suspension – Techdirt (original) (raw)

The Oversight Board's Decision On Facebook's Trump Ban Is Just Not That Important

from the undue-ado dept

Today is Facebook Oversight Board Hysteria Day, because today is the day that the Facebook Oversight Board has rendered its decision about Facebook’s suspension of Donald Trump. And it has met the moment with an appropriately dull decision, dripping in pedantic reasonableness, that is largely consistent with our Copia Institute recommendation.

If you remember, we were hesitant about submitting a comment at all. And the reaction to the Board’s decision bears out why. People keep reacting as though it is some big, monumental, important decision, when, in actual fact, it isn’t at all. In the big scheme of things, it’s still just a private company being advised by its private advisory board on how to run its business, nothing more. As it is, Trump himself is still on the Internet ? it’s not like Facebook actually had the power to silence him. We need to be worried about when there actually is power to silence people, and undue concern about Facebook’s moderation practices only distracts us from them. Or, worse, leads people to try to create actual law that will end up having the effect of giving others the legal power to suppress expressive freedom.

So our pride here is necessarily muted, because ultimately this decision just isn’t that big a deal. Still, as a purely internal advisory decision, one intended to help the company act more consistently in the interests of its potential user base, it does seem to be a good one given how it hews to our key points.

First, we made the observation that then-President Trump’s use of his Facebook account threatened real, imminent harm. We did, however, emphasize the point that it was generally better to try not to delete speech (or speakers). Nevertheless, sometimes it might need to be done, and in those cases it should be done “with reluctance and only limited, specific, identifiable, and objective criteria to justify the exception.” There might not ultimately be a single correct decision, we wrote, for whether speech should be left up or taken down. “[I]n the end the best decision may have little to do with the actual choice that results but rather the process used to get there.”

And this sort of reasoning is basically at the heart of the Board’s decision: Trump’s posts were serious enough to justify a sanction, including a suspension, but imposing the indefinite suspension appeared to be unacceptably arbitrary. Per the Board, Facebook needs to make these sorts of decisions consistently and transparently from here on out.

On January 6, Facebook?s decision to impose restrictions on Mr. Trump?s accounts was justified. The posts in question violated the rules of Facebook and Instagram that prohibit support or praise of violating events, including the riot that was then underway at the U.S. Capitol. Given the seriousness of the violations and the ongoing risk of violence, Facebook was justified in imposing account-level restrictions and extending those restrictions on January 7. However, it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose an indefinite suspension. Facebook did not follow a clear published procedure in this case. Facebook?s normal account-level penalties for violations of its rules are to impose either a time-limited suspension or to permanently disable the user?s account. The Board finds that it is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored.

The Board has given Facebook six months to re-evaluate the suspension in accordance with clear rules.

If Facebook determines that Mr. Trump?s accounts should be restored, Facebook should apply its rules to that decision, including any modifications made pursuant to the policy recommendations below. Also, if Facebook determines to return him to the platform, it must address any further violations promptly and in accordance with its established content policies.

As for what those rules should be, the Board also made a few recommendations. First, it noted that “political leader” versus “influential user” is not always a meaningful distinction. Indeed, we had noted that Trump’s position cut both ways: as a political leader, there was public benefit to knowing what he had to say. On the other hand, that position also gave his posts greater ability to do harm. The Board for its part noted that context will matter; while the rules should ideally be the same for everyone, since the impact won’t be, it is ok for Facebook to take into account the specific probability of imminent harm in making its decisions.

The Board believes that it is not always useful to draw a firm distinction between political leaders and other influential users. It is important to recognize that other users with large audiences can also contribute to serious risks of harm. The same rules should apply to all users of the platform; but context matters when assessing issues of causality and the probability and imminence of harm. What is important is the degree of influence that a user has over other users.

In general, the Board cited to general principles of human rights law, and specifically the Rabat Plan of Action “to assess the capacity of speech to create a serious risk of inciting discrimination, violence, or other lawless action.” As for how long suspensions should generally last, they should be long enough to “deter misconduct and may, in appropriate cases, include account or page deletion.” Facebook is therefore free to re-impose Trump’s suspension as it re-evaluates it, if it feels it remains warranted. It just needs to do so in a more transparent way that would be scalable to other similar situations. As it summarized:

Facebook should publicly explain the rules that it uses when it imposes account-level sanctions against influential users. These rules should ensure that when Facebook imposes a time-limited suspension on the account of an influential user to reduce the risk of significant harm, it will assess whether the risk has receded before the suspension ends. If Facebook identifies that the user poses a serious risk of inciting imminent violence, discrimination or other lawless action at that time, another time-bound suspension should be imposed when such measures are necessary to protect public safety and proportionate to the risk. The Board noted that heads of state and other high officials of government can have a greater power to cause harm than other people. If a head of state or high government official has repeatedly posted messages that pose a risk of harm under international human rights norms, Facebook should suspend the account for a period sufficient to protect against imminent harm. Suspension periods should be long enough to deter misconduct and may, in appropriate cases, include account or page deletion.

As we suggested in our comment, the right policy choices for Facebook to make boil down to the ones that best make Facebook the community it wants to be. At its core, that’s what the Board’s decision is intended to help with: point out where it appears Facebook has fallen short of its own espoused ideals, and help it get back on track in the future.

Which is, overall, a good thing. It just isn’t, as so many critics keep complaining, everything. The Internet is far more than just Facebook, no matter what Trump or his friends think. And there are far more important things for those of us who care about preserving online expression to give our attention to than this.

Filed Under: appeals, donald trump, permanent suspension, policies, rules, suspension
Companies: facebook, oversight board

How My High School Destroyed An Immigrant Kid's Life Because He Drew The School's Mascot

from the blue-devils dept

Late last year, Pro Publica and the NY Times published an incredible, long and infuriating article, mostly about how a high school in NY destroyed an immigrant student’s life, due to a mixture of moral panics about “MS-13” gang activity (whipped up by the federal government), over-aggressive policing within schools, and deeply troubling decisions by ICE. The story touches on a number of things that we normally write about — and I’ve been stewing over writing a post for weeks. The topics herein are most frequently covered on this site by Tim Cushing, rather than me. But I took this article, because the high school at the center of the article, Huntington High School in Suffolk County, New York, is the high school I attended. It’s the high school I went to for 4 years, and it’s the high school where I gave a speech at graduation on the same football field you can see in one of the photos used to illustrate the story.

Everything about the article is infuriating in so many ways, that it’s been difficult to figure out where to even start, but if we have to start someplace, let’s start with this: the rise of embedding police into schools — so-called School Resource Officers (SROs), who are employed by the local police, but whose “beat” is a school. Those officers report to the local police department and not the school, and can, and frequently do, have different priorities. We’ve long raised concerns about the increased policing of schools. Traditionally, schools handled their own disciplinary matters directly, within the school, with a focus on what was best for the learning environment of the students. They were not always good at this, but adding in an element where the end result could be criminal charges has always seemed misguided, and never more so than in this particular story and the case of “Alex” in the news story.

As the article notes, this trend of putting police in schools came about as a result of the original “famous” school shooting, the one in Columbine, which resulted in a variety of moral panics:

CONGRESS FIRST PROVIDED funding to bring full-time police officers into schools after the 1999 Columbine shooting. The number of these resource officers has doubled in the last decade, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers. Some 80 percent of high schools with more than 1,000 students have them. Schools with large populations of black and Latino students are more likely to have a resource officer than schools that are majority white. After the school shooting this year in Parkland, Florida, Trump called for police officers on every campus.

The position of school resource officer is a hybrid of conflicting roles: counselor, teacher and cop. ?You have to have a person who can be caring and loving, but on the flip of a switch, turn into a law-enforcement warrior,? said Mac Hardy, a spokesman for the resource officers association.

That was a few years after I had graduated from the school. We had security guards, but they were not actually police. They didn’t carry guns. They didn’t have the power to arrest people. And they certainly didn’t write up secret reports and send them to ICE leading to the deportation of students. But, apparently, we live in different times.

The second disturbing moral panic in the story is around gang activity, and specifically worries about MS-13.

