Tag: news

Last October, if you happened to be near the scene where some right-wing Proud Boys got into a fight with Antifa activists on New York City’s Upper East Side, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office may have collected your phone number and location at the time—without your knowledge.

Two members of the Proud Boys are on trial and several others have already pleaded guilty to rioting and disorderly conduct charges in connection with the fight. During the trial last week, an investigator with the DA’s office testified that they had gotten what’s called a “reverse location” search warrant demanding that Google cough up location information on people who had Android phones or used Google Maps near the scene. This warrant included many people who have no connection to the case—the technological equivalent of doing a house-to-house search for evidence connected to a crime in that neighborhood.

Gothamist reported that Google sent them an anonymized list of Google device identifications. Investigators cross-referenced location data and the IDs in order to narrow down those with multiple appearances in the area. They got the list to just two or three records that matched what they were looking for. On further investigation, though, they discovered that even those individuals were not connected to the case.

While this is the first time the public has been informed that these types of searches are happening in New York, the city didn’t pioneer this technique. Aaron Mak over at Slate reported in February on the growing trend of police and prosecutors turning to Google with warrants in hand, demanding data. Authorities are collecting phone numbers and locations in large numbers, and then trying to narrow down the information to likely suspects.

Mak notes that these types of searches are more powerful and far-reaching than the StingRay devices police secretly use to trick phones into connecting to them rather than phone cell towers, allowing police to track location data. With these warrants, Mak explains,

They can retrieve much more reliable data from users of Android phones or certain Google apps. Google’s location-tracking functions are often more precise than those of cell towers for tools like Maps and even Gmail. Plus, the company collects tracking data from phones that aren’t connected to cell towers, such as those using GPS satellites or Wi-Fi. When police request location data from Google-connected devices, they’ve also been known to ask for more personal information, like browsing history and past purchases.

We do not have reliable numbers about how frequently this is happening. Mak notes police in Raleigh, North Carolina, state investigators in Orange County, California, and police across Minnesota use this technique.

Google has responded to Mak that they resist overly broad requests when possible and require warrants for their cooperation. And police defend their actions by noting that they’re agreeing to the anonymized process until they narrow down to a couple of actual suspects.

Still, we should be concerned that police and prosecutors are quietly, secretly demanding phone data as a fishing expedition and that they’re getting private information about thousands upon thousands of people who are not suspected of a crime. Gothamist and Slate both spoke with privacy advocates who have concerns. From Gothamist:

Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project at the Urban Justice Center, said the case illustrates what privacy advocates have long feared.

“When we sign up for Google, we shouldn’t be signing away our core constitutional rights,” he said. “When law enforcement uses these sort of digital dragnets they often will get it wrong, and innocent people will be swept up in the mix.”

In a city as dense as New York, such digital sweeps could gather data on thousands of innocent cell phone users, noted Jerome Greco, a staff attorney in the Legal Aid Society’s Digital Forensics Unit.

“That’s like saying, we suspect that somebody hid a gun in an apartment in a building, so we’re going to search everybody in the building, even though we know only one apartment actually has this,” he said. He argued law enforcement warrants should be more focused.

Meanwhile, according to New York press reports, Apple doesn’t track the location of their devices and therefore cannot provide this information to the police or prosecutors.

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Operation Cross Country, the FBI’s signature program to fight “child sex trafficking,” has long been plagued with problems, from arresting underage victims to cracking down on hundreds of times as many sex workers as it does “pimps and traffickers.” After the FBI skipped last year⁠—and sources told Fox News the program was being reconsidered⁠—it looked like maybe authorities had seen the error in their ways.

Sadly, no: the feds were just tooling up for an even more extensive version of this “anti-human trafficking” sham.

Last week, the FBI and the Department of Justice (DOJ) trumpeted “Operation Independence Day,” a renamed and longer but otherwise unchanged Operation Cross Country (OCC). Instead of one weekend, the initiative lasted a whole month.

Despite this longer time frame, authorities “rescued” about the same number of young people that it has in the past couple years and significantly fewer than it did years prior.

For instance, in the eleventh and last OCC, in October 2017, the FBI announced that it had discovered 84 minors. After OCC IX, in the summer of 2015, an FBI press release reported “the recovery of 149 sexually exploited children” and, in 2014, police picked up 168 minors⁠—more than twice as many as this year, in less than one-quarter of the time.

