Entries Tagged "law enforcement"

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Analysis of the FBI's Failure to Stop the Boston Marathon Bombings

Detailed response and analysis of the inspectors general report on the Boston Marathon bombings:

Two opposite mistakes in an after-the-fact review of a terrorist incident are equally damaging. One is to fail to recognize the powerful difference between foresight and hindsight in evaluating how an investigative or intelligence agency should have behaved. After the fact, we know on whom we should have focused attention as a suspect, and we know what we should have protected as a target. With foresight alone, we know neither of these critically important clues to what happened and why. With hindsight, we can focus all of our attention narrowly; with foresight, we have to spread it broadly, as broadly as the imagination of our attackers may roam.

The second mistake is equally important. It is to confuse the fact that people in official positions, like others, will inevitably make mistakes in carrying out any complicated task, with the idea that no mistakes were really made. We can see mistakes with hindsight that can be avoided in the future by recognizing them clearly and designing solutions. After mistakes are made, nothing is more foolish than to hide them or pretend that they were not mistakes.

Posted on May 2, 2014 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

Police Disabling Their Own Voice Recorders

This is not a surprise:

The Los Angeles Police Commission is investigating how half of the recording antennas in the Southeast Division went missing, seemingly as a way to evade new self-monitoring procedures that the Los Angeles Police Department imposed last year.

The antennas, which are mounted onto individual patrol cars, receive recorded audio captured from an officer’s belt-worn transmitter. The transmitter is designed to capture an officer’s voice and transmit the recording to the car itself for storage. The voice recorders are part of a video camera system that is mounted in a front-facing camera on the patrol car. Both elements are activated any time the car’s emergency lights and sirens are turned on, but they can also be activated manually.

According to the Los Angeles Times, an LAPD investigation determined that around half of the 80 patrol cars in one South LA division were missing antennas as of last summer, and an additional 10 antennas were unaccounted for.

Surveillance of power is one of the most important ways to ensure that power does not abuse its status. But, of course, power does not like to be watched.

Posted on April 11, 2014 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

A Template for Reporting Government Surveillance News Stories

This is from 2006—I blogged it here—but it’s even more true today.

Under a top secret program initiated by the Bush Administration after the Sept. 11 attacks, the [name of agency (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.)] have been gathering a vast database of [type of records] involving United States citizens.

“This program is a vital tool in the fight against terrorism,” [Bush Administration official] said. “Without it, we would be dangerously unsafe, and the terrorists would have probably killed you and every other American citizen.” The Bush Administration stated that the revelation of this program has severely compromised national security.

We’ve changed administrations—we’ve changed political parties—but nothing has changed.

Posted on November 1, 2013 at 2:26 PM • View Comments

The NSA is Commandeering the Internet

It turns out that the NSA’s domestic and world-wide surveillance apparatus is even more extensive than we thought. Bluntly: The government has commandeered the Internet. Most of the largest Internet companies provide information to the NSA, betraying their users. Some, as we’ve learned, fight and lose. Others cooperate, either out of patriotism or because they believe it’s easier that way.

I have one message to the executives of those companies: fight.

Do you remember those old spy movies, when the higher ups in government decide that the mission is more important than the spy’s life? It’s going to be the same way with you. You might think that your friendly relationship with the government means that they’re going to protect you, but they won’t. The NSA doesn’t care about you or your customers, and will burn you the moment it’s convenient to do so.

We’re already starting to see that. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others are pleading with the government to allow them to explain details of what information they provided in response to National Security Letters and other government demands. They’ve lost the trust of their customers, and explaining what they do—and don’t do—is how to get it back. The government has refused; they don’t care.

It will be the same with you. There are lots more high-tech companies who have cooperated with the government. Most of those company names are somewhere in the thousands of documents that Edward Snowden took with him, and sooner or later they’ll be released to the public. The NSA probably told you that your cooperation would forever remain secret, but they’re sloppy. They’ll put your company name on presentations delivered to thousands of people: government employees, contractors, probably even foreign nationals. If Snowden doesn’t have a copy, the next whistleblower will.

This is why you have to fight. When it becomes public that the NSA has been hoovering up all of your users’ communications and personal files, what’s going to save you in the eyes of those users is whether or not you fought. Fighting will cost you money in the short term, but capitulating will cost you more in the long term.

Already companies are taking their data and communications out of the US.

The extreme case of fighting is shutting down entirely. The secure e-mail service Lavabit did that last week, abruptly. Ladar Levison, that site’s owner, wrote on his homepage: “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision.”

