The cost to Tamarac taxpayers will be as much as $50,000 for the city to hire a private investigator to figure out who gave public records to a reporter, according to records released Friday.

City leaders are scheduled to approve hiring the law firm of Kim Vaughan Lerner on Wednesday to conduct a “forensic” search to try to find who gave the South Florida Sun Sentinel a memo that is a public record in Florida.

$50,000 from taxpayers to hire someone taxpayers likely don't believe needs to be hired to discover the source of records taxpayers are entitled to have access to. An investigation so self-serving the city can barely be bothered to defend it. But since the city holds the power and the taxpayers' purse strings, the investigation will continue.

Why are city leaders so hot and bothered they're willing to chase the paper trail of a presumptive public record that ended up in the hands of journalists? Well, it sure as shit isn't because they're concerned in any way about the public they're supposed to be serving.

No, this expensive paper chase is the result of city leaders being embarrassed by their own misuse of public funds. The budget amendments handed to the Sun Sentinel included plenty of perks for city employees -- several of which directly benefited the people approving the amendments. This $50,000 will just be more ill-spent taxpayer "revenue," joining other public expenditures that have done nothing but reward city legislators for being bad stewards.

The city memo in dispute had outlined several budget amendments that would benefit the city commissioners themselves, including new retirement, full health benefits, and stipends for technology and education.

Those budget amendments, which have since been scrapped from being placed on a city agenda, came within months of other forms of spending that leaders passed for themselves to do their part-time job. That included a $25,000 personal initiative fund and a $15,000 local travel fund, on top of their salary, car and phone allowances, and out-of-town travel money.

The $50,000 will be spent interviewing officials and staffers to determine who "leaked" presumptively-public information to the public. This includes reviewing communications sent and received by everyone currently under this super-weird form of suspicion, which apparently includes anyone with access to the budget documents. There's no word yet whether this internal investigation will manifest outwardly, but one suspects city officials willing to spend $50,000 investigating the source of public info won't shy away from targeting the journalists who published the information.

No commissioner expressed any dismay with the outsized set of perks being handed to them or the willingness to waste money investigating a non-existent breach/leak. But one commissioner mistook her public platform for a mirror, issuing this… um… statement:

Commissioner Debra Placko chastised whoever gave out the information, saying at last week’s meeting, “Shame on you for being despicable.”

LOL. "Despicable" is spending $50,000 to find and punish the person who embarrassed you using nothing more than public records anyone could have obtained. Good luck with that. And good luck with your next election run, charlatans A-D (the decision to hire an investigator passed 4-1). This is not just stupid. It's expensive. And it does nothing more than show the public who their servants are actually serving.

The bill, like so many other such state bills, would violate the 1st Amendment by compelling websites to host speech they have no desire to host. It's not even worth going through the bill bit by bit to explain its many different unconstitutional parts, but like so many of these bills, it tries to say that social media websites (of a certain size) will be greatly restricted in any effort to moderate their website to make it safer. There is no way this is even remotely constitutional.

But, it gets worse. Seeing as this is Florida, which (obviously) is a place where Disney has some clout -- and Disney has famously powerful lobbyists all over the damn place -- it appears that Disney made sure the Florida legislature gave them a carveout. Florida Senator Ray Rodriques introduced an amendment to the bill, which got included in the final vote. The original bill said that this would apply to any website with 100 million monthly individual users globally. The Rodriques amendment includes this exemption:

The term does not include any information service, system, Internet search engine, or access software provider operated by a company that owns and operates a theme park or entertainment complex as defined in 509.013, F.S.

In other words, Disney (which owns a ton of companies with large internet presences) will be entirely exempt. Ditto for Comcast (Universal studios) and a few others. For what it's worth, the backers of this amendment claimed it was needed so that Disney could moderate reviews on its Disney Plus streaming service... but that makes no sense at all.

First, Disney Plus has nothing to do with theme parks. If the goal is to allow moderation of reviews on streaming platforms, then shouldn't the carveout be... for review sections on streaming platforms? Second, just the fact that the original bill would have created problems for the famously family friendly Disney to moderate reviews shows the problem with the entire bill. The whole point of 230 and content moderation is to allow websites to moderate in a way they see fit for their own community -- so sites like Disney can moderate to keep a "family friendly" experience, and others can moderate to match their own community standards.

Of course, that also means that if this bill is somehow found to be constitutional (and it will not be...), it will not be long until you start seeing 25 acres (the minimum amount necessary) somewhere in Florida suddenly under construction for the opening of GoogleLand, FacebookWorld or TwitterVillage. I, for one, can't wait to ride the AlgoSwings in GoogleLand and the Infinite Scroll Coaster at Twitter Village.

According to the Pasco County Sheriff "juvenile intelligence analysts," these were all risk factors that could signify future criminal behavior. The Sheriff claimed it wasn't trying to pre-crime children, but its own documentation said "analysts" should use the so-called "predictors" to "identify at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime."

Not only is the program arguably morally wrong, it's also generally wrong. Predictive policing rarely works as intended since it relies on skewed data. Those inputs produce more skewed data, sending officers into the same areas they already believe criminal activity will occur and aims them at the same people they've already assumed are criminals. It's basically confirmation_bias.xls. But this program targets kids and uses data it's not clear the Sheriff's Office has any legal right to access.

That means the program may also be legally wrong. As in "illegal." Analysis of the program and the data-sharing agreements with schools by student privacy advocates resulted in the determination that this access to student data without parental consent violated FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) -- a federal student privacy law passed in 1974.

This conclusion prompted Congressional reps to step in and request a federal investigation into Pasco County's pee-wee league pre-crime program. Four months after that request was made by Representative Robert C. Scott, the US Department of Education is moving forward with its review of the program.

The Tampa Bay Times reported in November that the school district shared information on student grades, discipline and attendance with the Sheriff’s Office, which used the data to compile a secret list of schoolchildren it believed could “fall into a life of crime.”

The federal education department is now looking into the arrangement, a spokesman said Friday.

The investigation follows calls for a review by U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott, who leads the House Committee on Education and Labor. In a statement, Scott said he was “encouraged” that the education department had accepted his request. He called the Pasco program “disturbing.”

Now that the federal government is involved, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office appears to be hastily revising its program. While it still claims the program does not label kids as criminals (despite what its own documentation says), it has started to change what data it accesses and how it obtains that access.

The law enforcement agency said that deputies, who serve in the role as school resource officers, do have access to student grades. But the agency said for the first time that students were being added to any list for review only if they had committed a crime. Aside from its school resource deputies, the agency said that Sheriff’s Office employees can see whether a student has been flagged by the district’s early warning system — not whether they had been flagged for a specific reason, such as grades or attendance.

Starting to do the right thing after months of negative press and multiple investigations isn't really doing the right thing. It's just damage control. But the Sheriff's Office already spent months or years screwing up and that's going to still come to light even if it's not trying to stop violating federal regulations.

And the Sheriff's Office still seems pretty defensive for an agency that believes it's done nothing wrong. Rather than simply defer comment until the investigation concludes, the Sheriff's Office issued a multi-paragraph comment to the Tampa Bay Times that starts out by attacking the credibility of the paper whose initial report was based entirely on the Sheriff Office's own documents.

We have no additional comment beyond what was previously provided to the Tampa Bay Times. However, we’re proud of our partnership with Pasco County Schools and the work our members do to ensure safety to students, staff and families in our community. Additionally, I’m providing you with the below, which details much of the misinformation the Times has misconstrued through the course of their reporting and sets the record straight on facts vs slant.

As always, it is our sincere hope that the Times uses this opportunity to set the record straight on their own reporting and the previous fallacies they’ve published.

The statement does its own misleading by claiming the things the Sheriff's Office is doing now are the things it has always done, despite that clearly not being the case. It's trying to backdate its culpability with this statement and that may work for small parts of the court of public opinion, but it's not going to change the course of the ongoing investigation.

Even if one is inclined to take the Sheriff's Office at its word, the fact that it "only" determined 330 students to be "at risk" for future criminal behavior is still disturbing. While identifying at-risk students can be helpful and perhaps head off future criminal acts, the Office's predictive policing program mainly serves up constant harassment to anyone selected by the software as a potential criminal. Rather than deter criminal activity, the program makes it impossible for people to break free of the criminal justice deathcycle by subjecting them to meaningless citations, extra court appearances, and frequent visits from deputies who apparently have nothing better to do with their time.

This sort of harassment isn't going to help at-risk students. And it will definitely negatively impact those caring for them, making it all the more likely something already tenuous will break completely, resulting in further hardship for everyone involved. The Pasco Sheriff's Office had made it clear it's not there to help. It has openly stated the program is there to harass people into suing or moving. And it thinks it okay to direct this same attitude at kids.

Here are just some of the expansions signed into law by DeSantis:

The law defines “riot” in an absurdly overbroad way, if just three people “meet together to commit a breach of the peace,” triggering all kinds of enhanced penalties for those involved. If nine people are involved and traffic is blocked, participants can be charged with “aggravated rioting.”

Shockingly, it would allow peaceful protesters to be charged with a crime if other people at a demonstration they attend do something violent. “Those individuals who do not engage in any violent conduct under this bill can be arrested and charged with a third-degree felony and face up to five years in prison and loss of voting rights,” said an official with ACLU Florida.

On top of that, it forbids anyone arrested under the new law from being released prior to their first court appearance, creating what appears to be an unlawful presumption of guilt that bypasses bail and bond options for those still only accused of violations.

The law [PDF] also expands protections for state monuments (even [or, perhaps, especially] the Confederate ones) and undercuts any local efforts to reduce police department budgets by moving funds to social services or other options that might allow people in mental distress to be handled by someone who isn't armed and "reasonably" scared. If even a single local official disagrees with law enforcement budget reductions, the state can step in and veto the changes.

Considering the root of these protests lies in the lack of accountability shown by law enforcement agencies, the law's targeting of unhappy citizens makes it clear Florida cops won't be punished for violating rights and won't be expected to treat residents with respect. More power has been given to law enforcement agencies -- powers that can be used to easily disrupt and dismantle protests by people unhappy with the services they're paying for.

If the goal is to exacerbate an already tense situation, Governor DeSantis has accomplished that. He -- along with the state reps who voted for this bill -- has made it clear he believes it's the state's taxpayers who are wrong. This broadly written law that criminalizes the actions of bystanders will convert riot police to goon squads, allowing them to cage as many disgruntled citizens as possible. This treatment will presumably continue until the public's morale improves and they finally start viewing the people beating and imprisoning them as the righteous warriors cops believe they are.

Law enforcement officers have discovered this law and legislators' seeming unwillingness to exempt public employees from these protections. And, since officers are often able to claim every violent act they've engaged in was predicated by a criminal act by the suspect they've deployed force against, they're able to claim they were "victims" of crimes, even if the crime was nothing more than the grab bag of charges commonly known as "contempt of cop."

We saw this law put to work a few years ago in South Dakota. An officer, who shot an arrestee two times, was able to keep their name private despite being engaged in public service and presumably putting their name on official reports about the incident -- reports that would be considered public records.

It has happened again, this time in Florida. Two officers who deployed deadly force against arrestees -- represented by their police union -- have successfully sued to keep their names secret. The Florida Court of Appeal says the victims' rights enacted by the law are constitutional and the withholding of these officers' name is completely justified. (via Volokh Conspiracy)

The lower court's decision coming down on the side of transparency and accountability has been reversed. Here's how the lower court summed it up:

The Court finds that the explicit language of Marsy’s Law was not intended to apply to law enforcement officers when acting in their official capacity.

