Brindle

For many years, we've discussed the pure ridiculousness of the Supreme court's adamant refusal to allow cameras in the courtroom, along with the Justices' questionable justifications of the ban. Now it appears that John Oliver has taken up the issue as well, but unlike those just whining about it, Oliver (thanks to the resources of HBO) has a possible "solution." Dogs. Oliver starts out mocking Justice Antonin Scalia's reason for barring cameras: that people would just see 15- or 30-second clips from the arguments, taking things out of context. Of course, as Oliver points out, that makes absolutely no sense, since the Supreme Court already releases audio of the hearings, and thus we already do hear the same clips -- it's just that they're generally paired with artistic renderings of the Justices instead of the actual video.

His solution -- using "an almost immoral amount of resources" -- is to present video representations of the entire Supreme Court... using dogs (and a couple of birds in supporting roles). And, Oliver claims, they're making those videos freely available to any other news provider who would like to create complete reenactments of any court case in a way that is cute and guaranteed to draw more attention than the court renderings, or, hell, actual videos if they were ever allowed. You can see the full ten minutes of footage (and, yes, I watched it all) right here: That video also, helpfully, links to the Supreme Court's oral arguments audio page for people to download. And the video description notes:

Please feel free to use it, post your videos, and tag them #RealAnimalsFakePaws so we can find them.

The only disappointment is that whoever put it up, still officially left it under a "standard" license, rather than the Creative Commons license that YouTube makes available. Still, nice move by Oliver and his team.

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This is a chart created using P0rnhub's anal-ytics showing what men versus women search for most often (links to P0rnhub's article with an even further breakdown that you might not want to click on since it is hosted on their main site). I learned a lot. Mostly that thinking about p0rn kinda makes you want to look at it. Thankfully, I'm at work and they have all that smut blocked here. I saw the calendar in the lobby this morning advertising that the office has been masturbation-free for over five months now. That they know about -- HIYO! (I can masturbate with my mind like Professor X) Thanks to my buddy C-Nasty, who prefers adult pay sites that cater specifically to his perversions.

The facts are in, thanks to Vice Media and Jason Leopold. Washington, DC police have a Stingray cell tower spoofer and have been using it for several years. The Metropolitan Police Department was an early adopter, but moving too fast cost it about five years of use.

Back in 2003, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in Washington, DC was awarded a $260,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to purchase surveillance technology called Stingray — a contraption the size of a suitcase that simulates a cell phone tower and intercepts mobile phone calls and text messages.

The rationale behind the DHS grant to MPD and other law enforcement agencies was to help them secure new anti-terrorism technology from private corporations. But the grant fell a little short, because the MPD couldn't come up with the extra several thousands dollars it needed to train officers how to use and maintain Stingray — so the device sat unused in an "Electronic Surveillance Unit equipment vault" at the department for more than five years.

In 2008, the Stingray was revived and upgraded and has apparently been in use ever since. Of course, it's no longer terrorism that justifies its usage, but rather good, old-fashioned drug dealing and other vanilla criminal activity, as one memo points out.

"The procurement of this equipment will increase the number of MPD arrests for fugitives, drug traffickers, and violent offenders (robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, Homicide), while reducing the time it takes to locate dangerous offenders that need to be removed from the streets of DC."

No doubt the news that bad guys are being speedily apprehended will make up for all the dropped calls and blocked data experienced by public servants employed in the metro area. They'll also be pleased to know that all sorts of unfiltered information about their phone calls, location, etc. was hoovered up along with the suspects'.

Not that this doesn't affect the "little people," who are just as likely to wonder why their cell phones aren't picking up a signal and are just as likely to be irritated that the local PD is scooping up a bunch of unrelated data in its search for bad guys, but this now affects the "real people" of DC -- policymakers and higher-ups whose complaints actually manage to find worthy ears quite frequently.

If the MPD is driving around DC with Stingray devices, it is likely capturing information about the locations and movements of members of Congress, cabinet members, federal law enforcement agents, and Homeland Security personnel, consular staff, and foreign dignitaries, and all of the other people who congregate in the District…. If cell phone calls of congressional staff, White House aides, or even members of Congress are being disconnected, dropped, or blocked by MPD Stingrays, that's a particularly sensitive and troublesome problem.

Of course, this has been ongoing for half a decade now, and if no one's complaining about it yet, it's because it hasn't been noticed or it's because too many of those officials mentioned are more than willing to sacrifice their privacy (along with everyone else's) for small gains in law enforcement efficiency -- even more so if the spectre of international terrorism is raised (which it was, initially), despite everyone knowing that the real targets would be normal, no-panic-needed criminal activities (as is almost always the case).

Will these newly-freed documents prompt a bit more activity from the Beltway? Well, the cheery outlook says, "anything's possible," which is as much an admission of defeat as it is a rallying cry. The more realistic viewpoint sees that multiple documents have been uncovered over the past few years with little more than a few, very localized reactions being observed. It will probably take more than the off-chance of being swept up in a surveillance dragnet to convince those in charge to take a second look at law enforcement tools and capabilities. In fact, many of them helped agencies (via legislation) like the DHS and FBI sell the courts on the idea that nearly everything related to human communication in this day and age carries with it "no expectation of privacy."

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Americans may have a Florida drug dealer to thank for expanding our right to privacy. Police departments around the country have been collecting phone metadata from telecoms and using a sophisticated spy tool to track people through their mobile phones—often without obtaining a warrant. But a new ruling out of Florida has curbed the activity […]

The post Cops Need a Warrant to Grab Your Cell Tower Data, Florida Court Rules appeared first on WIRED.

Apparently, the New Zealand government is not a huge fan of press freedom. The national police force recently raided and ransacked the home of Nicky Hager, an independent journalist who has been a thorn in the current leadership's side for some time now.

In August, one month before New Zealand’s national election, Hager published Dirty Politics, which showed that key figures in Prime Minister John Key’s National Party were feeding derogatory information about their opponents to a virulent right-wing blogger named Cameron Slater. Hager published evidence in the form of incriminating emails, provided by a hacker, demonstrating coordination between National Party officials and Slater. The ensuing scandal forced the resignation of a top Key ally, Justice Minister Judith Collins, and implicated numerous other National Party officials and supporters. Despite the scandal, the National Party won a resounding victory in the election, sending Key to a third term as prime minister.

And then, once safely back in power, the government wasted little time:

On October 2—less than two weeks after the election—detectives from a regional “major crime team” came to Hager’s Wellington home armed with a search warrant authorizing them to seize anything that might lead them to the identity of his source for Dirty Politics. The warrant shows that prior to the raid, a police “intelligence analyst” had studied Hager’s media appearances in an effort to discover information about his sources for the book, taking particular note of references Hager made to knowing the source’s identity.

Over at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher note that Hager was also working with them on some Snowden documents as they concerned what was happening in New Zealand. As you may recall, right before the election, Greenwald had used some Snowden documents to show that Prime Minister Key had lied about mass surveillance -- leading Key to petulantly lash out with ad hominems at Greenwald, referring to him as a "loser." Greenwald made it clear that they would likely be revealing more about New Zealand's activities -- and now wonders if that might be another reason why Hager was raided, once the government figured out who Greenwald was working with.

Either way, the search seems quite excessive and seriously raises questions about New Zealand's respect for the freedom of the press:

Once they entered the property, detectives spent ten hours sifting through Hager and his family’s personal effects, making copies of any USB storage devices they found and seizing Hager’s computer, personal documents, a camera, a dictaphone, CDs, and dozens of other items—not to mention his daughter’s laptop, cellphones, and iPod.

The whole thing seems fairly crazy, and clearly done to intimidate Hager and others for daring to actually call out the government's bad behavior. These are the kinds of actions that we're supposed to believe no longer happen in modern democracies, but they seem to be happening on an increasingly frequent basis.

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Over the summer, the United Nations commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, had said that mass surveillance likely violates human rights. At the time, she said:

‟International human rights law provides a clear and universal framework for the promotion and protection of the right to privacy, including in the context of domestic and extraterritorial surveillance, the interception of digital communications and the collection of personal data. Practices in many [s]tates have, however, revealed a lack of adequate national legislation and/or enforcement, weak procedural safeguards, and ineffective oversight. All of these have contributed to a lack of accountability for arbitrary or unlawful interference in the right to privacy.”

Now a new report from a different UN official, issued to the UN General Assembly, backs that up and appears to go further:

International human rights law requires States to provide an articulable and evidence-based justification for any interference with the right to privacy, whether on an individual or mass scale. It is a central axiom of proportionality that the greater the interference with protected human rights, the more compelling the justification must be if it is to meet the requirements of the Covenant. The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the Internet altogether. By permitting bulk access to all digital communications traffic, this technology eradicates the possibility of any individualized proportionality analysis. It permits intrusion on private communications without independent (or any) prior authorization based on suspicion directed at a particular individual or organization.

