Entries Tagged "law enforcement"

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There Aren't That Many Serious Spammers Out There

Interesting analysis:

If there’s only a few large gangs operating—and other people are detecting these huge swings of activity as well—then that’s very significant for public policy. One can have sympathy for police officers and regulators faced with the prospect of dealing with hundreds or thousands of spammers; dealing with them all would take many (rather boring and frustrating) lifetimes. But if there are, say, five, big gangs at most—well that’s suddenly looking like a tractable problem.

Spam is costing us [allegedly] billions (and is a growing problem for the developing world), so there’s all sorts of economic and diplomatic reasons for tackling it. So tell your local spam law enforcement officials to have a look at the graph of Demon Internet’s traffic. It tells them that trying to do something about the spammers currently makes a lot of sense—and that by just tracking down a handful of people, they will be capable of making a real difference!

Posted on April 11, 2007 at 6:41 AM • View Comments

Al-Qaeda or Teens?

From The Onion:

“In this day and age, it’s important for law-enforcement officials to consider global threats as well as local ones,” Steinhorst said. “We could be dealing with an al-Qaeda sleeper cell attempting to collect information that they could use to plan a terrorist strike or some of those goth kids who knocked over that mailbox. Neither group has any respect for the law.”

Excellent parody.

Posted on March 28, 2007 at 3:45 PM • View Comments

Diplomatic Immunity

Interesting article about diplomatic immunity as a “get out of jail free” card in Germany.

Shopping for free involves no legal consequences for the roughly 6,000 diplomats in Berlin and their families. Protected by diplomatic immunity as guaranteed under international law, members of the diplomatic service have all sorts of options not available to others. They can ignore red lights without fear of being fined, race through a speed trap drunk, bully the maid or refuse to pay the workman’s bills.

Berlin’s public prosecutor’s office registered about 100 such offenses last year, including theft, traffic violations, fleeing the scene of accidents, and inflicting bodily harm. No one is keeping precise statistics. Those who get caught need only show their red diplomatic passport to get off scot-free in most cases.

Of course they’re being counterfeited:

It seems like everybody wants one of those nice red “get out of jail free” cards these days: Senior prosecutor Karlheinz Dalheimer warns that “counterfeit diplomatic passports have been a major problem recently.”

Posted on March 22, 2007 at 1:44 PM • View Comments

Citizen Counter-Terrorists

The greater Manchester police want everyone to help them find terrorists:

In a new anti-terror drive, a tip-off hotline is being relaunched and an advertising campaign will urge people to report any suspicious behaviour. It asks:

* Do you know anyone who travels but is vague on where they’re going?

* Do you know someone with documents in different names for no obvious reason?

* Do you know someone buying large or unusual quantities of chemicals for no obvious reason?

* Handling chemicals is dangerous, maybe you’ve seen goggles or masks dumped somewhere?

* If you work in commercial vehicle hire or sales, has a sale or rental made you suspicious?

* Have you seen someone with large quantities of mobiles?

* Have you seen anyone taking pictures of security arrangements?

* Do you know someone who visits terrorist-related websites?

* Have you seen any suspicious cheque or credit card transactions?

* Is someone is asking for a short-term let on a house or flat on a cash basis for no apparent reason?

This reminds me of TIPS, the ill-conceived U.S. program to have meter readers and the like—people who regularly enter people’s homes—report suspicious activity to the police. It’s just dumb; people will report each other because their food smells wrong, or they talk in a funny language. The system will be swamped with false alarms, which police will have to waste their time following up on. This sort of state-sponsored snitchery is something you’d expect out of the former East Germany, or the Soviet Union—not the U.K.

For comparison’s sake, here’s a similar program that I actually liked.

Posted on March 20, 2007 at 12:26 PM • View Comments

The Difficulty of Profiling Terrorists

Interesting article:

A recently completed Dutch study of 242 Islamic radicals convicted or accused of planning terrorist attacks in Europe from 2001 to 2006 found that most were men of Arab descent who had been born and raised in Europe and came from lower or middle-class backgrounds. They ranged in age from 16 to 59 at the time of their arrests; the average was 27. About one in four had a criminal record.

The author of the study, Edwin Bakker, a researcher at the Clingendael Institute in The Hague, tried to examine almost 20 variables concerning the suspects’ social and economic backgrounds. In general, he determined that no reliable profile existed—their traits were merely an accurate reflection of the overall Muslim immigrant population in Europe. “There is no standard jihadi terrorist in Europe,” the study concluded.

In an interview, Bakker said that many local police agencies have been slow to abandon profiling, but that most European intelligence agencies have concluded it is an unreliable tool for spotting potential terrorists. “How can you single them out? You can’t,” he said. “For the secret services, it doesn’t give them a clue. We should focus more on suspicious behavior and not profiling.”

Posted on March 13, 2007 at 5:42 PM • View Comments

FBI Issued Illegal National Security Letters Under USA PATRIOT Act

A new Justice Department report concludes that the FBI broke the law in its use of the Patriot Act to secretly obtain phone, business, and financial data about people in the U.S.

The Justice Department’s inspector general has prepared a scathing report criticizing how the F.B.I. uses a form of administrative subpoena to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval.

The report, expected to be issued on Friday, says that the bureau lacks sufficient controls to make sure the subpoenas, which do not require a judge’s prior approval, are properly issued and that it does not follow even some of the rules it does have.

From the Associated Press:

The FBI’s transgressions were spelled out in a damning 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. He found that agents sometimes demanded personal data on people without official authorization, and in other cases improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.