[...]

The officers do not seek protection from the wouldbe accuseds, instead they apparently seek protection from possible retribution for their on-duty actions from unknown persons in the community. This type of protection is outside the scope of Marsy’s Law and is inconsistent with the express purpose and language of the amendment. This Court cannot interpret Marsy’s Law to shield police officers from public scrutiny of their official actions.

Unfortunately, this court can interpret the law this way. It says the lower court misread the conflict between the state's victims' rights law and the public's right to "inspect or copy records of any state of local agency." The Appeals Court [PDF] says the newer law (the victims' right law) supersedes the older public records law (emphasis in the original).

Article I, section 16 can be construed in harmony with article I, section 24(a)—without excluding from the definition of crime victim any person entitled to protection under article I, section 16. Article I, section 24(a) describes the broad right to inspect or copy public records in Florida:

Every person has the right to inspect or copy any public record made or received in connection with the official business of any public body, officer, or employee of the state, or persons acting on their behalf, except with respect to records exempted under this section or specifically made confidential by this Constitution.

The Appeals Court says older laws can be altered by newer laws, and residents' overwhelming support of the state's Marsy's Law (61% of voters) suggests the state as a whole desired the new law to protect every criminal victim, even public servants charged with arresting suspected criminals.

The court says the police can police themselves. It does not need the assistance of the public that has been locked out by this use of the victims' rights law.

This does not mean that the public cannot hold law enforcement officers accountable for any misconduct. Maintaining confidential information about a law enforcement officer who is a crime victim would not halt an internal affairs investigation nor impede any grand jury proceedings. Nor would it prevent a state attorney from reviewing the facts and considering whether the officer was a victim. If a prosecutor determines that the officer was not a victim and instead charges the officer for his conduct, then the officer would forfeit the protections…

But these are all state and local actions that -- while nominally performed to benefit the public -- rarely involve direct public participation or result in outcomes that approach any widely understood definition of "accountability."

This may be the correct ruling inasmuch as that's what the law says. But it's certainly not keeping with the spirit of the law, which was supposed to protect crime victims, not shield public employees from accountability. Legislators who've enacted these laws around the nation need to amend them to ensure this sort of abuse ceases.

This is undeniable. But why do cops lie? There seems to be little reason for it. Qualified immunity protects them against all but their most egregious rights violations. Internal investigations routinely clear them for all but their most egregious acts of misconduct. And police union contracts make it almost impossible to fire bad cops, no matter what they've done.

So, why do they lie? If I had to guess, it's because they've been granted so much deference by those adjudicating their behavior that "my word against theirs" has pretty much become the standard for legal proceedings. If a cop can push a narrative without more pushback than the opposing party's sworn statements, the cop is probably going to win.

This reliance on unreliable narrators has been threatened by the ubiquity of recording devices. Some devices -- body cameras, dashcams -- are owned by cops. And, no surprise, they often "fail" to activate these devices when some shady shit is going down.

But there are tons of cameras cops don't control. Every smartphone has a camera. And nearly every person encountering cops has a smartphone. Then there's the plethora of home security cameras whose price point has dropped so precipitously they're now considered as accessible as tap water.

The cops can control their own footage. And they do. But they can't control everyone else's. And that's where they slip up. A narrative is only as good as its supporting evidence. Cops refuse to bring their own, especially when it contradicts their narrative. But they can't stop citizens from recording their actions. This is a fact that has yet to achieve critical mass in the law enforcement community. A cop's word is only as good as its supporting facts. Going to court with alternative facts -- especially ones contradicted by nearby recording devices is a bad idea. (h/t TheUrbanDragon)

But that still doesn't stop cops from lying to courts. Cops in Lake Wales, Florida tried to claim a driver attacked them during a traffic stop -- something that could have resulted in a conviction on multiple felony charges. But camera footage obtained from a home security camera across the street from the traffic stop undermined the officers' sworn perjury:

A Lake Wales man, who could have been sent to prison for years based on the claims in a police report, was saved by a home surveillance camera. It showed he didn’t attack an officer, as claimed in the report.

[...]

Officer [Colt] Black’s report said, “Cordero immediately exited the driver door and began to charge towards my patrol vehicle.”

It also indicated Cordero approached the officer with closed fists.

Sounds like an attempted assault on police officers -- an assault only negated by the swift (and brutal) acts of officers on the scene. But here's what really happened, according to an unblinking eye located across the street.

Cordero stood by his car for more than 20 seconds.

[...]

Black approached Cordero about 30 seconds later.

“He sucker-punched me from the back, right here, cracked a piece of my tooth out. I landed on the ground,” Cordero said.

Despite this being an assault of a citizen by Officer Black (with an assist by Officer Travis Worley), Officer Black claimed he "delivered an elbow strike" because he thought Cordero was reaching for a weapon. This lie was added to the lie that Cordero had "approached" the officers with "closed fists." The security camera recorded the whole thing, which showed officers attacked Cordero as he stood motionless by his car.

So, what was the excuse given after security cam footage showed Officer Black had lied? Officer Black lied again. He claimed he was unable to accurately recall the traffic stop because it was so "stressful."

After Cordero shared the footage with police, Officer Black wrote in another report, "I believe my perception was altered due to the high stress of the incident.”

If a regular traffic stop is so stressful it alters officers' recollection of events, no officer -- or at least not this officer -- should be considered trustworthy when it comes to testifying about traffic stops or any other unrecorded interactions with citizens. Presumably most interactions are stressful. But that's the job. And if the stress makes you make shit up about incidents that implicate a host of constitutional rights and people's actual physical freedom, you probably shouldn't be a cop.

The DEA buys this data. So does ICE and the CBP. The Defense Department does it. So does the Secret Service and, at least once, so did the IRS. Data harvested from apps ends up in the hands of companies like Venntel and Babel Street. These companies sell access to this data to a variety of government agencies, allowing them to bypass warrant requirements and phone companies. Sure, the data may not be as accurate as that gathered from cell towers, but it's still obviously very useful, otherwise these brokers wouldn't have so many powerful customers.

The latest news on the purchasing of location data comes to us via Joseph Cox and Motherboard -- both of which have been instrumental in breaking news about the government's new source of third-party data capable of tracking people's movements.

So, who's using this data now? Well, it's a government agency overseeing a very captive audience.

The Florida Department of Corrections (FDC), which runs state-owned prisons in the state and is the third largest state prison system in the country, bought access to a tool that lets users track the location of smartphones via data harvested from ordinary apps, Motherboard has found. The tool, called Locate X, allows users to draw a geofence around a particular area, see which phones were at that location, and then follow them onwards or back in time to other places.

Unlike other uses of this data, the FDC's contract indicates it wants to know who's using phones inside its prisons. Most prisoners aren't going anywhere and even if they escaped, location data pulled from apps would be possibly the least useful way to track them down. Instead, it appears this data is being used to locate contraband phones being used by inmates.

But are contraband phones so much of a problem the Department of Corrections should spend nearly $70,000 a year on data broker services? That seems unlikely. And even if prisoners are having phones smuggled in, it would be a stretch to assume they're all being used to engage in criminal activity. Prison phone services are prohibitively expensive and internet access is severely limited. Some of these phones are being used for nothing more than allowing inmates to stay in contact with loved ones without draining their bank accounts or subjecting them to eavesdropping by prison staff.

Then there's the unanswered question as to whether the FDC is limiting its data searches to the confines of prisons. If it isn't, it could be tracking the movements of visitors and making some inferences about their day-to-day existences.

For now, this is all pretty Wild West. No court decisions directly address this and, despite efforts from legislators like Senator Ron Wyden, data brokers haven't really been willing to share information about their practices and government business partners. And not much has been said by federal and local agencies buying this data, which has filled this void in caselaw with more questions than answers.

Predictive policing is pretty much garbage everywhere, since it relies on stats generated by biased policing to generate even more biased policing. In Pasco County, however, it's a plague willingly inflicted on residents by a sheriff (Chris Nocco) who has apparently described the ultimate goal of the program as "making [people] miserable until they move or sue."

Well, Pasco County's getting one of these outcomes, after years of hassling residents who happen to find themselves labelled as criminals or possible criminals by the Sheriff's faulty software. Under the guise of "fighting crime," Sheriff's deputies make multiple visits to residences deemed troublesome, ticketing them for unmowed lawns, missing mailbox numbers, or for "allowing" teens to smoke on their property.

This program has bled over into the area's schools, subjecting minors to the same scrutiny for failing to maintain high grades or steady attendance. In one case, a 15-year-old on probation was "visited" by deputies 21 times in six months. Since 2015, 12,500 "checks" have been performed as part of Office's predictive policing program.

The Institute for Justice is representing four plaintiffs, including Robert Jones -- a target of the program who did both things the Office wanted: moved and sued.

Robert Jones, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, knows the cruelties of Pasco’s program firsthand. In 2015, Robert’s teenage son had a number of run-ins with the law. That landed his son on Pasco’s “prolific offender” list. Shortly thereafter deputies started to conduct “prolific offender checks.” These warrantless “checks” involved repeated, unannounced visits to Robert’s home at all hours of the day. Robert grew tired of the harassment and stopped cooperating with police. That only made matters worse.

Code enforcement is a common tactic to compel cooperation. One deputy said they would “literally go out there and take a tape measure and measure the grass if somebody didn’t want to cooperate with us.” In Robert’s case, deputies cited him for tall grass, but failed to notify him of the citation. Then, when he failed to appear for a hearing that he was never told was happening, they arrested him for failure to appear.

All told, Robert was arrested five times by Pasco deputies. Although the bogus charges never stuck—they were all dropped—the harassment accomplished its goal: Robert ultimately moved his family out of Pasco County to escape the constant harassment from the Sheriff’s Office.

The lawsuit [PDF] says the misery inflicted by deputies isn't confined to "targeted" residents. If deputies feel they're not getting enough cooperation from their targets, they'll threaten friends and family members with arrests/citations until they get the level of cooperation they desire.

The lawsuit claims this program violates a number of constitutional rights, including the First and Fourth Amendments. The program makes it impossible for anyone's debt to society to ever be repaid. Plaintiff Dalenea Taylor served two years as a juvenile and hasn't committed any criminal acts since. Despite severing ties to her old criminal acquaintances, deputies have visited her residence as often as "every other day" for the past three years, demanding permission to search her house and threatening friends with criminal charges if they did not cooperate with their demands.

Another plaintiff was harassed by deputies multiple times a day because her son had ended up on the Sheriff's "target" list. This ultimately resulted in deputies manufacturing arrests to turn her into a convicted felon.

In order to avoid prosecution and the risk of additional time in jail, Tammy pled guilty in March 2018 to the offenses of misdemeanor battery, obstructing or resisting an officer without violence, and giving false information to law enforcement.

Subsequently, in September 2018, during another visit to Tammy’s property conducted as part of the Program, PCSO officials arrested Tammy for opening her front screen door into a PCSO deputy in the process of consenting to a search.

Because she was on probation stemming from the prior arrest, Tammy spent 76 days in jail. She accepted a plea deal to avoid additional jail time, and now she is a convicted felon.

There's a pattern of rights violations and intimidation the Sheriff's Office will now have to answer for. Here's another plaintiff's experience with deputies due to her son's (non-violent) criminal activity.