The report is clear that it's not talking about just any surveillance -- but mass surveillance. It notes that preventing terrorism is a legitimate reason for targeted surveillance, but that since there's no proof that mass surveillance actually helps stop terrorism, it's in violation:

Article 17 of the Covenant provides that any interference with private communications must be prescribed by law, and must be a necessary and proportionate means of achieving a legitimate public policy objective. The prevention of terrorism is plainly a legitimate aim for this purpose, but the activities of intelligence and law enforcement agencies in this field must still comply with international human rights law. Merely to assert — without particularization — that mass surveillance technology can contribute to the suppression and prosecution of acts of terrorism does not provide an adequate human rights law justification for its use. The fact that something is technically feasible, and that it may sometimes yield useful intelligence, does not by itself mean that it is either reasonable or lawful (in terms of international or domestic law)

The report also takes on the whole "but it's the internet, you have no privacy anyway" argument pretty clearly:

Some argue that users of the Internet have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place, and must assume that their communications are available to be monitored by corporate and State entities alike. The classic analogy drawn by those who support this view is between sending an unencrypted email and sending a postcard. Whatever the merits of this comparison, it does not answer the key questions of legality, necessity and proportionality. The very purpose of the Covenant’s requirement for explicit and publicly accessible legislation governing State interference with communications is to enable individuals to know the extent of the privacy rights they actually enjoy and to foresee the circumstances in which their communications may be subjected to surveillance. Yet the value of this technology as a counter-terrorism and law enforcement tool rests in the fact that users of the Internet assume their communications to be confidential (otherwise there would be no purpose in intruding upon them). This is reflected in the assertions made by members of the intelligence communities of the United States of America and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland following the disclosure of mass surveillance programmes operated by these two States, in which the disclosures were said to have damaged national security by alerting potential terrorists to the fact that their communications were under surveillance.

[....] The suggestion that users have voluntarily forfeited their right to privacy is plainly unwarranted. It is a general principle of international human rights law that individuals can be regarded as having given up a protected human right only through an express and unequivocal waiver, voluntarily given on an informed basis. In the modern digital world, merely using the Internet as a means of private communication cannot conceivably constitute an informed waiver of the right to privacy under article 17 of the Covenant.

The Internet is not a purely public space. It is composed of many layers of private as well as social and public realms. Those making informed use of social media platforms in which messages are posted in full public view obviously have no reasonable expectation of privacy. The postcard analogy is entirely apposite for the dissemination of information through the public dimensions of Twitter and Facebook, for example, or postings on public websites. But reading a postcard is not an apposite analogy for intercepting private messages sent by e-mail, whether they are encrypted or unencrypted.

From there, the report notes that if states wish to impede on this privacy in the name of preventing terrorism, they must show tangible benefits from such surveillance -- and, so far, no government has done so. Furthermore, the report warns of:

...an ever present danger of “purpose creep”, by which measures justified on counter-terrorism grounds are made available for use by public authorities for much less weighty public interest purposes.

It's good to see such a clear condemnation of the problems of bulk/mass surveillance efforts -- almost always conducted with no evidence of benefit. Of course, the reality is that this report is unlikely to lead the intelligence community to change its stance on these programs, but it further highlights just how out of step with basic human rights these programs remain.

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When I was in middle-school, Mortal Kombat was released on home video game consoles. Because my friends and I loved the game so much, we used to draw pictures of the characters doing seriously horrible things to one another. As in, rectal-based spine-retrieval type of stuff. It was fun and it was funny...and if we did that today, I have to assume we all would have ended up arrested and in some kind of psychiatric facility.

It's the only conclusion I can draw as America begins to build a tradition of penalizing, and in some cases further traumatizing, children for playing make believe in any way that includes a gun or a bomb. But to really get into a situation where stupid adults take some innocuous creativity by a child and use it as a springboard to absolutely mess with that child's state of mind, we must go to Alabama.

A Mobile, Ala., mom says school officials forced her daughter to sign a contract promising not to commit suicide or harm others after the kindergartner "drew something that resembled a gun," then pointed a crayon at another kid and said "pew, pew!" 5-year-old Elizabeth was sent home after school officials made her take a questionnaire to evaluating [sic] her for suicidal thoughts, then had her sign the safety contract promising to contact an adult if she was thinking of suicide or homicide. This all happened while her mom waited in the lobby to pick her up, the upset parent told WPMI.

Okay, everyone stop what you're doing right now and seriously think about this for a moment. A public elementary school in the United States, an agent for the public good, coerced a five year old into signing a contract promising not to goddamn off herself because she "pew-pewed" with a crayon. You know, that same thing most of us did as children? The thing where you take some object and point it like a gun and make a cartoon noise? Yeah, a five year old was confronted with the concept of suicide by the school over that.

According to her mom, Elizabeth didn't know most of the words on the contract she signed. "Suicide," in particular, was a new one for her.

"Mommy, daddy, what is suicide?" Elizabeth's mother says she asked.

Holy hell, to foist that upon a child so young is insane.

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The less the public knows about law enforcement surveillance technology, the better. That's the thought process governing the purchase and deployment of technology like Stingray devices and automatic license plate readers. In the case of the former, even the nation's top cops (the FBI) actively discourage talking about the cell tower spoofers through the use of restrictive non-disclosure agreements.

Being public entities, it's sometimes hard to keep the public and local law enforcement's new tools and toys separated. FOIA requests and a whole lot of persistence have managed to uncover details about surveillance tech, but what's turned over is often heavily-redacted or several months out of date. The purchasing process should run through local governing bodies, but many of those are only too happy to defer to law enforcement and rubber-stamp purchases sight unseen or keep discussions of purchases off the public records.

If the normal routes -- as deferential as they are -- seem to be a bit too "leaky," many law enforcement agencies have a third option available to keep the public in the dark about their technology acquisitions: private funding.

Across the nation, private foundations are increasingly being tapped to provide police with technology and weaponry that -- were it purchased with public money -- would come under far closer scrutiny.

In Los Angeles, foundation money has been used to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of license plate readers, which were the subject of a civil-rights lawsuit filed against the region's law enforcement agencies by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (A judge rejected the groups' claims earlier this year.)

Private funds also have been used to upgrade "Stingray" devices, which have triggered debate in numerous jurisdictions because they vacuum up records of cellphone metadata, calls, text messages and data transfers over a half-mile radius.

These private foundations have been useful in the past, supplying cops with needed equipment like bulletproof vests and office equipment during times of budget shortfalls. Unfortunately, they've now stretched far beyond funding to fill in budgetary gaps to become the checkbook of choice when purchasing controversial surveillance technology.

Not only do these foundations help law enforcement sidestep public accountability, but they also serve as convenient recipients of private contractors' largesse. The LAPD avoided creating a paper trail when Palantir and Target Corp. teamed up to donate the former's surveillance software to the department through the Los Angeles Police Foundation.

These foundations are also used a lobbying proxy. Contractors hoping to receive city contracts grease the wheels by donating funds or products to the private foundations, again skirting accountability by taking advantage of looser disclosure requirements.

The NYPD's citywide surveillance hub uses software from IBM, which gave between $10,000 and 25,000 to the foundation. According to its website and tax documents, the foundation helped fund creation of the hub. IBM did not respond when asked about its relationships with New York's police foundation and police department.

DynTek Inc. made a contribution of similar size to the foundation and has won more than $47 million in technology contracts with New York City since 2008. It lobbied the police department for more business as recently as this January, according to disclosure records. DynTek officials also did not respond to questions.

Defenders of these accountability-skirting foundations portray them as nothing more than more efficient ways to get police departments the tools they need.

"There's very little discretionary money for the department," said Steve Soboroff, a businessman who is president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the civilian board that oversees the LAPD's policies and operations. "A grant application to the foundation cuts all the red tape, or almost all of the red tape."

And, hilariously, they portray the generous donations by private contractors (with eyes on securing city contracts) as nothing more than pure, unstoppable acts of charity.

Soboroff said he had no concerns that companies were donating to the foundation to improve their chances to do business with the city -- donors were typically driven by "an insatiable appetite to help," he said, not self-interest.

Some of this "insatiable appetite to help" more closely resembles straight-up lobbying combined with the infamous governmental "revolving door." Motorola, vying for a $600 million city contract, donated more than $164,000 to the Los Angeles Police Foundation and placed former chief Bill Bratton (now New York City's police commissioner) on its board of directors, a position that paid $240,000 a year. Motorola ended up with the contract, despite a good showing by its main competitor Raytheon, which dumped $311,000 into the foundation over the same period.

The problems here are numerous. These foundations allow police departments to acquire controversial surveillance technology with very little transparency. There appears to be no oversight on the spending -- something that is to be expected when a public entity decides to start making purchases using private funds. As the ProPublica article points out, there will be more of this in the future. What used to be something only available to the nation's two largest police forces (NYPD, LAPD) is becoming more common elsewhere. Foundations like these are popping up around the country and are being used similarly. One foundation in Atlanta, Georgia paid for the citywide network of surveillance cameras as well as the communication center where these feeds were viewed.

There's likely no simple fix to this problem or at least, not one that won't do considerable collateral damage. The default mode should be that if a public entity is spending money, it needs to be accountable for the expenditures, no matter where the funds originated. Even if city officials can't prevent the purchase of items with private funds, they should be able to force the creation of a paper trail that can be accessed by the public.

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For those who lived through the late 90's cryptowars, it's beginning to feel like history is repeating itself. We've seen the series of recent stories about the US government's misguided, FUD-based freakout over some recent moves to enhance privacy through more widely usable encryption, but now we're reaching the stage of the game where the government also starts attacking the "export" of cryptography. If you don't remember, a key part of the original cryptowars was over whether or not strong cryptography could be classified as a weapon, and subject to significant export controls. Thankfully, that idea was mostly scrapped, and encryption flourished, helping to make the internet and other technologies much safer.

However, it appears the government is back to going after the export of encryption, as the Department of Commerce recently fined Intel subsidiary Wind River Systems $750,000 for exporting products that included encryption to China, Hong Kong, Russia, Israel, South Africa, and South Korea. While most had recognized that sending encryption (or, well, just about anything) to places like Iran, Cuba and North Korea might be problematic, most people had assumed that other countries, like those on the list above were no big deal.