This year, agents from 400 different law enforcement agencies, 86 task forces, and 33 FBI field offices conducted some 161 operations throughout the month of July. In total, they picked up 82 minors allegedly selling sex. The youngest was age 15. The operation also “identified” another 21 teenagers who were possibly being exploited.

The number of possible “pimps and traffickers” caught in Operation Independence Day⁠—67⁠—is also down from recent previous years. Both this and the relatively small number of juveniles found could be related to sex-work ads shifting from a concentrated few (easy-to-access and friendly-to-law-enforcement) platforms to myriad smaller venues, following the government’s seizure of Backpage.com and, not long after, the passage of FOSTA (which prompted Craigslist and others to crack down on ads).

“Pimps and traffickers,” mind you, is something of a misnomer. Folks counted in this category can include sex workers themselves under the wrong circumstances, as well as federal Mann Act prosecutions (which applies to one adult driving another consenting adult across state lines for a sex act). The term “traffickers” also includes those who get snared in To Catch a Predator-style stings by undercover cops pretending to be teenagers. Even by these standards, however, the number of “human traffickers” that face either federal or state charges is similar to or less than in earlier, shorter operations.

In 2015, for instance, the FBI reported that “more than 150 pimps (in addition to) other individuals” had been apprehended. After the 2016 operation, the FBI bragged of nabbing “239 pimps and other individuals.”

As I reported here a few years ago, the 2016 “efforts yielded just 10 federal indictments as of May 2017″ and only three of these involved actual minors (none of whom alleged abuse, assault, or mistreatment). Meanwhile, 996 “adult prostitution subjects” were arrested, according to testimony from former FBI Director James Comey. He also noted that since the start of OCC less than a decade prior, 1,254 “johns” were arrested as a consequence of the stings.

The FBI no longer reports the number of adult sex workers whom these initiatives claim as collateral (it stopped offering up that information in 2010 and in recent years has said it does not keep track). However, local news and law enforcement agencies often do, helping provide us with a more in-depth, if incomplete, picture.

This year, in Alabama, 49 “sex workers and their facilitators” were arrested around the Birmingham area, according to ABC 33/40. “We make the phone calls,” said Vestavia Hills Police Captain Johnny Evans, describing the sting. “They agree to an act and a price. They come to where we are.”

Meanwhile, a sting Homewood, Alabama—conducted by both vice and narcotics units—led to the arrest of 14 people (nine women and five men) for promoting prostitution, sometimes accompanied by drug charges. Promoting prostitution is generally considered a type of “pimping” charge, but increasingly lobbed against sex workers themselves for placing ads online and similar conduct.

FBI-joined July stings in Northern Ohio led to eight women being charged with prostitution and one woman being charged with promoting prostitution. In Pennsylvania, a woman papers refer to as the “Monroeville Madam” was charged with prostitution, and one man was charged with promoting prostitution.

In Mississippi, four women and one man were arrested in a prostitution sting in Warren County. In Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, three young women were booked on prostitution charges and two men were booked for aiding and abetting prostitution. “Mount Pleasant Police Inspector Chip Googe says the FBI is investigating,” reported the local Live 5 News.

In Jacksonville Beach, Florida, a “prostitution sting conducted by the FBI with help from the Jacksonville Beach Police Department” involved “an undercover FBI agent pos[ing] as a customer who was looking for a prostitute at a Holiday Inn Express on Beach Boulevard after responding online via a website.” Ultimately, two women and one man were arrested, according to News 4 Jax.

This is the kind of thing we have the FBI working on these days—the kind of thing once relegated to rookie cops.

In the San Diego area, six men were arrested for soliciting (adult) prostitution, with local police, the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force, and the FBI all involved. Louisiana Alcohol and Tobacco Control agents, along with FBI agents, picked up 25 men for soliciting prostitution in Shreveport, and FBI agents worked with local cops to arrest seven sex workers at a hotel in Baton Rouge.

