Officials use ruse at high school to clear halls for drug search

By Mark Frauenfelder at 1:30 pm Monday, Oct 24 boingboing.net

[Video Link] Police and school administrators Wolcott High School in Connecticut tricked students and teachers into believing a dangerous intruder had come into the school building and ordered a lockdown. It was a ruse for a drug sweep of the lockers. No drugs were found. In the video, the police and Wolcott school superintendent Joseph Macary serve a large pile of steaming horseshit to defend their reckless stunt. As kehfysik says in the comments: "The teaching point here is that they can not trust the people into whose care they are given. The authorities will lie to you and try to use fear to control you. I hope the kids learn this."

At Wolcott High School one morning this week, an urgent announcement crackled over the intercom: a threatening intruder was in the building and students were told to immediately take refuge in classrooms. Doors were locked and police, with dogs, moved in. Students stayed huddled in classrooms where they were told to stay away from the windows.
But what sounded like a frightening situation was just a search for narcotics. Drug-sniffing dogs combed the school while students stayed in locked classrooms, believing that an attacker was roaming the halls.

Officials Use Ruse At Wolcott High To Clear Halls For Drug Search (Via The Agitator)

Here's another version:

Officials Use Ruse At Wolcott High To Clear Halls For Drug Search

Say There's An Intruder In Building, But It's Just A Drill

October 22, 2011|Rick Green articles.courant.com

At Wolcott High School one morning this week, an urgent announcement crackled over the intercom: a threatening intruder was in the building and students were told to immediately take refuge in classrooms. Doors were locked and police, with dogs, moved in. Students stayed huddled in classrooms where they were told to stay away from the windows. But what sounded like a frightening situation was just a search for narcotics. Drug-sniffing dogs combed the school while students stayed in locked classrooms, believing that an attacker was roaming the halls. Drug-free schools are an admirable goal but I wonder when we reached the point where the war on drugs justifies police searches under the ruse of a Virginia Tech-style attack. What on earth could authorities in Wolcott be thinking?

School officials told me it was a routine lockdown drill, the kind that schools are required to do. "We wanted to practice,'' said Superintendent of Schools Joseph McCary. "We said there was a lockdown with an intruder inside. Doors are locked, shades are drawn and the lights are turned off and students are told to move to a corner of the room." "After 10 minutes we say this is a drill and at that point we started a search for drugs,'' McCary said. "We are providing a safe and secure nurturing environment." [my emphasis] No drugs turned up in the search. An email from the high school to parents explained the event, without mentioning the intruder story. It was described as a "lockdown intervention drill" where "two police dogs swept the hallway lockers, locker rooms and the student parking lot.''

Bringing in police dogs to search for drugs in student lockers, while not common, isn't the real outrage here. It's understandable why adults feel they must do something about drug abuse. It's the trickery and tactics that seem more suited to a police sting operation than a public school. "I don't think the school administration and police department have any right to mislead these kids, under any circumstances, to conduct a public safety drill," said Carl Glendening, a parent of two high school students. "The kids are told there is an intruder and there is a lockdown and then they see cops coming in with dogs." "Some kids were freaked out by it. The notion of Columbine was in the back of their minds,'' Glendening said. "We didn't think this through clearly." "They are kids. They are students. They are not there to be used."

Andrew Schneider, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, called it a "terrible policy. It will cause more trouble in the long run. Young people will learn not to trust the police." "It's a terrible civics lesson." While state law requires schools to have regular emergency drills, drug-sniffing-dog searches are up to the individual school district. Canton schools recently attracted attention for surprise drug searches using dogs. "The whole issue of search and seizure, you have to have reasonable suspicion, such as if they have had other issues in where the administration feels there's a drug problem in the school,'' said Vincent Mustaro of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education. "This is one of those policies we consider optional."

School officials say it's not as if they think there's a drug problem in Wolcott. Bringing the dogs in "is precautionary," said school board Chairwoman Patricia Najarian, who added that she didn't see a problem with the fake intruder story. "Maybe there's a few people who get nervous. When we say it's a surprise drill, it's a surprise drill,'' she said. "We have a very active group of citizens against substance abuse." The drug search is "something that is good to do periodically. It says we don't have drugs in the school,'' she said. "Either way it's a win-win. I know people get concerned … there seems to be an overreaction." McCary, the Wolcott superintendent, said they want to teach students to take their safety seriously, so making them think it was real was essential. "If you say it's just a drill, would you move as quickly?" He makes a point, except that we don't set fires to get students to take fire drills more seriously. There's also another issue. If you say something important to teenagers and you want them to trust you, it's better not to lie.

