The Fourth Amendment guarantees that every person shall be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." This means government agents cannot enter your home or rifle through your stuff without a warrant, signed by a judge and based on probable cause. That right extends to the digital sphere: The Supreme Court ruled in 2018's Carpenter v. United States that the government must have a warrant to track people's movements through their cellphone data.

But governments are increasingly circumventing these protections by using taxpayer dollars to pay private companies to spy on citizens. Government agencies have found many creative and enterprising ways to skirt the Fourth Amendment.

Cellphones generate reams of information about us even when they're just in our pockets, including revealing our geographical locations—information that is then sold by third-party brokers. In 2017 and 2018, the IRS Criminal Investigation unit (IRS CI) purchased access to a commercial database containing geolocation data from millions of Americans' cellphones. A spokesman said IRS CI only used the data for "significant money-laundering, cyber, drug and organized-crime cases" and 
terminated the contract when it failed to yield any useful leads.

During the same time period, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) paid more than $1 million for access to cellphone geolocation databases in an attempt to detect undocumented immigrants entering the country. The Wall Street Journal reported that ICE had used this information to identify and arrest migrants.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent $420,000 on location data in order to track "compliance" with "movement restrictions," such as curfews, as well as to "track patterns of those visiting K-12 schools."

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) admitted in a January 2021 memo that it purchases "commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones" and that it had searched the database for Americans' movement histories "five times in the past two-and-a-half years." The memo further stipulated that "DIA does not construe the Carpenter decision to require a judicial warrant endorsing purchase or use of commercially
available data for intelligence purposes."

Even in the physical world, governments have contracted out their spying. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) spent millions of dollars paying employees at private companies and government agencies for personal information that would otherwise require a warrant. This included paying an administrator at a private parcel delivery service to search people's packages and send them to the DEA, and paying an Amtrak official for travel reservation information. In the latter case, the DEA already had an agreement in place under which Amtrak Police would provide that information for free, but the agency instead spent $850,000 over two decades paying somebody off.

It seems the only thing more enterprising than a government agent with a warrant is a government agent without one.

The post The Feds Are Skirting the Fourth Amendment by Buying Data appeared first on Reason.com.

Moral panic about sex work leads to law enforcement practices that reach far beyond anyone engaged in or with erotic labor. The latest example comes from San Diego County, California, where cops are putting up a creepy surveillance tower under the auspice of stopping sex sellers and sex buyers from meeting.

The prostitution surveillance tower, stationed along National City's Roosevelt Avenue, will record video of anyone who happens to be in the area.

Normalizing Warrantless Surveillance

A supporter of the surveillance tower told a local CBS affiliate that it will help reduce prostitution by recording the license plate numbers of people who enter the area to pick up sex workers.

Schemes to catch people who want to pay another consenting adult for sex are a waste of money and manpower and a violation of privacy, free association, and bodily autonomy, of course. But even if you think that punishing prostitution customers (or sex workers themselves) is a swell idea, it's hard to see how the surveillance tower makes any sense.

You can't charge someone for simply picking another person up off the street, even if police think the person on the street looks like a sex worker. Even if money visibly exchanged hands—well, it's not a crime to give someone cash. Unless the entire sexual exchange happens right in front of the cameras, it's hard to imagine on what basis cops could possibly make any charges stick.

Besides, the tower is very visible and local media have been publicizing it. Smart sex workers and their customers will simply move to another, less visible area. If the surveillance tower has any impact at all, it will be to drive prostitution from one part of the city to another. That's it.

It seems clear that the idea here isn't actually cracking down on prostitution. It's just a way for authorities to look like they're doing something about sex trafficking while further normalizing the idea of conducting broad, warrantless surveillance of everyone.

So Many Sex-Trafficking Myths

Local reporting on the new surveillance tower has been heavy on human trafficking myths and dubious statistics. Citing a group called The Ugly Truth, Fox 5 San Diego suggested that "there are over 3,000 to 8,000 sex trafficking victims in the county each year."

And on what data does The Ugly Truth base this? Its website doesn't say. But considering that that's vastly more victims than we see in trafficking arrests across the whole country in a year, and considering the fact that "sex trafficking stings" in California and elsewhere routinely turn up few or no victims, I'm going to guess this data is bogus, if it exists at all.

The Ugly Truth's website also states that there are "approximately 18,000 victims in the U.S." If we take that at face value (and again, it's dubious), that would mean that around 17 to 44 percent of all U.S. trafficking victims are in San Diego County. Why, it's almost as if these numbers are completely made up…

Such sketchy figures are par for the course when it comes to activism and reporting about sex trafficking.

Fox 5 also claims that the "the average age of entry into sex trafficking is 16" and that prostitution is "an $800 million industry locally." It does not cite any sources for these statements.

Claims like these tend to be based on shoddy studies put out by anti-prostitution activists and from groups whose funding depends on proving that sex trafficking is a major issue. For instance, there's a persistent claim that the average age of entry into prostitution or the average age at which someone becomes a trafficking victim is somewhere between 13 and 16. Here's what sex worker Maggie McNeill told Reason about this "fact" back in 2014:

There's a researcher named Melissa Farley who does an awful lot of these kind of studies to provide numbers for the anti-prostitution people. And on her site she traced this supposed number of average of 13 to several old studies which all drew back to a study done here in LA actually in the early 80's—in '82. And that study found the average age of entry for underage sex workers—not for all sex workers, but only for underage ones—was about 16. In a different part of the study, they listed 13 as being the average age of first sexual contact. First kiss, first groping in a car, first whatever. Farley seems to have conflated the two numbers to represent that 13 as being the age not of first sexual contact, but of first accepting money for it. Even so, she still was only claiming that that was the age of origin for underage sex workers. Normal distortion, the gossip game syndrome, has changed that from underage to average of all.

Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post has fact-checked many statistics like these, systematically dismantling claims about the average age of entry into prostitution, the revenues generated by sex trafficking, human trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border, and the number of total trafficking victims and child trafficking victims. These articles are a bit old by now, but common claims about sex trafficking are still rooted in the same shoddy data Kessler started tracing nearly a decade ago, so I highly recommend checking out his work.

The FBI Goes to Comic Con

Thankfully, there seem to be fewer nonsense statistics about sex trafficking in the media now than a decade ago, when trafficking panic was reaching a peak. But coverage of the National City surveillance tower serves as a good reminder that debunked myths are still out there—and still being used to justify police antics that otherwise might creep people out.

And while sex trafficking panic is arguably less omnipresent now than it was a decade ago, its press coverage should remind us how institutionalized this panic has become.

Authorities overseeing old-school vice stings routinely call them "human trafficking operations" or "sex trafficking stings" now, and reporters and people on social media just casually parrot this language. See, for instance, a recent announcement from Caflironia Attorney General Rob Bonta, who alleged that "sex traffickers capitalize on large events like Comic-Con to exploit victims" (never mind that these sorts of claims around big events have been debunked again and again) and bragged that "an investigation by the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force" led to "14 individuals [being] arrested."

Local, national, and even international media have run with Bonta's framing in their headlines. "14 Arrested at Comic-Con In Anti-Human Trafficking Sting," NBC reported. "Fourteen arrests in undercover sex trafficking sting at San Diego Comic-Con convention," Sky News said.

If you read a few paragraphs down into Bonta's press release, you'll see that no sex trafficking or labor trafficking arrest resulted from this trafficking sting. The 14 people arrested were picked up for trying to pay another adult for sex. That other adult, however, turned out to be an undercover cop.

The FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service assisted in these efforts.

This is the sort of vice sting that cops have been doing from time immemorial—and which many people started seeing as a waste of taxpayers' resources when it was done simply to arrest adult sex workers or their would-be clients. So now, authorities dress up their prostitution stings in the language of stopping sexual exploitation and slavery.

In this case, authorities also pretended to be prostitution clients and contacted sex workers. But instead of calling this what it is—a sex worker sting—they say they're recovering "potential victims of trafficking." If you frame all sex workers as potential trafficking victims, then you can call luring them to police under false pretenses a rescue mission, even if all that happens once they're in custody is they get "offered services." (That is, they get the phone numbers of some local charities.)

And while it's unclear if the "victims" here were arrested, this isn't uncommon in these sorts of operations, with police justifying it by saying they need to arrest them in order to save them.

The Comic Con operation did find one 16-year-old selling sex. (A minor selling sex is legally considered to be a sex trafficking victim, even if there is no trafficker.) Helping minors who are selling sex—whether they're actually being "trafficked" or not—is a good goal, of course, and people will point to this one teen as evidence hat the whole operation was a success. But arresting would-be sex buyers had nothing to do with finding this teenager; you didn't need to do one to do the other. And is the best way to help teenage sex workers really to terrify them in a sting and then turn them over to child welfare agents? Shelters and social services for victims—teen or adult—seem like a much more effective and humane approach.

More Sex & Tech News

• The Department of Justice is suing TikTok, claiming the company has violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Much of the complaint turns on the idea that TikTok should magically know whether any user is under age 13, even when users lie about their age or sign in with credentials from another website. The Justice Department also alleges that TikTok collected too much data on users it knew were under 13, and it objects to the fact that the company wouldn't delete minors' accounts upon parental request unless parents certified under penalty of perjury that they were in fact the users' parents.

• In a new report titled Abortion in the USA: The Human Rights Crisis in the Aftermath of Dobbs, Amnesty International shares stories from pregnant women in states where abortion is banned.

• The Consumer Product Safety Commission says Amazon is legally liable for recalling products sold by third parties.

• Some New Jersey lawmakers want to require adult-oriented websites to verify visitor ages. Meanwhile, a measure sponsored by Assemblyman Michael Inganamort (R–Morris) would require computer manufacturers to block porn sites unless a user pays a $20 fee, and to block "any website that facilitates prostitution."

• Another blow to "net neutrality": The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit "blocked the Federal Communications Commission's reinstatement of landmark net neutrality rules, saying broadband providers are likely to succeed in a legal challenge," reports Reuters. The court had already delayed the rules—which were initially adopted under former President Barack Obama then rescinded by former President Donald Trump—after the commission voted in April to bring them back. The court on Thursday said "it would temporarily block net neutrality rules and scheduled oral arguments for late October or early November on the issue, dealing a serious blow to President Joe Biden's effort to reinstate the rules," Reuters reports.

Today's Image

The post Prostitution Surveillance Tower Goes Up in San Diego appeared first on Reason.com.

Australia, freshly infested with high-definition traffic cameras, is issuing substantial fines to drivers filmed using phones—or holding anything that looks like one, such as a sunglasses case. A woman in Syndey was upset to learn that proving she owns a case consistent with the image is immaterial to the enforcing agency—whose name, "Revenue", seems to offer a clue about the priorities at hand. — Read the rest

The post Driver fined $387 after traffic cameras shoot her holding phone—or a sunglasses case appeared first on Boing Boing.

The government has a long history of using tracking technology to ascertain our whereabouts, our habits, and even our preferences. From cellphones and cars to snow plows and garbage trucks, governments seemingly want to track anything that moves—or moos.