A 21-year-old sex worker was also arrested in Louisiana, after traveling with a teen girl who told police the young woman had “encouraged and guided her on how to work” (as police put it). In addition, a woman initially thought missing was found along with her 4-year-old daughter, who was the subject of a custody dispute. The girl was safe and unharmed. The woman, who was allegedly working as a sex worker and/or living with other sex workers, was charged with a felony custody order violation. Police have portrayed the 4-year-old as being rescued from “human traffickers.”

If these cases are any indication, Operation Independence Day promises to help girls and young women but often winds up throwing them in handcuffs instead. Then, police fudge the details of cases to paint themselves the heroes. But while their press releases speak of “rescuing” sex-trafficked teens, “rescue” basically just means they made contact.

Teens found selling sex are generally sent on their way with a few social services numbers if they don’t have a sex-trade Svengali to testify against. And most don’t: Former FBI Deputy Director John Pistole testified that only around one-quarter of teens found in these operations had experienced force or threats as part of being in the sex trade.

This year, FBI Special Agent Jeanette Milazzo said that officers going undercover on “social media sites and escort sites” were “looking for runaways, and essentially juveniles who have been posting themselves for commercial sex.”

Do you know who looks like juveniles based on their ads? Young adult sex workers, who wind up with no sympathy when police find out they’re 18 or 19 or 23 years old. They’re still getting arrested, even as our number of minors found is going down.

Meanwhile, police make up for the dearth of actual rescue work by entrapping people into crimes there’s no indication they would otherwise have committed. This year, Operation Independence Day includes eight Illinois men indicted on federal charges of attempted enticement of a minor, after soliciting a sex worker who “admitted” to being a teenager and was really an undercover cop. No real minors were involved. Those arrested face a possible fine of up to $250,000 (in addition to asset forfeiture) and a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison.

With roots in the War on Drugs, early anti-immigration efforts, and Victorian-era vice policing, Operation Independence Day (and Operation Cross Country before it) are sold as safe-streets-making, social-justice-friendly, exploitation-stopping success stories. But once again, we’re seeing authorities boldly stop a lot of victimless crime while getting ladies naked and padding their pocketbooks.

If this were really about helping exploited and at-risk youth, and not just making a big splashy announcement, we would see way less focus on stings, prostitution charges, and other misdemeanor arrests and more resources devoted to runaway and homeless youth and sexual violence victims broadly.

Authorities now admit that the “human trafficking” problem isn’t so much about kids and women being abducted, tied up, and literally forced into selling sex, but rather that the issues driving it are much more complicated. But they still can’t or won’t admit that the old arrest-our-way-out approach has no place here.

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In 2011, 200 women serving sentences at the Lincoln Correctional Center in Lincoln, Illinois, woke one morning to a tactical team in riot gear, who rounded them up, handcuffed them, and herded them to the gymnasium. Eventually, the women were taken in groups of four to 10 to the adjoining beauty shop and bathroom, where they were told to take everything off—for what, they weren’t sure. That included menstrual products, so some women began to bleed onto the floor.

One by one, prisoners were forced to turn around, bend over, and spread their anal and vaginal cavities for inspection. The reason? A non-required training exercise for cadets.

“Dirty bitches,” said a correctional officer. Prisoners listened to a chorus of guards and cadets who called them “fucking disgusting,” told them they smelled “like death,” and taunted them with reminders that they “deserve[d] to be in here.” The bathroom’s door was kept open and the beauty shop’s walls were lined with mirrors, so male officers watched from the gym.

A federal court decided in July that the incident did not violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit ruled 2-1 that, because the women did the touching themselves, their right to privacy was not violated.

Writing for the majority, Circuit Judge Frank H. Easterbrook, a Reagan appointee, reminded the plaintiffs that they “lack any legitimate expectation of privacy inside prison walls” as it pertains to their possessions and surroundings. They are, however, legally entitled to some discretion when it comes to their own bodies, though he cited precedent which holds that such privacy applies only to the interior of the body. As such, since the prisoners did the poking and prodding themselves, their Fourth Amendment rights remained intact, he said.

“Plaintiffs allege a visual inspection, not a physical intrusion,” he wrote. “They maintain that each inmate had to manipulate her own body but do not contend that the prison’s staff touched any inmate.”

