lawsuit – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Trump Administration Tells Supreme Court DOGE Can’t Be FOIAed

from the schrodinger's-government-agency dept

The destructive force that is DOGE still somehow manages to exist, despite it not being (depending on which claim is made and when) an official federal agency and/or overseen by anyone specifically identifiable as the head of DOGE.

Until recently, everyone — including Donald Trump — knew (and said as much in public) that DOGE was both a government agency and headed by Elon Musk. When the lawsuits started flying, the backtracking began by the administration, which apparently thought it could cover its tracks by walking backwards in its golf-cleated clown shows.

Trump’s love for DOGE has managed to undercut the protections DOGE hoped it would be able to avail itself of when the FOIA requests began pouring in and the discovery demands started hitting federal dockets.

The administration is now attempting a Hail Mary play, albeit one that hails Thomas and Alito (and possibly, Roberts), rather than the patron saint it’s named after. Given the makeup of this current court, it probably has a far better chance of success than simply hurling the ball into the air and hoping someone on their own team manages to come down with it. (And, indeed, it has already scored a temporary stay, thanks to an emergency order issued by Chief Justice John Roberts.)

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has been suing DOGE ever since it rejected its FOIA requests for the agency’s operational documents. The Trump Administration is now fighting back, albeit with at least one hand inadvertently tied behind its back, as Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney report for Politico:

The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal Wednesday urging the high court to put a hold on a judge’s orders giving a watchdog group access to documents detailing firings, grant terminations and other actions proposed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which was overseen by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Solicitor General John Sauer is also asking the Supreme Court to block a deposition of the obscure official the Trump administration has identified as the leader of the budget-cutting drive: DOGE administrator Amy Gleason.

The crux of the administration’s opacity argument [PDF] is this: DOGE is nothing more than an advisory entity that lacks the power to make independent decisions. Obviously, everything about DOGE says otherwise, as it has propelled massive staffing and funding cuts across multiple agencies, participated in extremely careless (and possibly illegal) data exfiltration, and done pretty much whatever it wants since it materialized as the barely-sentient wet dream of a guy who insists on wearing a baseball cap to every Oval Office meeting.

But that has been undercut by Trump himself, who has stated the agency definitely can do everything the administration is now claiming in court it can’t do, as well as thrown someone under the DOGE bus to act as the recipient for the negative attention (and FOIA requests, and deposition demands) Trump managed to successfully shield his fascist-saluting man-child from since his return to the Oval Office.

This trouble has been brewing for a few months:

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper found there were strong indications that DOGE was actually directing cuts and layoffs at numerous federal agencies. That substantive operational role suggests DOGE’s activities fall under the Freedom of Information Act, the judge wrote.

Now that a judge is saying stuff we’ve all been able to clearly observe since DOGE’s inception, the administration now wants the Supreme Court to declare that the public (and multiple litigants) shouldn’t be allowed to believe their own eyes.

Making matters worse for the administration’s anti-transparency efforts is the fact that it has finally decided to put someone’s name on the top of the department’s letterhead: DOGE administrator Amy Gleason. (From what’s known about Gleason, it seems clear she’s being used to catch bullets meant for Trump/Musk, rather than actually direct DOGE operations.)

While this will probably keep Musk and his mouth out of court, it does make it clear that DOGE not only acts on its own impulses (rather than just offer mass termination “guidance”) but that someone will ultimately have to answer questions about DOGE’s actions in court, should discovery requests manage to secure some depositions.

Obviously, the normal court processes and determinations in litigation against DOGE cannot be allowed to stand. That’s why the administration wants the judges it bought to give it a free pass on destroying the federal government while simultaneously preventing the public from learning anything more about the salt-the-earth tactics being spearheaded by DOGE. And it really doesn’t matter whose name is currently at the top of the org chart in terms of destruction. But it does matter when it comes to FOIA litigation and the administration’s insistence DOGE is limited to simply suggesting moves the administration might want to make.

There’s no telling how this desperation move will work out. The Supreme Court has played both sides of the encroaching fascism line in recent weeks, giving Trump some free passes while occasionally shutting down the administration’s efforts to vanish constitutional rights into the anti-immigration cornfield.

Let’s hope this will end up being one of the latter. What’s already known about DOGE and its operations is extremely disturbing. Perhaps the exposure of more internal information will help more people realize the government they chose to elect is actively trying to destroy many of the things they still hold dear and propel some opposition from citizens who never thought they’d be #NeverTrump. We can only hope.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, doge, donald trump, elon musk, foia, lawsuit, public records, supreme court
Companies: crew

Detroit PD Sued Over Yet Another Bogus Arrest Based On An Unverified Facial Recognition ‘Match’

from the let-the-software-do-the-thinking dept

The city of Detroit finally revamped the rules for police department use of facial recognition tech last July. We’ll have to wait and see whether adding guardrails will result in fewer false arrests, but what may end up being too little definitely arrived too late for a Detroit woman who was falsely arrested by the same police department that had already done this three times previously.

Here’s Emma Camp with more details for Reason:

Last year, Detroit police wrongly arrested LaDonna Crutchfield after facial recognition software incorrectly identified her as the culprit of a shooting, according to a lawsuit filed on February 21. While police did not even have a warrant for Crutchfield’s arrest, they handcuffed, detained, and jailed her anyway. The officers had conducted no investigation, relying fully on a facial recognition database. Police released Crutchfield only when it became obvious that they had arrested the wrong person.