Free Bieber: campaign to kill proposed law that would send you to prison for 5 years for singing copyrighted music on YouTube

By Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing at 3:13 pm Wednesday, Oct 19

S.978, a new bill in Congress, make it a felony to post videos that contain copyright-infringing music, with up to five years in prison for violators. The clever folks at Fight for the Future have noticed that this law would have put Justin Bieber in jail, since he launched his career by posting videos of himself singing R&B tunes, in violation of copyright. The Free Bieber campaign is aiming to raise awareness of the campaign to fight S.978 and keep posting videos of yourself singing music legal, and they've got plenty of info for helping you fight the bill and enlist your friends to do the same. After you sign, you can submit a webcam video "from behind bars" explaining why jail-time for ordinary internet users is a terrible idea (they're calling it the "Biebercam"). You can also submit your own photos of Bieber in jail to their Tumblr.

Just a kid, singing a song:

This is a video of child celebrity Justin Bieber singing "With You" by the artist Chris Brown. YouTube videos like this one were what made him famous. Tons of kids do this for fun, and many now-popular artists got started in this same way.
Wait-- it's illegal?

Copyright law is so extreme, just singing somebody else's song in public could be infringement. Because he and his mother posted the videos to advance his music career, it's commercial infringement. And a new bill would make this a felony.
5 years in jail, for singing!

The maximum sentence would be five-years, just for singing a cover! Other online video "crimes" could include: videos of a school play, a professional baseball game, or videos with incidental background music (even just a ringtone). Nuts, right?

Free Bieber: Vote no on S. 978 [freebieber.org]

The Dangers in Classifying the News

October 18, 2011 - 9:57am | From Electronic Frontier Foundation By Jennifer Lynch and Trevor Timm 

“When everything is classified, then nothing is classified…The system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.” ~ Justice Stewart, New York Times v. United States, 1971.

Last week, the White House issued the so-called ‘WikiLeaks’ Executive Order, which mandates better security for the nation’s classified computer systems. While ensuring that the government has better security over its own systems is a good goal, it fails to address an equally important problem: the American government’s addiction to overclassification, which goes far beyond the appropriate and effective means necessary to safeguard real secrets.
The Order, announced nine months ago, was put on “a relatively fast track” by the administration, according to Secrecy News, yet the much more meaningful changes to the classification system President Obama pledged to implement at the very beginning of his presidency have been all but ignored.

In 2009, President Obama famously promised “an unprecedented level of openness” in his administration, and a lynchpin in his open government plan was an overhaul of the government’s bloated secrecy system. In a memo on classification on May 27, 2009, he directed all government agencies to aggressively tackle the problem of overclassification and find ways to reduce the number of classified documents. Included in his proposals were a National Declassification Center and “the possible restoration of the presumption against classification."

He wrote the memo for good reason. The amount of sensitive information held by the government at the end of the Bush Administration was extraordinary, as Suffolk Law Professor Alastair Roberts illustrates, using the largest leak in U.S. history—the WikiLeaks cache—as a starting point:

[T]he leaked State Department cables might have added up to about two gigabytes of data—one-quarter of an eight-gigabyte memory card. By comparison, it has been estimated that the outgoing Bush White House transferred 77 terabytes of data to the National Archives in 2009.  That is almost 10,000 memory cards for the White House alone. The holdings of other agencies are even larger.

And the problem is even older than that.  Several US Commissions, including one chaired by Senator Moynihan in the mid-90s and the 9/11 Commission in the last decade, found that unnecessary classification was rampant. EFF’s FOIA work is often thwarted by government claims under Exemption 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, which prevents the release of classified information.

Unfortunately, besides the most peripheral and cosmetic changes, government secrecy has only increased since Obama took office.  Last year, as part of their Washington Post series and subsequent book Top Secret America, Dana Priest and William Arkin reported, “An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.” Yet incredibly, when the government released its official count as part of an intelligence community report to Congress two months ago, the number of people holding the Top Secret clearance had ballooned to 1,419,051.  And the same report noted that 4.2 million people hold some level of security clearances for access to classified information.
Document classification, already at record highs under the Bush Administration, has continued to explode as well. The government classified a staggering 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase over the previous year.

