Friday, May 10th, 2013 — Good Morning, Stay Safe
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C.C.R.B. Now in Control / Is Kelly Caving to Stay On as P.C. with Next Mayor ??
NYPD allows complaint board to prosecute cops for misconduct
A new 'memorandum of understanding' between police and the Civilian Complaint Review Board will allow prosecution if complaints are substantiated.
By Rocco Parascandola — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
The NYPD has changed its mind about allowing the Civilian Complaint Review Board to prosecute cops accused of misconduct.
A “memorandum of understanding” between police and the independent panel, which took effect last month, allows the board to prosecute officers if it substantiates a complaint and recommends administrative charges.
But the CCRB said the NYPD has decided a case involving two cops accused of an illegal stop-and-frisk search should not be prosecuted because one of the officers doesn’t have a “significant” disciplinary history.
The memorandum of understanding is “unambiguous” and does not require a significant prior disciplinary history, David Liston, a CCRB commissioner, said.
After an inquiry from the Daily News, the NYPD agreed, saying it would allow the prosecution to proceed.
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New York judge questions efforts of NYPD's stop-and-frisk 'all-star'
Kha Dang, who made just six arrests out of 127 stops in summer 2009, insists officers were not stopping people without cause
By Ryan Devereaux — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The Guardian’ / London, England
In late summer 2009, few New York City police officers could match Kha Dang in street stops. Working with an aggressive plainclothes unit in Brooklyn's 88th precinct, the eight-year veteran of the force was among the NYPD's top four stoppers.
Dang racked up a total of 127 stops in the third quarter of that year. He performed 75 frisks and, on 37 separate occasions, searched inside suspects' clothing or belongings. He was, in the words of one civil rights attorney, an NYPD "all-star".
Despite his efforts, Dang's hit rate – the number of times in which his stops led to an arrest or summons, or removed a gun from the streets – was called into serious question in federal court this week.
Dang made a total of six arrests out of his 127 stops. He wrote one summons. He found contraband once. He never recovered any weapons and he only stopped people of color, primarily African Americans, 115 times to be exact. He never stopped a white person.
In two days of testimony that wrapped up Thursday morning, Dang explained his work to judge Shira Scheindlin, who is presiding over a landmark trial challenging the NYPD's controversial stop-and-frisk practices. Plaintiffs in the case seek to prove the NYPD has engaged in a pattern of widespread constitutional rights violations and racial profiling through its stop and frisk practices.
Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, over 4.4 million people have been stopped, roughly 88% have walked away without an arrest or summons and nearly nine out of 10 have been African American or Latino.
Dang described how in 2009 he was working in a high crime area, plagued by gangs and violence. He assured the court that when he and his fellow officers went on patrol in their unmarked vehicles, they were informed by quality intelligence reports and a familiarity with the individuals in their neighborhood.
"We pool a lot of resources," Dang told the court Tuesday. "These are not nice people, so we definitely keep our tabs on them."
He and his fellow officers were not simply stopping people without cause, Dang said. In July 2009, for example, he explained how a series of violent muggings near Fort Greene Park were linked to a group of young people. As a result, he would stop young people in the area surrounding the park, particularly those who spent their summer nights out after 1am. Dang's records for the time reflect that he stopped groups of three or more people on average.
In other instances, Dang said he would rely on repeated observation of individuals to justify his stops.
"We have a general idea of their behavior," Dang told the court Thursday, explaining that he would monitor the same individuals going about their lives on a daily basis. If he noticed anything out of the ordinary, what he called "weird behavior," he might make a stop. When asked what might count as "weird behavior", Dang said: "Furtive movement would be one of them."
The phrase has come up repeatedly in the course of the trial. Along with high crime area, furtive movement is the justification officers most frequently check off on departmental stop forms known as UF250s. Critics say it a dangerously vague term that allows officers overly broad discretion in conducting stops. In the third quarter of 2009, Dang checked off furtive movement as a justification for a stop on 45 occasions. He cited high crime area 105 times and used "time of day, day of week, season" to justify 98 stops.
Dang provided the court with examples of furtive movement which included: "hanging out in front of a building, sitting on benches or something like that," "standing near benches or trash cans," and "movements to certain areas of the body, usually the waistband or pants pocket."
Bruce Corey, an attorney for the plaintiffs, questioned Dang in cross-examination on his interactions with supervisors over his stop patterns.
"Has anyone asked you why you only stopped people of color?" Corey asked. Nobody had, Dang replied. Corey asked Dang if his supervisors had raised concerns about the fact that he did not recover any weapons during the period in question, again he said no.
"I think the city thought he was their all-star," Corey said outside court Thursday.
"Nobody seemed to care that he made 127 stops and recovered zero weapons," he added. "He's basically wrong 95% of the time and nobody seemed to care about that."
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NAACP condemns Quinn’s support of stop-and-frisk
By HAZEL DUKES — Thursday, May 9th, 2013 ‘The Amsterdam News’ / New York, NY
(Op-Ed / Commentary)
Last year on June 15, New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn joined the NAACP and a coalition of New Yorkers to deliver Mayor Michael Bloomberg a Father’s Day present he will not soon forget: 75,000 silent protestors outside his home.
The Silent March on Father’s Day was a reminder that New York City’s fathers and sons are criminalized on a daily basis by Bloomberg’s racial profiling program, known as stop-and-frisk policing. The march drew civil rights activists and elected officials of all races, creeds and backgrounds, including many mayoral hopefuls like Quinn.
In the months since, many of those city leaders have continued to speak out against the racial profiling program. But last week, Quinn suffered a failing of leadership when she decided to oppose a bill that would make racial and religious profiling illegal.
Quinn has demonstrated that she understands the threat posed by racial profiling. In early 2012, she wrote a letter to New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly calling for reform. The letter read, “I believe that, at times, [stop-and-frisk] has been carried out in a way that has sown distrust in communities of color.” That is why it came as a surprise when she announced she would not support a cornerstone provision of the Community Safety Act, which would allow New Yorkers to seek legal redress when they believe an officer has targeted them based on the color of their skin or their religious garb. There is an exemption for cases where the police report specifically indicates a suspect’s race. It takes concrete steps to prevent New York City police from abusing their powers.
Quinn argued that the anti-profiling bill could hamstring police officers from doing their job. In fact, it would have the opposite effect. Police are not doing their job when they profile based on race. Instead, they are wasting their time and resources when they could be searching for criminals and suspects based on behavior, rather than the color of their skin.
Quinn did offer support for another key provision of the Community Safety Act, which mandates the creation of an inspector general to monitor the NYPD. However, unless this is accompanied by strong anti-racial profiling legislation, this would merely add one more level of oversight as police continue to discriminate. Instead, the New Yorkers who are constantly targeted—whether it’s for being Black, Latino, LGBT, Muslim or an immigrant—should have a way to hold police accountable.
New York City is at a crossroads. In March, NYPD officers performed their five-millionth stop in the Kelly era. Out of 533,000 stops in 2012, 89 percent did not lead to an arrest and 90 percent were people of color. Last year’s Silent March brought together a strong coalition committed to ending stop-and-frisk, Communities United for Police Reform. They helped raised this issue to the national limelight just in time for the mayoral election.
