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Milwaukee Sewerage District Threatens Menards Over Fertilizer Sales

from the oh-shit dept

We have certainly seen some shitty trademark disputes in the past, but this one that centers around lawn fertilizer may take the proverbial cake. Apparently, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, supposedly focused on keeping the city’s public water clean and local flooding from occurring, has something of a side hustle going where it also sells fertilizer to citizens, marketed as “Milorganite”. Menards, the well-known home improvement retailer based in Wisconsin, sells its own fertilizer, marketed as e-Corganite. For this reason, in part due to an advertisement Menards put out (more on that in a moment), the Sewerage District has sent letters to Menards threatening to sue for trademark infringement. Worth noting is that Milorganite is actually sold in Menards stores.

The sewerage district has sent a letter to the company asking it to stop using the name e-Corganite for fertilizer it’s been selling in Menards stores. Menard is trying to convince shoppers to purchase e-Corganite instead of the district’s Milorganite fertilizer, according to the letter from Joseph Ganzer, a MMSD senior staff attorney.

The letter includes a photo of a Menard store display showing the two products next to each other.

“As you can see, the name, bag design, and label are virtually identical to MMSD’s Milorganite bag,” Ganzer wrote.

So, about that advertising display, well, here it is.

Now, there is quite a bit to say about that ad display. The names of the product are markedly different. While both use “organite” in the names as a reference to the organic material serving as a fertilizer, “mil” and “e-c” are very, very different. These are not homophones. They’re not calling out the same origins. They are flatly different.

On the question of trade dress, sure, both products feature a logo at the top of the bag and then a house and lawn in the imagery. The imagery is basically the same as every fertilizer product, or at least most of them. Complaining about including a home and lawn on a home fertilizer product is, frankly, silly. As to the logos at the top of the bag, well, those sure do seem significantly different as well. Different shapes on the borders combine with the prominent use of the different brand names to draw a firm distinction between the two products.

As does, you know, the fact that Menards is putting them side by side specifically to distinguish them in the advertising. Nobody is looking at that display and drawing any confusion that the two products are the same, related, or from the same origin. The whole point of the display is to draw a distinction between the two.

Yet, despite all of this, the Sewerage District has put the possibility of a lawsuit on its agenda for an upcoming commission meeting.

“The commission action is simply to ensure we may file suit if negotiations break down without having to rush an item to agenda in late summer, especially with August recess,” Ganzer said.

A lawsuit could seek damages, payment of any profits tied to selling e-Corganite and reimbursement of attorney’s fees.

“However, MMSD has had a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Menards and we hope to continue selling our product in Menards stores,” Ganzer wrote in the letter to the retailer. “My hope is that we can come to a resolution of this matter that will allow Menards to produce and market a competing biosolid fertilizer product, while simultaneously eliminating the risk of consumer confusion with MMSD’s product,” the letter said.

There is no confusion. Menards has taken great pains to distinguish its products from those of the city. The only real question left is why Menards would bother agreeing to sell Milorganite at all any longer, given that the Sewerage District appears to want to bite the hand that feeds it.

Filed Under: e-corganite, fertilizer, milorganite, milwaukee, milwaukee metropolitan sewarage district, trademark
Companies: menards

Report On Milwaukee PD Body Cams Show Fewer Complaints, Fewer Stops, But No Reduction In Use Of Force

from the better-than-nothing,-but-how-much-better? dept

The Milwaukee PD is (or was) staring down the barrel of a DOJ consent decree for its unconstitutional policing (mainly stop-and-frisk) and routine deployment of excessive force. This is among the many concerns brought to light last year by the DOJ’s draft report on the department.

The Milwaukee Police Department fails the community and its own officers by not communicating clearly, making too many traffic stops and applying inconsistent standards when disciplining officers, according to a draft of a federal report obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The draft report offers a particularly damning critique of Chief Edward Flynn’s reliance on data, a signature component of his strategy since he took over the department in 2008. Federal evaluators found this approach is having a damaging, if unintended, effect on police-community relations.

“MPD’s attention to crime data has distracted the department from the primary tenet of modern policing: trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve,” the draft report states.

The DOJ also found officers had no idea what community policing entailed, suggesting it only applied to other officers officially designated as community liaisons. The DOJ highlighted the disconnection between the MPD’s statements and actions on community policing using this depressing anecdote.