Huntington High administrators say there has never been any MS-13 presence at the school. Unlike a number of other Long Island high schools, Huntington High says nothing about gang activity on its website; instead it offers guidance on throwing snowballs (?dangerous?) and keeping the hallways clear (?essential?).

That sounds about right. I’m sure there is some gang activity and some violence among students at the school. There was when I was there. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I do remember when I was there being told that Huntington had been selected for some study because the population there was a pretty close match to the population diversity of the entire US. You had some rich families, some poor, and plenty of middle class. You had kids of every color and nationality. There were all sorts of groupings. The first time I saw a handgun was when a student (who I barely knew) was showing it off in his locker. There were fights and localized gangs, but hardly anything that crazy. It really doesn’t sound like that much has changed. But, with the President and others continually exaggerating the idea of “MS-13 gangs,” some police and some schools seem to have bought into the moral panic — including the police sent to high schools. And even though some have suggested not going overboard with these things, that kind of nuance appears to have gotten lost.

In Suffolk County, although resource officers have been in the schools for two decades, their roles are expanding. In 2017, the Police Department sent officers into Huntington High and other schools to train administrators and teachers to identify gang members. The presentations focused on items like plastic rosaries, blue bandannas, anything with horns and the numbers 504 and 503, written in notebooks or on hands. One slide, which was used in community presentations, featured a group of young men holding up the Salvadoran flag at a Central American pride parade.

Some police officers cautioned that these symbols could also mean a student was being pressured to join or just trying to look cool, and that symbols can have multiple meanings. The same way metal-heads might draw a pentagram, or wannabe punks might draw the anarchy sign (a letter A inside a circle), some students might draw MS-13 symbols, unaware that adults could take those doodles as proof of membership. One law-enforcement officer told me about being called in by a Long Island school after a student drew the signs for both MS-13 and a rival Mexican gang in his notebook. The officer explained that a real gang member would not draw signs of a gang he wasn?t a member of ? the drawings were not incriminating, just dumb. But not all officers were as clear about these nuances.

In the case of Alex, in this story, these kinds of warnings apparently created the problem. His problems started… because he wore some blue sneakers and a security guard thought it was a gang symbol:

Alex knew that MS-13 claimed Nike Cortez shoes and blue bandannas, so he made sure to avoid them. In the spring of 2017, school security guards stopped him as he walked down the hall wearing bright blue sneakers that his mother picked out for him as a gift for accompanying her to an immigration appointment in Queens. They said the blue of the shoes was the color of MS-13. They also searched Alex?s bag, on which he had written ?504,? and found that he had doodled the name of his Honduran hometown and a devil with horns. Without explaining why, the security guards photographed the drawings before giving Alex his books back. When Alex got home that day, he buried the shoes in a closet and didn?t wear them again, even on weekends.

Even trying not to wear anything that looked like a gang member was interpreted… as being a gang member:

He stopped wearing his Honduran sports jerseys and his bracelet with the colors of the flag. He avoided talking to anyone he didn?t already know well. He and his two best friends decided it was safest to wear all black to school to avoid being tagged as gang members. But when they showed up in their matching outfits, the security guards said they couldn?t dress like that because it looked as if they were trying to start a gang.

Oh, and about that “devil” drawing mentioned above. That apparently was a key part of where everything went wrong for Alex. Except… the freaking school mascot is the “Blue Devil” and has been since at least well before I went to the school. And that’s what the drawing was:

A few weeks later, on May 4, 2017, Alex was daydreaming as his algebra teacher introduced yet another indecipherable math operation. Without thinking, he began doodling in pencil on the school calculator he was using. When the bell rang, he handed it back in. That afternoon, security staff pulled Alex out of English class and took him to the office of Brenden Cusack, the principal. When Alex walked in, he saw the calculator on Cusack?s desk. Through an interpreter, Cusack asked Alex if he had drawn the number 504 on the case, and Alex said he had. Then Cusack produced the security guard?s photos of Alex?s drawing of devil horns and told him that the doodles signified MS-13.

Alex told me he would never have written on a wall or desk in this American school, and he knew it was wrong to draw on the school-issued calculator, but he was surprised to be taken to the principal for something he saw as a form of fidgeting. He tried to defend himself; the devil was the school mascot, after all, and 504 was the Honduras country code. ?For the police, it?s a gang thing, but for us, it?s about being proud of your country,? he later told me. To Cusack, Alex?s distinctions didn?t seem to matter. The principal signed an incident report that said Alex had been caught in possession of ?gang paraphernalia? and had been ?defacing school property with gang signs.? Alex said that Cusack told him that he would be suspended for three days and that the doodles would be reported to Fiorillo.

Indeed, Alex appears to have been proud to show off his school spirit:

When his parents had extra money, he asked for a T-shirt, sweatshirt or backpack emblazoned with Huntington High?s name and its mascot, the blue devil with horns.

But combine all of this and you end up with him being deported as a supposed MS-13 member. First, as mentioned above, he was suspended for three days over this moral panic concerning his doodling of the school mascot. Then, apparently, the local school police officer, Andrew Fiorillo, was given the “incident report” about this, leading him to share that with his police department… which later (of course) shared the information with ICE.

It is most likely that as Alex sat at home during his suspension, Fiorillo received word of the doodling incident. While Fiorillo told me he didn?t remember details about Alex?s case, Huntington High has a policy of calling him in as soon as a staff member sees something that could be gang-related, according to a former principal, Carmela Leonardi, who retired in 2015. ?The minute you see a gang sign, you need to intervene,? she said. ?First, we?d try to get Drew involved, and say, ?Have you seen this kid outside of the school talking to people?? Because sometimes you do that in your notebook because you?re trying to seem cool, or because you?re a little idiot.?

Once Fiorillo knew about Alex?s drawings, he would have had to fill out a form and send the information on to the department?s criminal-intelligence unit. Although Suffolk County school resource officers are allowed to use their judgment about reporting infractions like marijuana possession or writing on school walls, their 2017 handbook requires them to write up gang activity, no matter how trivial. School resource officers are not detectives, and they don?t generally go further than passing on what they are told and observe themselves, according to Gerard Gigante, Suffolk County?s chief of detectives.

There’s a lot more in the story, but a few months later, out of the blue, ICE showed up at his house and detained him. He had no idea why, but that was the last time he saw his home in Huntington.

… when the ICE agents came to Alex?s house on June 14, 2017, he was shocked into silence. It was only when they were far from Huntington, passing through unfamiliar, rundown Long Island towns, that he was able to get out the words to ask why he was being arrested. Alex says the agent first asked him to guess, and then told him, ?We received a report a while ago from the school that you were a gang member, and that?s why.? Behind the tinted windows, his confusion resolved into fear for himself and his parents. ?I felt so bad,? he said, ?because I was thinking that my mom and dad were going to suffer.?

The article details how everyone just kept passing the buck, rather than taking responsibility for this weird game of disciplinary telephone, where a doodle of the school mascot eventually leads to deportation:

When I asked Fiorillo if he had known that his information was shared with ICE, he demurred. ?I can?t speak to what they do, they being a federal government agency,? he said. ?I don?t work with them.? Testimony at an immigration hearing by another Suffolk County school resource officer, George Politis of Brentwood High, whose information collected in school was found in ICE memos, shed some light on the process. Asked what happened after he wrote a report, he said: ?It?s submitted, and then I don?t know how it?s disseminated from there. We enter it on a computer, and then it goes to whoever wants to read it within the department.?

Meanwhile, the high school — my freaking high school — did nothing to help. In fact, they appeared to actively block any attempt to help, with the school principal claiming they couldn’t help for privacy reasons:

Palacios asked his client?s teachers for letters of support. But the teachers refused, saying the administration wouldn?t allow it. Alex?s father and the parents of many of the other detained Huntington students also approached their children?s teachers for letters and were also turned down. Cusack, the principal, told me he had been caught off guard by the requests and worried that having staff write about students to third parties would violate students? privacy rights.

The article notes that the ACLU sued over a large number of similar situations (though, because Alex had just turned 19, and was no longer considered a minor, his case was not included). The result of that lawsuit showed that this combination of moral panics, school police officers, and ICE gone nuts, meant a bunch of kids being detained (and some deported) over little more than random accusations that some of them might have done something vaguely gang like.