Just like the previous three bogus arrests, cops went after people based solely on facial recognition matches without bothering to verify anything else about the supposed suspects. And just like those previous cases, the images used to perform these searches were far less than ideal. Crutchfield’s lawsuit [PDF] contains the images the Detroit PD used as [re-reads lawsuit] the entirety of its probable cause determinations.

The first image is far from ideal for facial recognition matches, given the low quality of the source image:

The second was even worse. If you’re relying on facial recognition tech to help you narrow down the list of suspects, it might help to have another photo that actually contains the alleged suspect’s face:

Sure, pedants might argue this does contain a face. But it doesn’t contain a useful image of a face. If this were actually useful, you’d think someone would have already knocked together an Alfred Hitchcock-based algorithm to identify people using only profile images.

In addition to the bad match, the officers actually didn’t have an arrest warrant when they arrested Crutchfield. All they had was permission to try to talk her into an interview with the detective (Marc Thompson) as a person of interest in the alleged shooting.

When Detective Thompson did finally interview the now-arrested Crutchfield, he offered up this embarrassing interaction completely unprompted:

PLAINTIFF noticed that the photos contained a heavy-set black woman wearing a bonnet, and DEFENDANT THOMPSON asked PLAINTIFF if that was her.

PLAINTIFF immediately stated “no” and explained to DEFENDANT THOMPSON that she does not wear bonnets.

DEFENDANT THOMPSON jokingly stated to PLAINTIFF that, “you got to admit it – that looks like you, and PLAINTIFF replied, “Why? Because I am fat and black like her?”

Not a great look for any officer from any American law enforcement agency, where racial profiling and long histories of biased policing are the norm. Crutchfield was finally released more than six hours after she was first arrested after she explained she couldn’t have been involved in the shooting because she had been at work and could prove it. At that point, both Detective Thompson and the other officer present during the interrogation agreed Crutchfield wasn’t the suspect they were looking for.

Even though it was only six hours, it still matters. It meant Crutchfield wasn’t able to go to her first job and was only barely able to get to work on time for her second job. And she spent the night at her second job traumatized by this bogus arrest, meaning she was of little use to the mentally challenged adults she cared for at that job.

On top of that, it’s clear no other investigation was performed before Crutchfield was warrantlessly arrested. The only thing officers relied on was a questionable match kicked out by an algorithm that had been fed even more questionable source images.

Hopefully, Crutchfield will secure a swift settlement from the city. The city has already had to pay out more than once for “detective” work that involved nothing more than someone running a cursory search and turning bad math into words and deeds that illegally deprived residents of their rights. Sure, the cops involved in this one won’t feel it hit their paychecks and will likely learn nothing from this, but the lack of deterrent shouldn’t prevent the city from compensating someone for wrecking up their life, if only temporarily.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, detroit pd, facial recognition, false arrest, lawsuit

CBS Shows Sign Of A Backbone In Standoff With Trump And His Extremist FCC

from the never-obey-in-advance dept

Tue, Feb 25th 2025 05:32am - Karl Bode

Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been “deceitfully edited” to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). As Mike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense.

CBS/Paramount is looking for regulatory approval for its $8 billion merger with Skydance (run by Larry Ellison’s kid David). Trump and his FCC boss Brendan Carr quickly zeroed on on this, and began using merger approval as leverage to bully CBS into even more feckless coverage of the administration.

Carr’s assault hasn’t been what you’d call subtle. Last week that even included changing the FCC website to try and redirect visitors to whine about CBS’ supposed editorial bias:

At first, there were signs that CBS, like ABC, was going to let Trump bully the company and settle the complaint. But there’s some indication that Carr and Trump’s behavior has finally pissed off CBS and Paramount enough for them to develop something vaguely resembling a backbone. Maybe.

Last week CBS/Paramount lawyers began indicating they may fight the FCC, with CBS lawyers throwing all kinds of things at the wall, including claims those suing violated fine print arbitration requirements and that the Trump administration is engaged in pretty obvious judge shopping:

“Its multipronged legal strategy revolves around arguments that Trump is judge-shopping, choosing to file the lawsuit at a court where a sympathetic judge is likely to oversee the case, and the possibility that those suing the company agreed to arbitration clauses when they used services hosted by the entertainment conglomerate.”

Earlier in February, Trump revised the complaint to add Republican U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson, his former doctor who lives in Texas, to keep the case in Trump-friendly federal court in the Northern District of Texas. CBS wants the case transferred to its hometown of New York for what should be obvious reasons:

“U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who’s overseeing the litigation and is the only judge in the Amarillo division of the court, was nominated to his position by Trump in 2017 and has been a member of the Federalist Society since 2012. In his five years on the bench, he’s issued rulings against several initiatives implemented by former President Joe Biden, some of which were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Republicans have been seeding their friendly news outlets (like the NY Post) with the bullshit narrative that CBS is in legal trouble because it has a “left wing bias.” In reality, Trump’s FCC boss is a power-abusing extremist, who wants to bully all media companies into kissing Trump’s ring.

The great irony in all of this is that like so many media giants, CBS had already responded to authoritarianism by making its journalism gentler to Republican ideology years earlier, in response to the all-pervasive lie that the corporatist, center-right U.S. press has a “liberal bias.”