Overclassification causes a myriad of problems. It can open the government up to ridicule, like when the CIA recently refused to release a single passage from its study on global warming, claiming it would harm national security. It can stifle public debate, like two months ago when the CIA tried to censor the memoir critical of its post-9/11 tactics (despite the fact that much of the information that had already been revealed in Congressional testimony).  It can encourage waste and incompetence, as it has at the Department of Homeland Security, where even the budget and number of employees is classified. And most critically, it can be used as a veil to hide illegal conduct, such as the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.

With so much information stamped “secret,” leaks to the media are inevitable.  On October 4th, the New York Times reported on just that: the “growing phenomenon” of public but classified information.

The older and larger drone program in Pakistan, for instance, is a centerpiece of American foreign policy, discussed daily in the news media — but it cannot be mentioned at a public Congressional hearing. The State Department cables published by WikiLeaks can be found on the Web with a few mouse clicks and have affected relations with dozens of countries — but American officials cannot publicly discuss them.

Nowhere was this absurdity starker than when the media reported on the death of Yemen’s alleged al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, at the hands of a (classified) C.I.A. drone. The evidence against him, the panel of U.S officials who decided he was to be put on a “kill list,” and the legal memo “authorizing” his killing were all “Top Secret,” despite the extraordinary constitutional implications of extrajudicially killing an American citizen.
While technically secret, these stories were plastered over the front pages of newspapers every day for one reason: leaks from government officials to journalists. Leaks of classified information, both helpful and damaging to administrations, have been commonplace for decades, and the Obama administration is no different.

But while high-level White House officials continually leak Top Secret information to justify their covert actions and to combat criticism, Obama’s Justice Department is also engaged in an unprecedented campaign to prosecute lower-level whistleblowers that leak information to the press in the name of public interest. This is in contradiction of another pledge Obama made to protect and strengthen whistleblower protections during his 2008 campaign. His administration, in just two and a half years, has indicted five leakers under the Espionage Act. That’s more than every president since Richard Nixon—combined. In addition, the Justice Department is currently trying to indict WikiLeaks for publishing classified information—a case that has huge First Amendment implications and could potentially criminalize portions of national security journalism.

By keeping everything “secret” and selectively prosecuting leakers, Obama is, as Glenn Greenwald put it,  “trumpeting information that makes the leader and his government look good while suppressing anything with the force of criminal law that does the opposite.” The government’s secrecy obsession has many remedies, however. J. William Leonard, George W. Bush’s former “classification czar,” thinks overclassifiers should be sanctioned. The Brennen Center just released a series of innovative proposals—from requiring a written explanation every time a document is stamped ‘secret,’ to allowing authorized clearance holders to win cash prizes for successfully challenging an improperly classified document.

Or Obama could just implement the ideas he already proposed two years ago.

[via]

Facebook’s Hotel California: Cross-Site Tracking and the Potential Impact on Digital Privacy Legislation

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Defending your rights in the digital world

October 10, 2011 - 11:34am | By Rainey Reitman

Tracking of Logged Out Users

For its 800 millions users, logging out of Facebook is not something done idly. Closing the Facebook tab won’t do it. Closing your browser won’t do it unless you’ve adjusted the settings in your browser to clear cookies upon closing. And Facebook has buried the log-out button so that it isn’t apparent from your Facebook main page or profile page. This doesn’t mean that logging out of Facebook is difficult; it’s not. But this does indicate that when someone logs out of Facebook, they are doing so purposefully. They aren’t just stepping outside of Facebook; they’re closing the door behind them.

On September 25th, 2011, Nik Cubrilovic, a hacker and writer, published a blog post1 that showed that a particular Facebook session cookie wasn’t being deleted after a user logged out. He noted that the session cookie included your Facebook user id number, which would presumably facilitate Facebook associating any data they collected about your browsing the web with your Facebook account. Cubrilovic’s review showed that, based on what the cookies were transmitting, Facebook could easily connect some of your browsing habits to your unique Facebook account.

This set off a storm of media coverage, but much of it lacked a detailed analysis of what Facebook is actually tracking and an understanding of how this could influence pending privacy legislation in Congress.

What Does Facebook Really Track?

Facebook sets two types of cookies: session cookies and tracking cookies.

• Session cookies are set when you log into Facebook and they include data like your unique Facebook user ID. They are directly associated with your Facebook account. When you log out of Facebook, the session cookies are supposed to be deleted.
• Tracking cookies - also known as persistent cookies - don’t expire when you leave your Facebook account. Facebook sets one tracking cookie known as 'datr' when you visit Facebook.com, regardless of whether or not you actually have an account. This cookie sends data back to Facebook every time you make a request of Facebook.com, such as when you load a page with an embedded Facebook 'like' button. This tracking takes place regardless of whether you ever interact with a Facebook 'like' button. In effect, Facebook is getting details of where you go on the Internet.

