shared with other federal agencies and with the approximately 18,000 tribal, state and local law enforcement agencies across the United States.

The records we received show that the face recognition component of NGI may include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. By 2012, NGI already contained 13.6 million images representing between 7 and 8 million individuals, and by the middle of 2013, the size of the database increased to 16 million images. The new records reveal that the database will be capable of processing 55,000 direct photo enrollments daily and of conducting tens of thousands of searches every day.

NGI Will Include Non-Criminal as well as Criminal Photos

One of our biggest concerns about NGI has been the fact that it will include non-criminal as well as criminal face images. We now know that FBI projects that by 2015, the database will include 4.3 million images taken for non-criminal purposes.

Currently, if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, your prints are sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database. However, the FBI has never before collected a photograph along with those prints. This is changing with NGI. Now an employer could require you to provide a “mug shot” photo along with your fingerprints. If that’s the case, then the FBI will store both your face print and your fingerprints along with your biographic data.

In the past, the FBI has never linked the criminal and non-criminal fingerprint databases. This has meant that any search of the criminal print database (such as to identify a suspect or a latent print at a crime scene) would not touch the non-criminal database.

This will also change with NGI. Now every record—whether criminal or non—will have a “Universal Control Number” (UCN), and every search will be run against all records in the database. This means that even if you have never been arrested for a crime, if your employer requires you to submit a photo as part of your background check, your face image could be searched—and you could be implicated as a criminal suspect—just by virtue of having that image in the non-criminal file.

Many States Are Already Participating in NGI

The records detail the many states and law enforcement agencies the FBI has already been working with to build out its database of images (see map below). By 2012, nearly half of U.S. states had at least expressed an interest in participating in the NGI pilot program, and several of those states had already shared their entire criminal mug shot database with the FBI. The FBI hopes to bring all states online with NGI by this year.

The FBI worked particularly closely with Oregon through a special project called “Face Report Card.” The goal of the project was to determine and provide feedback on the quality of the images that states already have in their databases. Through Face Report Card, examiners reviewed 14,408 of Oregon’s face images and found significant problems with image resolution, lighting, background and interference. Examiners also found that the median resolution of images was “well-below” the recommended resolution of .75 megapixels (in comparison, newer iPhone cameras are capable of 8 megapixel resolution).

FBI Disclaims Responsibility for Accuracy

At such a low resolution, it is hard to imagine that identification will be accurate.1 However, the FBI has disclaimed responsibility for accuracy, stating that “[t]he candidate list is an investigative lead not an identification.”

Because the system is designed to provide a ranked list of candidates, the FBI states NGI never actually makes a “positive identification,” and “therefore, there is no false positive rate.” In fact, the FBI only ensures that “the candidate will be returned in the top 50 candidates” 85 percent of the time “when the true candidate exists in the gallery.”

It is unclear what happens when the “true candidate” does not exist in the gallery—does NGI still return possible matches? Could those people then be subject to criminal investigation for no other reason than that a computer thought their face was mathematically similar to a suspect’s? This doesn’t seem to matter much to the FBI—the Bureau notes that because “this is an investigative search and caveats will be prevalent on the return detailing that the [non-FBI] agency is responsible for determining the identity of the subject, there should be NO legal issues.”

Nearly 1 Million Images Will Come from Unexplained Sources

One of the most curious things to come out of these records is the fact that NGI may include up to 1 million face images in two categories that are not explained anywhere in the documents. According to the FBI, by 2015, NGI may include:

• 46 million criminal images


• 4.3 million civil images


• 215,000 images from the Repository for Individuals of Special Concern (RISC)


• 750,000 images from a “Special Population Cognizant” (SPC) category


• 215,000 images from “New Repositories”

However, the FBI does not define either the “Special Population Cognizant” database or the “new repositories” category. This is a problem because we do not know what rules govern these categories, where the data comes from, how the images are gathered, who has access to them, and whose privacy is impacted.

