Tag Archive for: rights

LAPD Watchdog Says Department’s Data-Based Policing Is Producing Nothing But Wasted Time And Rights Violations

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The Los Angeles Police Department has just received some bad news from its oversight. It’s probably good news for the policed — many of whom are being disproportionately targeted thanks to biased input data — but the LAPD can’t be pleased that its reliance on expensive, mostly-automated tools hasn’t produced worthwhile results.

The department relies on a handful of tech tools to aid in its policing, but it doesn’t appear to be helping. It has CompStat — a holdover from the early 2000’s when Bill Bratton still ran the department. To that framework, it has added LASER — a nifty acronym that stands for “Los Angeles’ Strategic Extraction and Restoration.” The program with the reverse engineered nickname actually relies on input from human analysts to determine where officers should be deployed. But this reliance on data-driven policing isn’t making the city any safer, despite LASER’s focus on violent crime.

Here’s what the LAPD’s human analysts put together for the department’s patrol officers.

In perhaps the most contentious strategy, each of the department’s 21 geographic areas used data to compile lists or “bulletins” of people calculated to be among the top 12 “chronic offenders.”

The program assigns people points based on prior criminal histories, such as arrest records, gang affiliation, probation and parole status and recent police contacts.

This strategy received some public blow-back, resulting in the department abandoning it last August. Nothing of value was lost.

[Inspector General Mark] Smith examined data collected prior to the suspension.

He found 44 percent of chronic offenders had either zero or one arrest for violent crimes. About half had no arrest for gun-related crimes.

So much for curbing violent crime. All it did was create a loop where cops targeted nonviolent offenders, resulting in another arrest/detention that added more points to the person’s LASER record, resulting in even more targeting and, inevitably, more interactions with police officers. It’s a feedback loop no one can escape.

To make things worse, officers had the power to place people into this damaging loop by “nominating” them for targeting with LASER. The point-based system that was supposed to limit this targeting to just the worst of worst street criminals could be bypassed. Nominated citizens would find themselves rising up the ranks on the LASER lists, racking up points simply by officers performing stops based on faulty inputs.

And while the tech is supposedly improving, the quality of policing isn’t. CompStat has had nearly a 20-year run in LA, but its results are negligible. Predictive policing — which has its own bias issues — isn’t doing any better.

Like the other program, Smith found discrepancies with the data collection and could not draw conclusions to “meaningfully evaluate” the program’s overall effectiveness to reduce crime, the report said.

Unfortunately, the report recommends the LAPD stay the course. The LAPD is supposed to spend more time “reviewing” the data that isn’t producing results and tailor its outputs with an eye on Constitutional rights. As it stands now, the LAPD is allowing databases to conjure up reasonable suspicion for stops. That can’t keep happening. But the way forward can’t be more of the same, only at a slightly slower pace.

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Cambodian Rights Group Hacked Amid Concerns Over China-Linked Cyber Espionage Group

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  1. Cambodian Rights Group Hacked Amid Concerns Over China-Linked Cyber Espionage Group  The Cambodia Daily

    2. Full coverage

china espionage – read more

In A Surprising Decision, European Court Of Human Rights Says Sweden’s Mass Surveillance Is Fine

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In the wake of Snowden’s revelations of the scale of mass surveillance around the world, various cases have been brought before the courts in an attempt to stop or at least limit this activity. One involved Sweden’s use of bulk interception for gathering foreign intelligence. A public interest law firm filed a complaint at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). It alleged that governmental spying breached its privacy rights under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (pdf). The complaint said that the system of secret surveillance potentially affected all users of the Internet and mobile phones in Sweden, and pointed out that there was no system for citizens to use if they suspected their communications had been intercepted. The ECtHR has just ruled that “although there were some areas for improvement, overall the Swedish system of bulk interception provided adequate and sufficient guarantees against arbitrariness and the risk of abuse”:

In particular, the scope of the signals intelligence measures and the treatment of intercepted data were clearly defined in law, permission for interception had to be by court order after a detailed examination, it was only permitted for communications crossing the Swedish border and not within Sweden itself, it could only be for a maximum of six months, and any renewal required a review. Furthermore, there were several independent bodies, in particular an inspectorate, tasked with the supervision and review of the system. Lastly, the lack of notification of surveillance measures was compensated for by the fact that there were a number of complaint mechanisms available, in particular via the inspectorate, the Parliamentary Ombudsmen and the Chancellor of Justice.

When coming to that conclusion, the Court took into account the State’s discretionary powers in protecting national security, especially given the present-day threats of global terrorism and serious cross-border crime.

One expert in this area, TJ McIntyre, expressed on Twitter his disappointment with the judgment:

It might have been too much to expect bulk intercept ruled out in principle, but it is surprising to see a retreat from existing standards on safeguards.

McIntyre played a leading role in one of the key cases brought against mass surveillance, by Digital Rights Ireland in 2014. It resulted in the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), ruling the EU’s Data Retention Directive was “invalid”. As McIntyre notes, the detailed ECtHR analysis mentions the CJEU decision, but not the more recent ruling by the latter that struck down the “Safe Harbor” framework because of mass surveillance by the NSA.

The judgment significantly waters down safeguards previously developed by the ECtHR in relation to notification and possibility of a remedy against unlawful surveillance.

For example, McIntyre points out the ECtHR accepted that it is necessary for the Swedish signals intelligence service to store raw material before it can be manually processed:

Remarkably weak controls on storage and downstream use of intercept material were accepted by the ECtHR — in particular, it was satisfied with retention of bulk intercept “raw material” for one year!

Something of a setback in terms of limiting mass surveillance, the latest judgment goes against the general trend of decisions by the arguably more important CJEU court. In 2014 the latter effectively ruled that its own decisions should take precedence over those of the ECtHR if they came into conflict. That is now more likely, given the CJEU’s hardening position against mass surveillance, and the diverging judgment from the ECtHR, which shows some softening.

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