The same day, Silent Circle followed suit, shutting down their e-mail service in advance of any government strong-arm tactics: “We see the writing the wall, and we have decided that it is best for us to shut down Silent Mail now. We have not received subpoenas, warrants, security letters, or anything else by any government, and this is why we are acting now.” I realize that this is extreme. Both of those companies can do it because they’re small. Google or Facebook couldn’t possibly shut themselves off rather than cooperate with the government. They’re too large; they’re public. They have to do what’s economically rational, not what’s moral.

But they can fight. You, an executive in one of those companies, can fight. You’ll probably lose, but you need to take the stand. And you might win. It’s time we called the government’s actions what they really are: commandeering. Commandeering is a practice we’re used to in wartime, where commercial ships are taken for military use, or production lines are converted to military production. But now it’s happening in peacetime. Vast swaths of the Internet are being commandeered to support this surveillance state.

If this is happening to your company, do what you can to isolate the actions. Do you have employees with security clearances who can’t tell you what they’re doing? Cut off all automatic lines of communication with them, and make sure that only specific, required, authorized acts are being taken on behalf of government. Only then can you look your customers and the public in the face and say that you don’t know what is going on—that your company has been commandeered.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis recently wrote in the Guardian: “Technology companies: now is the moment when you must answer for us, your users, whether you are collaborators in the US government’s efforts to ‘collect it all—our every move on the internet—or whether you, too, are victims of its overreach.”

So while I’m sure it’s cool to have a secret White House meeting with President Obama—I’m talking to you, Google, Apple, AT&T, and whoever else was in the room—resist. Attend the meeting, but fight the secrecy. Whose side are you on?

The NSA isn’t going to remain above the law forever. Already public opinion is changing, against the government and their corporate collaborators. If you want to keep your users’ trust, demonstrate that you were on their side.

This essay originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com.

Slashdot thread. And a good interview with Lavabit’s founder.

Posted on August 15, 2013 at 6:10 AM • View Comments

Book Review: Rise of the Warrior Cop

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, PublicAffairs, 2013, 400 pages.

War as a rhetorical concept is firmly embedded in American culture. Over the past several decades, federal and local law enforcement has been enlisted in a war on crime, a war on drugs and a war on terror. These wars are more than just metaphors designed to rally public support and secure budget appropriations. They change the way we think about what the police do. Wars mean shooting first and asking questions later. Wars require military tactics and weaponry. Wars mean civilian casualties.

Over the decades, the war metaphor has resulted in drastic changes in the way the police operate. At both federal and state levels, the formerly hard line between police and military has blurred. Police are increasingly using military weaponry, employing military tactics and framing their mission using military terminology. Right now, there is a Third Amendment case—that’s the one about quartering soldiers in private homes without consent—making its way through the courts. It involves someone who refused to allow the police to occupy his home in order to gain a “tactical advantage” against the house next-door. The police returned later, broke down his door, forced him to the floor and then arrested him for obstructing an officer. They also shot his dog with pepperball rounds. It’s hard to argue with the premise of this case; police officers are acting so much like soldiers that it can be hard to tell the difference.

In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko chronicles the steady militarization of the police in the U.S. A detailed history of a dangerous trend, Mr. Balko’s book tracks police militarization over the past 50 years, a period that not coincidentally corresponds with the rise of SWAT teams. First established in response to the armed riots of the late 1960s, they were originally exclusive to big cities and deployed only against heavily armed and dangerous criminals. Today SWAT teams are nothing special. They’ve multiplied like mushrooms. Every city has a SWAT team; 80% of towns between 25,000 and 50,000 people do as well. These teams are busy; in 2005 there were between 50,000 and 60,000 SWAT raids in the U.S. The tactics are pretty much what you would expect—breaking down doors, rushing in with military weaponry, tear gas—but the targets aren’t. SWAT teams are routinely deployed against illegal poker games, businesses suspected of employing illegal immigrants and barbershops with unlicensed hair stylists.

In Prince George’s County, MD, alone, SWAT teams were deployed about once a day in 2009, overwhelmingly to serve search or arrest warrants, and half of those warrants were for “misdemeanors and nonserious felonies.” Much of Mr. Balko’s data is approximate, because police departments don’t publish data, and they uniformly oppose any attempts at transparency or oversight. But he has good Maryland data from 2009 on, because after the mayor of Berwyn Heights was mistakenly attacked and terrorized in his home by a SWAT team in 2008, the state passed a law requiring police to report quarterly on their use of SWAT teams: how many times, for what purposes and whether any shots were fired during the raids.