As the linked article (from law firm Goodwin Procter) points out:

We believe this to be the first penalty BIS has ever issued for the unlicensed export of encryption software that did not also involve comprehensively sanctioned countries (e.g., Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria). This suggests a fundamental change in BIS’s treatment of violations of the encryption regulations.

Historically, BIS has resolved voluntarily disclosed violations of the encryption regulations with a warning letter but no material consequence, and has shown itself unlikely to pursue such violations that were not disclosed. This fine dramatically increases the compliance stakes for software companies — a message that BIS seemed intent upon making in its announcement.

Furthermore, the report understates the simple fact that "encryption is ubiquitous in software products" these days. And that's something that's only growing (a trend that should continue as encryption is increasingly important). But if the Commerce Department has suddenly decided to pick a fight over this issue, it could create a real competitive disadvantage for American tech companies trying to offer products around the globe. So, not only has the US government undermined the US tech industry through surveillance and backdoors, now it's looking to make it more difficult to build in encryption that better protects against such intrusions. It's almost as if the government wants to cede technology leadership to other countries.

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We've been among those who have pointed out that the "most transparent administration in history," the Obama administration, has prosecuted media leakers more than all other Presidents in history combined (eight prosecutions in this administration, compared to three total in all previous administrations). Gabe Rottman, over at the ACLU, decided to dig into another stat: how much time has the Obama administration been able to lock up media leakers in jail compared to all other administrations. The answer? The Obama administration has put folks who leaked info to the media in jail for 526 months as compared to 24 months for all other Presidents combined. Admittedly, 420 of those months went to Chelsea Manning, but even if you take that out, we're still talking 106 months for other leakers in cases from this one administration vs. 24 months for all other administrations.

It once again has to make you wonder why the Obama Administration is so focused on punishing anyone who leaks information to the media (even as it likes to "unofficially" leak information all the time). In the end, I keep going back to the speculation I heard from Daniel Ellsberg nearly four years ago (which is also where I first heard the stat about the number of Obama prosecutions against leakers -- at that time, it was just five prosecutions, rather than eight).

Ellsberg's theory was that while President Bush abused the power of the Presidency in the surveillance realm, he was actually proud of it. And while people were upset about secrets leaking, they didn't find it embarrassing. President Obama, on the other hand, came into office claiming to be different -- arguing against those kinds of abuses and promising changes and protections for civil rights. Instead, it appears that the process started under President Bush continued and expanded under President Obama and -- Ellsberg speculated years ago -- the President is somewhat embarrassed by this, leading him and his administration to react negatively to the leaks. Not because of any legitimate security concern, but to try to silence those who seek to reveal that the administration and the President have not come close to living up to their ideals but rather went the other way entirely.

Putting those who leaked info to the media in jail for 526 months -- nearly 44 years -- says a lot about the way the administration truly views whistleblowing, and it's not a saying anything good.

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Here's a very short clip involving the seizure of funds by police and pepper spray as the answer to all questions.

In a video obtained by the New York Times, an unnamed officer forces 35-year-old Lamard Joye against a fence surrounding a Coney Island basketball court and removes what appears to be a handful of cash from Joye's pocket at the six-second mark.

"You see this? You see this?" Joye says, before demanding his money back. The officer replies, "You're gonna mouth off?" and begins to discharge pepper spray into Joye's face.

Joye's sister also gets pepper sprayed after asking the officer to state his name.

Joye was not arrested and has yet to receive his money back. He claims Officer William Montemarano took $1300 from him during this "stop-and-frisk."

The NYPD has issued a statement in defense of Officer Montemarano.

Following accusations that a New York City police officer stole $1,300 in cash from a Brooklyn man during a stop-and-frisk, the department said all the man had was $62, which has been vouchered.

“No one stole $1,300,” Deputy Commissioner Stephen Davis told the New York Daily News Thursday.

Apparently it's OK to take money from uncharged individuals during stop-and-frisks as long as it's: a) not very much money, and b) it's vouchered at the station.

What went unaddressed was the officer's use of pepper spray to shut up both Joye and his sister, who were both asking for the return of the money taken by Montemarano.

Between the asset seizure and the low-level brutality, there's not much about this that's all that surprising. Small abuses of power like these happen every single day. The only thing that's changed is the likelihood that someone will record the incident.

Gothamist's coverage of the story adds this very enlightening comment, presumably left by a fellow cop at Thee Rant, a forum frequented by law enforcement officers.

I know this cop and he is a solid guy with (if not) 20 years, very close to it.

It is possible that he has even more than 20 years.

I cannot fathom why he is still running around on Patrol. Truly unf u c k i n g believable.

[One possible reason? Officer Montemurano was recently named in a police brutality lawsuit alleging that he and another officer beat an arrestee with their nightsticks and kicked him in the throat. The city settled for $25,000.]

From an OBJECTIVE point of view and NOT KNOWING WHY the cops were called to this scene, I do not know WHY he would remove a wad of money from someone's pocket.

MONEY is not contraband and UNLESS you are collaring someone for robbery, GL or narcotics sales and are going to voucher the money as proceeds of a crime, you have no business WHATSOEVER removing money from a mope's pocket.

I repeat, you have no business taking money out of some mope's pocket because he is a loud mouth involved in a large dispute, which is what this situation appears to be.

That said, I would bet my house that this officer returned the money or vouchered it - he did NOT steal this money.

[Which seems to have been confirmed by the NYPD statement, but doesn't explain why money is being taken from someone who wasn't arrested.]

Spritzing the crowd with mace a la DI Bologna* is the cherry on top of the Sundae. In the current climate, that is going to be a problem.

I must say, the daily videos and the daily wholesale suspensions and modifications of MOS have left me exasperated.

It is as if the cops are completely OBLIVIOUS.

Do they read newspapers, do they ever watch TV, do they speak to other cops, do they ever see the Finest spitting out these 'change of duty' statuses?

It would appear that they do not.

It would appear that they are blissfully ignorant of what is going on in the world around them.

It appears that the PBA says and does nothing to raise their awareness that there is an anti-cop feeding frenzy in progress.

I am bewildered as to how this all continues.....

*Refresher link for Deputy Inspector Bologna's love of pepper spray.

This forum member makes a point that very few within the law enforcement community will ever raise. It's no longer business as usual out there. People are watching.

It's as if a majority of law enforcement agencies view the current "anti-cop feeding frenzy" as some sort of a fad -- something they can just muscle through without changing officer behavior, altering their training or even holding those caught in the act accountable for their misconduct.

Everyone has a camera these days. Anyone with a cell phone also has a recording device. YouTube gives everyone a platform to lift local incidents into the worldwide consciousness.

It's not just the ubiquity of cameras, though. It's the interconnectedness the internet provides. Brutality or misconduct lawsuits filed in small towns used to only be covered in local papers. Now, even the smallest of local news websites can be swept into basic searches for information.

And yet, the pace of these incidents doesn't seem to be slowing. Officers are still acting as though their worst behavior is still largely unobserved. They're not learning from the past mistakes of countless others. Even those who have been "burned" previously continue to act as though they can abuse their power to harass and intimidate people. Just read through the numerous postings at Photography Is Not A Crime. Many of the posts deal with the same law enforcement entities and the same accountability activists, and yet, there's no indication that policy changes or previous bad press have had any deterrent effect on the officers involved.

As the forum comment points out, there's no apparent sense of self-awareness evident in officers like Montemarano. He notes that the PBA (Patrolmen's Benevolent Association) isn't doing anything to help officers be more aware of public perception. I don't know why he's surprised by this. The PBA, like many other police unions, is one of the first entities to protest any changes in policy meant to address police misconduct, and actively fights additional accountability efforts like the use of body cameras. These unions are also instrumental in returning fired cops to their former positions, showing that even when local PDs finally make an effort to shed the worst in their ranks, their efforts can often be undone by entities that put an officer's employment well ahead of the public interest and the police department itself.

It's not that there aren't any positive signs. It's that there are so few, compared to the amount of citizen documentation piling up. This isn't some temporary change in public perception. It's ongoing, and it's not going to get any better if law enforcement officers remain insulated from accountability and wholly oblivious to the implications of their actions.

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One of the most frequent refrains from the big broadband players and their friends who are fighting against net neutrality rules is that there's no evidence that ISPs have been abusing a lack of net neutrality rules in the past, so why would they start now? That does ignore multiple instances of violations in the past, but in combing through the comments submitted to the FCC concerning net neutrality, we came across one very interesting one that actually makes some rather stunning revelations about the ways in which ISPs are currently violating net neutrality/open internet principles in a way designed to block encryption and thus make everyone a lot less secure. The filing comes from VPN company Golden Frog and discusses "two recent examples that show that users are not receiving the open, neutral, and uninterrupted service to which the Commission says they are entitled."

The first example you may have actually heard about. It got some attention back in July, when entrepreneur Colin Nederkoorn released a video showing how Verizon was throttling his Netflix connection, which was made obvious when he logged into a VPN and suddenly his Netflix wasn't stuttering and the throughput was much higher. That video got a lot of attention (over half a million views) and highlighted the nature of the interconnection fight in which Verizon is purposely allowing Netflix streams coming via Level 3 to clog. As most people recognize, in a normal scenario, using a VPN should actually slow down your connection somewhat thanks to the additional encryption. However, the fact that it massively sped up the Netflix connection shows just how much is being throttled when Verizon knows it's Netflix traffic. Nederkoorn actually was using Golden Frog's VyprVPN in that video, so it actually makes Golden Frog look good -- but the company notes that it really shows one way in which "internet access providers are 'mismanaging' their networks to their own users' detriment."

