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Attorney General William Barrs personally ordered an investigation into the Obama administrations handling of intelligence reports dubbed OBAMAGATE! by President Trump apparently ended with a whimper Tuesday. US Attorney John Bash concluded that no substantive wrongdoing took place, people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.

The implications of this finding are significant, and not good for President Donald Trump.

The crux of this investigation involves masking and unmasking, terms used by the intelligence community to refer to shielding (or revealing) the names of people mentioned in an intelligence report who were not the targets of the investigation.

For example, if the National Security Agency intercepts a conversation between a foreign intelligence target and someone in the United States, a report on that conversation disseminated outside the agency would refer to the American as U.S. PERSON 1, not by name. This process protects the Fourth Amendment rights of someone who is incidentally (though still legally) caught up in our intelligence gathering efforts on foreign targets.

For various reasons, people who receive such an intelligence report may need to know who the masked person is. It might help another intelligence agency connect the dots or add a puzzle piece in another investigation.

For high-level government officials, like diplomats, unmasking may be directly relevant to their work. In instances like these, officials can ask the agency that collected the intelligence to reveal to them the identity of a masked person, as long as they are authorized to receive that information and their request meets at least one of seven criteria set by the NSA. The criteria include, for example, that the intelligence indicates the US person may be involved in a crime, or is being targeted by foreign intelligence, among other reasons.

So, lets turn to Barrs unmasking probe.

Last May, Richard Grenell, then Trumps acting director of national intelligence, released a list of Obama administration officials who had made unmasking requests to the NSA between November 2016 and January 2017, where the unmasked individual was ultimately identified as former Trump national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn. The allegation being investigated was whether these requests were intended to sabotage the Trump campaign by unfairly targeting Flynn.

The investigation also seemed to link this allegation with the later FBI investigation of Flynn for making false statements regarding his secret call to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, charges that Barrs Justice Department is currently trying to have dropped.

The basis of this unmasking investigation was inherently flawed from the beginning. For starters, as explained above, the very purpose of an unmasking request is to learn the name of a person who is unidentified. The unmasking process by definition cannot be used to target a specific person, since the requesting official would have no idea who the person is until the request is granted and their identity is unveiled.

Further, the NSA memo providing the list of officials who made unmasking requests included an important note: Each individual was an authorized recipient of the original report and the unmasking was approved through NSAs standard process, which includes a review of the justification for the request. That means that each unmasking request met at least one of the seven justifications required by NSA, and that Flynns identity was necessary to fully understand the intelligence or its importance. Barrs handpicked Justice Department investigator apparently agrees.

Which is why this is bad news for Trump. Ultimately, 39 different government and intelligence officials found the communications or activities that Flynn was participating in so alarming that they each separately and independently made unmasking requests to the NSA. They all did this before even knowing it was someone involved in Trumps campaign.

These officials ranged from the US NATO defense adviser to the then-US ambassador to Russia. In addition, many of these requests were made in mid-December 2016 suggesting that the same few reports were raising alarm bells across the government and intelligence community.

Worst of all for Trump, the alarming activity by Flynn reported by the NSA has nothing to do with the FBIs case against Flynn for lying about his secret call to Kislyak. We know this for two reasons. First, that call took place on December 29, well after the majority of the unmasking requests involving Flynn took place. Second, that intelligence would not have been collected by the NSA in the first place. Only the FBI can conduct electronic surveillance of foreign targets like Kislyak that are located inside the US.

So whatever Flynn was up to cannot be dismissed as part of the Deep State coup which Trump has repeatedly claimed the FBI was waging against him.

Ultimately, Barrs unmasking investigation answers the question of whether Obama administration officials made legitimate and justified unmasking requests. They did. But it raises a new one: What, exactly, was Flynn up to in December 2016, while he was part of Trumps transition team, that caused these officials to be so concerned? Thats an investigation worth pursuing.

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The alarming question behind Barr's 'unmasking' probe - KTVZ

A Minneapolis City Council member filed a motion that could result in a citywide ban on law enforcement use of facial recognition technology.

If successful, the motion, which was filed on October 2 and will be officially introduced Friday, could signal a wave of reforms over the use of military and surveillance equipment following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

As calls to defund and disband police forces reverberate across the United States, a coalition has formed in Minnesota to reign in intrusive surveillance technology and establish democratic controls over policing. The POSTME coalition, which stands for Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology and Military Equipment, lobbied for a ban on the use of facial recognition by police in Minneapolis, among other reforms. In regular meetings with stakeholders including elected officials, organizers from around the nation and administrative staff within the city, the group has drafted legislation and educated those in government why these changes are vital. Their first target is a ban on the use of facial recognition by the Minneapolis Police Department which is seen as a strong first step towards restoring the Fourth Amendment protections that have lapsed in recent years.

