investigations – Techdirt (original) (raw)
Journalist Tells FBI To Give Back Devices Seized During Extremely Questionable Investigation Into Leaked Fox News Footage
from the this-ain't-hacking dept
The DOJ promised it wouldn’t target journalists and their sources during leak investigations. It also said wouldn’t engage in questionable CFAA prosecutions that appeared to involve nothing more than unapproved (or unexpected) access to data. Both of those self-imposed restrictions seem to have been ignored in a case involving former Deadspin contributor Tim Burke and some recordings Fox News clearly didn’t want made public.
Reports following the FBI raid of Burke’s home suggested he had published “leaked” footage obtained perhaps illegally from the site itself. According to Burke and his legal reps, there was no leak and there was no hacking. All Burke did is upload footage found on Fox’s website — footage Fox perhaps meant to bury but possibly left accessible to those who knew how to look for it.
The footage Burke obtained and shared with other journalists was obviously embarassing for the Fox brand. And that’s saying something, considering what Fox is willing to publish and air of its own free will and volition. A pair of videos featuring unreleased footage of a Kanye West interview allegedly illegally obtained by Tim Burke featured the rap star saying things even more abhorrent than his usual blend of sexism, bigotry, and conspiracy theories.
The videos Burke shared with Vice featured West expounding on some bizarre eugenics theory that involved Planned Parenthood, the KKK, and a concerted effort to control the Jewish population in the United States. The other video also said things Fox didn’t want to publicize: namely, that Kanye West — a White House guest of super-spreader Donald Trump — had been vaccinated.
Fox was obviously angry. But anger doesn’t change facts and it appears this CFAA prosecution — one that resulted in a raid of Burke’s house — threatens not only the very act of journalism, but those who seek to find information public figures wish to keep hidden, but have failed to take the necessary precautions to ensure they’re never publicly embarrassed by their words and deeds.
But Burke is fighting back. Represented by Mark Rasch — a former computer crimes prosecutor — Burke is hoping to force the DOJ to right the wrongs it has perpetrated against him over actions that don’t actually appear to be illegal.
Tim Burke’s home office is gutted.
In May, FBI agents searched his house while looking for evidence related to leaked Fox News footage, including an anti-Semitic rant from Kanye West and behind-the-scenes footage of Tucker Carlson on his now-canceled show.
Burke, 44, had his phone, computers, hard drives and other electronic devices confiscated, though he still hasn’t been charged with a crime.
On Friday, his lawyers filed a motion to the U.S. Department of Justice demanding that Burke’s devices be returned.
Burke also provided a written statement to the Tampa Bay Times, his first public comments to any media outlet since the May 8 FBI search. He and his legal team argue that he didn’t break any laws, and he wants the government to return his equipment and end what he called a “months-long nightmare.”
“Finding and reporting on newsworthy content is not a crime, no matter who is embarrassed by the reporting,” Burke said in a statement emailed to the Times.
You read that right: the FBI has retained all of the seized electronics despite the DOJ not actually charging (either via indictment or probable cause presentation to a judge) with any criminal activity. The DOJ has yet to offer any explanation for the raid, much less its refusal to return Burke’s devices. If it has any reason to believe Burke has committed a criminal act, it has yet to grant Burke access to its rationale.
The Department of Justice and FBI have confirmed to the Times that agents searched Burke’s housebut have declined to provide more information, citing an active investigation. The affidavit that explains the reasoning and method for obtaining the search warrant is still sealed by the federal court.
According to Burke’s lawyer, all Burke did was access URLs that were accessible by the public, but not readily accessible via links on Fox’s sites. The stuff was available online. All anyone had to do was know where (or how) to look for them.
Mark Rasch has filed a motion [PDF] for the return of Burke’s property. He’s also sent the DOJ a letter [PDF] that exposes the DOJ and FBI’s handling of this investigation — information both of these agencies would probably have preferred remain secret. (The Tampa Bay Times inexplicably decided these weren’t worth posting with its coverage, even though its reporting quotes from both of the documents.)
Both are worth reading as both highlight the government’s willingness to walk all over the First Amendment in order to punish someone for apparently doing nothing more than exposing recordings Fox never intended the public to see.
The letter from Burke’s lawyer opens with this. Sure, grain of salt and all of that, but Burke has steadily maintained no hacking took place.
As far as we can see, they are predicated on an incorrect narrative that Mr. Burke committed some offense, and therefore forfeited his rights as a journalist. He did not. He accessed no computers without authorization, and intercepted no private communications. He engaged in acts and works of journalism.
That’s the assertion. And it goes up against the DOJ’s allegations… which, at this point, are completely unknown. The search warrant affidavit remains sealed and Burke has yet to be charged with a criminal act.
Here are the undeniable facts, which Burke (and his legal rep) are fully apprised of because this is what has actually happened to Burke and his devices.
While the FBI and DOJ have agreed to allow Burke to shift his MFA (multi-factor authentication) credentials to the device he needed to obtain after the government seized the ones he was using, the government wants something in return. Burke is unwilling to give them what they’re demanding.
It does not appear that the process you contemplate would be workable. First, you insist that Mr. Burke waive his Fifth Amendment rights, and provide the agents the passcode necessary to unlock the cell phone to assist agents in cloning his phone as a condition precedent to Mr. Burke having access to either the original or cloned device. Mr. Burke declines to waive his Constitutional right against self-incrimination.
Remember, this is a case dealing with someone who has had a majority of their electronics seized, but has not been charged with a crime. At this point, Burke can only speculate as to why he’s been targeted by the feds, as the DOJ refuses to turn over (or unseal) the search warrant affidavit. And yet, the DOJ still feels comfortable in demanding someone waive constitutional rights just so they can regain access to internet services they routinely used until their life was rudely interrupted by a still unexplained “investigation.”
Then there are the drives seized by the government. While some of what’s stored there might be relevant to this (ultra-vague) investigation, there’s a lot that isn’t. But Burke and his lawyer have no idea what the government is allowed to search or retain because — as has been noted several times already — the government refuses to hand over the warrant affidavit or anything the magistrate judge that approved the warrant might have said about what the government can or can’t search/retain.
So, Burke is fighting blind. And he’s fighting for journalism, because what the government is doing here certainly looks like an attempt to sniff out sources, means, and methods utilized by journalists. And that sort of thing has been on the wrong side of the law (not to mention the wrong side of history) since the 1971 publication of the “Pentagon Papers.” (Emphasis added.)
You have indicated that you do not intend, at this time, to return to Mr. Burke (or his counsel) any data or information about these “live feeds,” including the live feeds themselves. You likened these live feeds to stolen personal information like Social Security Numbers or medical records obtained and used by fraudsters unlawfully, which you routinely refuse to return to the fraudsters during the scope of the investigation.
Putting aside the question of whether there was probable cause to believe that the live feeds were evidence of any crime (as you know, we wholeheartedly believe that they are not) or whether they were unlawfully obtained (again, we believe the evidence shows that they were not), the live feeds themselves are not “stolen” information, or information obtained by fraud. The live feeds are, in fact, Mr. Burke’s journalistic work product. They are the raw materials from which Mr. Burke reports. They are Mr. Burke’s “Pentagon Papers” if the Pentagon Papers were not classified, and were obtained lawfully as opposed to having been taken without authorization by Dr. Ellsberg. Many of the seized “live feeds” contain newsworthy content about which Mr. Burke and other journalists have reported, or intend to report on in the future. It is through these “live feeds” that Mr. Burke has developed his reputation as a reporter.