It’s worth noting that CBS’ attempt to appease extremist right wingers has only resulted in more harassment by said right wing, providing useful lessons to other media companies considering throwing their journalistic standards and the First Amendment in the trash in order to kiss the ring.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, brendan carr, donald trump, editorial, fcc, free speech, journalism, lawsuit, media, mergers
Companies: cbs, paramount

Honolulu Pays $175,000 To Settle Lawsuit Over Arrest Of A 10-Year-Old Girl

from the don't-put-cops-in-schools dept

If you put cops in schools, this is what you get:

On the morning of January 10, 2020, a parent complained to school officials about a sketch N.B. and other students had drawn in response to another student bullying N.B. The parent unreasonably insisted that school officials call the police.

After arriving on school grounds, police interrogated 10-year-old N.B., handcuffed her with excessive force, arrested her without probable cause, and transported her to the police station—all without letting N.B. see or speak with her mother. The police and school officials took these traumatizing actions despite the fact that N.B. was cooperative and did not pose any danger to any person or herself—and without accommodating N.B.’s disability, which was documented with the school.

The problem was a drawing another student didn’t like. The bigger problem was the response. Instead of calling in the child’s parent first to discuss a drawing another student felt was insulting and/or threatening, the school decided to involve law enforcement first and consider the consequences of this action later.

Obviously, bullying is a serious problem. But calling the cops over an allegedly “threatening” drawing is ridiculous, especially when the “target” of the drawing had no opinion whatsoever about the picture and that cops were only involved because the parents of another student decided to go full Karen about it.

Even assuming the complaining parent wanted to press charges—and assuming there were valid charges that could be brought against N.B.—N.B. could have easily been surrendered to her mother who was at the school. No one else involved in the drawing incident was arrested or interrogated. No charges were ever brought against N.B., who as a ten year old did not intend to commit a crime with a drawing she did not draw alone and did not even want to deliver. N.B.’s detention and false arrest without probable cause violated her rights to be free from unreasonable seizures under the Hawai_‘_i and U.S. Constitutions.

Because of this chain of events, the district court had no problem denying immunity to the cops involved in this handcuffing. Neither did the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court when the city of Honolulu decided to press the issue. In its decision, it not only pointed out that the police department felt THREE officers were needed to handle a 10-year-old armed only with crayons, but that a whole bunch of precedent made it clear this use of force — even as limited as it ultimately was — was unconstitutional.

In C.B. v. City of Sonora, we held that the “use of handcuffs on a calm, compliant, but non-responsive 11-year-old child was unreasonable.” We also determined that the “decision to leave [the child] in handcuffs for the duration of [a] half-hour commute to his uncle’s business—a commute that took place in a vehicle equipped with safety locks that made escape impossible—was clearly unreasonable.” Following Sonora, no reasonable official could have believed that the level of force employed against ten-year-old N.B. as alleged in Plaintiffs’ Second Amended Complaint—namely, placing her in adult handcuffs to transport her to the police station—was necessary. Like the eleven-year-old child in Sonora, N.B. was calm and compliant, was questioned in a secluded office surrounded by adults, and did not resist arrest or attempt to flee.

Thanks to two consecutive shutdowns by federal judges, the city of Honolulu has wisely decided to cut a check, rather than let a jury tell it to cut a presumably much larger check. Here’s the latest from Courthouse News Service:

Honolulu settled a civil rights lawsuit brought by the mother of a Black girl who was a 10-year-old elementary school student when police arrested her because of a drawing she made that was deemed threatening to another student.

[…]

The total settlement amount is 175,000,including175,000, including 175,000,including150,000 from the city and $25,000 from the Hawaii Department of Education, said Mateo Caballero, an attorney representing the mother.

That’s a bargain. And it’s the sort of bargain only an impending loser can strike. Even if this seems a bit small-ball when compared to the LITERAL ARREST AND HANDCUFFING OF A STUDENT THAT DREW A PICTURE THE PERSON IT SHOULD HAVE OFFENDED WASN’T ACTUALLY OFFENDED BY, the bigger, better part of this is that this state-enabled BS won’t be following the student around for the rest of her (minor) life:

The arrest record of the child will be expunged as part of the settlement, the attorney said.

Good. That’s the least the city could do. I mean, on top of the settlement, which still seems pretty low but will have to do until the city’s cops violate more rights in a more unforgivable fashion.

Look, I understand not all disciplinary problems can be handled by school staff. Actual violence involving actual weapons actually happens in schools. But when the dispute is over a drawing, the best way to take this on is to involve parents, students, and administrators. There’s no reason to call dispatch to see how many bored, under-utilized officers it might be able to spare. Cops only understand immediate compliance and the tactics they can use to ensure this. That’s how 10-year-olds end up shackled in adult handcuffs. And that’s how taxpayers get shit on for having the misfortune of living in a city where cops can’t control themselves when faced with “perps” less than half their height and more than half their age.

Filed Under: 9th circuit, excessive force, hawaii, lawsuit, police misconduct, school resource officer

Court Tells Plaintiff Oft-Abused Wiretap Act Can’t Be Abused To Cover Website Interactions

from the ma'am-this-is-a-website dept

Very few states laws can be considered to be “famous.” Almost any state law immediately recognized by people in other states can only be described as “infamous.” The Wiretap Law enacted in Massachusetts is definitely infamous.

For years, this statute was abused by law enforcement officers and other state employees to punish or prosecute residents who recorded them performing their public duties. This sort of thing occurred regularly in the state until a federal court told the state government the law couldn’t be used to arrest people for recording cops or other government employees.

But the law remains problematic, not just because of this oft-observed abuse but because the law’s language is vague enough to encompass almost any definition of communication and almost any entity that might have the ability to eavesdrop on the communications of others.

