Monday, October 13, 2014
FBI: new Apple, Google phones too secure, could put users ‘beyond the law’
The FBI director James Comey has expressed concern that Apple and Google are making phones that cannot be searched by the government.
Speaking to reporters in a briefing Thursday, Mr. Comey said he is worried that such phones could place users “beyond the law,” The Wall Street Journal reported. He added that he’s been in talks with the companies “to understand what they’re thinking and why they think it makes sense.”
Major tech companies recognize the marketing potential of selling products that make consumers feel their data is as secure as can be. Both Apple and Google have made recent announcements emphasizing their new products will make it more difficult for law enforcement to extract customers’ valued data.
But Comey’s remarks raise questions of what, exactly, the government wants.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in June that police need warrants to search the cellphones of people they arrest. Law enforcement also cannot maintain someone’s personal information for its own convenience. The only exception would be in the case of urgent, or “exigent” circumstances, says Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program.
But even then, law enforcement cannot require individuals to keep their information readily available just in case those circumstances occur. “It’s like saying you have to leave your door open in case we have an exigent circumstance and we need to search your house without a warrant,” she says.
FBI Director Says Apple and Google Are Putting Their Customers ‘Beyond The Law’
FBI director James Comey really likes car analogies. Last week, in the first of a two-part interview on 60 Minutes, he called the Internet the “most dangerous parking lot imaginable,” meaning, I think, that you should be prepared to Taser any menacing email attachment that sneaks up behind you. On Sunday night, in his second appearance, he addressed Apple and Google selling phones that can only be unlocked by their customers’ pin codes. Comey compared the tech giants selling phones with encrypted data that can’t be unlocked with a court order to a car dealer selling “cars with trunks that couldn’t ever be opened by law enforcement.”
His full remarks via CBS:
The notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond the law, troubles me a lot. As a country, I don’t know why we would want to put people beyond the law. That is, sell cars with trunks that couldn’t ever be opened by law enforcement with a court order, or sell an apartment that could never be entered even by law enforcement. Would you want to live in that neighborhood? This is a similar concern. The notion that people have devices, again, that with court orders, based on a showing of probable cause in a case involving kidnapping or child exploitation or terrorism, we could never open that phone? My sense is that we’ve gone too far when we’ve gone there.
It’s worth noting that earlier this year, law enforcement argued to the Supreme Court that it shouldn’t actually need that court order to search someone’s phone, but the high court disagreed.
Comey had already expressed concern about Apple’s new iCan’tOpenThisOS to the press last month, so I’d hoped that 60 Minutes interviewer Scott Pelley would push Comey more on what law enforcement might do to try to force Google and Apple’s hands. He did not, instead leaving the topic with Comey suggesting that Apple is making us all live in a more dangerous global neighborhood with its new encrypted operating system. Pelley failed to make the point that a locked trunk or locked home could have inside a hostage, a body, or contraband that needs to be seized. Phones can’t store those things for us (yet). They contain only our self-incriminating data.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Cops kill Georgia grandpa in no-knock raid triggered by burglary suspect’s tip
When Teresa Hooks looked outside the craft room window of her Georgia home one night last week, she saw hooded figures wearing camouflage standing outside.
The East Dublin woman woke up her husband, David Hooks, who grabbed his shotgun, believing burglars who had recently targeted the couple had come back again, reported WMAZ-TV.
The sheriff’s deputies burst through the back door about 11 p.m. on Sept. 24 and, seeing David Hooks holding the weapon, fired 16 shots – killing the 59-year-old grandfather.
Authorities said Hooks met deputies at the door and pointed his weapon aggressively at officers as they announced themselves.
But Teresa Hooks said the officers did not knock and never identified themselves as law enforcement, and her attorney said David Hooks was killed behind a wall in the home — not at the door.
Deputies were executing a search warrant as part of a drug investigation based on a tip from one of the burglars accused of stealing a vehicle from Hooks.
Federal Program Lets Cops Seize Cash, Evade State Laws And Keep Over A Billion Dollars
John Yoder and Brad Cates, who headed the Asset Forfeiture Office at the U.S. Department of Justice from 1983 to 1989, slammed civil forfeiture as a “complete corruption” and “fundamentally at odds with our judicial system and notions of fairness,” in an op-ed for The Washington Post. Thanks to civil forfeiture laws, police and prosecutors don’t need to charge someone with a crime to seize and keep their property. Yoder and Cates “were heavily involved in the creation of the asset forfeiture initiative at the Justice Department,” they write, but after seeing civil forfeiture become a “gross perversion of the status of government amid a free citizenry,” the two now believe it should be “abolished.”
Their criticisms come on the heels of an extensive, three-part investigation by The Washington Post into highway interdiction. Since 9/11, without warrants and despite a lack of criminal charges, law enforcement nationwide has taken in $2.5 billion from 61,998 cash seizures under equitable sharing. This federal civil forfeiture program lets local and state law enforcement literally make a federal case out of a seizure, if they collaborate with a federal agency. Not only can they then bypass state forfeiture laws, they can pocket up to 80 percent of the proceeds. So of that $2.5 billion seized through equitable sharing, local and state authorities kept $1.7 billion for their own uses.
In order to seize cash, police typically pulled drivers over for minor traffic infractions. During the stop, police would look for “indicators” of suspicious, criminal activity. Tinted windows, air fresheners, trash in the car, “a profusion of energy drinks,” “a driver who is too talkative or too quiet” and signs of nervousness have all been considered indicators. For one Florida sheriff, “cars obeying the speed limit were suspect—their desire to avoid being stopped made them stand out.”
On the grounds that a driver is sufficiently suspicious, police then have the authority to search the car with a drug dog. If the dog alerts (and there are significant concerns about their accuracy), police then have probable cause to seize property owned by the driver. After police seized cash, the government usually wins: The Washington Post found that out of nearly 62,000 cash seizures since 9/11, in only 4,455 cases—seven percent—did the government agree to return at least a portion of the money taken.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
The Sane Case for Auditing the Fed
The Federal Reserve, which was just caught paying footsie with Goldman Sachs, is as shadowy as it is powerful. So why can’t Congress bring itself to actually audit the damn thing?
If you want to get a sense of just how incredibly powerful the Federal Reserve really is, forget about interest rates, reserve requirements, or even the ways in which a random nose-pick or burp by Janet Yellin during lunch at a Jackson Hole delicatessen might send markets soaring or crashing.
Instead, think about this: In an age utterly bereft of bipartisanship, auditing the nation’s central bank is one of the few issues on which Rand Paul and Elizabeth Warren agree. So does everyone else. Polls consistently show anywhere between 70 percent and 80 percent of Americans supporting an audit that would not just open the Fed’s ledger books but peer into exactly how monetary policy gets set.
Just a couple of weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed The Federal Reserve Transparency Act by an overwhelming vote of 333-92; a majority of House Democrats voted for an audit while just one Republican voted against the bill.
Yet despite overwhelming public and congressional support for an audit, it’s just not going to happen.
What is it about the Fed that inspires such solidarity among its critics? Ever since its creation during the Woodrow Wilson era, it’s been a favorite target of everyone from right-wing conspiracists who fear the Fed is simply another cog in an international Jewish banking conspiracy to left-wing populists who see it as both a cause and effect of globalized capital. Because it controls the money supply of the planet’s biggest economy and because it operates so opaquely, it’s an obvious place to project all sorts of anxieties about large, impersonal forces beyond our reach that sharply affect, if not actually control, virtually all aspects of our daily lives.