If the government intends to continue pursuing this avenue of investigation, it will be leaving its boot prints all over the First Amendment. And it will have a direct, immediate chilling effect on newsgathering.
You will know who Mr. Burke’s sources are for identifying, finding, and reporting on information in live feeds. You will know who Mr. Burke and other reporters “target” for investigative reporting. You will know what specific programs or information they have decided to report about. You will also know what they have decided not to report about. Even within the live feeds themselves, your access to them (and retention thereof) will tell you what portions of those live feeds Mr. Burke and other journalists have determined to be “newsworthy” and which portions they determine not to be “newsworthy.” This winnowing process is the essence of journalism, and we strongly believe that compelled revelation and continued possession and retention by the government of this information constitutes a continuing affront to the First Amendment rights of Mr. Burke and those with whom he works both as a journalist and as a technical advisor to other journalists.
It certainly looks like the government is in the wrong here. If it isn’t, it can easily prove its case by unsealing the affidavit or, at the very least, handing over this information to Burke and his lawyer. But if it continues to engage in opacity, the public has no reason to give it the benefit of a doubt. The First Amendment is at stake here.
In this case, Mr. Burke has a presumptive right to publish the works he has collected. A mere unproven allegation that the originator of the original stream did not expressly authorize Mr. Burke to store the stream does not change his right to publish. Any argument that Mr. Burke is prohibited from publishing the live feeds he obtained lawfully because the media outlets that made them public did so “inadvertently” or “mistakenly” is unavailing.
[…]
Moreover, the live feeds Mr. Burke lawfully collected were all formerly in the public domain — they were all publicly accessible — irrespective of whether the news, entertainment, sports or public enterprises published them “on air.” Indeed, because “live” feeds must be captured while they are being broadcast “live,” part of Mr. Burke’s value to the journalistic community lies in his finding, collecting, storing, winnowing, organizing and making available these “stored” live broadcasts. Seizing and refusing to return that which was previously public, in a manner that serves to prevent Mr. Burke and other reporters from reporting on this content is the ultimate “prior restraint,” using armed FBI agents to prevent publication.
Hopefully, this motion and this letter will at least shame the government into doing the right thing. At the very least, it should hand over the affidavit and warrant to the target of its investigation, since there’s no need to retain secrecy once the target of warrant has already been searched and had personal property seized.
But these filings should do more than that: they should make it clear the government is intruding on territory owned by the people (you know, of “We the People”). This case has clear First Amendment implications and yet the DOJ seems to think it’s just some run-of-the-mill hacking case where it can do what it wants at whatever speed it chooses to do it.
You indicated that this case is “not your priority” and “not your most important case.” I do not have any reason to question this assertion. It is, of course, Mr. Burke’s most important case.
[…]
As I have repeatedly emphasized to you, despite the magistrate’s finding of probable cause to conduct the search of Mr. Burke’s office/residence and the seizure of his newsroom, Mr. Burke committed no crime and engaged in no behavior which violated either the CFAA or the wiretap statutes. […] Again, you have declined to tell us why you think Mr. Burke violated the CFAA or the wiretap law, and have adamantly insisted that disclosure to Mr. Burke of the affidavit in support of the warrant would cause some unspecified harm to your investigation. Each time I present our position that no crime occurred, you note that you “understand” our position, but that you nevertheless intend to further investigate.
This investigation appears to be 99% bullshit. Of course, the DOJ could change the presumed percentage by apprising Burke and his lawyer of the facts only it knows at this point. But it has refused to do so, which means there’s only one narrative in play at the moment. And that narrative says the DOJ is targeting a journalist solely because Fox News is angry someone made publicly accessible data public.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, doj, fbi, investigations, journalists, kanye west, mark rasch, tim burke
Companies: fox news
No, The FBI Is NOT ‘Paying Twitter To Censor’
from the not-how-any-of-this-works dept
Sigh.
Look. I want to stop writing about Twitter. I want to write about lots of other stuff. I have a huge list of other stories that I’m trying to get through, but then Elon Musk does something dumb again, and people run wild with it, and (for reasons that perplex me) much of the media either run with what Musk said, or just ignore it completely. But Musk is either deliberately lying about stuff or too ignorant to understand what he’s talking about, and I don’t know which is worse, though neither is a good look.
Today, his argument is that “the FBI has been paying Twitter to censor,” and he suggests this is a big scandal.
This would be a big scandal if true. But, it’s not. It’s just flat out wrong.
As with pretty much every one of these misleading statements regarding the very Twitter that he runs, where people (I guess maybe just former people) could explain to him why he’s wrong, it takes way more time and details to explain why he’s wrong than for him to push out these misleading lines that will now be taken as fact.
But, since at least some of us still believe in facts and truth, let’s walk through this.
First up, we already did a huge, long debunker on the idea that the FBI (or any government entity) was in any way involved in the Twitter decision to block links to the Hunter Biden laptop story. Most of the people who believed that have either ignored that there was no evidence to support it, or have simply moved on to this new lie, suggesting that “the FBI” was “sending lists” to Twitter of people to censor.
The problem is that, once again, that’s not what “the Twitter Files” show, even as the reporters working on it — Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger — either don’t understand what they’re looking at or are deliberately misrepresenting it. I’m no fan of the FBI, and have spent much of the two and a half decades here at Techdirt criticizing it. But… there’s literally no scandal here (or if there is one, it’s something entirely different, which we’ll get to at the end of the article).
What the files show is that the FBI would occasionally (not very often, frankly) use reporting tools to alert Twitter to accounts that potentially violated Twitter’s rules. When the FBI did so, it was pretty clear that it was just flagging these accounts for Twitter to review, and had no expectation that the company would or would not do anything about it. In fact, they are explicit in their email that the accounts “may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service” and that Twitter can take “any action or inaction deemed appropriate within Twitter policy.”
That is not a demand. There is no coercion associated with the email, and it certainly appears that Twitter frequently rejected these flags from the US government. Twitter’s most recent transparency report lists all of the “legal demands” the company received for content removals in the US, and its compliance rate is 40.6%. In other words, it complied with well under half of any demands for data removal from the government.
Indeed, even as presented (repeatedly) by Taibbi and Shellenberger as if it’s proof that Twitter closely cooperated with the FBI, over and over again if you read the actual screenshots, it shows Twitter (rightly!) pushing back on the FBI. Here, for example, Michael Shellenberger, shows Twitter’s Yoel Roth rejecting a request from the FBI to share information, saying they need to take the proper legal steps to request that info (depending on the situation, likely getting a judge to approve the request):
Now, we could have an interesting discussion (and I actually do think it’s an interesting discussion) about whether or not the government should be flagging accounts to review as terms of service violations. Right now, anyone can do this. You or I can go on Twitter and if we see something that we think violates a content policy, we can flag it for Twitter to review. Twitter than will review the content and determine whether or not it’s violative, and then decide what the remedy should be if it is.
That opens up an interesting question in general: should government officials and entities also be allowed to do the same type of flagging? Considering that anyone else can do it, and the company still reviews against its own terms of service and (importantly) feels free to reject those requests when they do not appear to violate the terms, I’m hard pressed to see the problem here on its own.
If there were evidence that there was some pressure, coercion, or compulsion for the company to comply with the government requests, that would be a different story. But, to date, there remains none (at least in the US).