Because of that, it takes the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court 93 pages [PDF] to arrive at the obvious conclusion that a hospital website passing browser information on to advertisers and other third parties is not a violation of the Wiretap Act. (via Courthouse News Service)

The plaintiff visited the website of two hospitals. During these visits to their sites, she accessed publicly-available information. At no time did she interact with any health care professionals, chatbots, chatbots pretending to be health care professionals, or provide any of her personal information (including any health issues) to anyone or anything.

Sometime later, she decided to sue both of the hospitals whose sites she had visited, claiming that their sharing of her browsing activity with third parties was somehow the sort of eavesdropping and communications interception the state law was enacted to deter.

The court is sympathetic. But even considering the vague language of the state law, it can’t find anything that would suggest the law was written to prevent websites from sharing user information with third parties.

Put most simply (and ahead of another 90 pages of discussion, including some dissenting opinions), the state law was designed to combat the sort of thing people most commonly associate with wiretaps: the interception of personal communications. While “wiretap” has historically referred to telephone conversations, it is understood that it also covers personal electronic communications. However, no conversations occurred here:

The interactions here are not with another person but with a website. Nor are they personal conversations or messages being intercepted, but rather the tracking of a website user’s browsing of, and interaction with, information published on a website.

That’s not to say it’s ok for any and all websites to harvest as much information as they can in order to please advertisers, data brokers, or some innate desire to just collect as much as you can because you never know when it might prove useful. In fact, there may still be some cause of action here. But the Wiretap Act isn’t the vehicle for redress.

Make no mistake, the hospitals’ alleged conduct here raises serious concerns, and may indeed violate various other statutes and give rise to common-law causes of action more specifically directed at the improper handling of confidential information, particularly confidential medical information. And we do not in any way minimize the serious threat to privacy presented by the proliferation of third-party tracking of an individual’s website browsing activity for advertising purposes. These concerns, however, should be addressed to the Legislature.

On top of that, the hospital sites provided a pop-up message to first-time visitors informing them of the sites’ use of cookies and providing links to privacy policies and third-party use of collected data. That’s hardly a furtive act, the sort of thing the Wiretap Act was written to address. Even if it’s true no one reads the fine print and that sites tend to gather way more info than might seem necessary, it’s not as though the websites accessed the plaintiff’s computer on their own and started looking for data to gather or, more directly, personal information to intercept.

Even if the statute is vague and even if the court is inclined to believe simply browsing a website could be construed as a personal communication between the site visitor and the website, reading the state statute this way would result in the criminalization of information gathering at any website anywhere, something clearly not intended by legislators when they crafted the law.

In analyzing whether the interception of this information constitutes a criminal violation, we must keep in mind that the statute does not distinguish medical information from other information, or hospital websites from other websites.

Consequently, we must impose a common definition of communication of information for all websites. For example, would it be a criminal violation if a user browses a music or sports website to inquire about particular songs or athletes, and the music website or sports website tracks its users, and shares that information with Internet advertisers without the user’s consent? Under this interpretation, it would appear that thousands of website owners could potentially face severe criminal and civil penalties for using tracking tools needed to support an advertising-based business model that is so common on the Internet.

While no doubt there are some legislators that would like to see this very thing happen, that simply isn’t the case here. Demanding better privacy protections for web users is a good thing, but a Wiretap Act clearly meant to criminalize illegal interception of personal communications isn’t the way to achieve this end. That was never the case here, and recent jurisprudence concerning the public recording of public officials further narrows the breadth of the law to target only the eavesdropping and interception of private communications legislators had in mind when they wrote it. While it’s easy to expand the law to cover text messages, email, and private messages via social media platforms, it’s impossible to believe the surface-level gathering of user interaction data could possibly be considered a violation of this law.

Filed Under: lawsuit, massachusetts, privacy, web advertising, wiretap act

Norfolk, Virginia Residents Sue City Over Its Network Of 172 Flock Cameras

from the panopticon-purveyors-beware dept

This lawsuit could not be more impeccably timed. Whether or not this timing is more fortuitous than impeccable remains to be seen, but there’s no denying the bang-bang-bang effect on display here, even if it may just be coincidental.

Last week, a Virginia federal court ruled three hits from Flock ALPR cameras wasn’t enough to trigger a Fourth Amendment violation. It reasoned this was not the same sort of post facto long-term tracking addressed by the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision, which mainly dealt with law enforcement’s obtaining massive amounts of cell site location data from service providers without a warrant.

That decision erected a warrant requirement for obtaining this data from service providers. The limited holding said important things about tech tools lending themselves to pervasive surveillance while evading the guardrails of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, but had little to say about slightly less pervasive surveillance using other systems that weren’t reliant on cell service providers and their location data.

The end result was a loss for the defendant, who failed to show three hits from Flock ALPR (automatic license plate reader) cameras violated his rights. The court arrived at this conclusion despite noting Flock’s cameras captured far more than just plate/location/time data. The cameras also captured distinguishing features of vehicles passing its camera and allowed law enforcement to search by make/model/distinguishing features, rather than limiting them to plate number searches. (It also noted Flock cameras gather lots of images of people, but Flock affirmed to the court that its software could not be used to perform facial recognition or otherwise track people’s movements outside of their cars. For now, anyway…)

A week later, another city in Virginia is being sued for its network of Flock ALPR cameras. Unlike what was seen in Richmond, Virginia, where a court ruled a few hits from a reverse search of a vehicle’s description didn’t raise constitutional concerns, the flock of Flocks in Norfolk is a bit more concerning. Even the city’s top cop has admitted it’s a panopticon enabled by easy-to-use and even easier to monitor cameras provided by Flock. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

Norfolk police chief Mark Talbot said last year, “It would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera.”