Many other cities follow New York City’s lead when it comes to policing, though sometimes under different names. Quinn has the chance, like Bloomberg, to lead on a national level. She should stick with her convictions and support an end to legalized racial profiling.
Hazel Dukes is the president of the New York State Conference of the NAACP.
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NYC Councilman: "Stop and Frisk Has Been An Abject Failure"
By Lauren Evans — Thursday, May 9th, 2013; 2:26 p.m. ‘The Gothamist’ / New York, NY
Stop-and-Frisk is, without question, one of the city's most polarizing police practices, so it comes as no surprise that the Museum of the City of New York was packed last night for a forum in which prominent New Yorkers gathered to discuss—and occasionally, bicker—about the tactic's effectiveness.
The four panelists—John Feinblatt, a chief advisor to Mayor Bloomberg; Franklin Zimring, UC Berkeley law professor and expert on New York City's crime reduction: Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College; and Councilman Jumaane Williams, who knows a thing or two about getting stopped by cops—bandied various opinions on the benefits of stop-and-frisk as an effective crime fighting tool, versus its controversial execution.
Stop-and-frisk's most vigorous defender was, of course, Feinblatt, who was quick to mimic his boss and point out New York's crime statistics compared to other "megacities" like Washington, D.C. and Chicago.
“There were 419 murders last year in NYC. If we had the crime rate of Washington D.C., today instead of having 419 murders, we’d have something like 1,196 murders," he said. "If we had the crime rate of Chicago today, instead of having 419 murders, we’d have 1,489 murders."
He went on to attribute the city's dramatic drop in crime since the '80s to a shift from "community policing" to what he called "hot spot policing," which focuses police pressure on specific locations where crime is particularly high.
"Many people say 'Well, the way you bring down crime is locking up people.' We don’t believe that’s true in New York City today," he said. "If you go to the 1980s where community policing was sort of the predominant approach, and you had 16,000, almost 17,000 murders, and your peak average daily population in Rikers was almost 19,000," he said, adding that today, it's slightly more than 12,000.
Councilman Williams, an outspoken advocate against the department's abundant use of stop-and-frisk, argued that there exists no concrete connection between increased use of the measure and cessation of crime. Moreover, he said, officials are constantly shifting the explanation for the purpose of stop-and-frisk, first claiming it was a tool for removing guns from the street, then that it was to prevent shootings and finally, that it was to lower the murder rate.
"They show the numbers, and say 'Look what we’re doing,' but they don’t tell you the cost of what we're doing," he said. "Stop-and-frisk has been an abject failure."
Williams also added that more guns are taken off the street from police sponsored buy-backs than random stops, 50 percent of which are made on the basis of "furtive movements."
"I have Tourettes—all I do is make 'furtive movements,' " he joked.
Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College, argued that the method is being overused. Many of the stops have no solid legal footing, he said, and rather than being based on "individualized reasonable suspicion," officers are simply blanketing specific areas, a practice the Supreme Court has ruled is unconstitutional.
"[The city] says 'Well, the stops mirror the race of alleged suspects in a serious crime.' But that’s not how the stops are being used. It’s not about stopping individuals who are believed to be wanted for a particular crime," he said. "It’s a broad, risk-based, place-oriented form of stopping, where officers are told, 'Go out and stop everybody in this place at this time of day who is, say, a young man. We need to have a more nuanced approach."
Williams acknowledged that he was not opposed to stop-and-frisk, as a tool, but rather, its overly aggressive implementation.
"It needs to be there so police officers can do their jobs," he said. But I’m against the current policy of stop, question and frisk that is not constitutional. It's not even a deterrent."
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81st Precinct Inspector Juanita Holmes
Cop-ma’s stop-frisk defense
By BRUCE GOLDING — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
A high-ranking NYPD official yesterday defended “stop and frisk” against criticism that it unfairly targets African-American boys, noting she is a black mother of a boy and not “in the business of stopping black youths.”
Inspector Juanita Holmes, commander of the 81st Precinct in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, was testifying in the Manhattan federal-court trial over a lawsuit challenging the NYPD policy.
She recalled her reply to lawmakers who raised concerns about the tactic at an August 2010 meeting of top cops and black politicians.
“I spoke about how I am a black mother and that I have a black son, and if you think that I am in the business of stopping black youths, then you’re terribly mistaken,” she testified.
“I also went on to assure them that I have actually locked up individuals — 13- and 14-year-olds — for shootings.”
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Black NYPD officer in Brooklyn approves of stop and frisk
Inspector Juanita Holmes of the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant says she has only heard of one complaint about illegal pat-downs since 2010.
By Thomas Tracy — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
The black commanding officer of a Brooklyn precinct testified Thursday that she approves of the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy — and has only had one resident complain to her about being illegally patted down in the minority neighborhood.
“Qualitatively (stop-and-frisks) can be used to deter a crime that’s about to happen,” said Inspector Juanita Holmes, a witness for the city in the ongoing stop-and-frisk trial, now in its eighth week.
Plaintiffs allege that the NYPD’s crimefighting tactic targets blacks and Latinos for illegal stops.
Holmes’ 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant is 77% black and 17% Hispanic, yet she claims she’s heard only one complaint about illegal pat-downs since assuming her post in 2010.
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Attorney of man charged with murder of Officer Peter Figoski claims partner lied to help case
During the murder trial for Kevin Santos, one of the men being tried for the death of Figoski, defense attorney Harold Baker said the officer’s partner, Glenn Estrada, ‘was traumatized and in shock and maybe felt responsible’ about the fateful night that resulted in Figoski getting shot and killed.
By Oren Yaniv — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
The lawyer for one of the men charged in the death of Officer Peter Figoski accused the slain cop’s partner of lying.
The surprise allegation came Thursday, during opening statements in the murder trial of Kevin Santos, one of five men accused of participating in the December 2011 robbery of a Brooklyn drug dealer that ended with the veteran officer fatally shot in the face.
“He didn’t pay attention to what his partner is doing,” defense lawyer Harold Baker said of Figoski’s partner Glenn Estrada. “He made a mistake.”
Prosecutors said Santos darted out of the ransacked basement apartment and wrestled with Estrada. Gunman Lamont Pride fled on the heels of his cohort, they said, and fired at Figoski, 47.
But Baker contended that Santos, 28, was never inside the apartment and didn’t engage Estrada, claiming the cop was distracted when Figoski got shot.
“He was traumatized and in shock and maybe felt responsible .... Maybe he fudged a little bit because he thought it would help the case,” the lawyer said, calling the officer’s account “completely wrong.” Neither Santos’ fingerprints nor DNA were recovered in the basement, Baker added, calling his client “a pot head” who had hoped to score marijuana.
Santos is the fourth man to go on trial for the shooting, and this was the first time authorities’ version of events has been significantly challenged.
Prosecutors pointed to a videotaped confession, in which Santos admitted his guilt, and to a photo of him found on Pride’s phone holding the murder weapon. He also allegedly asked a cop on the way to court, “Can they charge me with murder if I didn’t have the gun?”