As for the accounts that were flagged, from everything revealed to date in the Twitter Files, it mostly appears to be accounts that were telling a certain segment of the population (sometimes Republicans, sometimes Democrats) to vote on Wednesday, the day after Election Day, rather than Tuesday. Twitter had announced long before the election that any such tweets would violate policy. It does appear that a number of those tweets were meant as jokes, but as is the nature of content moderation, it’s difficult to tell what’s a joke from what’s not a joke, and quite frequently malicious actors will try to hide behind “but I was only joking…” when fighting back against an enforcement action. So, under that context, a flat “do not suggest people vote the day after Election Day” rule seems reasonable.
Given all that, to date, the only “evidence” that people can look at regarding “the FBI sent a list to censor” is that the FBI flagged (just as your or I could flag) accounts that were pretty clearly violating Twitter policies in a way that could undermine the US election, and left it entirely up to Twitter to decide what to do about it — and Twitter chose to listen to some requests and ignore others.
That doesn’t seem so bad in context, does it? It actually kinda seems like the sort of thing people would want the FBI to do to support election integrity.
But the payments!
So, there’s no evidence of censorship. But what about these payments? Well, that’s Musk’s hand-chosen reporters, Musk himself, and his fans totally misunderstanding some very basic stuff that any serious reporter with knowledge of the law would not mess up. Here’s Shellenberger’s tweet from yesterday that has spun up this new false argument:
That’s Shellenberger saying:
The FBI’s influence campaign may have been helped by the fact that it was paying Twitter millions of dollars for its staff time.
“I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” reports an associate of Jim Baker in early 2021.
But this is a misreading/misunderstanding of how things work. This had nothing to do with any “influence campaign.” The law already says that if the FBI is legally requesting information for an investigation under a number of different legal authorities, the companies receiving those requests can be reimbursed for fulfilling them.
(a)Payment.—
Except as otherwise provided in subsection (c), a governmental entity obtaining the contents of communications, records, or other information under section 2702, 2703, or 2704 of this title shall pay to the person or entity assembling or providing such information a fee for reimbursement for such costs as are reasonably necessary and which have been directly incurred in searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing such information. Such reimbursable costs shall include any costs due to necessary disruption of normal operations of any electronic communication service or remote computing service in which such information may be stored.
But note what this is limited to. These are investigatory requests for information, or so called 2703(d) requests, which require a court order.
Now, there are reasons to be concerned about the 2703(d) program. I mean, going back to 2013, when it was revealed that the 2703(d) program was abused as part of an interpretation of the Patriot Act to allow the DOJ/NSA to collect data secretly from companies, we’ve highlighted the many problems with the program.
So, by the way, did old Twitter. More than a decade ago, Twitter went to court to challenge the claim that a Twitter user had no standing to challenge a 2703(d) order. Unfortunately, Twitter lost and the feds are still allowed to use these orders (which, again, require a judge to sign off on them).
I do think it remains a scandal the way that 2703(d) orders work, and the inability of users to push back on them. But that is the law. And it has literally nothing whatsoever to do with “censorship” requests. It is entirely about investigations by the FBI into Twitter users based on evidence of a crime. If you want, you can read the DOJ’s own guidelines regarding what they can request under 2703(d).
Looking at that, you can see that if they can get a 2703(d) order (again, signed by a judge) they can seek to obtain subscriber info, transaction records, retrieved communications, and unretrieved communications stored for more than 180 days (in the past, we’ve long complained about the whole 180 days thing, but that’s another issue).
You know what’s not on that list? “Censoring people.” It’s just not a thing. The reimbursement that is talked about in that email is about complying with these information production orders that have been reviewed and signed by a judge.
It’s got nothing at all to do with “censorship demands.” And yet Musk and friends are going hog wild pushing this utter nonsense.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s own transparency report again already reveals data on these orders as part of its “data information requests” list, where it shows that in the latest period reported (second half of 2021) it received 2.3k requests specifying 11.3k accounts, and complied with 69% of the requests.
This was actually down a bit from 2020. But since the period the email covers is from 2019 through 2020, you can see that there were a fair number of information requests from the FBI:
Given all that, it looks like there were probably in the range of 8,000 requests for information, covering who knows how many accounts, that Twitter had to comply with. And so the $3 million reimbursement seems pretty reasonable, assuming you would need a decent sized skilled team to review the orders, collect the information, and respond appropriately.
If there’s any scandal at all, it remains the lack of more detailed transparency about the (d) orders, or the ability of companies like Twitter to have standing to challenge them on behalf of users. Also, there are reasonable arguments for why judges are too quick to approve (d) orders as valid under the 4th Amendment.
But literally none of that is “the FBI paid Twitter to censor people.”
And yet, here’s Elon.
Filed Under: censorship, content moderation, doj, elon musk, fbi, investigations, matt taibbi, michael shellenberger, terms of service
Companies: twitter
Cops Are Being ‘Trained’ To Use Literal Witchcraft To Find Dead Bodies
from the script-writers-appears-to-have-dropped-off-the-deep-end-of-farce dept
We [waves flattened palm parallel to the floor in circular motion meant to demonstrate the encompassing nature of the rest of this sentence] the People of this United States have seen some shit. This faaaaaaaaaaarrrr surpasses anything we’ve seen before.
By shit, I am referring to the gobsmackingly inane, incredibly insane garbage law enforcement passes off as “science” to secure convictions. Here’s a particularly astounding “for instance:” there’s an FBI “forensics expert” who claims he can recognize people by the patterns of the wrinkles in their mass-produced jeans and shirts. That’s the claim the malleable Dr. Richard Vorder Bruegge has not only made in his science-y sounding paper (“_Photographic Identification of Denim Trousers from Bank Surveillance Film_“) but also in court, where he has insisted the odds of wrinkle duplication in mass-produced clothing is 1-in-650 billion.
That’s just on the far end of the law enforcement bullshit spectrum. There’s plenty of other stuff that’s all been considered the gold standard of evidence that has failed to add up to anything when any actual scientific scrutiny is applied to it. Bite mark analysis, blood spatter analysis, bullet matching, hair matching, DNA… all of it is suspect or, at the very least, not nearly as accurate as law enforcement forensic experts assert in court.
But at least most of that stuff has some science to it, even if it’s not nearly as capable of producing bulletproof matches as law enforcement techs believe it is. Microscopes, labs, lab coats, software, specialized hardware, chain of custody, documentation, clipboards, things utilizing radiation or ions or spectroscopes or whatever… that all goes into examining evidence and generating leads or overly confident statements in court.
This has none of this. Worse, the legacy of this mockery of police investigative work carries with it a history of con artists utilizing showmanship to bilk rubes out of money. And yet, law enforcement agencies are actually spending tax dollars to send budding investigators to “learn” from someone who should have been laughed out of business immediately. This is not just a farce, it’s law enforcement malpractice.
Here’s Rene Ebersole with a jawdropper of a report for The Marshall Project:
Five crime scene investigators wearing white Tyvek suits and purple Latex gloves pace through a Tennessee woodland in a slow wave, searching for areas of sunken ground and other clues that might indicate a gravesite. The chill morning air is scented with loam, leaves, pine needles — and a hint of human decay.
The agents mark three suspicious depressions in the dirt with red flags and discuss their options for investigating further. One student asks about dowsing rods.
“You want to use some?” replies Arpad Vass, an instructor at the National Forensic Academy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where law enforcement officers come to learn how to use science to solve crimes — at least in theory. “I use them on everything.”
