Highway Honeypot
Police set up a highway sign warning motorists that there are random stops for narcotics checks ahead, but actually search people who take the next exit.
Entries Tagged "law enforcement"
Page 20 of 46
Not Answering Questions at U.S. Customs
I was detained last night by federal authorities at San Francisco International Airport for refusing to answer questions about why I had travelled outside the United States.
The end result is that, after waiting for about half an hour and refusing to answer further questions, I was released because U.S. citizens who have produced proof of citizenship and a written customs declaration are not obligated to answer questions.
Terrorism Entrapment
Back in 2007, I wrote an essay, “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot,” where I said:
The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn’t have ordinarily done. The Miami gang’s Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases.
Over on Salon, Stephan Salisbury has an essay on FBI entrapment and domestic terrorism plots. It’s well worth reading.
Misidentification and the Court System
How do most wrongful convictions come about?
The primary cause is mistaken identification. Actually, I wouldn’t call it mistaken identification; I’d call it misidentification, because you often find that there was some sort of misconduct by the police. In a lot of cases, the victim initially wasn’t so sure. And then the police say, “Oh, no, you got the right guy. In fact, we think he’s done two others that we just couldn’t get him for.” Or: “Yup, that’s who we thought it was all along, great call.”
It’s disturbing that misidentifications still play such a large role in wrongful convictions, given that we’ve known about the fallibility of eyewitness testimony for over a century.
In terms of empirical studies, that’s right. And 30 or 40 years ago, the Supreme Court acknowledged that eyewitness identification is problematic and can lead to wrongful convictions. The trouble is, it instructed lower courts to determine the validity of eyewitness testimony based on a lot of factors that are irrelevant, like the certainty of the witness. But the certainty you express [in court] a year and half later has nothing to do with how certain you felt two days after the event when you picked the photograph out of the array or picked the guy out of the lineup. You become more certain over time; that’s just the way the mind works. With the passage of time, your story becomes your reality. You get wedded to your own version.
And the police participate in this. They show the victim the same picture again and again to prepare her for the trial. So at a certain point you’re no longer remembering the event; you’re just remembering this picture that you keep seeing.
The Toronto 18
Long and interesting article from The Toronto Star on the Toronto 18, a terrorist cell arrested in 2006. Lots of stuff in this article I had not read before.
Vigilant Citizens: Then vs. Now
This is from Atomic Bombing: How to Protect Yourself, published in 1950:
Of course, millions of us will go through our lives never seeing a spy or a saboteur going about his business. Thousands of us may, at one time or another, think we see something like that. Only hundreds will be right. It would be foolish for all of us to see enemy agents lurking behind every tree, to become frightened of our own shadows and report them to the F.B.I.
But we are citizens, we might see something which might be useful to the F.B.I. and it is our duty to report what we see. It is also our duty to know what is useful to the F.B.I. and what isn’t.
[…]
If you think your neighbor has “radical” views—that is none of your or the F.B.I.’s business. After all, it is the difference in views of our citizens, from the differences between Jefferson and Hamilton to the differences between Truman and Dewey, which have made our country strong.
But if you see your neighbor—and the views he expresses might seem to agree with yours completely—commit an act which might lead you to suspect that he might be committing espionage, sabotage or subversion, then report it to the F.B.I.
After that, forget about it. Mr. Hoover also said: “Do not circulate rumors about subversive activities, or draw conclusions from information you furnish the F.B.I. The data you possess might be incomplete or only partially accurate. By drawing conclusions based on insufficient evidence grave injustices might result to innocent persons.”
In other words, you might be wrong. In our system, it takes a court, a trial and a jury to say a man is guilty.
It would be nice if this advice didn’t seem as outdated as the rest of the book.
Cryptography Success Story
From Brazil: the moral, of course, is to choose a strong key and to encrypt the entire drive, not just key files.
Filming the Police
In at least three U.S. states, it is illegal to film an active duty policeman:
The legal justification for arresting the “shooter” rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where “no expectation of privacy exists” (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.
Massachusetts attorney June Jensen represented Simon Glik who was arrested for such a recording. She explained, “[T]he statute has been misconstrued by Boston police. You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want.” Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley agrees, “The police are basing this claim on a ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law—requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the area of surveillance law and can say that this is utter nonsense.”
The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler’s license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.
This is a horrible idea, and will make us all less secure. I wrote in 2008:
You cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee.
If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.
An example will make this clearer. You’re stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer’s ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.
You can think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value, to you, of more information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.
Another example: When your doctor says “take off your clothes,” it makes no sense for you to say, “You first, doc.” The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals.
This is the principle that should guide decision-makers when they consider installing surveillance cameras or launching data-mining programs. It’s not enough to open the efforts to public scrutiny. All aspects of government work best when the relative power between the governors and the governed remains as small as possible—when liberty is high and control is low. Forced openness in government reduces the relative power differential between the two, and is generally good. Forced openness in laypeople increases the relative power, and is generally bad.
EDITED TO ADD (7/13): Another article. One jurisdiction in Pennsylvania has explicitly ruled the opposite: that it’s legal to record police officers no matter what.
Dating Recordings by Power Line Fluctuations
The capability, called “electrical network frequency analysis” (ENF), is now attracting interest from the FBI and is considered the exciting new frontier in digital forensics, with power lines acting as silent witnesses to crime.
In the “high profile” murder trial, which took place earlier this year, ENF meant prosecutors were able to show that a seized voice recording that became vital to their case was authentic. Defence lawyers suggested it could have been concocted by a witness to incriminate the accused.
[…]
ENF relies on frequency variations in the electricity supplied by the National Grid. Digital devices such as CCTV recorders, telephone recorders and camcorders that are plugged in to or located near the mains pick up these deviations in the power supply, which are caused by peaks and troughs in demand. Battery-powered devices are not immune to to ENF analysis, as grid frequency variations can be induced in their recordings from a distance.
At the Metropolitan Police’s digital forensics lab in Penge, south London, scientists have created a database that has recorded these deviations once every one and a half seconds for the last five years. Over a short period they form a unique signature of the electrical frequency at that time, which research has shown is the same in London as it is in Glasgow.
On receipt of recordings made by the police or public, the scientists are able to detect the variations in mains electricity occurring at the time the recording was made. This signature is extracted and automatically matched against their ENF database, which indicates when it was made.
The technique can also uncover covert editing—or rule it out, as in the recent murder trial—because a spliced recording will register more than one ENF match.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.