The State Commission on Judicial Conduct ordered Michelle Slaughter, a Galveston County judge, to enroll in a four-hour class on the “proper and ethical use of social media by judges.” The panel concluded that the judge’s posts cast “reasonable doubt” on her impartiality.
At the beginning of a high-profile trial last year in which a father was accused of keeping his nine-year-old son in a six-foot by eight-foot wooden box, the judge instructed jurors not to discuss the case against defendant David Wieseckel with “anyone.”“Again, this is by any means of communication. So no texting, e-mailing, talking person to person or on the phone or on Facebook. Any of that is absolutely forbidden,” the judge told jurors.
But Slaughter didn’t take her own advice, leading to her removal from the case and a mistrial. The defendant eventual was acquitted of unlawful-restraint-of-a-child charges.
The judge told local media Friday that her Facebook posts about the “Boy in the Box” case and others were unbiased.
“I will always conduct my proceedings in a fair and impartial way. The Commission’s opinion appears to unduly restrict transparency and openness in government and in our judiciary,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “Everything I posted was publicly available information.”
Month: April 2015
Motel Decides It Should Just Start Faxing All Guest Info To Local Police Every Night
The Third Party Doctrine is ridiculous. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies routinely exploit this loophole to warrantlessly access all sorts of data because of the stupid assertion that anything you “voluntarily” turn over to a third party carries no expectation of privacy. The agencies blow right past the reality of the situation: that any “voluntary” exchange of personal data for services is anything but voluntary. Service providers won’t provide you with an internet connection or cell phone service without collecting massive amounts of usage data. Hotels and motels won’t rent you a room unless you tell them who you are and provide documentation to back up your claims.
So, it’s stupid all over and no one’s in any hurry to fix it because drugs need to be warred against and terrorists must be handcrafted by FBI undercover agents and the rest of whatever. The courts have generally refused to stretch the Fourth Amendment to cover the data created by these involuntary exchanges. That’s a problem and one that is only very slowly being addressed.
Motel 6 has just decided to make it worse. While warrantless access to motel records is being challenged in the Supreme Court, the chain has decided to preemptively strip away any privacy expectations that may result from court rulings and just hand it all over to law enforcement because sometimes criminals stay in motel rooms.
Senior Police Officer Suggests Companies Allowing People To Use Strong Crypto Are ‘Friendly To Terrorists’
Last November, we ran through the list of senior law enforcement officers on both sides of the Atlantic who all came out with suspiciously similar whines about how strong crypto was turning the internet into a “dark and ungoverned” place. Judging by this story in Reuters, others want to join the choir:
Some technology and communication firms are helping militants avoid detection by developing systems that are “friendly to terrorists”, Britain’s top anti-terrorism police officer said on Tuesday.
That remark comes from Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley, who is the UK’s National Policing Lead for Counter-Terrorism, replacing Cressida Dick. Here’s the problem according to Rowley:
“Some of the acceleration of technology, whether it’s communications or other spheres, can be set up in different ways,” Rowley told a conference in London.
“It can be set up in a way which is friendly to terrorists and helps them … and creates challenges for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Or it can be set up in a way which doesn’t do that.”
“Set up in a way which is friendly to terrorists and helps them” obviously means using strong crypto; “set up in a way which doesn’t do that” therefore means with compromised crypto. Like his colleagues, Rowley too blames the current mistrust between the intelligence agencies and computer companies on Edward Snowden:
“Snowden has created an environment where some technology companies are less comfortable working with law reinforcement and intelligence agencies and the bad guys are better informed,” Rowley told Reuters after his speech.
Well, no, actually. That “environment” has been created by the NSA and GCHQ working together to break into the main online services, and undermine key aspects of digital technology, with no thought for the collateral damage that ruining internet security might cause for the world. Rowley is also quoted as saying:
“We all love the benefit of the internet and all the rest of it, but we need [technology companies’] support in making sure that they’re doing everything possible to stop their technology being exploited by terrorists. I’m saying that needs to be front and centre of their thinking and for some it is and some it isn’t.”