In one instance, PCSO deputies scaled a privacy fence to gain access to Dolly’s property. And in another, PCSO deputies assembled outside the residence and, using a bullhorn, demanded that Tyler—who was not there—come outside.

[...]

As retribution for Dolly’s perceived failure to cooperate with the Program, Dolly was cited for trivial code violations. Specifically, Dolly was fined $3,000 for missing house numbers, tall grass and having construction materials on her property while putting up a fence.

The pervasive harassment and intimidation of residents by the Sheriff's Office is so awful even long-standing supporters of law enforcement are demanding changes.

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz has called on Florida's governor to remove a sheriff who was sued this week by four residents claiming an intelligence program run by the top cop's agency violated their constitutional rights.

In a tweet on Thursday, Gaetz, a Republican congressman from the Florida Panhandle, said Gov. Ron DeSantis had the authority to remove Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco and should consider doing so.

“I don’t care that this is being done by a GOP Sheriff," Gaetz said in the tweet. “Its awful to harass citizens because you think they may commit crimes, hoping to make their lives miserable.'

And even if the program worked, it still wouldn't be an acceptable excuse for years of unwarranted harassment. But it doesn't. The stats don't back up the Office's claim the program is essential to reducing crime.

The agency has previously said it stands behind its intelligence program and credited it with a reduction in burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts over the last decade. The decline mirrors those in nearby police jurisdictions, according to the Times.

A decade of abusing the public and the public's trust and all the Pasco County Sheriff's Office has to show for it is a brand new lawsuit. Hopefully the judge will see this for what it is: a long-running intimidation campaign pretending to be "intelligence-led policing."

The answer, as is far too often the case, is poor security practices at the treatment plant.

According to an advisory from the state of Massachusetts, employees with the Oldsmar facility used a computer running Windows 7 to remotely access plant controls known as a SCADA—short for “supervisory control and data acquisition”—system. What’s more, the computer had no firewall installed and used a password that was shared among employees for remotely logging in to city systems with the TeamViewer application.

If you're not in the IT space, this is base level stuff. Have your computer systems on operating systems that are under active support and are being patched. That is doubly so for any systems that are critical, or which have access to critical systems. And to not have any client security, such as a local software firewall, on such a machine is IT malpractice. On top of the above, it appears that TeamViewer hadn't been actively used by the staff there for nearly six months. So there, again, was poor administration of the environment, with an antiquated remote access application not being removed from the production environment.

Instead, the save in all of this came from the meatware that was fortunately sitting at the machine and actively watching.

The breach occurred around 1:30pm, when an employee watched the mouse on his city computer moving on its own as an unknown party remotely accessed an interface that controlled the water treatment process. The person on the other end changed the amount of lye added to the water from about 100 parts per million to 11,100ppm. Lye is used in small amounts to adjust drinking water alkalinity and remove metals and other contaminants. In larger doses, the chemical is a health hazard.

Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reportedly told a House of Representatives Homeland Security committee on Wednesday that the breach was “very likely” the work of “a disgruntled employee.”

It's a water treatment plant for an entire city. In an era where there is an extreme lack of trust in government, dumb stuff like this acts as a supercharger.

That's what lots of people ask for without realizing that's an impossible ask. "Consistency" is not nearly as clear as people seem to think it is. Every scenario is different, and context plays a huge role in determining these things -- but people who complain about inconsistent enforcement never seem to recognize the wider context, and always focus in on some superficial similarity about the content, and insist that different outcomes mean inconsistency. It also ignores the scale of the problem. It also fails to take into account that policies have to keep being updated, because the issues that trust and safety teams face constantly are changing.

This bill would be like passing a law saying that the state of Florida must clearly define all its laws, can't pass new laws, and must apply the law consistently. That's not possible.

Even more ridiculous (and more unconstitutional) is that the bill would bar any moderation (or removal) of any political candidate. Of course, this would just mean that any troll who wants to be a total asshole online would register to run for office. Remember, it was rumored that well known online troll Laura Loomer supposedly ran for Congress in part because of she believed that it would force Twitter to give her her account back (which did not happen).

Of course, it's easy to just point at Florida and say "there goes Florida again..." but it's actually Republican legislators in a whole bunch of states. And this wasn't even the first such bill in Florida. A week or so earlier, Republican state Senator Joe Gruters introduced a bill called the "Stop Social Media Censorship Act" which bars any moderation of "religious or political speech."

Gruters may have introduced the bill, but it doesn't look like he wrote it. Because in Kentucky, Republican Senators Robby Mills and Phillip Wheeler introduced a nearly identical bill. Oh, and over in Oklahoma, Republican Senator Rob Standridge also introduced an identical bill. In Arizona, it's Senator Sonny Borrelli who has introduced very similar legislation, though his looks a little different, and (insanely) would try to put into law that a social media website is "deemed to be a publisher" and "deemed not to be a platform" which is, you know, not a thing that actually matters. In North Dakota, there's Republican State Rep. Tom Kading who's similar bill also includes the nonsense publisher/platform distinction.

All of these bills are (1) nonsense, (2) pre-empted by federal law, and (3) blatantly unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. A quick lesson for state legislators: the 1st Amendment means that the government (that's you!) cannot compel private parties (that includes social media companies!) that they have to host speech with which they disagree with. There's plenty of case law on this, but I'll point you to West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette which establishes quite clearly that the government cannot compel speech under the 1st Amendment. On top of that, I'll point people to the relatively recent ruling, written by Brett Kavanaugh (remember, Republicans, you supported this guy) and signed by all of the Conservative Justices, in the Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck case, in which it was made clear that social media websites are not state actors, and cannot be compelled to host speech. As Kavanaugh wrote in that ruling:

In short, merely hosting speech by others is not a traditional, exclusive public function and does not alone transform private entities into state actors subject to First Amendment constraints.

If the rule were otherwise, all private property owners and private lessees who open their property for speech would be subject to First Amendment constraints and would lose the ability to exercise what they deem to be appropriate editorial discretion within that open forum. Private property owners and private lessees would face the unappetizing choice of allowing all comers or closing the platform altogether. “The Constitution by no means requires such an attenuated doctrine of dedication of private property to public use.” ... Benjamin Franklin did not have to operate his newspaper as “a stagecoach, with seats for everyone.” ... That principle still holds true. As the Court said in Hudgens, to hold that private property owners providing a forum for speech are constrained by the First Amendment would be “to create a court-made law wholly disregarding the constitutional basis on which private ownership of property rests in this country.” ... The Constitution does not disable private property owners and private lessees from exercising editorial discretion over speech and speakers on their property

Remember how, as Republicans, you guys used to always support private property rights and the right to exclude those you disagree with? It's that all over again, except now you're suddenly trying to argue the exact opposite.

It wouldn't surprise me if there were a bunch more of these unconstitutional bills floating around, or that more will be introduced soon. Most of them are performative nonsense that no state legislature will actually pass. But if they do, just recognize that any legislature that does so is throwing away taxpayer money on a series of expensive lawsuits that will inevitably end with the law being tossed out as unconstitutional.

It still made headlines, mainly because New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft was one of those caught on camera. But nearly every attempted prosecution has been thwarted by the actions of law enforcement officers, whose recordings illegally intruded into private spaces, violating the Fourth Amendment. The Appeals Court of Florida tossed the allegedly incriminating recordings, finding them unconstitutional.

For some reason, the agencies that made the surreptitious, illegal recordings are still holding onto them. The state attorney's office has allowed the retention of the videos, claiming they might be useful to plaintiffs suing law enforcement officers and agencies over violated rights.

On the face of it, this seems like a reasonable assertion. There is at least one federal lawsuit involving this sting operation underway. But the state attorney -- David Aronberg -- thinks immunity (qualified or absolute) will allow him and several law enforcement agencies to escape unscathed. Until that happens, Aronberg wants the recordings to remain intact until this litigation concludes, claiming his office can't "legally or ethically" order the destruction of potential evidence against him.

But his arguments aren't working. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown reports for Reason, a federal judge has ruled against the state attorney.

In his January 22 order, Ruiz granted John Doe's motion to compel destruction of the massage room video. Ruiz ruled that the defendants "shall destroy the videos unlawfully obtained through the surveillance of the Orchids of Asia Day Spa […] from January 18, 2019 to January 22, 2019, including any body camera footage obtained during associated traffic stops as well as any copies thereof."

The motion to compel destruction was unopposed, and Ruiz noted that the destruction is "pursuant to the terms of the parties' settlement agreement."

So, let's sort this all out. The state attorney claimed the footage needed to be retained because these plaintiffs might want to use it as evidence in their lawsuit. But the plaintiffs actually wanted the footage destroyed and had to get the court to order the destruction the state attorney claimed wasn't "legal or ethical."

Retaining the footage plaintiffs wanted destroyed was, at the very least, unethical. And this order makes any further retention illegal. It would have seemed apparent destruction was the right way to go unless the plaintiffs requested otherwise, given that the state appeals court ruled last year that the recordings were illegally obtained and could not be used as evidence in the state's prosecutions.

This about wraps up this sordid little law enforcement escapade. And another sex trafficking sting resulting in the arrest of zero sex traffickers is par for the course for law enforcement agencies which appear to be looking for any excuse to engage in titillating wastes of taxpayers' time and money.

Some deputies made dozens of visits a year to residents that the Office had declared pre-criminals, citing them missing mailbox numbers or overgrown grass. What's in line for students being subjected to the same scrutiny isn't clear, but the Sheriff's broad list of indicators is pretty disturbing. According to the Sheriff, potentially criminal minors were students with low grades, spotty attendance, and/or were victims/witnesses of domestic violence.

The program itself was disturbing. But the Sheriff's access to student records appeared to be illegal. A privacy group dug into the laws surrounding the use of student records and came to the conclusion this program violated federal privacy protection laws, namely FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act).

While educators may have been able to share some records with School Resource Officers working with the Sheriff's Department, they were forbidden from sharing those records with the Sheriff's Office -- at least not without parental consent. Parental involvement in any of this pre-crime BS appears to be minimal. In fact, most parents (and administrators) appeared to be unaware the program even existed before the Tampa Bay Times uncovered it with public records requests.

Now the program has drawn the attention of Congress.

Denouncing the program as promoting “racial bias” and further feeding the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a U.S. congressman Tuesday called for a federal investigation into the Pasco school district’s practice of sharing student data with law enforcement.

“This use of student records goes against the letter and the spirit of (the federal student privacy law) and risks subjecting students, especially Black and Latino students, to excessive law enforcement interactions and stigmatization,” said U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott, a Virginia Democrat and the chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, in a letter to the acting federal education secretary.

The letter [PDF] points out the Sheriff's program blatantly ignores FERPA to give the Office a way to turn students into criminals, even if they have never committed a crime in their (short) lives.

Despite these clear restrictions, a recently uncovered “Intelligence-Led Policing Manual” indicates that a public school district has been releasing FERPA-protected education records to its local sheriff’s office, so that the sheriff can “identify at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime.” The sheriff’s office collects information from FERPA-protected records on “student’s grades, attendance, and behavior.” Using these records, the sheriff categorizes students by what it claims is their likelihood of “becoming prolific offenders” effectively creating a school to prison pipeline and determining their outcomes for them. Additionally, the sheriff collects data from other state agencies on children’s social networks and whether children have experienced abuse or other trauma, which it claims “significantly increase[s] their likelihood of developing into serious, violent, and chronic . . . offenders.” To be clear, though the sheriff’s intelligence report refers to these children as “potential offenders,” this is not a list of juvenile offenders, but a list of children that may have committed no crimes.

