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ladystylestores · 5 years ago

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NATO Imagines Future Warfare

Innovation is a key component of readiness when it comes to future threats. NATO’s Innovation Hub recently commissioned a short story from author August Cole, asking him to draw upon his writing and imaginative abilities to create a picture of what NATO operations could be like in the year 2040. The Cipher Brief is pleased to be able to bring you 2040: KNOWN ENEMIES, with permission from NATO.

CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES — PARIS, FRANCE

The protestors’ braying air horns reminded Alain Durand of the feel of his father’s hand squeezing his as they watched the Tour de France peloton speed by on a verdant hill outside Chambéry, half a lifetime ago. Tonight on the Champs Elysees it meant drones. It meant gas.

He carefully pushed aside two old fashioned white cloth banners — “PAX MACHINA” and “NON AUX ARMEES, NON A LA GUERRE,” written in thick red brush strokes to better see. In a field of view populated with synthetic representations of the real world, the banners were anachronistic but also enduring. They spoke to the necessary spirit of dissent in one of Europe’s more temperamental democracies, Alain thought. Yet it was time to change again: France was the last NATO member, other than the United States, to maintain conventional combat forces. The other members had already robotized.

“A matter of not just tradition but national survival,” his father, a colonel in France’s 3e Régiment de Parachutistes d’Infanterie de Marine, always insisted.

The horns stopped. The crowd of thousands hushed to better hear the whine of the oncoming Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité riot-police crowd-control drones, a sound like a frantically played piccolo. It was a child’s sound — that was why it intimidated. The flight of a dozen drones hovered in a picket formation in front of the crowd of more than 10,000 marching along the cobbled stones toward the Arc de Triomphe. On Alain’s augmented reality glasses, the bots were bright orange dots, tagged with comments from around the world guiding him on everything from how to download apps to jam their controllers to offers of legal representation. Alain reached into his satchel and cursed, as an ad for gas mask replacement filters popped into view.

A protestor’s drone, bright yellow and the size of an espresso cup, darted past him, then returned to hover in front of his face. It was filming. He could see the live feed it broadcast on his own glasses, identifying him as the son of a senior army officer. He looked around, feeling a need to disappear in the crowd even though that was impossible. He swatted at the yellow drone, and it darted off.

Was that a Catalyst design?, he wondered. The mysterious informal global network emerged on the public stage about three years ago, fomenting dissent and countergovernment action in the virtual realm. It started with what was essentially algo-busting or AI-enabled augmented-reality pranks to make a point about excessive Chinese and American influence around the world. But in the last six months, something had changed, and they were now moving from the online to the real world, supplying not only plans for printable grenades or swarm drones but also the fabs to make them. They had never tried to operate in Europe before, or the U.S. Was this drone a sign something was changing, literally before his own eyes?

Those same eyes began to itch. He had other things to worry about for the moment.

“Juliet, I don’t have my mask,” he said to his sister. She already had hers, a translucent model with a bubble-like faceplate that made her look like a snorkeler.

“And?” she said.

“I am certain I put it in there, but …” he trailed off.

She sighed angrily, condensation briefly fogging her mask. Four years younger, his 15-year-old sister could judge him harshly. She got that from their father.

“We stay,” she said, passing him a bandana and bottle of water. “Parliament votes tomorrow. Father is already deployed. If we leave now, when will we ever stand?”

“Ok, ok,” Alain muttered. He wet the bandana and braced himself for the gas.

Drones dashed just a few feet overhead, a disorienting swirl of straining electric motors and the machines’ childlike tone. The crowd sighed all at once and then individual shouting erupted around him. A moment later his eyes began to sting. Fumbling with the bandana he quickly wrapped the wet cloth around his mouth. But, eyes now burning, he struggled to tie it around his neck. With so much gas in the air, no one without a mask would be able any more to continue watching the eruption of digital dissent. He felt Juliet’s fingers on his neck, helping secure the bandana’s knot. Hands now free, he angrily pumped his fists in the air and blindly grasped to help hold his cloth banners aloft.

JULIUS NYERERE INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT — DAR-ES-SALAAM, TANZANIA

It was so hot, when the convoy stopped at the main gate to the joint United Nations-African Union compound, that the German and Italian battle bots broke formation. The NATO task force’s hundreds of small armored wheeled and tracked machines jerked and shimmied like ants as they fought over the shade beneath the bright blue revetments — towering stacks of shipping containers reinforced with blast-foam. That left the French para forces, what NATO classified as a light-effects company due to its mostly non-robotic composition under, in the crushing heat with nowhere to go. That was fine for the French unit’s commander, Luc Durand. His men and women could handle the heat; the bots were another story.

Captain Monika Toonce hopped off one of the oversized German Jaeger crawlers and jogged over to Durand’s open scout car. The French convoy included the jeep, six-wheeled troop carriers (each carrying 12 paratroopers as well as external racks of offensive and defensive smallbots), and four mules loaded with ammunition, spare parts, and assorted spider-like fixers.

“Colonel, we are still waiting for the clear codes before the task force can enter the compound,” Toonce said. She paused to wipe sweat from her nose. “Headquarters said they sent them. But they are not yet authenticated here …”

Durand cursed. The bots would not yet be cleared for self-defense, let alone offensive use. He forced himself to ease back and put his boot up on his jeep’s wheel well, a pose he could hold for hours on a high-speed cross-desert dash or pulling security at a vital intersection. This is an old problem in a new form, he thought. This is why the French army trains to fight with or without machines. “La victoire ne se donne pas!” was the motto adopted four years ago.

Deconflicting the newly arrived German and Italian anti-armor/aircraft and counter-personnel bots with the existing UN-AU peacekeeping forces — so that they didn’t automatically attack one another — was just another form of confusion and complexity. For all the advantage the machines offered, they also brought the onset of the fog of war forward that much earlier in a conflict. Ignoring Toonce, Durand drew with his finger on the dusty screen he wore at his waist, a series of arrows to sketch out a concept. He snapped a picture of the tracings with his glasses; it was something he would write up when he got back from deployment. You never know where inspiration will come from.

“Ok, you want to ride with us then? We are heading in. The machines can handle themselves, no?” Durand said.

Toonce looked torn between waiting with the disabled bots or accompanying Durand. Her responsibility for the German armored forces was a significant one, given the expense and competition for deployment-likely slots in the Bundeswehr. There were fewer soldiers in the German army today than there were postal carriers in Bavaria. Why they kept so many of the latter and so few of the former us was not something Toonce allowed herself to weigh too deeply. She loved the army, loved her comrades and their machines.

Toonce nodded. The maintenance techs were still on the way. She was the sole German representative, and she told herself she needed to be present when the NATO task force leaders finally presented themselves.

The two soldiers were in a narrow pause, a lull — in what had been fevered fighting — that the NATO task force had taken advantage of to deploy by air from a staging area outside Nairobi.

“Good choice,” Durand said. Toonce hopped on. Durand smiled at the master sergeant in the seat next to him, who tapped the jeep’s dash twice with the sort of gentle encouragement one might give a beloved horse. The vehicle advanced on its own at the gentle command.

They proceeded inside the compound under the watching guns of a pair of stork-legged Nigerian sentry turrets, each armed with a trio of four-barreled Gatling guns mounted on the mottled-grey fuselage pod.

Serge Martelle, the para master sergeant, handed Durand a palm-sized screen, a phone that used the local civilian networks.

“Seen this, sir?” Martelle asked.

A sigh. An image appeared of Alain’s face, jaw clenched and wide eyed, in the midst of a Paris protest. Again.

“No, not now, Martelle,” Durand said. A nod and he withdrew the screen. But Durand pulled up footage on his glasses, already tagged to his own and his son’s social media accounts. The final image was a bleary-eyed and red-faced Alain holding aloft the “PAX MACHINA.” It is Bastille Day after all, isn’t it. Durand smiled as they pulled up to a Kenyan general and his staff, standing at attention.

AU-UN HEADQUARTERS — DAR-ES-SALAAM, TANZANIA

“It’s not a mystery, as such, but we are not yet certain who is supplying the rogue Tanzanian army elements, as well as other local elements. But we can ascertain that they are currently involved in a rapid-equipping cycle using established and improvised fabrication sites that …”

“It’s Catalyst,” Durand barked. “Just call it out!” It was too easy to be rude to the UN Peacekeeping Office AIs; they were atrocious. Indecisive. Burdened with a politeness programmed to appease too many sensibilities. And that accent, unattached to any country’s native tongue, is an affront, he thought.

“Colonel Durand, analysis indicates a probability of certainty of—” the machine responded, now using a careful ethereal cadence to mollify Durand.

“General Kimani, with respect, how might we begin to engage an adversary that we refuse to identify?” Durand pressed the point. If the AU UN force acknowledged an “outbreak” of Catalyst coercive technologies, it would require an escalation of military presence that neither organization wanted to endorse at this point in the crisis.

“The last twenty-seven hours have seen no fighting,” Kimani responded. “We are hoping to use this window for dialogue.” He was the senior officer of the AUMIT, or African Union Mission in Tanzania. His charge included the military aspects of the peacekeeping mission, as well as coordinating with UN and quasi-governmental conflict-resolution groups trying to cool the conflict. “Right now, we’re running a Blue Zone dialogue with the dissident Tanzanian army, UN negotiators, Front Civil, and others. An invitation was extended to Catalyst, but no response.”

Durand nodded. Why would this highly disruptive and increasingly dangerous movement join in? It had no leaders. No clear strategy. He viewed French military intelligence’s take as sound: Catalyst sought to undermine US or Chinese economic, political, and military blocs of strategic influence to enable sub-national movements of self-determination.

The Blue Zones were private virtual environments managed by UN AIs to facilitate non-confrontational negotiations with machine-speed modelling and data. Some even talked of the platform’s AIs themselves being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. If Kimani really believed the UN could speed that diplomatic cycle up before the rearming of the Tanzanian coup forces then there was a chance this could resolve without further violence. Durand knew him by reputation and instinctively trusted him. Then he ground his teeth. He was being too optimistic. But what were the odds some Catalyst algos weren’t already spoofing that whole thing? It happened before, in Venezuela, in ’38. They never joined these kinds of hand-holding sims.

His watch buzzed. Toonce reported the clearance codes were finally being transmitted and would be uploaded shortly. Having the NATO mech forces inside the base would make him feel better as they could be re-checked, zeroed, and synched with the UN and AU bots already in the area of operations. NATO-reinforced UN and AU patrols could begin the next morning, he hoped. Leave the conciliation and negotiation to the UN. He had his mission.