A 2007 FBI document available on the web describes SPC as “a service provided to Other Federal Organizations (OFOs), or other agencies with special needs by agreement with the FBI” and notes that “[t]hese SPC Files can be specific to a particular case or subject set (e.g., gang or terrorist related), or can be generic agency files consisting of employee records.” If these SPC files and the images in the “new repositories” category are assigned a Universal Control Number along with the rest of the NGI records, then these likely non-criminal records would also be subject to invasive criminal searches.

Government Contractor Responsible for NGI has built some of the Largest Face Recognition Databases in the World

The company responsible for building NGI’s facial recognition component—MorphoTrust (formerly L-1 Identity Solutions)—is also the company that has built the face recognition systems used by approximately 35 state DMVs and many commercial businesses.2 MorphoTrust built and maintains the face recognition systems for the Department of State, which has the “largest facial recognition system deployed in the world” with more than 244 million records,3 and for the Department of Defense, which shares its records with the FBI.

The FBI failed to release records discussing whether MorphoTrust uses a standard (likely proprietary) algorithm for its face templates. If it does, it is quite possible that the face templates at each of these disparate agencies could be shared across agencies—raising again the issue that the photograph you thought you were taking just to get a passport or driver’s license is then searched every time the government is investigating a crime. The FBI seems to be leaning in this direction: an FBI employee email notes that the “best requirements for sending an image in the FR system” include “obtain[ing] DMV version of photo whenever possible.”

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Why Should We Care About NGI?

There are several reasons to be concerned about this massive expansion of governmental face recognition data collection. First, as noted above, NGI will allow law enforcement at all levels to search non-criminal and criminal face records at the same time. This means you could become a suspect in a criminal case merely because you applied for a job that required you to submit a photo with your background check.

Second, the FBI and Congress have thus far failed to enact meaningful restrictions on what types of data can be submitted to the system, who can access the data, and how the data can be used. For example, although the FBI has said in these documents that it will not allow non-mug shot photos such as images from social networking sites to be saved to the system, there are no legal or even written FBI policy restrictions in place to prevent this from occurring. As we have stated before, the Privacy Impact Assessment for NGI’s face recognition component hasn’t been updated since 2008, well before the current database was even in development. It cannot therefore address all the privacy issues impacted by NGI.

Finally, even though FBI claims that its ranked candidate list prevents the problem of false positives (someone being falsely identified), this is not the case. A system that only purports to provide the true candidate in the top 50 candidates 85 percent of the time will return a lot of images of the wrong people. We know from researchers that the risk of false positives increases as the size of the dataset increases—and, at 52 million images, the FBI’s face recognition is a very large dataset. This means that many people will be presented as suspects for crimes they didn’t commit. This is not how our system of justice was designed and should not be a system that Americans tacitly consent to move towards.

For more on our concerns about the increased role of face recognition in criminal and civil contexts, read Jennifer Lynch’s 2012 Senate Testimony. We will continue to monitor the FBI’s expansion of NGI.

Here are the documents:

• FBI NGI Description of Face Recognition Program


• FBI NGI Report Card on Oregon Face Recognition Program


• FBI NGI Sample Memorandum of Understanding with States


• FBI NGI Face Recognition Goals & Objectives


• FBI NGI Information on Implementation


• FBI Emails re. NGI Face Recognition Program


• FBI Emails from Contractors re. NGI


• FBI NGI 2011 Face Recognition Operational Prototype Plan


• FBI NGI Document Discussing Technical Characteristics of Face Recognition Component


• FBI NGI 2010 Face Recognition Trade Study Plan


• FBI NGI Document on L-1’s Commercial Face Recognition Product

Notes:

1.In fact, another document notes that “since the trend for the quality of data received by the customer is lower and lower quality, specific research and development plans for low quality submission accuracy improvement is highly desirable.”
2.MorphoTrust’s parent company, Safran Morpho, describes itself as “[t]he world leader in biometric systems,” is largely responsible for implementing India’s Aadhaar project, which, ultimately, will collect biometric data from nearly 1.2 billion people.
3.One could argue that Facebook’s is larger. Facebook states that its users have uploaded more than 250 billion photos. However, Facebook never performs face recognition searches on that entire 250 billion photo database.