More locally, the Pasco County Parents and Teachers Association is calling for the school district to reconsider its data-sharing agreements with the Sheriff's Office and to ensure its participation is actually lawful. More reasonable parents are demanding the program be stopped completely.

So far, the school district has only offered this vapid statement:

The school district said it planned to “assure the PTA County Council that our agreements with the Sheriff’s Office are routinely reviewed and, when appropriate, revised or updated.”

Obviously, this isn't true. If they were routinely reviewed, someone who actually gave a damn would have spotted the federal privacy law violations well before a local newspaper and privacy activists did. This statement means nothing more than the district is waiting for the furor to die down before getting back to pre-crime business as usual.

And the last sentence of this paragraph pretty much directly contradicts the hollow claim data-sharing agreements are "routinely reviewed."

But asked directly, [the district] declined to say whether it would act on any of the PTA’s requests, whether it was reviewing the Sheriff’s Office program, or whether Superintendent Kurt Browning had learned anything about the program since he told a reporter he was unaware data was being used this way in September.

The district's apparent plan to wait this thing out isn't working. At least not yet. It's been on the radar since last November. And now it's going federal. Someone's going to be forced to take some action soon. Hopefully, it will be the school district reaching for the program's cord and pulling the plug on this abomination attempting to pass itself off as good police work.

This subjects minors to the same harassment that currently targets adults in the Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's jurisdiction. The pre-crime program run by the Sheriff allows deputies to swarm houses late at night to harass residents and write them citations for missing mailbox numbers or overgrown grass. There's nothing in this program that appears to target serious or violent crime. Instead, as the Sheriff has stated, the goal is to make people miserable enough that they "sue or leave the county."

This same mentality now plagues Pasco County schools. And there's more to it than a lifetime of petty harassment that now begins while residents are still minors. Not only is it pretty messed up to predetermine students' criminal histories using a handful of questionable indicators and an Excel spreadsheet, it also appears to be illegal. The Pasco County Sheriff's Office seems to have bypassed asking itself any tough questions about turning bad students into criminals. It also appears to have avoided running this program past its in-house counsel.

Subjecting students to the Sheriff Office's "juvenile intelligence analysts" isn't as straightforward as the Pasco Sheriff thinks. There are laws governing the sharing of school records -- both at state and federal levels. And the Sheriff's Office -- the personification of "rule of law" -- appears to be violating federal law, according to analysis by Student Privacy Compass.

From the supplied documentation, the Sheriff’s Office’s current data practices violate not only its contract with the school board but also the privacy protections required by the federal education privacy law, FERPA. School Resource Officers (SROs) cannot share student information to their local law enforcement office without consent if that disclosure fails to meet an exception to FERPA’s parental consent requirement.

The program has run in secret since its inception. It was exposed by public records requests. Parents aren't notified when their children are flagged as potential criminals. And, it can safely be assumed interactions with police officers on school campuses aren't forwarded to parents, nor are they given a chance to intercede on behalf of their children.

The Sheriff Office's predictive policing database shares data the Office isn't allowed to share with other employees. Federal privacy laws may allow schools to share students' personal information with deputies tasked as "school resource officers," but it does not allow those officers to share that data with the Sheriff's Office.

It’s important to note that although SROs do receive student PII from an education record under the school official exception, sharing student PII with an SRO is very different from sharing student PII with a teacher. Most SROs are employed by a school in tandem with the sheriff’s office—becoming an SRO at a local school does not change the fact that the SRO is still an external law enforcement officer. SROs must segment how they absorb student PII: the student PII they receive as a school official cannot be redisclosed to their sheriff’s office or police department without parental consent, unless that disclosure meets an appropriate exception to the parental consent requirement (in the event of a health or safety emergency or in response to a subpoena or other judicial order).

The exceptions to FERPA do not appear to apply to routine data gathering solely for the purpose of "predicting" whether students will go on to commit crimes. There are exceptions for investigating legitimate threats to school safety, but an ongoing program that turns a bunch of ridiculous "predicates" into an excuse for SROs and deputies to harass students obviously isn't limiting itself to known exceptions to federal privacy laws.

Instead, it seems the Sheriff's Office appears to have opportunistically leveraged a school shooting to create an school-centric surveillance program, bypassing privacy laws with the blessing of schools in its jurisdiction. And it's using the same thought process that allows it to oppress locals it finds undesirable. But this time it's targeting locals under the age of consent.

I will faithfully serve and protect my community…

- A Hippocratic Oath for Policing, the National Police Foundation

To Protect and To Serve

- The Los Angeles Police Department motto, adopted in 1955

[N]othing in the language of the Due Process Clause itself requires the State to protect the life, liberty, and property of its citizens against invasion by private actors…

- US Supreme Court, DeShaney v. Winnebago County, 1989

There is no legal obligation for police officers to protect citizens. There may be a moral obligation. And there may be the obligation thrust on certain departments who've adopted mottos or decorated their badges with "protection" niceties, but that obligation only goes as far as the courts demand… which is nowhere.

That's why we end up with this sort of protection/service far too often. (h/t WarOnPrivacy)

Seventy-year-old Bill Norkunas, a childhood polio survivor, headed over to the light and flicked it on hoping to scare away whoever was there. Instead, the light was a beacon drawing a young man to his front door, a door made of glass.

And then for the next 15 minutes, Norkunas stood there, barefoot and unclothed, with his crutches, on one side of the glass pane trying to steady a gun in his trembling hand while the stranger stood on the other side, pounding on the door, banging it with his hip or gnawing at the thick hurricane-grade glass with a garden paver.

[...]

And as bewildering, and just as terrifying to him, is the knowledge that a squad of Broward sheriff’s deputies responded to his Tamarac neighborhood, but none came close to his home to stop the man. Instead, they waited down the street until he walked over to them and surrendered, witnesses told the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

It wasn't just Norkunas involved in this. The man trying to break into his home had attempted to do the same thing at other houses in the neighborhood. 911 was besieged by calls from Norkunas' neighbors. But apparently nothing they said made the Broward County Sheriff's Department any more willing to confront the reported burglar. For this entire ordeal, deputies waited hundreds of feet away, apparently waiting for the problem to solve itself.

Instead of stopping the would-be-intruder at Norkunas’ door, witnesses said, the deputies stayed down the street and around a corner, some 500 yards away while Norkunas and his neighbors flooded the 911 emergency communications system begging for help for almost 15 minutes.

This was an actual emergency. The 70-year-old man asked 911 operators if it was OK for him to shoot the intruder if he managed to make his way into his house. Neighbors calling the dispatchers expressed similar concerns for the man's safety. Meanwhile, 18 deputies stood by while this information was relayed, never moving for the fifteen minutes it took for the burglar to give up and surrender to law enforcement.

And the Broward County Sheriff's Department -- the same department that received deserved heat for its inadequate response to the Parkland school shooting in 2019 -- has offered no satisfactory explanation for this lack of effort when citizens' lives were on the line.

Norkunas said a sergeant explained procedures for setting up a perimeter so that Johnson could not escape, but also admitted they could have done better.

That's a problem. There were 18 deputies at the scene. It only would have taken a handful to approach Norkunas' house and attempt to apprehend the suspect. Not a single officer did. Instead, the amassed group of useless deputies lucked into an arrest when the suspect found them and turned himself in.

Because of this inaction, the relationship between the neighborhood and their alleged "protectors" has been irreparably damaged. One neighbor installed security cameras. Another stated she no longer "counts on police" to handle dangerous situations. And Nakounas has taken to carrying his gun with him at all times, even when taking his dog for a walk.

When the Supreme Court said police have no obligation to protect citizens, they took this to heart. The end result has been a stream of horrendous and horrifying incidents where police are willing cast aside their moral obligations just because they couldn't be held legally liable for failing to "do better." Not giving a shit still pays off, ensuring officers return home safely every night, even if those paying their salaries end up dead.

As Jones herself explained after being fired:

I was asked by DOH leadership to manually change numbers. This was a week before the reopening plan officially kicked off into phase one. I was asked to do the analysis and present the findings about which counties met the criteria for reopening. The criteria followed more or less the White House panel's recommendations, but our epidemiology team also contributed to that as well. As soon as I presented the results, they were essentially the opposite of what they had anticipated. The whole day while we're having this kind of back and forth changing this, not showing that, the plan was being printed and stapled right in front of me. So it was very clear at that point that the science behind the supposedly science-driven plan didn't matter because the plan was already made.

Since then, Jones has been running Florida COVID Action, which is a dashboard of Florida COVID information, like the one she used to run for the state.

And apparently Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis couldn't allow that to stand. This afternoon Rebekah posted a short Twitter thread, with video, showing Florida state police raiding her home. As she notes, when they asked her who else was in the home, she told them that her husband and children were upstairs, and they pulled out their guns:

This is horrifying on so many levels. Why was her home raided? Why did they pull out guns? Why did they do it after she told them that it was her children upstairs? Why did they seize all of her electronics equipment? Why are they doing any of this?

Jones has been doing everything to better inform the public of what's happening in the middle of a pandemic, and this is the thanks she gets? Having her home raided by the police and having guns drawn on her children?

This is not supposed to happen. This should not happen. It is horrifying and I hope that Jones is able to retain powerful legal help to fight back against this clear violation of her civil liberties, and a clear authoritarian overreach by Governor DeSantis.

Update: Since the original story broke, Florida state police claim that the search warrant was in response to someone breaching an emergency alert system and sending a group text saying: "It's time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don't have to be a part of this. Be a hero. Speak out before it's too late." The warrant claims that the breach was tied to an IP address at Jones' house. Jones has vehemently denied she had anything to do with this:

"I'm not a hacker," Jones said. She added that the language in the message that authorities said was sent was "not the way I talk," and contained errors she would not make.

"The number of deaths that the person used wasn't even right," Jones said. "They were actually under by about 430 deaths. I would never round down 430 deaths."

Later in the evening, the full search warrant was published, and it raise serious questions... not about Jones, as much as what the fuck Florida's Dept. of Health is doing with its communications systems. The service that Jones is accused of using involves a shared password among a ton of people:

On November 10, 2020, at approximately 1420 hours and 1442 hours, an unidentified subject gained access to a mull—user account group StatoESF— 8 Planning" and sent a group text stating the following: "it's time to speak up before another 17,000 people are dead. You know this is wrong. You don't have to be part of this. Be a here, Speak out before it's too late— From StateESF8 Planning". FDOH estimates that approximately 1,750 messages were delivered before the software vendor was able to stop the message from being transmitted.

FDOH has several groups within ReadyOp's application platform, one of which is StateESF8.Planning. ESF8 is Florida's Emergency Support Function for Public Health and Medical with which they coordinate the state‘s health and medical resources, capabilities, and capacities. They also provide the means for a public health response, triage, treatment, and transportation. The group StateESF8.Planning is utilized by multiple users, some of which are not employees of FDOH but are employees of other government agencies. Once they are no longer associated with ESF8 they are no longer authorized to access the multi—user group.

All users assigned to StateESF8.Planning group share the same username and password. SA Pratts requested and received a copy of the technical logs containing the Internet Protocol (IP) address for users accessing the ReadyOp web—based platform for the multi—user StateESF. Planning.