On his glasses, Durand cued up his task force’s status reports, and began watching the downloading of the clearance codes. Details mattered, even more so with machines. As a leader you had to stay on top of it. He focused on the data and half-listened as Kimani spoke for another minute. A Rwandan officer began discussing the Belgian food fab facility near the port about to be brought online.

Blasting horns brought conversation to an abrupt stop. Half of the attendees around the table jolted upright, standing and holding the conference table with white-knuckled grips as if bracing for a bodily impact. Durand remained seated and sighed. He locked eyes with Kimani, who shook his head. An attack with a warning was one you would survive, they both knew. It’s the strikes that come without any heads up that get you.

His glasses blinked, a scratching and pixelated green snow, then returned to showing the download progress of the clear codes. Stuck at seventy-six percent. Martelle was already on his notepad, ensuring the French paras inside the compound were ready for what came next. Of course they would be, he knew. That also gave him calm.

The door burst open and Toonce paused to catch her breath. She wiped dust from her mouth and began to speak.

“The clear codes were hijacked,” she said. “Catalyst payload rode the packets, but it’s not a Tanzanian Army attack. They got partially hit, too — at least their Chinese systems, from what I can tell already. One of the local groups it looks like, based on analytics. Took the task force bots and mechs down. Same with the AU and UN already deployed here. They’re trying to bring the whole country to a stop, they say, to start real negotiations.”

“How did they attack, exactly?”“They used the clear codes to target our bots’ firmware, forcing a factory reset that requires hard keys that only exist back with the civilians at the defense ministries. We, as the deployed German army, don’t even hold those. Same with the Italians. As for the Tanzanian army systems they got from the PLA, I don’t know anything for sure, but seem to be down, too.”

That might seem fortuitous, but Durand immediately looked at it another way: If Catalyst elements could wipe out the Tanzanian army’s reliance on Chinese platforms, that would be a blank slate for a new dependence on easily downloadable and fabbable Catalyst systems. Tanzania would probably acquire the Doktor anti-armor system, a simple self-firing short-barreled launcher that could be concealed in a backpack or mounted with suction-grips to a driverless vehicle, and maybe Viper launchers, a short-range 64-shot swarm weapon about the size of a concrete block that could be held and aimed by two handles or prepositioned to strike on its own.

Nearby explosions — one, two, three — rocked the room and knocked out the lights. Sounds like mortars. In the darkness, as Durand began to taste dust in the air, he conferred with Martelle about what to do next. His paras might be the only truly friendly combat-capable force in the area right now.

CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES — PARIS, FRANCE

Wringing out the handkerchief for a third time into the café’s brown-stained sink, Alain finally had the courage to look into the cracked mirror. Black splotches beneath the edges of the glass stained the edges of the reflective surface, framing a specter’s raw, red eyes peering back from an inky cloud.

“Oof,” he sighed. The neck of his black shirt was torn, by whom he could not remember. Claw-like scratches ran along his neck from his left ear down to his opposite clavicle. The blond girl who was shot in the legs? Or was it the CRS trooper who hit him with the mace?

A gentle knock on the door. “Everything Ok?”

That was his sister.

“A moment,” he said. He wiped his face with a coarse paper towel one more time, then put his augmented reality glasses back on. He tinted the lenses light blue. “I’m coming.”

Back out into the café, he rejoined his sister. A coffee waited, and he carefully touched its side with shaking fingers. Still warm. He closed his eyes and sipped the bitter espresso, grateful for the company of his sister and the tranquility of the café. Police drones raced by every few minutes, but no police were going to stop in here. They had other concerns right now responding to the attacks on the Champs-Élysées.

AU-UN HEADQUARTERS — DAR-ES-SALAAM, TANZANIA

Through thick black smoke, one of the tall two-legged defense turrets spun its gun mounts in lazy circles like a pinwheel. It did not fire as a swarm of bird-sized winged drones flew past in a corkscrew formation toward a far corner of the compound used for medevac flights. A series of blue strobe-like flashes followed by a sound like tearing paper meant that part of the camp would no longer be usable, Durand knew.

“Whose drones?” he asked aloud, looking around for Martelle.

“TA,” Martelle shouted, meaning “Tanzanian Army.” Normally, Martelle could look up with his glasses and get a read-out of the environment, seeing detailed information on everything from bandwidth to physical objects just as if he were going shopping. But since he had been on the base network during the attack, he saw nothing except fingerprint smudges and dust.

Yet after emerging from the bunker, the French officer knew where to find his soldiers. He sprinted at a low crouch toward a dispersed arrangement of vehicles set up in defensive positions. He greeted a soldier crouched near the rear flank of an AMX-3 armored vehicle. The paratrooper had set up a camoflage brown pop-up ballistic shield and was aiming a 10-year-old portable defense weapon skyward. These double-barreled shoulder-fired kinetic and microwave weapons were not connected to the base network or even the vehicles they were carried on, and so were still able to autonomously shoot down incoming shells and drones.

“Getting started a bit earlier than we wanted,” Durand said.

“Always ready, no?” said the soldier, whose chest armor name-plate read Orbach.

Durand held up the tablet he wore at his waist, and tapped it against the soldier’s forearm-mounted screen. Between the hastily broken up meeting and this physical connection, the mission-management AIs hosted on Durand’s tablet had created a plan of action based on years of training and real-world operations led by the colonel.

“There you go, Orbach. You have everything you need? Maybe I can fire up a fab for a nice coffee for you?”

Orbach smiled and nodded.

“Now get ready,” Durand said. “Let’s get out of this mess here and go start some trouble.”

Orders given, the information would spread rapidly from soldier to soldier, vehicle to vehicle, by direct or indirect laser transmission. Reliable, tightband, and perfect for a situation like this. Somebody might intercept it, but that was true with everything, wasn’t it?

At once, half the French paras moved to their vehicles, as the other half began climbing the shipping containers. Thanks to the task force’s own orbital sensors, unaffected by the attack so far, Durand had targets. Conventional doctrine emphasized machine vs. machine engagements, but he was going to be doing something far riskier. And more important: targeting the individuals who were the contacts, or nodes, for the Catalyst technologies. There was no time to waste staying inside the protection the base afforded. The Catalyst systems were learning and improving, from the first wave of attacks. Iterative warfare required ferocious speed and more initiative than most leaders were comfortable with.

A text message from Toonce appeared on Durand’s glasses. The UN base’s network was back up. Wait. Based on the auburn-colored text and the blue triangle icon, this was a message being sent via an encrypted consumer messaging app.

“I’m printing new logic cores for the defensive bots first, then the offensive systems. We have 213,” Toonce said.

“Of course,” Durand responded, a subvocal command converted to text. “How long?”

“Six hours.”

“And if you alternate printing, say, one defensive then one offensive, so there is … balance in our capability? I will not wait for the AU forces to regenerate. There is a window here we have to take before another round of upgrades by Tanzanian Army forces, or whoever else is equipping with Catalyst systems. We are moving out now.”

He closed out the conversation. Six hours would become 12, which would become a day delaying until the machines were ready. Durand’s paras were primed to fight now. La Victoire ne se donne pas.

Inside and atop the trucks and jeeps, the soldiers began cueing up virtual representations of their targets. The drivers took manual control, the safest option at a time like this. Less than a minute later, Durand and Martell were back in the scout car, with the commander buckling on his armor. The convoy rolled forward at a walking pace toward the base’s main gate. Some of the paras cast wary glances at the glitching Nigerian defense bots, which swayed back and forth atop their stork-like legs. Other soldiers looked for the two para sniper teams protectively watching from atop the shipping containers. As the vehicles advanced, the snipers flew a quartet of Aigle reconnaissance drones to scout routes established by Durand’s AIs.

The French soldiers were not the only ones rushing to action. Holding a water bottle in his lap, Martelle watched a squad of Kenyan infantry worked carefully to clear the medevac flight pad, guiding a pair of eight-legged explosive ordnance disposal bots as they cleared the area of micro-munitions left behind by the Catalyst swarm. The “confetti mines” were the size of an old postage stamp, paper-like explosives that detonated when their millimeters-thin bodies were bent or cracked. Coiled tight around titanium spools stored inside the bird-like drones, the mines fluttered to the ground by the hundreds, arming as they fell. One mine alone might not be enough to injure a person or even a machine. But if one detonated, it triggered other nearby mines.

“Martelle, hey,” Durand said.

“Sir,” Martelle responded, nodding. He took a drink of water.

“They have their job. We have ours.”

“Always ready. Onward,” Martelle said.

A tap on the pad at his waist and Durand urged the column forward. The base’s thick-plasticrete barrier-gates at its main entrance swung outward like arms extending for an embrace. Durand held his breath as his jeep was the first through, out into the open area beyond the base. With a feeling of regret, he passed intricate human-sized pyramids of dust-covered German and Italian bots, looking like cairns on a forgotten desert trail. It was as if in their final moments they sought to join together out of fear. He did not need those machines to complete this mission, but he would be lying to himself if he did not admit that they could make a life-or-death difference for his soldiers.

“Faster now,” said Durand. “We have our objectives, now we—”

His glasses vibrated painfully.

“MISSION ABORT,” read the message, a bright red scrawl of flashing characters.

This was no time to stop. He swiped it aside, and motioned for Martelle to keep driving.

Then General Kimani broke through with a direct audio feed.

“Colonel, you need to return to base. Mission abort. Confirm?”

There was no way to lock the officer out. Unlike with a fully autonomous formation, there was no “kill switch” for Durand’s troops. He led them, fully.

“We are en route to the objectives, general. You can see our target set; it has been approved by the task force command.”

The jeep slewed to the right, around a broken-down Tanzanian Army T-99X tank, a self-driving Chinese model that was exported throughout Africa, complete with stock PLA green-and-brown digital camo.

“No longer. PKO and AU leadership just made the call. They do not want your troops hunting down individuals in the city. Their models say it will just worsen the situation for civilians, everybody.”

Worsen? Durand thought. Isn’t it already bad enough?

“So,” said Durand. “That’s it?”

“I am going to propose another target set. Only bots, fabs, and cyber targets. No humans. We can deploy the task forces systems in six hours, I understand. Your paras can be on standby.”

Machines targeting machines, said Durand. That’s all they want any more.

He braced his leg and leaned back in his seat as his vehicle accelerated onto a deserted artery flanked by half a kilometer of torched and roofless four-story buildings. He looked back over his shoulder at the trailing convoy. His troops were there, following.