But there’s more to it than just a network of ALPR cameras. Most ALPR systems are designed to notify law enforcement when plates on alert lists pass a camera. It’s a passive system that doesn’t require nor allow constant monitoring by law enforcement. The system in use in Norfolk is the opposite. While it can be utilized as a passive system that provides alerts for plate hits, the Norfolk PD has decided to use it as an active monitoring system to track people’s movements. This is from the lawsuit [PDF], filed with the assistance of the Institute for Justice:

There are no meaningful restrictions on City officers’ access to this information. Officers need only watch Flock’s orientation video and create login credentials to get access. After that, the police department requires them to log in and use Flock’s database throughout their entire shift. Although the police department’s policy requires that officers use the information for law enforcement purposes only, no one proactively monitors their use. Every City officer can search the database whenever they want for whatever they want—no need to seek advance approval.

All of this is done without a warrant. No officer ever has to establish probable cause, swear to the facts in a warrant application, and await the approval of a neutral judge. The cameras take photographs and store the information of every driver that passes them—suspect or not. The photographs and information are then available to any officer in the City to use as they see fit, for the next 30 days. And if City officials download the photos and information during that 30-day window, there are no meaningful restraints on how long they can hold them or how they may be used.

Worse still, Flock maintains a centralized database with over one billion license plate reads every month. So, even after a driver leaves the City, officers can potentially keep following them in the more than 5,000 communities where Flock currently has cameras. Likewise, any person with access to Flock’s centralized database can access the City’s information, potentially without the City even knowing about it. Ominously, the City’s police chief has said this “creates a nice curtain of technology” for the City and surrounding area.

The Fourth Amendment concerns might be the least of the issues here. This is a massive database of people’s movements being constantly refilled by the city’s 172 cameras, operated by officers who are expected to actively engage with the system, all without any credible or meaningful oversight.

The city and PD tout it as a crime fighting tool. But it’s a system that actively encourages abuse. Since it tracks every vehicle, officers can use it to track the movements of anyone they wish to track, ranging from journalists to protestors to estranged spouses to anyone they might feel like knowing more about for definitely non-law enforcement purposes. This isn’t mere speculation. The lawsuit cites a couple of past abuses of law enforcement databases by police officers. We’ve covered several more of these cases here at Techdirt over the past decade.

The argument here is that warrantless surveillance of people’s movements violates the Fourth Amendment, even if any single plate/vehicle photo is not a violation in and of itself. Whether this argument will generate favorable judicial action depends on whether or not the court decides to view the hundreds of thousands of photos captured by the 172 cameras as a whole, or whether it decides each of these hundreds of thousands is it own individual observation of a vehicle on a public road, which has never been considered a Fourth Amendment violation.

And that’s where Carpenter will come into play. The Supreme Court knew any individual data point meant nothing, especially under the Third Party Doctrine. But when combined to create a long-term record of someone’s movements, officers needed probable cause to obtain this data. In this case, the court will have to decide whether accessing this database requires a warrant.

Whatever it decides, it’s clear the Norfolk PD needs to be doing more to prevent abusive access by officers. The policies it has in place do absolutely nothing to deter misuse. The only requirement appears to be agreeing to some click-wrap that happens to include a short video officers are only obligated to press “play” on. After that, the use and application of this tech appears to be left to each officer’s discretion, which is absolutely the best way to encourage multiple indiscretions. If this lawsuit can’t actually get a warrant requirement installed, perhaps it will, at the very least, force the PD to more closely supervise officers’ use of the Flock-enabled Norfolk Panopticon.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, alpr, carpenter, lawsuit, license plate readers, surveillance, virginia
Companies: flock

Detroit Cops Misused ALPR Tech To Seize An Innocent Person’s Car For Three Weeks

from the fake-it-till-you-take-it dept

The Detroit PD is a case study in misuse of powerful surveillance tech. The department is notable for being involved in no less than three wrongful arrests, due to misuse/abuse of its facial recognition tech. The city has already paid out a $300,000 settlement in one of these cases. Worse, two of the three cases involve the same so-called “detective,” which means one of their investigators should definitely never be allowed to use the tech again.

These arrests are the result of ignoring the guidance that surrounds the tech. The tech provider warns facial recognition matches should not be used as the sole probable cause for arrest warrants. The PD’s policies say the same thing. And yet, there have been multiple wrongful arrests because investigators ignored these policies and procedures, including one who’s done this at least twice.

Now, there’s another misuse of surveillance tech that’s making the wrong kind of headlines for the Detroit Police Department. Automatic license plate readers capture hundreds of millions of plate/location images across the country every day. These are automatically searched against hot lists of vehicles tied to criminal activity.

This is an efficiency gain — one that allows officers to more with less legwork. But it also accelerates the error rate, something that has also been linked to wrongful stops and arrests. That the Detroit PD would also be misusing this tech isn’t a surprise. The bigger surprise might be that the Detroit PD specifically allows officers to engage in this misuse. This is from Paul Egan’s article for the Detroit Free Press, which details yet another tech-enabled screwup by the Detroit PD.

A Detroit police spokesperson said officers are authorized to use license plate readers in reverse, when they have a vehicle description but no partial license plate number.