The lead case involved a Brentwood High student, Noel (his middle name), who ICE said was dangerous because he had been seen with suspected MS-13 members and had written the number 503 in a school notebook. ICE labeled Noel a ?gang member? when he was detained, then downgraded him to a ?probable member? and finally, on the day of his hearing, settled on calling him a person identified by a school resource officer as ?associated? with the gang. In an immigration courthouse in lower Manhattan, Judge Aviva Poczter ordered Noel?s immediate release, noting that 503 is a country code. ?I think this is slim, slim evidence on which to base the continuing detention of an unaccompanied child,? Poczter said.

In other hearings, ICE presented evidence pulled from the Suffolk Police Department?s gang database. Again and again, judges found that the material ? a student cited for a gang tattoo who didn?t have a tattoo; a photo of a group of suspected gang members that did not include the student in question ? was far too weak or inaccurate to detain the students. In the cases involving Huntington students, the ?Huntington High resource officer? kept coming up. In one case, he reported that one student was ?found to be in possession of MS-13 drawings in his school work.? In another, he reported that a student had written ?MS13? on his arm. Ultimately, 30 of the 32 teenagers in the ACLU lawsuit were freed, including Palacios? client, who returned to school.

The article goes on and on with much more detail, and background about Alex and his family — and how a judge in his asylum case ignored the (lack of) evidence and ordered him deported. And then, the government kept pressuring him not to fight deportation, basically making his life a living hell until he felt he had no choice but to accept deportation.

All because he’d drawn the freaking school mascot. And because we’ve put police where they don’t belong. And because of moral panics over “gang violence” that is not nearly as big a problem as gets hyped up by the media… and the President of the United States (for a good backgrounder on the actual threats of MS-13, I recommend the thorough This American Life episode, which shows (1) that MS-13 is much smaller than people claim, (2) that the violence is mostly directed at other immigrant kids, (3) that the police who claim to be so concerned about MS-13 seem to mostly ignore or deny actual reports of MS-13 violence when it involves immigrant kids, and (4) that the police only really care in the rare instances when it impacts white, American-born people).

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is celebrating this program of detaining and deporting kids who probably haven’t done anything wrong as they continue to expand it:

But across Long Island, immigrant students who get in trouble for minor offenses still risk the same chain of overreactions that led to Alex?s deportation. In August 2018, the school district for Bellport High banned students from drawing devil horns and the numbers 503 and 504, or posting them on their private social-media pages. By December, the ACLU identified about 20 new minors around the country arrested by ICE on shaky gang claims, and it sued to force ICE to reveal the total number of minors who have been detained. ICE now says Operation Matador will be permanent on Long Island. This fall, the initiative won an annual award from the Department of Homeland Security for best new ICE program.

After the article came out, the school district posted a letter in response, which calls the details of the article “upsetting,” but hardly seems to suggest that the school is going through any serious self-reflection of its role in all of this:

While it would be simple to argue statements and context in numerous places within the article, it does not change the fact that the events, as presented, are beyond upsetting. We deeply regret the harm faced by any family in our community who has been separated from a child. In that light, systems and processes at the high school will be reviewed thoroughly in an effort to maintain a safe haven, as well as the happiness and well-being of all students. We could not ask for a more caring and compassionate group of school staff members, who routinely place the needs of children before their own.

And while it says that it will do this “thorough” review, the letter, at the same time, suggests only minor modifications to having a police officer in the school:

We have enjoyed a productive working relationship with the area?s SRO through the years. He has helped and guided numerous students and families in our district and others. In light of current national and local concerns, however, we believe that we must advocate for an additional layer of organization addressing the relationship between schools districts and the Police Department. This can be accomplished through formulation of a Memorandum of Understanding. It is our firm belief that such an agreement would establish formal procedural guidelines associated with the SRO position, as well as with information flow and restrictions. It is our additional belief that this would not only provide guidance and protection for schools, school staff and students, but for the SRO?s and Department as well.

That seems like too little too late.

Honestly, so much of the article is a demonstration of how little things snowball and overreactions create horrific situations. Putting police in schools was never a good idea — but extra fear about high profile school shootings encouraged doing that as a “solution” that isn’t much of a solution (how often have you heard about SROs stopping a school shooting?). The panic over MS-13 and “gangs” has resulted in people freaking out over anything they perceive as a gang indicator. In many ways, it actually reminds me of the “Satanic Panic” from back in the 1980s, where adults were freaking out about “the kids” somehow being evil, and freaking out over even the slightest “evidence” to support their own delusions.

It is deeply disturbing that this happens anywhere, but the fact that I’m so familiar with this particular school makes it that much more painful to me, personally. That school, its teachers and other students, are certainly a big part of who I am today. And today I’m ashamed that that very same school had any role in this travesty, completely ruining a kid’s life because he had a little school spirit (likely much more school spirit than I ever had).

While writing this, I was trying to recall the details of the graduation speech I gave 25 years ago at Huntington High School. It’s possible that the printed out text is in a box somewhere at my parents’ house — which is still mere blocks away from the school. I don’t remember it exactly, but I do recall, with tremendous clarity, that the key theme was about learning how to keep things in perspective, and about not getting carried away, especially based on trends or peer pressure. It probably was not a very good speech (a friend at the time noted that the other speaker that day gave a “reach for the clouds” message, while mine was a “but keep your feet planted on the ground” kind of speech). However, it certainly seems that many, many people these days could gain from internalizing that message — including at the very high school I went to.

Filed Under: blue devil, gangs, high school, ice, immigration, mascot, moral panic, ms-13, police, refugees, school resource officers, sro, suffolk county police, suspension
Companies: huntington high school

Twitter Suspends Popehat For Writing About Violent Threats He Received From Another Twitter User

from the wait-what? dept

Twitter has gotten a lot of flack over the years for how it responds to threats and abuse online — much of it deserved. The company insists that it’s gotten much better about this, and now responds much more quickly to inappropriate threats or abuse online. But doing so is often difficult and bound to lead to some really bad decisions. Like one that just happened. Ken White’s Popehat account has been temporarily suspended from Twitter. Why? Because he posted a threat he had received from someone else on Twitter to Twitter. Update: after this story started getting some attention, Twitter reversed the suspension and publicly apologized, saying that it was an error.

If you’re a regular Techdirt reader, I’m sure you’re familiar with Ken “Popehat” White, the blogging lawyer who covers a lot of the same stuff we do, mainly in the free speech realm. Ken has also, a few times, represented us in response to silly legal threats we’ve received. If you’re a Twitter user, you may also be aware that Ken is a prolific and masterful user of Twitter often commenting on the news of the day. He also uses Twitter to do some law ‘splaining and to call out bullies and trolls. He’s pretty good at it. One such recent bully was a Texas lawyer named Jason L. Van Dyke. We actually wrote about Jason a few years ago when he tried to sue the Tor Project, because some revenge porn site used Tor. We didn’t hear much about him until a few months ago. It seems that, somehow, Van Dyke was offered a job as an assistant district attorney in Victoria County. For unclear reasons, that job offer was pulled. Van Dyke was not happy. He proceeds to sue the DA for pulling the job offer.

In the midst of all this, another Twitter user, Asher Langton — who has an uncanny ability to sniff out people online who are not exactly what they claim to be — pointing out that it certainly looked like there were very strong similarities between Van Dyke and someone claiming to be a lawyer trolling for business on the white supremacist site Stormfront. There’s a fair amount of back and forth between Langton and Van Dyke and then a direct threat from Van Dyke to knock out Langton’s teeth. At one point there was this bizarre drama in which Van Dyke gave Langton 24 hours to promise to stop talking about him or promising to come to Langton and punch out his teeth.

24 hours passed and nothing happened.

Anyway… around this point, Ken White steps in and writes up quite the post about Jason L. Van Dyke. It’s a good, well researched, thorough and detailed post as you might expect. In response, Van Dyke trains his anger on Ken, and starts tweeting shit about Ken and making similar threats to those he made to Langton (though a bunch of those tweets now appear to have been deleted).