You read that right: Arpad Vass, “forensic instructor,” is handing out divining rods to students hoping to become better crime scene investigators. I wish this were a joke. It is, very sadly, an actual thing that is happening with the blessing of the University of Tennessee and is capable of subjecting students from all over the nation to this stupidity.
Vass, a 62-year-old wearing a blue CSI-Death Valley cap, is teaching his students witching, aka divining or dowsing. It’s a centuries-old practice in which a person walks a straight line holding two bent pieces of metal, or sometimes a Y-shaped twig, until they signal the presence of whatever is being sought underground. Water witches dowse for groundwater. Others use divining rods for seeking precious gems, oil, gold. Or, as in this case, human remains.
The Marshall Project undersells the next sentence.
Dowsing for the dead is not exactly endorsed by scientists or forensic experts.
Fact: dowsing for fucking anything has never been endorsed by scientists of forensic experts. In fact, anyone pushing dowsing as a scientific solution for any problem whatsoever is trying to deceive you. It’s a simple as that. Here’s a much more succinct (and harsher) appraisal of dowsing and dowsing apparati, taken from this NPR report on a man who separated victims from $38 million with a modified golf ball retriever he claimed could be used to detect IEDs.
SIEGEL: As you report, James McCormick was ultimately convicted by a British court for selling devices like the ADE651. What was or is the ADE651?
HIGGENBOTHAM: Well, it was essentially a touted up dousing rod. A plastic pistol grip with a plastic hinge in it on which was mounted what looked a lot like a telescopic car antenna.
SIEGEL: And it actually was adapted from a golf ball retriever.
[…]
SIEGEL: What’s the real science behind it?
HIGGENBOTHAM: There is no science.
That pulled punch from The Marshall Project kind of takes some of the power out of the follow-up.
Outside experts I spoke with — professional forensic anthropologists and lawyers, as well as law enforcement officers involved with police training reforms — say they’re alarmed that a leading training program is teaching the pseudoscience of witching.
Alarmed? They should be fucking apoplectic! This is insanity. That this has gone longer than Vass’ first attempt to introduce dowsing into forensic science is an indictment of both the University of Tennessee and the law enforcement agencies that still pay to have officers and investigators subjected to cop-washed black arts by a “scientist” deep in throes of self-delusion. Dowsing “works” like a Ouija board “works.” It’s an illusion that relies on self-deception. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, science.
It does not magically become a science just because Vass is capable of using science-y words or has a background in actual science.
If you’re not completely stupefied yet, brace yourself. It gets even worse and much, much more idiotic.
In particular, some experts are distressed that a Vass trainee recently got witching results admitted as evidence in a Georgia murder trial. This could set a legal precedent and allow witching-based evidence to be used in other cases, says Chris Fabricant, a lead attorney for the Innocence Project, which works to exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners. “The search for the truth is never advanced through junk science.”
Yes. This is a thing that actually happened during the 21st century in an American court room. There’s video of it, as people who were born around the middle of the last century might say. (h/t Lowering The Bar)
This so-called “expert” (GBI agent Todd Crosby) throws around some scientific terms during his demonstration of dowsing for dead people, but none of it adds up to actual science. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent is simply parroting Vass’ pseudoscience spiel. But (as Lowering the Bar points out) he can’t even pronounce the term he’s abusing correctly.
Here’s Vass himself, spouting equal parts jargon and bullshit.
He says the metal rods can detect “piezoelectricity,” an electric charge that builds in certain solid materials such as crystals (it’s the reason quartz watches work). Bones under mechanical stress can also produce these charges, which is why, Vass says, some people can find them with dowsing rods. But not everyone, he told me, because “if people don’t have the right voltage, it’s not going to work.” (No peer-reviewed published research has illustrated that piezoelectricity can be used to detect buried remains.)
Blind tests of dowsing during actual scientific research have shown dowsing is no better than a coin toss when it comes to detecting whatever is supposed to be detected. Most of the “detection” is guided by the person handling the, um, dowsing tools, who (sometimes unconsciously) manipulate the rods to point to where they expect stuff to be found.
Vass, of course, says these trials, which use actual scientific principles, are the real bullshit here. Those scientists and researchers simply don’t know as much dowser-specific science as he does.
Vass called the study “useless,” writing that he teaches students the proper way to dowse and some of “the 17 scientific principles that make the rods work, which took me years to figure out.”
LOL LMAO
Anyone who claims they’re the only person who knows certain specific science is a huckster. There’s nothing in this statement that wouldn’t look out of place on the dust jacket of a self-help book written by Dr. Oz, or L. Ron Hubbard, or Gwyneth Paltrow. UNLEASH THE HIDDEN POWER OF THESE 17 SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLES TO [INSERT LIFE-CHANGING EXPERIENCE HERE]!!!
This is all equal parts regrettable and laughable. But the laughter tends to get choked off by the real world consequences of tax dollars being spent to immerse crime scene investigators in the never-not-been-debunked method of dowsing for evidence. Crimes will go unsolved. Families of victims will never have closure. Rights will be violated. Innocent people will be jailed. And somehow, the law enforcement community (along with the management of the University of Tennessee) are cool with these potential outcomes. If there’s any justice in the world (and there sure as shit isn’t much of it), this report will result in Vass being tossed out of the academy and forbidden from introducing his spin on witchcraft into the already suspect world of law enforcement forensics.
Filed Under: arpad vass, dowsing, forensics, investigations, witchcraft
Survey Says Portland Cops Should Be Locked Out Of Recordings Until After They’ve Written Reports, Answered Investigators
from the it's-time-to-make-cops-cameras-work-for-the-people dept
The Department of Justice has been keeping an eye on the Portland (OR) Police Bureau (PPB) for nearly a decade now, finding that officers routinely engage in excessive force, especially when dealing with residents suffering from mental illness. A consent decree was put in place in 2014. Since then, the Portland PD has violated the agreement regularly.
In early 2021, the DOJ (again) approached the city and its Police Bureau, demanding more reforms to bring it in compliance with the agreement the PD had signed seven years earlier.
In February, the Justice Department found the Police Bureau failed to meet four key reforms under the settlement, citing inappropriate police use and management of force during protests last year, inadequate training, subpar police oversight and a failure to adequately share an annual Police Bureau report with the public as required.
More pressure was applied later that year, when the DOJ strongly suggested the PPB begin outfitting its officers with body-worn cameras.
U.S. Justice Department lawyers on Monday sent a letter to Portland’s city attorney and police chief recommending all uniformed patrol officers, sergeants and any officers regardless of rank who are part of tactical, traffic or crowd-control operations should wear body cameras.
The letter came as the city remains in negotiations with the police union over the parameters of equipping officers with body cameras — one of the steps the city can take to return to compliance with its 2014 settlement with the federal government over police use of excessive force.
Somehow, the police force patrolling one of the most “progressive” cities in the country was still using outdated tech to collect footage of police interactions, limited almost solely to whatever could be captured by dash cams. The DOJ also suggested the cameras be activated any time officers engaged with a member of a public, but especially in cases where guns or Tasers were drawn or car chases initiated.
Somehow, the Portland PD has still failed to start equipping its officers with body cameras. This will be changing, but apparently on the PPB’s timeline, rather than the DOJ’s. 173 officers will be part of the test run that will test camera functionality. Eventually, this will expand to 636 officers. Currently, the city employees about ~800 sworn officers.
The PPB and the public differ on how body camera footage should be handled. The PB believes it should set the rules on access to footage. Or, at least, its union feels this way.