August Cole is co-author of Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution

Read also How NATO is Innovating Toward the Future only in The Cipher Brief

Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief.

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expomahal-blog · 6 years ago

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Consumer Electronics Marketing events

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makaveli96me-blog · 7 years ago

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Resources for Keeping Current on Emerging Technology

TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com

TechCrunch is a resource that provides information about upcoming and current technology, gaming, videos, reviews, and entertainment content. The site contains news, articles, videos, and blogs to relay information.

The most interesting item I found on this site is the Modobag. This item is a suitcase that is rideable, yes, rideable. It is TSA and FAA compliant, weighing in at about 20lbs, can travel 11 miles on one charge at a speeding 5-8mph.

Engadget

https://www.engadget.com

Engadget is a resource that provides information about upcoming and current technology, gaming, videos, reviews, and entertainment content. The site contains news, articles, videos, and blogs to relay information.

One of the more interesting group of items found on Engadget are the 3E Robotics Concept robots. There are four robots, each is reported to serve a different role, one named 3E-A18 is a companion robot, designed to show compassion to its user. The 3E-B18 is a chair that assists in mobility for users that have disabilities or difficulty moving from one location to another. 3E-C18 is similar to the previous, but contains storage compartments, both models are designed for indoor and outdoor use. And the last model, 3E-D18 is an autonomous off-road vehicle. All models are designed to help people who need assistance, whether physical in nature or mental depression and just need a friend.

Wired

https://www.wired.com

Wired is a resource that provides information about upcoming and current technology, digital culture and entertainment content. The site contains news, articles, and blogs to relay information.

Although, pet collars that provide GPS location of the pet are not new, LinkAKC recently released its smart collar for dogs. It is capable of not only providing GPS coordinates in the event that your pet goes missing, it monitors your pet’s activities and health, has remote controlled sound & light for safety, and via your smartphone it allows you to share, save, and record special walks or adventures that you and your dog shared.

Mashable

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Mashable is a resource that provides information about upcoming and current technology, digital culture and entertainment content. The site contains news, articles, and blogs to relay information.

One new emerging technology that is provided on Mashable is a new wearable glass device. The device is called MAD Gaze, a Kickstarter project that is similar in nature to Google Glass. The device (if funding is acquired) supposedly will allow a holographic user interface, using hand gestures and finger movements to navigate through content.

ZDNet

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ZDNet is a resource that can provide a variety of information, from IT jobs both current and emerging to reviews about specific emerging technology. Although much of the content are blogs from investigative technology journalists and experts in the field of technology, the site provides information regarding software, hardware, mobile devices, security, IT research, technology laws, social media, new gadgets, and the companies involved. Great site to see and hear about the latest and greatest in technology.

One new emerging technology in recent years is facial recognition for log-in to smartphones and other devices. Intel intends to launch a 5G facial-recognition payment technology that would enable users to make a purchase without the use of cash or credit cards, reducing the threat of credit card abuse/fraud. Additionally, this technology could be used on street cameras to facilitate missing persons cases and allow stoplights to auto adjust times based on traffic flow.

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neptunecreek · 4 years ago

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GitHub Reinstates youtube-dl After RIAA’s Abuse of the DMCA

GitHub recently reinstated the repository for youtube-dl, a popular free software tool for downloading videos from YouTube and other user-uploaded video platforms. GitHub had taken down the repository last month after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) abused the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice-and-takedown procedure to pressure GitHub to remove it.

By shoehorning DMCA 1201 into the notice-and-takedown process, RIAA potentially sets a very dangerous precedent.

The removal of youtube-dl’s source code caused an outcry. The tool is used by journalists and activists to save eyewitness videos, by YouTubers to save backup copies of their own uploaded videos, and by people with slow or unreliable network connections to download videos in high resolution and watch them without buffering interruptions, to name just a few of the uses we’ve heard about. youtube-dl is a lot like the videocassette recorders of decades past: a flexible tool for saving personal copies of video that’s already accessible to the public.

Under the DMCA, an online platform like GitHub is not responsible for the allegedly infringing activities of its users so long as that platform follows certain rules, including complying when a copyright holder asks it to take down infringing material. But unlike most DMCA takedowns, youtube-dl contained no material belonging to the RIAA or its member companies. RIAA’s argument hinges on a separate section of the DMCA, Section 1201, which says that it’s illegal to bypass a digital lock in order to access or modify a copyrighted work—or to provide tools to others that bypass digital locks. The RIAA argued that since youtube-dl could be used to infringe on copyrighted music, GitHub must remove it. By shoehorning DMCA 1201 into the notice-and-takedown process, RIAA potentially sets a very dangerous precedent, making it extremely easy for copyright holders to remove software tools from the Internet based only on the argument that those tools could be used for copyright infringement.

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youtube-dl’s code did contain the titles and URLs of certain commercial music videos as a part of a list of videos to use to test the tool’s functionality. Of course, simply mentioning a video’s URL is not an infringement, nor is streaming a few seconds of that video to test a tool’s functionality. As EFF explained in a letter to GitHub on behalf of youtube-dl’s team of maintainers:

First, youtube-dl does not infringe or encourage the infringement of any copyrighted works, and its references to copyrighted songs in its unit tests are a fair use. Nevertheless, youtube-dl’s maintainers are replacing these references. Second, youtube-dl does not violate Section 1201 of the DMCA because it does not “circumvent” any technical protection measures on YouTube videos.

Fortunately, after receiving EFF’s letter, GitHub has reversed course. From GitHub’s announcement:

Although we did initially take the project down, we understand that just because code can be used to access copyrighted works doesn’t mean it can’t also be used to access works in non-infringing ways. We also understood that this project’s code has many legitimate purposes, including changing playback speeds for accessibility, preserving evidence in the fight for human rights, aiding journalists in fact-checking, and downloading Creative Commons-licensed or public domain videos. When we see it is possible to modify a project to remove allegedly infringing content, we give the owners a chance to fix problems before we take content down. If not, they can always respond to the notification disabling the repository and offer to make changes, or file a counter notice.

Again, although our clients chose to remove the references to the specific videos that GitHub requested, including them did not constitute copyright infringement.

RIAA’s letter accused youtube-dl of being a “circumvention device” that bypasses a digital lock protected by section 1201 of the DMCA. Responding on behalf of the developers, EFF explained that the “signature” code used by YouTube (what RIAA calls a “rolling cipher”) isn’t a protected digital lock—and if it were, youtube-dl doesn’t “circumvent” it but simply uses it as intended. For some videos, YouTube embeds a block of JavaScript code in its player pages. That code calculates a number called “sig” and sends this number back to YouTube’s video servers as part of signaling the actual video stream to begin. Any client software that can interpret JavaScript can run YouTube’s “signature” code and produce the right response, whether it’s a standard web browser or youtube-dl. The actual video stream isn’t encrypted with any DRM scheme like the ones used by subscription video sites.

It’s no secret that EFF doesn’t like Section 1201 and the ways it’s used to shut down innovation and competition. In fact, we’re challenging the law in court. But in the case of youtube-dl, Section 1201 doesn’t apply at all. GitHub agreed, and put the repository back online with its full functionality intact.

GitHub recognized that accusations about software projects violating DMCA 1201 don’t make valid takedowns under section 512. GitHub committed to have technical experts review Section 1201-related accusations and allow code repository owners to dispute those accusations before taking down their code. This is a strong commitment to the rights of GitHub’s developer community, and we hope it sets an example.

EFF is proud to have helped the free software community keep this important tool online. Please consider celebrating this victory with us by making a donation to EFF.

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emarkly-blog · 7 years ago

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How to Get Free Traffic to Your Website

irst a WARNING! Any free traffic offer that has the word “Exchange” in it would be a good traffic source to avoid!

– Link exchanges aren’t worth anything and could actually be harmful. – Traffic from places where you click theirs in exchange for them clicking yours is also junk traffic.

Rule #1 when generating free traffic is to PROTECT YOUR DIGITAL PROPERTY at all times. Your website is your money maker and you don’t want to expose it to bad company.

Places to get Free Traffic to Your Blog

Top two things are SEO and links!

Whether it is your blog that is getting traffic directly or indirectly you have to understand the nature of SEO.

#1 Keyword Research

You cannot skip this step and succeed in SEO. You cannot get quality free traffic if you do not apply SEO.

Finding out the keywords relevant to what you are selling involve knowing two important metrics. ONE – the size of your target market. TWO – how badly do they want what you are selling?

You want to find the people who are in your market and wanting to give you money.

Google’s tools are great for starting out. There are more powerful tools but the basic’s can be accomplished using mostly free tools.

Here is a detailed post on how to do keyword research for your blog.

If you are new to the idea of SEO it can be overwhelming. Keep at it, after awhile it will make a lot of sense to you.

Doing your keyword research will give you a great overview of how much traffic is available for each of your keywords as well as make suggestions for additional keywords that you can use to “build out” your network.

Seeing the total numbers of people searching for your keyword terms will give you a traffic goal to work towards.

The value in Long Tail Keywords

One very smart thing you can do is to start with the long-tail keywords and network your link-building SEO strategies there first. Then build out to more and more competitive terms.

Let the big dog’s have the highly competitive terms to start. You learn to dominate on smaller terms it won’t be long until you are a real contender for the more coveted keywords.

#2 Borrowing From the Neighbours

Part of researching keywords is actually taking them out for a test drive. Collect all your relevant terms and plug them into Google Search. Who comes up?

BTW… there are some excellent paid tools for this too that will give you MUCH MORE insight to your competitors- who can also be your advocates ( *hint* keep reading ) See who the top listings are on the first three pages of each keyword combination. make note of the sites and their rankings.

Next find out who is linked to them. You can find out their backlinks using different free tools on the internet but will get the most information and cleanest report from Bing Webmaster Tools.

After that you really do need to look at some quality paid keyword research tools.

Generally speaking the more backlinks a webpage (page being the focus word here), the more popular it is.

Be cautious about trying to repeat everything they do because MOST websites do have live links that are from link farms and links that were put in place by malicious competitors. use your information wisely to pick the best building ideas.

The quality of the link will always be worth more than the quantity. With a little bit of research and applied SEO techniques – you have a good change of becoming VERY competitive.

#3 External Sources of Traffic

After you have learned the basic SEO techniques and know the keywords you want to get traffic for. You can broaden the area your target market will be able to find you by using your SEO wizardry on highly trafficked and high ranking websites and networks.

Top 10 Free Traffic Sources 3a. Article Marketing

This is an oldie but a goodie. Not as powerful as it once was but still good if you are taking the pains to make sure you are providing quality information and useful content.