The USDA recently finalized a rule—set to go into effect in a few months—that will require all cattle and bison being moved across state lines to be tagged with radio-frequency identification (RFID) ear tags. RFID technology uses radio frequency waves to transmit and collect data by way of a system of electronic tags and scanners. The technology is best viewed as a type of electronic or remote barcode, in which scanners can read an RFID chip anywhere from a few meters away to around 100 meters away. In some ways analogous to a shorter-range GPS system, RFID can track geographic location and also operate as a system of data collection and storage.

In the context of livestock, a quick scan of an RFID tag can pull up information like a cow's date of birth, weight, vaccine records, ownership history, what farms it has been to, and what movements it has made. The USDA is justifying its RFID mandate on public health grounds, claiming that it can help trace and eradicate potential disease outbreaks among livestock, such as mad cow disease or hoof-and-mouth disease. 

While plausible at first blush, it is far from clear that the mandate will accomplish its intended objective, and it is very clear that it will disproportionately hurt small and independent ranchers and cattle farmers.

For one thing, most ranchers already want to be able to identify their cattle and have used physical metal tags for years to do so. Electronic RFID tags are twice as expensive as traditional metal tags and also require an upfront investment in scanners and software, making the switch cost-prohibitive for many small farms. Farmers also complain that electronic tags are harder to identify visually from a distance, which matters during cattle drives and other large and quick-paced movements of livestock. Most farmers that use electronic tags therefore also still tag their animals with traditional physical tags, necessitating a double-investment in two types of tags.

There's also the issue of tag retention. "I've talked to many people who have used these RFID tags and their cows have lost 50 percent after five years," Ken Fox, a South Dakota cow farmer and chair of R-CALF USA's Animal Identification Committee, told Wisconsin State Farmer. "By year nine or ten only 14 percent of the tags were left; and our beef cows can be with us for 15 to 20 years, so that's a serious concern." Fox also notes that the RFID scanners often need to be replaced every four or five years.

Fox points out that not all livestock operations are created equal. For dairy farmers who keep their livestock penned up, frequent replacing of tags is more logistically feasible, if still expensive. But for cattle ranchers, tag replacement can be entirely impracticable. "That just doesn't work when we've got cattle on 10,000 or 30,000 acres of range land and we handle those cattle maybe twice a year," said Fox. "If they lose those tags, how are we going to know who those cattle are?" Amish farmers have also opposed electronic tagging on moral grounds given their opposition to technology.

Large cattle operations can afford to double-tag their livestock with physical and electronic tags, and in fact, many have already done so voluntarily—which means the mandate's burden will fall heaviest on small and medium-sized farms and ranches. The USDA rule also favors large cattle operations more directly, including allowing them to use so-called "group identification" for livestock herds of a certain size and continuity.

"The new rule also provides for large-scale cattle operations to use one ID per group of a certain size, instead of one ID per animal," writes Remington Kesten in a blog post for David's Pasture, a small-scale cattle operation in Missouri. "This means that the smaller farms will actually incur more cost per animal once the mandate takes effect, than the big players will." 

Worse yet, this group identification actually undercuts the USDA's entire disease-traceability rationale for mandated electronic tagging. "This intentional loophole also reduces the traceability for large farms and exporters, contradicting the USDA's primary reason for mandating RFID Ear Tags in the first place," notes Kesten.

The rule also fails on its own terms. While supporters point to the 2003 mad cow disease outbreak in Washington state as an example of a situation where electronic tagging could have allowed for quicker identification of where the disease originated, it's worth noting that the government was still able to track the original diseased cow back to its birthplace farm in Canada within 13 days.

It's also worth recognizing that livestock disease outbreaks are exceedingly rare in the United States. An article in Lancaster Farming, which takes a generally favorable bent toward the USDA mandate, notes that hoof-and-mouth disease was last found in America in 1929. Farmers such as Fox have also highlighted the successful combatting of brucellosis in the United States, which was accomplished without electronic tagging. 

If anything, it is large-scale commercial farms that are most responsible for disease outbreaks. "There is no data in over a decade showing that food borne illnesses have resulted from disease on small farms," writes Kesten. "All major disease outbreaks in recent years have occurred on large farms." In other words, small and independent ranchers are bearing the brunt of a new rule in the name of fixing a problem that they have nothing to do with.

Finally, the USDA rule creates significant data privacy concerns. RFID tags cannot distinguish between scanners—which are portable and easily carried in hand—so potentially anyone with a scanner could access the data contained in each tag. Ominously, the USDA rule opts to use the term electronic identification tags instead of the RFID acronym, although for now RFID tags are the only technology approved by the USDA for livestock tagging. 

This flexible language means that USDA is explicitly leaving the door open to even more comprehensive tracking technology. This could come in the form of "active" RFID tags (instead of "passive" ones as currently contemplated) that have a greater range of readability or even GPS tracking of cows via satellites.

One small beacon of hope for American ranchers is that Congress appears to finally be waking up to the USDA's overreach. Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) recently introduced legislation that would prohibit the USDA from implementing any rule that mandates electronic tagging technology for cattle and bison.

The USDA is attempting to find a solution for a problem that has already been largely addressed through current practices. 

Fox puts it more colorfully: "Someone told me this story—NASA spent millions trying to develop a pen that could work in sub-zero temperatures and zero gravity. The Russians just used a pencil."

The post The Government Wants To Track Your Steak appeared first on Reason.com.

Last week, Reason reported on the rising trend of Colorado police departments increasingly using aerial drones as first responders to certain 911 calls.

A new investigation out this week reveals how such a system could work in practice, with startling implications for privacy and civil liberties.

In WIRED, Dhruv Mehrotra and Jesse Marx write about Chula Vista, a town in southern California roughly equidistant between San Diego and Tijuana. In 2018, the Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD) launched the Drone as First Responder (DFR) program, allowing 911 operators to deploy drones either in lieu of or in addition to uniformed officers—the first U.S. city to do so.

DFR "is not a replacement for officers, it's an enhancement," Police Chief Roxana Kennedy told KPBS at the time. In the program's first week, drones responded to 30 calls and led to three arrests, including a domestic violence case in which a man suspected of stabbing a woman fled back to a homeless encampment and a pursuing drone led police to his location. The program was initially limited to within one mile of the police station, but it expanded over time before receiving federal authorization to operate citywide in March 2021.

In the nearly six years since, as Mehrotra and Marx detail, CVPD drones have taken nearly 20,000 flights, "often dispatched for serious incidents like reports of armed individuals [but] also routinely deployed for minor issues such as shoplifting, vandalism, and loud music. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the city even used drones to broadcast public service announcements to homeless encampments."

WIRED examined "nearly 10,000 drone flight records from July 2021 to September 2023," encompassing "more than 22.3 million coordinates from flight paths," to assess CVPD's claim that drones are only dispatched in response to specific 911 calls or lawful searches and do not merely go roaming in search of suspicious activity.

"Drones were used in about 7 percent of the city's service requests," the authors found, including "nearly half of the incidents involving reports of armed individuals and about a quarter of those related to violent crime," plus mental health and domestic violence calls.

"The vast majority" of the 10,000 flight records analyzed "could be linked to corresponding 911 calls. But not all of them." In fact, about 10 percent "lacked a stated purpose and could not be connected to any relevant 911 call; for 498 flights, the department lists the reason as an 'unknown problem.'" Further, "nearly 400 [flights] didn't come within half a mile of where any call in the preceding half hour originated."

Even specifically sanctioned flights may be cause for concern: "Operators are trained to start recording with the drone's camera immediately, capturing video throughout the entire flight, from takeoff to landing," Mehrotra and Marx note. The cameras, "powerful enough to capture faces clearly and constantly recording while in flight, have amassed hundreds of hours of video footage of the city's residents," the vast majority of which the city has refused to release.

"On average, each drone flight passes above 13 census blocks and potentially exposes approximately 4,700 of the residents below to a drone's camera," the WIRED analysis found. And potential exposure did not fall equally: "Residents on a typical block in the working-class and largely immigrant west side of Chula Vista had drones in the skies above 10 times longer than a resident of a typical east-side block," Mehrotra wrote in WIRED's Politics Lab newsletter yesterday. West-side residents "alleged that police drones were following them personally, lingering unnecessarily in their backyards, or watching them during their most intimate moments," and others complained about the noise of drone rotors. (The CVPD claimed the disparity is due to the unequal number of 911 calls that each area receives; the WIRED analysis "confirm[ed] that this is largely the case.")

Interestingly, support for the drone program is also strongest among the lower-income Chula Vista residents most likely to be subjected to it. One Latino man—who lives in an apartment complex that CVPD drones have flown over more than 300 times since July 2021—told WIRED that the drones make him feel safer, especially after a stranger tried to steal his child and police deployed a drone to look for the suspect. This isn't unheard of: Polls show black Americans are significantly more afraid of the police than their white neighbors, yet they still want a strong, effective police presence in their neighborhoods.

Regardless, Chula Vista's drone program could be a concerning sign of where American policing is headed. Even apart from DFR, city residents have been subject to a shocking amount of surveillance in recent years: automated license plate readers, facial recognition software, and a partnership with Amazon for access to its Ring doorbell cameras. In December 2017, the CVPD partnered with a company to share its data with other law enforcement agencies, including federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

As Colorado's example makes clear, police departments increasingly see DFR programs as a plausible alternative to traditional policing, in which an officer would be dispatched to the scene of an emergency. While that's certainly true, it would also expose everyday citizens to a shocking new world of state surveillance.

The post Police Flew Drones Over One California City Nearly 20,000 Times in 6 Years appeared first on Reason.com.

Instead of dispatching an officer each time, several Colorado police departments may soon dispatch a drone to respond to certain 911 calls. While the proposal has promise, it also raises uncomfortable questions about privacy.

As Shelly Bradbury reported this week in The Denver Post, "A handful of local law enforcement agencies are considering using drones as first responders—that is, sending them in response to 911 calls—as police departments across Colorado continue to widely embrace the use of the remote-controlled flying machines."

Bradbury quotes Arapahoe County Sheriff Jeremiah Gates saying, "This really is the future of law enforcement at some point, whether we like it or not." She notes that while there are currently no official plans in place, "Gates envisions a world where a drone is dispatched to a call about a broken traffic light or a suspicious vehicle instead of a sheriff's deputy, allowing actual deputies to prioritize more pressing calls for help."

The Denver Police Department—whose then-chief in 2013 called the use of drones by police "controversial" and said that "constitutionally there are a lot of unanswered questions about how they can be used"—is also starting a program, buying several drones over the next year that can eventually function as first responders.

In addition to Denver and Arapahoe County, Bradbury lists numerous Colorado law enforcement agencies that also have drone programs, including the Colorado State Patrol, which has 24 drones, and the Commerce City Police Department, which has eight drones and 12 pilots for a city of around 62,000 people and plans to begin using them for 911 response within a year.

In addition to helping stem the number of calls an officer must respond to in person, some law enforcement agencies see this as a means of saving money. One Commerce City police official told The Denver Post that "what we see out of it is, it's a lot cheaper than an officer, basically." And Denver intends for its program to make up for an $8.4 million cut to the police budget this year.