[T]he Milwaukee Police Department doesn’t have a strategic plan for community policing or a set of guidelines regarding it, the draft report says. And department-wide training on how to implement the strategy has not been offered in years.

Federal evaluators highlighted one example of an attempt at community engagement that fell flat.

Officers held a roll-call, or shift change, outside a Milwaukee school. The stated purpose was to let kids know officers wanted them to have a safe summer. The problem? There were no kids in sight, not even student leaders.

The evaluators noted the event may even have sent the wrong message: That the students on summer break were a problem, and the police planned to deal with them.

This draft may never coalesce into an official report. AG Jeff Sessions’ full-blooded support for law enforcement includes allowing them to be a law unto themselves by killing off DOJ investigations of misbehaving police forces. What’s in the draft report is damning, but it will probably remain a draft in perpetuity.

The PD’s responsiveness to community unhappiness did at least result in one change: a pilot program equipping officers with body cameras. Unfortunately, the cameras appear to have done little to address one community complaint.

Milwaukee police officers with body cameras made fewer stops and were less likely receive a citizen complaint, a new study has found.

But when it comes to use of force — the primary reason residents clamored for officers to use the cameras — it didn’t matter if officers had the cameras or not. They used force at roughly the same rates.

The PD claims this report [PDF] vindicates officers and the department itself, at least in terms of accusations of excessive force deployment. According to the PD, the conclusions make it clear officers have applied force in accordance with policy. But that’s stretching the findings a bit much. It could also mean the deterrent effect one assumes the cameras would have simply hasn’t materialized. Officers may feel footage is at least as likely to clear them as damn them and are willing to roll the dice.

And the dice come pre-loaded: officers are given weeks or months to make statements when accused of deploying excessive force. And while statements from witnesses are recorded, those made by officers are not, allowing them to retcon narratives if body cam footage refuses to align with the official narrative. The body cam footage may be a new twist, but the internal investigation process has been an issue for a long time. It, too, receives criticism in the DOJ’s draft report.

When it comes to officer-involved shootings, the cases reviewed by the Justice Department were inconsistent and the documentation was inadequate.

In both non-fatal shootings and other uses of force, information about officers’ training, prior use of force, complaints and discipline were not included in internal affairs files.

That information also does not seem to have an effect on whether officers are promoted.

One number that did drop in the wake of camera deployment is street stops. Officers wearing cameras performed far fewer stops than officers without them. This suggests the stop-and-frisk program the PD is currently being sued over tends to make the Constitution an afterthought. Documentation of unconstitutional stops isn’t going to help the PD emerge victorious in this lawsuit and the simplest solution is to leave those stops to officers without cameras.

It’s not all negative, however. As noted above, officers with cameras received 50% fewer complaints, suggesting the presence of another “witness” causes both parties to treat each other with a little more respect. Camera use can result in de-escalation, which is something rarely willfully practiced by officers.

But we can’t read too much into that either. The drop in complaints is tracked by a drop in stops, which may suggest the cameras aren’t “civilizing” interactions so much as fewer of them are taking place.

Body cams are band-aids, at best. They can never be a panacea, but they’re far from useless. Things do change when law enforcement operates under additional scrutiny. But they don’t change as quickly or dramatically as proponents of cameras hope they will. A seismic cultural shift is needed in most departments and body cameras will only incrementally increase the speed in which bad apples are expunged from the barrel. But the barrel will still be filled with slightly-less-rotten apples. That being said, cameras should be a requirement as should the presumption that missing footage weighs against a cop’s statements. Just because they’re not working as well as many of us thought they would doesn’t mean it’s without its merits.

Filed Under: body cameras, milwaukee, police, use of force

Game Maker Sues Milwaukee Over Permit Requirement To Make Augmented Reality Games

from the virtually-real dept

One of the great stories in unintentional consequences in technology in the past few years has been Pokemon Go. The augmented reality game application has resulted in all kinds of legal action and consequences, including New York declaring playing it to be a sex offender parole violation, lawsuits stemming from players of the game wandering onto private property and annoying the residents there, and even the DOD releasing guidelines for safe Pokemon hunting.