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Cop-slay pothead
By JOSH SAUL — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’
The lawyer for a Brooklyn man on trial for the murder of NYPD Officer Peter Figoski said his client rode along with a band of violent robbers only because he’s a “pothead” who wanted to score weed.
“Kevin Santos is a pothead, and he might not be too swift, but he’s always thinking about how he can get high,” attorney Howard Baker said in his opening statement yesterday.
Santos, 32, and Nelson Morales, 28, are on trial for burglary and felony murder in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Prosecutors say the two men took part in the botched 2011 robbery of an East New York drug dealer that led to Lamont Pride’s shooting Figoski in the face.
Baker told jurors Santos left the Pine Street address when he realized Morales’ goal was robbery, adding that investigators used “coercion” to obtain statements from Santos.
The trial continues tomorrow.
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NYPD Surveillance of Muslims
Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Post’ Editorial:
The judge gets it right
“[R]elease of the requested documents could impair the lives and safety of the law-enforcement community, undercover officers, confidential informants and members of the public who cooperate with the NYPD’s investigations and anti-terrorism efforts. Accordingly, the requested records were properly withheld under the public safety exemption.”
— State Supreme Court Justice Alexander Hunter, denying a request by groups alleging the NYPD’s intelligence-gathering in Muslim communities violates civil rights, in yet another vindication of the police
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NY / NJ Port Authority Police Dept. P.B.A. to Rudy Giuliani and Joe Lhota ‘Up Yours’
Rudy Giuliani Says Joe Lhota's Going To Be OK After Port Authority "Mall Cops" Dustup
BY Celeste Katz — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Daily News’
Republican Joe Lhota did the right thing in apologizing for his "mall cops" crack about Port Authority police, and the misstep isn't derailing his campaign -- or so says his old boss, ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Lhota fell on his sword after police unions and rivals excoriated him for dissing PAPD officers during a Tuesday forum. The former MTA boss said he regretted his remark, calling it "insensitive," "unfortunate" and "inappropriate."
Giuliani, who recently made his first personal fundraising appearance for Lhota, told the Daily News the two "had a little talk" about the episode.
"He apologized. We all make mistakes, but I think he's doing fine," he said of Lhota, who was at his side during and after the 9/11 terror attacks that claimed the lives of 37 Port Authority cops.
"Everyone's going to have two or three mistakes during the campaign," Giuliani said -- adding that he himself was hardly immune to such missteps as a candidate. "The important thing is that you've got to acknowledge it right away, apologize, and move on, which I think he did."
I circled back with the Port Authority PBA's Paul Nunziato after Lhota -- whose dad retired from the NYPD with the rank of lieutenant -- issued his lament.
He didn't seem particularly ready to forgive and forget.
On the contrary, Nunziato said he didn't consider Lhota's "a true apology," and said the episode spoke to his "elitist attitude towards police officers in general."
As for Giuliani, Nunziato said as a candidate, he "came begging for our endorsement and [then] he wanted to close the Port Authority. Maybe [Lhota's] got a little Rudy in him."
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U.S.A.
3D Printed Guns: Some States are Already Moving to Ban Them
By Aubrey Bloomfield — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘PolicyMic.Com’ / New York, NY
In the wake of the recent revelations that 25-year-old Texas law student Cody Wilson had manufactured and successfully fired the world's first 3D printed gun, lawmakers in some states are already looking to ban them. Wilson's company, Defense Distributed, has posted the blueprints for the gun, named "The Liberator," online and as of Thursday they had already been downloaded over 100,000 times. The State Department has reacted by sending Wilson a letter demanding he take down the files, and Wilson has said he will comply. Amid fears that this technology could make guns easier to obtain and harder to track and detect, lawmakers in California, New York, and Washington D.C. are already moving to outlaw them.
It will still be a while before large numbers of people have access to 3D printers to make use of such technology, and people can already make their own firearms for personal use. 3D printing technology, however, is set to become increasingly widespread over the next decade and because the guns are made of plastic (the Liberator currently has one small metal nail, but this could be removed by others who print it) they are harder to detect. Given that this technology is expected to rapidly become more widespread, it pays to start thinking about how to deal with it now.
Although Defense Distributed has successfully fired its gun, it only holds one bullet and has yet to prove consistently reliable. The company, however, has also successfully printed lower receivers and magazines for the AR-15. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which enforces but doesn't make gun laws, while they have been following the development of the technology, representatives believe it is still not advanced enough to start figuring out how to regulate it. However, given that this technology is rapidly improving, some lawmakers have begun doing exactly that.
In California, State Senator Leland Yee, a Democrat, has announced that he is planning to introduce legislation that would ban people from being able to use 3D printing technology to simply print guns themselves. "We must be proactive in seeking solutions to this new threat rather than wait for the inevitable tragedies this will make possible," Yee said. He added that he is aiming to "ensure that any individual who is going to make a gun out of these 3D printers go through a background check, just like any other individuals who purchase a gun."
In Washington, D.C., council member Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6), has also announced his intent to introduce legislation to regulate the technology. "An undetectable firearm constructed on your computer may sound like science fiction, but unfortunately, it's already here and our laws have never contemplated this scenario," he said on Tuesday. According to Charles Allen, Wells' chief of staff, the legislation would essentially update and renew existing gun laws.
One of the pieces of existing legislation that Wells wants Congress to renew is the Undetectable Firearms Act, which is due to expire at the end of the year. Democrat Congressman Steve Israel of New York has been pushing to do just that, introducing a bill called the Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act. In doing so he has repeatedly talked about the threat posed by 3D printed guns.
3D printing technology is clearly still in its infancy when it comes to making guns, but it is evolving fast. And 3D printers are becoming more widely available. Staples, the office supplies store, has started carrying 3D printers in some of its stores. Nick Bilton, a technology writer for the New York Times, believes that the technology will become much more widespread over the coming decade. Although it remains to be seen exactly what form any legislation to regulate 3D printed guns would take at state or federal level or if it could be enforced, this is clearly a conversation that it is better to start having now rather than later.
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3D printers don’t make guns, people do
By Emi Kolawole — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The Washington Post’ / Washington, DC
(Edited for brevity)
What does Defense Distributed’s “Liberator” mean for the future of 3D printing? Scientific American’s Larry Greenemeier interviewed Ryan Wicker to find out. Wicker is the director of the W.M. Keck Center for 3D Innovation at the University of Texas at El Paso. In the interview, Wicker makes the point that 3D printing is not the most significant part of the debate over DIY weapons. Wicker says the technology in and of itself isn’t what should inspire the greatest fear:
“3-D printing is not the only enabling technology here. 3-D printers may be a little less complicated to use than [some computer numerical control (CNC) systems that manufacturers use to make tools], but you still can buy a CNC machine today and use that to build weapons. In fact, I would be much more scared of people who have expertise in machine shops [making weapons] than I would of someone using a 3-D printer.”
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Banned 3D Gun Plans Still Available Online
File-sharing websites offer links to plastic gun blueprints days after a takedown notice was issued by US authorities.
By Unnamed Author(s) — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘Sky News’ / Great Britain
The Liberator gun was designed by Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization set-up to "defend access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution".