When you leave Facebook without logging out and then browse the web, you have both tracking cookies and session cookies. Under those circumstances, Facebook knows whenever you load a page with embedded content from Facebook (like a Facebook 'like' button) and also can easily connect that data back to your individual Facebook profile.
Based on Cubrilovic’s recent findings, there was also a period of time when you kept a session cookie after logging out of Facebook, allowing Facebook to easily associate your web browsing history and your Facebook account. Facebook says they’ve addressed this issue, and that now all session cookies are deleted at log out.

But there have been other concerns around Facebook tracking, including an issue that has surfaced three times in the last year. Dutch doctoral candidate Arnold Rosendaal, independent security researcher Ashkan Soltani, and Stanford doctoral candidate and law student Jonathan Mayer have each discovered instances in which Facebook was setting tracking cookies on browsers of people when they visited sites other than Facebook.com. These tracking cookies were being set when individuals visited certain Facebook Connect sites, like CBSSports. As a result, people who never interacted with a Facebook.com widget, and who never visited Facebook.com, were still facing tracking by Facebook cookies.

But there’s yet another layer to this, a layer often glossed over by mainstream coverage of this issue: Facebook can track web browsing history without cookies. Facebook is able to collect data about your browser – including your IP address and a range of facts about your browser – without ever installing a cookie. They can use this data to build a record of every time you load a page with embedded Facebook content. They keep this data for 90 days and then presumably discard or otherwise anonymize it. That's a far cry from being able to shield one’s reading habits from Facebook.

Facebook’s Response

For its part, Facebook admits they collected the data through the accidental setting of tracking cookies and the failure to delete session cookies upon log out - but says these were oversights. They say that the issues are now resolved. They expanded their help section and sent us this statement:

Facebook uses cookies to provide customized content, measure the performance of our products, and protect individual users and our service. We do not track people across the Web to sell that information or use it to target advertisements. In recent instances, when we were made aware that certain cookies were sending more information to us than we had intended, we fixed our cookie management system immediately. Our intentions stand in stark contrast to the many ad networks and data brokers that deliberately and, in many cases, surreptitiously track people to create profiles of their behavior, sell that content to the highest bidder, or use that content to target ads on sites across the Internet.

The Trust Gap

For users concerned about privacy, this statement is small consolation. It’s clear that Facebook does extensive cross-domain tracking, with two types of cookies and even without. With this data, Facebook could create a detailed portrait of how you use the Internet: what sites you visit, how frequently you load them, what time of day you like to access them. This could point to more than your shopping habits – it could provide a candid window into health concerns, political interests, reading habits, sexual preferences, religious affiliations, and much more.
Facebook insists they aren’t misusing the data they are collecting. The question is then: do we as Internet users trust Facebook? Do we trust them not to connect our data with our Facebook profiles, sell it to marketers, or provide it to the government upon request? If Facebook’s business model becomes less profitable in the coming years, do we trust them to continue to not connect tracking data to profiles? If the government brings pressure to bear on Facebook, do we trust Facebook to stand with users and safeguard the data they’ve collected? And, do we believe that Facebook isn’t actually connecting browsing data to profiles now, given their history of mistakes when it comes to tracking and the clear market incentive they would derive from that sort of connection?

This is the “trust gap”- the space between what Facebook promises they are doing with the data they are collecting and what we as Facebook users can reasonably trust them to do. And, when it comes to safeguarding the sensitive reading habits of millions of users, the trust gap is pretty wide.

Could Privacy Snafus Spur Privacy Legislation?

If you are uneasy with Facebook’s cross-domain tracking, you aren’t alone. This has led to a call from lawmakers as well as privacy advocates to have the FTC investigate whether Facebook deceived users by tracking logged-out users. And a group of 6 Facebook users has filed suit against Facebook over this issue.