Sgt. Aaron Schmautz, president of the Portland Police Association, argued that allowing officers to view the camera footage beforehand would allow them to consider all the evidence and write the most accurate and thorough report of what occurred.
Schmautz said most agencies of “any substantial size” in Oregon, including Oregon State Police, the Clackamas and Washington county sheriff’s offices, Eugene, Beaverton, Gresham, Hillsboro, Medford and Bend police departments, allow officers to review their camera video before writing reports.
The DOJ disagrees.
The Justice Department has recommended to the city that when a Portland police officer uses force, the officer shouldn’t review any of the recordings before first reporting and then completing all reports or interviews associated with the incident.
Officers who use deadly force or are involved in a death in custody case also shouldn’t view any of the footage until they give an interview to an investigator and only after they get permission from the local prosecutor, the federal lawyers suggested. Local prosecutors may not, for example, want an officer to view the footage before testifying before a grand jury.
The DOJ’s position may be an outlier, but it’s not as though it’s nonexistent. The DOJ noted this was the policy in place in major cities like Baltimore, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia.
A majority of Portland residents agree with the DOJ: cops should be locked out of body cam footage in certain cases.
More than half, or 52 percent, of 2,110 community members surveyed in Portland this year said police should not be allowed to view body camera footage that captures an officer’s use of force before writing reports or being interviewed.
And 46 percent of those surveyed said videos of police use of deadly force should be made public immediately after prosecutors determine that releasing the footage won’t jeopardize a criminal investigation.
A survey [PDF] conducted by the city with the assistance of consultants Rosenbaum & Associates queried the public on the DOJ’s body cam recommendations, as well as those crafted by the city’s civilian oversight board, the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing (PCCEP). Here’s the PCCEP’s recommendations:
PPB should be transparent in how officers for the pilot project are selected. Officers for the pilot
project should be randomly selected. This will alleviate the perception that officers are
handpicked for the project based on behavior and other positive factors that could influence
results.
PPB should be transparent in how officers for the pilot project are selected. Officers for the pilot project should be randomly selected. This will alleviate the perception that officers are handpicked for the project based on behavior and other positive factors that could influence results.
We strongly recommend body camera footage be stored by an independent third party.
Officers should write their police reports before viewing body camera footage. This would avoid officers tailoring their accounts of the incident based on what the footage shows.
Strict discipline for officers who turn off their cameras when they are supposed to be engaged. This should include the possibility of termination.
Public access to the video should be accessible to all individuals in regard to disabilities, etc including ADA accessible.
These recommendations make sense. That’s why the PPB rank-and-file — as fronted by their police union — is against them. The public definitely wants more accountability. The 52% wanting cops to be locked out of footage until after reports are written and interviews completed may seem like a slim majority, but factor in the 13.5% that had no opinion and only 34% of city residents think cops should be able to craft narratives that fit the recordings when writing reports or answering questions.
Other results from the survey show an overwhelming majority of those surveyed want more accountability from police officers.
– Seventy percent said the city auditor’s office should be able to view the body camera recordings to evaluate the Police Bureau’s performance.
– Ninety percent said the Police Bureau’s training division should be allowed to view body camera recordings to help develop or alter officer training.
– Eighty-five percent said an officer’s supervisor should be allowed to randomly review body camera recordings to see if an officer is doing their job appropriately.
I’m sure the PPB knows the public wants more accountability from officers. But it’s probably going to side with what its officers want, which is more of the opacity that has encouraged a culture of violence and misconduct. But the DOJ agreement complicates matters, and that means the PPB will at least have to try to meet the public halfway, which should hopefully make the city’s cops better by making the worst of the rank-and-file feel the heat.
Filed Under: body cameras, doj, investigations, portland, portland police, ppb
Oversight Report Says Commerce Dept. Investigative Unit Went Rogue, Engaged In Biased, Retaliatory Investigations
from the power-corrupts dept
Years after it was granted too much power, a federal internal investigations unit created during the presidency of George W. Bush is finally having its dirty laundry aired. The Senate Commerce Committee — years after the fact — is finally delivering some oversight of an entity created to root out internal threats.
The ITMS (Investigations and Threat Management Service) operated largely under the radar, thanks to its housing within the Commerce Department — an entity that very rarely raises too many eyebrows. But its reach extended far past the confines of this department. And it was given broad discretion to initiate investigations — something that led directly to the Justice Department crafting new rules for espionage investigations after a series of failed prosecutions indicated the intel coming from the ITMS was extremely questionable.
It was the ITMS that initiated the investigation of a US citizen of Chinese descent who did nothing more than share publicly-available information with a Chinese government official — an official who happened to be a friend of Department of Weather Services employee Sherry Chen. Chen’s prosecution was just a leading edge indicator of the ITMS’s lack of accountability and incredible amount of power.
The report [PDF] released by the Commerce Committee shows the ITMS wasn’t as much interested in rooting out internal threats as it was in rooting out government employees of certain nationalities.
Although many investigations targeted legitimate threats, the ITMS appears to have opened cases on a variety of employees for the purpose of exaggerating the unit’s ability to uncover security risks within the civil service. The unit targeted visible employees across the Department, including award-winning professionals whose background investigations had been successfully adjudicated by other agencies. These probes often resulted in suspended or revoked security clearances, although subsequent reviews largely determined that the unit’s allegations lacked merit. The ITMS also broadly targeted departmental divisions with comparably high proportions of Asian-American employees, ostensibly to counter attempts of espionage by individuals with Chinese ancestry. Former and current ITMS employees became subjects as well for challenging the lawfulness of the unit’s practices.
Saying the unit went rogue isn’t hyperbole. It’s a fact.
Poor management and weak oversight allowed the ITMS to operate outside the norms of the law enforcement community. Deficient policies and procedures outlining the unit’s investigative capabilities led to repeated instances of malfeasance, including the purposeful prolonging of investigations, unauthorized use of secured messaging systems, and overclassification of documents to protect the unit from external scrutiny.
The first bullet point of the report’s “Findings” spells it out explicitly.
Investigating threats against the Secretary of Commerce and the Department’s assets without a clearly defined mission ultimately led to the mutation of the ITMS into a rogue, unaccountable police force across multiple presidential administrations.
The ITMS originally had no power of its own. Its power was derived from the US Marshals Service, which provides protection to the Commerce Department and its “critical assets.” It’s the last term that caused trouble. Authority to protect “critical assets” allowed the ITMS to abuse the poorly-defined term to open investigations and engage in activities that went beyond its original purview, as well as limits placed on the Marshals Service.
This lack of oversight, accountability, and respect for the Constitution led directly to the DOJ dismissing prosecutions originating from ITMS investigations. ITMS investigators engaged in highly-questionable activities, including concealing their identities, seizing government computers and devices to perform warrantless searches, and picking the locks of government offices and personal storage containers owned by government employees. Whenever these tactics were challenged by government employees, these employees soon found themselves subjected to additional ITMS scrutiny.
Tactics the general public never would have condoned were bought and paid for with tax dollars.
Because of inadequate oversight by the Inspector General’s office, the unit’s improper exercises of law enforcement powers likely resulted in preventable violations of civil liberties and other constitutional rights, as well as a gross abuse of taxpayer funds.
In 2005, the ITMS was limited to protecting tangible assets, like federal facilities. This began to morph as it was given discretion to look for threats to intangible “assets,” like “U.S. economic advancement” and “Departmental functions.” This then expanded to cover anything the ITMS felt was “inadequately protected.” As its purview expanded, the ITMS granted itself plenty of new law enforcement powers, despite receiving no permission or direction to do so from Congress, its apparently-absent oversight, or the US Marshals Service.