The audit also concluded that the FBI for three years underreported to Congress how often it used national security letters to ask businesses to turn over customer data. The letters are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge’s approval.

[…]

Under the Patriot Act, the national security letters give the FBI authority to demand that telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and other businesses produce personal records about their customers or subscribers. About three-fourths of the letters issued between 2003 and 2005 involved counterterror cases, with the rest for espionage investigations, the audit reported.

Shoddy record-keeping and human error were to blame for the bulk of the problems, said Justice auditors, who were careful to note they found no indication of criminal misconduct.

Here’s the report (mirrored here), and here’s a BoingBoing post on the topic; also, this Wired article. And this by Daniel Solove.

Posted on March 12, 2007 at 3:55 PM • View Comments

Canadian Anti-Terrorism Law News

Big news:

The court said the men, who are accused of having ties to al-Qaeda, have the right to see and respond to evidence against them. It pointed to a law in Britain that allows special advocates or lawyers to see sensitive intelligence material, but not share details with their clients.

In its ruling, the court said while it’s important to protect Canada’s national security, the government can do more to protect individual rights.

But the court suspended the judgment from taking legal effect for a year, giving Parliament time to write a new law complying with constitutional principles.

Critics have long denounced the certificates, which can lead to deportation of non-citizens on the basis of secret intelligence presented to a Federal Court judge at closed-door hearings.

Those who fight the allegations can spend years in jail while the case works its way through the legal system. In the end, they can sometimes face removal to countries with a track record of torture, say critics.

And that’s not the only piece of good news from Canada. Two provisions from an anti-terrorism law passed at the end of 2001 were due to expire at the end of February. The House of Commons has voted against extending them:

One of the anti-terrorism measures allows police to arrest suspects without a warrant and detain them for three days without charges, provided police believe a terrorist act may be committed. The other measure allows judges to compel witnesses to testify in secret about past associations or pending acts. The witnesses could go to jail if they don’t comply.

The two measures, introduced by a previous Liberal government in 2001, have never been used.

“These two provisions especially have done nothing to fight against terrorism,” Dion said Tuesday. “[They] have not been helpful and have continued to create some risk for civil liberties.”

Another article here.

Posted on March 2, 2007 at 6:54 AM • View Comments

Private Police Forces

In Raleigh, N.C., employees of Capitol Special Police patrol apartment buildings, a bowling alley and nightclubs, stopping suspicious people, searching their cars and making arrests.

Sounds like a good thing, but Capitol Special Police isn’t a police force at all—it’s a for-profit security company hired by private property owners.

This isn’t unique. Private security guards outnumber real police more than 5-1, and increasingly act like them.

They wear uniforms, carry weapons and drive lighted patrol cars on private properties like banks and apartment complexes and in public areas like bus stations and national monuments. Sometimes they operate as ordinary citizens and can only make citizen’s arrests, but in more and more states they’re being granted official police powers.

This trend should greatly concern citizens. Law enforcement should be a government function, and privatizing it puts us all at risk.

Most obviously, there’s the problem of agenda. Public police forces are charged with protecting the citizens of the cities and towns over which they have jurisdiction. Of course, there are instances of policemen overstepping their bounds, but these are exceptions, and the police officers and departments are ultimately responsible to the public.

Private police officers are different. They don’t work for us; they work for corporations. They’re focused on the priorities of their employers or the companies that hire them. They’re less concerned with due process, public safety and civil rights.

Also, many of the laws that protect us from police abuse do not apply to the private sector. Constitutional safeguards that regulate police conduct, interrogation and evidence collection do not apply to private individuals. Information that is illegal for the government to collect about you can be collected by commercial data brokers, then purchased by the police.

We’ve all seen policemen “reading people their rights” on television cop shows. If you’re detained by a private security guard, you don’t have nearly as many rights.

For example, a federal law known as Section 1983 allows you to sue for civil rights violations by the police but not by private citizens. The Freedom of Information Act allows us to learn what government law enforcement is doing, but the law doesn’t apply to private individuals and companies. In fact, most of your civil right protections apply only to real police.

Training and regulation is another problem. Private security guards often receive minimal training, if any. They don’t graduate from police academies. And while some states regulate these guard companies, others have no regulations at all: anyone can put on a uniform and play policeman. Abuses of power, brutality, and illegal behavior are much more common among private security guards than real police.

A horrific example of this happened in South Carolina in 1995. Ricky Coleman, an unlicensed and untrained Best Buy security guard with a violent criminal record, choked a fraud suspect to death while another security guard held him down.

This trend is larger than police. More and more of our nation’s prisons are being run by for-profit corporations. The IRS has started outsourcing some back-tax collection to debt-collection companies that will take a percentage of the money recovered as their fee. And there are about 20,000 private police and military personnel in Iraq, working for the Defense Department.

Throughout most of history, specific people were charged by those in power to keep the peace, collect taxes and wage wars. Corruption and incompetence were the norm, and justice was scarce. It is for this very reason that, since the 1600s, European governments have been built around a professional civil service to both enforce the laws and protect rights.

Private security guards turn this bedrock principle of modern government on its head. Whether it’s FedEx policemen in Tennessee who can request search warrants and make arrests; a privately funded surveillance helicopter in Jackson, Miss., that can bypass constitutional restrictions on aerial spying; or employees of Capitol Special Police in North Carolina who are lobbying to expand their jurisdiction beyond the specific properties they protect—privately funded policemen are not protecting us or working in our best interests.

This op ed originally appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

EDITED TO ADD (4/2): This is relevant.

Posted on February 27, 2007 at 6:02 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.