But the second example Golden Frog provides is much scarier and much more pernicious, and it has received almost no attention.

In the second instance, Golden Frog shows that a wireless broadband Internet access provider is interfering with its users’ ability to encrypt their SMTP email traffic. This broadband provider is overwriting the content of users’ communications and actively blocking STARTTLS encryption. This is a man-in-the-middle attack that prevents customers from using the applications of their choosing and directly prevents users from protecting their privacy.

They demonstrate this with the following graphic: This is scary. If ISPs are actively trying to block the use of encryption, it shows how they might seek to block the use of VPNs and other important security protection measures, leaving all of us less safe. Golden Frog provides more details of what's happening in this case:

Golden Frog performed tests using one mobile wireless company’s data service, by manually typing the SMTP commands and requests, and monitoring the responses from the email server in issue. It appears that this particular mobile wireless provider is intercepting the server’s banner message and modifying it in-transit from something like “220 [servername] ESMTP Postfix” to “200 ********************.” The mobile wireless provider is further modifying the server’s response to a client command that lists the extended features supported by the server. The mobile wireless provider modifies the server’s “250-STARTTLS” response (which informs the client of the server’s capacity to enable encryption). The Internet access provider changes it to “250-XXXXXXXA.” Since the client does not receive the proper acknowledgement that STARTTLS is supported by the server, it does not attempt to turn on encryption. If the client nonetheless attempts to use the STARTTLS command, the mobile wireless provider intercepts the client’s commands to the server and changes it too. When it detects the STARTTLS command being sent from the client to the server, the mobile wireless provider modifies the command to “XXXXXXXX.” The server does not understand this command and therefore sends an error message to the client.

As Golden Frog points out, this is "conceptually similar" to the way in which Comcast was throttling BitTorrent back in 2007 via packet reset headers, which kicked off much of the last round of net neutrality concerns. The differences here are that this isn't about blocking BitTorrent, but encryption, and it's a mobile internet access provider, rather than a wired one. This last point is important, since even the last net neutrality rules did not apply to wireless broadband, and the FCC is still debating if it should apply any new rules to wireless.

After reading the Golden Frog filing, the answer should be that it is absolutely necessary to apply the rules to wireless, because practices like these put us all at risk by undermining the encryption that keeps us all safe. As Golden Frog notes:

Absent enforceable Commission rules, broadband providers can (and at least one already does) block and discriminate against entirely acceptable Internet uses. In this case, users are not just losing their right to use the applications and services of their choosing, but also their privacy. It is not at clear that this type of encryption blocking would be forbidden for fixed broadband Internet access, under the proposed rules’ exception for reasonable network management. This example involves mobile wireless broadband, however, and it is clear that the proposed rules would not prohibit the activity. STARTLLS encryption does not constitute “a lawful website” or “an application[] that compete[s] with the provider’s voice or video telephony services[.]”11 The proposed rules on their face do not prohibit mobile broadband Internet access providers from blocking user efforts to maintain privacy through encryption.

Furthermore, Golden Frog concludes:

The claim that rules banning blocking and unreasonable discrimination are solutions in search of a problem is flatly wrong. There have been problems in the past and there are problems now. The proposed rules do not resolve all of the problems identified in the NPRM. Further broadband Internet access providers are still interfering with beneficial and privacy-enhancing applications users want to employ.

This is incredibly important -- just at a time when we need stronger encryption and privacy online, the FCC may undermine it with weak net neutrality rules that allow this type of behavior to continue.

A few months ago, I got into a conversation with a well-known internet entrepreneur/investor, who asked about possible "compromise" rules on net neutrality, suggesting that maybe it's okay to throttle Netflix traffic because there's so much of it. He argued that, perhaps there could be some threshold, and if your traffic was above that threshold it's okay to throttle it. After some back and forth, I asked the hypothetical about encryption: what if, at a time when more and more encryption is important, such a rule was in place, and overall encrypted traffic passed that threshold, then suddenly access providers could throttle all encrypted traffic, doing tremendous damage to security and privacy. What I didn't realize was that some access providers are effectively already attacking privacy and encryption in this manner.

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If Vice contributor Jason Leopold isn't careful, he'll kill us all. Back in August, Leopold requested Keith Alexander's financial statements -- something required of certain government officials by the Ethical Government Act (EGA) of 1978. The CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence both complied. Keith Alexander, via the NSA's refusal to turn over the documents, is the lone holdout.

The NSA claimed Alexander's financial statements were exempted from public disclosure by the National Security Agency Act of 1959. But the EGA overrides the NSA Act, unless the president himself has issued a waiver making Alexander exempt from these stipulations. President Obama hasn't, although the NSA's lawyer -- Shadey Brown -- implied that he had, by extension stating that releasing the information "would compromise the national interest," i.e., threaten national security, which is the only way to receive this presidential waiver.

Alexander has been given no such waiver. As a result of Leopold's lawsuit, the NSA has released Alexander's documents and will be turning over incoming NSA head Michael Rogers' as well. All in "the interest of transparency." "See how open we are!" the NSA shouts as it is sued into compliance. Forced transparency isn't really transparency, and these government agencies should really stop using that word in this highly misleading way.

The documents forced out of the NSA's hands are apparently linked to national security interests, so it's only a matter of time before terrorist attacks on Americans become as common as 4th Amendment violations and FOIA lawsuits.

What's contained in Alexander's financial statements are several investments in little-known tech firms. Both James Clapper and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers have looked over Alexander's investments and declared them to be completely free of conflicts of interest, but a look at some of Alexander's investments doesn't necessarily justify these unequivocal statements.

Alexander invested as much as $15,000 in: Pericom Semiconductor, a company that has designed technology for the closed-circuit television and video surveillance markets; RF Micro Devices designs, which manufactures high-performance radio frequency technology that is also used for surveillance; and Synchronoss Technologies, a cloud storage firm that provides a cloud platform to mobile phone carriers (the NSA has been accused of hacking into cloud storage providers).

In addition, RF Micro Devices secured nearly $13 million in R&D contracts from the US government between 2004 and 2010, with most of that money coming from the Defense Department. And while Pericom doesn't seem to have any direct contracts with the government, its products are (or were) used by Harris Corporation, the manufacturer of Stingray cell tower spoofers.

Then there's this:

Alexander also held shares in Datascension, Inc., a data gathering and research company. The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading in Datascension last August "due to a lack of current and accurate information" about the company. (Datascension was linked to telemarketing calls that apparently prompted one person in a complaint forum to remark the company is "trying to gain personal information.")

Alexander backs a bad company -- something that is probably just an indication that not even the most well-connected win every bet. With Alexander's initial investment appearing years before the company got smacked down by the SEC, this looks like not much more than somewhere the former NSA chief lost money.

What's included here may be slightly on the shady side, but Alexander's disclosures don't definitely point to wrongdoing. In fact, his financial disclosure sheets are nearly completely blank -- either a sign of clean living, or a case of conspicuousness in absence.

The most surprising thing isn't Alexander's investments. It's the fact that the NSA played hardball to protect nearly nothing of interest. Or perhaps it isn't surprising, considering the agency seems to believe it cannot release anything, no matter how minute, without somehow compromising its mission and the nation's security. Of course, considering how much has been disclosed without its permission, and the subsequent failure of the world's terrorists to turn the US into their personal playground, we know these phrases are largely empty and signify little more than the NSA's persistent allegiance to darkness and secrecy, even as it spouts (always) belated lip service to "transparency."

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We don't have a full recording (i.e., from the beginning of this stop) but it apparently began with a seat-belt violation. By the time the recording begins, the passenger has already been asked to show some ID. He doesn't have any on him, much to the officers' apparent unease. At one point, his hand goes towards the center console, prompting one officer to pull his gun.

The driver (Lisa Mahone) is on the phone with a 911 dispatcher, trying to get some help because she has two cops going after her passenger, one of whom has already pulled a gun. The operator tells her to calm down (and why wouldn't she suggest that -- after all, the driver is "safely" in the hands of law enforcement) but Mahone points out something that should be equally obvious, especially post-Ferguson.

“I am scared. And the man–pulled a gun out. A gun! Why do my kids have to see that,” Mahone told the 9-1-1 operator.

Jamal Jones, the passenger at whom the gun is being pointed makes the same point.

Mr. Jones expressed reluctance to get out of the vehicle due to the officers’ aggressiveness and mentioned that “People are getting shot by the police.”

Also true. Case in point: seatbelt violation greeted with a handful of bullets rather than a citation. But these police officers have apparently gone too far by the point the recording starts. They can't de-escalate, not after a weapon has been unholstered. So, they take it further.

“You’re going to come out of the car one way or another,” the officer menaced. “You want your kids to see you come out through the window?”

Apparently afraid Jones has a gun (because why else would another gun be out), the officer approaches the vehicle with an ax and smashes the window, sending glass flying into the back seat where Mahone's two children are sitting. Almost immediately, Jamal Jones is tasered and dragged from the vehicle.

The seven-year-old begins crying. The fourteen-year-old continues to record with his cellphone.

Now, it's a lawsuit.

Jamal Jones was officially charged with resisting law enforcement and "refusal to aid an officer." The last charge makes no sense. Here's the law itself:

A person who, when ordered by a law enforcement officer to assist the officer in the execution of the officer's duties, knowingly or intentionally, and without a reasonable cause, refuses to assist commits refusal to aid an officer, a Class B misdemeanor.

