Self-Loathing: An Owner's Manual

U.S. Opening Up Airspace to Use of Drones

From MSNBC:

After more than 40 years of development and extensive use by the military, the United States has set the date when the nation’s airspace will be open for drones. Should you be scared?

Short answer: No, but like any new technology, unmanned aerial vehicles have their dark side.

Legislation passed by Congress last week gives the Federal Aviation Administration until Sept. 30, 2015, to open the nation’s skies to drones.

The first step comes in 90 days when police, firefighters and other civilian first-response agencies can start flying UAVs weighing no more than 4.4 pounds, provided they meet still-to-be-determined requirements, such as having an operator on the ground within line-of-sight of the drone and flying it at least 400 feet above ground.

Currently, UAVs can only fly in restricted airspace zones controlled by the U.S. military.

By May 2013, the next class of drones, those weighing less than 55 pounds, can fly the nation’s skies, according to provisions of the FAA bill passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama last week. 

The deadline for full integration of drones into U.S. airspace is Sept. 30, 2015.

Rules about where and when drones can fly and who can operate them are still under development. And there are still technical hurdles, such as setting up the bandwidth for secure UAV radio communications and refining collision avoidance systems, said NASA program manager Chuck Johnson of the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, Calif.

But the most pressing issues are privacy concerns and public perceptions.

“Right now, under current U.S. laws there are very few restrictions on our ability to take pictures or videos of individuals outside,” Harley Geiger, a policy attorney with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., told Discovery News.

“Some of the privacy issues that we see with drones are very different than the sort of surveillance that can be conducted with a helicopter. Drones can quietly watch an entire town without refueling. It can conduct a pervasive and secret surveillance that helicopters cannot match,” Geiger said.

“You can’t avoid it if you’re outside unless you take cover. People don’t want to be on YouTube whenever they go outside,” he added

Full article can be found here.

Homeboy Industries: Working with At-Risk and Former Gang-Involved Youth Homeboy Industries: Working with At-Risk and Former Gang-Involved Youth

Homeboy Industries is the largest gang intervention rehab and re-entry program in the country, offering comprehensive services from tattoo removal to job placement. Homeboy Industries runs five businesses, mental health counseling, case management, and many other services. Father Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries and the author of Tattoos on the Heart, and in the podcast, he discusses his work with at-risk and former gang-involved youth.

Listen/Download | Read Transcript 

Mexican Cartels 101

Finding yourself struggling with Mexican Cartels in drug cases and intelligence? There are several resources available to familiarize yourself with the various Transnational and Drug Trafficking Organizations operating on both sides of the border. The major groups include the following in no particular order: Tiajuana Cartel, Los Zetas (Beltran Leyva), Sinaloa Cartel, Juarez Cartel,Gulf Cartel, and La Familia. There are currently several areas in dispute with the different cartels engaged in violent struggles to maintain or expand their influence. Just yesterday, over 40 people were killed in a prison riot that occurred between members of the Zetas and Gulf Cartels.

For a good general summary of the Cartels, the New York Times ran this piece last fall. In addition, Longmire Consulting has a good blog and website that has a breakdown of each of the major groups and their spheres of influence. The National Drug Threat Assessment, available from the DEA (here) contains chapters regarding Transnational Drug Trafficking Organizations as well. Depending on the nature of your case, it may be advisable to seek an expert especially in a major drug or RICO prosecution.

DOJ Requests Supreme Court to Dismiss FISA Challenge

Today, the Department of Justice filed a petition requesting the Supreme Court to overturn an appellate court ruling that allowed a lawsuit filed by the ACLU that challenges the constitutionality of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act to go forward. The FISA Amendments Act, signed into law in 2008 allows unprecedented surveillance of Americans’ international communications with none of the safeguards that the Constitution requires. Little is known about how the Act has been used. In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the government revealed that every six-month review of the Act had identified “compliance incidents,” suggesting either an inability or an unwillingness to properly safeguard Americans’ privacy rights. The government has withheld the details of those “compliance incidents,” however, including statistics relating to abuses of the Act. The Act is scheduled to sunset in December 2012, and the ACLU is calling for amendments that would prohibit dragnet surveillance, require the government to be more transparent about how the law is being used, and place stronger restrictions on the retention and dissemination of information that is collected. Full story here.

