More bad news for ShotSpotter, which recently re-branded to “SoundThinking” to distance itself from exactly this sort of negative press. Four legislators (three senators, one congressperson) are asking the DHS Inspector General to take a closer look at the tech the DHS is funding via one of its grant programs.

The problem with Spotshotter is it seems unlikely to put a dent in the public’s arsenal. Multiple cities have chosen to dump the tech rather than continue to pay for false positives, altered shot reports, and nonexistent public safety increases.

The problem with the DHS is that it has already started spending money on a portable “Gunshot Detection System.” It’s capitalized for a reason. It’s a bespoke version of a product already offered by a company called [re-reads DHS press release] Shooter Detection Systems — a redesign of its [deep breath] Guardian Indoor Active Shooter Detection System.

According to the DHS’s PR team, the “enhanced” version of this off-the-shelf shot spotter will detect both sounds and light flashes, apparently aiming to reduce the number of false positives generated by acoustic-only detection systems… like the one offered by [coughs at first half of rebrand] SoundThinking, formerly ShotSpotter.

Whether adding “eyes” to “ears” to spot shots has accomplished a reduction in false positives is still an open question. Whether or not the DHS should continue to pay for shot spotting tech — namely the one offered by the former ShotSpotter — is exactly the question these four lawmakers would like the DHS Inspector General to answer.

The question — as posed in this letter [PDF] from Sen. Ed Markey, Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and Congressperson Ayanna Pressley — is a bit leading perhaps. But the question is valid and the lawmakers’ letter contains plenty of evidence that lends validity to the question: should the DHS really be spending federal dollars on grants to local law enforcement agencies seeking to acquire ShotSpotter tech?

Several recent reports have cast substantial doubt on the accuracy and effectiveness of the “ShotSpotter” gunshot detection system and have raised serious questions about its contribution to unjustified surveillance and over-policing of Black, Brown, and Latino communities. Through the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) provides funding to localities to deploy the ShotSpotter system. We request that the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) investigate DHS’s spending of taxpayer dollars on ShotSpotter, including potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits recipients of federal financial assistance from discriminating based on race, color, and national origin.

And that’s only part of the problem. It’s not even necessarily a ShotSpotter problem per se, but a long-standing problem with law enforcement agencies, who almost always deploy new surveillance “solutions” in low-income neighborhoods, especially those heavily populated by minorities.

The other problem is more technical: the tech just doesn’t work as advertised. Multiple investigations have shown the tech is either (1) unable to reliably detect gunshots, or (2) doesn’t lead to better enforcement of gun-related crime. The cities now dumping the tech say it’s both unreliable and useless. Of course, SoundThinking/ShotSpotter insists otherwise in responses to the latest negative reporting and in its marketing materials, which are still somehow capable of convincing government entities to buy its tech.

That’s where the DHS comes in. It offers grant money to law enforcement agencies — funding that can be used to purchase acoustic gunshot detection tech. The biggest brand in the business is SoundThinking, so naturally that’s where most of this funding goes.

In Massachusetts alone, “UASI [Urban Area Security Initiative] has funded almost a decade of contracts for gunshot detection technology with ShotSpotter in Cambridge, Chelsea, Somerville, and Boston.” Since 2012, according to city records, Boston has spent more than $4 million on ShotSpotter. Elsewhere, municipalities across the country have used UASI funds for the ShotSpotter system. One study found that “[t]hrough an analysis of UASI funding in Los Angeles, Boston, New York City, and Chicago . . . cities spend millions of UASI dollars on contracts with surveillance corporations” such as ShotSpotter.

And what are we getting in return for this combination of federal and local spending? Not much.

The ShotSpotter system’s ineffectiveness has consequences for law enforcement, community response, and the prevention of gun violence. A 2021 study from the Journal of Public Health found “that implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes” and that “[p]olicy solutions may represent a more cost-effective measure to reduce urban firearm violence.” Another study from the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University concluded “that more than 90% of ShotSpotter alerts lead police to find no evidence to corroborate gunfire when police arrive at the location ShotSpotter sent them: no shooting, no shell casings, no victims, no witnesses, no guns recovered.

Not great. More bad stuff from studies and reports: 70% of people in neighborhoods with ShotSpotter systems are either black or Latino. 75% of those neighborhoods had annual incomes well below the national median.