The plans were made available for download on their website on May 6 but they took them down three days later after receiving a demand from the US State Department.
Officials insisted they were removed immediately to give the Department time to ensure they were compliant with US arms export control laws.
But copies of the document, which was downloaded from the site over 100,000 times, are now being exchanged through censorship-resistant file-sharing sites such as Mega and The Pirate Bay.
Sharing or downloading the plans is not considered illegal under US law, though assembling a non-detectable weapon is, according to George Mocsary, a gun-law expert at the University of Connecticut School of Law.
Most parts of the gun can be 'printed' using high-strength thermoplastic, making them resistant to metal detectors and easier to smuggle into places where guns are banned.
But the firing pin and ammunition must still be constructed of metal and the gun can only fire one shot at a time, meaning questions remain whether it is as dangerous as a real firearm.
But Defense Distributed founder and law student Cody Wilson says the premise of open-source gun technology is more important than the limitations of the Liberator.
"Now the gun is out there nothing can take it back," he said. "I’ve talked to people who have walked into hacker spaces and seen a row of printers all printing Liberator parts.
"The next big thing is getting a picture of one of these things printed out in another country," he adds, adding that Liberators are already being printed in China assisted by a Chinese version of the instructions in the download package.
Mr Wilson insists he has done nothing wrong by releasing the Liberator plans for download. He claims there is an exemption for non-profit organizations distributing technical files that are in the public interest.
He also insists that the fact they can still be downloaded elsewhere means attempts by the US government to censor access to arms information have been defeated.
"This is the conversation I want," he says. "Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing?"
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Senator demands DOJ, FBI seek warrants to read e-mail
Democratic Sen. Mark Udall says the Justice Department should not allow FBI agents to peruse Americans' private communications without obtaining a search warrant from a judge.
By Declan McCullagh — Thursday, May 9th, 2013; 12:04 p.m. ‘C/net News’
Last month, Sen. Mark Udall and a handful of other privacy-focused politicians persuaded the IRS to promise to cease warrantless searches of Americans' private correspondence.
Now Udall, a Colorado Democrat, is taking aim at the Justice Department, which has claimed the right to conduct warrantless searches of Americans' e-mail, Facebook chats, and other private communications.
"I am extremely concerned that the Justice Department and FBI are justifying warrantless searches of Americans' electronic communications based on a loophole in an outdated law that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled was unconstitutional," Udall said in a statement sent to CNET Thursday.
Udall's statement cites a CNET article yesterday that was the first to disclose the Justice Department and the FBI's electronic search policies. The article was based on internal government documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The senator's statement urges Congress to move quickly to update the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- enacted during an era of dialup modems and the black and white Macintosh Plus -- that currently does not require search warrants for all e-mail messages. The 6th Circuit ruled in 2010, however, that the privacy protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment require police to obtain search warrants signed by a judge first.
Neither the Justice Department nor FBI immediately responded to a request for comment from CNET.
Nate Wessler, an ACLU staff attorney, told CNET that a legal fix is long overdue. "Senator Udall is absolutely right that Congress must update ECPA to protect the privacy of Americans' emails, text messages, and other electronic communications," he said Thursday.
The documents show that the U.S. Attorney for Manhattan circulated internal instructions saying a subpoena -- a piece of paper signed by a prosecutor, not a judge -- was sufficient to obtain nearly "all records from an ISP" including older e-mail messages. And the U.S. Attorney in Houston recently obtained "contents of stored communications" from an unnamed Internet service provider without asking a judge for a search warrant first.
After the IRS's warrantless e-mail access policy came to light last month, a dozen Republican and Democratic senators rebuked the agency. The senators' letter (PDF) opposing warrantless searches was signed by Udall, Mike Lee, R-Utah, Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and said: "We believe these actions are a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures."
Steven Miller, the IRS' acting commissioner, eventually said during a Senate hearing that the policy would be changed.
After the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals' 2010 ruling in U.S. v. Warshak, a few e-mail providers, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook, but not all, have taken the position that the Fourth Amendment mandates warrants for e-mail all over the country. The Justice Department, industry representatives say, has informally moved toward recognizing Warshak all over the country, but only for e-mail and not other stored data, such as Facebook chats, Twitter direct messages, Google Drive and Dropbox files, and so on.
Before the Warshak decision, the general rule since 1986 had been that police could obtain Americans' e-mail messages that were more than 180 days old with an administrative subpoena or what's known as a 2703(d) order, both of which lack a warrant's probable cause requirement and are less privacy protective.
A phalanx of companies, including Amazon, Apple, AT&T, eBay, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and Twitter, as well as liberal, conservative, and libertarian advocacy groups, have asked Congress to update ECPA to make it clear that law enforcement needs warrants to access private communications and the locations of mobile devices. Bills have been introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and last month the Senate Judiciary committee approved one version of the legislation.
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Judge OKs FBI Tracking Tool That Tricks Cellphones With Clandestine Signal
By Ryan Gallagher — Thursday, May 9th, 2013; 4:35 p.m. ‘Slate Magazine’ / Washington, DC
Back in March, the FBI was accused of hiding information from judges when seeking authorization for a clandestine cellphone tracking device called the “Stingray.” But now a judge has ruled that the feds’ use of the surveillance tool was lawful in a case that could have wider ramifications for law enforcement spy tactics.
The Stingray, sometimes described as an “IMSI catcher,” is a transceiver used by the FBI to locate suspects. As I have reported here previously, it sends out a signal that tricks phones within a targeted area into hopping onto a fake network. Civil liberties groups have challenged the lawfulness of the Stingray’s deployment, particularly because it intentionally gathers data from innocent bystanders’ phones and interferes with signals in a way that may be barred under a federal communications law. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act have also appeared to show that the FBI knows its use of the device is in shaky legal territory. The technology has been used in some capacity by the feds for almost two decades, but only recently has it garnered attention, in part because of a court case in Arizona—U.S. v. Rigmaiden.
The ACLU had argued that evidence gleaned from a Stingray to track down Daniel Rigmaiden, who is accused of conspiracy, wire fraud, and identity theft, should be suppressed. The rights group alleged that when the FBI sought authorization to use the Stingray, it concealed information about the device. In an amicus brief, the ACLU wrote that “[b]y failing to apprise the magistrate that it intended to use a stingray, what the device is, and how it works, it prevented the judge from exercising his constitutional function of ensuring that warrants are not overly intrusive and all aspects of the search are supported by probable cause.”
But on Wednesday, Judge David Campbell dismissed the motion to suppress. Campbell concluded that the warrant was valid and that the suspect “did not have an expectation of privacy society is willing to accept as legitimate.” Campbell wrote that the suspect could not “credibly argue that he had a legitimate expectation of privacy” because he had allegedly rented his apartment and purchased his computer fraudulently using false identities. The judge also added that the use of the Stingray did not constitute a “severe intrusion” and ultimately held that “no Fourth Amendment violation occurred.”