This newest privacy snafu could prod legislators into moving on one of the many online privacy bills that have been introduced this year. Users’ unease with the quickly-evolving technical capabilities of companies to track users, combined with the abstruse ways in which that data can be collected (from social widgets to super cookies to fingerprinting), has resulted in a growing user demand to have Congress provide legal safeguards for individual privacy when using the Internet.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook hopes that its brand of data collection through ‘like’ buttons won’t be subject to federal regulation. According to AdAge, Facebook sent an “army of lawyers” to Washington to convince Senators McCain and Kerry to carve out exceptions to their recently introduced privacy bill so that Facebook could track their users via social widgets on other sites (dubbed the "Facebook loophole"). But while Kerry and McCain may have acquiesced to Facebook's requests, Senator Rockefeller did not. He introduced legislation that would empower the FTC to create rules around how best to protect users online from pervasive online tracking by third parties.

Facebook seems keen to influence future legislation on these issues. They recently filed paperwork to form a political action committee that will be "supporting candidates who share our goals of promoting the value of innovation to our economy while giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected."

We hope that these efforts to influence politicians won't come at the cost of strong protections for user privacy on the Internet.  As the situation currently stands, the resources available to governments and corporations to track users across the Internet far outstrip the resources of the average user to fend off such tracking. And from all appearances, self-regulation by industry is failing. 

What You Can Do

If you find yourself creeped-out by being tracked by Facebook on non-Facebook sites, then you have a few options to protect yourself and voice your concerns.

• Install Firefox addons like Ghostery, ShareMeNot, Abine’s Taco, and/or AdBlockPlus to limit online tracking. None of these is perfect and each works a little different; check out this guide for a discussion. Also consider installing the Priv3 Firefox extension, which is still in beta.
• Use private browsing mode.
• Adjust the settings in your browser to delete all cookies upon closing. Clear your cookies when leaving a social networking site, and log out of Facebook before browsing the web. You should consider having one browser strictly for logging into your Facebook account and one browser for the rest of your web usage.
• Send a quick complaint to the Federal Trade Commission via their online web complaint form. The FTC uses its complaint form the gauge what issues concern consumers and may launch investigations if there is sufficient user interest.
• Support privacy legislation like the Rockefeller Do Not Track bill, which will give users a voice when it comes to online tracking.

• 1. According to his blog, Cubrilovic says he’s been trying to inform Facebook of these issues since November 14, 2010
  
  
  [via Electronic Frontier Foundation}

Why Did the New York Times Change Their Brooklyn Bridge Arrests Story?

By Nick Greene, The Village Voice, Sun., Oct. 2 2011 at 2:34 PM

​The above photo of juxtaposed screenshots from the New York Times website has been making the rounds on Facebook, and it shows two very different takes for the same story on yesterday's Brooklyn Bridge arrests. The screenshot on the left, from 6:59 p.m., appears to reflect what many protesters are saying: The police tricked them into marching on the bridge. At 7:19 p.m., any mention of the police allowing demonstrators onto the bridge was removed from the lede. Why did they make this change?

We asked City Room Bureau Chief Andy Newman, and he said the following:

At every point yesterday as the story unfolded, we offered the most complete account we could of a large and chaotic scene that could not be grasped by any one person. The earlier version had almost no input from the police. The later version reflected the accounts of the police, protesters and of course our reporters at the scene. The later version, read in its entirety (not just the one highlighted sentence in that photo), reflected the various perspectives much more thoroughly. The final version of the piece was more thorough still.

It's worth noting that one of their reporters at the scene, freelancer Natasha Lennard, was among the over 700 arrested. The original City Room report that Lennard contributed to says that police did in fact allow protesters onto the bridge:

After allowing marchers from the Occupy Wall Street protests to claim the Brooklyn-bound car lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge and get partway across, the police cut the marchers off and plunged into the crowd and began making arrests around 4:15 p.m. Saturday.

That paragraph is now nowhere in the story. Currently, the only mentions in the piece of police telling protesters they were allowed onto the bridge are in the words of the protesters themselves.

The Times published a post, "Police Gave Warnings at Bridge, Videos Show", that features footage released by the NYPD. They say the clips "show the police issuing two separate warnings to marchers who were either poised to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on its roadway, rather than the pedestrian walkway, or had already begun doing so." Take a look at the videos for yourself:

While the NYPD videos certainly represent the "input from the police," they may raise more questions than they answer. Animal New York's Bucky Turco tweeted that the second video above appears to be edited at the 29-second mark. How much was edited is unknown, but the footage certainly does jump.

Because this is an ever-evolving story, the original City Room piece is subject to change. As of right now, the last update was posted at 1:23 this afternoon. The current text for the story on the site's front page is still, "In a tense showdown on Saturday, police arrested Occupy Wall Street demonstrators after they entered the bridge's Brooklyn-bound roadway."

From The Village Voice