The top two big no no’s are NO DUPLICATE CONTENT and NO BAD SPINNING CONTENT. Be lazy and you will get lazy results. At least don’t be lazy on the front end. The goal is to do good work on the front so you can be lazy on the back end.

It is challenging to come up with many ways to write one article. A couple of things you can do is hire someone to write on a particular topic for you or to write “related” articles that can still link using the same relevant keyword family or group.

3b. Classified Ad and Directory Networks

There are a tonne of FREE places to advertise your stuff. Make a detailed and well written copy to go with your “get it here” link to give your content a boost.

3c. Press Releases From Quality Source

This one needs to be handled with caution. Just like the old link farms there are some really bad places advertising they handle a Press Release. The top ones cost money but there are ways to get a free press release from a reputable press company. One way is to do something newsworthy in your town and talk your local newspaper to put the news “on the wire” for you.

3d. Slide Submission

Places like SlideShare and Scribd will take your content on their sites. Make some really helpful slides targeted to your audience.

3e. Forum Participation

Done right this can be a powerful source of free traffic and buyers.

There are RULES to forums and rule one in all of them is – DO NOT SPAM

When you interact, provide useful information, people become familiar with you. They will click your links, follow your recommendations, and investigate your profile.

One very powerful thing is to realize that every post and comment you make also carries your signature.

3f. Social Media

This is a big one and continues to evolve and grow. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter etc. All of them have different ways to drive free and paid traffic to your website.

3g. Video Share Sites

Another HUGE resource for targeted free and paid traffic. By submitting your video and optimizing it for the search engines you can get a lot of traffic to your site.

A couple of hints you can do is to make sure you have a clickable link embedded in your video (if available) that goes to your site. At least ensure your website address is at the bottom of the video screen so people will be able to find you.

Also in the video description, use basic SEO rules when writing it and make sure there is a clickable link to your webpage.

3h. Free Blog Sites

Use free blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress etc.

Expand on your main websites information on the larger free blogging platforms. This is similar to article marketing where you write related articles to the main page you want people to find. Don’t be too dramatic when using links and be sure you don’t violate the terms of service on the

3i. Using Web 2.0

Sites like Hubpages & Squidoo will let you write on a niche topic. Similar to the blogging platforms. The free blogging platforms can also be considered Web 2.0.

These Web 2.0 properties carry a lot of juice and can rank quickly and high in the search engines.

Here is a lazy trick for anyone who is bothering to read this far. In your search for your keyword, find a long-tail lens or hub that is ranking high and then contact the owner of that lens or hub to see if they might put in a link for a couple of bucks.

Something as simple as “you can read more about this stuff here” will send traffic your way.

3j. Write a Book

Write a book and upload it to kindle. Give it away for free and make sure the title and description are optimized for search.

That list above was just a small drop in the bucket of all the traffic sources available on the internet. Podcasts, videos, articles, interviews, webinars, guest posting, commenting, RSS feeds, and on and on.

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neptunecreek · 4 years ago

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EFF at 30: Surveillance Is Not Obligatory, with Edward Snowden

To commemorate the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 30th anniversary, we present EFF30 Fireside Chats. This limited series of livestreamed conversations looks back at some of the biggest issues in internet history and their effects on the modern web.

To celebrate 30 years of defending online freedom, EFF was proud to welcome NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden for a chat about surveillance, privacy, and the concrete ways we can improve our digital world, as part of our EFF30 Fireside Chat series. EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, EFF Director of Engineering for Certbot Alexis Hancock, and EFF Policy Analyst Matthew Guariglia weighed in on the way the internet (and surveillance) actually function, the impact that has on modern culture and activism, and how we’re grappling with the cracks this pandemic has revealed—and widened—in our digital world.

You can watch the full conversation here or read the transcript.

On June 3, we’ll be holding our fourth EFF30 Fireside Chat, on how to free the internet, with net neutrality pioneer Gigi Sohn. EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow once wrote, "We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before." This year marked the 25th anniversary of this audacious essay denouncing centralized authority on the blossoming internet. But modern tech has strayed far from the utopia of individual freedom that 90s netizens envisioned. We'll be discussing corporatization, activism, and the fate of the internet, framed by Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," with Gigi, along with EFF Senior Legislative Counsel Ernesto Falcon and EFF Associate Director of Policy and Activism Katharine Trendacosta.

RSVP to the next EFF30 Fireside Chat

The Internet is Not Made of Magic

Snowden opened the discussion by explaining the reality that all of our internet usage is made up of a giant mesh of companies and providers. The internet is not magic—it’s other people’s computers: “All of our communications—structurally—are intermediated by other people’s computers and infrastructure…[in the past] all of these lines that you were riding across—the people who ran them were taking notes.” We’ve come a long way from that time when our communications were largely unencrypted, and everything you typed into the Google search box “was visible to everybody else who was on that Starbucks network with you, and your Internet Service Provider, who knew this person who paid for this account searched for this thing on Google….anybody who was between your communications could take notes.”

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How Can Tech Protect Us from Surveillance?

In 2013, Snowden came forward with details about the PRISM program, through which the NSA and FBI worked directly with large companies to see what was in individuals' internet communications and activity, making much more public the notion that our digital lives were not safe from spying. This has led to a change in people’s awareness of this exploitation, Snowden said, and myriad solutions have come about to solve parts of what is essentially an ecosystem problem: some technical, some legal, some political, some individual. “Maybe you install a different app. Maybe you stop using Facebook. Maybe you don’t take your phone with you, or start using an encrypted messenger like Signal instead of something like SMS.”

Nobody sells you a car without brakes—nobody should sell you a browser without security.

When it comes to the legal cases, like EFF’s case against the NSA, the courts are finally starting to respond. Technical solutions, like the expansion of encryption in everyday online usage, are also playing a part, Alexis Hancock, EFF’s Director of Engineering for Certbot, explained. “Just yesterday, I checked on a benchmark that said that 95% of web traffic is encrypted—leaps and bounds since 2013.” In 2015, web browsers started displaying “this site is not secure” messages on unencrypted sites, and that’s where EFF’s Certbot tool steps in. Certbot is a “free, open source software that we work on to automatically supply free SSL, or secure, certificates for traffic in transit, automating it for websites everywhere.” This keeps data private in transit—adding a layer of protection over what is traveling between your request and a website’s server. Though this is one of the things that don’t get talked about a lot, partly because these are pieces that you don’t see and shouldn’t have to see, but give people security. “Nobody sells you a car without brakes—nobody should sell you a browser without security.”

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Balancing the Needs of the Pandemic and the Dangers of Surveillance

We’ve moved the privacy needle forward in many ways since 2013, but in 2020, a global catastrophe could have set us back: the COVID-19 pandemic. As Hancock described it, EFF’s focus for protecting privacy during the pandemic was to track “where technology can and can’t help, and when is technology being presented as a silver bullet for certain issues around the pandemic when people are the center for being able to bring us out of this.”

There is a looming backlash of people who have had quite enough.

Our fear was primarily scope creep, she explained: from contact tracing to digital credentials, many of these systems already exist, but we must ask, “what are we actually trying to solve here? Are we actually creating more barriers to healthcare?” Contact tracing, for example, must put privacy first and foremost—because making it trustworthy is key to making it effective.

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The Melting Borders Between Corporate, Government, Local, and Federal Surveillance

But the pandemic, unfortunately, isn’t the only nascent danger to our privacy. EFF’s Matthew Guariglia described the merging of both government and corporate surveillance, and federal and local surveillance, that's happening around the country today: “Police make very effective marketers, and a lot of the manufacturers of technology are counting on it….If you are living in the United States today you are likely walking past or carrying around street level surveillance everywhere you go, and this goes double if you live in a concentrated urban setting or you live in an overpoliced community.”

Police make very effective marketers, and a lot of the manufacturers of technology are counting on it

From automated license plate readers to private and public security cameras to Shotspotter devices that listen for gunshots but also record cars backfiring and fireworks, this matters now more than ever, as the country reckons with a history of dangerous and inequitable overpolicing: “If a Shotspotter misfires, and sends armed police to the site of what they think is a shooting, there is likely to be a higher chance for a more violent encounter with police who think they’re going to a shooting.” This is equally true for a variety of these technologies, from automated license plate readers to facial recognition, which police claim are used for leads, but are too often accepted as fact.

“Should we compile records that are so comprehensive?” asked Snowden about the way these records aren’t only collected, but queried, allowing government and companies to ask for the firehose of data. “We don’t even care what it is, we interrelate it with something else. We saw this license plate show up outside our store at a strip mall and we want to know how much money they have.” This is why the need for legal protections is so important, added Executive Director Cindy Cohn: “The technical tools are not going to get to the place where the phone company doesn’t know where your phone is. But the legal protections can make sure that the company is very limited in what they can do with that information—especially when the government comes knocking.”

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After All This, Is Privacy Dead?

All these privacy-invasive regimes may lead some to wonder if privacy, or anonymity, are, to put it bluntly, dying. That’s exactly what one audience member asked during the question and answer section of the chat. “I don’t think it’s inevitable,” said Guariglia. “There is a looming backlash of people who have had quite enough.” Hancock added that optimism is both realistic and required: “No technology makes you a ghost online—none of it, even the most secure, anonymous-driven tools out there. And I don’t think that it comes down to your own personal burden...There is actually a more collective unit now that are noticing that this burden is not yours to bear...It’s going to take firing on all cylinders, with activism, technology, and legislation. But there are people fighting for you out there. Once you start looking, you’ll find them.”

If you look for darkness, that’s all you’ll ever see. But if you look for lightness, you will find it.

“So many people care,” Snowden said. “But they feel like they can’t do anything….Does it have to be that way?...Governments live in a permissionless world, but we don’t. Does it have to be that way?” If you’re looking for a lever to pull—look at the presumptions these mass data collection systems make, and what happens if they fail: “They do it because mass surveillance is cheap...could we make these systems unlawful for corporations, and costly [for others]? I think in all cases, the answer is yes.”

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Democracy, social movements, our relationships, and your own well being all require private space to thrive. If you missed this chat, please take an hour to watch it—whether you’re a privacy activist or an ordinary person, it’s critical for the safety of our society that we push back on all forms of surveillance, and protect our ability to communicate, congregate, and coordinate without fear of reprisal. We deeply appreciate Edward Snowden joining us for this EFF30 Fireside Chat and discussing how we can fight back against surveillance, as difficult as it may seem. As Hancock said (yes, quoting the anime The Last Airbender): “If you look for darkness, that’s all you’ll ever see. But if you look for lightness, you will find it.”