This is officers piling on charges because they were inconvenienced. Refusing to exit a vehicle may be "resisting law enforcement" but this law isn't supposed to be read as another means of forcing citizens into complete compliance. It's meant to direct citizens to assist law enforcement officers when their help is requested. Being ordered out of a car under threats of violence isn't the same thing as being asked to give an eyewitness statement or use a cell phone to call dispatch/911 for backup. (That this law is on the books is itself questionable, considering it effectively directs citizens to protect and serve police officers who are under no legal obligation to return the favor. It also would seem to put citizens directly in the path of civil lawsuits, should they injure someone or assist officers in violating their rights.)

As the PoliceMisconduct.net story notes, Mahone told police dispatch that she had been "pulled over like a bank robber." Once again, we have to wonder what was actually on the officers' minds when they deployed a spike strip in front of the vehicle they had allegedly pulled over because of seatbelt violations.

The official statement attempts to explain this.

The police release said that another officer car with video equipment was called for and “considerable time” had passed. It added that Mahone at one point put the vehicle into drive, which is when they were told about the spike strips.

So, the spike strips preceded the supposed attempt to escape.

Here's what the PD has to say in defense of its officers' actions.

The officers… called for backup and at some point saw Jones’ hands drop to the center console. That’s when police ordered Jones to show his hands and exit the vehicle because of fear for officer safety, according to the release.

Jones also feared for his safety, but had no laws backing up his refusal to exit the vehicle. For two officers "fearing for their safety," they sure move with a lot of confidence.

At what point does the mental math add up to "he might have a gun so I'd better move towards the window armed only with an ax?" Or, for that matter, when Jones asks for a "white shirt" (supervisor), why does the fearful officer (remember a gun has already been pulled at this point) say, "Look at my shoulder, dumbass. I've got bars?" These don't seem to be the actions of officers fearing for their lives. These seem to the actions of officers who are now looking to prove a point after coming up empty in their demands for ID.

The police report also says that 13 minutes had elapsed between the beginning of the stop and the shattering of the window/tasering of Jamal Jones. What were they looking for? They had two people effectively detained for a minor traffic violation and yet deployed a spike strip in front of the vehicle and finally forced their way inside. They then had one person in custody and another cited. With all of this information and time, they still couldn't come up with heftier charges than those thrown at people when cops can't find anything more damning: variations on resisting arrest.

So, you can cut the cops some slack (but not much considering both accused officers have been named in excessive force lawsuits in the past) since they were dealing with an unknown person and the perception of danger. But then what? Here's more of the police statement:

“In general, police officers who make legal traffic stops are allowed to ask passengers inside of a stopped vehicle for identification and to request that they exit a stopped vehicle for the officer’s safety without a requirement of reasonable suspicion,” the release says. “When the passenger displayed movements inside of the stopped vehicle that included placing his hand in places where the officer could not see, officers’ concerns for their safety were heightened.”

The statement claims officers were concerned about multiple movements inside the vehicle and yet they never made an attempt to search it for weapons, drugs or anything else that might "heighten safety concerns." They deploy a spike strip in front a stopped vehicle but don't bother trying to justify this tactic until after the fact.

What it looks like -- and yes, appearances can be deceiving, especially if several minutes elapsed between the beginning of the stop and the violent conclusion -- is another case of officers not knowing how, or just being unwilling to de-escalate a situation when immediate compliance isn't forthcoming. It's at minimum a training issue. But it's also an attitude issue. You want to use a seatbelt violation as an excuse to run names for warrants? Fine. But where do you go when someone has no ID, or refuses to produce it? This is one answer. And it's the wrong one.

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Steven Aftergood of FAS Secrecy News went searching for an answer to an almost-unanswerable conundrum. And he got the most nonanswer-like answer imaginable.

As we all know, there are two kinds of leaks: the one the government approves of, utilizing anonymous officials, and everything else. Aftergood wanted to know more about these authorized leaks, in which classified information is handed over to journalists, etc. in response to queries, usually with several stipulations attached. It happens so often there's even a provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act, which gives the NSA and others the funds and permission to keep doing what they're doing.

In the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2013 (sec. 504), Congress directed that “In the event of an authorized disclosure of national intelligence” to the media, the government official responsible for authorizing the disclosure shall notify Congress in a timely fashion whenever the intelligence disclosed is classified (or declassified for the purpose of the disclosure).

The purpose of that requirement was to ensure that the congressional intelligence committees are made aware of authorized disclosures to the press “so that, among other things, these authorized disclosures may be distinguished from unauthorized ‘leaks’,” according to the Senate report on the FY2013 intelligence bill.

There's a report out there that details all of the authorized disclosures of classified information to press members who are decidedly not cleared to receive classified documents. This authorized release of classified document generates it own oxymoron.

The notion of an authorized disclosure of classified information is close to being a contradiction in terms. If something is classified, how can its disclosure be authorized (without declassification)? And if something is disclosed by an official who is authorized to do so, how can it still be classified? And yet, it seems that there is such a thing.

Knowing that a.) this happens and b.) a report is generated when it occurs, Aftergood requested a copy of these authorized disclosure reports. The answer he received defies logic in only the way a secretive bureaucracy can. [pdf]

“The document responsive to your request has been reviewed by this Agency as required by the FOIA and has been found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with Executive Order 13526,” according to an October 2 letter signed by retiring NSA FOIA chief Pamela N. Phillips. “The document is classified because its disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.”

The stuff we already disclosed is too dangerous to disclose.

And yet, the government -- when it serves its interests -- will "cause exceptionally grave damage to national security" by handing classified information over to press members willing to carry its narrative water.

One of the biggest open secrets in Washington is that, despite officialdom’s intensive efforts to demonize whistleblowers like former NSA analyst Edward Snowden, the vast majority of disclosures of secret information are not “leaks” but “pleaks” — a term Columbia Law Professor David E. Pozen coined to describe something that is more like an official “plant” than a “leak.”

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were particularly adept at selectively disclosing secret intelligence findings that served their agenda – even while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would damage them.

We saw evidence of this most recently when the government tried to head off The Intercept's publication of leaked terrorist watchlist documents by leaking its own version to the Associated Press shortly before the Intercept piece went live.

It's ridiculous for the government to claim documents leaked from unauthorized sources are somehow still secret even though the public has access to them. For it to make the same claim for documents it selectively chose to "leak" is preposterous and highly hypocritical. Aftergood and FAS have appealed this decision, stating, “It is well established that information, including classified information, that has been publicly disclosed on an authorized basis loses its exemption from disclosure under FOIA."

Whether or not this will have any effect on the NSA remains to be seen. But so far, the only proven method to obtaining documents from the highly-secretive agency seems to result in Russian exile.

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Once those leaks are made to the media and published, why shouldn't the public also be able to know when the information came from an authorized source or an unauthorized one?

The post NSA Mind-Bender: We Won’t Tell You What Info We Already Leaked to the Media appeared first on WIRED.

"Last Week Tonight's" John Oliver is again taking an entertaining swing at a subject that has made its way into Techdirt's pages: asset seizure and forfeiture. Going beyond the "robbery at badgepoint" (Cory Doctorow's term) to civil asset forfeiture (in which the government files suit against property that is presumed guilty of criminal ties), Oliver is his usual entertaining self while still managing to highlight the obscene depths these programs -- started with the intent of breaking up criminal enterprises and returning assets to those defrauded, etc. -- have sunk, thanks to the perversion of incentives.

The highlights are a law enforcement official sheepishly explaining (in a public hearing) that there is really no oversight or discretion involved in the spending of seized funds. (He flat out states that it's used to buy "toys" the department "needs.") This leads directly to a police department being called out by a citizen (in another public meeting) for purchasing booze and a margarita machine with seized funds.

Also fun (but in a rather twisted way) is the names of suits brought by the US against "guilty" property, including United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls. You can find several others simply by running a search at Justia. (This also happens at state level, so additional searching uncovers gems like this one: South Dakota vs. Fifteen Impounded Cats.)

Anything that brings more attention to this issue is welcome. Oliver's take allows for a rather painless digestion of the issue while still refusing to underplay how thoroughly corrupted the ideal has become, thanks mainly to policies that allow those seizing the property to directly benefit from the seizures. As to a solution, Oliver suggests two things: an overhaul of this system and rigorous oversight or (the easier route) changing TV procedurals to more accurately reflect law enforcement activities -- like the cuffing and frisking houses, furniture, etc.

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After seeing full Google Voice integration in Hangouts a few weeks back, Voice users are now being treated to another long requested update (seriously, this has been in the works since 2011). Revealed by Alex Wiesen on his Google+ page only moments ago, Google Voice has expanded MMS support to over 100 North American carriers including big ones like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Telus, Bell Canada, and Rogers.

Receiving picture messages in Hangouts has long been hit or miss, typically requiring the forwarding of MMS messages to one’s Gmail. With full carrier support, Voice users no longer have to wonder whether or not they’ve missed out on a funny meme or baby picture — it’s all coming through (even group MMS messages, although individually).

Of course, not all carriers are onboard with the new update (cough, Verizon), with Google asking them to please enable MMS support for Google Voice on their network. Yes. Freakin’. Please.

The Washington Post editorial board has weighed in on the recent "controversy" over Apple and Google's smart decision to start encrypting mobile devices by default. The "controversy" itself seems pretty hyped up by law enforcement types who are either lying or clueless about the technology. Throwing a bunch of technically ignorant newspaper editors into the mix probably wasn't the wisest of decisions.