That’s not responsible use of this tech. This is nothing more than a policy-enabled fishing expedition, which allows investigators to surf the database for suspects, using nothing more than speedy guesswork to find a “suspect.”

This case — which has resulted in a lawsuit — is even worse. Investigators didn’t even have a partial plate number. All they had was a vehicle description. So, they googled the haystack until they found a car to stop, assuming whoever was in it must be the criminal they were looking for. They were wrong, but that didn’t stop them from sending a bunch of officers to this person’s house, throwing her 2-year-old child into a cruiser while they cuffed her and, basically, stealing her car.

Acting on information drawn from its multi-million-dollar network of license plate readers, Detroit police handcuffed Isoke Robinson, put her 2-year-old son, who has autism, in the back of a police cruiser, and seized and impounded her only car for more than three weeks.

But witnesses to the Sept. 3, 2023, drive-by shooting police were investigating never gave officers even a partial license plate number.

And the man later convicted in the nonfatal shooting has no known connection to Robinson or her 2013 Dodge Charger. Robinson, who had to borrow someone’s truck to keep her job as an assembly line worker at Stellantis and has sued the city in federal court, was never charged with a crime or even identified as a suspect.

Based on nothing more than a reverse image search (so to speak), officers took Robinson off the road, out of her car, and traumatized her son. The testimony given by officers in the lawsuit makes it clear no one was handling anything professionally or responsibly. The plate reader cops looked at was two miles from the crime scene but only a couple of blocks from where Robinson lived. (She has since moved out of Detroit.)

On top of that, images of the suspect vehicle obtained from nearby private CCTV cameras showed something an actual investigator might have attempted to verify before prematurely declaring victory over crime just because they’d take an innocent woman’s car. Those images showed a Dodge Charger with only a single working fog light. Despite holding onto Robinson’s car for three weeks, no one bothered to take another look at the car cops were carelessly claiming was evidence.

Detroit Police Detective Dion Corbin, Jr., who was in charge of the shooting investigation, testified in an Aug. 14 deposition that the entire time police had Robinson’s vehicle impounded, they never checked to see whether both her fog lights were working, or not. They also never tested the car for potentially relevant evidence, such as gunpowder residue, Corbin testified.

These people don’t deserve the title of “detective” or “investigator.” They’re doing neither of these things. They’re just finding the simplest, most effort-free “solution” to their problem. And, by doing so, they’re neither finding criminals, nor are they making Detroit any safer. While they’re impounding cars and throwing toddlers into cop cars, the real criminals are still out there, avoiding arrest by doing nothing more than existing alongside officers who can’t be bothered to take their own work seriously.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, alpr, detroit, detroit pd, lawsuit

LAPD Raids Medical Lab For (Nonexistent) Weed, Get Gun Stuck In An MRI Machine

from the keystone-kops-handling-the-Drug-War dept

Some of our nation’s finest Drug Warriors are at it again. And by “at it,” I mean doing seriously stupid, seriously unconstitutional stuff in hopes of finding drugs or (better yet!) cash that will somehow prove they’re doing anything at all to stem the flow of illegal drugs.

And yet, they weren’t even after a truly illegal drug here. The LAPD was going after some supposedly “unlicensed” weed, which means weed that isn’t generating tax dollars, rather than the substance that is mostly legal in a lot of places, including Los Angeles, California.

The raid was botched in more ways than one, but it led off with the claim always made by Drug Warriors when they need an excuse to start violating the Constitution. (h/t Radley Balko)

The owners of NoHo Diagnostic Center are suing the LAPD, the city of Los Angeles and multiple police officers, alleging they violated the business owners’ constitutional rights and demanding an unspecified amount in damages. Officers allegedly raided the diagnostic center, located in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, thinking it was a front for an illegal cannabis cultivation facility, pointing to higher-than-usual energy use and the “distinct odor” of cannabis plants, according to the lawsuit.

Yep, cops on Drug War duty are peeping electric bills to locate grow operations. Even when they’re wrong, they still feel they’re right. There are lots of reasons a place might be using more electricity, whether it’s someone’s desktop Bitcoin rig or, in this case, a place that uses a lot of high-powered, highly-specialized medical equipment. And “distinct odor” is just a useful dodge — something used to justify otherwise illegal entries that can’t be readily disputed because there’s no body cam on the market (yet) that is capable of identifying odors.

What the body cams can catch is the butchery of rights and some incredibly incompetent policing. We’ll see if any of this footage survives — not just because the LAPD might want to cover this up, but because the officers just sort of blundered around the building, poking and prodding at x-ray machines, ultrasound devices, CT scanners, and — most comically — an MRI behind a door that clearly told everyone entering not to bring anything metal into the room. And for good reason, as one officer immediately discovered.

The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine…

An officer then allegedly pulled a sealed emergency release button that shut the MRI machine down, deactivating it, evaporating thousands of liters of helium gas and damaging the machine in the process. The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.

Please tell me more about this “training and expertise,” Officer Disarmed-By-An-MRI-Machine. Also, explain to me why it was worth the sacrifice of a multi-million dollar machine to save a gun that’s far more replaceable than you are, Officer Doesn’t-Know-What-The-Fuck-He’s-Doing. The cop shop will always issue you another one. But without securing a win or a settlement in this lawsuit, the medical facility will have to cover the repairs out of its own pocket due to your inept blundering.

The lawsuit’s [PDF] allegations further highlight the complete ineptitude of everyone involved in this raid, starting with the officer who secured the search warrant. Behold this amazing display of detective work by someone who shouldn’t be allowed to operate MS Word, much less a handgun.