The technology is not being “exploited” by terrorists, it’s being used by them, just as they use telephones or microwaves or washing machines. That’s what those devices are there for. The idea that trying to make broken internet technologies should be “front and center” of technology companies’ thinking bespeaks a complete contempt for their users.
This constant refrain about how awful strong crypto is, and how we must break it, is simply the intelligence services implicitly admitting that they find the idea of doing their job in a free society, where people are able to keep some messages private, too hard, so they would be really grateful if technology companies could just fall in line and make life easier by destroying privacy for everyone.
New Jersey Cop Demands Camera From Eyewitness After Police Dog Allowed To Maul Prone Suspect
If you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide, right? That’s what the government tells us when it wants to erect cameras and fund domestic surveillance efforts. So, what do you tell a police officer who demands a citizen hand over their phone? Even if the officer has done something wrong, he still can at least attempt to hide it. And even if the effort fails, he still likely has nothing to fear. That’s the imbalance of power at work and it leads directly to this sort of thing.
New Jersey police may have gone too far when they took the cell phone from an onlooker who recorded their encounter with a suspect who was mauled by a police dog and later died.
The man, Phillip White, had dog bites all over his body last week, his lawyer said, and a jarring video shows cops struggling to pull the dog away.
A police officer took the video from a witness who was recording the arrest — possibly in violation of the law — but the footage was later obtained by NBC Philadelphia.
Pirate Bay Blockade Censors CloudFlare Customers
Like any form of censorship web blockades can sometime lead to overblocking, targeting perfectly legitimate websites by mistake.
This is also happening in the UK where Sky’s blocking technology is inadvertently blocking sites that have nothing to do with piracy.
In addition to blocking domain names, Sky also blocks IP-addresses. This allows the site to stop https connections to The Pirate Bay and its proxies, but when IP-addresses are shared with random other sites they’re blocked too.
This is happening to various customers of the CDN service CloudFlare, which is used by many sites on the UK blocklist. Every now and then this causes legitimate sites to be blocked, such as CloudFlare customers who shared an IP-address with Pirate Bay proxy ilikerainbows.co.uk.
Although the domain is merely a redirect to ilikerainbows.co, it’s listed in Sky’s blocking system along with several CloudFlare IP-addresses. Recently, the CDN service received complaints from users about the issue and alerted the proxy owner.
“It has come to our attention that your website — ilikerainbows.co.uk — is causing CloudFlare IPs to be blocked by SkyB, an ISP located in the UK. This is impacting other CloudFlare customers,” CloudFlare wrote.
The CDN service asked the proxy site to resolve the matter with Sky, or else it would remove the site from the network after 24 hours.
“If this issue does not get resolved with SkyB though we will need to route your domain off CloudFlare’s network as it is currently impacting other CloudFlare customers due to these blocked IP addresses.”
US judge lobs antivirus patents back to Hell
A US district court has torn the heart out of two patents wielded by Intellectual Ventures against two antivirus makers.
In a judgment this week, Chief Judge Leonard Stark ruled that Intellectual Ventures’ US patents 6,460,050 and 6,073,142 were “ineligible,” meaning they are too vague and the technologies they described unpatentable.
The ‘142 and ‘050 patents described email filters designed to catch spam and malware. A third Intellectual Ventures patent, 5,987,610, which described “computer virus screening methods and systems”, was upheld by the judge.
The three patents were brought before the Delaware district court for scrutiny by Symantec and Trend Micro after they were sued by Intellectual Ventures for alleged patent infringement. The antivirus pair wanted the patents torn up so they could undo Intellectual Ventures’ case against them.
“Trend has firmly believed that Intellectual Ventures’ case has been based on over-broad construction of invalid patents since it was targeted by IV in 2010, and we are appreciative of today’s vindication on the validity issue,” Trend Micro’s general counsel Felix Sterling said in a statement passed to El Reg.
In a Thursday court filing, Intellectual Ventures agreed to abandon its legal action against Trend, though the two sides were at odds over how their court costs should be split.
As for Symantec, Intellectual Ventures has already won a $17m patent-infringement judgment against the California-based biz: $9m of of that was down to the ‘142 patent.