On one hand, there is certainly merit to such a proposal: Unless they're of the Predator variety, drones are much less likely than officers to kill or maim innocent civilians—or their dogs. And as Gates noted, drones could take some of the busywork out of policing by taking some of the more mundane tasks off an officer's plate.

But it also raises privacy concerns to farm out too much police work to unmanned surveillance aircraft.

"Sending out a drone for any time there is a 911 call, it could be dangerous and lead to more over-policing of communities of color," Laura Moraff, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, told The Denver Post. "There is also just the risk that the more that we normalize having drones in the skies, the more it can really affect behavior on a massive scale, if we are just looking up and seeing drones all over the place, knowing that police are watching us."

Indeed, while this sort of dystopic panopticon would certainly make life easier for officers day to day, it would signal the further erosion of the average Coloradan's Fourth Amendment rights.

In Michigan, for example, police hired a drone pilot to take pictures of a person's property rather than go to the trouble of getting a warrant. Earlier this month, the state supreme court upheld the search, ruling that since the purpose was for civil code enforcement and not a criminal violation, it didn't matter whether the search violated the Fourth Amendment.

Thankfully, there are some positive developments on that front: In March, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled against state troopers who flew a plane over a suspect's house and took pictures with a high-powered zoom lens to see if he was growing marijuana.

"The fact that a random person might catch a glimpse of your yard while flying from one place to another does not make it reasonable for law enforcement officials to take to the skies and train high-powered optics on the private space right outside your home without a warrant," the court found. "Unregulated aerial surveillance of the home with high-powered optics is the kind of police practice that is 'inconsistent with the aims of a free and open society.'"

The post Colorado Will Replace Cops With Drones for Some 911 Calls appeared first on Reason.com.

In December 2022, Reason reported that both state and federal wildlife agents routinely trespass onto private land and plant cameras. Two Tennessee homeowners successfully sued the state over the practice, and a three-judge panel ruled in their favor. The state appealed the decision, and this week the court of appeals ruled in the homeowners' favor.

At issue is a state law allowing officers of the Tennessee Wildlife Resource Agency (TWRA) to "go upon any property, outside of buildings, posted or otherwise," in order to "enforce all laws relating to wildlife." In the case of Terry Rainwaters and Hunter Hollingsworth, TWRA officers not only entered their respective properties but also installed trail cameras to look for hunting violations, all without a warrant and ignoring "No Trespassing" signs. A lawsuit filed by the Institute for Justice (I.J.) on behalf of Rainwaters and Hollingsworth asked the court to declare the law unconstitutional and issue an injunction against the TWRA, barring it from carrying out any further unwarranted intrusions.

Under the "open-fields doctrine," Supreme Court precedent dating back to Prohibition holds that undeveloped land on someone's property lacks the same rigorous Fourth Amendment protections as their home and the "curtilage," the area immediately surrounding the home.

In March 2022, a three-judge panel from the Benton County Circuit Court ruled in the homeowners' favor, finding that the state constitution provided more protections than the Fourth Amendment. It determined that the state law allowing the TWRA practice created an "intolerable risk" of abuse and was "facially unconstitutional," but it stopped short of issuing an injunction. The state appealed the decision the following month.

In a hearing before the Tennessee Court of Appeals Western Section on June 20, 2023, I.J. attorney Josh Windham argued that the state law is unconstitutionally broad. "It allows TWRA officers to enter and roam around private land, fishing for evidence of crime," Windham said. "It doesn't require consent. It doesn't require warrants. It doesn't require probable cause….It's a blank check for officers to invade private land whenever and however they please."

Amanda Jordan argued for the Tennessee Attorney General's office that the statute was not unconstitutional and that the policy was necessary for the TWRA to do its job. She argued that "it's the particular purpose and function of the TWRA which makes such warrantless entry reasonable."

Judge Jeffrey Usman asked Jordan why, if the state would need a warrant in order to enter someone's property to look for criminal violations, it should not also need a warrant to do the same for civil violations of hunting laws. Jordan agreed that "while normal law enforcement officers would not be able to enter" without a warrant, "you have to look at the state's interest in furthering its duty of protecting and preserving" Tennessee's wildlife.

But Usman pressed further, asking whether the state has "an even stronger interest in protecting persons than wildlife." Further, he asked, "If you can't enter to investigate a crime being committed against a person…why is the interest greater to enter to protect wildlife?"

In a decision issued Thursday, the court of appeals ruled in favor of the property owners. The TWRA claimed that the homeowners' claims of injury were "speculative" as "TWRA agents have not entered the Plaintiffs' lands since September 2018." The court disagreed: Writing for a unanimous court, Usman noted in the decision,

Even if the TWRA has not entered the Plaintiffs' properties since 2018, it continues to assert its power to do so. The TWRA has asserted a continuing right to enter upon the Plaintiffs' properties. At oral argument, the TWRA suggested that if the Plaintiffs want to keep the TWRA off of their land in the future that they should desist in hunting.

"At the most foundational level," the court determined, "the statute is facially constitutional because there are applications of the statute that are constitutionally permissible," including "wild waste land areas." But in this specific scenario, where wildlife agents planted cameras on homeowners' land without ever even pursuing a warrant, the court found the TWRA's actions unconstitutional as applied.

"The TWRA's contention is a disturbing assertion of power on behalf of the government that stands contrary to the foundations of the search protections against arbitrary governmental intrusions in the American legal tradition, generally, and in Tennessee, specifically," Usman wrote. "What the TWRA claims is reasonable is not."

"Our entire theory of the case was vindicated by this decision," Windham tells Reason. "The part that goes against the trial court ruling [says] that the statute can be constitutionally applied to land where people haven't taken any steps to exert control or exert their privacy, which is a rule we don't particularly object to."

The post Tennessee Appeals Court Rules Against Wildlife Agents Who Planted Cameras on Private Land appeared first on Reason.com.

On May 10, 1924, one of the worst events in history for American civil liberties happened: 29-year-old J. Edgar Hoover assumed the role of director of the then-Bureau of Investigation. Ambitious, power-hungry, and conniving, Hoover epitomized the snake in the proverbial garden. Under his watch, which lasted until his death in 1972, the FBI emerged as an alarming adversary to constitutional freedoms. 

Starting his career at the Justice Department in 1917 at only 22 years old, Hoover quickly ascended the ranks, often at the expense of Americans' civil liberties. By 1919, he headed the Justice Department's Radical Division, charged with destroying the supposed communist infiltration of America. Hoover's lifelong disdain for communists was matched only by his disregard for their constitutional rights, making this role a perfect fit for his ambitions. 

Hoover Cuts His Unconstitutional Teeth

As head of the Radical Division, Hoover began developing the dirty tricks he would become known for, relying on tactics fundamentally at odds with a free society. For example, he started compiling the secret files that made him infamous and feared by the political elite. "What Hoover accomplished during his first months at the Radical Division forever changed the nature of American politics," writes Beverly Gage in G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, "launching an unprecedented experiment in peacetime political surveillance."

Under Hoover's leadership and fueled by the Espionage Act of 1917, federal agents aggressively pursued radicals—communists, socialists, and anarchists—tapping their phone lines and intercepting their mail. Hoover amassed more power, and at the tender age of 24, according to Tim Weiner in Enemies: A History of the FBI, Hoover "could call for the arrest of almost anyone he chose."

In April 1919, a coordinated anarchist campaign of mail bombs targeted prominent Americans, including Hoover's boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Though none of the bombs met their intended targets, the first Red Scare was on. 

Hoover answered by organizing what became known as the Palmer Raids, with the initial raid in November 1919 leading to the mass arrests of nearly 1,200 suspected radicals—far more people than Hoover secured warrants for. Many rotted in city and county jails for months, and nearly 200 were deported under the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1918.

But it was Hoover's encore the following January that epitomized what would become his lasting legacy: utter disregard for constitutionally protected rights. Beginning at 9 p.m. on January 2, 1920, Hoover led the largest mass arrests in American history. The raids continued into the week, and thousands were detained indiscriminately, many without warrants or just cause. 

According to Weiner in Enemies, "somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 people were swept up in the raids." However, he notes that we will likely never know the exact number as "no official accounting ever took place."

Rather than landing Hoover behind bars or at least ending his career, he evaded accountability and mastered the art of bureaucratic survival that protected him through eight presidential administrations. Before long, he was rewarded. On May 10, 1924, Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone named Hoover acting director of the Bureau of Investigation. Stone was a believer in civil liberties, notably, and told Hoover he was on probation and that the Bureau was out of the secret police game. 

But Hoover would have the last laugh. Soon after, he revived his domestic intelligence operations and unconstitutional ways, often operating beyond public and political accountability scrutiny.

Friends in High Places

Presidential administrations throughout the 20th century—likely fearing Hoover and his secret files—left him unchecked and either actively supported or tacitly approved of his methods. Presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Richard Nixon found Hoover's capabilities useful for their political agendas, thus embedding a culture of surveillance and political manipulation that Hoover masterfully orchestrated. 

"He wasn't acting on his own," writes FBI Special Agent Paul Letersky in The Director: My Years Assisting J. Edgar Hoover. "Since before World War II, every president he'd served—those revered by the left and those revered by the right—knew what Hoover and the Bureau were doing in domestic security and surveillance." 

During the run-up to World War II, FDR turned Hoover loose, empowering the FBI director to return to gathering intelligence on American fascists and communists. Hoover revived secret warrantless wiretapping only two years after Congress banned it in the Communications Act of 1934. 

With war breaking out in Europe, Hoover's worries about internal subversion grew. On December 6, 1939, Hoover issued his agents a secret (read: unauthorized) order named "Internal Security." The agents were to begin compiling a list of "dangerous" people—not just immigrants but also American citizens—to be detained when the war came to American shores. 

The list was known as the Custodial Detention Program. It categorized people into three groups (A, B, and C), with people in Group A considered to be the most dangerous—if war broke out, they would be arrested and detained immediately. One conspicuous name in Group A was Roger Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union and its current chief. 

Attorney General Francis Biddle learned about the Custodial Detention Program in 1943 and ordered it shuttered. Hoover simply renamed it the Security Index. It would remain secret until after Hoover's death, growing to include well over 20,000 names, almost all Americans. 

But no matter how many laws or norms Hoover broke, he continued atop his powerful perch at the FBI. President Harry Truman didn't like Hoover. In the words of his Treasury Secretary John Snyder, Truman believed "Mr. Hoover had built up a Frankenstein in the FBI." 

John F. Kennedy—like his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy—wanted to send Hoover packing. Bobby Kennedy said Hoover was "frightening" and called the FBI "a very dangerous organization." But JFK ultimately concluded, "You don't fire God."

Hoover, if nothing else, was a survivor.

Seeing Red Again

Perhaps the most infamous example of Hoover's brazen attacks on American civil liberties was the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Initiated in 1956, COINTELPRO's operations were characterized by illegal surveillance, organizational infiltration, and police harassment. With this tool in place, Hoover shifted his concentration to a new enemy: the civil rights movement and its leader, Martin Luther King Jr.