As I stated above, this is a cop problem: the long-held biases that subject the same people to any new surveillance option. The rest of it is a ShotSpotter problem: it doesn’t spot shots and it doesn’t stop crime. And yet, millions are being spent on it every year, with some of the funding flowing directly from the DHS.

The main point of this letter, however, is to nudge DHS oversight to take a close look at the end result of this funding in terms of purchasing ShotSpotter tech. The federal government is forbidden from spending money on anything that violates federal laws. And this funding might be doing that. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forbids recipients of federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Does planting most of your shot-spotting mics in predominately non-white neighborhoods violate the Civil Rights Act?

Well, that’s what these lawmakers hope to find out.

For all the preceding reasons, we respectfully request that you open an investigation in DHS’s funding of the ShotSpotter system to determine whether it is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars, including the critical question of whether such funding may lead to Title VI violations.

It will likely be awhile before we hear back on this. But given what’s already been discovered via studies, public records requests, and investigative journalism, it certainly looks as though cops with this tech are violating the law. And one would expect another investigation into ShotSpotter use is going to turn up more of the same biased policing. If that’s the case, it won’t stop cops from being racist. But it will mean they’ll have to spend local funds to keep minorities under their tech-enhanced thumbs.

Bombs kill people. When someone provides bombs to a government at war, those weapons will be used to kill people. It's a simple fact but one that seems to have eluded Democrats.

After voting to send bombs to the Israeli military, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) condemned the Israeli military for killing Palestinian civilians with an American-made bomb. And after urging the Israeli military to use smaller munitions, the Biden administration found itself scrambling to deal with a mass civilian casualty event caused by one of those smaller weapons.

On Sunday, the Israeli Air Force bombed Tel al-Sultan, a neighborhood of Rafah that Israel had previously designated a safe zone for fleeing civilians. The Israeli government claimed the airstrike successfully killed two senior Hamas commanders. But a fire started by the bomb spread through the densely-packed tent city, burning to death at least 45 people, including 12 women, eight children, and three elderly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the civilian deaths were a "tragic mistake."

British doctor James Smith called the fire "one of the most horrific things that I have seen or heard of in all of the weeks that I've been working in Gaza." CNN found pieces of a GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb, a type of 250-pound bomb that the U.S. military had rush-shipped to Israel following the Hamas attacks last October, with serial numbers from a California manufacturer.

"The Israeli bombing of a refugee camp inside a designated safe zone is horrific," Warren stated on social media. "Israel has a duty to protect innocent civilians and Palestinians seeking shelter in Rafah have nowhere safe to go. Netanyahu's assault of Rafah must stop. We need an immediate cease-fire."

Last month, Warren had voted for a $26.38 billion U.S. military aid package to Israel, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) pointed out. "Ma'am, you voted to send those bombs to Israel," he wrote in a response to Warren's statement.

Warren's office did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement last month, Warren noted that she voted for the aid package after the Biden administration agreed to certify that every military receiving U.S. aid "follows international law, protects civilians in war zones and allows for humanitarian aid."

On May 10, the administration ruled that there are "reasonable" accusations that Israel breaks the laws of war but that the Israeli government gave "credible and reliable" assurances about how it plans to use U.S. weapons. President Joe Biden also said that he would not be "supplying the weapons" for an Israeli invasion of Rafah that threatened the civilian population and held up a shipment of Mark 80 series bombs, which were responsible for some of the worst mass-casualty attacks in Gaza.

At a Senate hearing earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin presented the GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb as a safer alternative to the Mark 80 series: "A Small Diameter Bomb, which is a precision weapon, that's very useful in a dense, built-up environment, but maybe not so much a 2,000-pound bomb that could create a lot of collateral damage."

Last October, the Israeli military used two American-made 2,000-pound bombs to assassinate a Hamas commander, killing dozens of civilians in the Jabaliya refugee camp.

Austin is right that 2,000-pound bombs, which can kill everything within 600 feet, are more likely to harm bystanders than lighter alternatives. And as the name suggests, the Small Diameter Bomb has a smaller lethal radius. However, that doesn't make the bombs any less lethal for people inside the radius—or people caught up in secondary fires caused by the weapon.

Much of the Israeli army's "precision" targeting is carried out by artificial intelligence programs. The Israeli publication +972 Magazine has reported that one AI targeting system called "Lavender" is allowed to kill a large number of civilians per Hamas fighter, and is believed to have a 10 percent error rate when identifying fighters in the first place.