Much of the editorial engages in hand-wringing about what law enforcement is going to do when they need the info on your phone (answer: same thing they did for years before smartphones, and most of the time with smartphones as well, which is regular detective work). It even repeats the bogus use of the phrase "above the law" that FBI director James Comey bizarrely keeps repeating (hint: putting a lock on your stuff isn't making you above the law). But the real kicker is the final paragraph:

How to resolve this? A police “back door” for all smartphones is undesirable — a back door can and will be exploited by bad guys, too. However, with all their wizardry, perhaps Apple and Google could invent a kind of secure golden key they would retain and use only when a court has approved a search warrant. Ultimately, Congress could act and force the issue, but we’d rather see it resolved in law enforcement collaboration with the manufacturers and in a way that protects all three of the forces at work: technology, privacy and rule of law.

Did you get that? No "back door," but rather a "golden key." Now, I'm not sure which members of the Washington Post editorial board is engaged in mythical "golden key" cryptography studies, but to most folks who have even the slightest understanding of technology, they ought to have recognized that what they basically said is: "a back door is a bad idea, so how about creating a magic back door?" A "golden key" is a backdoor and a "backdoor" is a "golden key." The two are indistinguishable and the Post's first point is the only accurate one: it "can and will be exploited by bad guys, too." That's why Apple and Google are doing this. To protect users from bad guys.

In the meantime, just watch, and we'll start to see ignorant politicians and law enforcement start to echo this proposal as well, talking down "backdoors" and talking up "golden keys." The fact that we already had this debate in the 1990s, when the "golden key" was called "key escrow" and when having the government lose that was was fairly important in allowing the internet to become so useful, will apparently be lost on the talking heads.

Still, a small request for the Washington Post Editorial Board: before weighing in on a subject like this, where it's fairly clear that none of you have the slightest clue, perhaps try asking a security expert first?

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Chris Hamby, over at Buzzfeed, has an incredible and crazy story about the DEA impersonating a woman, creating a fake Facebook profile without her knowledge or permission, and posting photos from her seized cell phone, all in order to try to get information from others. The specifics involve a woman, Sondra "Sosa" Arquiett, who was apparently the girlfriend of Jermaine Branford, a guy who was accused of (and eventually pleaded guilty to) drug trafficking. Arquiett was a minor player, charged with basically allowing Branford to use her apartment for storing and processing the cocaine he was trafficking. Arquiett was eventually sentenced to probation.

Where this gets interesting, however, is that Arquiett has now filed a civil suit against the US and DEA agent Timothy Sinnigen, who allegedly set up the fake Facebook account. Arquiett claims she never had a Facebook account, and only found out about the fake DEA one when a friend mentioned something about photos she was posting -- photos that the DEA had from seizing her phone. The details are laid out clearly in the lawsuit. Arquiett was arrested in July of 2010. By August, Sinnegen had set up the fake Facebook profile using information and photos from her phone, without telling Arquiett at all. Arquiett notes that:

The photographs used by Sinnigen included revealing and/or suggestive photographs of Plaintiff, including photographs of the Plaintiff in her bra and panties. Sinnigen also posted photographs of Plaintiff's minor child and her minor niece to Facebook.

The DEA then allegedly used the fake profile to try to contact other acquaintances who may have been involved in drug trafficking. This went on for at least three months before she discovered it. Sinnigen apparently flat out admitted it when confronted about it. Arquiett notes that, beyond the basic invasion of privacy reasons to be concerned, the whole thing may have put her in danger:

... by posing as her on Facebook, Sinnegen had created the appearance that Plaintiff was willfully cooperating in his investigation of the narcotics trafficking ring, thereby placing her in danger.

In the DEA's response to the lawsuit, they admit to setting up the fake profile and contacting possible drug dealers, but insist this is all perfectly fine.

Defendants admit that Plaintiff did not give express permission for the use of photographs contained on her phone on an undercover Facebook page, but state the Plaintiff implicitly consented by granting access to the information stored in her cell phone and by consenting to the use of that information to aid in an ongoing criminal investigations.

It's one thing to say "use the information seized for investigations" and quite another to "fake my identity and pretend to be me." Furthermore, the response argues:

Plaintiff relinquished any expectation of privacy she may have had to the photographs contained on her cell phone.

Plaintiff consented to the search of her cell phone.

Plaintiff consented to use of information contained on her cell phone in ongoing criminal investigations.

Plaintiff cannot establish a violation of her substantive due process rights because she has not, and cannot, allege that Defendant Sinnigen’s alleged actions were taken with the absence of a legitimate governmental interest.

Again, consenting to the use of the information is very different from saying "hey, go impersonate me." But, again, this is the DEA we're talking about, and they have quite a bit of history to playing fast and loose with legal boundaries to try to go after folks. Buzzfeed quotes numerous legal experts saying it's a massive stretch to go from consenting to using the information in an investigation, to arguing that means it's okay to impersonate the individual and pretend they're engaged in ongoing conversations with potential drug dealers.

This effort also almost certainly violates Facebook's terms of service, though it's unclear how Facebook feels about law enforcement folks doing so. Either way, it's yet another example of very questionable investigative techniques used online by law enforcement, and the DEA in particular.

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A district court in Missouri has granted an injunction filed against the police in Ferguson for their ridiculous "5 second rule" that was used to arrest numerous protestors. The rule was that if you stood in place for more than 5 seconds, you could be arrested -- with the goal of (a) keeping protestors moving and (b) having an excuse to arrest a bunch of protestors. Mustafa Abdullah, with help from the ACLU, sued over this and the court has agreed that the rule is clearly unconstitutional, and thus a preliminary injunction has been granted. The court notes that standing in place for 5 seconds is not a legitimate standard to be used for Missouri's "failure to disperse law" (or any other law).

First, the court doesn't buy the police's claim that the 5 second rule matches up with the failure to disperse law:

This statute provides no defense to this suit for several reasons. First, people were not told to “disperse” – in other words, to leave the area. Instead they were told to keep moving. Second, the order was given even when there were fewer than six people gathered. The evidence included examples where the order was given to one person alone, to three people attempting to pray, to a reporter and one other person, as well as to larger groups. And the order was given to people who were doing nothing to indicate they intended to violate laws of any sort, much less to engage in violence. In fact, nearly all of plaintiff’s fact witnesses testified that despite gatherings that were peaceful and law-abiding at the time, officers told people they must keep moving or they would be arrested.

Then there's the question of due process. And, once again, the 5 second rule is problematic:

Plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits of showing that the keep-moving policy violates due process in both ways. Of course, in this situation there is no statute or ordinance being challenged. Rather, it is an unwritten policy, given to officers at their roll calls, instructing them to order people to keep moving whenever the officers thought it was appropriate to do so. Some officers told everyone to keep moving, so if plaintiff was unlucky enough to be standing in the vicinity of those officers, he would be told to move. Some officers told people they would be arrested if they did not move, but at least one officer told people that they had to keep moving but probably would not be arrested if they failed to comply. Some officers interpreted the policy to mean that people had to walk at a certain speed, others told people that they could not walk back and forth in a certain-sized area. Some officers applied it to members of the press, while others did not. Plaintiff and his other witnesses testified that they could not tell what would or would not be allowed at any given moment.

The rule provided no notice to citizens of what conduct was unlawful, and its enforcement was entirely arbitrary and left to the unfettered discretion of the officers on the street. This policy “necessarily entrusts lawmaking to the moment-to-moment judgment of the policeman on his beat.” See Kolender, 461 U.S. at 360 (brackets and quotation marks omitted). Like the gang loitering ordinance found unconstitutional in Chicago v. Morales, 527 U.S. 41 (1999), the keep-moving policy cannot meet constitutional standards for definiteness and clarity.

And then the good old First Amendment:

I conclude that it is likely plaintiff will prevail on the merits of his First Amendment claim, and given my conclusions about the Due Process claim, I need not at this time discuss the First Amendment issues in detail. The keep-moving policy – as it was applied to plaintiff and others – prohibited citizens from peacefully assembling on the public sidewalks. Although the state has a valid interest in maintaining order on its streets and sidewalks and in preventing violence by crowds, this interest is not sufficient to apply such a blanket rule to people assembling peacefully.... The evidence showed that the strategy burdened substantially more speech than was necessary to achieve its legitimate goals. In fact, one of the police witnesses testified that it only worked well during the daytime when there were no large crowds and no threats of violence – when the crowds grew unruly, telling them to keep moving was not an effective strategy. Thus, defendants’ own evidence shows that this strategy fails the requirement that “the means chosen are not substantially broader than necessary to achieve the government’s interest,”

Nice to see this ruling, though it would have been nicer to have this earlier -- but hopefully it will at least prevent future such actions.

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We discuss moral panics, past and present, pretty frequently to make a key point: for all the fears you hear about today's technologies, there were similar (almost always unfounded) fears for new technologies in the past. And, in retrospect, almost all of them look silly. Among my favorites were when chess or the waltz were going to undermine society. However, the NY Times' archivist, Evan Sandhaus has an amusing example (via Mathew Ingram) concerning that time, back in 1878, when the NY Times editorialized against Thomas Edison's phonograph and aereophone, for the fact that they could destroy everyone's privacy. Here's just the beginning: You can read the rest at the link above or embedded below (oh yeah: and this was written in 1878, so contrary to the NY Times' totally bogus copyright claim on the PDF below, the content is public domain). The whole thing is hilarious, first railing against Edison (who has apparently "invented too many things") and then against the phonograph for destroying privacy and making it impossible for anyone to talk to anyone any more:

THE AEROPHONE.