Hoover believed the Soviets—not black Americans fed up with segregation and racial injustice—were behind the civil rights movement. He also believed King was a Moscow stooge, which landed him on the Security Index.

The FBI's disdain for the civil rights movement was so visceral that agents would tip off police in Alabama about the plans of the Freedom Riders, a contingent of black and white demonstrators protesting Jim Crow laws. Freedom Riders were often met with overwhelming violence by both police and the Ku Klux Klan, who had also thoroughly infiltrated the Alabama police. 

In arguably the FBI's most infamous COINTELPRO operation, agents bugged MLK's hotel rooms as he traveled. The preacher had his own dark side. The bugs would frequently pick up the sounds of sex after late-night parties. In an effort to destroy King for good in November 1964, Hoover's intelligence chief sent the sex tapes to King's wife with a letter that gave him an ultimatum—suicide or disgrace. Its conclusion read:

King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You have just 34 days in which to do…You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.

It would take the rifle of James Earl Ray to do what the FBI couldn't—end King's life.

Hoover's corruption extended into his personal realm, too. He maintained a luxurious lifestyle, heavily subsidized by the FBI's budget and, therefore, the American taxpayer. "The Bureau provided with him chauffeurs, handymen, gardeners, valets, and the tax accountants who sorted out the honoraria he received, totaling tens of thousands of dollars, from corporate grandees," explains Weiner in Enemies. "The gifts, given for ghostwritten speeches and articles, and as private awards for public service, supplemented the freely spent tax dollars that financed Hoover's four-star style." 

On May 2, 1972, Hoover's heart gave out in his sleep. While this ended his reign of terror, Hoover's methods and the culture he cultivated within the FBI have left a lasting imprint on American law enforcement and intelligence practices. Libertarians often describe government as a form of organized crime. Hoover's godfather-like dominion over the FBI makes that comparison harder to dismiss. 

A Man of Zeal

In his dissent in Olmstead v. U.S., which coincidentally legalized government wiretapping for a short time, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: "The greatest dangers to liberty lie in insidious encroachments by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

And therein lies the danger of men like Hoover. To give the devil his due, Hoover most certainly believed plunging his hands into the latrine was necessary to defend the country he loved from those he thought would destroy it. As Letersky writes in The Director, Hoover was "a man who in his sincere belief that he was protecting his country had repeatedly violated the principles of the Constitution on which the country was founded." 

The 100th anniversary of Hoover's rise to power should serve as a reminder that the FBI—and the national security state it exemplifies—remains a dagger pointed at the heart of American civil liberties. All the Bureau needs to break bad again is another man "of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding" to return to Hoover's dirty tricks. 

There is no greater domestic threat to American freedom than a secret police. Hoover proved that for five decades until the devil called him home. May his ghost never wander the FBI's halls.

The post An American Gangster at 100: J. Edgar Hoover's Authoritarian Legacy 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.

pAI is nearly impossible for us to escape these days. a href=https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalinabryant/2024/03/14/how-ai-is-reshaping-social-media-platforms-and-5-tips-for-success/Social media/a companies, a href=https://www.wired.com/story/student-papers-generative-ai-turnitin/schools/a, a href=https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098601458/artificial-intelligence-job-discrimination-disabilitiesworkplaces/a, and even a href=https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/04/dating-apps-are-starting-crack/678022/dating apps/a are all trying to harness AI to remake their services and platforms, and AI can impact our lives in ways large and small. While many of these efforts are just getting underway — and often raise significant civil rights issues — you might be surprised to learn that America’s most prolific spy agency has for years been one of AI’s biggest adopters./p pThe National Security Agency (NSA) is the self-described a href=https://www.nsa.gov/leader/a among U.S. intelligence agencies racing to develop and deploy AI. It’s also the agency that sweeps up vast quantities of our phone calls, text messages, and internet communications as it conducts a href=https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/five-things-to-know-about-nsa-mass-surveillance-and-the-coming-fight-in-congressmass surveillance/a around the world. In recent years, AI has transformed many of the NSA’s daily operations: the agency uses AI tools to help a href=https://perma.cc/97GE-4ULZgather/a information on foreign governments, a href=https://fedtechmagazine.com/article/2022/10/intelligence-community-developing-new-uses-ai-perfconaugment/a human language processing, a href=https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-helps-u-s-intelligence-track-hackers-targeting-critical-infrastructure-944553facomb/a through networks for cybersecurity threats, and even monitor its own analysts as they do their jobs./p pUnfortunately, that’s about all we know. As the NSA a href=https://perma.cc/97GE-4ULZintegrates/a AI into some of its most profound decisions, it’s left us in the dark about how it uses AI and what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect everyday Americans and others around the globe whose privacy hangs in the balance./p pThat’s why we’re suing to find out what the NSA is hiding. Today, the ACLU filed a href=https://www.aclu.org/documents/nsa-ai-foia-complainta lawsuit/a under the Freedom of Information Act to compel the release of recently completed studies, roadmaps, and reports that explain how the NSA is using AI and what impact it is having on people’s civil rights and civil liberties. Indeed, although much of the NSA’s surveillance is aimed at people overseas, those activities increasingly ensnare the sensitive communications and data of people in the United States as well./p pBehind closed doors, the NSA has been studying the effects of AI on its operations for several years. A year-and-a-half ago, the Inspectors General at the Department of Defense and the NSA issued a a href=https://perma.cc/A4L3-EC4Kjoint report/a examining how the NSA has integrated AI into its operations. NSA officials have also publicly lauded the completion of a href=https://perma.cc/F4ZT-PNTBstudies/a, a href=https://perma.cc/EQB4-XDVCroadmaps/a, and a href=https://perma.cc/SXP8-4APAcongressionally-mandated plans/a on the agency’s use of novel technologies like generative AI in its surveillance activities. But despite transparency pledges, none of those documents have been released to the public, not even in redacted form./p pThe government’s secrecy flies in the face of its own public commitments to transparency when it comes to AI. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and more than a dozen other intelligence agencies, has touted transparency as a core principle in its a href=https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/AI_Ethics_Framework_for_the_Intelligence_Community_10.pdfArtificial Intelligence Ethics Framework for the Intelligence Community/a. And a href=https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-promoting-use-trustworthy-artificial-intelligence-federal-government/#:~:text=Certain%20agencies%20have%20already%20adopted,National%20Intelligence's%20Principles%20of%20Artificialadministrations/a a href=https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/10/30/executive-order-on-the-safe-secure-and-trustworthy-development-and-use-of-artificial-intelligence/from both parties/a have reiterated that AI must be used in a manner that builds public confidence while also advancing principles of equity and justice. By failing to disclose the kinds of critical information sought in our lawsuit, the government is failing its own ethical standards: it is rapidly deploying powerful AI systems without public accountability or oversight./p pThe government’s lack of transparency is especially concerning given the dangers that AI systems pose for people’s civil rights and civil liberties. As we’ve already seen in areas like a href=https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-face-recognition-fuels-racist-systems-of-policing-and-immigration-and-why-congress-must-act-nowlaw enforcement/a and a href=https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/how-artificial-intelligence-might-prevent-you-from-getting-hiredemployment/a, using algorithmic systems to gather and analyze intelligence can compound privacy intrusions and perpetuate discrimination. AI systems may amplify biases already embedded in training data or rely on flawed algorithms, and they may have higher error rates when applied to people of color and marginalized communities. For example, built-in bias or flawed intelligence algorithms may lead to additional surveillance and investigation of individuals, exposing their lives to wide-ranging government scrutiny. In the most extreme cases, bad tips could be passed along to agencies like Department of Homeland Security or the FBI, leading to immigration consequences or even wrongful arrests./p pAI tools have the potential to expand the NSA’s surveillance dragnet more than ever before, expose private facts about our lives through vast data-mining activities, and automate decisions that once relied on human expertise and judgment. These are dangerous, powerful tools, as the NSA’s own ethical principles recognize. The public deserves to know how the government is using them./p div class=mp-md wp-link div class=wp-link__img-wrapper a href=https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/the-government-is-racing-to-deploy-ai-but-at-what-cost-to-our-freedom target=_blank tabindex=-1 img width=1200 height=628 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/0c811044641e2e113a33ba4134743c76.jpg class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt= decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/0c811044641e2e113a33ba4134743c76.jpg 1200w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/0c811044641e2e113a33ba4134743c76-768x402.jpg 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/0c811044641e2e113a33ba4134743c76-400x209.jpg 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/0c811044641e2e113a33ba4134743c76-600x314.jpg 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/0c811044641e2e113a33ba4134743c76-800x419.jpg 800w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/0c811044641e2e113a33ba4134743c76-1000x523.jpg 1000w sizes=(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px / /a /div div class=wp-link__title a href=https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/the-government-is-racing-to-deploy-ai-but-at-what-cost-to-our-freedom target=_blank The Government is Racing to Deploy AI, But at What Cost to Our Freedom? /a /div div class=wp-link__description a href=https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/the-government-is-racing-to-deploy-ai-but-at-what-cost-to-our-freedom target=_blank tabindex=-1 p class=is-size-7-mobile is-size-6-tabletOur FOIA request seeks to uncover information about what types of AI tools intelligence agencies are deploying, what rules constrain their use, and.../p /a /div div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet a href=https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/the-government-is-racing-to-deploy-ai-but-at-what-cost-to-our-freedom target=_blank tabindex=-1 p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p /a /div /div

May Day was coming up and the feds were worried. In April 2015, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security sent out a bulletin warning that "anarchist extremists will probably engage in criminal or violent activity in one or more US cities on 1 May 2015 and may attempt to co-opt legal protest activity to carry out attacks."

It was the anniversary of the deadly 1886 labor unrest in Chicago's Haymarket. Several anarchists were executed for the violence back then, and in the 2015 bulletin's words, May 1 became "an international day honoring workers' rights that frequently results in anarchist extremist violence both domestically and internationally." To emphasize that anarchism was still a live threat, the Feds listed several recent anarchist attacks in their bulletin.

One of them, the firebombing of a congressional office in Kansas City, Missouri, was serious stuff. Police car tires were also slashed in Bloomington, Indiana; anonymous anarchists claimed online that the vandalism was in "Solidarity with the revolt in Ferguson." But another incident was more Parks and Recreation than V for Vendetta.

"In October 2014, 'some Bull City anarchists' chained the front door and glued the locks to a parking lot at a government facility in Durham, North Carolina, according to media reporting," the memo read. "The graffiti on the front of the building stated 'Solidarity with Missouri Rebels' and '[Expletive] the Police.'"

Reason was unable to locate any media reports from October 2014 mentioning the phrase "Bull City anarchists" or a parking lot incident in Durham like the one the bulletin describes.

Journalist Emma Best obtained a copy of the bulletin through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and published it to the public records platform MuckRock late last month. The FBI heavily redacted the version it sent Best. Reason also found an original copy of the bulletin in the BlueLeaks document dump, a trove of homeland security "fusion center" files released by hackers in June 2020.

The parts of the bulletin that the FBI had chosen to redact are a story unto themselves. The original version states that there is "no specific credible reporting to indicate anarchist extremists are planning violent criminal activity." But the FBI censored that line in the version it sent to MuckRock and Best under FOIA.