What Milwaukee did in the wake of this legal activity made less of a media splash, but that appears to be changing. The Midwest city decided to add a city ordinance requiring a permit from any augmented reality game makers that made use of locations within the city. The ordinance reads:

Virtual and location-based augmented reality games are not permitted in Milwaukee County Parks except in those areas designated with a permit for such use by the Director of the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Culture. Permits shall be required before any company may introduce a location-based augmented reality game into the Parks, effective January 1, 2017. The permitting application process is further described on DPRC’s website for companies that create and promote such games. That process shall include an internal review by the DPRC to determine the appropriateness of the application based on site selection, protection of rare flora and fauna, personal safety, and the intensity of game activities on park lands. Game activity shall only occur during standard park hours, unless otherwise authorized by the DPRC Director, who has the authority to designate special events and activities within the Parks outside of the standard operational hours.

If that seems overly broad and restrictive to you, you’re not the only one. The problem with an ordinance like this is it directly inserts the city between the speech rights of an app developer and users of the app. Games of this nature have long ago established themselves as both works of art and speech, meaning free speech protections apply. Prior restraint on free speech has a lofty legal bar over which to vault.

In fact, that is the exact argument made by an app developer, Candy Lab AR, makers of the augmented reality app Texas Rope ‘Em, when it sued Milwaukee.

According to the complaint, the “restriction impinges on Candy Lab AR’s right to free speech by regulating Candy Lab AR’s right to publish its video games that make use of the augmented reality medium. The Ordinance is a prior restraint on Candy Lab AR’s speech, impermissibly restricts Candy Lab AR’s speech because of its content, and is unconstitutionally vague such that Candy Lab AR does not have notice as to what speech must be approved by permit and which it can express without seeking a permit.”

Much like Pokemon, Texas Rope ‘Em has players traveling to real world locations to collect assets — playing cards, in this case — in order to further progress in the game. Augmented reality, though becoming something of an industry buzzword, is actually a long-established technology, used in everything from map applications on phones to games. Candy Labs is asserting that the ordinance requiring a permit prior to the game being used in the city amounts to prior restraint on its speech. And it’s quite difficult to see how that isn’t in fact the case.

We’re talking about public land, after all. Augmented reality makes use of public locations and public data all the time. Broad ordinances looking to curb its use in the face of its rise in popularity face headwinds of all kinds, but it seems the question of its constitutionality may torpedo this one entirely.

Filed Under: augmented reality, milwaukee, permits, pokemon go, texas rope 'em
Companies: candy lab ar

Judge Posner Smacks Around Cabbies For Thinking That Cities Allowing Uber Violates Their 'Property Rights'

from the that's-not-how-this-works dept

It’s no secret that cab companies and many cab drivers don’t much like Uber and Lyft. Competition is tough. And cabs in most cities have survived thanks to artificial limits on competition through medallions and the like. This has always been a stupid, and frequently corrupt, system. For years, before Uber and Lyft came along, people talked about the ridiculousness of artificially limiting competition in this manner, but it was only once those companies came along that the true ridiculousness was made clear. While some forward looking cabbies have embraced these and similar systems, others have been fighting the new reality, often in fairly ridiculous ways. In Milwaukee and Chicago, cab companies sued those cities, arguing that allowing this type of competition amounted to a Fifth Amendment violation, in the form of “taking private property for public use without just compensation.” What private property, you might ask? Well, according to the cab companies, the artificially restricted competition is their property. No, really.

The district courts didn’t buy it, and now that it’s moved up to the 7th Circuit appeals court, Judge Richard Posner isn’t buying it either. In the two decisions — Joe Sanfelipo Cabs v. City of Milwaukee and Illinois Transportation Trade Association v. Chicago, Posner makes quick work of explaining to these folks that the government restricting competition from entering your market isn’t a property right that those who benefit from it get to make claims over (though he does, unfortunately, say that patents are a form of property in dismissing the “absurd” claims from the cabbies):

The plaintiffs? contention that the increased number of permits has taken property away from the plaintiffs without compensation, in violation of the constitutional protection of property, borders on the absurd. Property can take a variety of forms, some of them intangible, such as patents. But a taxi permit confers only a right to operate a taxicab (a right which, in Milwaukee, may be sold). It does not create a right to be an oligopolist, and thus confers no right to exclude others from operating taxis.

Posner notes that if there had been an explicit promise not to change regulations, that might have been one thing, but there was not. Similarly, he admits that the taxi permits are property, but that’s unrelated to the issuing of more permits:

The taxi permits issued by the Milwaukee city government are property, but have not been ?taken,? as they do not confer on the holders a property right in, amounting to control over, all transportation by taxis and taxi substitutes (such as Uber) in Milwaukee.