There were other tweets that certainly appeared to imply potential violence against Ken including a meme involving a bullet, that Van Dyke posted to Ken’s Facebook thread about one of his posts:

Ken then posts a second story about being sent a truly pathetic “glitterbomb” by someone claiming to be a supporter of Van Dyke’s… and then goes on to expose someone who commented about Van Dyke on the earlier post, making Van Dyke out to be some sort of bad ass (or, as Ken puts it “a badass [as] might be imagined by a lonely 14-year-old.”) Ken tracks down some evidence suggesting that the comment came from Van Dyke himself or someone working with him (though, very likely Van Dyke himself).

Following that post, Van Dyke sent Ken this email:

If you can’t read that, it says:

White–

You listen to me, and you listen good. This ends now and here is how it’s going to work. I have deleted my Twitter account because, frankly, I have better things to do than deal with you and your followers. I am going to make you a one-time offer and you get to choose.

1. I am willing to walk away. Right here. Right now. You remove the libelous blog posts about me and make whatever excuse you want. I really don’t care what it is. You will never see or hear from me ever again. We both go about our lives. 2. You can do what I think you are more than likely to do anyway and simple add this e-mail to your blog post. If you d that, I want to make it very clear what is going to happen. I have a picture of you. I am going to put it on my mirror at home, near my desk, and in my truck. My pure and absolute hatred for you will be unprecedented. My hatred for you will serve as a motivation for me to build an entirely new business and to earn enough money so that, one day, I will be able to make your life such an absolute living hell that I’ll be able to hurt you without so much as laying a hand on you. I will make you so miserable and treat you with such extreme and completely unprecedented cruelly that you’ll either kill yourself or move yourself and your family to the most remote part of the world you can afford to escape my wrath. The bottom line is that I will not forget you and that there will be retribution. It may take me a year. It may take me 20 years. I may get you on my first try. I may get you on my seventeenth try. But I will never stop.

You will take this offer today or the only thing you will have to know is that, sooner or later, I will come for you.

Jason L. Van Dyke Attorney & Counselor at Law

So, nice guy, right? Ken posted that email to his blog and to Twitter, noting: “I don’t respond well to threats. It’s kind of a thing. Sorry, Jason.”

And… Twitter suspends Ken’s Popehat account for 12 hours. Ken’s. Not Jason’s. Not the guy doing the threatening. The guy posting about being threatened. It’s Twitter’s “cool off” suspension, in which your account is still live, but you can’t tweet, retweet or like other tweets for 12 hours.

Having seen stuff like this before, I’m pretty sure I know why Twitter did this, even if it’s stupid. Twitter’s terms of service and “rules” which are incorporated into the terms says that you cannot share private information. In the past I’ve seen similar suspensions when people post someone else’s email that includes phone numbers/addresses and the like. Indeed in a post that Ken just put up on his own blog, Twitter confirms that it’s the posting of someone else’s info that got him into trouble, though Ken points out that Twitter itself says that it will take context into account. And if you’re taking context into account, you have to wonder how it is that Ken gets suspended for highlighting the guy who threatened him, while the actual threatener remains free to post at will.

I asked Ken for a comment on the situation, and he told me:

Twitter is perfectly in its rights to do this. Twitter is a private company with its own free speech and free association rights. I’ve got no right to post there if they don’t want me to post there.

But I think most reasonable people would see this as egregiously stupid, and a sign of a recurrent problem — the systems that social media platforms put in place to deal with harassment are often dumb, and seem to catch people responding to threats and abuse as often as they catch the abuse itself.

Meanwhile, I’m not deleting the tweet. I wrote about a lawyer and damn-near-active-prosecutor who threatened people who writing about him, and he threatened me. When I wrote more, he threatened more, including that freakish email. That’s newsworthy, and I’m not taking it down.

Indeed. We’ve talked many times about the problems of demanding that platforms police behavior. It’s one of those things that seems easy, until you realize just how tricky it is. A trust and safety team dropping in on Ken’s conversations wouldn’t have the relevant background and is likely to rush through and make a bad decision. So be careful what you wish for when you say platforms should be policing content. They’re probably not up to the task.

Filed Under: jason l. van dyke, jason lee van dyke, jason van dyke, ken white, popehat, privacy, private info, suspension, threats, trust and safety
Companies: twitter

Leading DarkNet Market Agora Temporarily Suspends Service Over Tor Vulnerability Concerns

from the here-come-the-fuzz dept

Thu, Aug 27th 2015 10:41am - Karl Bode

As the government continues to play Whac-a-Mole with darknet drug bazaars, one of the Silk Road’s leading darknet market replacements says it has temporarily suspended service over Tor vulnerability concerns. In an encrypted post to the site’s buyers and dealers (copied over to PasteBin and over at the /r/darknetmarkets subReddit), Agora’s administrators say the darknet market is nervous about law enforcement’s ability to take advantage of recent Tor vulnerabilities, and as such are pulling the market offline for an undisclosed amount of time to protect the site:

“Recently research had come that shed some light on vulnerabilities in Tor Hidden Services protocol which could help to deanonymize server locations. Most of the new and previously known methods do require substantial resources to be executed, but the new research shows that the amount of resources could be much lower than expected, and in our case we do believe we have interested parties who possess such resources. We have a solution in the works which will require big changes into our software stack which we believe will mitigate such problems, but unfortunately it will take time to implement.”

While the post doesn’t specify which Tor vulnerability the market’s responding to, a paper recently published by researchers from Qatar University and MIT (pdf) argued that it was possible to use a Tor vulnerability to identify Tor hidden services with as much as 88% accuracy. Tor director Roger Dingledine responded to these findings in a blog post back in July. Dingledine downplayed the ability of the vulnerability to be exploited in the wild, while pointing out that researchers have long over-estimated the ease of such fingerprinting methods in the real world.

To succeed in the fingerprinting process, the attacker needs to control the Tor entry point for the server hosting the hidden service, and have previously collected unique network identifiers allowing for the fingerprinting for that particular service. Still, Agora itself strongly hints that they’ve seen some (presumably law enforcement) behavior in the wild already attempting to take advantage of the vulnerability, and wasn’t willing to take the risk:

“…We have recently been discovering suspicious activity around our servers which led us to believe that some of the attacks described in the research could be going on and we decided to move servers once again, however this is only a temporary solution. At this point, while we don’t have a solution ready it would be unsafe to keep our users using the service, since they would be in jeopardy. Thus, and to our great sadness we have to take the market offline for a while, until we can develop a better solution. This is the best course of action for everyone involved.”

Agora’s decision to forgo possible revenue for the sake of OPSEC (operational security) resulted in some Reddit posters praising Agora for its “iron testicles”. The outfit does appear to be slowly paying funds back to dealers and users (funds for DarkNet markets are usually held in escrow until deals are completed), but payments appear to be taking 24 to 48 hours for Agora to process. Meanwhile, admins for other darknet markets, like Middle Earth, have subsequently proclaimed that they have already covered their bases and aren’t worried about the vulnerability:

“We noticed the strange happenings early on. We KNOW that TOR devs are the best of the best. This is only theoretical paper from MIT students. TOR updates daily on a development level, they would fix any vulnerabilities from any theoretical paper. Emphasis: Theoretical Paper, Not Successful Tests. We have covered all bases.”

While the Agora shutdown combined with dropping Bitcoin value (due to the potential forking of currency development by those concerned about scalability) have Bitcoin advocates and Darknet market users sweating a bit, Agora’s shutdown would seem to be only a temporarily bump in the road to future darknet opsec skirmishes. Agora already had survived last November’s Operation Onymous, which took down Silk Road 2 and 400 other websites. It’s still debated whether those seizures were thanks to a Tor vulnerability or old-fashioned detective work (law enforcement obviously isn’t keen on being illuminating).

Even if Agora doesn’t return, there’s a half-dozen or more already established Darknet markets happy to fill the void and satiate the globe’s inexhaustible supply of drug buyers and dealers, those entertained by the endless game of opsec cat and mouse, and the government’s insatiable need to fill its mole-whacking quota.

Filed Under: bitcoin, dark market, security, suspension, tor, vulnerability
Companies: agora

School, Police Chief Must Face Lawsuit Brought By Student Suspended For 10 Days For Tweeting 'Actually, Yes'

from the farcical-behavior-could-result-in-real-damages dept

Two words, delivered in jest, are now the focus of a civil rights lawsuit filed by a suspended student against his former school and, incredibly, the local police chief. There were a million ways this debacle could have been avoided, but the school district has decided doubling-down on its stupidity was the only way out of the mess it chose to create. After all, it won’t lose much more than a bit of its reputation. If the plaintiff wins, it’s taxpayers who will be footing the bill for the school’s self-destructive, massively stupid overreaction.