___________________________

Check out additional recaps of EFF's 30th anniversary conversation series, and don't miss our next program where we'll tackle digital access and the open web with Gigi Sohn on June 3, 2021—EFF30 Fireside Chat: Free the Internet.

Related Cases:

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neptunecreek · 5 years ago

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EFF Urges Congress Not to Dismantle Section 230

The Keys to a Healthy Internet Are User Empowerment and Competition, Not Censorship

The House Energy and Commerce Committee held a legislative hearing today over what to do with one of the most important Internet laws, Section 230. Members of Congress and the testifying panelists discussed many of the critical issues facing online activity like how Internet companies moderate their users’ speech, how Internet companies and law enforcement agencies are addressing online criminal activity, and how the law impacts competition.

EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry testified at the hearing, offering a strong defense of the law that’s helped create the Internet we all rely on today. In her opening statement, McSherry urged Congress not to take Section 230’s role in building the modern Internet lightly:

We all want an Internet where we are free to meet, create, organize, share, debate, and learn. We want to have control over our online experience and to feel empowered by the tools we use. We want our elections free from manipulation and for women and marginalized communities to be able to speak openly about their experiences.

Chipping away at the legal foundations of the Internet in order to pressure platforms to play the role of Internet police is not the way to accomplish those goals.

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Recognizing the gravity of the challenges presented, Ranking Member Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) aptly stated: “I want to be very clear: I’m not for gutting Section 230. It’s essential for consumers and entities in the Internet ecosystem. Misguided and hasty attempts to amend or even repeal Section 230 for bias or other reasons could have unintended consequences for free speech and the ability for small businesses to provide new and innovative services.”

We agree. Any change to Section 230 risks upsetting the balance Congress struck decades ago that created the Internet as it exists today. It protects users and Internet companies big and small, and leaves open the door to future innovation. As Congress continues to debate Section 230, here are some suggestions and concerns we have for lawmakers willing to grapple with the complexities and get this right.

Facing Illegal Activity Online: Focus on the Perpetrators

Much of the hearing focused on illegal speech and activity online. Representatives and panelists mentioned examples like illegal drug sales, wildlife sales, and fraud. But there’s an important distinction to make between holding Internet intermediaries, such as social media companies and classified ads sites, liable for what their users say or do online, and holding users themselves accountable for their behavior.

Section 230 has always had a federal criminal law carve out. This means that truly culpable online platforms can already be prosecuted in federal court, alongside their users, for illegal speech and activity. For example, a federal judge in the Silk Road case correctly ruled that Section 230 did not provide immunity against federal prosecution to the operator of a website that hosted other people’s ads for illegal drugs.

But EFF does not believe prosecuting Internet intermediaries is the best answer to the problems we find online. Rather, both federal and state government entities should allocate sufficient resources to target the direct perpetrators of illegal online behavior; that is, the users themselves who take advantage of open platforms to violate the law. Section 230 does not provide an impediment to going after these bad actors. McSherry pointed this out in her written testimony: “In the infamous Grindr case... the abuser was arrested two years ago under criminal charges of stalking, criminal impersonation, making a false police report, and disobeying a court order.”

Weakening Section 230 protections in order to expand the liability of online platforms for what their users say or do would incentivize companies to over-censor user speech in an effort to limit the companies’ legal exposure. Not only would this be harmful for legitimate user speech, it would also detract from law enforcement efforts to target the direct perpetrators of illegal behavior. As McSherry noted regarding the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA):

At this committee’s hearing on November 30, 2017, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation special agent Russ Winkler explained that online platforms were the most important tool in his arsenal for catching sex traffickers. One year later, there is anecdotal evidence that FOSTA has made it harder for law enforcement to find traffickers. Indeed, several law enforcement agencies report that without these platforms, their work finding and arresting traffickers has hit a wall.

Speech Moderation: User Choice and Empowerment

In her testimony, McSherry stressed that the Internet is a better place for online community when numerous platforms are available with a multitude of moderation philosophies. Section 230 has contributed to this environment by giving platforms the freedom to moderate speech the way they see fit.

The freedom that Section 230 afforded to Internet startups to choose their own moderation strategies has led to a multiplicity of options for users—some more restrictive and sanitized, some more laissez-faire. That mix of moderation philosophies contributes to a healthy environment for free expression and association online.

Reddit’s Steve Huffman echoed McSherry’s defense of Section 230 (PDF), noting that its protections have enabled the company to improve on its moderation practices over the years. He explained that the company’s speech moderation philosophy is one that prioritizes users making decisions about how they’d like to govern themselves:

The way Reddit handles content moderation today is unique in the industry. We use a governance model akin to our own democracy—where everyone follows a set of rules, has the ability to vote and self-organize, and ultimately shares some responsibility for how the platform works.

In an environment where platforms have their own approaches to content moderation, users have the ultimate power to decide which ones to use. McSherry noted in her testimony that while Grindr was not held liable for the actions of one user, that doesn’t mean that Grindr didn’t suffer. Grindr lost users, as they moved to other dating platforms. One reason why it’s essential that Congress protect Section 230 is to preserve the multitude of platform options.

“As a litigator, [a reasonableness standard] is terrifying. That means a lot of litigation risk, as courts try to figure out what counts as reasonable.”

Later in the hearing, Rep. Darren Soto (D-FL) asked each of the panelists who should be “the cop on the beat” in patrolling online speech. McSherry reiterated that users themselves should be empowered to decide what material they see online: “A cardinal principle for us at EFF is that at the end of the day, users should be able to control their Internet experience, and we need to have many more tools to make that possible.”

If some critics of Section 230 get their way, users won’t have that power. Prof. Danielle Citron offered a proposal (PDF) that Congress implement a “duty of care” regimen, where platforms would be required to show that they’re meeting a legal “reasonableness” standard in their moderation practices in order to keep their Section 230 protection. She proposes that courts look at what platforms are doing generally to moderate content and whether their policies are reasonable, rather than what a company did with respect to a particular piece of user content.

But inviting courts to determine what moderation practices are best would effectively do away with Section 230’s protections, disempowering users in the process. In McSherry’s words, “As a litigator, [a reasonableness standard] is terrifying. That means a lot of litigation risk, as courts try to figure out what counts as reasonable.”

Robots Won’t Fix It

There was plenty of agreement that current moderation was flawed, but much disagreement about why it was flawed. Subject-matter experts on the panel frequently described areas of moderation that were not in their purview as working perfectly fine, and questioning why those techniques could not be applied to other areas.

The deeper you look at current moderation—and listen carefully to those directly silenced by algorithmic solutions—the more you understand that robots won’t fix it.

In one disorienting moment, Gretchen Peters of the Alliance to Counter Crime Online asked the congressional committee when they’d last seen a “dick pic” on Facebook, and took their silence as an indication that Facebook had solved the dick pic problem. She then suggested Facebook could move on to scanning for other criminality. Professor Hany Farid, an expert in at-scale, resilient hashing of child exploitative imagery, wondered why the tech companies could not create digital fingerprinting solutions for opioid sales.

Many cited Big Tech’s work to automatically remove what they believe to be copyright-infringing material as a potential model for other areas—perhaps unaware that the continuing failure of copyright bots is one of the few areas where EFF and the entertainment industry agree (though we think they take down too much entirely lawful material, and Hollywood thinks they’re not draconian enough.)

The truth is that the deeper you look at current moderation—and listen carefully to those directly silenced by algorithmic solutions—the more you understand that robots won’t fix it. Robots are still terrible at understanding context, which has resulted in everything from Tumblr flagging pictures of bowls of fruit as “adult content” to YouTube removing possible evidence of war crimes because it categorized the videos as “terrorist content.” Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) pointed out the consequences of having algorithms police speech, “Groups already facing prejudice and discrimination will be further marginalized and censored.” A lot of the demand for Big Tech to do more moderation is predicated on the idea that they’re good at it, with their magical tech tools. As our own testimony and long experience points out—they’re really not, with bots or without.

Could they do better? Perhaps, but as Reddit’s Huffman noted, doing so means that the tech companies need to be able to innovate without having those attempts result in a hail of lawsuits. That is, he said, “exactly the sort of ability that 230 gives us.”

Reforming 230 with Big Tech as the Focus Would Harm Small Internet Companies

Critics of 230 often fail to acknowledge that many of the solutions they seek are not within reach of startups and smaller companies. Techniques like preemptive blocking of content, persistent policing of user posts, and mechanisms that analyze speech in real time to see what needs to be censored are extremely expensive.

That means that controlling what users do, at scale, will only be doable by Big Tech. It’s not only cost prohibitive, it will carry a high cost of liability if they get it wrong. For example, Google’s ContentID is often used in the copyright context is held up as one means of enforcement, but it required a $100 million investment by Google to develop and deploy—and it still does a bad job.

Google’s Katherine Oyama testified that Google already employs around 10,000 people that work on content moderation—a bar that no startup could meet—but even that appears insufficient to some critics. By comparison, a website like Wikipedia, which is the largest repository of information in human history, employs just about 350 staff for its entire operation, and is heavily reliant on volunteers.

A set of rules that would require a Google-sized company to expend even more resources means that only the most well-funded firms could maintain global platforms. A minimally-staffed nonprofit like Wikipedia could not continue to operate as it does today. The Internet would become more concentrated, and further removed from the promise of a network that empowers everyone.

As Congress continues to examine the problems facing the Internet today, we hope lawmakers remember the role that Section 230 plays in defending the Internet’s status as a place for free speech and community online. We fear that undermining Section 230 would harden today’s largest tech companies from future competition. Most importantly, we hope lawmakers listen to the voices of the people they risk pushing offline.

Read McSherry’s full written testimony.

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neptunecreek · 5 years ago

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Amazon’s Ring is a Perfect Storm of Privacy Threats

Doors across the United States are now fitted with Amazon’s Ring, a combination doorbell-security camera that records and transmits video straight to users’ phones, to Amazon’s cloud—and often to the local police department. By sending photos and alerts every time the camera detects motion or someone rings the doorbell, the app can create an illusion of a household under siege. It turns what seems like a perfectly safe neighborhood into a source of anxiety and fear. This raises the question: do you really need Ring, or have Amazon and the police misled you into thinking that you do?

Recent reports show that Ring has partnered with police departments across the country to hawk this new surveillance system—going so far as to draft press statements and social media posts for police to promote Ring cameras. This creates a vicious cycle in which police promote the adoption of Ring, Ring terrifies people into thinking their homes are in danger, and then Amazon sells more cameras.