Curiously, the FOIA version also censored the assessment that "anti-police and law enforcement sentiment will likely continue to serve as a prominent motivator for anarchist extremists in 2015, barring any significant changes in anarchist extremist rhetoric or major public events that could galvanize anarchist extremists against other traditional targets."

Editorializing aside, that prediction turned out to be true. Anarchists played a significant role in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and were often blamed for violence during the unrest. 

In the FOIA version of the bulletin, the FBI redacted its specific recommendations for local police, citing the "law enforcement techniques" exemption to the Freedom of Information Act. Not that any of the advice was hard to guess. Basically, if police see anarchists training or gathering weapons and barricade materials, they should be extra vigilant and try to confiscate the weapons.

But, the Feds warned, local police shouldn't get too paranoid.

"Some of these behavioral indicators may be constitutionally protected activities and should be supported by additional facts to justify increased suspicions," the bulletin noted. "Independently, each indicator may represent legitimate recreational or commercial activities; however, multiple indicators could suggest a heightened threat."

The post Feds Worried About Anarchists Gluing the Locks to a Government Facility appeared first on Reason.com.

The government had a few years to sort this out, but as usual, the final call came down to the last minute. Shortly after Section 702 expired at midnight, April 19, the Senate pushed through a two-year reauthorization — one pretty much free of any reforms.

This happened despite there being a large and vocal portion of the Republican party seeking to curb the FBI’s access to these collections because some of their own had been subjected to the sort of abuse that has become synonymous with the FBI’s interaction with this particular surveillance program.

The reauthorization passed to the Senate from the House had been stripped of a proposed warrant requirement and saddled with an especially expansive definition of the term “electronic communication service provider.” Here’s how Senator Ron Wyden explained it while speaking out against the amendment:

Now, if you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a wifi router, a phone, or a computer. Think about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. These people are not just the engineers who install, maintain and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government could deputize any one of these people against their will, and force them to become an agent for Big Brother.

For example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

This could all happen without any oversight. The FISA Court won’t know about it. Congress won’t know about it. The Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. And unless they can afford high priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all.

So, instead of reform, we’re getting an even worse version of what’s already been problematic, especially when the FBI’s involved. As the clock ticked down on this vote (but not really: the FISA court had already granted the Biden administration’s request to keep the program operable as-is until 2025), attempts were made to strip the bill of this dangerous addition and add back in the warrant requirement amendment that had failed in the House.

None of this worked, as Gaby Del Valle reports for The Verge:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced an amendment that would have struck language in the House bill that expanded the definition of “electronic communications service provider.” Under the House’s new provision, anyone “who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.” The expansion, Wyden has claimed, would force “ordinary Americans and small businesses to conduct secret, warrantless spying.” The Wyden-Hawley amendment failed 34-58, meaning that the next iteration of the FISA surveillance program will be more expansive than before.

Both Sens. Paul and Dick Durbin (D-IL) introduced separate amendments imposing warrant requirements on surveilling Americans. A similar amendment failed in the House on a 212-212 vote. Durbin’s narrower warrant requirement wouldn’t require intelligence agencies to obtain a warrant to query for those communications, though it requires one to access them.

The version headed to the president’s desk is the worst version. The rush to push this version of the bill through possibly gained a little urgency when two unnamed service providers informed the government they would stop complying with FISA orders pretty much immediately if the Senate didn’t renew the program.

One communications provider informed the National Security Agency that it would stop complying on Monday with orders under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables U.S. intelligence agencies to gather without a warrant the digital communications of foreigners overseas — including when they text or email people inside the United States.

Another provider suggested that it would cease complying at midnight Friday unless the law is reauthorized, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

We’ll never know how empty these threats might have been or if the Intelligence Community would have even noticed the brief interruption in the flow of communications. Section 702 has been given a two-year extension in the form approved by the Senate, superseding the FISA Court’s blessing of one more year of uninterrupted spying if discussions over renewal blew past the April 19, 2024 deadline.

If you’re a fan of bipartisan efforts — no matter the outcome — well… enjoy your victory, I guess. But there’s nothing about this renewal debacle that can actually be called a win. Unless you’re the FBI, of course. Then it’s all gravy.

I’ve mentioned more than a few times how the singular hyperventilation about TikTok is kind of silly distraction from the fact that the United States is too corrupt to pass a modern privacy law, resulting in no limit of dodgy behavior, abuse, and scandal. We have no real standards thanks to corruption, and most people have no real idea of the scale of the dysfunction.

Case in point: a new study out of the University of Pennsylvania (hat tip to The Register) analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 U.S. hospitals, and found that 96 percent of them were doling out sensitive user visitor data to Google, Meta, and a vast coalition of dodgy data brokers.

Hospitals, it should be clear, aren’t legally required to publish website privacy policies that clearly detail how and with whom they share visitor data. Again, because we’re too corrupt as a country to require and enforce such requirements. The FTC does have some jurisdiction, but it’s too short staffed and under-funded (quite intentionally) to tackle the real scope of U.S. online privacy violations.

So the study found that a chunk of these hospital websites didn’t even have a privacy policy. And of the ones that did, about half the time the over-verbose pile of ambiguous and intentionally confusing legalese didn’t really inform visitors that their data was being transferred to a long list of third parties. Or, for that matter, who those third-parties even are:

“…we found that although 96.0% of hospital websites exposed users to third-party tracking, only 71.0% of websites had an available website privacy policy…Only 56.3% of policies (and only 40 hospitals overall) identified specific third-party recipients.”

Data in this instance can involve everything including email and IP addresses, to what you clicked on, what you researched, demographic info, and location. This was all a slight improvement from a study they did a year earlier showing that 98 percent of hospital websites shared sensitive data with third parties. The professors clearly knew what to expect, but were still disgusted in comments to The Register:

“It’s shocking, and really kind of incomprehensible,” said Dr Ari Friedman, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “People have cared about health privacy for a really, really, really long time.” It’s very fundamental to human nature. Even if it’s information that you would have shared with people, there’s still a loss, just an intrinsic loss, when you don’t even have control over who you share that information with.”

If this data is getting into the hands of dodgy international and unregulated data brokers, there’s no limit of places it can end up. Brokers collect a huge array of demographic, behavioral, and location data, use it to create detailed profiles of individuals, then sell access in a million different ways to a long line of additional third parties, including the U.S. government and foreign intelligence agencies.

There should be hard requirements about transparent, clear, and concise notifications of exactly what data is being collected and sold and to whom. There should be hard requirements that users have the ability to opt out (or, preferably in the cases of sensitive info, opt in). There should be hard punishment for companies and executives that play fast and loose with consumer data.

And we have none of that because our lawmakers decided, repeatedly, that making money was more important than market health, consumer welfare, and public safety. The result has been a parade of scandals that skirt ever closer to people being killed, at scale.

So again, the kind of people that whine about the singular privacy threat that is TikTok (like say FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, or Senator Marsha Blackburn) — but have nothing to say about the much broader dysfunction created by rampant corruption — are advertising they either don’t know what they’re talking about, or aren’t addressing the full scope of the problem in good faith.

Tech companies and First Amendment groups are calling attention to a provision in a domestic spying bill that they say would significantly expand the federal government's power to snoop on Americans' digital communications—potentially by forcing employees of private businesses to become informants.

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a global trade group that represents major tech companies including Google and Microsoft, is calling for last-minute changes to the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which could get a final vote in the Senate on Friday. The bill's primary purpose is to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows U.S. intelligence agencies to scoop up communications between Americans and individuals abroad.

But the bill also includes a provision that "vastly expands the U.S. government's warrantless surveillance capabilities, damaging the competitiveness of U.S. technology companies large and small, and arguably imperiling the continued global free flow of data between the U.S. and its allies," the ITI said in a statement this week.

As Reason reported in December, that provision means that nearly any business or entity with access to telecom or internet equipment could be forced to participate in the federal government's digital spying regime. The big target, as Wired noted this week, is likely to be the owners and operators of data centers.

Under the current FISA law, Section 702 only applies to telecommunications companies and internet service providers. But the amendment included in the RISAA would expand that definition to cover "any service provider" with "access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store" electronic communications.

"The practical impact of the revised definition is significant and means any company, vendor, or any of their employees who touch the physical infrastructure of the internet could now be swept under FISA's scope and compelled to assist with FISA surveillance," the ITI warns. "If this amendment were to become law, any electronic communications service equipment provider or others with access to that equipment, including their employees or the employees of their service providers, would be subject to compelled FISA disclosure or assistance."

In short, even someone like a custodian could be legally compelled to assist in the federal government's spying efforts.

Marc Zwillinger, an attorney who has experience arguing before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), wrote this week on his personal blog that the RISAA would "permit the government to compel the assistance of a wide range of additional entities and persons in conducting surveillance under FISA 702."

The newest version is less broad than what was initially proposed in December—for example, gathering places like hotels and coffee shops have been specifically excluded from the law. But, as Zwillinger writes, the revised definition would cover "the owners and operators of facilities that house equipment used to store or carry data, such as data centers and buildings owned by commercial landlords, who merely have access to communications equipment in their physical space," as well as "other persons with access to such facilities and equipment, including delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utility providers."

Because newsrooms and other places where journalists work are not specifically exempted, some First Amendment groups are also worried about how the expansion of digital spying authority could affect journalism.

"This bill would basically allow the government to institute a spy draft," Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), said in a statement on Thursday. "If this bill becomes law, sources will rightly suspect that American newsrooms are bugged by the government. And journalists won't be able to reassure them that they're not, because, for all they know, the building maintenance worker is an involuntary government spy."

The reactions from tech companies, legal experts, and free press advocates come on the heels of objections raised by various civil libertarian groups. As Reason's J.D. Tuccille covered earlier this week, some opponents of the FISA reauthorization bill have taken to calling it "the 'Everyone Is a Spy' provision, since potentially anybody with access to a laptop or WiFi router could be compelled to help the government conduct surveillance."

If the RISAA is approved by the Senate on Friday, as expected, and signed by President Joe Biden, Americans will have little recourse except to hope that the Justice Department is telling the truth when it says it won't use the broad authority contained in the bill. In a letter to senators on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote that his department "commits to applying" the new definition of electronic communications service providers in a narrow fashion. "The number of technology companies" covered by the new provision, he wrote, "is extremely small."

Of course, anyone with a working knowledge of the history of federal surveillance programs—or any government initiative, for that matter—is probably right to be skeptical of that assurance.

"Even if the bill is intended to target data centers, it doesn't say that," Stern said in a statement. "And, even if one trusts the Biden administration to honor its pinky swears, they're not binding on any future administrations."

The post How the FISA Reauthorization Bill Could Force Maintenance Workers and Custodians To Become Government Spies appeared first on Reason.com.

At press time, the U.S. Senate is debating whether to not only renew the U.S. government's spying powers under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) but dramatically expand them. That's because the House, in reauthorizing the expiring powers last week after an extended battle, adopted language that broadens the definition of those who can be forced to help the government snoop. That leaves the Senate as the last check on already controversial legislation that just became more dangerous before it's signed by a president eager to exercise its power.