Please visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation for the latest in how to protect your privacy.

IFiles
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VkKeM-OK6g]

Nadia Kayyali
Electronic Frontier Foundation

While all eyes are on the disturbing evidence of police militarization in Ferguson, are you paying attention to what’s happening with law enforcement in your own back yard?

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the answer is yes. A coalition of community groups has come together to call attention to Urban Shield, a four-day long “preparedness” exercise for law enforcement and other agencies that will take place from September 4-8.  They’ve organized a week of education, including a march and demonstration outside of the event on Friday, September 5. To these community groups, Urban Shield represents state violence and political repression, not public safety.

The reasons for protesting Urban Shield are clear. It is one of the ways that local law enforcement gets access to, and romanced by, military and surveillance technologies like the ones we’ve seen turned against protesters in Ferguson, as well as low-level crimes, across the country.

Urban Shield is coordinated by the for-profit company Cytel Group, and in addition to training exercises, it also functions as a marketplace and testing site for new militarized technologies. The accompanying trade show includes exhibitors from armored vehicle manufacturers to a “counter-terrorism magazine.” In 2013, companies were encouraged “to place their products and technology directly into the hands of SWAT, Fire, EOD, and EMS professionals.” Vending at Urban Shield is touted as a way to get “invaluable real-time feedback for vendor product[s]” since “at the end of every scenario the teams are questioned concerning the benefits and drawbacks of each piece of technology used in that scenario.” It’s unsurprising that Urban Shield has a “try it out” component for law enforcement, since there is an incredible amount of profit to be made from such products, often with federal funds (i.e. taxpayer dollars) footing the bill.

The event is part of the federal Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI). UASI is a grant program administered by the federal Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Grant Program (the same program that funds fusion centers). In the San Francisco Bay Area, the grants are coordinated by the Bay Area UASI, a regional coordinating body. UASI grants are supposed to go to “planning, organization, equipment, training, and exercise needs of high-threat, high-density Urban Areas.” The grants have gone to law enforcement agencies all over the country— but the program has been the subject of scathing critique from grassroots groups and lawmakers.

Much of the criticism around UASI is that the grants enable purchases of equipment that no community should adopt without a public conversation. The obvious examples are armored vehicles and so-called “less-lethal” weapons like tear gas and rubber bullets, like those used to violently suppress demonstrators in Ferguson.

But UASI funds can also be used to purchase sophisticated surveillance equipment that, absent safeguards, could allow local law enforcement to spy on activists before demonstrations ever take place, or to racially profile people of color in communities like Oakland.

Senator Tom Coburn’s 2012 report “Safety at Any Price” lists some of the equipment that has been purchased with UASI money, and it reads like a laundry list of privacy advocates’ concerns: surveillance cameras, mobile fingerprinting devices, automated license plate readers, armored vehicles, and drones. To make matters worse, as Senator Coburn’s report points out, there is no evidence that these purchases make anyone safer.

It should also be noted that Urban Shield is not limited to the San Francisco area. Boston and Austin also participate in similar trainings, as has Jordan. And Jordan isn’t the only international connection. As the Urban Shield website boasts, “In 2014, teams from Singapore and South Korea will participate.” Teams in the past have included the French National Police and teams from Israel, Brazil, Jordan, and Bahrain. Police departments from across the country participate as well, including SWAT teams from Newark, Dallas, Chicago, and Travis County, Texas.

None of this has escaped the attention of organizers, who have made it clear that Urban Shield is linked to surveillance of activists and violence against communities of color across the country, but also to political repression internationally. In their words: “The line between police and military is blurring as parallel military tactics are being deployed globally to repress dissent and increase state control over people who are calling for freedom and justice.”