As security pro Jake Williams notes, it is bizarre beyond belief that (1) you have an important system relying on a single shared username and password and that such login info is not changed after someone is fired:

Still, it sounds like we may end up seeing a classic CFAA-style case here, regarding "unauthorized access." Unfortunately, there are some cases on the books where logging into a system where you had a password after you've been instructed not to do so any more means you've violated the CFAA. This is kind of stupid, because it should be on the organization itself to actually change the password, rather than putting the burden on the user... but if there's real evidence here that she did access the system, she could be in serious CFAA trouble.

Even so, that's no excuse for raiding her home with guns drawn.

The Pasco Sheriff’s Office keeps a secret list of kids it thinks could “fall into a life of crime” based on factors like whether they’ve been abused or gotten a D or an F in school, according to the agency's internal intelligence manual.

The Sheriff’s Office assembles the list by combining the rosters for most middle and high schools in the county with records so sensitive, they’re protected by state and federal law.

The Pasco County pre-crime list makes about as much sense as any gang database/terrorist watchlist in the country. Pretty much anything can get a student labelled a problem child whose future criminal activity is a presumed destiny. Gang databases include people who live where gangs are operating and whose children go to the same schools gang members attend.

The same guilt-by-association applies here, but more absurdly. According to the Sheriff's pre-crime program, kids who have witnessed or been the victim of domestic abuse will probably become criminals. So will those who are struggling academically, have missed classes, or have been sent to the office for discipline.

This seems like the sort of thing better handled by school counselors, social workers, and others not inclined to view students as criminals. But it's in the hands of the Sheriff's office, along with sensitive information about students not normally considered to be under law enforcement's purview.

The Pasco County Sheriff claims this is all about helping kids -- not predetermining their destiny.

In a series of written statements, the Sheriff’s Office said the list is used only to help the deputies assigned to middle and high schools offer “mentorship” and “resources” to students.

Asked for specifics, it pointed to one program where school resource officers take children fishing and another where they give clothes to kids in need.

The documents obtained by TampaBay.com say something else. The Office's manual [PDF], which provides guidance for the Sheriff's [what fresh dystopian hell is] "juvenile intelligence analysts," places far more emphasis on determining who should be placed on lifelong surveillance due to their alleged criminal tendencies than finding help for at-risk students.

The list itself is the Sheriff's secret. Parents aren't notified when their kids are put on the "pre-criminal" list. Some school administrators seem largely unaware their schools' data is being used to profile minors. The Sheriff's Office, however, claims it has been the recipient of student info/data for two decades. Its move to put minors on the same level as adults is perhaps to be expected, given the lack of oversight or awareness by anyone else involved.

The list of school kids isn’t the agency’s only effort to identify and target people it considers likely to commit crimes. In September, a Tampa Bay Times investigation revealed that the department’s intelligence arm also uses people’s criminal histories and social networks to predict if they will break the law.

This is only going to cause more pain for Pasco County residents. As was revealed earlier by another investigation, the Pasco County Sheriff's other predictive policing program has led to months of harassment, with supposed "at-risk" residents being cited for un-mowed lawns, missing mailbox numbers, minors smoking on their property, and having chickens in their yard. When fines and fees aren't paid, deputies start arresting people. Anyone flagged by the system can expect to be visited several times a month by deputies who apparently have way too much time on their hands.

The same harassment is in store for students the Pasco County Sheriff deems "at risk." And it doesn't take much to get on the list. According to the program's documents, getting 1 "D" in a semester will flag a student as "at risk." So will 3-4 absences in a quarter. Being a victim of a "personal crime" is also an at-risk factor.

And so it goes. The data schools are sharing with law enforcement is fed into a spreadsheet that prejudges kids, setting them up for more interactions with law enforcement… which sets them up for even more marks in the at risk column. Like seemingly everything else law enforcement touches, it disproportionately affects certain people.

In Pasco County, Black students and students with disabilities are twice as likely to be suspended or referred to law enforcement, according to federal data.

It would be nice to believe this garbage in/garbage out pre-criming ends when a student graduates high school. But there's no reason to believe the Sheriff's Office doesn't feed info on graduates into its other pre-crime system, ensuring deputies spend a considerable amount of time hassling people they suspect might commit a crime at some undetermined point in the future. And until there's any real crime to handle, they can continue nickel-and-diming Pasco County residents -- some of who will have become accustomed to this bullshit long before they become legal adults.

In both cases, these law professors are effectively arguing that when they make convoluted arguments, you must include all of the nuances and context, or you might face defamation claims. That's incredibly chilling to free speech, and not how defamation law works. Dershowitz's complaint is that during the trial, he made the following claim:

“The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were somehow illegal. Now we talk about motive. There are three possible motives that a political figure could have. One, a motive in the public interest and the Israel argument would be in the public interest. The second is in his own political interest and the third, which hasn’t been mentioned, would be his own financial interest, his own pure financial interest, just putting money in the bank. I want to focus on the second one for just one moment. Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest and, mostly you are right, your election is in the public interest, and if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment."

Dershowitz is upset that CNN aired a segment that showed just that final sentence:

Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest and, mostly you are right, your election is in the public interest, and if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.

But here's the thing: CNN also did air the full segment. And Dershowitz admits this. He's just upset that at other times they only aired part of it, and that some commentators don't paraphrase it the way he wanted them to. Here's where he admits that CNN did, in fact, air the entire clip:

Immediately after Professor Dershowitz presented his argument, CNN employees, Wolf Blitzer and Jake Tapper, played the entire clip properly, so CNN knew for certain that Professor Dershowitz had prefaced his remarks with the qualifier that a quid pro quo could not include an illegal act. That portion then disappeared in subsequent programming.

It disappeared because the longer quote is long, and people were focused on the key part -- that final sentence. Many people -- including some on CNN -- mocked Dershowitz for those remarks. Because they're ludicrous. Even with the full paragraph. But the mockable part is the final sentence, and that's why it's news. And the CNN commentators who mocked it were commentators -- people paid to give their opinion on what Dershowitz said.

But, as with Lessig's lawsuit, the complaint from Dershowitz is that commentator's opinions about what was said differs from what was meant. But opinions cannot be defamatory. And if people misinterpreted what Dershowitz said, that's on Dershowitz for not explaining it clearly enough. We're in a world of trouble if people get to sue for defamation every time someone misunderstands their poorly made argument.

I can understand why it's frustrating for people to completely misunderstand your argument. It happens all the time to lots of people -- including myself. It happens quite often when people try to make carefully nuanced arguments. But misunderstanding, or even misrepresenting, a more nuanced argument is not defamation. And nothing in Dershwotiz's lawsuit changes that.

Dershowitz's lawsuit hangs its hat on the Masson v. New Yorker Supreme Court ruling from 1991. Dershowitz's complaint describes that ruling as follows:

... the Court held that a media organization can be held liable for damages when it engages in conduct that changes the meaning of what a public figure has actually said. While Masson involved the use of quotation marks to falsely attribute words to Jeffrey Masson, the law that the case created is broad, and unequivocally denies first amendment protections to a media organization that takes deliberate and malicious steps to change the meaning of what a public figure has said. That is exactly what CNN did when it knowingly omitted the portion of Professor Dershowitz’s words that preceded the clip it played time and time again.

This is... not an accurate portrayal of the Masson case or ruling. And, yes, I recognize that there's some irony in Dershowitz claiming its defamation to misrepresent himself while his lawsuit then misrepresents a key Supreme Court case that it relies on. The Masson case is a fun one to read. In involves an article (and then a book made out of the article) about an academic where it appears that the author didn't just selectively quote the academic, but made up quotes. The ruling compares the quotes in the article to the tape recordings of interviews to note just how different the quotes in the story are from what was actually said. That's... not what is happening here. It is true that one of the quotes in the Masson case involved selectively excising some of a quote, but that was done in a truly egregious way. It wasn't that they left out context, it was that they excised a middle portion, to make a later portion appear that it was referring to something much earlier, rather than what was excised.

That is... not what happened to Dershowitz. Indeed, the Masson ruling works against Dershowitz in many ways. It actually says that you have to expect the press to take your long rambling comments and tighten them up, because that's part of journalism:

Even if a journalist has tape-recorded the spoken statement of a public figure, the full and exact statement will be reported in only rare circumstances. The existence of both a speaker and a reporter; the translation between two media, speech and the printed word; the addition of punctuation; and the practical necessity to edit and make intelligible a speaker's perhaps rambling comments, all make it misleading to suggest that a quotation will be reconstructed with complete accuracy. The use or absence of punctuation may distort a speaker's meaning, for example, where that meaning turns upon a speaker's emphasis of a particular word. In other cases, if a speaker makes an obvious misstatement, for example by unconscious substitution of one name for another, a journalist might alter the speaker's words but preserve his intended meaning. And conversely, an exact quotation out of context can distort meaning, although the speaker did use each reported word.

In all events, technical distinctions between correcting grammar and syntax and some greater level of alteration do not appear workable, for we can think of no method by which courts or juries would draw the line between cleaning up and other changes, except by reference to the meaning a statement conveys to a reasonable reader. To attempt narrow distinctions of this type would be an unnecessary departure from First Amendment principles of general applicability, and, just as important, a departure from the underlying purposes of the tort of libel as understood since the latter half of the 16th century. From then until now, the tort action for defamation has existed to redress injury to the plaintiff's reputation by a statement that is defamatory and false.

In the Masson case, the Court did find that many of the changes to the text, including that one section, involved a "material" difference in meaning, and therefore could be found defamatory by a jury. But this case is very, very different than what Dershowitz is claiming about CNN. They didn't quote his whole line, but there is no requirement they quote his entire argument.

Then there's the whole damages bit. According to Dershowitz, his reputation was damaged to the tune of $300 million because some people made fun of him on CNN, and it's all their fault that they didn't understand his poorly made argument. The fucking entitlement of this guy.

The damage to Professor Dershowitz’s reputation does not have to be imagined. He was openly mocked by most of the top national talk show hosts and the comments below CNN’s videos show a general public that has concluded that Professor Dershowitz had lost his mind.

Being mocked on TV is proof of damages? Really, now? How fragile is Dersh's ego here? Multiple times in the lawsuit, Dershowitz's lawyer (yes, he found an actual Florida man lawyer to file this lawsuit) talks about how only playing part of his long silly answer would lead people to believe that Dersh had "lost his mind":

The very notion of that was preposterous and foolish on its face, and that was the point: to falsely paint Professor Dershowitz as a constitutional scholar and intellectual who had lost his mind. With that branding, Professor Dershowitz’s sound and meritorious arguments would then be drowned under a sea of repeated lies.

If only airing one sentence of your preposterous argument makes you look like you've lost your mind, perhaps the problem is in how you frame your arguments.

This is yet another SLAPP suit. Florida has an anti-SLAPP law, but it's a mixed bag in terms of how strong it is. Of course, as with many SLAPP suits, the real goal is likely to just be intimidation, rather than to actually win a vexatious nonsense lawsuit.

Supposedly, this will allow officers to prevent more criminal activity. The dirty data sends cops into neighborhoods to target everyone who lives there, just because they have the misfortune of living in an area where crime is prevalent. If the software was any "smarter," it would just send cops to prisons where criminal activity is the highest.

The Pasco County Sheriff's Department thinks it's going to drive crime down by engaging in predictive policing. But no one's crippling massive criminal organizations or liberating oppressed communities from the criminal activity that plagues their everyday lives. Instead of smart policing that maximizes limited resources, Pasco County residents are getting this instead:

First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.

Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.

They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.