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Map of Ring partnerships with police compiled by Shreyas Gandlur. See full screen.

How Ring Surveils and Frightens Residents

Even though government statistics show that crime in the United States has been steadily decreasing for decades, people’s perception of crime and danger in their communities often conflict with the data. Vendors prey on these fears by creating products that inflame our greatest anxieties about crime.

Ring works by sending notifications to a person’s phone every time the doorbell rings or motion near the door is detected. With every update, Ring turns the delivery person or census-taker innocently standing on at the door into a potential criminal.

Neighborhood watch apps only increase the paranoia. Amazon promotes its free Neighbors app to accompany Ring. Other vendors sell competing apps such as Nextdoor and Citizen. All are marketed as localized social networks where people in a neighborhood can discuss local issues or share concerns. But all too often, they facilitate reporting of so-called “suspicious” behavior that really amounts to racial profiling. Take, for example, the story of an African-American real estate agent who was stopped by police because neighbors thought it was “suspicious” for him to ring a doorbell.

Even law enforcement are noticing the social consequences of public-safety-by-push-notification. At the International Associations of Chiefs of Police conference earlier this year, which EFF attended, Chandler Police Assistant Chief Jason Zdilla said that his city in Arizona embraced the Ring program, registering thousands of new Ring cameras per month. Though Chandler is experiencing a historic low for violent crime for the fourth year in a row, Ring is giving the public another impression.

“What happens is when someone opens up the social media, and every day they see maybe a potential criminal act, or every day they see a suspicious person, they start believing that this is prevalent, and that crime is really high,” Zdilla said.

If getting an alert from your front door or your neighbor every time a stranger walks down the street doesn’t cause enough paranoia, Ring is trying to alert users to local 911 calls. The Ring-police partnerships would allow the company to tap into the computer-aided dispatch system, and alert users to local 911 calls as part of the “crime news” alerts on its app, Neighbors. Such push alerts based on 911 calls could be used to instill fear and sell additional Ring services.

From Neutral Guardians to Scripted Hawkers

Thanks to in-depth reporting from Motherboard, Gizmodo, CNET, and others, we know a lot about the symbiotic relationship between Amazon’s Ring and local police departments, and how that relationship jeopardizes privacy and circumvents regulation.

At least 231 law enforcement agencies around the country have partnered with Ring, a report by Motherboard revealed. This partnership takes both a financial and digital form.

Police that partner with Ring reportedly have access to Ring’s “Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal,” which allows police to see a map of the locations of Ring cameras. Police may then ask owners for access to their footage—and when owners give permission, police do not need to acquire a warrant.

The arrangement is also financial. Amazon encourages police to encourage residents to install the Ring app and purchase cameras for their homes. Per Motherboard, for every town resident that downloads Ring’s Neighbors app, the local police department gets credits toward buying cameras it can distribute to residents. This arrangement makes salespeople out of what should be impartial and trusted protectors of our civic society.

This is not the first time the government has attempted to use an economic incentive to expand the reach of surveillance technology and to subsidize the vendors. In 2017, EFF spoke out against legislation that would provide tax credits for California residents who purchased home security systems.

Police departments also get communications instruction from the large global corporation. Documents acquired by Gizmodo revealed that questions directed at police departments concerning Ring are often passed on to Ring’s Public Relations team. Thus, many statements about Ring that residents think are coming from their trusted local police, are actually written by Ring. Worse, Ring instructed police departments not to reveal their connections to the company. Instead of getting an even-handed conversation with your local police about the benefits and pitfalls of installing a networked security camera, residents are fed canned lines from a corporation whose ultimate goal is to sell more cameras.

Even the Monitoring Association, an international trading organization for surveillance equipment, announced its concern regarding Ring's police partnerships. The organization's President, Ivan Spector, told CNET, "We are troubled by recent reports of agreements that are said to drive product-specific promotion, without alerting consumers about these marketing relationships...This lack of transparency goes against our standards as an industry, diminishes public trust, and takes advantage of these public servants."

Dissemination of Your Video Images

So, Ring and the police have an intimate relationship revolving around sharing data and money. But at least users own their own video footage and control who gets access to it, right? Not if you ask Amazon.

Earlier this year, social media users pointed out that Ring was using actual security camera footage of alleged wrong-doers in sponsored ads. Amazon harvested pictures of people’s faces and posted them alongside accusations that they were guilty of a crime, without consulting the person pictured or the owners of the cameras. According to their terms of service, Ring and its licensees have “an unlimited, irrevocable, fully paid, and royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide right to re-use, distribute store, delete, translate, copy, modify, display, sell, create derivative works,” in relation to the footage taken from your front door.

Police will also seek access to residents’ video footage. Residents may deny police access when requested. However, Amazon actively coaches police on how to persuade residents to hand over the footage. A professional communications expert instructs police on how to manipulate residents into giving away their Ring’s footage.

If convincing the resident doesn’t work, police can go straight to Amazon and ask them for the footage. This process circumvents the camera’s owner. Amazon says it will not disclose Ring video to police absent a warrant from a judge or consent from the resident. And California law generally requires police to get a warrant in this situation. But some California police say they don’t need a warrant. Tony Botti of the Fresno County Sheriff’s department told Government Technology that police can “subpoena” a Ring video. A subpoena typically does not require judicial authorization before it is sent. Botti continued: “as long as it’s been uploaded to the cloud, then Ring can take it out of the cloud and send it to us legally so that we can use it as part of our investigation.” Amazon needs to clear up this uncertainty.

Next Steps

The rapid proliferation of this partnership between police departments and the Ring surveillance system—without any oversight, transparency, or restrictions—poses a grave threat to the privacy of all people in the community. It also may chill the First Amendment rights of political canvassers and community organizers who spread their messages door-to-door, and contribute to the unfair racial profiling of our minority neighbors and visitors. Even if you chose not to put a camera on your front door, video footage of your comings and goings might easily be accessed and used by your neighbors, the police, and Amazon itself. The growing partnerships between Amazon and police departments corrodes trust in an important civic institution by turning public servants into salespeople for Amazon products.

Residents of towns whose police department have already cut a deal with Ring should voice their concern to local officials. Users of Ring should also consider how their privacy, and the privacy of the neighbors, may be harmed by having a camera on their front door, networked into a massive police surveillance system.

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neptunecreek · 6 years ago

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The Foilies 2019

Recognizing the year’s worst in government transparency

The cause of government transparency finally broke through to the popular zeitgeist this year. It wasn’t an investigative journalism exposé or a civil rights lawsuit that did it, but a light-hearted sitcom about a Taiwanese American family set in Orlando, Florida, in the late 1990s.

In a January episode of ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, the Huang family’s two youngest children—overachievers Evan and Emery—decide if they sprint on all their homework, they’ll have time to plan their father’s birthday party.

“Like the time we knocked out two English papers, a science experiment, and built the White House out of sugar cubes,” Evan said. “It opened up our Sunday for filing Freedom of Information requests.”

“They may not have figured out who shot JFK,” Emery added. “But we will.”

The eldest child, teenage slacker Eddie, concluded with a sage nod, “You know, once in a while, it’s good to know nerds.”

Amen to that. Around the world, nerds of all ages are using laws like the United States’ Freedom of Information Act (and state-level equivalent laws) to pry free secrets and expose the inner workings of our democracy. Each year, open government advocates celebrate these heroes during Sunshine Week, an annual advocacy campaign on transparency.

But the journalists and researchers who rely on these important measures every day can’t help but smirk at the boys’ scripted innocence. Too often, government officials will devise novel and outrageous ways to reject requests for information or otherwise stymie the public’s right to know. Even today—20 years after the events set in the episode—the White House continues to withhold key documents from the Kennedy assassination files.

Since 2015, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, privacy and government transparency in the digital age) has published The Foilies to recognize the bad actors who attempted to thwart the quests for truth of today’s Evans and Emerys. With these tongue-in-cheek awards, we call out attempts to block transparency, retaliation against those who exercise their rights to information, and the most ridiculous examples of incompetence by government officials who handle these public records.

The Corporate Eclipse Award - Google, Amazon, and Facebook

The Unnecessary Box Set Award - Central Intelligence Agency

The (Harlem) Shaky Grounds for Redaction Award - Federal Communications Commission

The Unreliable Narrator Award - President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. District Court Judges

The Cross-Contamination Award - Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho

The Scanner Darkly Award - St. Joseph County Superior Court

The Cash for Crash Award - Michigan State Police

The Bartering with Extremists Award - California Highway Patrol

The Preemptive Shredding Award - Inglewood Police Department

The What the Swat? Award - Nova Scotia and Halifax Law Enforcement

The Outrageous Fee Request of the Year - City of Seattle

The Intern Art Project Award - Vermont Gov. Phil Scott

The Least Transparent Employer Award - U.S. Department of Justice

The Clawback Award - The Broward County School Board

The Wrong Way to Plug a Leak Award - City of Greenfield, California

If it Looks like a Duck Award - Brigham Young University Police

The Insecure Security Check Award - U.S. Postal Service

The Corporate Eclipse Award - Google, Amazon, and Facebook

Sunshine laws? Tech giants think they can just blot those out with secretive contracts. But two nonprofit groups—Working Partnerships and the First Amendment Coalition—are fighting this practice in California by suing the city of San Jose over an agreement with Google that prevents city officials from sharing the public impacts of development deals, circumventing the California Public Records Act.

Google’s proposed San Jose campus is poised to have a major effect on the city’s infrastructure, Bloomberg reported. Yet, according to the organization’s lawsuit, records analyzing issues of public importance such as traffic impacts and environmental compliance were among the sorts of discussions Google demanded be made private under their non-disclosure agreements.

And it’s not just Google using these tactics. An agreement between Amazon and Virginia includes a provision that the state will give the corporate giant—which is placing a major campus in the state—a heads-up when anyone files a public records request asking for information about them. The Columbia Journalism Review reported Facebook has also used this increasingly common strategy for companies to keep cities quiet and the public in the dark about major construction projects.

The Unnecessary Box Set Award - Central Intelligence Agency

Courtesy of National Security Counselors

After suing the CIA to get access to information about Trump’s classified briefings, Kel McClahanan of the National Security Law Center was expecting the agency to send over eight agreed-upon documents.

What he was not expecting was for the files—each between three and nine pages each—-to be spread out across six separate CD-ROMs, each burned within minutes of each other, making for perhaps the most unnecessary box set in the history of the compact disc.