The ACLU responded with dismay, stating that it believes the ruling “trivializes the intrusive nature of electronic searches and potentially opens the door to troubling government misuse of new technology.” Linda Lye, staff attorney at ACLU, wrote in a blog post that the group was particularly disgruntled that the judge appeared to dismiss the significance of the Stingray’s ability to scoop up data from innocent third parties, which the ACLU believes the feds do not fully disclose. Campbell’s approval of the Stingray in the Rigmaiden case, Lye wrote, sends the message that it is “alright to withhold information from courts about new technology, which means that the law will have an even harder time catching up.”
Incidentally, new FBI documents related to the Stingray were released by the Electronic Privacy Information Center on Wednesday. Four hundred pages of heavily redacted files, some marked “secret,” join several other batches that have been released by the rights group as part of ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation. Of particular note in the latest trove are documents that show the FBI has been imposing nondisclosure agreements on its staff in order to prevent public disclosure of any information related to the spy technology.
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Oakland, California / Bill Bratton and Patrick Harnett
Bratton Says Oakland Lacks Police for Murders, Robberies
By Alison Vekshin (Bloomberg News) — Thursday, May 9th, 2013; 5:34 p.m. EDT
Oakland, California’s police investigations are ineffective in solving shootings, robberies and burglaries, and should be decentralized into five neighborhood districts, former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton recommended.
Robbery investigators are slow to respond and interview victims, while one part-time robbery detective was assigned to 10,000 cases last year, according to the report by The Bratton Group LLC released today.
Oakland hired Bratton, who was also police chief in Boston and Los Angeles, as a law-enforcement adviser in January for $250,000 to boost crime-fighting efforts. The city of about 396,000 has cut its police force by about 25 percent, according to the report. The Oakland Police Department reported a 22 percent increase in homicides and a 43 percent jump in burglaries last year, according to city data.
“The OPD is working to add police officers, but the current staffing shortfalls make it all the more important that the department deploys and manages its resources effectively now,” Bratton’s report said.
The report came a day after Howard Jordan, Oakland’s police chief, announced his resignation, saying in a statement posted on the police website that he was taking steps toward medical retirement after 24 years with the department.
Oakland ranked fifth among U.S. cities in crime in 2011, behind Flint, Michigan; Detroit; Camden, New Jersey; and St. Louis, according to the City Crime Rate Rankings based on FBI data, published by Congressional Quarterly.
Bratton’s report suggests dividing the city into five districts, with each led by a captain responsible for that area’s crime problems and “its specific cast of criminal characters.” It recommends assigning gun assaults and most robberies for investigation at the district level.
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Oakland burglaries barely investigated
City consultants lay out their plan to reduce crime
By Matthai Kuruvila — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The San Francisco Chronicle’ / San Francisco, CA
The Oakland Police Department has been so ineffectively structured that only one part-time investigator was assigned to handle 10,000 reported burglaries last year, a stunning deficiency revealed Thursday by police consultants hired by the city to develop a crime-fighting plan.
"Given the way the organization was structured, burglary was not being investigated," said William Andrews, one of the consultants working on a team hired by Oakland Mayor Jean Quan and the City Council to help police reduce the crime problem.
"Burglaries have gone through the roof," Andrews said.
The revelation came one day after Howard Jordan abruptly stepped down as Oakland's police chief, citing long-term medical reasons, and as the consultants and city officials released a brief six-page summary of the consultants' crime plan.
City officials refused to release the full plan Thursday, saying they needed to review it before releasing it on Friday. But sources said the plan had been given to Jordan on Sunday.
The consultant team, headed by former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, criticized the Police Department's centralized structure, saying that there are not enough investigators and that the few the department does employ should not all be located at headquarters.
The team's plan says the city should drastically increase the number of detectives and give those investigators geographic responsibilities.
Working closely with officers also assigned to those geographic areas, detectives would have a more intimate understanding of crime patterns and the criminals behind them, according to the consultants. The effort would be aided by a thorough use of a data-driven policing tool known as CompStat and, possibly, increased camera surveillance throughout the city.
Getting started
Acting Police Chief Anthony Toribio said the department has already begun carrying out the plan, which consultants promised would reduce crime within six months - a quick pace for a department that's seen crime rise in each of the past two years. But it remained unclear Thursday whether the department will implement the entire plan.
Oakland police have been under federal court oversight for the past decade as part of an agreement made in the aftermath of a police abuse scandal. The scrutiny was intensified in March, when a federal judge appointed a compliance director who has the authority to fire the police chief and even direct the city administrator - powers otherwise held only by the mayor.
"When this is fully implemented, this is going to have an impact on crime and reduce crime in this city," said Patrick Harnett, a former Hartford, Conn., police chief who is one of the Bratton consultants.
Burglary concerns
Police response to a rise in burglaries has been a persistent concern for residents throughout the city over the past few years.
Burglaries increased each of the last two years, including a 43 percent spike from 2011 to 2012. Auto burglaries jumped 77 percent last year, while home burglaries rose 24 percent.
At the same time, because of low officer staffing, the Police Department has said it cannot respond to burglaries that are not in progress. The combination has infuriated many residents, who have believed that the inadequate police response has contributed to the rise of burglaries.
The Bratton report comes a week after the federal compliance director, Thomas Frazier, issued a report highly critical of police management.
Struggling to develop plan
The department has struggled to develop a crime plan since July 2010, when the City Council laid off 80 officers in a dispute over job security and pensions. The force declined from roughly 776 officers before the layoffs to a historic low of 611 this March as officers continued to retire and leave.
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Homeland Security
The Blame Game
F.B.I. Says It Gave Boston P.D. Access to Info on the Tsarnaev Brothers
Edited from:
House holds first Boston bombings hearing
By: Josh Gerstein and Ginger Gibson — Thursday, May 9th, 2013; 7:54 p.m. ‘Politico’
In a statement released after the hearing, the top official in the FBI’s Boston office said Boston police officers on the area’s Joint Terrorism Task Force had access to a database called Guardian, which contained information on the interview with Tsarnaev.
“Boston JTTF members, including representatives from the Boston Police Department (BPD), were provided instruction on using Guardian, including suggestions on methods for proactively reviewing and establishing customized searches, which would allow them to be fully informed of all JTTF activity that may affect Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers said. “Guardian allows for the necessary accessibility and awareness that otherwise would be unfeasible given the number of assessments that are conducted by the JTTF on a regular basis.”
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Statement by FBI Boston Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers
Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTFs) members, including the state and local members, are responsible for maintaining awareness of possible threats to their respective jurisdictions. To manage and provide accessibility to the significant number of assessments conducted by the JTTF, each task force member has access to Guardian, a web-based counterterrorism incident management application that was launched in July 2004. In Guardian, threat and suspicious activity incidents are entered, assigned, and managed in a paperless environment and allows terrorist threats and suspicious activities to be viewed instantaneously by all system users. The primary purpose of Guardian is to make immediately available threat and suspicious activity information to all system users and to provide all users with the capability to search all incidents for threat trend analysis.