Munira Mohamed, an organizer with the coalition explained, one of the most insidious aspects of facial recognition technologies is how widespread and indiscriminate it can be, which is made even more horrifying when you learn how absolutely unreliable and inaccurate it can be. The amount of racial bias shown in this technology is stunning and it has incredibly painful consequences for those falsely identified.

Numerousreports and studies have shown just how wildly inaccurate facial recognition systems can be. The Detroit Chief of Police said that the forces software misidentifies 96 percent of the time, and public records from the force showed that it was almost exclusively used on Black people in 2019. The use of facial recognition has been linked to at least two false arrests in Detroit, and the lawyers of one falsely arrested man believe there are many more victims.

In Minnesota, alarming investigative reports have raised concerns that law enforcement was rapidly adopting facial recognition and deliberately hiding their actions from the public. Law enforcement emails obtained by public records request stated, this is not an application that I want advertised to anyone other than sheriff's office employees." This tendency to keep technology secret and deploy it against the public without any public oversight is the norm not the exception in Minnesota. This undemocratic process has been the case with the vast majority if not all surveillance technologies being used in the state.

Emun Solomon is also an organizer with the coalition who said, the goals of POSTME are really divided into two buckets for me. The first is to establish a future proofing. The second is to build a friction-less or near frictionless system to maintain community engagement in holding police accountable. This also extends to other cities as well as the state of Minnesota.

The coalition includes members of the American Civil Liberties Union, Council on American Islamic Relations, Restore the Fourth, Communities United Against Police Brutality among other organizations. They met earlier this year for the first time, prior to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, and have decided for the time being to focus their efforts on Minneapolis City Council and expand from there. From the coalitions website, Police are increasingly using surveillance technology and military equipment to further entrench racial bias into the criminal justice system, secretly invade civilian privacy, and wrongfully arrest innocent people.

POSTME is all about bringing the values of democracy to the sphere of police powers. Not only do ordinary citizens not have a say, the police are often systematically shielded from any kind of public regulation or control and largely operate in the dark. The POSTME coalition is determined to bring oversight and accountability to surveillance and military technologies, Mohamed explained.

She notes that these reforms also expand democracy itself, Not only do we want laws and structures in place that create greater transparency but we want community control of that process. Surveillance technology is oftentimes implemented in complete secrecy and only after it has been in use for some time does its existence in a local community become apparent. The POSTME coalition wants to change that dynamic by plugging the community into conversations before new technology or military equipment is acquired by police.

Now that the facial recognition ban is beginning to advance at city hall, the POSTME coalition aims to increase community involvement in these discussions and grow the political capital to further these goals. The group is planning a virtual town hall with Minneapolis Councilmember Steve Fletcher to discuss this potential ban and their next steps on October 22nd.

Continued here:
Minneapolis Will Consider Facial Recognition Ban - VICE

According to court records from an arson case in Florida, Google regularly provides information to law enforcement about people that search a particular term or physical location using a Google service like Google Search or Google Maps. Information such as the the IP address. Typically, if police have an interest in requesting the search history of one particular suspect, they have to get a warrant. What they do now instead is request a list of information on all those that searched a particular keyword in a particular timeframe and use that to build a list of suspects by corresponding IP addresses to real identities. The barrier that faces the latter type of warrant is much more than the former. Here, Google was asked for:

users who had searched the address of the residence close in time to the arson.

In this particular arson case, the police got the IP address of the suspect from the wide net data request from Google, then associated that IP address with a particular phone number belonging to the suspect. Police were then able to use that known phone number to get location data records from the phone providers cell towers which corresponded to the arson location. They didnt get the phones location data or GPS coordinates as reported by the phone, they got the location data as reported via cell tower data.

On Googles end, they state that these warrants are complied with but the company always pushes for narrower requirements to protect the privacy of more users. The exact contents of the warrant are still sealed, so we dont know for sure just how many people had their privacy violated. Googles Director of Law Enforcement and Information Security, Richard Salgado, stated:

We require a warrant and push to narrow the scope of these particular demands when overly broad, including by objecting in court when appropriate. These data demands represent less than 1% of total warrants and a small fraction of the overall legal demands for user data that we currently receive.

No matter how narrow Google can get a warrant to be, the fact that innocent people can be scooped up in dragnet surveillance techniques like this is heinous. The fact that these warrants are even allowed to be granted is the real issue at hand. The fact of the matter is, keyword warrants violate the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told CNET:

This keyword warrant evades the Fourth Amendment checks on police surveillance. When a court authorizes a data dump of every person who searched for a specific term or address, its likely unconstitutional.