One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”

Those are the options given to residents. The Sheriff wants residents to fund their own harassment. If they don't like being hassled by officers, move or sue. Both are costly. Both disrupt people's lives. And it's happening because people live in the "wrong" areas or have committed criminal acts in the past, the latter of which law enforcement isn't willing to forgive or forget long after these residents have repaid their debt to society.

In one case, a 15-year-old boy on probation (and overseen by a probation officer) for stealing motorized bikes was "visited" by deputies 21 times in six months. They went to his mother's employer, his friend's house, and the gym he frequented. Past mistakes are the impetus for months or years of hassling by deputies, thanks to the Sheriff's software.

Since September 2015, the Sheriff’s Office has sent deputies on checks like those more than 12,500 times, dispatch logs show.

The Sheriff's Office says this is a smarter way to fight crime. When deputies fine someone $2,500 for having chickens in their yard or arrest a father because a 17-year-old was spotted smoking cigarettes on his property, it's just better police work all around. The Sheriff's Office has become the county's unofficial Homeowner's Assocation, hassling residents for uncut grass, missing mailbox numbers, and having unpopular pets on the premises. But the Pasco County Sheriff thinks this is a good thing and has the stats to back it up.

The Sheriff’s Office said its program was designed to reduce bias in policing by using objective data. And it provided statistics showing a decline in burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts since the program began in 2011.

Or does it?

But Pasco’s drop in property crimes was similar to the decline in the seven-largest nearby police jurisdictions. Over the same time period, violent crime increased only in Pasco.

All the data generated by the Office's 12,500 hasslings goes back into the system, laying the foundation for the next 12,500 useless insertions of law enforcement into people's lives.

The program utilizes 30 people and runs residents $2.8 million a year. It's headed by a former senior counterterrorism expert. The second-in-command is a former Army intelligence officer. But for all the supposed expertise, it's only country residents being terrorized.

The system assigns points to people to see if they can make the top 100 "offenders" list, which is where the Office focuses its efforts. Points are given to people if they're accused of any criminal act, even if the charges are dropped or they're only considered a suspect. Their scores are enhanced if they appear in police reports, even as a witness or a victim.

Body camera recordings and documents show deputies engaged in "intelligence-led" policing threatening people with arrests and citations if they won't agree to let officers in their homes. They also show efforts targeting teens and people with developmental disabilities, including one "target" who had twice been ruled incompetent to stand trial. Former deputies and officers say not every interaction was recorded or logged. In some cases, deputies would park multiple cars outside of targets' homes for hours at a time or make up to six visits a day to the same residence.

The goal is harassment. And it works. Residents feel harassed. Interactions that began cordially have steadily become more confrontational. This works to the Sheriff's advantage. Provoking anger makes it easier to find something to charge residents with, given the number of statutes that enable "contempt of cop" charges. At least one frequent target moved their family out of the county

All of this targeted harassment hasn't made county residents any safer. They'd enjoy the same reduction in property crime in any other nearby county without having to deal with this massive downside. And, as the stats show, violent crime is lower in nearby counties not subjecting residents to mafioso tactics under the guise of "intelligence-led policing." All the program has really shown is that the Sheriff's Office has an excess of personnel and resources.

The latest development comes from Florida's Fifth District, where another state appeals court has reached the same conclusion as the others: passcodes are testimonial, and forcing people to turn them over implicates the Fifth Amendment. (via FourthAmendment.com)

The case deals with some targeted vandalism and alleged stalking. Investigators feel the phone they found at the crime scene belongs to the suspect and contains evidence to support the aggravated stalking charges. (The victim also apparently found a GPS device attached to her car, presumably placed there by the suspect.)

The decision [PDF] recounts the state's bizarre argument at the trial court level -- one that claimed demanding a passcode from the suspect was not an "intrusion."

Because Garcia’s smartphone was passcode protected, law enforcement was unable to unlock the phone to conduct the search. The State then moved to compel Garcia to provide the passcode, alleging in its motion that the contents of Garcia’s phone “are relevant to how the events occurred and whether [Garcia] is guilty,” and that providing the passcode would “involve no unreasonable intrusions upon the body of [Garcia].”

The trial court bought the state's arguments and its "foregone conclusion" assumption and granted the motion to compel.

It orally found that providing the passcode was non-testimonial and thus, “the Stahl decision is controlling here.”

The decision the trial court cited (but didn't discuss in its ruling) was handed down by the Second District Appeals Court in 2016. In that case, the court decided a passcode was non-testimonial because the passcode itself didn't give the state anything it didn't already possess. But, as was pointed out by the Fourth District in its decision in favor of the Fifth Amendment, the Stahl decision misses the point:

Contrary to the Stahl court’s conclusion, which the trial court adopted, the “evidence sought” in a password production case such as this is not the password itself; rather, it is the actual files or evidence on the locked phone.

But that's all the trial court used here and it did so without explaining any of its reasoning in a written order. The appeals court says Stahl controls nothing because the Stahl decision did not correctly address the issue.

In Stahl, law enforcement obtained a warrant to search the defendant’s locked phone, but the defendant refused to provide them with his passcode. The State filed a motion to compel production of the passcode, which the trial court denied, finding the production of the passcode to be testimonial. The Second District Court quashed the order, holding that compelling the defendant to reveal his passcode was not testimonial because the passcode was “sought only for its content and the content has no other value or significance.”

We respectfully disagree with the Second District Court. Distilled to its essence, the revealing of the passcode is a verbal communication of the contents of one’s mind. (“As a passcode is necessarily memorized, one cannot reveal a passcode without revealing the contents of one’s mind.”). We agree with Garcia that the order under review requires that he utilize the contents of his mind and disclose specific information regarding the passcode that will likely lead to incriminating information that the State will then use against him at trial. We therefore conclude that the compelled disclosure of his passcode is testimonial and is protected by the Fifth Amendment.

The "foregone conclusion" exception doesn't work here either. The court says US Supreme Court precedent deals with the production of documents, not oral testimony. Since the court considers oral revelation of a passcode "testimonial," it's unwilling to extend this exception to cover it. Doing so would "narrow" a right without adequate justification.

In summary, we hold that compelling a defendant, such as Garcia, to provide orally the passcode to his smartphone is a testimonial communication protected under the Fifth Amendment and that the foregone conclusion exception or doctrine does not apply to compelled oral testimony.

This decision also asks the Florida Supreme Court to weigh in on this issue and hand down precedent for the state. The appellate level appears to lean heavily towards recognizing compelled production to be a Fifth Amendment violation. Meanwhile, trial courts are acting as though the question was already settled by a single 2016 decision handed down by a single appellate district, ignoring every ruling that's been handed down since then. This should happen sooner rather than later. The issue is too big to ignore.

But they did land a big fish. Robert Kraft -- the owner of the New England Patriots -- was one of the spa customers caught up in the sting. That was the biggest news. Evidence of actual trafficking never appeared, leaving law enforcement with a big name, a bunch of low-level arrests, and little else.

What little law enforcement and prosecutors did have is now gone as well. Upholding a lower court's decision on video evidence captured by hidden cameras, a Florida state appeals court says everything captured on the government's secret cameras was illegally obtained. (via FourthAmendment.com)

This conclusion was reached even though investigators obtained warrants for the cameras. Here's the backstory on the video recordings, taken from the decision [PDF]:

The Jupiter detective then applied for a warrant to install secret, non-audio video cameras in the spa and to monitor and record the video. A magistrate issued a warrant allowing police to install hidden cameras at the spa in places where prostitution was believed to be occurring and in the lobby. The warrant prohibited cameras in areas where prostitution was not suspected, such as the kitchen, bathroom, and personal bedrooms.

The warrant allowed non-audio video recording for no more than five days to obtain evidence of prostitution and the felony offense of deriving support from the proceeds of prostitution. The warrant did not discuss or otherwise direct any police conduct related to “minimization,” and the detectives were not given any type of formal written instructions about how to minimize.

Using a phony bomb threat to clear the building, police installed hidden cameras in four of the spa’s massage rooms and in the lobby. Three detectives monitored and recorded video from the hidden cameras over five days. The cameras recorded video continuously, but Jupiter detectives monitored the video feeds only during business hours.

The detectives toggled between the video feeds when they displayed or when they thought they might soon display criminal conduct. They focused on the end of the massages because the sexual conduct typically occurred at the end. In all, police recorded 25 spa customers pay for sexual services. Ten more customers were suspected to have paid for sex, but the offenses could not be confirmed due to dim lighting. Four customers, including two women, were recorded who did not engage in illegal activity.

The same thing happened in other locations. Cameras were surreptitiously installed and monitored by other law enforcement agencies. Technical limitations and hardware glitches resulted in some legal massages being recorded along with those involving sexual acts. In total, multiple spas were surveilled for more than 60 days. While some effort was made to minimize the recording of legal acts or activities not related to possible prostitution and solicitation, this didn't appear to be much of a concern to investigators.

That led to the lower court throwing out the evidence because officers and investigators did not make enough of an effort to minimize intrusion or avoid recording activities outside of the scope of the warrants. The state appealed, claiming three things:

First, it said none of the defendants had any expectation of privacy in their activities at the massage parlors. It also claimed the Fourth Amendment does not contain a "minimization" requirement. Finally, the state argued even if it was wrong about its two previous arguments, investigators should be awarded "good faith" for not knowing any better.

Wrong, says the court. Of course the defendants have standing. The expectation of privacy doesn't disappear just because they've stepped out of their own homes and into a massage parlor.

The spa-client defendants in all of these cases had a subjective and objectively reasonable expectation of privacy in the massage parlor rooms. The surveillance took place in a professional private setting where clients are expected to partially or fully disrobe. The spa owners and their employees also had a reasonable right to expect that the interactions with nude or partially nude clients in the massage rooms would not be exposed to the public. As soon as the door to the massage room was closed, they had a reasonable expectation of privacy.

The court also dispenses with one of the state's more ridiculous arguments: that the people caught on tape engaging in criminal activities had no expectation of privacy because they were engaging in criminal activity.

The state also argues that the spas were primarily used as a brothel, as most of the customers who were recorded and monitored engaged in unlawful activity, and thus, the state asserts, the defendants cannot rely on the Fourth Amendment rights of third parties who had their innocent conduct recorded. However, as case law shows us, Fourth Amendment rights are nearly always safeguarded by those who are criminally prosecuted. [...] Consequently, the state’s circular argument that the defendants lacked a privacy interest because they were engaging in criminal behavior is uncompelling.

The state's assertion that the Fourth Amendment contains no minimization requirements is correct as far as the plain text is concerned. But jurisprudence has developed quite a bit since 1789, when video surveillance was nonexistent and unimaginable.

[T]he Tenth Circuit adopted “five requirements for video surveillance that define more specifically the probable cause and particularity requirements of the fourth amendment,” and which requirements expressly include the minimization requirement: An order permitting video surveillance shall not be issued unless: (1) there has been a showing that probable cause exists that a particular person is committing, has committed, or is about to commit a crime; (2) the order particularly describes the place to be searched and the things to be seized in accordance with the fourth amendment; (3) the order is sufficiently precise so as to minimize the recording of activities not related to the crimes under investigation…

The warrants obtained in this investigation are faulty because they ignored this crucial prerequisite for video surveillance of private places.

The warrants at issue did not set forth any specific written parameters to minimize the recording of innocent massage seekers, and law enforcement did not actually employ sufficient minimization techniques when monitoring the video or deciding what to record. In all the investigations, some innocent spa goers were video recorded and monitored undressed. There was no suggestion or probable cause to believe that female spa clients were receiving sexual services, yet law enforcement largely failed to take the most reasonable, basic, and obvious minimization technique, which was simply to not monitor or record female spa clients.