The Fraud Examiner

By Peter Goldmann, CFE

“Mining social media for clues is one of the fastest-growing areas of insurance-fraud investigation. (For example), workers compensation investigators might find that a supposedly injured employee is bragging about hang gliding and is posting action photos on Facebook” -- James Quiggle, Coalition Against Insurance Fraud

A growing number of fraud examiners, investigators and attorneys are finding that social media sites can be potentially powerful tools in investigating fraud. Case-in-point: a woman who claimed workers compensation benefits from an insurance company during a legal proceeding went to jail after it was discovered that she posted details about her employment on her Facebook page. But there are legal traps to beware of...

Facebook For Fighting Fraud

At the corporate level, in-house attorneys and investigators have their own awareness challenges regarding fraud on social media. For example, they must be aware of attorneys’ professional responsibility rules in conducting social networking investigations.

Example: According to Jaclyn S. Millner, an attorney at Fitch, Johnson, Larson & Held, P.A. and Gregory M. Duhl, Associate Professor of Law at the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn., there is nothing unethical or illegal about a defense attorney or an agent of the attorney, such as a company representative or investigator, accessing a fraud suspect’s information and photographs that are stored on a social-networking site and are not protected with privacy settings preventing public access.

In that sense, according to the Millner and Duhl -- who have researched and written extensively on the topic -- searching for public information on a social networking site is no different than video surveillance in any public location that defense counsel may authorize in a fraud investigation.

However, your organization’s attorney(s) cannot initiate contact with an opposing party -- such as an employee suspected of committing fraud -- who is represented by counsel. In that light, courts are likely to rule that it is a violation of professional ethics for the organization’s counsel to “friend” a suspect on Facebook or any other social media site if he or she is represented by counsel.

Extended Risk

The rules governing professional responsibility of attorneys do not distinguish between the activities of a lawyer and those of an investigator who is supervised by the attorney on a particular case. That makes it highly risky for an attorney to direct an investigator (or a company representative) to “friend” an employee represented by counsel on Facebook or another social networking site.

For investigators, the good news, according to Millner and Duhl, is that ethical considerations do not apply to informal investigations of social networking sites when the information is publicly available and no direct contact is made with the opposing party.

The Fine Line of Propriety

The guidelines on what is and what is not legally permissible with regard to searching for fraud evidence on social networks comes, by a large degree, from a recent ruling by the New York State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics. Helpfully, the opinion provides clear guidance that lawyers and their investigators can use informal discovery to search for, view and investigate public social networking profiles.

However, as Millner and Duhl point out, non-attorney investigators and organization representatives in fraud litigation are not regulated by the attorney codes of professional responsibility. They are not ethically prohibited from “friending” a subject on Facebook or gaining access to his or her other social networking profile -- as long as the investigator is not employed by or associated with an attorney.

And here’s where it gets really tricky. Attorneys working with companies and private investigators must be especially careful because an attorney cannot advise a non-attorney to initiate contact with a fraud suspect if the suspect is represented by counsel. Many companies’ investigators routinely work with the same attorneys, and this may be considered association with an attorney, even if the attorney was not involved with the case at the time of the social networking investigation.

Attorneys and investigators or other company representatives may initiate contact with a social network account holder who is not represented by counsel. However, it is important to note that even if a subject is not represented by counsel, your organization’s attorney(s) should proceed with caution before having a representative “friend” or contact the subject through a social networking site because that conduct is likely to be deemed deceptive and thus prohibited in many states.

Deception Matters

Trickier still, states differ on whether lawyers and their agents, including investigators and other company representatives, can engage in deception in investigations under the supervision of an attorney. In some states, for example, deceptive practices could technically include “friending” a fraud suspect under a false name or account in order to gain access to his or her private social networking account.

Caution: According to Millner and Duhl, even “friending” a fraud suspect from a valid personal social networking account for the sole purpose of obtaining information to use in litigation may be deceptive -- as a form of misrepresentation.