OFFICER FRANCO conducted surveillance on multiple dates in 2023, reporting the “distinct odor of live cannabis plant and not the odor of dried cannabis being smoked,” tinted windows – which he attributed to efforts to conceal cannabis cultivation, security cameras –which he associated with locations where cannabis is grown to prevent theft, and two individuals in similar attire at the premises – whom he concluded were performing maintenance or expanding the cultivation operation.

Pretty hard to square the claim of a pervasive marijuana odor with the distinct lack of marijuana on the premises. And everything Officer Franco claims is illustrative of illegal operations is also illustrative of plenty of fully legal operations — like the operation and housing of incredibly expensive medical equipment by trained professionals.

That’s not all the stupid, though. There’s more from Officer Franco, who couldn’t even be bothered to compare the NoHo Diagnostic Center to its nearest electricity-using neighbors to see if he was actually witnessing something anomalous (and, I guess, drug-related) or just the sort of normal usage split one would expect in a situation like this.

OFFICER FRANCO compared the power usage of the TARGET PREMISES to nearby businesses and found it significantly higher.

OFFICER FRANCO, therefore, concluded that the TARGET PREMISES was cultivating cannabis, disregarding the fact that it is a diagnostic facility utilizing an MRI machine, Xray machine, and other heavy medical equipment—unlike the surrounding businesses selling flowers, chocolates, and childrens’ merchandise, none of which would require significant power usage.

Officer Franco also claimed to have performed an “internet search” linking the lab to “Fouad Ashour,” despite publicly-available business records showing the business had been incorporated in 2021 by its Chief Executive Officer, Ustiana Shaginian.

This isn’t “training and expertise.” It certainly isn’t “expertise.” And if this is how Officer Franco makes inferences, there’s something seriously wrong with the LAPD’s training, as the lawsuit points out. (Emphasis in the original.)

Despite the TARGET PREMISES’ legitimate business certification, OFFICER FRANCO, as a natural next step, contacted LAPD’s Gang and Narcotics Division Cannabis Support Unit. OFFICER FRANCO learned that the TARGET PREMISES, a medical diagnostic center, does not have a license to cultivate cannabis, a finding he promptly labeled a “violation of the California Health and Safety Code.”

Based on his 15 years as an LAPD officer and twelve hours of narcotics training, and based upon the presence of security cameras (typical of any reasonable commercial business), tinted windows (a reasonable practice for any medical facility concerned with patient privacy), high power usage (as any diagnostic facility), the alleged odor of cannabis plants (in a busy shopping plaza with no prior reports), the absence of a cultivation permit (which no diagnostic healthcare facility would possess), and the presence of two men wearing identical company branded shirts (unexpected of individuals involved in illegal cultivation), OFFICER FRANCO found probable cause for cannabis cultivation at the TARGET PREMISES.

Burn him. Burn him to the ground. This wasn’t an investigation. This was an officer working backwards from conclusions he’d apparently generated without any reasonable suspicion that would warrant the initiation of an investigation until he arrived at the point he could get a warrant and start violating rights.

Given these allegations, I would sincerely hope the city of LA already has a check half-written. All it needs now is the settlement amount. Allowing this to move forward just means more cops are going be asked more questions. And the one cop, whose name leads off the lawsuit, has answered plenty of those with actions, and has raised a similar number of disturbing questions whose answers are just going to generate more liability for the PD.

And while it’s always difficult to hold a city or entire police department accountable for officers’ actions, every time these officers attest to their “training” and “experience” in warrant requests, depositions, or direct testimony, they’re implying the errors (or willful violations) they committed were at least partially based on the training provided by their employers and their service to the higher power (the city) that signs their paychecks. This is embarrassing on several levels. Hopefully, NoHo Diagnostic will get some justice here. And even more hopefully, the city will decide to make some heads roll in hopes of deterring future actions like these that not only violate residents’ rights, but insult their intelligence and rob them of their tax dollars.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, drug war, lapd, lawsuit, police misconduct
Companies: noho diagnostic center

Lawsuit: Cops Stood By While Elderly Woman Was Stabbed 68 Times; Cops: Hey, We Yelled At The House

from the suddenly-incapable-of-a-forcible-entry dept

This isn’t a good look for the Las Vegas Metro PD, even if it’s completely supported by court precedent. No matter how often law enforcement agencies sling around the phrase “protect and serve,” they have almost no legal obligation to do either of those things.

Sometimes a “failure to intervene” allegation might undermine a cop’s attempt to secure qualified immunity for violations committed by other cops, but when it comes to crimes being committed against regular people, cops simply aren’t legally obliged to stop crimes in progress even when they’re already at the scene.

But this lawsuit is hoping a court might find otherwise. Whether or not it does, it will definitely expose some cops for what they are: lazy opportunists who aren’t really in the life-saving business. Even if the officers are found to be on the right side of judicial precedent, they’re not going to come out of this looking like people who should be employed as police officers.

Las Vegas police officers stood outside listening as a 74-year-old woman was stabbed 68 times and killed by one of her sons in her home, a lawsuit filed Saturday alleged.

How the Metropolitan Police Department responded to the event prompted the woman’s other sons to file a lawsuit alleging, among other things, negligence and wrongful death.