Besides documenting policy decisions at the federal and state levels, the author examines the influence of military contractors who have looked to expand into new markets. And he tells some pretty horrific stories of SWAT raids gone wrong. A lot of dogs get shot in the book. Most interesting are the changing attitudes of police. As the stories progress from the 1960s to the 2000s, we see police shift from being uncomfortable with military weapons and tactics—and deploying them only as the very last resort in the most extreme circumstances—to accepting and even embracing their routine use.

This development coincides with the rhetorical use of the word “war.” To the police, civilians are citizens to protect. To the military, we are a population to be subdued. Wars can temporarily override the Constitution. When the Justice Department walks into Congress with requests for money and new laws to fight a war, it is going to get a different response than if it came in with a story about fighting crime. Maybe the most chilling quotation in the book is from William French Smith, President Reagan’s first attorney general: “The Justice Department is not a domestic agency. It is the internal arm of national defense.” Today we see that attitude in the war on terror. Because it’s a war, we can arrest and imprison Americans indefinitely without charges. We can eavesdrop on the communications of all Americans without probable cause. We can assassinate American citizens without due process. We can have secret courts issuing secret rulings about secret laws. The militarization of the police is just one aspect of an increasing militarization of government.

Mr. Balko saves his prescriptions for reform until the last chapter. Two of his fixes, transparency and accountability, are good remedies for all governmental overreach. Specific to police departments, he also recommends halting mission creep, changing police culture and embracing community policing. These are far easier said than done. His final fix is ending the war on drugs, the source of much police violence. To this I would add ending the war on terror, another rhetorical war that costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, gives law enforcement powers directly prohibited by the Constitution and leaves us no safer.

This essay originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Related essay.

Posted on August 13, 2013 at 1:31 PM • View Comments

False Positives and Ubiquitous Surveillance

Searching on Google for a pressure cooker and backpacks got one family investigated by the police. More stories and comments.

This seems not to be the NSA eavesdropping on everyone’s Internet traffic, as was first assumed. It was one of those “see something, say something” amateur tips:

Suffolk County Criminal Intelligence Detectives received a tip from a Bay Shore based computer company regarding suspicious computer searches conducted by a recently released employee. The former employee’s computer searches took place on this employee’s workplace computer. On that computer, the employee searched the terms “pressure cooker bombs” and “backpacks.”

Scary, nonetheless.

EDITED TO ADD (8/2): Another article.

EDITED TO ADD (8/3): As more of the facts come out, this seems like less of an overreaction than I first thought. The person was an ex-employee of the company—not an employee—and was searching “pressure cooker bomb.” It’s not unreasonable for the company to call the police in that case, and for the police to investigate the searcher. Whether or not the employer should be monitoring Internet use is another matter.

Posted on August 2, 2013 at 8:03 AM • View Comments

Protecting E-Mail from Eavesdropping

In the wake of the Snowden NSA documents, reporters have been asking me whether encryption can solve the problem. Leaving aside the fact that much of what the NSA is collecting can’t be encrypted by the user—telephone metadata, e-mail headers, phone calling records, e-mail you’re reading from a phone or tablet or cloud provider, anything you post on Facebook—it’s hard to give good advice.

In theory, an e-mail program will protect you, but the reality is much more complicated.

  • The program has to be vulnerability-free. If there is some back door in the program that bypasses, or weakens, the encryption, it’s not secure. It’s very difficult, almost impossible, to verify that a program is vulnerability-free.
  • The user has to choose a secure password. Luckily, there’s advice on how to do this.
  • The password has to be managed securely. The user can’t store it in a file somewhere. If he’s worried about security for after the FBI has arrested him and searched his house, he shouldn’t write it on a piece of paper, either.
  • Actually, he should understand the threat model he’s operating under. Is it the NSA trying to eavesdrop on everything, or an FBI investigation that specifically targets him—or a targeted attack, like dropping a Trojan on his computer, that bypasses e-mail encryption entirely?

This is simply too much for the poor reporter, who wants an easy-to-transcribe answer.

We’ve known how to send cryptographically secure e-mail since the early 1990s. Twenty years later, we’re still working on the security engineering of e-mail programs. And if the NSA is eavesdropping on encrypted e-mail, and if the FBI is decrypting messages from suspects’ hard drives, they’re both breaking the engineering, not the underlying cryptographic algorithms.

On the other hand, the two adversaries can be very different. The NSA has to process a ginormous amount of traffic. It’s the “drinking from a fire hose” problem; they cannot afford to devote a lot of time to decrypting everything, because they simply don’t have the computing resources. There’s just too much data to collect. In these situations, even a modest level of encryption is enough—until you are specifically targeted. This is why the NSA saves all encrypted data it encounters; it might want to devote cryptanalysis resources to it at some later time.

Posted on July 8, 2013 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.