The ruling may be welcome news for those seeking patent reform and the elimination of “patent trolls” that acquire patents and sue companies for alleged violations. Groups such as the EFF have condemned Intellectual Ventures as one of the worst patent troll offenders. Even populist TV funnyman John Oliver has taken a pop at patents…
Five Disturbing Things You Didn’t Know About Forensic “Science”
Last week, The Washington Post revealed that in 268 trials dating back to 1972, 26 out of 28 examiners within the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit “overstated forensic matches in a way that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent” of the cases. These included cases where 14 people have since been either executed or died in prison.
The hair analysis review — the largest-ever post-conviction review of questionable forensic evidence by the FBI — has been ongoing since 2012. The review is a joint effort by the FBI, Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The preliminary results announced last week represent just a small percentage of the nearly 3,000 criminal cases in which the FBI hair examiners may have provided analysis. Of the 329 DNA exonerations to date, 74 involved flawed hair evidence analysis.
While these revelations are certainly disturbing — and the implications alarming — the reality is that they represent the tip of the iceberg when it comes to flawed forensics.
In a landmark 2009 report, the National Academy of Sciences concluded that, aside from DNA, there was little, if any, meaningful scientific underpinning to many of the forensic disciplines. “With the exception of nuclear DNA analysis … no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source,” reads the report.
There is one thing that all troubling forensic techniques have in common: They’re all based on the idea that patterns, or impressions, are unique and can be matched to the thing, or person, who made them. But the validity of this premise has not been subjected to rigorous scientific inquiry. “The forensic science community has had little opportunity to pursue or become proficient in the research that is needed to support what it does,” the NAS report said.
Nonetheless, courts routinely allow forensic practitioners to testify in front of jurors, anointing them “experts” in these pattern-matching fields — together dubbed forensic “sciences” despite the lack of evidence to support that — based only on their individual, practical experience. These witnesses, who are largely presented as learned and unbiased arbiters of truth, can hold great sway with jurors whose expectations are often that real life mimics the television crime lab or police procedural.
But that is not the case, as the first results from the FBI hair evidence review clearly show. And given the conclusions of the NAS report, future results are not likely to improve. What’s more, if other pattern-matching disciplines were subjected to the same scrutiny as hair analysis, there is no reason to think the results would be any better. For some disciplines the results could even be worse.
When Will Obama Apologize for All the Other Innocent Victims of Drone Strikes?
In the fall of 2013, Rafiq ur Rehman, a school teacher from the remote tribal region of North Waziristan, in Pakistan, stood with his 12-year-old son, Zubair, and 9-year-old daughter, Nabila, in Washington, D.C., preparing to challenge one of the U.S. government’s most secretive means of killing.
The Rehmans say a missile fired from a U.S. drone killed 68-year-old Momina Bibi — Rehman’s mother, and grandmother to the two young children — in an October 2012 airstrike. Both Zubair and Nabila were present when the attack happened and suffered injuries. The missile had struck their grandmother straight on, obliterating her completely. There were no others killed in the attack and no substantiated reports of terrorists at the scene.
According to the family’s account, Bibi was killed tending okra while her grandkids played nearby.
The family came to the U.S. to demand answers. They were treated as honored guests among the human rights community in New York City, but when they met with lawmakers on October 20, 2013, a total of five members of Congress showed up.
For Pakistani attorney Shahzad Akbar, who represents 150 victims of the strikes, including the Rehman family, President Barack Obama’s recent apology for the killing of two Americans merely underscores the double standard that exists for civilian death.
“Today, if Nabila or Zubair or many of the civilian victims — if they are watching on TV the president being so remorseful over the killing of a Westerner, what message is that taking?” Akbar said Thursday in an interview with The Intercept.
The answer, he argued, is “that you do not matter, you are children of a lesser God, and I’m only going to mourn if a Westerner is killed.”
The absence of transparency, despite the Rehman family’s tremendous efforts, has been a defining feature of the Obama administration’s drone program. Typically, no amount of evidence gathered by journalists, human rights investigators or researchers indicating the death of a civilian from a drone strike will elicit an on-the-record response from the U.S. government — let alone an admission of responsibility — or prompt an independent investigation.