This is exceptionally careless given the technology involved.

The most egregious example is the investigation by the Vero Beach Police Department in the Freels case where the cameras recorded continuously for 60 days. Thirty days’ worth of unmonitored recordings remain in the police department’s possession in that case. Other innocent spa clients may have been recorded nude – or partially undressed – on those days. Those innocent clients potentially live with the knowledge that nude videos of themselves are preserved on a server somewhere with unknown accessibility. In our ever increasingly digital world filled with hackers and the like, such awareness renders the surveillance a particularly severe infringement on privacy.

There's no good faith here either. Video surveillance has been around for decades. Investigators can't just ignore long-standing policies and court precedent and expect their "errors" to be treated as inadvertent.

We cannot conclude here that the law enforcement agencies acted in good faith with respect to minimization due to the lack of Florida law on point. The warrant applications themselves cited the decades-old federal law (such as Mesa-Rincon) setting out the requirements for obtaining a warrant to conduct secret video surveillance in private locations, including the need to minimize the recording of innocent conduct. These citations negate a finding of ignorance of minimization requirements.

Your ignorance, stupidity, and haste is your own fault, the court says to the state. Everything you had is gone because law enforcement decided to ignore years of well developed jurisprudence to engage in a human trafficking investigation that has yet to uncover any human traffickers.

The federal case law cited herein pertaining to silent video surveillance is well reasoned and widely accepted. Consequently, we must hold—as every federal circuit court and state court to consider the question has— that this type of intrusive, covert video surveillance is subject to heightened standards and procedures designed to implement Fourth Amendment protections, particularly in the face of the constantly expanding use of electronic surveillance techniques by law enforcement. And where the government fails to faithfully follow these standards and procedures, it will be held to account by the exclusion of the evidence obtained. The Fourth Amendment demands no less under these circumstances.

The Fourth Amendment makes demands of law enforcement. This isn't a new thing. It's been there since these two entities began their uneasy coexistence. But far too often, law enforcement is unwilling to uphold its end of the bargain. And let's not lose sight of what actually happened here, which goes beyond the multiple rights violations: cops deployed the video equivalent of wiretaps to catch sex workers and their customers. This sort of intrusion is supposed to be reserved for only the most serious of crimes and the most dangerous of criminals, as the concurrence points out:

The authorization of electronic or video surveillance for petty crimes as a steppingstone in an effort to investigate more serious offenses would make a mockery of the designated crime requirement. Such a subterfuge would violate the princip[le] that continuous invasions of privacy must be reserved for occasions when the need to do so was critical. . . . Florida law provides no basis for seeking a warrant for electronic eavesdropping of conversations in a misdemeanor prostitution case, and there is no reason to believe that either the legislature or judiciary would want to permit such warrants when intrusive video surveillance is at issue.

And this is yet another reason why the surveillance in this case was unlawful: there's no Florida law that permits it.

Neither the Florida statutes, nor case law authorize covert audio surveillance to investigate prostitution-related offenses. It follows that the more intrusive video surveillance is also prohibited, providing yet another basis for affirmance.

All the state has now is a bunch of petty charges it may not be able to make stick without these surreptitious recordings. If cops were really trying to break up a trafficking ring, they have failed miserably and put potential victims right back into harm's way. If investigators and cops were just looking to hassle some minorities and get a few handjobs on the clock, well, then this operation was still a success.

As for why the first announced was separate and done by Florida officials, it appears that it involved a 17-year-old, and apparently it was easier to charge him as an adult under state laws, rather than under federal law, as with the other two.

Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren filed 30 felony charges against the teen this week for “scamming people across America” in connection with the Twitter hack that happened on July 15. The charges he’s facing include one count of organized fraud, 17 counts of communications fraud, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 or 30 or more victims, 10 counts of fraudulent use of personal information and one count of access to computer or electronic device without authority.

Hillsborough County Jail records show Clark was booked into jail shortly after 6:30 a.m. Friday.

Warren’s office says the scheme to defraud “stole the identities of prominent people” and “posted messages in their names directing victims to send Bitcoin” to accounts that were associated with the Tampa teen. According to the state attorney, the scheme reaped more than $100,000 in Bitcoin in just one day.

Once again, it's looking like we got incredibly lucky -- that it was just some young hackers mostly messing around, rather than anyone with serious ill-intent and the ability to plan something bigger. It now appears that Twitter's internal security controls were kind of a mess. Over 1,000 employees had access to the control panel that would allow people to make the changes that enabled the hack -- and even that some staffers and contractors somehow made it a game to abuse their powers to spy on users.

Once again, it seems that Twitter needs to fix up a lot of things on the security side, including figuring out how to do end-to-end encryption for direct messages.

A number of states appear to have stopped listening after the word "reopen." Whether or not they've hit the CDC's checkpoints does not appear to matter. A collective shrug about deaths and infections was issued by a number of governors, some of whom are (justifiably) tired of gun-toting residents showing up at the state house to protest their lack of access to haircuts and house parties.

When the data doesn't match the narrative, there's only one thing to do: fuck up the data. And the person who's compiling it. Florida has lots of sunny beaches that are currently too empty to satisfy sun junkies who wish to take advantage of the lengthy shorelines contained in America's Penis. COVID stats weren't exactly lending themselves to the "it's fine" narrative the governor wanted to push. So, the state government did some pushing of its own.

Late last Friday, the architect and manager of Florida's COVID-19 dashboard — praised by White House officials for its accessibility — announced that she had been removed from her post, causing outcry from independent researchers now worried about government censorship.

[...]

Citing "reasons beyond my division’s control," Jones said her office is no longer managing the dashboard, is no longer involved in publication, fixing errors or answering questions "in any shape or form."

She warned that she does not know what the new team's intentions are for data access, including "what data they are now restricting."

The means of impartial COVID stat reporting have been seized. Power to the (powerful) people! The dashboard that used to provide an easy-to-understand breakdown of the state's infection and death rates is being replaced with something that aligns more closely with the aura of sunny healthiness the state government wants to project. Dance through the droplets or whatever. Want to check the state's new math? Well, you can fuck right off, apparently.

When [researchers] tried requesting the previously available underlying data, DOH officials said that because the data are "provisional" no such requests would be considered until May 2021.

Yet the state regularly publishes provisional data, including for infectious diseases such as influenza.

Here's the governor's literally unbelievable defense of his indefensible actions: when someone asks for time off, they're clearly asking to be fired and for their work to be destroyed.

When first asked about Jones' dismissal, [Governor Ron] DeSantis on Monday called it a "nonissue." He said he understood from an email she sent her supervisor that "she was tired and needed a break."

He then went on to claim -- after being given a few days to compose his thoughts -- that this firing was due to "repeated insubordination" rather than the researcher just being tired. "Insuboridination" apparently means publishing actual COVID stats rather than manipulated data that provides post hoc justification for the state government's reopening plans.

The state is now open. Whether or not that's good for residents and visitors remains to be seen. The state has taken control of a narrative. Since the real numbers aren't aligned with the state's official OPEN FOR BUSINESS pitch, the state apparently felt its only option was to fire the person compiling the data.

Now, residents and visitors will have only the state-approved numbers to rely on. Let's hope they don't. If this turns into another pandemic nightmare that the state could have avoided by being honest, citizens are going to start wondering why government entities are immunized against manslaughter charges. And those who demanded at gunpoint that the government take the brakes off the state economy are welcome to discover firsthand why an overabundance of caution is preferable to caution that's been carried off by the wind.

This is a state that has decided to lie to everyone, starting with itself. Govern yourself accordingly.

As is all too common these days, the documentary didn't do a particularly good job describing the legal issues at the heart of the dispute, and mentioned both trademark and copyright claims that came up. There were actually three separate lawsuits -- one over trademark and two over copyright (and then a few follow on efforts that we won't even get into). To be clear, the trademark claims, were more legitimate -- though not a complete slam dunk. You can see the court docket here. I still feel like many trademark cases are bogus, but this case seemed like the perfect example of what trademark law is supposed to be for: to stop a pretty obvious copycat from trying to confuse the public into who is who. And that's exactly what Joe Exotic was attempting to do in setting up Big Cat Rescue Entertainment Group, for his "traveling show" (bringing tigers and such to malls) in a manner that was designed to confuse the public into thinking he was actually his nemesis organization Big Cat Rescue Corp (which doesn't do shows). In fact, despite being based in Oklahoma, Joe Exotic used a Florida phone number for the BCR "Entertainment" Group, knowing full well that the actual BCR was based in Florida.

So, that sounds like a standard issue trademark infringement situation... Except, it wasn't even that clear. While Carole Baskin and BCR had a trademark on BCR's logo, they did not have a registered trademark on the name -- nor the use of "snow leopard eyes." The website has since changed, but here's a quick screenshot from the Netflix episode (Episode 4) that discusses the cases. On the left is Joe Exotic's "copycat" and on the right is Carole Baskin's website at the time:

The crazy thing is (probably by total coincidence) the elements that Joe Exotic copied were not the elements that were covered by the registered trademark. That said, Baskin had a strong case for common law trademark infringement, which is almost as good, but the case (contrary to what's said in the documentary) did not actually end with the court ruling that Baskin won the trademark dispute. While the documentary implies that Baskin won the case, that's not quite what happened. Joe Exotic had filed some (mostly silly) counterclaims in his response to the complaint, trying to throw a bunch of fairly weak defamation claims back at Baskin (and a few equally weak tortious interference claims).

Carole Baskin and BCR sought to have the counterclaims thrown out on summary judgment, which is exactly what the judge did. While the clip in the documentary shows Howard Baskin saying the judge ruled in their favor, that was only on dismissing Joe Exotic's counterclaims, and not on the actual trademark issue. That was still set to go to trial, and perhaps recognizing how insanely costly an actual trial was going to be, that's when the two sides agreed to settle, with Joe agreeing to pay nearly a million dollars (though as the documentary makes clear, he had little intention of actually doing so).

The main copyright case covered in the documentary (full docket here), however, is just... bad. It's a really bad case. It's an obvious SLAPP suit, filed on very questionable grounds, as a pile-on lawsuit while the trademark lawsuit discussed above was still chugging along. The details here are just ridiculous. Joe Exotic had come across a photo of Baskin's employees happily holding up some dead rabbits that they were going to feed to the tigers, and made a big deal out of her killing the rabbits (it appears that this was not, as we find out, because he's opposed to killing animals -- because he's not -- but apparently because he hates Carole Baskin). Joe used the photo on social media and in a variety of videos as part of his never-ending hate-campaign against Baskin. I'm not going to post the photo here, but will say that it's both in the documentary and if you do want to see it, it's in the court filings.

Baskin had not taken the photograph, nor registered it, but had purchased the rights to the photograph from the photographer, Julie Hannon, then registered the photograph, and immediately issued DMCA notices on Joe's use of the images. Joe counternoticed the DMCA takedown claiming that the "material was removed due to a mistake or misidentification." He should have claimed fair use, because it clearly was. But he didn't, and then Baskin sued.

Again, this is quite clearly an abuse of copyright law to censor fair use of the image. No matter what you think of either of the two individuals (neither of whom comes out of this looking good), there's no way the use in question was not fair use, and the purchasing of the rights and the late registration, were quite clearly just aimed at censoring Joe Exotic, the critic, and not for any legitimate copyright purpose.