Here’s where it all began:

In February 2014, [Reid] Sagehorn was an honor student at Rogers High School, a member of the National Honor Society, and a four-time recipient of the Scholastic Achievement Award. He was a varsity letterman in football, basketball, and baseball, as well as the named captain of the basketball team in 2012 and both the football and basketball teams in 2013. Prior to February 2014, Sagehorn had never been subject to any disciplinary actions by Rogers High School, aside from a single parking ticket. On October 11, 2013, he was admitted to North Dakota State University (“NDSU”), pending completion of all work for any remaining courses taken prior to his enrollment.

Stellar student, but he went two words too far.

On January 26, 2014, someone anonymously posted on a website titled “Roger confessions” the following: “did @R_Sagehorn3 actually make out with [name of female teacher at Rogers High School]?” Sagehorn did not create or maintain the “Roger confessions” website. In response, Sagehorn posted “actually yes,” which he intended to be taken in jest. The post was made the same day, outside of school hours and not on school grounds. Sagehorn was not at a school-sponsored event at the time he made his post, nor did he use any school property to make the post.

A non-event. Teens will be teens. Not school-related in any way but the use of a teacher’s name. No one’s business but the jokesters amusing themselves with a little off-color banter. But, if any rational behavior had followed this non-incident, we wouldn’t be quoting parts of a legal filing.

Roughly a week later, some “helpful” parent started the stupid ball rolling by contacting the school. It wasn’t until February 3 that Sagehorn was summoned to the principal’s office. It quickly became clear anything resembling a proportionate response wasn’t in the works.

The principal (Roman Pierskalla) called Sagehorn to the office and brought with him a fully-uniformed school police officer (Stephen Sarazin). Pierskalla told Sagehorn he was suspending him for five days for “damaging a teacher’s reputation.” To support his decision, he pulled a page out of the school policy manual that referred to “threatening, intimidating or assaulting a teacher, administrator or staff member.” Clearly, Sagehorn’s two-word tweet had performed none of these infractions.

A week later, Pierskalla talked to Sagehorn and his parents and told them he was extending the suspension another five days, giving them no reason for doing so. He further defended his unilateral extension by “getting angry” at Sagehorn’s parents for “questioning his authority.”

Sagehorn’s parents went over Pierskalla’s head and requested an open-ended hearing with the school board to determine whether the principal’s actions were justified. They received two responses, both equally asinine, but one carrying potential consequences far more damaging than a blighted academic record.

About an hour later, [Officer] Sarazin called Lori Sagehorn and left her a voicemail telling her that he had forwarded police reports from the postings to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office for their review and decision as to whether to charge Sagehorn with any crimes.

[…]

[Superintendent Mark] Bezek and [Asst. Superintendent Jana] Hennen-Burr represented to the Sagehorns that they could have a hearing in front of a hearing officer to contest the expulsion. Sagehorn alleges that Bezek and Hennen-Burr also informed the Sagehorns, however, that a hearing would be meaningless and the outcome was pre-ordained. In addition, Bezek and Hennen-Burr warned the Sagehorns that the school would consider increasing the expulsion punishment through the remainder of the school year if they requested a hearing. Bezek and Hennen-Burr told the Sagehorns that an expulsion of any duration would likely cause NDSU to withdraw its early acceptance of Reid Sagehorn and therefore the only real option was to withdraw Sagehorn from school. They then presented the Sagehorns with a pre-drafted withdrawal agreement.

Everything about this chain of events indicates the district employs too many people who cannot abide with having their decisions challenged. There’s nothing in this that doesn’t stink of retaliation. In addition to the school’s actions, Sagehorn also had to deal with public statements made by Rogers’ Chief of Police Jeffrey Beahen, who publicly called Sagehorn a felon.

Here’s one of Beahen’s statement’s:

We sent the case down for review by the county attorney,” Beahen said. “The case would be potentially criminal defamation. The student said something about a teacher that could have cost her career.”

He said a teacher having a relationship with a student is a felony, so implying such was not taken lightly.

“The teacher is a victim, she’s being harassed,” he said.

Here’s another, but with additional stupid.

“That’s a crime. It just wasn’t a tweet that went from Jimmy to John. It got up on this anonymous website where people weren’t supposed to use names.” Beahen said, also adding:

“It’s like screaming ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater or ‘I have a bomb’ on an airplane,” Beahen said, “If you say something on a very public forum, there are consequences. This young, innocent teacher is the victim here.”

All of the parties named in Sagehorn’s suit have asked for a dismissal or, failing that, immunity. The only one walking away from the suit alleging First and Fourteenth Amendment violations is Officer Sarazin, who the judge has determined was little more than a passive bystander through most of this.

The school attempted to claim Sagehorn’s two-word reply wasn’t protected by the First Amendment because it was “obscene.” It brought a variety of dictionaries with it to allege that “making out” actually could be taken to mean “had sexual intercourse with,” thus making his two-word affirmation akin to say he had performed a sexual act with a teacher. The court doesn’t find this argument persuasive and brings something actually obscene to buttress its rebuttal.

Even if the Court were to find that Sagehorn’s post unambiguously referred to sexual intercourse, the content actually attributable to Sagehorn – a response of “actually yes” – is not nearly as graphic as the content courts have found obscene as a matter of law. […]

The stark contrast between Sagehorn’s speech and speech that would now be considered obscene is particularly evident when this case is compared to other recent obscenity cases. Sagehorn’s post, for example, markedly differs from a student tweet deemed obscene in Rosario v. Clark County School District, 2013, cited by the School Defendants. In Rosario, the court concluded that a tweet, which was sent off-campus after a basketball game, was obscene when it expressed a hope that the basketball coach “gets fucked in tha ass by 10 black dicks.” […]

“[G]ets fucked” is an unambiguous appeal to prurient interest. Unlike “make out,” there is no ambiguity as to whether the Rosario tweet referred to sexual intercourse.

The school also tried the “lewd and vulgar” argument — in the context of a school environment — as being sufficient to shield it against First Amendment claims. Again, the court uses the school’s citations against it.

While Fraser offers school officials significant discretion to define “vulgar” speech delivered on school grounds, Fraser is clearly limited to on-campus speech. The Supreme Court stated that such discipline is restricted to “[t]he determination of what manner of speech in the classroom or in school assembly is appropriate.”

The school similarly had no luck with its plea for qualified immunity.

The law is sufficiently clear that on facts such as the complaint alleges in this case – a student using personal property to make non-threatening speech off-campus, that in no way impacts or disrupts the school environment – a student would have a clearly established right to free speech. The Court further concludes that a reasonable officer or school official would understand that punishing such speech would violate the student’s clearly-established right. Therefore, the Court finds that the School Defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity on Sagehorn’s First Amendment claim. The Court will accordingly deny the School Defendants’ motion for judgment on the pleadings as to Sagehorn’s First Amendment claim.

While Police Chief Beahen won’t be facing civil rights claims, he’s won’t be able to walk away from Sagehorn’s defamation allegations.

The Court concludes that Sagehorn’s complaint adequately pleads a defamation claim against Beahen. Sagehorn’s complaint identifies specific quotations by Beahen – for example, that Sagehorn’s post was like “crying or yelling ‘Fire!’ in a movie theater or saying ‘I got a bomb!’ on a plane” – and at least one specific media outlet to which allegedly defamatory statements were made – the Star Tribune. Sagehorn’s complaint does not include lengthy quotations or full context for the statements, but they are much more specific than, for example, in Magee, where the plaintiff alleged that the defamatory statements were “those found in the Hearing Committee determination,” with no further specificity.

[…]

Further, although Beahen asserts that the complaint is too vague to enable him to identify the news reports Sagehorn quotes, during oral argument on Beahen’s motion for judgment on the pleadings, Beahen’s counsel offered to play for the Court the exact Fox 9 news video containing the alleged defamatory statements identified in the complaint. Therefore, the Court finds that the complaint gave Beahen sufficient information to identify the relevant statements and news reports.