That was not the case on Thursday morning when President Barack Obama delivered a press conference describing a strike gone wrong. In the unprecedented address, Obama detailed how a failure in intelligence-gathering had left two civilians dead. Numerous anonymous U.S. officials said the attack occurred in Pakistan and that the CIA was responsible, though Obama and his press secretary, Josh Earnest, refused to explicitly confirm either. Unlike past cases, the unintended victims killed in the attacks were Westerners, one an Italian, the other a U.S. citizen.
The American, 74-year-old Warren Weinstein, had spent 40 years working around the world. For the last decade he had lived in Pakistan, where he served as country director for a consulting firm working with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The second victim, Giovanni Lo Porto, was an Italian national. The 39-year-old had come to Pakistan four years ago, when severe floods ravaged the country. Both men ultimately found themselves hostages of al Qaeda — Weinstein was taken in 2011, Lo Porto in 2012. They had been held in a compound in Pakistan’s Shawal Valley, The New York Times reported Thursday night.
“We believed that this was an Al Qaeda compound, that no civilians were present and that capturing these terrorists was not possible,” Obama said of the January 15 strike. “And we do believe that the operation did take out dangerous members of Al Qaeda. What we did not know, tragically, is that Al Qaeda was hiding the presence of Warren and Giovanni in this same compound.”
The compound had been placed under “hundreds of hours of surveillance,” Obama said. U.S. intelligence officials chose to take the shot only after achieving “near certainty” that the building was a legitimate terrorist target and civilian lives would not be risked, Earnest added. When the dust settled, American spies watched as more bodies were pulled from the rubble than expected. It would take weeks, however, for the intelligence community to confirm that the dead included Weinstein and Lo Porto. Ahmed Farouq, an American and alleged al Qaeda leader, also died in the attack. A separate U.S. airstrike in the region on January 19 was also described in detail on Thursday. U.S. intelligence officials said they believed that attack killed Adam Gadahn, a U.S. citizen and al Qaeda propagandist. Again, the Americans said they did not know he was inside when they fired.
Neither of the two strikes targeted specific individuals, U.S. officials said. The attacks were signature strikes, a much-criticized tactic in which the CIA kills people without knowing their identities, instead relying on behavioral observations. In both of the January strikes, the U.S. only learned whom it had killed after the fact.
Earnest told reporters that neither Farouq nor Gadahn were considered high-value targets, meaning they were not eligible for the type of assassination of U.S. citizens the Obama administration has deemed legal in recent years, which requires additional layers of approval. “The president did not specifically sign off on these two operations,” Earnest said.
Earnest said an inspector general was conducting an independent review of the operation.
President Obama said the operation that killed the two Westerners would be declassified and disclosed publicly, “because the Weinstein and Lo Porto families deserve to know the truth.”
“One of the things that sets America apart from many other nations, one of the things that makes us exceptional is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes,” Obama explained. “Already, I have directed a full review of what happened. We will identify the lessons that can be learned from this tragedy, and any changes that should be made.”
When asked by The Intercept if the president’s words meant there would be a policy change in how the U.S. deals with claims of civilian casualties resulting from counterterrorism operations, an administration official declined to comment.
Whether anyone from the CIA has been or will be held accountable for the strikes remains unclear. Writing for The New Yorker, Steve Coll raised the question of whether the March removal of the powerful head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center may have been linked to the attacks. For nearly a decade, a man named Mike — who uses the CIA cover name Roger — has overseen the agency’s drone program in Pakistan. Known for his apparently dark persona and chain-smoking, the counterterrorism chief is considered a principal architect of signature strikes, which in 2010 brought the number of U.S. kills in Pakistan to its highest-ever recorded total of 117.
“I predict that even this episode will have no effect,” Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert in U.S. counterterrorism operations, told The New York Times.
Though he did not identify the agency, the aircraft or the country, Obama, in his remarks Thursday, came as close as he ever has to directly and candidly addressing civilian casualties in the CIA’s drone war in Pakistan in public.