Further, all JTTF members are able to perform customized key word searches of Guardian to identify relevant assessment activity. Boston JTTF members, including representatives from the Boston Police Department (BPD), were provided instruction on using Guardian, including suggestions on methods for proactively reviewing and establishing customized searches, which would allow them to be fully informed of all JTTF activity that may affect Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Guardian allows for the necessary accessibility and awareness that otherwise would be unfeasible given the number of assessments that are conducted by the JTTF on a regular basis. Many state and local departments, including the BPD, have representatives who are full-time members of the JTTF, and specifically had representatives assigned to the JTTF squad that conducted the 2011 assessment of deceased terrorism suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
As set forth by law and policy, assessments may be carried out to detect, obtain information about, or prevent or protect against federal crimes or threats to the national security or to collect foreign intelligence when the information provided to the FBI does not rise to a level that would allow for the opening of a predicated investigation. By their very nature, and in accordance with United States constitutional restrictions, JTTF members are limited in the types of investigative methods that can be utilized in an assessment. In 2011 alone, the Boston JTTF conducted approximately 1,000 assessments, including the assessment of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, which was documented in the Guardian database. The Tsarnaev assessment was thorough, comprehensive, and fully compliant with law and policy.
While sponsored by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), JTTFs are composed of federal, state, local, and tribal personnel and are based in more than 100 cities nationwide, including Boston. The JTTF is a collaborative environment that allows for the completely unrestricted flow of investigative information among task force members. Importantly, the purpose of sharing information freely is to create a force multiplier by enabling state, local, and federal officials to participate in the intelligence cycle by gaining awareness of activity that may affect their respective jurisdictions and then providing any information from their own records that might assist in the further analysis and investigation of potential terrorists. Further, fusion centers—entities separate and apart from JTTFs—are designed to provide terrorism-related information to the JTTFs for possible investigative purposes.
State and local law enforcement personnel, analysts, and FBI personnel at fusion centers who have the appropriate security clearances are afforded the same unrestricted access as their FBI colleagues.
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Boston chief: Wasn't told FBI got Tsarnaev warning
By ALICIA A. CALDWELL (The Associated Press) — Thursday, May 9th, 2013; 5:19 p.m. EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The FBI did not initially share with Boston police the warnings it had received from Russia about one suspect in last month's marathon bombings, despite the work of four city police representatives on a federal terrorism task force, Boston's police commissioner told Congress on Thursday.
Yet Commissioner Ed Davis acknowledged that police might not have uncovered or disrupted the plot even if they had fully investigated the family of Tamerlan Tsarnaev based on those warnings. The FBI after a cursory investigation closed its assessment on Tsarnaev, who died in a police shootout after the bombings. Boston police learned about the Russian security service warnings only later.
"That's very hard to say. We would certainly look at the information, we would certainly talk to the individual," Davis said. "From the information I've received, the FBI did that, and they closed the case out. I can't say that I would have come to a different conclusion based upon the information that was known at that particular time."
In Massachusetts, meanwhile, Tsarnaev was secretly buried in an undisclosed location outside Worcester after a weeklong search for a community willing to take the body. Worcester police Sgt. Kerry Hazelhurst said Thursday the body was no longer in that city and had been entombed, but he would not say where.
The congressional hearing was the first in a series to review the government's initial response to the attacks, ask what information authorities received about Tsarnaev and his brother before the bombings and consider whether everything was handled correctly.
Some lawmakers questioned whether Boston police could have more thoroughly investigated Tsarnaev after 2011, based on Russia's vague warnings then to the FBI and CIA or the discovery by the Homeland Security Department in 2012 that he was traveling to Russia for six months, and whether Justice Department rules intended to protect civil liberties constrained the FBI's own inquiry.
"Why didn't they involve the local law enforcers who could have stayed on the case and picked up signals from some of the students who interacted with them, from the people in the mosque," asked former Sen. Joe Lieberman, who also testified. "In this case, aggravatingly, you have two of our great homeland security agencies that didn't involve before the event the local and state authorities that could have helped us prevent the attack."
Davis' testimony revealed a gap in information-sharing between federal and local officials. That was somewhat reminiscent of intelligence failures that preceded the 2001 terror attacks. Unlike those lapses, however, it's not clear that anything would have been different, whatever coordination there might have been.
Led by the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Forces operate in many cities as a way to bring federal, state and local officials together to share information. The model has existed for decades but, after 9/11, task forces sprouted up in cities nationwide to ensure that police were not out of the loop on investigations like the one the FBI conducted into Tsarnaev.
Davis said that while his officers weren't given specific information about the elder Tsarnaev, they did have access to computer databases maintained by the terrorism task force. Later Thursday, Boston FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard DesLauriers issued a statement detailing how and why representatives from local agencies have access to the databases.
He said giving task force members access to the databases provides necessary "accessibility and awareness that otherwise would be unfeasible" given the volume of such investigations.
Under questioning from lawmakers, Davis said he was not aware of anyone from a local mosque where Tamerlan Tsarnaev once worshipped calling police after photographs of the suspects were released by the FBI. He said authorities also did not hear from classmates of Tsarnaev's brother, Dzhokhar, at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured and faces federal terrorism charges in the attacks.
In a time of widespread budget cuts, the hearing also began laying the groundwork for an expected push for more counterterrorism money. Both Davis and Kurt Schwartz, the Massachusetts homeland security chief, praised federal grants that for years have kept cities flush with money for equipment and manpower.
"People are alive today" because of money for training and equipment, Schwartz said.
The hearing was conducted by the House Homeland Security Committee. The panel's chairman, Rep. Michael McCall, R-Texas, and ranking Democrat, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, both spoke of the importance of federal money, as did Lieberman.
"You can't fight this war without resources," Lieberman said.
In written testimony, Davis told lawmakers that cities should look at deploying more undercover officers and special police units and installing more surveillance cameras - but not at the expense of civil liberties.
"I do not endorse actions that move Boston and our nation into a police state mentality, with surveillance cameras attached to every light pole in the city," Davis said. "We do not and cannot live in a protective enclosure because of the actions of extremists who seek to disrupt our way of life."
Investigators used surveillance video from a restaurant near one of the explosions to help identify the Tsarnaev brothers.
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Associated Press writers Jay Lindsay and Michelle R. Smith contributed to this report from Boston.
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F.B.I. Did Not Tell Police in Boston of Russian Tip
By SCOTT SHANE and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. did not tell the Boston police about the 2011 warning from Russia about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers accused in the Boston Marathon bombings, the city’s police chief said Thursday during the first public Congressional hearing on the terrorist attack.
Boston’s police commissioner, Edward Davis, said that though some of his officers worked with the F.B.I. on a Joint Terrorism Task Force, they did not know about the Russian tip or the bureau’s subsequent inquiry, which involved an interview with Mr. Tsarnaev and his parents.
Had his department learned about the tip, in which Russian officials said that Mr. Tsarnaev had embraced radical Islam and intended to travel to Russia to connect with underground groups, “we would certainly look at the individual,” Commissioner Davis told the House Homeland Security Committee. He noted that F.B.I. officers found no evidence of a crime and closed the case. He said that he could not say whether he would have reached a different conclusion, but that his officers would “absolutely” have taken a second look at Mr. Tsarnaev.