Unchecked Surveillance Authority

"The legislation coming from the House gives the government unchecked authority to order millions of Americans to spy on behalf of the government," warns Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.). "Under current law—section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the government can order the telephone companies and email and internet service providers to hand over communications. This bill expands that power dramatically. It says that the government can force cooperation from, quote, 'any other service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications.'"

The problem, point out privacy advocates, is that even before the House of Representatives debated the provisions of the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA)—rejecting (on a tie vote) a requirement that government agents get a warrant before searching records about Americans, and ultimately settling on a two-year renewal of surveillance powers—members of the House Intelligence Committee inserted new and troubling language.

Their intention, according to Charlie Savage of The New York Times, was to clarify that cloud-computing data centers must cooperate with government spooks. But that's not what they confined themselves to in their changes to the text. As Wyden emphasizes, the bill now broadly applies to service providers with access to communication equipment. After much protest, exceptions were written in for hotels, restaurants, dwellings, and community centers. But everybody else is subject to the law.

Everyone Is a Spy

"An enormous range of businesses would still be fair game," protests a coalition of privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights groups in a letter to Senate leadership from both parties, "including grocery stores, department stores, hardware stores, laundromats, barber shops, fitness centers, and—perhaps most disturbingly—commercial landlords that rent out the office space where tens of millions of Americans go to work every day, including news media headquarters, political campaign offices, advocacy and grassroots organizations, lobbying firms, and law offices."

The coalition, which includes groups of widely varying political views, refers to this language as the "Everyone Is a Spy" provision, since potentially anybody with access to a laptop or WiFi router could be compelled to help the government conduct surveillance. Given how broadly the word access can be defined, that might even include cable installers, repairmen, and house cleaners.

"If this became law, millions of American small business owners would have a legal obligation to hand over data that runs through their equipment," caution former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–Va.) and former Sen. Mark Udall (D–Colo.), both now with the Project for Privacy and Surveillance Accountability. "And when they're done with doing their part in mass surveillance, these small businesses would then be placed under a gag order to hide their activities from their customers."

RISAA's Section 702 reauthorization is pending in the Senate, though the White House is pushing lawmakers "to swiftly pass this bill before the authority expires on April 19," so abuses of the new language are hypothetical. But it's a fact that the law's existing surveillance power, without the broadened scope of the "Everyone Is a Spy" provision, has already been misused against a great many Americans.

Surveillance Abuse Under Existing Law

In 2023, the House Judiciary Committee held two hearings to examine "the FBI's abuses of its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorities." Declassified documents offered glimpses of misuses of surveillance power including FBI spying on a U.S. senator, a state lawmaker, and a judge.

"Section 702 poses significant privacy and civil liberties risks, most notably from U.S. person queries and batch queries" in which multiple search terms are run through the system as part of a single action, according to a report published last September by the federal Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). That report revealed that roughly three million queries on Americans were run just in 2021.

"Significant privacy and civil liberties risks also include the scope of permissible targeting," added the PCLOB review.

If the scope of permissible targeting is already risky, expanding the law's language to compel cooperation from "any other service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications" would seem to dramatically compound the risks.

Government Itself Is a Threat

"No democracy should give its government the Orwellian power contained in the House bill," cautions Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. "The Senate must take the time it needs to get this right, or our democracy will pay the price."

Fortunately, Ron Wyden isn't the Senate's only skeptic when it comes to Section 702 and domestic surveillance. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) opposed extending the law even before its language was broadened to include the "Everyone Is a Spy" provision.

"Using 702, Americans' communications content and metadata is inevitably swept up and kept in government databases without a warrant. Law enforcement agencies then access Americans' communications without a warrant," Paul warned in December. "Those who make the lazy and predictable argument that government is your only shield from threats always fail to mention that government itself often is the threat."

Civil libertarians were right about the dangers of Section 702 before it was amended to apply to landlords and cable installers. Last year's House hearings demonstrated that the law's power has already been abused by government officials. There's no reason to believe they'll be more restrained in their snooping when the law is less so.

The post Revised Section 702 Surveillance Authority Poses More Danger Than Ever appeared first on Reason.com.

Say what you will about the general politeness of Canadians and the genteel nature of their secondhand Britishness, but never forget their cops can be just as petty and vindictive as our cops.

Law enforcement entities everywhere have a massive sense of entitlement. Officers and officials tend to think that people should comply with whatever they say, never question any assertions they make, and give them whatever they ask for without providing the proper paperwork.

The fact is that people aren’t obliged to give cops things they’re only supposed to be able to obtain with warrants. Voluntary consent eliminates this obligation, and that’s fine as long as it’s actual informed consent.

But cops tend to get all shitty when they’re unable to obtain stuff without warrants. Rejected requests for consent are often treated as inherently suspicious. Reluctance to cooperate (without the existence of court orders compelling more) is viewed as obstruction and, sometimes, results in criminal charges (or at least an arrest) even when the person being badgered by cops is completely in the right.

This report of a Canadian bar’s refusal to voluntarily relinquish its parking lot recordings contains plenty of statements from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and others in the law enforcement field. And every single statement makes it clear Canadian law enforcement believes they’re owed whatever evidence might be available and should never be inconvenienced (even momentarily) by demands officers go get a warrant they could easily obtain within minutes.

A shooting happened outside of the Cactus Club Cafe and the RCMP asked anyone in the area to come forward with any recordings they might have of the area the shooting took place in. The RCMP approached the club and was told it needed to obtain a warrant if it wanted copies of the club’s parking lot footage.

As the owners of the restaurant chain pointed out in its statement to Canada’s Global News, this is standard operating procedure for the company.

“The process of requesting a production order before releasing surveillance footage is a standard practice put in place across all of our locations. This protects privacy and ensures we’re following the law.”

Which is, of course, the way it should be. The company should comply with court orders but it should not feel obligated to hand over footage obtained by its cameras without one.

Everyone else — including the national association representing bars and restaurants — appears to feel the Cactus Club is in the wrong.

“The general protocol is for people to give up, not just restaurants, but people to give up video to help and assist the police in a manner that’s fairly quick,” said president and CEO Ian Tostenson.

Totenson heads up British Columbia’s Restaurant and Food Service Association. But rather than advocate for the rights of the private companies he represents, he has chosen to present the Cactus Club as some sort of scofflaw, even if all it did was ask to see a warrant before handing over recordings that can only be obtained with a warrant or consent.

That demand for the proper paperwork was apparently a first for the RCMP, which seemingly feels it shouldn’t need to seek warrants when there’s [checks article again] suspected criminal activity occurring. Here’s just one of the statements made by British Columbia’s “visibly upset” public safety minister.

“It’s the first time it’s crossed my desk that there has been a refusal to initially comply with police request for video,” Mike Farnworth told Global News in an interview Tuesday.

Well, that’s a shame. Too many private entities are being far too compliant. There’s no legal obligation to consent to warrantless searches of any private property, including recordings created with privately-owned cameras. Just because most people turn over footage voluntarily doesn’t make the Cactus Club wrong. It just means most people don’t care about their rights, much less the precedent they’re inadvertently setting — the sort of low bar that ensures law enforcement officers will be easily offended (and pettily vindictive) the moment anyone provides the least bit of (explicitly legal!) resistance.

And it’s not just the RCMP. It’s also the mayor of Coquitlam, where this particular club is located.

“For a local business to insist that the RCMP get a warrant for information that they might have that could lead to an arrest is outrageous…” 

It definitely is not “outrageous.” It’s exactly within their well-established rights. The RCMP has an obligation to obtain consent or a warrant. It failed to get consent. It did, as the article notes, secure a warrant and the footage investigators were seeking. Everything worked out. And one would logically assume it didn’t take much to secure the warrant, considering the strong likelihood the restaurant’s cameras captured footage of the shooting.

So, why all the shouting? Well, it appears that everyone from the RCMP official to the mayor to the head of a private retail association believes cops should never have to get a warrant when investigating crimes. Holy shit, what a statement to make, even implicitly.

And somehow, it gets even worse. The club’s decision to exercise its rights has been met with explicit retaliation by the BC government. Here’s more from the BC public safety minister, who apparently sees nothing wrong with punishing a company for asking to see a warrant:

In the most recent case, Farnworth said the province has since amended the terms and conditions of the Barnet Highway Cactus Club’s liquor licence.

“They must have video surveillance and they must provide it to the police or a liquor inspector upon request,” said the public safety minister.

A warrant is a “request,” you fool. And yet, this entity has decided to “amend” a liquor license of this one club to force it to comply with warrantless demands for private camera footage — something that clearly falls outside of its legal obligations. But now, it’s the law of land — a law that now explicitly singles out a single business with a compelled compliance mandate.

Hopefully, the Cactus Club will sue. This is clearly retaliatory. It’s now subject to mandates that don’t apply to other liquor license holders in British Columbia… just the one that did nothing more than ask the RCMP to respect its rights as a private business.

There are a variety of reasons to alter, if not actually end, the Section 702 collection. Whatever value it may have in terms of national security, the very real fact is that it has been endlessly abused by the FBI since its inception.

It’s a foreign-facing collection, which means it harvests communications and data involving foreign targets of US surveillance. But there’s a massive backdoor built into this collection. Collecting foreign communications often means collecting US persons’ communications with foreign persons or entities.

That’s where the FBI has gone interloping with alarming frequency. US persons’ communications are supposed to be masked, preventing the FBI from engaging in warrantless surveillance of US-based communications. This simply hasn’t happened. And the FBI has not only performed second-hand abuse of this collection regularly, but it has equally regularly refused to be honest with the FISA court about its activities.

The latest rejection of a clean reauthorization of Section 702 has nothing to do with the FBI’s continuous refusal to play by the rules. Instead, it has to do with the few times it decided to engage in some backdoor action that targeted the party in power or people temporarily involved with inflicting four years of Donald Trump on a nation that was definitely greater before someone started promising to make it great again.

However, the FBI — despite having abused its access for years — continues to insist the program should not be ended or altered. It has actually admitted its backdoor searches would otherwise be illegal without this program and its side benefits — something that should have hastened legislators on both sides of the political aisle to shut the whole thing down until these critical flaws were patched.

Instead, the whole thing have devolved into the expected in-fighting. Some legislators proposed meaningful reforms to the program, which were soundly rejected by a lot of Republicans simply because some Democrats were involved. The Republicans heading up the House Intelligence Committee proposed their own reforms, but the only thing they really wanted to change was the FBI’s ability to place Republicans under surveillance.

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has decided the FBI is right, no matter how often it’s been wrong. Ignoring years of casual abuse, the Biden team has pushed for a clean reauthorization — something it may not have done if it weren’t for all the Republicans demanding (mostly for self-serving reasons) the program be ended or altered.

Unfortunately, Section 702 continues to live on, even if it’s in an unresponsive coma at the moment. Rather than let the surveillance authority expire, a bi-partisan effort did the country dirty by extending it until April 2024 where it could be further disagreed about following the return of Congressional reps to Capitol Hill.