What makes this “extra silly,” McClanahan said, is that the CIA has previously complained about how burdensome and costly fulfilling requests can be. Yet the CIA could have easily combined several requests onto the same disc and saved themselves some time and resources. After all, a a standard CD-ROM can hold 700 MB, and all of the files took only 304 MB of space.

The (Harlem) Shaky Grounds for Redaction Award - Federal Communications Commission

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After repealing the Open Internet Order and ending net neutrality, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai doubled down on his efforts to ruin online culture. He released a cringe-inducing YouTube video titled “7 Things You Can Still Do on the Internet After Net Neutrality" that featured his own rendition of the infamous “Harlem Shake” meme. (For the uninitiated, the meme is characterized by one person subtly dancing in a room of people to Baauer’s track “Harlem Shake.” Then the bass drops and the crowd goes nuts, often with many people in costumes.)

Muckrock editor JPat Brown filed a Freedom of Information Act request for emails related to the video, but the FCC rejected the request, claiming the communications were protected “deliberative” records.

Brown appealed the decision, and the FCC responded by releasing all the email headers, while redacting the contents, claiming that anything more would cause “foreseeable harm.” Brown did not relent, and a year later the FCC capitulated and released the unredacted emails.

“So, what did these emails contain that was so potentially damaging that it was worth risking a potential FOIA lawsuit over?” Brown writes. “Pai was curious when it was going live, and the FCC wanted to maintain a veto power over the video if they didn’t like it.” The most ridiculous redaction of all was a tiny black box in an email from the FCC media director. Once removed, all that was revealed was a single word: “OK.”

The Unreliable Narrator Award - President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. District Court Judges

When President Trump tweets attacks about the intelligence community, transparency groups and journalists often file FOIA requests (and subsequently lawsuits) seeking the documents that underpin his claims. The question that often comes up: Do Trump’s smartphone rants break the seal of secrecy on confidential programs?

The answer seems to be no. Multiple judges have sided with Justice Department lawyers, concluding that his Twitter disclosures do not mean that the government has to confirm or deny whether records about those activities exist.

In a FOIA case seeking documents that would show whether Trump is under investigation, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that the President’s tweets to that effect are “speculation.” Similarly, in a FOIA suit to get more information about the widely publicized dossier of potential ties between Trump and Russia, U.S. District Judge Amir Mehta said that the President’s statements are political rather than “assertions of pure fact.”

And so, whether Trump actually knows what he’s talking about remains an open question.

The Cross-Contamination Award - Stanford Law Professor Daniel Ho

One of the benefits of public records laws is they allow almost anyone—regardless of legal acumen—to force government agencies to be more transparent, usually without having to file a lawsuit.

But in Washington State, filing a public records request can put the requester at legal risk of being named in a lawsuit should someone else not want the records to be made public.

This is what happened to Sarah Schacht, a Seattle-based open government advocate and consultant. For years Schacht has used public records to advocate for better food safety rules in King County, an effort that led to the adoption of food safety placards found in restaurants in the region.

After Schacht filed another round of requests with the county health department, she received a legal threat in November 2018 from Stanford Law School professor Daniel Ho’s attorney threatening to sue her unless she abandoned her request. Apparently, Ho has been working with the health department to study the new food safety and placard regulations. He had written draft studies that he shared with the health department, making them public records.

Ho’s threat amounted to an effort to intimidate Schacht from receiving public records, probably because he had not formally published his studies first. Regardless of motive, the threat was an awful look. But even when faced with the threat, Schacht refused to abandon her request.

Fortunately, the lawsuit never materialized, and Schacht was able to receive the records. Although Ho’s threats made him look like a bully, the real bad actor in this scenario is Washington State’s public records law. The state’s top court has interpreted the law to require parties seeking to stop agencies from releasing records (sometimes called reverse-FOIA suits) to also sue the original requester along with the government agency.

The Scanner Darkly Award - St. Joseph County Superior Court

Courtesy of Jessica Huseman

ProPublica reporter Jessica Huseman has been digging deep into the child welfare system and what happens when child abuse results in death. While following up on a series of strangulations, she requested a copy of a case file from the St. Joseph County Superior Court in Indiana. Apparently, the clerk on the other end simply took the entire file and ran everything through a scanner. The problem was that the file contained a CD-ROM, and that’s not how CD-ROMs work. “Well this is the first time this had happened,” Huseman posted to Twitter, along with the blotchy black-and-white image of the top of the disc. “They scanned a CD as part of my FOI and didn’t give me its contents. Cool cool.”

The Cash for Crash Award - Michigan State Police

As tech companies experiment with autonomous vehicles on public roadways, reporters are keeping tabs on how often these cars are involved in collisions. That’s why The Information’s Matt Drange has been filing records requests for the crash data held by state agencies. Some government departments have started claiming that every line of the dataset is its own, individual record and subject to a copy fee. Our winner, the Michigan State Police, proposed to charge Drange a 25-cent fee for each of a 1.9 million-line dataset, plus $20 for a thumbdrive, for a grand total of $485,645.24, with half of it due up front. Runners-up that quoted similar line-by-line charges include the Indiana State Police ($346,000) and the North Carolina Department of Transportation ($82,000). Meanwhile, Florida’s government released its detailed dataset at no charge at all.

The Bartering with Extremists Award - California Highway Patrol

In 2016, the Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP), an infamous neo-Nazi group, staged a demonstration at the California State Capitol. Counter-protesters fiercely opposed the demonstration, and the scene soon descended into chaos, leaving multiple people injured. When the dust settled, a member of the public (disclosure: also a co-author of this piece) filed a California Public Records Act request to obtain a copy of the permit the white nationalist group filed for its rally. The California Highway Patrol rejected the request for this normally available document, claiming it was related to a criminal investigation.

Two years later, evidence emerged during criminal proceedings that a CHP detective used the public records request as a bargaining chip in a phone call with the TWP protest leader, who was initially reluctant to provide information. The officer told him how the request might reveal his name. “We don’t have a reason to...uh...deny [the request],” the officer said according a transcript of the call. But once the organizer decided to cooperate, the officer responded, “I’m gonna suggest that we hold that or redact your name or something...uh...until this thing gets resolved.” In light of these new facts, the First Amendment Coalition filed a new request for the same document. It too was denied.

The Preemptive Shredding Award - Inglewood Police Department

In defiance of the law enforcement lobby, California legislators passed a law (SB 1421) requiring police and sheriffs to disclose officer misconduct records in response to California Public Records Act requests. These documents, often contained in personnel files, had historically been untouchable by members of the public and the press.

Almost immediately, police unions across the Golden State began to launch lawsuits to undermine these new transparency measures. But the Inglewood Police Department takes the prize for its efforts to evade scrutiny. Mere weeks before the law took effect on Jan. 1, 2019, the agency began destroying records that were set to become publicly available.

“This premise that there was an intent to beat the clock is ridiculous,” Inglewood Mayor James T Butts Jr. told the LA Times in defending the purge. We imagine Butts would find it equally ridiculous to suggest that the fact he had also been a cop for more than 30 years, including serving in Inglewood and later as police chief of Santa Monica, may have factored into his support for the destruction of records.

The What the Swat? Award - Nova Scotia and Halifax Law Enforcement

One Wednesday morning in April, 15 Halifax police officers raided the home of a teenage boy and his family. “They read us our rights and told us not to talk," his mother would later tell CBC. “They rifled through everything. They turned over mattresses, they took drawers and emptied out drawers, they went through personal papers, pictures. It was totally devastating and traumatic."

You might well wonder, what was the Jack Bauer-class threat to geo-political stability? Nothing at all: The Canadian teen had just downloaded a host of public records from openly available URLs on a government website.

At the heart of the ordeal was some seriously terrible security practices by Nova Scotia officials. The website created to host the province’s public records was designed in such a way that every request and response had a nearly identical URL and placed no technical restrictions on the public’s ability to access any of the requests. This meant that regular public records requests and individuals’ requests to access government files about them, which included private information, were all stored together and available on the internet for anyone, including Google’s webcrawler, to access. All that was necessary was changing a number identifying the request at the end of the URL.

What Nova Scotian officials should have done upon learning about leaks in their own public records website’s problems was apologize to the public, thank the teen who found these gaping holes in their digital security practices, and implement proper restrictions to protect people’s private information. They didn’t do any of that, and instead sought to improperly bring the force of Canada’s criminal hacking law down on the very person who brought the problem to light.

The whole episode—which thankfully ended with the government dropping the charges—was a chilling example of how officials will often overreact and blame innocent third parties when trying to cover up for their own failings. This horror show just happened to involve public records. Do better, Canada.

The Outrageous Fee Request of the Year - City of Seattle

When self-described transparency advocate and civic hacker Matt Chapman sent his request to Seattle seeking the email metadata from all city email addresses (from/to/BCC addresses, time, date, etc), he expected some pushback, because it does sound like an incredible amount of data to wrangle.

Seattle’s response: All the data can be yours for a measly $33 million. Officials estimated that it would take 320 years worth of staff time to review the roughly 32 million emails responsive to Chapman’s request. Oh, and they estimated charging an additional $21,600 for storage costs associated with the records. The fee request is the second highest in the history of The Foilies (the Department of Defense won in 2016 for estimating it would take $660 million to produce records on a particular computer forensic tool).

Then the city did something entirely unexpected: It revisited the fee estimate and determined that the first batch of records would cost only $1.25 to process. We get it, math is hard.

But wait—that’s not all. After paying for the batches of records with a series of $1.25 checks, Chapman received more than he ever bargained for. Rather than disclosing just the metadata for all 32 million emails, Seattle had given him the first 256 characters of every email. Those snippets included passwords, credit card numbers, and other personally identifying information.

What followed was a series of conversations between Chapman, Seattle’s lawyers, and the city’s IT folks to ensure he’d deleted the records and that the city hadn’t just breached its own data via a public records request.

Ultimately, Seattle officials in January 2018 began sending the data to Chapman once more, this time without the actual content of email messages. The whole episode doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Seattle officials’ ability to do basic math, comply with the public records law or protect sensitive information.

The Intern Art Project Award - Vermont Gov. Phil Scott

Seattle isn’t the only city to stumble in response to Matt Chapman’s public records requests for email metadata. The Vermont governor’s office also wins for its scissor-and-glue approach to releasing electronic information.

Rather than export the email information as a spreadsheet, the Vermont governor’s office told Chapman it had five interns (three of whom were unpaid) working six hours each, literally “cutting and pasting the emails from paper copies.” Next thing Chapman knew, he had a 43-page hodgepodge collage of email headers correlating with one day’s worth of messages. The governor’s attorney told Chapman it would cost $1,200 to process three more days’ worth of emails.