Commissioner Davis said he recognized the sensitivity of intelligence received from other countries. “But when information is out there that affects the safety of my community, I need to know that,” he said.
In a statement later on Thursday, the F.B.I. said that the squad that carried out the assessment of Mr. Tsarnaev in 2011 included some Boston Police Department officers, and it suggested that they could easily have read the information collected about him in a database that every member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force has access to. But the statement also noted that the Boston task force conducted about 1,000 assessments in 2011, a workload that made it unlikely that each assessment could get close attention from every task force member. Also, Mr. Tsarnaev lived in Cambridge, not Boston.
The committee’s chairman, Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who is a former federal counterterrorism prosecutor, said he was concerned that a decision not to share information among agencies — widely blamed for the failure to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — might have been a factor in the Boston bombings.
“We learned over a decade ago the danger in failing to connect the dots,” Mr. McCaul said. “My fear is that the Boston bombers may have succeeded because our system failed. We can and we must do better.”
Mr. McCaul said he also had concerns that the “emerging narrative” about the Boston plot “downplays the spread of the global jihadist movement.”
“From the attack at Fort Hood to the tragedy at Benghazi, the Boston bombings are our most recent reminder that we must call terrorism really for what it is in order to confront it,” Mr. McCaul said. “You cannot defeat an enemy you refuse to acknowledge.”
Some Republicans have accused the Obama administration of playing down the threat from radical Islam and of exaggerating the administration’s success in reducing the threat from Al Qaeda. On Wednesday, at a politically charged hearing that lasted for almost six hours, Republicans accused the administration of initially trying to cover up the true nature of the attack last September on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
The F.B.I.’s investigation of the Boston attack is continuing, but officials have said that so far the evidence suggests that Mr. Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed in a shootout after the bombings, and his younger brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who awaits trial on terrorism charges, were radicalized in the United States and got their instructions in bomb making from the Internet.
But agents are currently in Dagestan, a turbulent area of southern Russia where Tamerlan Tsarnaev spent six months last year. The agents are looking into reports that Mr. Tsarnaev was trying to connect with Islamist militants who have carried out a campaign of terrorism against Russian forces.
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The Hard Truth About More Spycams in Boston
By Philip Bump — Thursday, May 9th, 2013 ‘The Atlantic Wire’ / Washington, DC
Boston police commissioner Ed Davis, a now-familiar face in the wake of last month's bombings, testified this morning before the House Homeland Security Committee in Washington. He went off-script in the hearing, diverging from his expected call for more surveillance cameras — maybe because it's unclear what good that would have done. Boston's existing cameras caught the Tsarnaevs, sure, but more cameras watching more targets would have done nothing better on prevention, little better on detection, and cost much, much more.
The hearing, meant to be the "first in a series" investigating the attacks, featured testimony from Massachusetts' undersecretary for public safety and security, a professor of risk analysis from USC, Commissioner Davis, and former senator Joe Lieberman. Lieberman testified first, presenting the case for increased focus on terror and apparently arguing incorrectly that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's friends could have prevented the attacks.
When it was his turn, Davis first acknowledged the victims of the bombing and its aftermath. The commissioner then noted that working with citizens was important — more so than a reliance on technology. "There's no technical means [for identifying terrorists] that you can point to," he said. "There's no computer that can spit out the name. It's the community being involved in the conversation."
This is a different position than what Davis had written to the committee in his prepared remarks. In those remarks, which are nonetheless part of the record of the hearing, Davis argued for stronger security around "soft targets" — like crowds gathered at marathons — and more security cameras. Noting that he didn't want to "move Boston and our nation into a police state mentality," Davis' remarks said that "images from cameras don't lie."
They can be viewed by a jury as evidence of what occurred.
These efforts are not intended to chill or stifle free speech, but rather to protect the integrity and freedom of that speech and to protect the rights of victims and suspects alike.
This is an argument that Davis has raised before. At the end of last month, he spoke with the Boston Herald, making largely the same case.
“We need to gather all the information we can as to what happened and make a determination as to the overall commitment the city of Boston has to the threat of terrorism,” Davis said. “That’s very, very important to me. It’s very important to the mayor. I’m sure there will be a lot of questions about that.” …
“Drones are a great idea. I don’t know that would be the first place I’d invest money, but certainly to cover an event like this, and have an eye in the sky that would be much cheaper to run than a helicopter is a really good idea,” he said.
The commissioner's prepared remarks did note that his department "had to rely almost exclusively on the support of our business partners to provide critical video surveillance along the finish line" — a less generous formulation of the relationship with the community than Davis spoke of during his testimony.
It was inevitable that an argument would be made, as we noted shortly after the attacks. But the flaws in the argument for more technology are as apparent as they were then.
As The Atlantic Cities noted in the aftermath of the attack, the city has an existing network of official cameras. A 2003 survey of Boston's downtown spotted a number of government and private cameras throughout the city center; in the intervening ten years, that number has certainly grown.
Davis gave those existing security cameras credit for their crucial role in helping to catch the Boston bombers. The images released by the FBI that triggered the Tsarnaev manhunt came from cameras on a restaurant along the marathon route — the Forum Restaurant, which Davis thanked in his testimony. Prior to that, the Boston Globe reported that one suspect — apparently Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — was recorded by a camera on a Lord & Taylor department store across the street from the second explosion (the scene at right). Even identifying those important snippets of film was heavily resource intensive. As The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal pointed out last month, there doesn't exist software that can effectively sift through such video. So prior to release of the footage, "more than 100 analysts were painstakingly reviewing thousands of hours of surveillance and amateur videotape for anything suspicious," according to the Globe.
Some law enforcement agencies argue that a better strategy is to strengthen that informal network. Earlier this month, CBS spoke with officials from various agencies who made that point.
[I]n Houston, officials want to add to their 450 cameras through more public and private partnerships. The city already has access to hundreds of additional cameras that monitor the water system, the rail system, freeways and public spaces such as Reliant Stadium, officials said. ...
"If they have a camera that films an area we're interested in, then why put up a separate camera?" said Dennis Storemski, director of the mayor's office of public safety and homeland security. "And we allow them to use ours too."
A deputy chief from Los Angeles argued about a camera network: "First, it's a deterrent and, second, it's evidence." That is a key point. While cameras can provide evidence to a jury, it is much less likely is that they can prevent such attacks. Deterrence might work for keeping people from committing vandalism; recent studies suggest that people behave differently when they know they're being observed. But for a terrorist intent on causing harm, it's not likely that would do much. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, while clearly not a sophisticated criminal, didn't even bother to cover his face.
What's more, while there exists software that can identify suspicious packages, it's not clear how effective that detection mechanism is. More cameras necessarily require more staffing; even if software does the initial filtering, human law enforcement needs to be dispatched to investigate. That's expensive over the long term, in an effort to prevent very rare incidents — and still not fool-proof.
It's not clear why Davis decided not to focus on his prepared remarks today. It's possible that, knowing they were part of the record, he felt he could use his time to make a more emotional case. It's less likely that he did so because he recognizes that adding more cameras wouldn't have made much of a difference.