April just isn’t good enough, apparently. The Biden Administration wants to buy even more time without any termination or authorization, presumably in hopes that the current furor will die down and this executive power will be granted a clean re-authorization. (Of course, by that point, there may be an actual Fuhrer in play, given Donald Trump’s early sweeps of critical primaries.)

Here’s Charlie Savage with more details for the New York Times:

The Biden administration is moving to extend a disputed warrantless surveillance program into April 2025, according to officials familiar with the matter.

The decision by the administration, which requires asking for court approval, seemed likely to roil an already turbulent debate in Congress over its fate. The program has scrambled the usual partisan lines, with members of both parties on each side of seeing the program as potentially abusive of civil liberties or as necessary for protecting national security.

This is probably preferable to holding a budget bill hostage in an executive office display of “I’ll hold my breath until I get my way.” And it’s preferable to Republican efforts to alter Section 702 simply to protect themselves from illegal surveillance. But it’s definitely not preferable to actually engaging with the inherent problems of this surveillance program, all of which seem to lead back to the FBI and its insistence on abusing its access.

This throws these problems on the back burner for another year. And it will be yet another year where the FBI abuses its access. We can make this assumption because there’s never been a year where the FBI hasn’t abused this surveillance power. Refusing to address an issue that’s been publicly acknowledged for several years now just to ensure the NSA doesn’t lose this surveillance program is irresponsible. The Biden Administration’s apparently tactic agreement with assertions made by an agency that has proven it can’t be trusted doesn’t bode well for anyone.

And, if this yearlong reprieve results in a clean reauthorization, the Biden Administration will quite possibly be handing this renewed power to Republicans now allowed to engage in their worst excesses, thanks to the re-election of Dumpster Fire Grover Cleveland.

The best thing the current administration could do at this point is allow the authority to die, which would force Republicans who love power (but hate to see it wielded against them) try to reconcile their desire for a surveillance state with the inevitable reality they will sometimes be on the receiving end of this surveillance. The worst thing it can do is what it’s doing now: pressing the pause button because it doesn’t have the desire or willingness to go head-to-head with an agency that claims — without facts in evidence — the only way it can keep this country secure from foreign threats is by warrantlessly spying on Americans.

So we’ve noted for a long while that the fixation on China and TikTok specifically has often been used by some lazy thinkers (like the FCC’s Brendan Carr) as a giant distraction from the fact the U.S. has proven too corrupt to regulate data brokers, or even to pass a baseline privacy law for the internet era. The cost of this corruption, misdirection, and distraction has been fairly obvious.

Enter the Biden administration, which this week announced that Biden was signing a new executive order that would restrict the sale of sensitive behavioral, location, financial, or other data to “countries of concern,” including Russia and China. At a speech, a senior administration official stated the new restrictions would shore up national security:

“Our current policies and laws leave open access to vast amounts of American sensitive personal data. Buying data through data brokers is currently legal in the United States, and that reflects a gap in our national security toolkit that we are working to fill with this program.”

The EO fact sheet is vague, but states the Biden administration will ask the The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Defense, and Veterans Affairs, to all work in concert to ensure problematic countries aren’t able to buy “large scale” data repositories filled with U.S. consumer data, and to pass new rules and regulations tightening up the flow of data broker information.

We’ve noted for a long, long time that our corrupt failure to pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers was not only a frontal assault on consumer privacy, it was easily exploitable by foreign intelligence agencies looking to build massive surveillance databases on American citizens.

It’s why it was bizarre to see lawmakers myopically fixated on banning TikTok, while ignoring the fact that our corrupt policy failures had made TikTok’s privacy issues possible in the first place.

You could ban TikTok tomorrow with a giant patriotic flourish to “fix privacy,” but if you’re not willing to rein in the hundreds of sleazy international data brokers doing the same thing (or in some cases much worse at even bigger scale), you haven’t actually accomplished much beyond posturing to get on TV.

The EO sounds at least like a first step (depending entirely on the implementation), but is filled with some flowery and revisionist language. This bit, for example:

“These actions not only align with the U.S.’ longstanding support for the trusted free flow of data, but also are consistent with U.S.’ commitment to an open Internet with strong and effective protections for individuals’ privacy and measures to preserve governments’ abilities to enforce laws and advance policies in the public interest.”

Again, we don’t have a privacy law for the internet era in 2024 not because it was too hard to write one, but because Congress is too corrupt to pass one. We have, repeatedly, made the decision to prioritize the profits of an interconnected array of extractive industries over the public welfare, public safety, and even national security.

The result has been a massive, interconnected, hyper-surveillance market that hoovers up data on your every fart down to the millimeter, bundles that data up in vast profiles, and monetizes it across the globe with very little if any real concern for exploitation and abuse. All under the pretense that because much of this data was “anonymized” (a meaningless, gibberish term), there could be no possible harm.

The result has been just a rotating crop of ugly scandals that have gotten progressively worse. All while we (mostly) sat on our hands whining about TikTok.

The FTC has been cracking down on some location data brokers, but generally lacks the resources (by design) to tackle the problem at the scale it’s occurring. They lack the resources because the over-arching policy of the U.S. government for the better part of the last generation has been to defund and defang regulators under the simplistic pretense this unleashes untold innovation (with no downside).

This myopic view of how government works is all pervasive in America, and has resulted in most corporate oversight in the U.S. having the structural integrity of damp cardboard. And it’s all about to get significantly worse courtesy of a handful of looming Supreme Court rulings aimed at eroding regulatory independence even further. There’s a very real cost for this approach, and the check has been, and will be, increasingly coming due in a wide variety of very obvious and spectacular ways.

But we also don’t have a privacy law and refuse to regulate data brokers because the U.S. government benefits from the dysfunction, having realized long ago that the barely regulated data broker market is a great way to purchase data you’d otherwise need to get a warrant to obtain. Data broker location data is now tethered tightly to all manner of U.S. government operations, including military targeting.

The press has also played a role in failing to educate the public about the real risks of failing to regulate data brokers or pass a privacy law. Just 23 percent of the U.S. public even knows the government has failed to pass a privacy law for the internet era. And when the U.S. press does cover privacy, the fact that rank corruption is at the heart of the dysfunction is routinely never mentioned.

So yes, it’s great that we’re starting to see some growing awareness about the real world costs of our corrupt failures on privacy policy. Senator Ron Wyden, in particular, has been doing an amazing job sounding the alarm on how this failure is being exploited by not just a diverse array of self-serving companies, but a surging authoritarian movement in the post-Roe era.

But it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than an EO to course correct. It’s going to take shaking Congress out of its corrupt apathy. And the only thing I think will accomplish that will be a privacy scandal so massive and unprecedented (potentially including mass fatalities or the leaking of powerful figures’ data at unprecedented scale), that elected officials have absolutely no choice but do do their fucking job.

The UK’s privacy regulator says the government did not take into account the intrusiveness of ankle tags that continuously monitor a person’s location.

On March 5, San Franciscans will have the opportunity to vote on a ballot measure that would decide whether or not to make them into guinea pigs for surveillance experiments by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).

Proposition E purports to streamline the SFPD, with sections on community engagement, recordkeeping, and the department's vehicle pursuit and use of force policies. But its portion on department use of surveillance technology is troubling.

Under an existing ordinance passed in 2019, the SFPD may only use "surveillance technologies"—like surveillance cameras, automatic license plate readers, or cell site simulators—that have been approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city and county legislative body. The process requires that the SFPD, like any other city or county agency, submit a policy to the board for approval before using any new technology. The 2019 ordinance also banned the use of facial recognition technology.

But Prop E adds a clause stipulating that the SFPD "may acquire and/or use a Surveillance Technology so long as it submits a Surveillance Technology Policy to the Board of Supervisors for approval by ordinance within one year of the use or acquisition, and may continue to use that Surveillance Technology after the end of that year unless the Board adopts an ordinance that disapproves the Policy."

In other words, the SFPD could roll out an unapproved method of surveillance, and it would have free rein to operate within the city for up to a year before ever having to ask city officials for permission. And until the city passes a statute that specifically forbids it—that is, forbidding a technology that is by that point already in use—then the SFPD can keep using it indefinitely.

"Let's say the SFPD decides they want to buy a bunch of data on people's geolocation from data brokers—they could do that," says Saira Hussain, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "They could use drones that are flying at all times above the city. They could use the robot dogs that were piloted at the border. These are all surveillance technologies that the police doesn't necessarily have right now, and they could acquire it and use it, effectively without any sort of accountability, under this proposition."

If those scenarios sound implausible, it's worth noting that they've already happened: As Hussain notes, the Department of Homeland Security recently tested robot dogs to help patrol the U.S./Mexico border. And in 2012, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department enlisted civilian aircraft to fly over Compton and surveil the entire area.

Not to mention, federal agencies already routinely purchase people's cell phone geolocation information and internet metadata without a warrant.

In a sense, Prop E would make San Franciscans into guinea pigs, on whom the SFPD can experiment with all manner of surveillance technology. If that sounds hyperbolic, a member of Mayor London Breed's staff told the board of supervisors in November 2023 that Prop E "authorizes the department to have a one-year pilot period to experiment, to work through new technology to see how they work."

The San Francisco Ballot Simplification Committee's description of the proposition notes that it would "authorize the SFPD to use drones and install surveillance cameras without Commission or Board approval, including those with facial recognition technology."

The ACLU of Northern California calls Prop E "a dangerous and misleading proposal that knocks down three pillars of police reform: oversight, accountability, and transparency." Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the EFF, wrote that under Prop E, police could "expose already marginalized and over-surveilled communities to a new and less accountable generation of surveillance technologies."

Despite these concerns, Prop E has its share of support. Breed defended the proposal, saying "it's about making sure that our police department, like any other police department around the country, can use 21st century technology." By January, groups supporting Prop E had raised more than $1 million—ten times the amount raised by opponents and considerably more than has been raised for any other proposal on the March ballot.

It also seems to be popular among the public: A January survey released by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce found that 61 percent of San Franciscans favored Prop E, with only 37 percent opposed. (One possible explanation: The same survey found that 69 percent of those polled feel that crime has gotten worse. Recent data indicates that violent crime rose during 2023 even as it declined nationally, and while the rate of property crime fell, state and national rates fell faster.)

San Francisco is no stranger to potentially abusive surveillance practices. In 2022, the board of supervisors passed an ordinance that would allow the SFPD to request and receive real-time access to citizens' private security camera feeds. While city officials like Breed and newly-appointed District Attorney Brooke Jenkins touted that the ordinance would help crack down on smash-and-grab shoplifting rings, a recent city report detailed that in the third quarter of 2023, the vast majority of requests were for narcotics investigations.