The legal trap here is that making a misrepresentation in “friending” a suspect from a valid personal social networking account stems from the intentional omission of the fact that the only reason the friendship is requested by the attorney or investigator is to uncover incriminating evidence for litigation.

Full article can be found here.

Comparison of Fingerprint Detection Report by National Institute of Justice

A variety of light sources and reagents are available for the detection and identification of latent fingermarks. The National Institute of Justice released this study recently. The study was undertaken to explore the optimum light and filter combinations of laser and light-emitting diode (LED) light for use with indanedione and two new chemical reagents, genipin and lawsone.The light sources utilized were Coherent® TracER™ lasers operating at 460nm, 532nm and 577nm and the Rofin Polilight Flare Plus LED operating at 505nm.

Facebook Is Using You

By LORI ANDREWS

Last week, Facebook filed documents with the government that will allow it to sell shares of stock to the public. It is estimated to be worth at least $75 billion. But unlike other big-ticket corporations, it doesn’t have an inventory of widgets or gadgets, cars or phones. Facebook’s inventory consists of personal data — yours and mine.

Facebook makes money by selling ad space to companies that want to reach us. Advertisers choose key words or details — like relationship status, location, activities, favorite books and employment — and then Facebook runs the ads for the targeted subset of its 845 million users. If you indicate that you like cupcakes, live in a certain neighborhood and have invited friends over, expect an ad from a nearby bakery to appear on your page. The magnitude of online information Facebook has available about each of us for targeted marketing is stunning. In Europe, laws give people the right to know what data companies have about them, but that is not the case in the United States.

Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85 percent of its total revenue. Yet Facebook’s inventory of data and its revenue from advertising are small potatoes compared to some others. Google took in more than 10 times as much, with an estimated $36.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2011, by analyzing what people sent over Gmail and what they searched on the Web, and then using that data to sell ads. Hundreds of other companies have also staked claims on people’s online data by depositing software called cookies or other tracking mechanisms on people’s computers and in their browsers. If you’ve mentioned anxiety in an e-mail, done a Google search for “stress” or started using an online medical diary that lets you monitor your mood, expect ads for medications and services to treat your anxiety.

Ads that pop up on your screen might seem useful, or at worst, a nuisance. But they are much more than that. The bits and bytes about your life can easily be used against you. Whether you can obtain a job, credit or insurance can be based on your digital doppelgänger — and you may never know why you’ve been turned down.

Material mined online has been used against people battling for child custody or defending themselves in criminal cases. LexisNexis has a product called Accurint for Law Enforcement, which gives government agents information about what people do on social networks. The Internal Revenue Service searches Facebook and MySpace for evidence of tax evaders’ income and whereabouts, and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services has been known to scrutinize photos and posts to confirm family relationships or weed out sham marriages. Employers sometimes decide whether to hire people based on their online profiles, with one study indicating that 70 percent of recruiters and human resource professionals in the United States have rejected candidates based on data found online. A company called Spokeo gathers online data for employers, the public and anyone else who wants it. The company even posts ads urging “HR Recruiters — Click Here Now!” and asking women to submit their boyfriends’ e-mail addresses for an analysis of their online photos and activities to learn “Is He Cheating on You?”

Stereotyping is alive and well in data aggregation. Your application for credit could be declined not on the basis of your own finances or credit history, but on the basis of aggregate data — what other people whose likes and dislikes are similar to yours have done. If guitar players or divorcing couples are more likely to renege on their credit-card bills, then the fact that you’ve looked at guitar ads or sent an e-mail to a divorce lawyer might cause a data aggregator to classify you as less credit-worthy. When an Atlanta man returned from his honeymoon, he found that his credit limit had been lowered to $3,800 from $10,800. The switch was not based on anything he had done but on aggregate data. A letter from the company told him, “Other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history with American Express.”

Full article can be found here.