And then he basically says “welcome to a market economy, cabbies”:

Undoubtedly by freeing up entry into the taxi business the new ordinance will reduce the revenues of individual taxicab companies; that is simply the normal consequence of replacing a cartelized with a competitive market. But the plaintiffs exaggerate when they predict ruination for themselves. Buses and subways and livery services and other taxi substitutes have not destroyed the taxi business; nor has Uber or Lyft or the private automobile or for that matter the bicycle. Taxicabs will not go the way of the horse and buggy? at least for some time.

That’s from the case against Milwaukee. The Chicago ruling is pretty similar:

All seven of the plaintiffs? claims are weak. The first is that allowing the TNPs into the taxi and livery markets has taken away the plaintiffs? property for a public use without compensating them. A variant of such a claim would have merit had the City confiscated taxi medallions, which are the licenses that authorize the use of an automobile as a taxi. Confiscation of the medallions would amount to confiscation of the taxis: no medallion, no right to own a taxi, … though the company might be able to convert the vehicle to another use. Anyway the City is not confiscating any taxi medallions; it is merely exposing the taxicab companies to new competition?competition from Uber and the other TNPs.

**?Property? does not include a right to be free from competition.**A license to operate a coffee shop doesn?t authorize the licensee to enjoin a tea shop from opening. When property consists of a license to operate in a market in a particular way, it does not carry with it a right to be free from competition in that market.

Posner doubles down on just how dumb this argument is by the cab companies:

Taxi medallions authorize the owners to own and operate taxis, not to exclude competing transportation services. The plaintiffs in this case cannot exclude competition from buses or trains or bicycles or liveries or chartered sightseeing vehicles or jitney buses or walking; indeed they cannot exclude competition from taxicab newcomers, for the City has reserved the right (which the plaintiffs don?t challenge) to issue additional tax medallions. Why then should the plaintiffs be allowed to exclude competition from Uber? To this question they offer no answer.

All that the City gives taxi?medallion owners is the right to operate taxicabs in Chicago…. That isn?t a right to exclude competitive providers of transportation.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Posner also shoots down the argument that it’s unfair that Uber gets to operate under a different regulatory regime:

The plaintiffs argue that the City has discriminated against them by failing to subject Uber and the other TNPs to the same rules about licensing and fares (remember that taxi fares are set by the City) that the taxi ordinance subjects the plaintiffs to. That is an anticompetitive argument. Its premise is that every new entrant into a market should be forced to comply with every regulation applicable to incumbents in the market with whom the new entrant will be competing.

Here?s an analogy: Most cities and towns require dogs but not cats to be licensed. There are differences between the animals. Dogs on average are bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than cats, are feared by more people, can give people serious bites, and make a lot of noise outdoors, barking and howling. Feral cats generally are innocuous, and many pet cats are confined indoors. Dog owners, other than those who own cats as well, would like cats to have to be licensed, but do not argue that the failure of government to require that the ?competing? animal be licensed deprives the dog owners of a constitutionally protected property right, or alternatively that it subjects them to unconstitutional discrimination. The plaintiffs in the present case have no stronger argument for requiring that Uber and the other TNPs be subjected to the same licensure scheme as the taxi owners. Just as some people prefer cats to dogs, some people prefer Uber to Yellow Cab, Flash Cab, Checker Cab, et al. They prefer one business model to another. The City wants to encourage this competition, rather than stifle it as urged by the plaintiffs, who are taxi owners.

And, later:

There are enough differences between taxi service and TNP service to justify different regulatory schemes, and the existence of such justification dissolves the plaintiffs? equal protection claim. Different products or services do not as a matter of constitutional law, and indeed of common sense, always require identical regulatory rules…. If all consumers thought the services were identical and that there was therefore no advantage to having a choice between them, TNPs could never have gotten established in Chicago.

There are all sorts of arguments people can make about whether or not companies like Uber and Lyft are good (and I’m a fan of them), but arguing that they’re “taking property” away from cab medallion holders is not a legitimate argument.