The post Proposition E Would Make It Easier for Police To Surveil San Francisco appeared first on Reason.com.

pOver the last decade, California has built up some of the nation’s strongest driver privacy protections, thanks to the hard work of activists, civil rights groups, and elected leaders./p pOne law in particular, often called a href=https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB34SB 34/a, prohibits police from circulating detailed maps of people’s driving patterns with the federal government and agencies in other states– a protection that has only grown more important with the end of iRoe v. Wade/i and the subsequent surge in abortion criminalization./p pBut dozens of California police departments have decided to defy the law, even after receiving a href=https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdfclear guidance/a from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, the chief law enforcement officer in the state. Last month the ACLU of Northern California and our partners a href=https://www.aclunc.org/sites/default/files/2024-01-31_letter_to_ag_bonta_re_sb_34_final.pdfsent Attorney General Bonta a letter/a listing 35 police agencies that have refused to comply with the law and protect driver privacy./p pWe should all be able to drive to a doctor’s office, place of worship, or political rally without being tracked and cataloged by police agencies. But for years now, police have used automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to record and track the movements of drivers on a previously unseen scale. These a href=https://www.aclu.org/documents/you-are-being-tracked-how-license-plate-readers-are-being-used-record-americans-movementssystems/a allow police to collect and store information about drivers whose cars pass through ALPR cameras’ fields of view, which, along with the date and time of capture, can reveal sensitive details about our movements and, as a result, our private lives./p div class=mp-md wp-link div class=wp-link__img-wrapper a href=https://www.aclu.org/documents/you-are-being-tracked-how-license-plate-readers-are-being-used-record-americans-movements target=_blank tabindex=-1 img width=1120 height=788 src=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-12.35.20-PM.png class=attachment-4x3_full size-4x3_full alt=A highway with fast moving cars. decoding=async loading=lazy srcset=https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-12.35.20-PM.png 1120w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-12.35.20-PM-768x540.png 768w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-12.35.20-PM-400x281.png 400w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-12.35.20-PM-600x422.png 600w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-12.35.20-PM-800x563.png 800w, https://www.aclu.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Screen-Shot-2024-02-13-at-12.35.20-PM-1000x704.png 1000w sizes=(max-width: 1120px) 100vw, 1120px / /a /div div class=wp-link__title a href=https://www.aclu.org/documents/you-are-being-tracked-how-license-plate-readers-are-being-used-record-americans-movements target=_blank You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans' Movements /a /div div class=wp-link__source p-4 px-6-tablet a href=https://www.aclu.org/documents/you-are-being-tracked-how-license-plate-readers-are-being-used-record-americans-movements target=_blank tabindex=-1 p class=is-size-7Source: American Civil Liberties Union/p /a /div /div pThe ACLU has long seen the danger ALPR surveillance poses, and working alongside communities on the ground, has fought to bolster California’s legal protections for driver privacy. For over a decade, we have conducted investigations, advocacy, and litigation focused on how police agencies use ALPR to track law-abiding drivers, amass hordes of sensitive information, and use it to harm people./p pIn the wake of a href=http://chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/071613-aclu-alprreport-opt-v05.pdfACLU’s groundbreaking report/a on ALPR across the US, a href=https://www.aclunc.org/blog/use-automated-license-plate-readers-expanding-northern-california-and-data-shared-fedswe called out/a police use of ALPRs in 2013 as a threat to driver privacy and warned that California lacked statewide driver privacy protections. In 2016, thanks in part to the advocacy of the ACLU and a href=https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/success-sacramento-four-new-laws-one-veto-all-victories-privacy-and-transparencyallies/a, the California legislature passed a href=https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB34SB 34/a, the law at issue today. In a href=https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/documents-reveal-ice-using-driver-location-data2019/a we discovered Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) exploitation of ALPR-collected information to track and target immigrants in California and across the United States./p pFrom there, we took action to enforce California’s driver privacy protections. In a href=https://www.aclunc.org/news/california-activists-sue-marin-county-sheriff-illegally-sharing-drivers-license-plate-data-ice2021/a we sued Marin County, California for illegally sharing millions of local drivers’ license plates and locations with federal and out-of-state agencies, including ICE. The sheriff eventually agreed to comply with SB 34 as part of a a href=https://www.aclunc.org/our-work/legal-docket/lagleva-v-doyle-license-plate-surveillance#:~:text=In%20May%202022%2C%20the%20plaintiffs,54.settlement agreement/a, but we believed that many other California police agencies were still violating SB 34./p pWe rang the alarm again in the wake of the iDobbs /idecision overturning iRoe v. Wade./i Alongside our partners at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU of Southern California, we a href=https://www.aclunc.org/news/civil-liberties-groups-demand-california-police-stop-sharing-drivers-location-data-police-antisent letters to over 70 law enforcement agencies in California/a demanding they stop sharing people’s driving patterns with states that have criminalized abortion care. We also notified the attorney general’s office of these violations./p pFollowing our letters, the attorney general issued a href=https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/2023-dle-06.pdfinstructions/a to police across the state to follow SB 34’s plain text and cease sharing license plate information with state and federal agencies outside California. While some agencies have come into compliance, many police are digging in and refusing to follow the law. Police lobbyists have even a href=https://www.eff.org/files/2024/01/23/bulletin_reponse_letter.03_jrt_final.khb_.02.pdfasked/a the attorney general to withdraw his interpretation of the law./p pSimply put, the position touted by police agencies and their lobbyists puts Californians at risk. SB 34 is important because when police track and share the locations of law-abiding drivers, that information can easily be used to facilitate racist policing, a href=https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexcampbell/the-ticket-machinepunitive fees/a, and the a href=https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the-news/2012/with-cameras-informants-nypd-eyed-mosquesdiscriminatory targeting/a of people in California and beyond. And, as a href=https://www.eff.org/files/2023/05/24/tracy.pdfour letters warned/a, when California shares ALPR information with authorities in states with anti-abortion or anti-trans laws, police and prosecutors gain new power to track and prosecute people who traveled to California to receive reproductive or gender-affirming care./p pWe should all be able to travel safely on the state’s roads without our movements being handed to authorities outside the state. That is why we have continued to push California police agencies to follow California’s driver privacy law. And it’s why we have supported localities a href=https://www.aclunc.org/blog/alameda-rejects-surveillance-deal-company-tied-icethat reject/a ALPR programs at odds with their values./p pIt is unacceptable that police agencies charged with enforcing laws are refusing to comply with this one. While we are pleased with Attorney General Bonta’s strong statement on SB 34, we urge the attorney general to use all available means at his disposal to ensure compliance. And rest assured, that the ACLU will continue fighting to enact and enforce protections that keep all of us safe, no matter where we go in the state./p piThis article was a href=https://www.aclunc.org/blog/californians-fought-hard-driver-privacy-protections-why-are-police-refusing-follow-themoriginally featured/a on the blog of the ACLU of Northern California./i/p div class=rss-cta__titleWe need you with us to keep fighting/diva href=https://action.aclu.org/give/now class=rss-cta__buttonDonate today/a/div

I’m normally not a “ends justifies the means” sort of guy, but ever since some House Republicans started getting shitty about Section 702 surveillance after some of their own got swept up in the dragnet, I’ve become a bit more pragmatic. Section 702 is long overdue for reform. If it takes a bunch of conveniently angry legislators to do it, so be it.

The NSA uses this executive authorization to sweep up millions of “foreign” communications. But if one side of these communications involves a US person, the NSA is supposed to keep its eyes off of it. The same thing goes for the FBI. But the FBI has spent literal decades ignoring these restraints, preferring to dip into the NSA’s data pool as often as possible for the sole reason of converting a foreign-facing surveillance program into a handy means for domestic surveillance.

The FBI’s constant abuse of this program has seen it scolded by FISA judges, excoriated by legislators actually willing to stand up for their constituents’ rights, and habitually abused verbally at internet sites like this one.

Not that it has mattered. For years, the NSA (and, by extension, the FBI) has been given a blanket blessing of their spy programs by legislators who have been convinced nothing but a clean re-authorization is acceptable in terrorist times like these.

Fortunately for all of us, the future of Section 702 remains in a particularly hellish limbo. As Dell Cameron reports for Wired, Republicans are going to war against other Republicans, limiting the chances of Section 702 moving forward without significant alteration.

The latest botched effort at salvaging a controversial US surveillance program collapsed this week thanks to a sabotage campaign by the United States House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI), crushing any hope of unraveling the program’s fate before Congress pivots to prevent a government shutdown in March.

An agreement struck between rival House committees fell apart on Wednesday after one side of the dispute—represented by HPSCI—ghosted fellow colleagues at a crucial hearing while working to poison a predetermined plan to usher a “compromise bill” to the floor.

This makes it sound like this is a bad thing. It isn’t, even if those thwarting a clean re-auth have extremely dirty hands. Legislators should definitely take a long look at this surveillance power, especially when it’s been abused routinely by the FBI to engage in surveillance of US persons who are supposed to be beyond the reach of this foreign-facing dragnet.

Some in the House want the FBI to pay for what it did to Trump loyalists. Some in the House want the FBI to do whatever it wants, so long as it can claim it’s doing (our?) God’s work in its counterterrorism efforts. Excluded from the current infighting are people who actually give a damn about limiting surveillance abuses, shunted to the side by political opportunists, loudmouths, and far too many legislators who refuse to hold the FBI accountable.

What’s odd about this scuttling is the reason it happened. It had nothing to do with Section 702 and everything to do with the government’s predilection for buying data from brokers to avoid warrant requirements erected by Supreme Court rulings.

The impetus for killing the deal, WIRED has learned, was an amendment that would end the government’s ability to pay US companies for information rather than serving them with a warrant. This includes location data collected from cell phones that are capable in many cases of tracking people’s physical whereabouts almost constantly. The data is purportedly gathered for advertising purposes but is collected by data brokers and frequently sold to US spies and police agencies instead.

Senior aides say the HPSCI chair, Mike Turner, personally exploded the deal while refusing to appear for a hearing on Wednesday in which lawmakers were meant to decide the rules surrounding the vote. A congressional website shows that HPSCI staff had not filed one of the amendments meant to be discussed before the Rules Committee, suggesting that at no point in the day did Turner plan to attend.

And that’s where we are now: legislators refusing to authorize one form of domestic surveillance because it would rather give the feds a pass on a much more prevalent form of domestic surveillance. The former once ensnared some of Trump’s buddies. The latter has yet to do so.

The infighting continues, with one side being rallied by none of than Fox News, which prefers to cater to its base, rather than provide any reporting or analysis that might accurately portray current events. The spin being pushed by Fox claims the alterations added to the bill would somehow prevent the NSA (and, by extension, the FBI) from surveilling foreign terrorists.

A Fox News report published Thursday morning, while accurately noting that it was Turner’s threat that forced Johnson to cancel the vote, goes on to cite “sources close to the Intelligence Committee” who offered analysis of the events. The sources claimed that Turner was compelled to abandon the deal because the “compromise bill” had been sneakily altered in a manner that “totally screws FISA in terms of its ability to be a national security tool.”

While redirecting blame away from Turner and his cohorts, the claim is both false and deceptive, relying on assertions that, while farcical perhaps to legal experts, would be impossible for the public at large (and most of the press) to parse alone.

Section 702 still has a good chance to survive intact. This infighting actually makes it much less likely any true reform will take place. Grandstanding has replaced oversight. But, at least for now, we can be assured the surveillance program will remain one step away from being ditched until House Republicans can reconcile their desire to protect people like Carter Page with their desire to treat everyone a little bit on the brown side as a potential terrorist.