Threats to Non-Mandatory Federal Sentencing Guidelines

Both NPR and the ACLU have recently ran news stories of concern to many federal practitioners: the Republican party's movement in Congress to return to mandatory federal sentencing schemes. In 2005, the United States Supreme Court held that mandatory federal guidelines were unconstitutional in United States v. Booker. Since that time, federal judges have been able to consider more than just numbers in a chart to determine an appropriate sentence. However, some critics have said that the post-Booker sentencing universe leads to disparity in sentencing. At a recent hearing, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, stated:

"A criminal committing a federal crime should receive similar punishment regardless of whether the crime was committed in Richmond, Va., or Richmond, Calif., and that's why I am deeply concerned about what's happening to federal sentencing."

On the other hand, proponents of the advisory guideline sentencing guidelines can point to issues as the financially crippling and soaring incarceration rates, the reduction in crime rates overall, and the fact that sentencing is now subject to more "fact based" inquiry as reasons to keep the advisory system intact. The ACLU and the American Constitution Society held a panel discussion on the issue that can be watched here.

Eric Holder's 'Fast and Furious' Woe

From CNN:

Schadenfreude -- joy at the misfortune of others -- is a bad thing.

So I've been trying to resist temptation these past months as I watch Attorney General Eric Holder deal with public and congressional reaction to the "Fast and Furious" scheme, the failed attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to seed and then track U.S. firearms to Mexican drug cartels.

Fast and Furious was a secretive, high-risk operation seemingly intended to deal with an intractable problem abroad. On those grounds, some may be tempted to equate it to a CIA covert action.

But even if some attributes are similar -- tough problem, edgy solution, inherent complexity, great secrecy, high operational and political risk -- it was definitely not a covert action since those are clearly defined in an executive order as the province of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Beyond that, if it had been a true covert action, the attorney general would have had to give his opinion as to its lawfulness beforehand; the implementing agency would have been required to exhaustively articulate risk; the National Security Council would have had to judge it favorably; President Barack Obama would have had to authorize it; and the Congress would have had to have been briefed before its implementation.

And all concerned would have had the opportunity to reject a bad idea, whatever its rationale.

These routine safeguards not only protect agencies, their leaders and their officers from legal and political jeopardy, they also protect the government from serious missteps.

Now Holder, without such safeguards in place, must defend himself against some very tough accusations, including one by some skeptics that the operation was intended principally to discredit, and thereby justify further regulation of, firearms dealers.

This is where the schadenfreude comes in.

After the congressional elections of 2006, the CIA was forced to defend edgy (often controversial and sometimes unsuccessful) actions in a tough political environment. President George W. Bush was politically weakened, the Senate and the House were under Democratic control and a presidential election was in the offing.

On the Hill, the questions were aggressive, often partisan and, in my view, sometimes even deeply mean-spirited and unfair to the many intelligence professionals who were putting their lives and careers on the line in a very successful effort to protect America from further attack. The agency dealt with the committees as best a nonpolitical organization could, fully recognizing that, although congressional oversight was a necessary instrument, it could sometimes be a difficult one.

But any personal instinct toward some common "executive branch" empathy for Holder is muted not only by the dubious character of Fast and Furious, but by some of the attorney general's other actions, as well. While out of office, for example, he famously called for a "reckoning" for CIA officers and other officials who authorized and conducted operations that were edgy and risky and intended to deal with difficult circumstances.

Once in office, he launched a "reckoning" of CIA renditions, detentions and interrogations of terrorists by directing the Justice Department to reopen investigations closed years before by career prosecutors. This decision was opposed by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his predecessors, and Holder reportedly made the decision without reading detailed memos prepared by those career prosecutors declining to pursue further proceedings.

The CIA officers affected by this may be forgiven some feelings of irony when they now hear the attorney general repudiating some of the charges made against his officers by stating: "Those who serve in the ranks of law enforcement are our nation's heroes and deserve our nation's thanks, not the disrespect that is being heaped on them by those who see political advantage."

Of course, it was also Holder who decided in 2009 to release what had been secret DOJ memos outlining the details and providing the legal justification for the Bush administration's interrogation program. The release was defended by the administration as part of a broad commitment to "transparency."

Full article can be found here.