Once it had expanded its area of coverage to include whatever it wanted to throw resources and Constitutional violations at, the ITMS began doing things like this:
Without a defined meaning of what constituted a critical asset from the Marshals Service, the ITMS conducted investigations typically reserved for domestic law enforcement agencies. Many were conducted in an overzealous manner whereby agents abused steps in the investigative process. In one instance, the ITMS investigated Sherry Chen, an award-winning, Chinese-born hydrologist employed at the Department, on charges of espionage and providing false statements after she allegedly downloaded and distributed unclassified information to a foreign national. Agents reportedly interrogated her for seven hours and told her she could never discuss the interrogation with anyone, including her superiors. In a lawsuit filed against federal officials, Chen said that ITMS agents “ignored exculpatory evidence throughout the interview, reached false conclusions without even a cursory investigation of underlying facts, and reported false results reflecting their racial and ethnic bias.”
And even when the ITMS couldn’t find anything substantial to justify its investigations, it still found something to bring to federal prosecutors.
In one document, ITMS officials described to agents a broad range of offenses for which referrals to federal prosecutors could be made. Substantive offenses included racketeering, money laundering, and theft of government property, espionage, economic espionage, and computer fraud. More commonly, however, ITMS agents sought to charge targets of its criminal investigations with offenses such as obstruction, conspiracy, making false statements to federal agents, and resistance to search.
The ITMS went past believing it was a law enforcement agency with zero accountability to believing it was an intelligence agency with a similar lack of accountability. And, like other law enforcement agencies who believe themselves to be intelligence agencies, the ITMS engaged in “investigations” predicated on little more than last names or native language.
Whistleblowers claim, for example, that agents were directed to run ethnic surnames through secure databases even in the absence of evidence suggesting potential risk to national security, indicating that immutable characteristics served as a pre-text for initiating investigations. Documents show that the ITMS also ran broad keyword searches of email accounts using a broad variety of terms and phrases in Mandarin Chinese, such as “state key laboratory,” “overseas expert consultant,” “Ministry of Science and Technology,” “funding support,” “government support,” and “highly secret.” Multiple whistleblowers claimed that the unit worked with officials at the CIA and FBI to devise the list of search terms and review the results.
[…]
One former senior Commerce Department official described the indiscriminate targeting of Chinese-Americans as a “fine line between extra scrutiny and xenophobia, and one that ITMS regularly crossed.” This official also discovered a case into a Chinese-American employee at the Department left open for four years without any indication of investigative diligence to close the matter, claiming that the ITMS “targeted her purely because of her ethnic Chinese origin.” The official also believes that ITMS leaders directed agents to “launch the investigation for the purpose of raising the heat so high that she became radioactive and would have to leave the Department,” despite no indication that she presented a national security threat after her emails had been pulled and agents surveilled her on Department premises and at her home.
The ITMS also surveilled US citizens who weren’t government employees, opening investigations into people associated with foreign visitors to Commerce Department buildings. And it monitored social media accounts that raised questions about the 2020 Census’ accuracy, forwarding all flagged posts to the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Most of the accounts flagged had less than 100 followers. No threats were determined to be credible, and yet the investigations into these accountholders remained open all the way through the end of 2020.
Abuse of power, retaliation, unjustified investigations, violated rights, racial profiling… all of this overseen by no one and tracked solely by an Excel spreadsheet that provided no way for investigators to attach documentation or submit findings. With no internal tracking or external oversight, millions of tax dollars were misspent and resources utilized to engage in fruitless, pointless, or retaliatory investigations. In the end, the ITMS was mainly concerned about sustaining its own existence.
One former senior official even described the network as a “vanity project” designed to showcase an unusual volume of open cases rather than facilitate a user-friendly system for agents to use in processing them. The official said leadership of the ITMS is more interested in appearing productive to retain the ability to investigate a wide variety of purported threats with broad discretion––and continue receiving funding from Congress––than processing cases within an acceptable period of time.
The entire report is harrowing, showing how much damage a government entity can do when its purview is nearly unlimited and its oversight nearly nonexistent. This report will hopefully result in the ITMS being brought into check, but Commerce oversight still needs to explain why it allowed the ITMS to run rogue for more than a decade before it finally decided to step in and do something about it.
Filed Under: china, commerce department, investigations, itms, senate commerce committee
After 40 Years Of Being Wrong, Texas Rangers Finally Decide Hypnosis Isn't A Viable Investigative Technique
from the when-modern-policing-meets-your-crazy-aunt's-hobby dept
Never let it be said that cops are not open-minded.
Sure, everyone with a darker-than-white skin tone moving around in any part of the city deemed unsafe by the same people charged with keeping it safe are almost always considered de facto criminals, but cops are still very willing to explore alternate avenues when it comes to arresting and criminally charging people.
Let’s take a look at cops and their willingness to suspend their disbelief. Anyone accused of a crime is inherently untrustworthy: guilty until proven innocent. This includes people they’ve killed for doing nothing more than, say, threatening to kill themselves. The only good criminals are those who are willing to work with cops. These criminals have reputations that are unassailable and cops are willing to fabricate the paperwork needed to keep assailing of their reputations to a minimum.
Cops and prosecutors have, for years, relied on “experts” who were often no better than YouTube conspiracy theorists. For years, law enforcement has said things like bite marks, hair samples… even mass-produced clothing should be admitted as damning evidence of criminal acts. And everyone indulged them.
We’ve finally reached the critical mass needed to turn criticism of cop means and methods into mobilization. Years after it should have been apparent this was abject bullshit, the Texas Rangers are finally abandoning an investigative “technique” that has done little more than propel the storylines of horror movies since its inception.
The Texas Department of Public Safety has ended the controversial practice of using hypnosis to investigate crimes.
A department spokesman said the hypnosis program ended in January 2021, more than forty years after its inception, because its officers are now relying on better investigative practices.
First: FORTY FUCKING YEARS? Really?
Second, “better investigative practices” would seem to be anything but this. A Ranger with a divining rod and a backpack full of healing crystals could presumably turn up better leads than this method — one that, let’s not forget, the Texas Rangers relied on for four decades.
And yet, the Rangers persisted. The last documented case didn’t happen sometime during the Satanic Panic of the 80’s (something else faith in hypnosis managed to make worse). It happened only months ago.
The Rangers used hypnosis to investigate an attempted kidnapping as recently as October 2020, just two months before the program was ended.
While there may be some therapeutic value to hypnosis, there’s almost no evidence supporting the assumption that hypnotizing victims and witnesses will result in usable evidence. “This thing their brain said” should be considered so far removed from “hearsay” as to be completely inadmissible.
But while the Texas Rangers have finally decided to abandon hypnosis in favor of literally anything not so ridiculously stupid, doesn’t mean other law enforcement agencies are following suit. The Rangers may have made the first move, but others are so sure it works they’re not willing to give up this ultra-specious investigative method.
Even without the program, local police departments may still be using hypnosis to investigate crimes. More than 800 law enforcement officers statewide have been approved to use hypnosis as an investigative tool since the 1980s, and Dallas and Houston once boasted the most hypnotists on staff.
Can you even imagine making such a boast? It’s like telling people you’ve got the most Tarot readers on hand for their fortune-adjacent law enforcement needs. Step right up and get your fortune told! Oh, sorry, the cards say you’ve committed some crimes or whatnot. Sometimes it just works out that way. Let’s get you processed.