Keyword warrants are very similar to reverse location warrants or geo-fencing warrants which law enforcement use to get lists of people that were within a specific geographic area during the time of a crime. The thing is, a federal court has ruled that reverse location warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. Police are switching their tactics to deal with that hiccup by falling back to their tried and true method of keyword warrants. Google declined to comment to CNET about how many keyword warrants theyve received in the last three years. How about the last twenty years?

Read the original here:
Google gives IP addresses to police of people who have searched particular keywords or addresses - Privacy News Online

According to a June 2020 poll, more than two-thirds of Americans say that the criminal justice system needs either major changes or a complete overhaul. How would four more years of President Donald Trump or a first term of Joe Biden affect that system? Heres an overview of where they stand on criminal justice reform.

Though a movement to defund the policeand reinvest that money in education, jobs, housing, and so onhas gained popularity this year, Biden has rejected those calls, saying that he will not take away funding from police departments. Instead, he has proposed investing more in Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), a Department of Justice office that awards grants to hire more officers, and for community policing training. According to Bidens website, he plans to invest $300 million in the COPS program, with the condition that the hiring of police officers reflect the racial diversity of the communities those officers will serve.

By providing training on community policing, the COPS office aims to build better relationships between police and the communities they serve and find ways for them to work together, rather than against each other. While the DOJ says research shows community policing reduces crime, criminal justice advocates take issue with the idea that trust and collaboration between the police and the public is enough to fix systemic issues.

The Trump campaign, on the other hand, does not lay out any policy plans for the next four years. Trump has publicly criticized the idea of defunding the police, but throughout his presidency, he has actually proposed federal funding cuts for police departmentsincluding a 58% cut to the COPS program proposed in February 2020and withheld federal policing money through policies that targeted sanctuary municipalities.

This doesnt mean Trump actually supports the move to defund police, though. Its true that the Trump administration hasnt supported [the COPS office] or its efforts to support local policing, but thats not because the Trump administration thinks that police departments should have less powers or should operate less violently, says David Alan Sklansky, a professor at Stanford Law School and faculty director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center. Its just because he doesnt want to spend as much money.

Riot police line up facing protestors near the White House on June 1, 2020. [Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images]When it comes to police reforms and addressing issues of police misconduct, Trump did sign an executive order in June, following the police killing of George Floyd, that would provide federal grants to improve police training, including higher standards on the use of force, and create a database to track officers with misconduct complaints, though it does not seem to have created any major changes since. Democrats criticized the order for not going far enough; it allows exceptions to a chokehold ban and does not include any restrictions for no-knock warrants. Before the presidents order, House Democrats had introduced a police reform package that includes limiting the use of qualified immunity and banning chokeholds outright. That package passed in the House at the end of June.

Biden says hell address police and prosecutor misconduct by expanding the power of the Justice Department using pattern-or-practice investigations, which allow the government to investigate and sue police departments that engage in pattern or practice of excessive force, Fourth Amendment violations, discriminatory policing, and so on. In such an instance, the Justice Department wouldnt be suing for monetary damages, but for injunctive relief, a court order to stop such behavior. The use of that authority was dramatically rolled back during the Trump administration, Sklansky says. The Obama administration conducted 25 such civil rights investigations into police forces across the country. Under Trump, the Justice Department has opened just one, and its still ongoing three years later without results to show.

Trump has repeatedly pointed to Bidens work on the 1994 crime bill, accusing the former vice president of setting Black Americans back big time.' Biden did help write the bill, which critics have said contributed to mass incarceration. Biden has played down its impactthough his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, says it did contribute to mass incarceration. In June, Biden saidthat voters questions about his role with that bill were legitimate, but that he hopes people judge him on his current actions.

In this campaign, Biden has talked about the need to reduce the number of people who are incarcerated, and says that as president he would create a $20 billion grant program to push states to move away from incarceration and toward prevention efforts, like investments in education through pre-K, Title I funding for schools that serve students from low-income families, and expanded funding for mental health and substance abuse services. In order to access that funding, per the Biden website, states will have to eliminate mandatory minimums for non-violent crimes, institute earned credit programs, and take other steps to reduce incarceration rates without impacting public safety.

Biden has also outlined plans to decriminalize cannabis and expunge prior cannabis convictions, as well as end all incarceration for drug use alone and divert those people instead to treatment. He also announced a goal to ensure 100% of formerly incarcerated people have housing when they are released from prisona lack of which can affect how likely they are to reenter the criminal justice system.