Sagehorn’s lawsuit is allowed to proceed and both the school and Police Chief Beahen will potentially be ordered to hand over damages for their participation in a debacle that combined a complete lack of better judgment with retaliatory behavior. And all over two small words that would have gone largely unnoticed if the school’s principal hadn’t been so intent on overstepping the boundaries of his authority.

Filed Under: defamation, jana hennen-burr, jeffrey beahen, mark bezek, minnesota, overreaction, reid sagehorn, roman pierskalla, school, suspension
Companies: rogers high school

Suspended Cop Sends Email To Department Thanking Them For The Paid Time Off

from the swiftly-voted-'Most-Punchable'-by-his-peers-and-non-peers dept

Police misconduct and abuse allegations are always greeted with defensive department statements about “thorough investigations” and “taking allegations seriously.” And yet, when it’s all said and done, very little has been done to prevent future abuse.

The most common outcome is a temporary reassignment. Sometimes there are suspensions, most of which are simply paid vacations. Even if a cop manages to get fired, his union will step up to try to get him his job back. In some cases, officers are allowed to resign rather than face firing — a move that ensures vacation, sick time and pensions are paid out.

The public is supposed to take these various levels of wrist-slapping very seriously. And law enforcement officers and agencies are supposed to make sure this illusion of accountability isn’t completely shattered. But one former officer of a Canadian police department has just stripped the veneer of respectability coating the law enforcement discipline process.

Back in 2011, Constable Craig Markham did all sorts of things a cop shouldn’t do.

On September 28, 2011, the Appellant [Craig Markham] received a text on his personal cell phone from A.S. inquiring about her common law partner, N.C., who had just been arrested and was in police custody facing serious drug related charges. N.C. was an acquaintance of the Appellant.

The Appellant accessed the Service’s internal records system as well as CPIC and searched out information regarding N.C. He then proceeded to the cells where N.C. was being held and had a discussion with him. After leaving N.C., the Appellant phoned a mutual acquaintance of theirs, E.C., and advised him that N.C. had been arrested. The Appellant again accessed the Service’s internal records, copied the synopsis form and the occurrence report pertaining to N.C.’s arrest to his Service email account, and emailed it to his personal email account. The next day the Appellant again accessed the Service’s system to inquire about E.C. and A.S

Markham was fired for passing confidential information to a member of the public. Or, rather, the Waterloo Police Service attempted to fire him. He appealed the decision, which resulted in three years of paid suspension while he waited for his case to be heard.

Markham was finally, officially fired for these violations early last year after his case was heard. No. Wait. He resigned because the Waterloo Police Service Board gave him this option.

The Hearing Officer gave the Appellant seven days to resign or he was to be terminated from all employment with the Service. The Appellant sought a lesser penalty.

You would think that being allowed a graceful exit and three years of fully-funded free time would be payment enough. But no, Markham had to rub it in. In what has to be one of the stupidest moves ever performed by a disgraced public servant, Markham sent an email to the department’s legal rep gloating about his paid time off. (via Information Liberation)

A former Waterloo Regional Police officer who was suspended with pay for three years sent an email to police thanking them for his continued salary while he sat at home, played golf, travelled and took a course to become a firefighter.

“I am very thankful and fortunate to have received such a nice gift from WRPS over the last three years. You have opened up other doors for me and have paid me to sit back and watch. What a dream come true,” Craig Markham wrote in an email on March 27 addressed to the police service’s solicitor.

Markham made over $90,000 a year pursuing his hobbies while his case was being appealed. He might have gotten away with it if he hadn’t felt compelled to apprise his former department of the details of his extended vacation. Unfortunately for him, his audaciously moronic move pissed off his former boss.

Police Chief Bryan Larkin presented the letter to members of the Region of Waterloo Police Services Board at a meeting last week.

“He (Markham) mocks what is supposed to be a fair and judicial system,” Larkin said in an interview.

“It sends a bad message to the community,” Larkin said.

“More importantly, it harms and takes away from the incredible work of the 760 officers who are out there everyday putting their lives at risk.”

Larkin is completely right. And every police department that allows (or is forced to by union contracts) its misbehaving officers to take paid vacations as “punishment” for wrongdoing is making the situation worse. Markham just exposed the system for what it really is: a great way to abuse the public’s trust and get paid for doing nothing.

Unbelievably, Markham is now trying to play the victim.

“I think it’s disgusting that Bryan Larkin released my email,” Markham told the meeting. “He is using me as a scapegoat.”

Whatever Larkin is using Markham for, it’s the first thing he’s earned in over three years. Markham claims the email was sent in a “moment of frustration,” but it’s rather difficult to square that with his boasts about using unearned paychecks to travel and play golf — the total of which approaches $350,000.

But despite his email’s jocular recounting of hobbies pursued and unearned money spent, Markham still maintains he’s still an upstanding dude.

“I’m not the taxpayer bandit,” Markham said. “It’s not like I came in during the middle of the night with a mask on and robbed the taxpayer.”

“It just sounds like I laid on the beach and drank pina coladas for three years.”

As for the first part? No, it’s actually worse. Markham robbed taxpayers behind their backs, collecting paychecks he hadn’t earned while fighting to reclaim a position he didn’t deserve. He abused the public’s trust and spent more than three years taking their money in exchange for nothing at all.

As for the last?

I can’t think of anyone else to blame for what this “sounds like.” If Markham doesn’t like being misrepresented by his own words, maybe he should have chosen them more carefully.

The only silver lining (beyond a possible overhaul of disciplinary policies in Waterloo) is the fact that only the province of Ontario allows its law enforcement officers to collect paychecks while suspended. If Markham had done the same thing anywhere else, he might have actually felt the sting of accountability. But he did it in Waterloo and managed to continue abusing the public’s trust even after exiting the field of public service.

Filed Under: craig markham, paid time off, police, police misconduct, suspension

Tulsa University Bans Student From Campus For Someone Else's Facebook Posts

from the feelings-were-hurt,-therefore-vindictive-stupidity dept

Nothing generates bad press quite like overreaction, and Tulsa University (OK) is busy making itself look vindictive and stupid. How does it handle critical Facebook posts directed at its staff? By punishing the student who didn’t write them and following that up with an attempt to silence critics of its terrible disciplinary decision.

In a triple blow to free speech, due process, and freedom of the press, the University of Tulsa (TU) arbitrarily banned a student from campus until 2016 for Facebook posts that someone else admitted to writing and then attempted to intimidate student journalists who were trying to cover the story.

Student George “Trey” Barnett’s husband, Chris Magnum (posting under the name “Christopher Blackstone”), posted comments critical of TU staff to Barnett’s Facebook page, tagging Barnett in the process. Despite the fact that Barnett didn’t write the posts and Magnum provided a sworn affidavit attesting to his authorship, the university went after Barnett.

[S]hortly after TU professor Susan Barrett filed a complaint against Barnett arguing that Barnett could not “avoid responsibility” because someone else was responsible for the posts, TU Senior Vice Provost Winona Tanaka imposed eight restrictive interim measures against Barnett. The sanctions included suspending his participation in certain courses and activities and even barring him from speaking about certain individuals.

Further steps in the disciplinary process were sidestepped in TU’s push to punish Barnett for something he didn’t write. According to school policies, Barnett was entitled to a hearing prior to the meting out of disciplinary actions, but the university refused to follow its own rules. Instead, it claimed Barnett was somehow “responsible” for the insults and criticisms written by his significant other and asserted that he was just “hiding behind” this “excuse” to avoid being punished.

The university’s disciplinary memo shows a clear lack of understanding of how Facebook works. The memo states that Barnett (already wrong) posted these comments on his page, when in fact, they were posted to his page by someone else. These are very different actions, even if they may look the same to those unfamiliar with Facebook’s posting mechanisms. Yes, the posts would have shown up on Barnett’s page, but it should have been easily apparent these were not posted from Barnett’s account.