But the acolytes are having a hard time letting go of this bogus investigative technique, especially those who were getting paid to make the Texas Rangers dumber.
Marx Howell, one of the chief practitioners of police hypnosis in Texas, said he was not aware that the Department of Public Safety ended the program and expressed disappointment in the decision
“It is a viable investigative technique under certain circumstances in certain types of cases where you don’t have any other leads,” Howell told The News. “If DPS has stopped it, that will be a major effort to use hypnosis that has gone away.”
So, when you have no other leads, you just do whatever the fuck? Is that the thought process at Ranger HQ? Toss science out the window and scatter tea leaves on the breakroom table just because an investigation has been dead-ended? Jesus. That’s worse than just plain sad. That’s self-induced delusion so strong one wonders how many times Howell has stood in front of a mirror telling himself he’s getting sleepy.
At least the Rangers have dumped this. Hopefully, other agencies will join them in abandoning a technique that offers almost zero investigative benefits but plenty of ways to deprive people of their rights and freedoms.
Filed Under: evidence, hypnosis, investigations, texas, texas rangers
Kansas City PD Presentation Says Every Shooting Investigation Is Handled The Same Way… Unless It Involves A Cop
from the no-bias-here-if-you-don't-count-the-bias-towards-cops dept
The Kansas City Police Department has managed to turn a few heads — and not in the good way — with an internal PowerPoint that may as well have been titled “So, You’ve Killed Someone.” The document was obtained during discovery in a wrongful death suit against the KCPD. Back in 2019, Officer Dylan Pifer shot and killed Terrance Bridges, claiming he thought Bridges was trying to pull a gun from his sweatshirt pocket. No gun was found on Bridges.
The presentation [PDF] obtained from Bridges’ family’s lawyer by the Kansas City Star advises cops of two things: police shootings should be handled like routine criminal investigations to eliminate claims of bias. And police shootings should be handled nothing like routine criminal investigations because they involve cops.
The opening slide makes it clear what the priority is in investigations of shootings by cops: preserving the narrative. It even has the number one next to it.
Upon completion of this block of instruction, the participants will, with the use of handouts and notes, be able to:
1. Identify the best defense again [sic] claims of bias or favoritism in the investigations of officer involved shootings.
You know what’s not a top priority? Preserving evidence. That comes behind officer safety.
Supervisors should consider the preservation of evidence as secondary to the safety of the public and department personnel.
The presentation points out that shootings are controversial and claims “police critics” will often claim investigations — which routinely clear officers of wrongdoing — are “biased and that police receive special treatment.” So, the best defense is a good offense:
The best defense to these claims is CONSISTENCY in how we conduct ALL criminal investigations.
[…]
The best way to do this is to treat the investigation into officer involved shootings LIKE EVERY OTHER CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION.
All well and good, except the presentation spends most of its running time explaining how this sort of investigation won’t be treated like a regular criminal investigation.
Does this look like the sort of thing cops offer to non-cops involved in shootings?
Don’t engage the member in detailed conversation about the incident, but you are encouraged to talk with them like you would on any other day.
Make sure that all requests (bathroom, food, drinks, cigarettes) by the involved members are met as soon as possible.
Forget about preserving evidence:
If their recording system is active, have the member mute the mike and mute yours. They will be making calls to FOP [Fraternal Order of Police] and spouses and family. They may be in an excited state and hyperverbal.
And start hiding stuff from journalists:
Park somewhere that responding media will not be able to film the involved member.
But that of course only means the involved cop. The non-cop will have any and all possibly incriminating information immediately forwarded to local media, along with any mugshots the PD happens to have on hand. Information about the involved officer will be much slower in arriving. Much slower than even the involved officer’s statement to investigators:
Generally, the member will be permitted up to forty-eight (48) hours to complete such statement…
The presentation then spends a bit of time bemoaning the public’s confidence in law enforcement, which isn’t at an all-time high. It blames the media (again) for misrepresenting shootings by officers and, again, stresses doing everything by the book to combat this perception. But the book for officers is very different from the book for citizens. And until law enforcement agencies are willing to change that, the rest of what bothers the presenter about public perception isn’t going to change.
And this is about the worst possible way you could end an instructive presentation on handling shootings by officers:
There is nothing wrong with being glad to be alive and being okay that you were the winner in a competition in which the winning prize was your life.
Law enforcement isn’t a competition with winners and losers. It’s a job, an important one, but one that has apparently been handed to people who believe members of the public are enemy combatants and that shootings are just games to be won.
Filed Under: investigations, kansas city, police, police shootings
Trump Appointee Who Wanted To Turn Voice Of America Into Breitbart Spent Millions Of Taxpayer Dollars Investigating His Own Staff
from the holy-shit dept
Remember Michael Pack? That’s the Steve Bannon protégé who Trump appointed last year to head the US Agency for Global Media. USAGM is the organization that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting and the Open Technology Fund. It was an open secret that Pack was appointed to turn those widely respected, independent, news organizations into pure Breitbart-style propaganda outfits. He wasted little time causing a huge fucking mess, firing a ton of people in a manner so upsetting that even Republican Senators were concerned. It also turned out that many of the people he fired… he legally had no right to fire.
In the fall, things got even more ridiculous as it came out that Pack had been investigating VOA journalists to see if they were “anti-Trump” and then moved to get more power to directly dictate how VOA should be reporting. One of President Biden’s first official acts in office… was to fire Pack, who laughably claimed that his being fired was “a partisan act” that would harm the credibility of USAGM.
Meanwhile, the latest story, as revealed by NPR, is that Pack spent millions of tax payer dollars investigating staff throughout the various organizations to try to come up with reasons they could be fired. This was in response to the courts pointing out he couldn’t just randomly fire people in these organizations.
Last summer, an appointee of former President Donald Trump was irate because he could not simply fire top executives who had warned him that some of his plans might be illegal.
Michael Pack, who was CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media that oversees Voice of America, in August suspended those top executives. He also immediately ordered up an investigation to determine what wrongdoing the executives might have committed.
Instead of turning to inspectors general or civil servants to investigate, Pack personally signed a no-bid contract to hire a high-profile law firm with strong Republican ties.
The bill ? footed by taxpayers ? exceeded a million dollars in just the first few months of the contract.
And hiring an outside law firm is an abuse of his position, according to the Government Accountability Project, which discovered the details of this contract via a FOIA request:
“The engagement constitutes gross mismanagement, gross waste of taxpayer dollars and abuse of authority,” David Seide of the Government Accountability Project, wrote in a letter Thursday to Congressional committees with oversight of the committee.
“The ‘deliverables’ provided by McGuireWoods are ? always were ? of questionable value,” he wrote. “The investigations produced nothing that could justify the kind of discipline Mr. Pack sought to impose on current USAGM employees he did not like ? he wanted them fired (they have since been reinstated). Investigations of former employees also yielded nothing.”
It seems almost cartoonish what Pack did here:
The group’s analysis of the new documents, shared with NPR, found the law firm McGuireWoods charged more than $320 per hour for 3,200 billable hours from August through October alone. It devoted five partners, six associates, two lawyers “of counsel,” two staff attorneys, seven paralegals, three case assistants, 14 other timekeepers, and 11 “outsourced attorneys” to the work.
[….]
The invoices reflect that McGuireWoods’ legal team, among other duties, reviewed social media posts, “news articles relating to Michael Pack” and an “[Office of Inspector General] audit on Hillary Clinton’s email breach.”