Something ought to be done to Mr. EDISON, and there is a growing conviction that it had better be done with a hemp rope. Mr. EDISON has invented too many things, and almost without exception they are things of the most deleterious character. He has been addicted to electricity for many years, and it is not very long ago that he became notorious for having discovered a new force, though he has since kept it care- fully concealed, either upon his person or elsewhere. Recently he invented the phone- graph, a machine that catches the lightest whisper of conversation and stores it up, so that at any future time it can be brought out, to the confusion of the original speaker. This machine will eventually destroy all confidence between man and man, and render more dangerous than ever woman's want of confidence in woman. No man can feel sure that wherever he may be there is not a concealed phonograph remorseless gathering up his remarks and ready to reproduce them at some future date. Who will be willing, even in the bosom of his family, to express any but most innocuous and colorless views and what woman when calling on a female friend, and waiting for the latter to make her appearance in the drawing-room, will dare to express her opinion of the wretched taste displayed in the furniture, or the hideous appearance of the family photographs ? In the days of persecution and it was said, though with poetical exaggeration, that the walls had ears.

Thanks to Mr. Edison's perverted ingenuity, this has not only become a literal truth, but every shelf, closet, or floor may now have its concealed phonographic ears. No young man will venture to carry on a private conversation with a young lady, lest he should be filling a secret phonograph with evidence that, in a breach of promise suit, would secure an immediate verdict against him, and our very small-boys will fear to express themselves with childish freedom, lest the phonograph should report them as having used the name of "gosh," or as having to "bust the snoot" of the long-suffering governess. The phonograph was, at the time of its invention, the most terrible example of depraved ingenuity which the world had seen; but Mr. EDISON has since reached a still more conspicuous peak of scientific infamy by inventing the aerophone--an instrument far more devastating in its effects and fraught with the destruction of human society.

Yes, now we move on to the aerophone. The true worry of the moralists at the NY Times. For the aerophone, you see, can make voices louder. Fear the innovation:

The aerophone is apparently a modification of the phonograph. In fact, it is a phonograph which converts whispers into roars. If, for example, you mention, within hearing of the aerophone, that you regard Mr. HAYES as the; greatest and best man that America has yet produced, that atrocious instrument may overwhelm you with shame by repeating your remark in a tone that can be heard no less than four miles. Mr. EDISON, with characteristic effrontery, represents this as a useful and beneficent invention. He says that an aerophone can be attached to a locomotive, and that with its aid the engineer can request persons to "look out for the locomotive" who are nearing a railway crossing four miles distant from the train. He also boasts that he will attach an aerophone to the gigantic statue of "Liberty." Which France is to present to this country, provided we will raise money enough to pay for it, and that the statue will thus be able to welcome incoming vessels in the Lower Bay, and to warn them not to come up to the City in case Mr. STANLEY MATTHEWS is delivering an oration on the currency, or Mr. Cox is making a comic speech at Tammany Hall. Were the aerophone to be confined strictly to these uses, it prove a comparatively unobjectionable intstrument; but no man can loose a whirlwind and guarantee that its ravages shall be confined to Chicago, or to some other place where it may do positive good.

There is some talk about the threat of this horrible invention on "dumb wives" and "dumb husbands" which we will skip over here, and then it gets to the next fear: the public being overwhelmed with everyone blasting their speech for four miles with aerophones. Oh the cacophony.

Our present vocal powers are always used to their full capacity. Everybody talks with about the same volume of voice, and when the aerophone comes into use, people will universally talk as loudly as the instrument will permit. When ninety-nine people out of a hundred converse with the aerophone, there will be such a roar of conversation that the hundredth person, who may speak in his natural voice, cannot be heard. We can only faintly imagine the horrible results of the general introduction of the aerophone. Wives residing in suburban Jersey villages will call to their'husbands at their places of business in the City, and require information as to subjects of purely domestic interest. Mothers whose children have wandered out of sight will howl over a four-mile tract of country direful threats as to the flaying alive which awaits James Henry and Ann Eliza unless they instantly come home. From morning till midnight our ears will be tortured with the uproar of aerophonic talk, and deaf men will be looked upon as the favored few to whom nature has made life tolerable.

I love the fear of having to hear talk of "purely domestic interest." And, in the end, could anything less that the entire destruction of society follow as a result?

The result will be the complete disorganization of society. Men and women will flee from civilization and seek in the silence of the forest relief from the roar of count- less aerophones. Business, marriage, and all social amusements will be thrown aside, except by totally deaf men, and America will retrogade to the Stone Age with frightful rapidity. Better is a dinner of raw turnips in a damp cave than a banquet at DELMONICO'S within hearing of ten thousand aerophones. Far better is it to starve in solitude than to possess all the luxuries of civilization at the price of hearing every remark that is made within a radius of four miles. It may be too late to suppress the aerophone now, but at least there is time to visit upon the head of its inventor the just indignation of his fellow-countrymen.

Frankly, the whole thing is so over the top and outrageous that it almost feels like parody of similar moral panics, but it does seem to be legit. Consider this when comparing it to today's moral panics, like Google Glass, mobile phones in general, autonomous cars, personal drones and a variety of other technologies. Perhaps one day we'll learn not to pre-freak out, but it doesn't appear to be happening just yet.

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We've heard complaints that warrant requirements for searches are an obstacle to efficient crime fighting. Here's a timeline of an incident that led to the death of a homeowner during a SWAT team raid in search of drugs it never found. (via PoliceMisconduct.net)

Late Sept. 22nd/early A.M. Sept. 23rd: David and Teresa Hooks' home was burglarized. Among the items stolen was their SUV.

Sept. 23rd, 3:45 pm: After a brief investigation, the Laurens County Sheriff's Dept. issues an arrest warrant for suspect Rodney Garrett.

Sept. 24th, 3:45 pm: 24 hours later, Garrett is in police custody, turning himself in after becoming "fearful for his life" when he realized a bag he stole from the Hooks' home contained crystal meth. He confessed to the burglary, vehicle theft and "other crimes." (It must be noted that this version of events comes from the warrant application. Hooks' attorney's statement merely says Garrett was "taken into custody.")

Sept. 24th, 9:56 pm: Six hours, later the Laurens County "drug task force" has its warrant application for a search of Hooks' house signed by Judge Snell, based almost solely on the statements made by an admitted felon in their custody.

From a statement by the Hooks' attorney, Mitch Shook:

The facts submitted to Deputy Magistrate Snell to convince her that probable cause existed to issue the warrant consisted of the statement by Rodney Garrett a confessed burglar, thief, and a meth addict who was under the influence at the time of his arrest that the approximately 20 grams of methamphetamine, a digital scale, and 2 firearms found on him at the time of arrest had been stolen by him out of another vehicle at the Hooks home.

The warrant application also lists an investigation from 2009 as more "probable cause."

In the warrant application, Laurens investigator Chris Brewer wrote that he knew Hooks and his home address from a previous investigation. Brewer said a suspect claimed he had been supplying "multiple ounces" of methamphetamine to Hooks, who re-sold it.

Shook says that investigation was done in 2009. Neither Shook or the Sheriff's department stated the outcome of that investigation.

The timeline continues. One hour later -- at 10:55 PM -- Hooks' home is raided and David Hooks is shot dead.

Here's the police version:

The Laurens County Sheriff's office says Hooks was shot after he got out a firearm and started showing aggression.

Here's his wife's version:

He says Teresa Hooks, David's wife, looked outside and saw people with hoods during the evening of the drug search. He says she woke her husband up, thinking the burglars were back. He says Hooks then armed himself.

Which seems plausible. Less than 48 hours had passed and Hooks would have had no idea he was on the receiving end of a drug task force "investigation." The word "investigation" receives the scariest of scare quotes, considering it mostly consisted of a multiple felon trying to explain away the gun, scale and meth in his possession. If the suspect had claimed he didn't rob Hooks' house, the police wouldn't have believed him. But when this same suspect starts blabbering about finding meth during his robbery, the cops are all ears, as though he were Abraham Lincoln himself, swearing on a stack of Bibles.

How do we know all of this is bullshit? Because the police spent almost as much time searching Hooks' house -- nearly two days -- as it did between the point Hooks' house was invaded the first time (by confessed burglar Rodney Garrett) and the second time (by the SWAT team).

[A]fter taking over the scene at around 11:55 p.m. on the 24th of September the GBI conducted a thorough search of the property that lasted until approximately 8:00 p.m. Friday, September 26th. That search of some 44 hours conducted by numerous agents with the GBI resulted in not one item of contraband being found! This has been confirmed to the family by the GBI and is evidenced by the return of the original search warrant which was finally filed in court on September 29th and indicates that nothing was seized pursuant to the search warrant.

In between these two periods of 40+ hours was a flashpoint: the raid itself. The task force shot Hooks dead in his own home, pursuing the self-serving pipe dreams of a meth addict. The SWAT team broke down the back door and fired "no less than 16 shots" at David Hooks, some blindly through an adjacent wall. Hooks had every right to pick up his weapon and investigate this second home invasion. But in doing so, he gave every raiding officer all the justification needed to shoot first -- and shoot often.

He's too dead to be charged with forcing law enforcement weapons to discharge (because they fire themselves so often in official police statements), and he died as the result of a speedy judge-jury-executioner process that hinged on the arbitrary credulity of the Sheriff's Department and its drug task force. To call this willing suspension of disbelief an "investigation" is to strip the word of all meaning. (And beat it. And send it naked and bruised into the harsh winter, etc.) A late-night raid has all sort of deadly implications that could have been avoided by an actual investigation. Now, the department has blood on its hands and a lawyer on its trail -- all because a burglar told some law enforcement officers whatever came to mind during his interrogation.