Filed Under: car hailing, chicago, competition, medallions, milwaukee, property, property rights, richard posner, ride sharing, taxis

EFF, ACLU And Public Records Laws Team Up To Expose Hidden Stingray Use By The Milwaukee Police Department

from the acronyms-to-the-rescue! dept

The EFF and ACLU — along with the assistance of a very fortuitous public records request by Stingray-tracker extraordinaire Mike Katz-Lacabe — have uncovered more hidden use of IMSI catchers by law enforcement. A criminal prosecution relying on real-time tracking of a suspect’s cell phone has finally led to the admission by Wisconsin police that they used a Stingray to locate defendant Damian Patrick.

The information wasn’t handed over to the court until the EFF, ACLU, and Katz-Lacabe’s FOIAed documents forced the government to admit it used the device. Up until that point, testimony given by officers gave the impression that tracking Patrick down only involved the use of records from his service provider. They also claimed the information pinpointing Patrick’s location in a parked vehicle was just a tip from an “anonymous source.”

As we’ve seen in other cases involving Stingrays, the government did everything it could in this case to hide the fact that it used a Stingray—from the court that issued the pen register/trap and trace order, the court that heard Patrick’s motion to suppress the evidence, and even from Patrick, himself. In police reports, the officers said only that they “‘obtained information’ of Patrick’s location; . . . had ‘prior knowledge’ that Patrick was occupying the vehicle; . . . [and] ‘obtained information from an unknown source’ that Patrick was inside the vehicle at that location.”

This charade continued through an evidentiary hearing, where the judge refused to allow the defense to coax more specific information out of the testifying officer.

[E]ven at an evidentiary hearing where officers admitted to cellphone tracking, they would only acknowledge, cryptically, that they’d received “electronic information” confirming Patrick was in the vehicle. When Patrick’s attorney asked what “electronic information” meant, the officer on the stand would say only that it involved “tracking [a] cell phone.” The judge cut off any further questioning at that point.

And that’s where Katz-Lacabe’s FOIA request played a significant role. Katz-Lacabe had obtained Stingray logs using Wisconsin’s public records laws. Contained in those logs were Stingray deployments matching up to the government’s tracking and locating of Damian Patrick. The government has now begrudgingly admitted as much, via a letter from the DOJ to the court regarding the Milwaukee Police Department’s Stingray deployment.

Per our conversation last week, the government has determined that on October 28, 2013, the Milwaukee Police Department used a cell site simulator to locate Damian Patrick. At this time, we do not intend to seek leave to supplement the record pursuant to Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 10.

The government is still arguing that the MPD complied with the Fourth Amendment, even if it never obtained a search warrant to deploy the Stingray. In any event, the affidavit it submitted (for what appears to be a pen register order, rather than a warrant) did not mention the use of a Stingray. Still, it argues no evidence should be suppressed… because circular reasoning.

[T]he government also argues it didn’t violate the Fourth Amendment in this case because it actually got a warrant—or maybe, in the alternative, the equivalent of a warrant (the police had a warrant to arrest (not search) Patrick and a court order (not a search warrant) to track Patrick’s phone). In a confusing and somewhat circular argument, the government asserts that because it submitted a “sworn affidavit” in support of its request for the pen/trap order, the order must have actually been a search warrant—if it hadn’t been a warrant, then it “wouldn’t have needed a finding of probable cause, which it contained.”

Dumping probable cause into a pen register application is a nice nod to the Fourth Amendment, but it’s not required and it doesn’t turn a court order into a warrant. An arrest warrant is not a search warrant, and it’s likely the MPD would not have been able to serve its arrest warrant without the use of its Stingray-obscuring pen register order. The admission that Stingray surveillance should require the use of a warrant is, again, a nice nod to the Fourth Amendment, but it means nothing if that’s not how the Milwaukee PD actually operates. And, yet again, the long battle to uncover evidence of Stingray tracking makes it clear the PD is hiding this information from judges when applying for court orders and warrants.

Filed Under: imsi catcher, milwaukee, milwaukee pd, police, secrecy, stingrays
Companies: aclu, eff

Milwaukee PD Hid Stingray Usage From Judges, Defendants And Now Congress Members Want Answers From The FBI

from the the-huge-secret-that-isn't dept

More evidence of Stingray obfuscation has been uncovered in Milwaukee. What appeared at first to be a bog standard court order for tracking of a suspect using a cell phone provider’s own “network equipment” actually appears to be something else. The ACLU was already involved in this case, arguing that such tracking by cell phone providers only be available with a warrant. But as it dug into the specifics, it became obvious the tracking had not been performed by the cell provider.