Chapman pushed back and provided his own instructions on exporting the data using a computer and not, you know, scissors and glue. Sure enough, he received a 5,500-line spreadsheet a couple weeks later at no charge.

The Least Transparent Employer Award - U.S. Department of Justice

In the last few years, we’ve seen some great resignation letters from public servants, ranging from Defense Secretary James Mattis telling President Trump “It’s not me, it’s you” to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ forced resignation.

But the Trump DOJ seems to have had enough of the tradition and has now determined that U.S. Attorney resignation letters are private in their entirety and cannot be released under the Freedom of Information Act. Of course, civil servants should have their private information protected by their employer, but that’s precisely what redactions should be used to protect.

Past administrations have released resignation letters that are critical of executive branch leaders. The change in policy raises the question: What are departing U.S. Attorneys now saying that the government wants to hide?

The Clawback Award - The Broward County School Board

After the tragic Parkland shooting, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel went to court to force the Broward County School Board to hand over documents detailing the shooter’s education and disciplinary record. A judge agreed and ordered the release, as long as sensitive information was redacted.

But when reporters copied and pasted the file into another document, they found that the content under the redactions was still there and readable. They broke the story of how the school denied the shooter therapeutic services and alternative education accommodations, but then uploaded the school board’s report with working redactions.

Rather than simply do better with double-checking their redactions next time, the school board struck back at the newspaper. They petitioned the court to hold the newspaper in contempt and to prevent anyone from reporting on the legally obtained information. Although the local judge didn’t issue a fine, she lambasted the paper and threatened to dictate exactly what the paper could report about the case in the future (which is itself an unconstitutional prior restraint).

The Wrong Way to Plug a Leak Award - City of Greenfield, California

The Monterey County Weekly unexpectedly found itself in court after the city of Greenfield, California sued to keep the newspaper from publishing documents about the surprising termination of its city manager.

When Editor Sara Rubin asked the interim city manager for the complaint the outgoing city manager filed after his termination, she got nothing but crickets. But then, an envelope containing details of a potential city political scandal appeared on the doorstep of one of the paper’s columnists.

The weekly reached out to the city for comment and began preparing for its normal Wednesday print deadline. Then, the morning of publication, the paper got a call saying that they were due in court. The city sued to block publication of the documents, to have the documents returned and to have the paper reveal the identity of the leaker.

Attorney Kelly Aviles of the First Amendment Coalition gave everyone a fast lesson in the First Amendment, pointing out that the paper had every right to publish. The judge ruled in the paper’s favor, and the city ended up paying all of the Monterey County Weekly’s attorney fees.

If it Looks like a Duck Award - Brigham Young University Police

Brigham Young University’s Police Department is certified by the state,* has the powers of the state, but says that they’re not actually a part of government for purposes of the Utah transparency law.

After the Salt Lake Tribune exposed that the University punished survivors of sexual assault for coming forward and reporting, the paper tried to get records of communications between the police department and the school’s federally required sexual assault coordinator. BYU pushed back, saying that the police department is not subject to Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act because the police department is privately funded.

This actually turns out to be a trickier legal question than you’d expect. Brigham Young University itself isn’t covered by the state law because it is a private school. But the university police force was created by an act of the Utah legislature, and the law covers entities “established by the government to carry out the public’s business.” Investigating crime and arresting people seems like the public’s business.

Last summer, a judge ruled that the police department is clearly a state agency, but the issue is now on appeal at the Utah Supreme Court. Sometime this year we should learn if the police are a part of the government or not.

*Because BYU police failed to comply with state law, and was not responsive to an internal investigation, the Utah Office of Public Safety notified the department on February 20th that the BYU police department will be stripped of its certification on September 1, 2019. The University police also plan to appeal this decision.

The Insecure Security Check Award - U.S. Postal Service

Congressional elections can turn ugly, but the opponent of newly elected U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger got a boost when the U.S. Postal Service released Spanberger’s entire personnel file, including her security clearance application, without redaction of highly sensitive personal information.

When a third party requests a person’s federal employment file without the employee’s permission, the government agency normally releases only a bare-bones record of employment dates, according to a Postal Service spokesperson. But somehow Rep. Spanberger wasn’t afforded these protections, and the Postal Service has potentially made this mistake in a “small number” of other cases this year. Security clearance applications (Form SF-86) are supposed to be analyzed and investigated by the FBI, raising questions about how the FOIA officer got the information in the first place. The Postal Service has apologized for the mistake, which they say is human error, but maybe security clearance applications should be kept just as secure as the state secrets the clearance is meant to protect.

The Foilies were compiled by Electronic Frontier Foundation Senior Investigative Researcher Dave Maass, Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey, Frank Stanton Fellow Camille Fischer, and Activist Hayley Tsukayama. Illustrations by EFF Art Director Hugh D'Andrade. For more on our work visit eff.org.

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neptunecreek · 7 years ago

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EFF Goes to Battle at the California Statehouse: 2017 in Review

In the wake of the 2016 election, California lawmakers quickly adopted the posture of “The Resistance.” For the digital rights community, this presented an opportunity to pursue legislation that had not previously enjoyed much political momentum. As a result, EFF staff found themselves trekking back and forth between San Francisco and Sacramento to testify on everything from surveillance transparency to broadband privacy. In the end, we checked off a number of victories, but also some defeats, and created more opportunities for next year.

Here’s a selection of the California campaigns EFF launched in 2017.

Broadband Privacy

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Ignoring the anger and opposition by the American public, Congress repealed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules that blocked Internet provides (think Cox, Comcast, Time-Warner) from collecting and selling customers’ data without their consent.

California Assemblymember Ed Chau seized the opportunity to restore those rights and partnered with EFF to introduce A.B. 375. The telecom industry spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight the bill and even went so far as to circulate false information to legislators at the 11th hour. The bill failed to receive a Senate floor vote on the last night of the session. However, the bill remains alive and we’re ready to finish the job in 2018.

Protecting Immigrants and Religious Minorities

Shortly after the election, lawmakers introduced S.B. 54, a compendium bill meant to simultaneously protect immigrants from mass deportation, defend Muslims from being placed on religious registries, and curtail how much unnecessary data is being collected on all Californians by state agencies. The political process resulted in the bill being split into three, with S.B. 54 continuing to create a firewall between California data and immigration enforcement, while S.B. 31 forbade California data from being used for religious registries, and S.B. 244 enhanced the privacy requirements for state agencies.

After a hard fought battle, S.B. 31 was signed into law, while S.B. 244 died in committee. Ultimately, EFF removed its support for S.B. 54 because the data protections were weakened (although the bill did create new, important measures for immigrant communities).

A Public Process for Restricting Police Surveillance

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Over the last few years, local communities in the bay area such as Santa Clara County, Oakland, and Berkeley have begun pursuing measures that would require police agencies to seek approval from elected officials before acquiring surveillance technology. S.B. 21 would have instituted that requirement for every local law enforcement agency across the state. Police also would have been required to issue periodic reports on how often the technology was used, and how often it was misused. The bill passed the Senate and two Assembly committees, only to die without a vote in the Assembly’s Appropriations Committee.

Although the bill failed, the momentum remains. EFF is supporting our local partners in the Electronic Frontier Alliance as they push for similar—if not stronger—ordinances on the local level.

Internet Access for Youth in State Care

EFF lent its technological expertise to a campaign by the Youth Law Center and Assemblymember Mike Gipson to ensure that youth in detention and foster care have access to computers and the Internet. A.B. 811 sailed through both legislative houses and landed on the governor desk. EFF testified in support of the bill when it came before the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee.

While Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed A.B. 811, all is not lost. Brown ordered the state’s juvenile detention authorities to draw up a plan to offer Internet access to youth. Furthermore, he indicated he might support a second go at a modified bill in 2018. EFF intends to join YLC and Gipson in this renewed effort to ensure that at-risk youth have access to the digital tools they need to succeed.

License Plate Privacy

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To combat the scourge of private license plate reader companies that are harvesting and selling our travel data, EFF drafted S.B. 712 to allow drivers to mask their vehicles’ license plates when lawfully parked. Currently, drivers are allowed to cover their entire cars to protect their paint jobs from the elements, so they should also be allowed to cover just a portion of their vehicle to protect their privacy.

Even in an age of bitter enmity between the political parties, S.B. 712 is proof that common ground can still be found. Republican Sen. Joel Anderson introduced the bill, and although it died in committee, it did receive cross-aisle support from some Democrats, such as Sen. Scott Wiener. We hope to pursue this legislation again in 2018.

Gang Database Reform

In 2016, EFF joined a coalition of civil rights and justice reform groups to pass A.B. 2298, a bill that started the process of overhauling California’s discriminatory gang databases. Midway through that effort, the California State Auditor released its investigation, showing that the system was riddled with problems that the original legislation did not anticipate. So this year, the coalition reassembled to support Assemblymember Shirley Weber’s follow-up bill, A.B. 90.

Gov. Brown signed A.B. 90 in October. The new law mandates audits, creates a new oversight body, and requires policies to be supported by empirical research.

Publication of Police Policies

S.B. 345 would have required every law enforcement agency in the state, by default, to publish all their policies and training materials online. This was a landmark bill due to its support by both law enforcement associations and civil liberties organizations, who rarely share common ground on these issues.

Unfortunately, Gov. Brown vetoed the bill. But he did leave the door open for more narrow reforms in 2018.

Strengthening the California Public Records Act

The California Public Records Act is notoriously toothless. If an agency unjustifiably rejects your request, delays the release of records, or requires unreasonable fees for copies, your only option is to take them to court, and even if you win, the agency is only be liable for your legal bills. A.B. 1479 would have allowed a judge to levy fines against agencies that behave badly.

The legislature sadly balked at the last minute, reducing the bill to a weak pilot program where agencies were required to appoint a central records custodian. EFF pulled its support from the bill, and Gov. Brown vetoed it.

Fake News Fumble

Shortly after the election, policymakers began to worry about how false or exaggerated articles were being circulated over social media. In California, a well-intentioned bill, A.B. 1104, was written so broadly that it would have criminalized any “false or deceptive” information around an election, regardless of whether the statement was hyperbole, poetic license, or common error. EFF launched a Twitter campaign and the bill’s sponsor removed the unconstitutional section of the legislation.

This article is part of our Year In Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2017.

Like what you're reading? Support digital freedom defense today!

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