U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee, an Obama appointee who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, was asked to sit on the panel for the 7th Circuit. He subsequently dissented, writing that the majority’s stipulation fails to pass logical muster and is not supported by previous court decisions. The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the subject of strip searches as they relate to privacy rights, and the 7th Circuit “has taken various, sometimes inconsistent, tacks to answer this question,” claimed Lee.

Contrary to Easterbrook, he noted that there is precedent within the same circuit that supports the plaintiffs. Consider Sparks v. Stutler, in which the court ordered that involuntary catheterization violated the Fourth Amendment. And in Del Raine v. Williford, the 7th Circuit ruled a rectal probe conducted by a correctional officer crossed the line.

With those in mind, Lee argued that the only substantial difference is who is doing the manipulating since the end result is comparable. “It seems odd, however, to make the question of whether a prisoner has a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in the integrity of his or her intimate body cavities dependent on who it is that does the probing or penetrating,” he wrote. “The distinction between those cases and this one—in which inmates were ordered to probe their own body cavities and subject them to visual inspection—is difficult to discern.”

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Over the past decade, a shy frog has been involved in one of the most high-profile legal cases involving an endangered species. On Monday, after more than a year of weighing proposals and public comments, the Department of the Interior unveiled several changes to the way it implements the Endangered Species Act.

In July, an eight-year legal saga involving the dusky gopher frog came to a close when the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to remove the property of Edward Poitevent, a Louisiana landowner, from its “critical habitat designation” for the species. The designation delineates areas that are important for the recovery of a species, but often comes with burdensome land-use restrictions.

In 2011, the government included about 1,500 acres of Poitevent’s property because the land encompasses several rare ponds conducive to the frog’s breeding needs. Yet the government admitted “the surrounding uplands are poor-quality terrestrial habitat for dusky gopher frogs” because they lack the particular timber ecosystem the amphibian requires. Moreover, the frog has not been documented in the state for half a century—the surviving population, which numbers about 150, is in southern Mississippi. 

It’s no surprise that Poitevent and his family weren’t interested in trying to help recover the frog, which would have been a costly, laborious, and uncertain endeavor of its own. The government’s own estimate found that the designation could have cost the Poitevents up to $34 million in lost development value. In deciding Weyerhaeuser Co. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last November, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the government agency had overstepped its bounds by including the 1,500 acres in its designation. The justices essentially declared that an area must actually be habitable to be designated as critical habitat for the species in question.

When the Endangered Species Act pits rare species against the people who own habitats that could help in their recovery, no one wins. That’s why the policy tweaks announced this week are sensible. 

The department’s revised regulations clarify that “areas where threatened or endangered species are present at the time of listing be evaluated first before unoccupied areas are considered.” The aim is to reduce “the potential for additional regulatory burden that results from a designation when species are not present in an area.”

When I met Poitevent in 2018, he was miffed that the government would designate his land as “potential backup habitat,” as he phrased it. “They don’t use that phrase exactly,” he said, “but that’s what it is. But so is your backyard. You’re not gonna spend enough money to turn it into [a] frog habitat. So how does this benefit the frog? It doesn’t, and it won’t. Yet all they tell you is they need our land to save the frog.”

The revisions also explain that for unoccupied areas to be designated as critical habitat, they must “contain one or more of the physical or biological features essential to the species’ conservation.” For instance, a more deft designation that included the rare ponds in Louisiana yet excluded the “poor-quality terrestrial habitat” that surrounded them might have survived Supreme Court scrutiny in Weyerhaeuser.

Critical habitat designations can threaten property values or tie landowners’ hands by limiting land uses, and legal disputes often leave all sides frustrated when they drag on for years. Even if a tract of land might conceivably qualify as “backup” habitat, when a rare species doesn’t inhabit the area it makes sense to focus scarce recovery resources in places where they have a better chance of succeeding.

The dusky gopher frog went all the way to the Supreme Court, yet the end result of the legal battle seems not to have benefited the species in any tangible way. Perhaps the time, energy, and money exerted on the case could have been better spent in Old Fort Bayou, Mississippi, where biologists from the Nature Conservancy have had their boots in the mud working to recover the frog for more than a decade. 

Hopefully this change to endangered species policy will avoid similar conflicts with landowners—and give them better incentives to become partners in efforts to conserve imperiled wildlife.

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