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When the US finally set up some "rules" for its extrajudicial killing-via-drones (after years of no rules at all, which allowed the CIA to "acquire a taste for killing people with drones"), one of the "rules" was that drone bombs wouldn't be used unless there was a "near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured." As President Obama noted, this was "the highest standard we can set" to avoid civilian casualties via drones. This high standard upset some bloodthirsty hawks like Rep. Mike Rogers, who saw things like actually trying to prevent civilian casualties as unnecessary "red tape." And, in fact, soon after the rules were in place, the Obama administration itself started realizing that it didn't really like the restrictions it put on itself.

So it's just going to ignore them. Last week, we wrote about how the administration has been redefining pretty much everything to justify the attacks on Syria, including what is meant by "civilian." However, even with that new definition, they've run into some very obvious problems: namely that there's increasing evidence that (despite repeated denials) the bombings did, in fact, kill civilians.

No problem, apparently, for the Obama administration, which has now decided that the very rules it set up in the past to avoid killing civilians with drones... no longer matter. Basically, it looks like the Obama administration just added a big fat asterisk to the "near-certainty" standard for civilian deaths, whereby those rules can be ignored... because the Obama administration says "this is different."

At the same time, however, Hayden said that a much-publicized White House policy that President Obama announced last year barring U.S. drone strikes unless there is a “near certainty” there will be no civilian casualties — "the highest standard we can meet," he said at the time — does not cover the current U.S. airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

The “near certainty” standard was intended to apply “only when we take direct action ‘outside areas of active hostilities,’ as we noted at the time,” Hayden said in an email. “That description — outside areas of active hostilities — simply does not fit what we are seeing on the ground in Iraq and Syria right now.”

It's not much of a rule when you can exempt it based on... deciding to exempt it.

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ferespo sends this news out of Belgium: As reported to ECDC by Belgian authorities, on 2 September 2014, following a human error, 45 liters of concentrated live polio virus solution were released into the environment by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in Rixensart city, Belgium. The liquid was conducted directly to a water-treatment plant (Rosieres) and released after treatment in river Lasne affluent of river Dyle which is affluent of the Escaut/Scheldt river. Belgium's High Council of Public Health conducted a risk assessment that concluded that the risk of infection for the population exposed to the contaminated water is extremely low due to the high level of dilution and the high vaccination coverage (95%) in Belgium.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A couple years ago, we wrote about a guy named John Brennan (who, we're pretty damn sure is not the John Brennan who is now director of the CIA) who decided to strip naked at a TSA screening area in an airport to protest the screening process. As we noted, a federal judge acquitted Brennan on First Amendment grounds, noting that he was engaged in a public protest, and that the nudity was a form of protected expression, not subject to indecent exposure laws.

No matter, apparently, for the TSA, who just went ahead and fined Brennan anyway claiming Brennan "interfered with screening personnel in the performance of their duties" (a violation of this rather broad law). As Lowering the Bar notes, this charge is bogus -- and is basically the same thing as when police arrest people filming them under similar charges:

[The TSA] fined him $1,000 for doing this, claiming he had "interfered" with screening operations when he took off all his clothes. As I discussed here, and then again here, that's the same bullshit argument police use when they arrest people for filming them—we had to come over there and stop you from doing something you're constitutionally entitled to do, and so you "interfered" with us. But that logic makes perfect sense to the TSA, and in particular to the administrative-law judge (a TSA employee) who upheld the penalty (reduced to $500) in April. Brennan appealed.

You'll never guess what happened next -- or, wait, actually you will:

Because this is an agency proceeding, the initial appeal is still within the agency, in this case to the deputy administrator. And as I mentioned above, because I didn't want you to be on pins and needles wondering what happened, he affirmed the ruling. The final order (PDF via PapersPlease.org) is again based entirely on the "no, you interfered with us" argument (about which I feel as described above). This also has the benefit (for the TSA) of making the law irrelevant. In fact, the deputy administrator says in his opinion, "I agree with TSA"—of which he is the deputy administrator—"that Respondent's arguments regarding the legality of the nudity are not relevant." Well, that's handy.

Handy indeed to be able to ignore a federal court saying that the activity was constitutionally-protected free speech.

Oh, and it gets more ridiculous. Apparently, the TSA review of the matter said the fine is appropriate because the whole three minutes that things were delayed was horrible for TSA efficiency:

By the way, he admits in his opinion that the checkpoint was closed "for approximately three minutes" as a result of the incident, yet affirms the finding that because of this, the agents "were not able to conduct screening in an efficient manner on other passengers present at the checkpoint." So the TSA is claiming here, with a straight face, not only that it screens passengers "in an efficient manner" to begin with but that it is so efficient that punishment is justified if you delay it by three minutes.

I don't know about you, but I've been pointlessly delayed by much more than three minutes by the TSA approximately EVERY TIME I HAVE FLOWN DURING THE PAST DECADE, so I would describe that claim as farcical.

I'm still wondering how any of this is making us safer. I'm guessing I'll have to keep waiting on that one...

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For many years, we've written about questionable activities by the Olympics, usually focusing on the organization's insanely aggressive approach to intellectual property, which could be summed up as "we own and control everything." Yes, the Olympics requires countries to pass special laws that protect its trademarks and copyrights beyond what standard laws allow. Of course, this is really much more about control and money. It's simply shining a light on just how corrupt the whole Olympic setup is. For decades, the Olympics has tried to hide this basic truth, and it has always been able to get various cities and countries to actively compete to suffer through the Olympics requirements, often with promises of big money in tourism and local business as a result. But it looks like jig may be up.

As Dan Wetzel notes, it appears that almost no one has any interest in hosting the 2022 Olympics. The only active attempts are Beijing (which is 120 miles from a mountain suitable for skiing) and Almaty Kazakhstan. All the other credible players have bailed out:

Certainly not Oslo, Norway, not even at the bargain rate of an estimated $5.4 billion in a nation of just five million people. It once wanted desperately to host the 2022 Winter Olympics and its bid was so perfect that it was considered the favorite to win. Then the country held a vote earlier this year and 55.9 percent of Norwegians opposed.

Wednesday the Norwegian government effectively pulled the bid. Norwegians are known for the ability to cross country ski really fast and being so friendly they beg visitors to come experience their picturesque nation. Since this involved the IOC however, they decided against having visitors come experience their picturesque nation to watch them cross country ski really fast.

They aren't alone. Previous finalist Krakow, Poland, saw 70 percent voter opposition and pulled its application. A majority felt the same way in Germany and Switzerland, killing bids in Munich and St. Moritz respectively. In Sweden the majority party rejected funding the proposed games in Stockholm.

Plenty of other countries didn't even bother thinking about it. As Wetzel points out, basically the only two countries interested are authoritarian regimes:

Essentially the only places interested in hosting the 2022 games are countries where actual citizens aren't allowed a real say in things – communist China and Kazakhstan, a presidential republic that coincidentally has only had one president since it split from the old USSR in 1989.

To sum it up:

Essentially the entire world has told the IOC it's a corrupt joke.

Don't hold back:

The IOC has billions of dollars laying around and billions more coming because to most people the Olympics is just a television show and the ratings are so high that the broadcast rights will never go down. The IOC doesn't pay the athletes. It doesn't share revenue with host countries. It doesn't pay for countries to send their athletes. It doesn't lay out any construction or capital costs. It doesn't pay taxes.

It basically holds caviar rich meetings in five star hotels in the Alps before calling it a day. That and conduct weak investigations into corruption charges of the bidding process, of course. "No evidence uncovered" is on a win streak.

It's a heck of a racket.

Except now the racket may be ending. Except for China and Kazakhstan. Wetzel's conclusion is spot on:

So China or Kazakhstan it is, the last two suckers on earth willing to step up to this carnival barker.

One lucky nation will win. The other will host the 2022 Winter Olympics.

The Olympics are from another era -- one of top down, "we control and own everything while paying none" variety. We've seen those types of businesses failing in lots of other arenas -- and now it may be happening to the Olympics as well.

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Despite gaining $22 million in series B funding last year, Cyanogen Inc’s has yet to generate any sizable revenue. Sure they’re partnered up with Oppo and the folks at OnePlus to launch a few devices with their custom Android OS pre-installed, but other than that what have the one time Android modders been up to? Well, we know they were said to be in talks with some of the biggest firms in tech, companies like Microsoft and Yahoo looking to take the startup under their wing.

Now, as we approach the eve of their series C funding, it appears Cyanogen Inc could be seeking a breathtaking valuation, hitting upwards of a $1 billion. We know what you’re thinking: just how the heck did they arrive at that number? According to The Information, potential investors recently learned from Cyanogen’s chief executive that the Seattle-based software company recently met up with Sundar Pichai — the man in charge of Google’s Android division —  for acquisition talks, but walked away.

Even with talks of a Google buyout, that number is almost dumbfounding. That’s not to diminish the talented team at Cyanogen or the amazing work they’ve produced throughout the years. Some would argue Android wouldn’t be where it’s at with all the features Cyanogen and their team added to the OS over the years (only to be later replicated in official Android builds).

Once again, we should warn you. Reports out The Information can sometimes be hit or miss, so take it with a grain of salt. This is still very much a rumor. As an Android fan who has followed CyanogenMod since its humble beginnings, I’d have to say it’s inspiring to see men (and women) who once worked from their basements gaining the level of success they have in such a short amount of time.

To help you visualize a billion dollars, here’s what it would look like if stacked onto wood pallets.

 

Americans want guns without serial numbers. And apparently, they want to make them at home.

The post That $1,200 Machine for Making Untraceable Guns Just Sold Out in 36 Hours appeared first on WIRED.