[…]

Bonilla was arrested and booked on one charge of murder of an elderly or protected person. After pleading guilty in 2023, he was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

Pablo Bonilla — someone well known to Las Vegas law enforcement — murdered his mother in a most horrific manner. Then he walked out the door and surrendered to the law enforcement officers who just basically hung out outside of the house and waited for the murder-in-progress to resolve itself.

They can’t even say they tried everything they could to prevent this murder from happening. The officers’ report makes it clear they did nothing more than shout in the direction of the house from the safety of their cop car. And in all my years of reporting on police misconduct, I have never seen this particular description of officers’ (in)action:

Bonilla’s arrest report said that officers “challenged the apartment” using a vehicle bullhorn because the apartment’s patio and front door were guarded by metal gates. About 30 minutes after they arrived, they heard Zuniga screaming for help, according to the lawsuit. Afterward, Bonilla appeared at the doorway of the apartment, covered in blood, police said. He was taken into custody.

What even the fuck is that. The apartment wasn’t murdering Paula Prada Zuniga. Her son was. And since when have mental gates on doors and patios ever stopped cops from performing forced entries? Because if that’s all it takes to stop cops from entering residences, every criminal in America can ensure undisturbed criminal activity in perpetuity with a very small investment in security non-tech.

Trust me, these cops would have blown past the supposedly impassable metal gates in a heartbeat if they thought there was cash to seize or drugs to bust or a warrantless search to be had. But when it came to hearing an elderly woman screaming for help as she was brutally stabbed, the officers were suddenly faced with insurmountable obstacles that reduced them to yelling at a house from a safe distance away.

This is the worst kind of policing: officers who don’t feel it’s worth their effort, much less their time, to prevent or respond to a crime in (audible) progress. When confronted with their own laziness and (presumably) cowardice, the cops claimed they had zero chance of entering the house because the same metal gates they’d bypassed for other reasons were now the on-the-ground equivalence of… I don’t know… dealing with a foreign country with no extradition agreement in place.

This is already an absurd abdication of professionalism. But, thanks to the officers’ own report, it’s now in a realm of police failure that goes beyond what any talented satirist could actually create without destroying readers’ suspension of disbelief. “Challenged the apartment,” my ass. These officers need to be fired before they cause any more damage, either by hanging out near in-progress murders or by dragging down the entirety of the LVMPD to their level.

Filed Under: defund the police, las vegas pd, lawsuit, negligence, paula zuniga

Apple Dumps Suit Against NSO Group After Israeli Government Walks Off With A Bunch Of The Company’s Files

from the friends-in-the-highest-places dept

Well, it worked. We’ll have to see how this plays out in the lawsuit WhatsApp brought against NSO Group, but it has managed to shed one litigant thanks to intervention from the home team: the Israeli government.

In July, documents obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) revealed the desperate measures NSO Group deployed to avoid having to turn over internal information during discovery in multiple lawsuits, including one filed by Apple. Knowing that discovery was inevitable, NSO met with Israeli government officials and asked them to secure a blocking order from the nation’s courts to prevent having to comply with discovery requests.

The government secured these orders and went to work shortly after WhatsApp served NSO with its discovery requests. According to the paperwork, the government needed to seize a bunch of the company’s internal documents for “national security” reasons, speculating disingenuously and wildly that turning over any information about NSO’s Pegasus phone-hacking malware would make the nation itself less secure.

Shortly thereafter, the Israeli government engaged in a performative raid of NSO’s offices to seize anything NSO felt might be disadvantageous in these lawsuits. WhatsApp is still in the litigation game, hoping to obtain anything the Israeli government hasn’t already seized that might relate to its claims of unauthorized access by NSO customers deploying Pegasus malware via the company’s US servers.

Apple, however, has decided it’s not going to spend any more money or time trying to win a rigged game, as Joseph Menn reports for the Washington Post.

Apple asked a court Friday to dismiss its three-year-old hacking lawsuit against spyware pioneer NSO Group, arguing that it might never be able to get the most critical files about NSO’s Pegasus surveillance tool and that its own disclosures could aid NSO and its increasing number of rivals.

[…]

“While Apple takes no position on the truth or falsity of the Guardian Story described above, its existence presents cause for concern about the potential for Apple to obtain the discovery it needs,” the iPhone maker wrote in its filing Friday. Israeli officials have not disputed the authenticity of the documents but have denied interfering in the U.S. litigation.

As for that last sentence, that’s a dodge. Of course the Israeli government interfered with this litigation. That it didn’t actually insert itself directly into either of these bases doesn’t change the fact that the raid it performed because NSO Group asked it to means the company no longer has the documents sought by US litigants in its possession.

The more surprising assertion is Apple’s: that part of its reason for dropping the lawsuit is to avoid having to turn over any of its own stuff in response to discovery requests. But the rationale is very much an Apple thing: the company feels giving more information to NSO — especially in open court — will just be used to facilitate the creation of new hacking tools for NSO (or its competitors) to use against Apple’s customers.

That’s more of a concern for Apple, which is seeking to protect an entire operating system. WhatsApp’s concerns are more limited. While it too would probably prefer any information it hands over in court not be used against it by malware merchants, it only has to worry about a single service, rather than the underlying infrastructure (so to speak) shared by dozens of Apple products.

Discovery is underway in the WhatsApp case, so hopefully we’ll be seeing some interesting developments there soon. But given what’s happened here, NSO and its Israel-based competitors have some really interesting (and disturbing) options when it comes to thwarting lawsuits over the constant abuse of its Pegasus malware.

Filed Under: israel, lawsuit, malware, pegasus, spyware, surveillance
Companies: apple, nso group