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Bombings a Bitter Bookend for F.B.I.’s Director
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT — Friday, May 10th, 2013 ‘The New York Times’
WASHINGTON — Robert S. Mueller III was awakened at home close to 1:30 a.m. on April 19 as one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing was in cardiac arrest and the other was on the run.
By 3 a.m., after an F.B.I. agent had used a fingerprint scanner on the dying suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in a hospital emergency room to learn his identity, Mr. Mueller, the F.B.I. director, had arrived in a suit and tie at his agency’s headquarters in downtown Washington.
His agents gave him the bad news: two years earlier, the F.B.I. had interviewed, and closed its file on, Mr. Tsarnaev. Mr. Mueller took it in without showing emotion, his aides said. He turned to a deputy and ordered the release of the information — knowing it would call into question whether the F.B.I. failed to head off one of the most spectacular attacks on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
Now, Mr. Mueller’s 12-year tenure under two presidents is facing scrutiny, months from his longtime plans to step down in September, as hearings begin on Capitol Hill into what happened in Boston and why.
Although his privileged roots and sometimes wooden personality have not made him a beloved figure in the F.B.I.’s beer-and-brats culture, he has always had supporters in both parties in Congress. Now, instead of coasting into retirement, Mr. Mueller will spend his final months answering tough questions about how the bombing suspects slipped away.
On Thursday, Boston’s police chief testified to the House Homeland Security Committee that the F.B.I. had not shared with the Boston police information it received in 2011 about Mr. Tsarnaev, or about the bureau’s subsequent inquiry, which found no evidence of ties to Muslim extremists. Although the information appeared to raise questions about whether Mr. Tsarnaev would commit terrorist acts in Russia, Edward Davis, the police commissioner, said that had his department learned about the tip, “we would certainly look at the individual.” He could not say whether he would have come to a different conclusion.
For Mr. Mueller, who took over the F.B.I. one week before the Sept. 11 attacks, the hearings stand as an unwelcome bookend to a long law enforcement career.
“If an attack of this scale happens toward the end of your tenure and there is evidence that the F.B.I. had its hands on the people years ago and missed them, that is what people will remember,” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton historian and author of a book on the politics of national security.
Lee H. Hamilton, the co-chairman of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, was blunt. “He can’t avoid it,” he said. “It happened, so it’s part of his legacy.” Mr. Mueller declined to be interviewed for this article.
His defenders, including President Obama, praise the bureau for its fast work in identifying Mr. Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, ethnic Chechen immigrants who the F.B.I. believes learned to make explosives from an Al Qaeda-affiliated online magazine. For days after the bombings, the F.B.I. flew its planes, including a Gulfstream 5 jet, between Boston and Washington, ferrying evidence gathered at the scene to the F.B.I.’s crime laboratories for DNA analysis in a frantic effort to learn who the bombers were.
The break came with the fingerprint scan — technology ordinarily used to identify enemy fighters in Afghanistan — that set in motion Mr. Mueller’s decision to make public the F.B.I.’s previous contact with Mr. Tsarnaev. That the agency had crossed the suspect’s path did not come entirely as a surprise, aides said. Inside the bureau, where F.B.I. agents under orders since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to check out the smallest terrorist tip have built databases of millions of names, the view was that it was only a matter of time before the agency would be blamed for the next attack. From the agents’ perspective, the F.B.I. is vigilant, not incompetent. “In some ways, they’re a victim of their own success,” said Kenneth Wainstein, a former chief of staff to Mr. Mueller and former general counsel at the F.B.I.
Whether blame is deserved or not, by 10 a.m. on April 19, Mr. Mueller had made the short trip from the F.B.I.’s headquarters to the White House, where he briefed Mr. Obama in the Situation Room. Boston was on lockdown and an extensive manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was under way. Using what Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, described as a “very factual” tone, Mr. Mueller did not apologize to the president for the F.B.I.’s closing of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s case.
“His view is that the F.B.I. has thousands upon thousands of leads that they investigate, and it’s the nature of the business that if you don’t find derogatory information about somebody in that investigation, it’s just not going to trigger a detention or a deportation,” Mr. Rhodes said. “It wasn’t defensive at all.”
But a few days later, when Mr. Mueller briefed House members behind closed doors, one lawmaker said he seemed uncharacteristically tense. “He was ill at ease, not his normal confidence,” said the congressman, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the session was classified. “He wasn’t himself.”
Three days before the Boston bombings, Mr. Mueller, 68, delivered a rare and unusually personal speech at the University of Virginia, where he received his law degree 40 years ago.
“I love doing bank robberies, drug cases, homicides — as a prosecutor, that’s what I thought I was going to be overseeing when I got to the bureau,” he said. But, he said, Americans “expect us to prevent the next terrorist attack.”
Mr. Mueller’s words — which have since become, at minimum, awkward — also described his transformation of the F.B.I. He became director on Sept. 4, 2001; faced investigations into the failures to prevent the Sept. 11 plot; then set about changing the culture of the F.B.I. — 56 field offices, each fiercely protective of its turf — from a domestic crime-fighting agency into a counterterrorism operation.
“It was an enormously difficult challenge, and he went at it with great energy and skill,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Some agents bought into it, and others did not.”
Mr. Mueller expanded the bureau’s presence overseas, deployed agents to gather evidence on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and pressed for expanded surveillance powers. He nearly resigned over the George W. Bush administration’s electronic eavesdropping program, and instructed his agents not to participate in brutal interrogation techniques used by the C.I.A. But there is no evidence that he put his objections in writing or took them to the White House.
Mr. Mueller’s years at the F.B.I. — traditionally the proletarian competitor to the Ivy Leaguers at the C.I.A. — are the logical culmination of a long career spent fighting criminals, though not necessarily of his origins. Born into an affluent New York family, Mr. Mueller graduated from the elite St. Paul’s School in the same 1962 class as Secretary of State John Kerry, followed his father’s footsteps to Princeton, earned a master’s degree in international relations from New York University, then saw combat when he led a rifle platoon in Vietnam.
He went on to become United States attorney in both San Francisco and Boston, and supervised cases like the prosecution of the crime boss John J. Gotti and the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland when he ran the Justice Department’s criminal division under the first President George Bush. Friends say law enforcement had always drawn him in.
“He really hates the bad guys,” said William F. Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, who preceded Mr. Mueller as the United States attorney in Boston.
In recent years, friends say Mr. Mueller has grown increasingly concerned about the potential for other homegrown attacks like the one in Boston. Leon E. Panetta, the former defense secretary who ran the C.I.A. from 2009 to 2011 and who counts Mr. Mueller as a friend, said the two often talked of the changing nature of the terror threat.
“The one area that I think we were always concerned about was the Lone Wolf Syndrome,” Mr. Panetta said, using law enforcement jargon for criminals who act alone, “largely because the real challenge is, how do you locate these people? How do you get ahead of it?”
In his University of Virginia speech, Mr. Mueller said he measured success on how many attacks had occurred on American soil over the past 10 to 12 years. As he wrapped up his remarks, he offered to take questions, alluding to the skills he has developed in Washington through many a Congressional hearing, and more to come.
“I’ll either answer ’em,” he said, “or duck ’em.”
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Mike Bosak
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