“As president and as commander-in-chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations, including the one that inadvertently took the lives of Warren and Giovanni,” Obama said. “I profoundly regret what happened. On behalf of the United States government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.”
Weinstein’s family released a statement Thursday placing the ultimate responsibility for his death on the men who took him captive, but the family characterized elements of the U.S. government’s response — aside from that of lawmakers and the FBI — as “inconsistent and disappointing over the course of three and a half years.”
Following Lo Porto’s kidnapping, a petition calling on the Italian government to ensure that “all possible efforts” were made in securing his release amassed nearly 48,000 signatures. On Thursday, the Italian news agency ANSA reported that the Lo Porto family was grief-stricken by the news of Giovanni’s death. “Leave me with my pain,” his mother said. “I do not have much to add,” his brother told reporters. “Obama has apologized? Thanks.”
The January attacks brought the total number of Americans killed by a drone strike under Obama to at least eight. Of that total, the U.S. has intentionally killed one.
Mustafa Qadri, an investigator with Amnesty International, has spent years conducting investigations in Pakistan, including into the strike that killed Momina Bibi. Speaking to The Intercept on Thursday, the human rights investigator said he was pained by the death of Weinstein, but noted that there are scores of other innocent people who have been killed in drone strikes.
“Obama’s statement is really moving,” Qadri said. “And we welcome that, I welcome the fact he has done that.” But, he added, “there are hundreds, potentially thousands of others who deserve the same apology.”
The big boys made us do it: US used German spooks to snoop on EU defence industry
Germany’s BND spy agency spied on European politicians and enterprises at the behest of the NSA for over a decade.
Der Spiegel reports (in German) that for years the NSA sent its counterparts at the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst – Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service) thousands of so-called selectors – IP addresses, emails, and mobile phone numbers – it wanted targeted for online surveillance.
German cyberspies fed this data into their own surveillance systems. The reports generated were evaluated at BND headquarters before intelligence was passed back to the NSA.
In practical terms, it seems that the BND have been tapping the Internet Exchange Point DE-CIX in Frankfurt, since at least 2009.
Results from the bulk tap of this Internet exchange were then passed over, in part at least, to the Americans as part of a collaborative agreement involving intel agencies.
The selectors included referred to European politicians and European aerospace and defence firms, including the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) and Eurocopter.
BND workers picked up on this anomalous targeting – which had nothing to do with a bilateral US-Germany agreement signed in 2002 to pool efforts in combating global terrorism – and have been complaining about it since at least 2008.
Yet it was only when the Edward Snowden revelations began in 2013 that German spy bosses began questioning the practice, which fits more closely with the profile of economic espionage.
An estimated 800,000 selectors were passed from the NSA to the BND in total over the years. A post-Snowden internal probe concluded that at least 2,000 of these various spying requests were contrary to either German or wider EU interests.
The BND helped the NSA with spying on European ministers and enterprises, without anyone in the German parliament being aware of this.
BND bosses didn’t pass on their findings to the Chancellor’s Office instead acting only to ask the NSA not to filter out requests that potentially ran contrary to German and Western European political and economic interests.
Japanese Court Orders Google To Remove Customer Reviews From Its Maps Service — Globally
The Chiba District Court today issued a preliminary injunction forcing the U.S. internet company to remove two anonymous reviews for an undisclosed medical clinic in the country. While they document negative customer experiences at the clinic, neither review violates the policies that Google has in place for user generated content within the Maps service.
Nothing special there, you might think, but there’s a sting in the tail:
The court ruled that Google not only removes the content in Japan, but across the entire globe too.
That’s troubling, because it’s yet another case of a local court asserting its right to affect what happens across the entire internet — the best-known example being the EU’s claim that its privacy regulations have to apply globally if they are to be effective. It’s worrying to see a similar ruling from Japan, albeit only in a preliminary injunction, and one that Google is appealing against, because it risks normalizing that view, with serious consequences for the online world. Far from being a domain subject to no rules, as politicians love to claim, the internet would begin to turn into the one place that has to obey every country’s laws.