As we read through documentation from the case, however, we began to suspect that something else was going on. It appears that police secretly used a cell site simulator, also known as a Stingray, to track the phone, but successfully concealed that fact from the defense and the court.

Our suspicion was first raised because police initially did not disclose to the defendant that they had located him by tracking his phone, only revealing it at an evidentiary hearing. In reports prepared after the defendant’s arrest, police officers used oddly vague language to explain how they located him: one officer merely wrote that law enforcement had “obtained information” about the defendant’s location; another said that police “obtained information from an unknown source” about where he was. This sounded to us a lot like the kind of intentionally ambiguous language used by police across the country to hide their Stingray use.

Like every other law enforcement agency with a Stingray device in its possession, the Milwaukee PD had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI. This “allowed” it to withhold the information from courts and defendants. But cracks in the NDA appeared and a prolific FOIA filer was able to pry loose documents detailing MPD’s use of cell tower spoofers.

Last fall, privacy activist Mike Katz-Lacabe obtained a list of 579 investigations in which the Milwaukee Police Department used Stingrays. (Here are Mike’s public records request and MPD’s response letter). That previously unpublicized list includes an entry for a case that matches the date and description of this one: an October 28, 2013, apprehension of a “fugitive” “related to [an] FBI roundup.”

The ACLU is now arguing for suppression of the evidence obtained with the Stingray. That isn’t local law enforcement’s only problem, however. The ACLU’s exposure of this secret Stingray use (along with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s coverage) has attracted the attention of people in a better position to demand answers from the FBI: Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner and Sheila Jackson.

In a letter sent to James Comey (who kind of has a lot on his plate already, tbh), the Congress members demand to know why the FBI is actively hiding information about these tracking devices from the public.

The FBI’s stated reason for secrecy was that disclosing the existence of the capabilities may allow “the subject of investigation wherein this equipment/technology is used to employ countermeasures to avoid detection by law enforcement.” But certainly not lost on the FBI was the fact that secrecy shields the technology from debate and inevitable controversy. Courts could not review its constitutionality. The public could not debate the merits and costs of the technology and what limitations might be appropriate. While this type of secrecy may be appropriate in the national security context, it is entirely inappropriate in the context of law enforcement where citizens have the constitutional right to challenge the government’s evidence against them

We are not prejudging the outcome of the debate over the use of Stingray technology, but we categorically denounce the use of nondisclosure agreements that limit the ability of the public and of courts to debate the merits of the technology and to implement limits they may deem appropriate.

The letter acknowledges that the FBI has recently backed away from supporting its own NDAs. The FBI’s last statement on the matter basically said the NDAs should not be read as saying exactly what they say: that information about Stingray usage should be hidden from everyone, if possible. It also expressed mild disbelief that the agreements were being taken so literally. The disingenuous and self-serving nature of this walkback is highlighted in the letter.

This, however, is at odds with the explicit language of the NDA which precludes disclosure to the public in any manner “including but not limited to: in press releases, in court documents, during judicial hearings, or during other public forums or proceedings.” The agreement, in fact, goes much further and states that the Milwaukee Police Department should seek FBI permission before responding to court ordered disclosures and should be prepared to dismiss cases at the FBI’s request if necessary to protect against disclosure.

The FBI has until March 25th to answer the following questions:

• Does the FBI consider state and local law enforcement to be bound by the NDAs related to the use of cell-site simulators? • Has the FBI ever requested that a law enforcement agency dismiss a case to maintain the secrecy of law enforcement technology? • How many NDAs has the FBI signed with state and local law enforcement agencies regarding cell-site simulators? • Are there other technologies for which the FBI demands state and local law enforcement sign an NDA? • Does the FBI continue to believe that NDAs are appropriate? • Would the FBI ever condone perjury to Congress or judges to protect the existence of technology?

The answers should be illuminating — if the public is actually allowed to see the responses. The FBI may still try to claim this super-secret technology that everyone knows about can’t be discussed in an open forum. And I’m certain the agency will claim it would not condone perjury even though its NDAs strongly hint this would be preferable to exposing “sensitive” law enforcement methods.

Filed Under: congress, courts, evidence, fbi, imsi catcher, judges, milwaukee, police, stingray