While Joe eventually did make a fair use claim, the fact that he (stupidly) didn't use that as his claim in the YouTube counternotice actually opened him up to Baskin adding a DMCA 512(f) (!!!) claim for making false statements in his counter notice. Joe's legal team argued fair use, failure to state a claim, misuse of copyright, and a few other similar defenses. Most of these got tossed because (they were nonsense and because) Joe Exotic's legal team didn't actually support most of the defenses, making it easy for the judge to toss them. The one defense that the court did not rule on was the fair use defense, which the judge said should be determined by a jury at trial. For what it's worth, the judge also claimed the 512(f) claim should go to trial as well.

There were a few more twists and turns in the case before, once again, the case settled with a consent decree, with Joe agreeing to pay statutory damages of $50,000. The statutory damages part is interesting, in part, because statutory damages are supposed to only be available for infringement that happens after registration -- and registration is supposed to occur within 3 months of "first publication" for statutory damages to be available. In this case, it's unclear what actually counts as "1st publication" or if there was a first publication by the photographer.

Separately, even though the initial infringement occurred prior to registration, it appears that after Baskin sued, Joe Exotic decided to keep on posting the image over and over and over again to various social media, blogs, and videos, which might then open him up to statutory damages. Of course, the fact that the case was settled kind of makes the whole question moot anyway. It feels odd that the settlement agreement said it was for statutory damages. In the terms of a settlement agreement, it's not clear why the type of damages matters at all. It's just been agreed to by the parties.

That said, what's amazing to me is that copyright maximalists seem to be cheering on this clear abuse of copyright as a form of a SLAPP suit. The Copyright Alliance, a Hollywood front group that lobbies for ever more aggressive anti-consumer copyright policies, put out a blog post happily explaining this lawsuit as if it were a perfectly normal and reasonable copyright lawsuit. In fact, the Copyright Alliance -- somewhat incredibly -- says that Joe Exotic should have just taken down this obviously fair use image when he got the DMCA takedown notice, to avoid the lawsuit, which was clearly filed as a pile-on to go with the trademark lawsuit:

Joe Exotic may have been able to avoid the two copyright infringement lawsuits and not been liable to Big Cat Rescue at all. Big Cat Rescue had sent a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) requesting the Photographs and videos containing the alleged infringing Photographs be taken down from the respective websites.

But instead of taking down the alleged infringing material, Exotic made the deliberate choice to challenge Big Cat Rescue’s claims by filing a counternotice contesting the infringement claims. After the counternotice was filed, under the law, Big Cat Rescue had 10 days to file a lawsuit in federal court, otherwise Exotic would be permitted to repost the photos.

Had Exotic not filed the counternotice, it is possible that Big Cat Rescue would have simply been content with the photos (and videos containing the photos) being taken down and it may not have sued Exotic. It should also be pointed out that, not only did the court hold that Exotic was liable for copyright infringement, it also held that he lied in the counternotice that he filed.

This is quite incredible. This is basically the Copyright Alliance ignoring fair use (which it literally never mentions), ignoring the obvious SLAPP nature of the lawsuit, and falsely claiming that the court held that Joe Exotic lied in the counternotice (it did not, it said that it was a matter to be determined at trial):

The evidence submitted by Plaintiff demonstrates that genuine disputes exist as to whether any of the Defendants "knowingly" misrepresented facts. Plaintiff, therefore, is not entitled to summary judgment.

But even more bizarre is the idea that if he'd taken down the images "it is possible that Big Cat Rescue would have simply been content..." Given that this was one of a few pile-on lawsuits all designed to go after Joe Exotic, the idea that Baskin would have simply been content to drop things if he'd taken the images down upon the DMCA notice defies all sense of reality. It's nonsense.

Even worse: in a Twitter discussion about whether or not this lawsuit was a SLAPP suit, a former top US Copyright Office official, and now top USPTO official, David Carson, misleadingly claimed that it wasn't a SLAPP because the court awarded judgment to Baskin. Except that's not at all what happened. The case settled before it could go to trial, just like in the trademark case, and the only award was what was agreed to (perhaps in bad faith by Joe Exotic) as part of the settlement, and not because the judge or a jury actually weighed all the facts.

Separately, this case stretched from 2011 to 2013. At that time, Florida had a very, very narrow anti-SLAPP law. It only put in place a (slightly) better one in 2015, long after this case was over. So there was no official way to use an anti-SLAPP law to fight this case at the time.

As with the documentary, most of the details of this case are crazy, with crazy personalities. But it's even more ridiculous when even copyright maximalist lobbyists and (worse) Copyright Office/Patent Office officials try to defend this obvious abuse of copyright law in a SLAPP suit, and argue that the person using the photograph should have just silenced himself to get out of the suit.

Correction: in the original version, we said David Carson worked at the Copyright Office, which is where he used to work, as opposed to running copyright policy for the USPTO, where he currently works (in between he worked for the recording industry). That has since been corrected.

Things aren't much better at the state level. The Miami Herald filed a public records request seeking information about nursing homes in the state affected by the virus. The governor has repeatedly refused to release this information, which is putting healthcare workers and nursing home residents at risk. So, the Miami Herald sued. It notified Governor Ron DeSantis' counsel that it would be filing suit, as is required by the state's litigation process. The governor's lawyers responded by telling the Herald's legal rep to drop the case.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ general counsel called a representative of the Miami Herald’s law firm seeking to quash a public records lawsuit that would force the state to divulge the names of all elder-care facilities that have had a positive test for the coronavirus.

The back-door pressure — through an attorney that had no involvement in the case — paid off.

The law firm, Holland & Knight, told Sanford Bohrer, a senior partner with decades of representing the Miami Herald, to stand down and abandon the lawsuit.

The newspaper will not be abandoning its lawsuit. It has found another law firm to take up its case. But there's already a chill in the air, thanks to these actions.

It appears the governor's office spoke to a different partner in the firm, rather than the lawyer representing the paper. Conveniently, this member of the law firm has represented the state in other matters, making it that much easier to persuade the law firm to drop the Herald as a client in this case.

General Counsel Joe Jacquot sought to short-circuit the litigation. He didn’t call the lawyer who drafted the lawsuit and had sent the letter, but rather another Holland & Knight lawyer, George Meros.

Meros has represented the state on numerous matters, including its recent efforts to defend legislation that undermines the intent of Amendment 4, the ballot measure — passed overwhelmingly — that gives felons the right to vote after they have served their sentences.

Meros has represented a long list of state agencies during his career as an attorney. And his employer apparently felt the best step to take was to direct the paper to drop its lawsuit.

The governor is claiming his office did nothing wrong. His office's spokesperson says contacting a law firm to dissuade them from filing a lawsuit is just a normal pre-litigation tactic used to "avoid unnecessary litigation." That would make sense if the governor's office had called to settle or offer to turn over the records the paper is seeking. But it didn't do that. The governor's lawyer instead leaned on a law firm employee with a long history of defending the state in lawsuits and the firm obliged by "advising" the paper to drop the lawsuit.

There's enough plausible deniability built into this that the blame may lie with the law firm, rather than the governor's office. If the law firm wanted to pass on the lawsuit due to possible conflicts of interest, it could have said as much. And if the governor's office wanted to discuss the lawsuit during the five-day waiting period, it could have spoken to the paper's rep, rather than an attorney that had frequently defended the government in the past. None of that happened, and the paper was forced to hire a new legal rep to continue seeking information the governor's office should have been willing to release in the first place.

This ruling [PDF] by a Florida federal court does not coddle the officer who made a mockery of both objective reasonableness and probable cause. You can tell this is headed into unconstitutional territory during the recounting of the events that led to the arrest of Jorge Sanchez. (via FourthAmendment.com)

Local officers were working with the DEA on a drug trafficking investigation. They decided to pull over someone heading away from the house they were surveilling. But the officers had nothing approaching probable cause. All they had was someone driving away from a house they suspected might be tied to drug sales. But that wasn't going to stop them from stopping Sanchez. So, they did what they had to do.

Deputy Steuerwald asked Sgt. Beuer to “develop his own probable cause and conduct a traffic stop on the car.”

This would be a lot more shocking if it wasn't nearly pretty much every pretextual stop ever. You can't fish unless you have someone else's (drivers) license in your hand, so any real or imagined traffic violation will do. Only this one was so imaginary the court's not having any of it.

Sgt. Beuer did so—or at least he thought he did (more on this later)—and pulled Sanchez over for violating the Florida “stop bar” statute.

The "more on this later" is the best part of the suppression order. The bogus stop led to a search of the vehicle and the arrest of Sanchez. None of that matters any more because Sgt. Beuer was objectively awful at creating probable cause.

The state's stop bar statute says this:

[E]very driver of a vehicle approaching a stop intersection indicated by a stop sign shall stop at a clearly marked stop line, but if none, before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection or, if none, then at the point nearest the intersecting roadway where the driver has a view of approaching traffic on the intersecting roadway before entering the intersection.

And here's what Sgt. Beuer testified Sanchez had done:

At the hearing, Sgt. Beuer identified this intersection and confirmed that Sanchez brought his vehicle to a complete stop at a position in relation to the stop sign as depicted in this photo.

There's no stop bar on the road and the vehicle is stopped "where the driver has a view of approaching traffic."

The government said Sgt. Beuer's lie was reasonable enough to generate probable cause for a stop. The court disagrees, using evidence Beuer agreed was true, as well as his own testimony about the stop.

While generally familiar with stop bars, and believing them to be fairly ubiquitous, Sgt. Beuer acknowledged he was not overly familiar with this area of Rockledge, Florida. (Doc. 30.) But Sgt. Beuer had walked back and forth on Skelly Drive at or near the intersection with Florida Avenue, so he had an opportunity to view the road surface condition and the general “lay of the land,” both in his vehicle and on foot.

Looking at the photographic evidence, which Sgt. Beuer accepts as properly depicting the scene (Doc. 31-5; Doc. 32-8, p. 8), it is difficult to imagine how a motorist might, at this particularly odd intersection, have any ability to see oncoming traffic from the left if stopped anywhere short of the point where Sgt. Beuer concedes Sanchez stopped his vehicle on this night. An added stop bar would have made the situation worse from a safety perspective.

This isn't even subjectively reasonable, says the court.

In short, it was not objectively reasonable for Sgt. Beuer to believe that Sanchez violated Florida Statute § 316.123 by failing to stop at a stop bar that not only was not there, but where there was nothing about this intersection to suggest it would be there—quite the contrary. When you add the fact that Sgt. Beuer actually traversed the area on foot, the reasonableness of his predication is further undermined.

Now, here's where the order gets really good. The court not only slaps the government, but judges who are far too willing to overlook blatant Constitutional violations by law enforcement officers because it's presumably too difficult to do police work and respect rights at the same time.

If these facts qualify as “objectively reasonable”, then the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure is simply not applicable to a pretextual traffic stop. The Court should stop imbuing the “objectively reasonable” officer with a cloak of constitutional comfort for justifications that strain credulity and discount the facts out of deference to their necessary “game time decisions”. See Chanthasouxat, 342 F.3d at 1276. While deference is a necessary component of the analysis, it does not warrant a rubber stamp. The Fourth Amendment still has some teeth in a traffic stop.

Courts are supposed to act as a bulwark against government overreach, not as an enabler of unconstitutional behavior. But qualified immunity, the good faith exception, and other defenses cops can raise when accused of illegal behavior -- defenses that aren't available to citizens -- have turned the courts into an entity that rarely allows for the actual redress of grievances.