While the posts were certainly negative and verging on defamatory (one instructor is referred to as “morbidly obese,” and that’s about the nicest thing that’s said; another is accused of being corrupt and the word “racketeering” is carelessly deployed), they were not written by the student who was ultimately punished for them. The university had a sworn affidavit in its possession from the actual author, but it wasn’t interested in facts. Not only is Barnett suspended, but he is banned from campus until 2016. And he won’t be earning a degree from TU even after he’s allowed to return to campus, making his prior investment in his theater degree wasted money.

Beyond its vindictive actions towards Barnett, the university also went after its student paper for daring to question its wrongheaded decision.

TU has also threatened the expressive rights of the staff of its independent student newspaper, The Collegian, which this week reported on Barnett’s suspension and criticized his treatment. The Collegian reports that after contacting TU administrators for comment, student reporters were told by TU’s director of marketing and communications that if “anything that the university deems to be confidential” is “published or shared, (that) could violate university policies.” The university refused to explain what might constitute “confidential” information and, come press time, the journalists were unsure what action the university might take against them.

Strange behavior for a university that claims its students are guaranteed “the rights and privileges granted citizens by the Bill of Rights.” So far, the university has attacked students’ free speech and arbitrarily stripped away the due process its own policies promise to students facing discipline. So much for that “guarantee.”

FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has issued its a statement condemning TU’s actions:

“TU students are right to be concerned about their free speech and due process rights, given the university’s sheer vindictiveness in banishing Barnett and its treatment of their student newspaper,” said Bonilla. “We’ve warned TU about its dangerously overbroad harassment policy before, yet it continues to fly in the face of its promise that students retain ‘the rights and privileges granted to all citizens in the Bill of Rights.’ The university needs to be held accountable for breaking that promise.”

“Held accountable” likely means a lawsuit is in the works, as the university has shown no interest in rolling back its decision. A memo issued sixty days after Barnett’s appeal states — without accompanying explanations for its findings — that all of his complaints (lack of due process, the school’s decision is unsupported by the accompanying facts, etc.) are “without merit” and that the ban will remain in place. Its unwillingness to recognize the many flaws of its decision are likely going to cost it some money down the road. Standing its ground when it’s so clearly in the wrong will have a chilling effect on its student body, which now knows any attendee can be punished for the actions of others.

The backlash to all of this didn’t take long at all to rub the supersensitive university the wrong way. Prolific twitterer, revenge porn nemesis and erstwhile provocateur Adam Steinbaugh headed to Tulsa University’s Facebook page to ask it about its stupidity, highlighting how easy it was for someone to post to someone else’s Facebook page.

This post was swiftly deleted by the page admin. So, Steinbaugh asked again. This too was deleted, as were related questions and comments from others. Finally, the TU Facebook admin went full nuclear ostrich and just deleted everything posted by others to its page, whether it involved the university’s vindictive discipline of Barnett or not.

Before:

After:

Nothing says you’re wholly in the right quite like a deliberate and proactive avoidance of any discussion on the matter, eh Tulsa?

Filed Under: chris magnum, free speech, george barnett, overreaction, social media, suspension, threats
Companies: facebook, university of tulsa

New York City Dept. Of Education Suspends Special Needs Instructor For Helping Student With A Kickstarter Project

from the system-broken-all-the-way-UP-as-well dept

A New York city schoolteacher sent sexually explicit emails to a student — emails he admitted to sending. It took six years to get him fired, during which he was paid $350,000.

Another instructor was given a 60-day suspension for continually making offensive remarks to his students, like, “These Chinese students need to go back to their own country. They don’t belong here.”

A NYC school swim coach repeatedly touched and kissed his female students. Told one to shave the hair around her bikini. Commented on another’s tan lines. He paid a $7,000 fine and was instructed to take a sexual harassment class.

Hundreds of New York city teachers bounced around the city’s so-called “Rubber Rooms” for years, drawing full pay while playing cards and reading magazines as they killed time waiting for their case to come up. Some were “merely” incompetent. Others were facing misconduct charges, ranging from altering grades to physically or verbally abusing students. Very few of these teachers were ever fired. Firing a NYC teacher is generally a costly labyrinth that few with the power to eliminate bad teachers are willing to navigate. (PDF link to a 2-page flowchart showing all the steps needed to remove a lousy teacher from NYC schools.)

These are just some that actually were punished as the result of an investigation. Few teachers actually find themselves being punished for their actions. Between tenure and the city’s powerful unions, the Dept. of Education has very little power to reprimand those it’s charged with overseeing. But if the system wants to expeditiously punish a teacher, it can. But those it acts quickly against generally aren’t the problem.

Case in point: Therapist Deb Fisher received a 30-day suspension for misconduct. Her misconduct?

She raised money on Kickstarter for a program that she and the student, Aaron Philip, 13, created called This Ability Not Disability. An investigator with the Education Department’s Office of Special Investigations, Wei Liu, found that Ms. Fisher sent emails about the project during her workday at Public School 333, the Manhattan School for Children, and was thus guilty of “theft of services.”

Unmentioned in the official report leading to this suspension were any of the following details.

• The entire school, including the principal, was involved with the Kickstarter project and routinely utilized school email accounts to send update blasts.
• Ms. Fisher developed an arts program for disabled students aimed at developing tools and supplies they could use. She received a mayoral commendation for this effort.
• She spearheaded a drive to ensure permanent, accessible housing for Aaron Phillip and his family after unemployment led to a stay at a homeless shelter.
• The Kickstarter project — a graphic novel and movie about being the only person with legs in a world filled with wheelchair users — hit its goal and was celebrated during a town hall meeting.

All of this was ignored in order to punish Ms. Fisher for a small infraction of the rules. The investigation itself stemmed from something even more small-minded and petty than the Dept. of Education’s final decision.

[A] co-worker with whom Ms. Fisher had had continuing disagreements made a series of charges against her. Ms. Fisher had complained that the co-worker was physically bullying and taunting her.

Even the best people have their flaws. It’s not altogether inconceivable that this one-woman storm of good deeds wasn’t above treating someone horribly. Except the accusations were lies.

The special investigators found that none of the serious allegations against Ms. Fisher were true, but said she was guilty of fund-raising for “her own charity.”

Except that this isn’t true either. The money went to the student. Not that the Department ultimately cared to sort out the facts.

The report made no mention that the entire building had been involved with the effort, nor did it try to determine whether Ms. Fisher would profit from it in any way. She was suspended on Sept. 15 until the end of October.

Because rules are rules and using the school’s email system to raise money for a personal project (albeit one that completely benefited a different person) isn’t allowed… even if the rest of the school — including the principal — did the same thing. Fisher’s 30-day suspension for helping an overachieving student pursue his dreams is the same amount handed out to librarian Devin Black, who helped a 13-year-old student fulfill Black’s dreams by telling her she “looked sexy,” while touching her — something that wasn’t an isolated incident.

Justice — true justice — may be blind, but what passes for “justice” in bureaucratic systems is spineless, officious and brutally incompetent. The same can be said for those who apply the “rules” in this fashion, ensuring no good deed goes unpunished while ignoring the rot and corruption inherent in the system. Whoever oversees the New York Dept. of Education needs to tell everyone involved in this decision that they’re clearly too stupid to be entrusted with this — or any — power.

Filed Under: aaron philip, bureaucracy, deb fisher, new york city, nyc, suspension, teachers

The Logical Conclusion Of Zero Tolerance: College Prof Suspended Because Daughter Wore A GoT Tshirt

from the tolerating-stupdity dept

When we talk about the stupidity that is school-affiliated zero-tolerance policies, the stories usually revolve around an administration’s inability to marry common sense with their reactions to non-issues. This can produce somewhat varied results, from really dumb stories about children being children and ending up in serious trouble, to a far more angering practice of victim-blaming. What it all boils down to, though, is an overreaction to certain tragic situations that results in bureaucratic lunacy on a level I never would have thought possible. School shootings and violence are the impetus in these cases, but we see this elsewhere as well. 9/11 resulted in the s#!*-show we know as airport security and NSA surveillance. The Boston Marathon bombing has resulted in the kind of militarized protection and media-blitzkrieg that would likely have other world nations that deal with far more terrorism shaking their heads. And, in each of these cases, we learn a simple truth that we should have seen coming all along: reactionary policies breed stupidity, corruption, and trouble.