It truly is insane how obsessed Trumpists are over Hillary’s emails.
But the main crux of the “investigation” appears to have been to cook up any reason at all to justify Pack firing all the non-Trump people he wanted to fire:
The nonprofit group’s review found the McGuireWoods team spent nearly 2,000 hours in a massive review of documents and emails, 400 hours on fact investigation, and nearly 700 hours on what was labeled as “analysis/strategy.” The records also show the legal team conducted voluminous legal research on federal ethics regulations and U.S. statutes. Such tasks for federal departments are typically, though not exclusively, undertaken by government attorneys, inspectors general, and human resources employees.
Incredible.
Filed Under: donald trump, intimidation, investigations, michael pack, propaganda, taxpayers, usagm, voice of america
Companies: voice of america
So Much For Going Dark: FBI Using Social Media, E-Commerce Sites To Track Down Suspects (Including Non-Lawbreakers)
from the where's-the-darkness dept
You know the drill, right? The FBI keeps insisting that it has a “going dark” problem due to encryption making it impossible to access key evidence of supposedly criminal behavior, in theory allowing crime to happen without recourse. The problem, though, is that nearly every single bit of this claim is false. It’s kind of stunning.
- It appears that, in practice, the FBI almost never runs into encryption.
- In the rare cases where it has (and we don’t know how many because since the FBI admitted it over exaggerated how many “locked” devices it had, and then has since refused to provide an updated count), there do appear to be ways to get into those devices anyway.
- But the key issue, by far, is that the opposite of going dark is happening. Thanks to our increasingly electronic lives, the government actually has way more access to information than ever before.
Two recent articles highlight this in practice, with regards to the FBI trying to track down the rare cases of criminal activity happening around some of the protests. The local ABC affiliate in Philadelphia has the fairly remarkable story of how the FBI used Etsy, Poshmark and Linkedin to track down someone suspected of torching two Philadelphia police cars. How would those sites be useful? Well:
In amateur photos given to authorities, she is seen wearing a T-shirt that says, “Keep the immigrants, deport the racists.”
They were able to trace the T-shirt back to an Etsy shop, where a review was left by a user that displayed a Philadelphia location.
Investigators say open searches for the username led them to a Poshmark user by the name of lore-elisabeth. Open searches for a Lore Elisabeth in Philadelphia led investigators to a LinkedIn profile for a woman who was employed as a massage therapist.
And, then they checked the website of her employer, which… included a few videos of a woman who matched the photographs of the woman lighting the cop car on fire.
None of that would have been possible in that way pre-internet. The FBI doesn’t have a “going dark” problem at all. They have more light than ever before. Indeed, it seems a bit more darkness and privacy would be useful, because in some cases, the FBI seems to completely overreacting to otherwise fine (or, in some cases, joking) social media posts.
And that brings us to the second story, from NBC News, detailing the FBI trawling social media to arrest protesters they claim tried to incite riots at various (mostly peaceful) protests. Of course, the details suggest that the FBI may have an itchy trigger finger in freaking out about what people are posting, as the story details many of the charges are being dropped after the facts come in and the overzealous FBI appears to have overreacted. Indeed, it looks like they’re arresting people entirely based on social media posts, which raises some pretty significant 1st Amendment questions. Or at least it would, if prosecutors didn’t realize what a mess they’d caused and dropped the charges quickly.
Avery is one of four known people across the United States indicted on charges of incitement to riot solely on the basis of social media posts, according to federal court records. One man was charged for posting a crude napalm recipe that is widely available online. His charges were dropped several days later. Another man was questioned by the FBI for jokingly tweeting that he was the local head of antifa ? a loose anti-fascist and left-leaning political movement with no clearly-defined organization, structure or leadership.
Taken together, the cases offer some insight into how federal law enforcement continues to monitor online speech related to social movements and pursue what legal experts say is a fairly aggressive approach to prosecution.
The charges against Avery were suddenly dropped without explanation Wednesday.
In other words, the problem does not appear to be “going dark.” The problem appears to be so much sunlight that the FBI is finding “crimes” where none actually exist…
Filed Under: arrests, fbi, investigations, social media
Companies: etsy, facebook, linkedin
Richard Burr Steps Down From Intel Committee Following FBI Warrant; Feinstein Talks To FBI, While Loeffler Won't Say
from the insider-trading dept
Following the news that the FBI got a warrant and seized Senator Richard Burr’s phone as part of its investigation into his alleged insider trading, Burr has announced that he’s stepping down from being the chair of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, where he’s long been one of the biggest boosters of the surveillance state.
Of course, some are now wondering if that’s part of the reason why the Trumpian wing of the GOP have come out against Burr. Because the Senate Intel Committee has released a report confirming that Russia tried to help Trump win in 2016. The report is not particularly surprising, highlighting many widely known points. However, in Trumpland, no one seems to be able to handle the nuanced differences between the campaign directly “colluding” with Russia (for which the evidence is more limited) with the idea that Russia independently sought to boost Trump (for which the evidence is overwhelming). So, Trump supporters have been clamoring for Burr’s head on a platter for merely stating facts, which are not allowed in this world where pointing out that The Emperor is Naked is somehow deemed to be heresy.
Given Attorney General Barr’s recent decisions to more fully weaponize and politicize the Justice Department, it can’t be dismissed out of hand that there are political reasons for the FBI’s sudden interest in Burr, but it still seems like a stretch. Sooner or later it’s likely that there will be some fallout from which one can better assess the validity of the warrant, and whether or not Burr was engaged in insider trading.
One point that a few people have raised is to look at whether or not the FBI is looking into any of the other Senators who sold notable chunks of stock just before the pandemic hit, though as we explained in that original story, the situations and fact patterns with each of the other Senators is at least somewhat different than Burr’s case. For what it’s worth, there are reports that the FBI questioned Senator Dianne Feinstein, who also sold some stock during this period. However, as we pointed out in the original post, there’s little indication that her sales were COVID-19 related, especially since it was mostly selling off biotech stocks (exactly the kind of stocks you’d think would go up in a pandemic).
The other Senator’s selloff behavior that looked at least somewhat sketchy was Senator Kelly Loeffler, whose actions look worse and worse, as she denies things more vociferously. Just recently, she went on Fox News (natch) to claim that “this is 100% a political attack.” Huh? What? You’re the one who sold the stock. She also (get this) tried to blame socialism because why not?
This gets at the very heart of why I came to Washington, to defend free enterprise, to defend capitalism. This is a socialist attack.
Who knew that insider trading was “free enterprise”?
Either way, while Burr has had to hand over his phone and Feinstein had to answer questions from the FBI… Loeffler simply refuses to say whether or not the FBI has reached out to her. If it does turn out that the FBI has investigated the others, but left Loeffler entirely alone (whether or not her sales were aboveboard), that’s certainly going to be some evidence to add to the pile that the focus on Burr was just as much political as it was about the legal issues at play.
Update: After this story was completed, Loeffler’s office announced that she had handed documents over to the SEC and DOJ along with the Senate Ethics Committee. It’s unclear if the DOJ/FBI asked for anything or if she just did this proactively. Just a few days ago, there was a report saying that her team was considering doing exactly this as a “hail mary” to try to get out ahead of this story that she can’t seem to get rid of, and which appears to be having an impact on her campaign to retain the office that she was gifted a few months ago.
Filed Under: dianne feinstein, doj, fbi, insider trading, intelligence community, investigations, kelly loeffler, politics, richard burr, russia, russian election interference, senate intelligence committee