Please visit EFF for the latest news and information about digital privacy and government surveillance. 

Dave Maass
Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California are taking the fight over automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data to the next level by asking the California Court of Appeal to rule that the public has a right to know how Los Angeles cops are tracking their locations.

ALPRs are cameras mounted to patrol cars and fixed locations, such as light poles, that are able to capture, process, and store the license plates of every vehicle that passes nearby. The Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department together collect close to 3 million license plates each week; these data points could give police an intimate picture of the comings and goings of the entire population over several years. By our estimates, these agencies currently have an average of 61 plate scans for each vehicle registered in Los Angeles County.

EFF Senior Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch and ACLU SoCal Senior Staff Attorney Peter Bibring describe the potential impact on civil liberties in the new brief:

A network of readers enables police to collect extensive location data on an individual, without his knowledge and without any level of suspicion. ALPRs can be used to scan and record vehicles at a lawful protest or house of worship; track all movement in and out of an area; gather information about certain neighborhoods or organizations; or place political activists on hot lists so that their movements trigger alerts … Taken in the aggregate, ALPR data can create a revealing history of a person’s movements, associations, and habits.

Two years ago, EFF and ACLU SoCal used the California Public Records Act to obtain policies and training presentations regarding ALPR used by these agencies, but the agencies refused to provide us with one week’s worth of ALPR data that we believe is crucial to an informed public debate over this mass surveillance technology.

When we took LAPD and LASD to court, the agencies came back with a stunning argument that they were allowed to withhold this information because 100 percent of the data constituted investigative records, which are exempted from disclosure under California’s open records law.

Who were they investigating? Every car in Los Angeles.

The Superior Court judge ultimately ruled in favor of the Los Angeles cops, but this decision was based on serious misconceptions about how the technology works and the public interest in the data. These two points are the central issues EFF and ACLU SoCal are now asking the California Court of Appeal for the Second Appellate District to consider.

In his ruling, Judge James Chalfant concluded that Los Angeles cops use ALPR in a “targeted”  fashion because officers choose where to drive their vehicles and which plates to focus on. This ignores the fact that ALPR cameras indiscriminately capture every license plate’s image, not just those of specific vehicles (such as stolen cars) that are the subject of investigations. As Lynch and Bibring write in the brief:

LAPD and LASD use ALPRs to collect license plate data automatically and indiscriminately on each and every driver in Los Angeles who passes within range of their cameras—at a rate of three million scans per week—whether or not those drivers are suspected of wrongdoing. These systems are unlike almost any other surveillance technology in use by law enforcement today. Even red-light cameras, which also capture an image of a vehicle’s license plate, are only triggered to save a picture of the plate when the driver has violated the law by entering an intersection after the light has turned red.

EFF and ACLU SoCal are also challenging the judge’s conclusion that releasing the week’s worth of data would compromise police investigations, outweighing the public interest in seeing this data. For example, the judge indicated that releasing the data would reveal patrol patterns, despite the fact that patrol patterns aren’t particularly secret—patrol cars are easily viewable to the naked eye.

More importantly, as we note in the brief, release of raw ALPR data has fueled debates in jurisdictions such as Minneapolis and Boston, leading to distinct policy changes to protect citizens’ privacy. Lynch and Bibring argued:

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In each of these examples, disclosure of the data was integral to informed debate—within the legislatures, among the general public, and even within the agencies themselves. Without public access to information about how ALPR technology is being used—including the raw ALPR data from a limited time period—the very people whose whereabouts are being recorded cannot know if their rights are being infringed nor challenge policies that inadequately protect their privacy.

Around the country, we have seen local law enforcement agencies adopt privacy-invasive technologies with little oversight or public input. In some cases—particularly with ALPRs—even the companies supplying these devices ask agencies to sign agreements not to speak publicly about these programs.

The truth is: the only threat posed by transparency is to the police’s unchecked surveillance powers.

Click here for the text of the petition for writ of mandate.

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