So let’s get back to zero-tolerance policies in schools and witness the logical conclusion they offer: a college professor who had recently been at odds with his school’s administration was just suspended for posting a picture of his child wearing a Game Of Thrones t-shirt.

A popular community college professor was suspended after posting a photo of his daughter wearing an oversized T-shirt bearing a tagline from this season of Game of Thrones—Daenerys Targaryen’s “I will take what is mine with fire and blood.” Francis Schmidt, who teaches art and animation at Bergen Community College in New Jersey, shared the photo on Google+, where it was seen by several of his work contacts. One of them, a dean, decided the shirt was a veiled threat of some kind.

In case you can’t see the image, it’s of Schmidt’s daughter doing a handstand while wearing a Game of Thrones t-shirt that includes the tagline: “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” In case you think it’s reasonable that such a picture being shared on social media could be interpreted as a threat to commit violence at a local community college, stop thinking that because that’s a stupid thought. I imagine Schmidt said as much when he was called in to meet with the administration to explain why he’d sent a “threatening email”, despite the fact that no email had been sent.

At the meeting, Schmidt explained the shirt in the context of Game of Thrones and showed Miller that the “fire and blood” tagline has 4 million results on Google. The professor asked why his photo had caused such a reaction, and was told that “fire” could be a metaphor for “AK-47s.” Schmidt was placed on administrative leave without pay later that week, and told he would have to pass a psychiatric evaluation before he could return.

Now, like me, you should be even more confused. There’s no way you could somehow interpret “fire” to mean “AK-47” any more than you could interpret “fire” to mean “Easter ham.” They aren’t related. And if you’re thinking that there’s so little sense being made here that there must be something more to this story, there sure as hell is. The head of the school’s administration had just been delivered a vote of no confidence by the staff, including Schmidt, who had also filed a grievance recently for being denied a request for a sabbatical. You don’t need to read between the lines much to understand that this is probably a trumped-up charge serving to punish a member of the teacher’s union.

Which brings us nicely back to my original point: it isn’t just the stupid you have to worry about when it comes to zero-tolerance policies, it’s also the corrupt. When we overreact to admittedly tragic occurrences, we almost invariably open up the possibility for abuse through that overreaction.

Filed Under: francis schmidt, game of thrones, suspension, zero tolerance

Tweeted 'Terroristic Threat' Lands Another Teen In Trouble

from the it's-like-the-word-'threat'-has-lost-all-meaning dept

Here we go again. Another teen fires off a post on social media platform and ends up being portrayed by school administrators as “terroristic.” This particular incident somehow finds the teen in question unharassed by law enforcement and unthreatened with a lengthy prison sentence, but it still contains lots of baffling details.

Tyson Leon, 16, was indefinitely suspended from school sports in late August after sending a tweet that school officials said constituted a terroristic threat.

He denies threatening anyone, and in U.S. District Court in St. Paul on Tuesday, attorney Meg Kane argued that the suspension is a violation of her client’s constitutional rights.

Leon wrestles and plays football for a Shakopee, MN high school. Over a weekend before the football season kicked off, he sent the following tweet.

“Im boutta drill my ‘teammates’ on Monday.”

Even those with only a passing familiarity with full contact sports will recognize that “drilling” means tackling someone hard. Even those with no sports experience would probably fail to see this as any sort of threat. However, those with vivid imaginations and panicky hands to wring saw Leon’s tweet as something much more serious. Leon was hauled off the bus on the way to football practice and taken to the administrator’s office for questioning.

Head coach Jody Stone and [athletic director] Janke met the boy in a conference room, closed the door and began interrogating him, according to Kane and Leon’s family.

“Neither … Janke nor Stone informed T.L.’s parents of their intent to interrogate T.L.,” the lawsuit said. “T.L. did not feel free to leave because of … Janke and Stone’s position as school officials.”

During this informal chat that Leon was compelled to attend, the two school officials raised allegations about the student’s possible “chemical use” during a football retreat, along with confronting him about the tweet.

A later meeting involving Leon’s parents dealt only with the tweet.

On Aug. 26, during a meeting with Leon and his parents, Stone and Janke produced a printed copy of Leon’s tweet about drilling his teammates, the lawsuit said. They said nothing more about the allegations of chemical use. A letter to the family dated Aug. 29 didn’t mention the chemical use either, but said Leon’s behavior violated school and league rules and that he was indefinitely suspended.

Leon was indefinitely suspended from the football team (although this wasn’t clear at the time). The school claimed this was a result of cumulative violations and not because of his tweet. Leon has had three previous suspensions from the team, for a verbal altercation, a fight that occurred off school grounds and “chemical use” at a party in January. His parents didn’t fight any of these previous suspensions, feeling Leon needed to suffer the consequences of his actions. However, they did object to the latest one, which was seemingly tied solely to Leon’s tweet.

The school’s logic for Leon’s latest suspension was laid out by the district’s attorney, Carla White.

On Tuesday, White pointed out that the suspension resulted from Leon’s fourth violation and that he and his family received a letter after his third violation reminding them that violations are cumulative and could cost him his eligibility.

The fourth violation apparently being the “threatening” tweet that contained no threat. As is detailed above, the letter sent to Leon’s parent made no mention of the more recent alleged “chemical use.” But, just in case anyone feels compelled to argue the latest suspension had nothing to do with the tweet, White’s further statements make that crystal clear.

“Every single school administrator who read [the tweet] believed that he was threatening harm,” White said.

That doesn’t say much for the administrators. Even the judge hearing the preliminary arguments had trouble buying that claim.

The judge questioned why, if administrators truly believed that the tweet was a threat, police weren’t called to the school.

Good question, especially considering it takes very little for most schools to call in law enforcement, whether its non-threatening “threats” being posted on social media or rumors of a water balloon fight.

White countered the judge’s question by reaffirming the administrators’ collective terrible judgement.

“They did believe it was a threat,” White said. “They did believe it was going to happen on Monday. They took care of it.”

Leon’s family sued the school for violating Leon’s constitutional rights, but it appears to have been settled after a meeting by both parties with the judge. The school has reinstated Leon to the wrestling team (of some importance to the student — reportedly he’s being scouted by a local college) but held onto his suspension from the football team.

This is probably the best possible outcome (barring a striking of his fourth suspension over a non-threatening tweet) considering Leon’s attorney’s statements show she was relying on a couple of dubious legal arguments. First, she claims Leon’s participation in extracurricular sports is a “property right,” but most schools view these as purely optional parts of the educational experience, something that often requires participants to follow extra rules the rest of the non-participating school body is exempt from. In fact, schools are under no federal obligation to provide interscholastic sports programs due to the extra financial burden it can place on schools for uniforms, travel, salaries, etc. So, from both the student side and the administrative side, these sports programs are clearly optional and in no way resemble a “right.” Leon may have been concerned about his future scholarship chances, but three previous incidents indicate his desire for future sports participation was often overridden by his questionable judgement.

Second, Meg Kane claims the school violated rights by accessing “private” social media accounts. This is a tough sell in most courts. Even IF Leon’s accounts were set to “private,” anyone receiving his tweets, posts, etc. could easily disseminate them further. A “private” social media account is pretty much a misnomer and attempting to claim the school violated his privacy by accessing public postings (even if these were limited or filtered in any way) is a non-starter. There’s a better argument to be made that rights were violated by the school’s response to his protected speech, but there’s not much to be had going the privacy route.

But, given all this, the question still remains: why did the school treat this tweet the way it did? It took a hard line, claiming it was a “terroristic threat” and questioned Leon without informing his parents. It also never informed the police, meaning the administration didn’t view this as an actual threat, no matter what its legal representation says.

And if it didn’t consider it to be a true threat — either at the point of interception or after hearing Leon’s explanation of the tweet — why did it insist on following through with the suspension? Was it a way to punish him for the alleged “chemical use” it couldn’t nail down conclusively but still believed occurred given Leon’s disciplinary track record?

No matter what the rationale, the entire incident makes the Shakopee administration look ridiculous and even slightly vindictive. It clearly had nothing to do with this “terroristic” tweet and yet it followed through with the disciplinary actions and didn’t bother clearing up any misunderstandings until it was facing a lawsuit. That’s no way to run a school.

Filed Under: schools, suspension, terroristic threat, tweets, tyson leon