Bidens work on that 1994 bill, Sklansky says, was a product of the tough on crime ideals of that time period, noting that there was a bipartisan push starting in the 1980s to toughen criminal penalties. But I think [Biden] recognizes that times have changed, and public sentiment has changed, he adds. I think theres a bipartisan recognition that the country veered way too far in the direction of tough on crime, and that criminal justice policies became vastly too punitive and too bloated. The [former] vice president recognizes that too, hes part of this broad bipartisan reconsideration of criminal justice, and the president is not.

Trump did sign into law the First Step Act, which has shortened some mandatory minimum sentences and given judges the discretion to skirt those mandatory minimums. By its one-year mark, the act helped more than 2,000 people with sentence reductions that average nearly six years, according to the Sentencing Project. Still, its been criticized for not going far enough. The First Step Act was a good first step, but it was only a first step, Sklansky says. The president hasnt shown any indication to follow up on that. I dont think we can expect a significant rollback of mass incarceration under Trump. In his speeches and rhetoric, Trump has pushed for law and order and a need to be tougher on crime. In June, he threatened maximum prison sentences for anyone who attempted to vandalize or topple monuments.

Criminal justice advocates have long harshly criticized the conditions and practices within U.S. prisonsfrom solitary confinement to the lack of educational opportunitiesfor being both inhumane and ineffective. Biden has pledged to overhaul some prison practices, including ending the use of solitary confinement (with very limited exceptions, per his campaign site, such as when protecting an incarcerated persons life) and requiring states to fix environmental health problems, like a lack of clean water, in their prison facilities.

Under Biden, federal criminal justice grants would also be conditional on the care given to women, especially pregnant women, who are incarcerated. Bidens website doesnt specify what such care would require, only that it be an adequate provision of primary care and gynecological care. He has also said he wants to work with Congress to eliminate the federal death penalty, and that all incarcerated people should have the chance to earn a GED diploma (though a policy plan to reach that goal is unclear).

The First Step Act under Trump did include efforts to improve conditions for incarcerated pregnant women, including banning the use of restraints during labor and recovery. When it comes to solitary confinement, Trump hasnt publicly opposed the practice, and under his administration, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Preventions website has removed guidance that urged states to stop putting children in solitary confinement.

Biden has more criminal justice reforms outlined on his campaign website, including measures to stop corporations from profiting from incarceration, and a plan to end cash bail. (Trump has criticized efforts to end cash bail, even falsely saying that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ended cash bail, making the crime rate go through the roof.)

Ultimately, Sklansky sees a stark difference in the future of criminal justice depending on who wins the presidency. When the president says, I am your law and order president, what he means is I stand for fewer restrains on the police, more police use of force, more forceful policing, and I think we can expect more of that. I think that we can expect only token efforts to reduce mass incarceration, he says. If Biden wins, you can expect an emphasis on community policing, and a greater effort to hold police departments responsible and accountable for excessive violence and other violations of constitutional rights. The [former] vice presidents made clear he would work much more energetically than President Trump to reduce levels of mass incarceration, and made it clear he would restore traditions of independence and professionalism in the Department of Justice.

Read the rest here:
Where Trump and Biden stand on the future of policing - Fast Company

By Crime and Justice News | October 13, 2020

New York City plainclothes officers often leave unmarked cars to stop mostly Blacks and Latinos and demand their IDs, charges a federal class-action lawsuit. In cases cited in the lawsuit, officers stopped and searched people in mostly poor communities, then, even after finding no unlawful items on them, demanded to see identification. Officers sometimes told the suspects that they were looking for guns and ran their IDs to search for arrest warrants or possibly matches in other law enforcement databases, including ones tracking alleged gang affiliation or connections to open cases. Police ran those checks without any basis or reasonable suspicion, making temporary detentions and digital searches unconstitutional, the lawsuit claims, The Intercept reports. By exploiting surveillance technology, the NYPD has replaced traditional and largely discredited police practices such as stop-and-frisk with invasive digital searches that rely on surveillance systems, the complaint says.

They have nothing besides the fact that these are young men in certain neighborhoods, said Cyrus Joubin, an attorney for the plaintiffs, arguing that the practice violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches, and the 14th, which prohibits racial discrimination. They have at most a baseless hunch and theyre just going on a fishing expedition. The practice appears to be sanctioned by the police department, the lawsuit notes, with officers sometimes telling the individuals they stopped that they were just following procedure. The lawsuit accuses department officials of failing to train and supervise officers on the legality of these searches. Its just common practice for them to run warrant checks on the vast majority of people whom they stop, said Molly Griffard of the Legal Aid Societys Cop Accountability Project.

Originally posted here:
Lawsuit Charges Unlawful Digital Stop-and-Frisk in NYC - Crime Report