Another program revealed by +972, called "Where's Daddy," targets Hamas fighters who have left the battlefield and gone home to their families.

In other words, the type of weapon matters but how the weapon is used matters more. Despite Biden's earlier threats and assurances over human rights, the Biden administration is keen to defer to Israeli claims.

"As a result of this strike on Sunday, I have no policy changes to speak to," White House spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday. "It just happened. The Israelis are going to investigate it. We're going to be taking great interest in what they find in that investigation. And we'll see where it goes from there."

The post Democrats Surprised To Learn Bombs Are Used To Bomb People appeared first on Reason.com.

The Department of Justice indicted the creators of an application that helps people spend their bitcoins anonymously. They're accused of "conspiracy to commit money laundering." Why "conspiracy to commit" as opposed to just "money laundering"?

Because they didn't hold anyone else's money or do anything illegal with it. They provided a privacy tool that may have enabled other people to do illegal things with their bitcoin. But that's not a crime, just as selling someone a kitchen knife isn't a crime. The case against the creators of Samourai Wallet is an assault on our civil liberties and First Amendment rights.

What this tool does is offer what's known as a "coinjoin," a method for anonymizing bitcoin transactions by mixing them with other transactions, as the project's founder, Keonne Rodriguez, explained to Reason in 2022: 

"I think the best analogy for it is like smelting gold," he said. "You take your Bitcoin, you add it into [the conjoin protocol] Whirlpool, and Whirlpool smelts it into new pieces that are not associated to the original piece."

Smelting bars of gold would make it harder for the government to track. But if someone eventually uses a piece of that gold for an illegal purchase, should the creator of the smelting furnace go to prison? This is what the government is arguing. 

Cash is the payment technology used most by criminals, but it also happens to be essential for preserving the financial privacy of law-abiding citizens, as Human Rights Foundation chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein told Reason:

"The ATM model, it gives people the option to have freedom money," says Gladstein. "Yes, the government will know all the ins and outs of what flows are coming in and out, but they won't know what you do with it when you leave. And that allows us to preserve the privacy of cash, which I think is essential for a democratic society." 

The government's decision to indict Rodriguez and his partner William Lonergan Hill is also an attack on free speech because all they did was write open-source code and make it widely available. 

"It is an issue of a chilling effect on free speech," attorney Jerry Brito, who heads up the cryptocurrency nonprofit Coin Center, told Reason after the U.S. Treasury went after the creators of another piece of anonymizing software. "So, basically, anybody who is in any way associated with this tool…a neutral tool that can be used for good or for ill, these people are now being basically deplatformed."

Are we willing to trade away our constitutional rights for the promise of security? For many in power, there seems to be no limit to what they want us to trade away.

In the '90s, the FBI tried to ban online encryption because criminals and terrorists might use it to have secret conversations. Had they succeeded, there would be no internet privacy. E-commerce, which relies on securely sending credit card information, might never have existed.

Today, Elizabeth Warren mobilizes her "anti-crypto army" to take down bitcoin by exaggerating its utility to Hamas. The Biden administration tried to permanently record all transactions over $600, and Warren hopes to implement a Central Bank Digital Currency, which would allow the government near-total surveillance of our financial lives.  

Remember when the Canadian government ordered banks to freeze money headed to the trucker protests? Central Bank Digital Currencies would make such efforts far easier.

"We come from first principles here in the global struggle for human rights," says Gladstein. "The most important thing is that it's confiscation resistant and censorship resistant and parallel, and can be done outside of the government's control." 

The most important thing about bitcoin, and money like it, isn't its price. It's the check it places on the government's ability to devalue, censor, and surviel our money. Creators of open-source tools like Samourai Wallet should be celebrated, not threatened with a quarter-century in a federal prison.

Music Credits: "Intercept," by BXBRDVJA via Artlist; "You Need It,' by Moon via Artlist. Photo Credits: Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/Newscom; Omar Ashtawy/APAImages / Polaris/Newscom; Paul Weaver/Sipa USA/Newscom; Envato Elements; Pexels; Emin Dzhafarov/Kommersant Photo / Polaris/Newscom; Anonymous / Universal Images Group/Newscom.

• Video Editor: Regan Taylor
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser

The post The Government Fears This Privacy Tool appeared first on Reason.com.