Should TDCJ staff resent giving up Facebook passwords?

The Back Gate posed an interesting question to Texas prison staff and got some animated responses: "Is TDCJ violating your privacy rights by requiring you give them your Facebook password?" Most respondents seemed to be against it and some suspected the agency of ulterior motives: E.g., "This has less to do with keeping us from being friends with former offenders and everything to with keeping an eye on what we might be saying about our own administrations."

Whaddya think? Justified security measure or snooping beyond the purview of a government employer? There are a lot of interesting angles from many different perspectives on that one. How would you prioritize the conflicting values and interests aligned on the question?

Droning away: Which agencies requested FAA permission for spy drones?

Which Texas police agencies  and  educational institutions have requested permission to  use unmanned drones from the Federal Aviation Administration? Reports Texas Watchdog, via EFF:

Texas is home to many: the Houston and Arlington police departments; the Texas Department of Public Safety; the Hays County Office of Emergency Management in San Marcos; Texas A&M University Corpus Christi; Texas A&M – Texas Engineering Experiment Station in College Station and Texas State University in San Marcos

Further,

See a map of the agencies given permission to fly drones here.

EFF officials also obtained a list of private drone manufacturers authorized to fly drones domestically.

Big Brother, felony pranks, and rebates for 'murder insurance'

Let's do a roundup post to clear out the mounting, increasingly daunting sea of tabs across my browser that have relentlessly taunted Grits for several days now:

PBS features Kerry Max Cook saga
PBS Frontline has a new feature on Kerry Max Cook, following up on a New York Times story last week by Michael Hall.

Picking grand jurors
This Austin Statesman story gives one of the best descriptions you'll see of the nuts and bolts of how grand juries are selected in Travis County - either by appointed commissioners or from the same jury pool as regular jurors. I prefer the latter, even if the commissioner system generates more "diversity." I don't want prosecutors cherrypicking grand juries - as DA Rosemary Lehmberg said she did in a recent, high-profile case involving a police shooting - based on the grand jurors' skin colors, either to affect the outcome or to pander to public perception.

Big Brother in Big D
According to the Dallas Morning News, tomorrow Dallas Police Chief David "Brown will unveil the latest in crime-fighting technology that, he hopes, will ensure that the city’s crime rate stays permanently on its declining trajectory. The technology consists of monitoring devices such as cameras, license-plate readers for squad cars and tracking equipment" for use in bait cars and other "bait" items. The News editorial focuses on the "bait" strategy, but I'm more concerned about the expansion of cameras with little credible evidence they're cost effective or prevent crime, much less "license plate readers for squad cars," which would amount to a massive data mining project operating in the field with little regulation. The Dallas City Council should reject those two items.

Big Brother meets the Alamo
James Bamford at Wired has a lengthy, must-read story on the domestic intelligence gathering apparatus of the National Security Administration, including a massive campus at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio which "Focuses on intercepts from Latin America and, since 9/11, the Middle East and Europe. Some 2,000 workers staff the operation. The NSA recently completed a $100 million renovation on a mega-data center here—a backup storage facility for the Utah Data Center."

Defense can explain 'guilty beyond a reasonable doubt'
The Court of Criminal Appeals recently upheld a pro-defense ruling to say that defense counsel has a right to explain to jurors what "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt means." Good luck with that! In my experience if you get five different lawyers in a room you'll get at least six different opinions on the question. As the judge in the story pointed out, reasonable doubt "is not mathematically quantifiable, but rather is a level of certainty of belief in the minds of each of the jurors."

Counties get 'murder insurance' rebate
The regional capital public defender office in West Texas - what some have dubbed "murder insurance" - refunded $400K to the 77 counties in its jurisdiction, reported the Lubbock Avalanche Journal.

Public interest lawyering recognized
Congrats to the UT Law School's Texas Law Fellowship Public Interest Award recipients. "They are: Ian Spechler, ‘07, founder of the Legal Representation for Dually Managed Youth Project; David Gonzalez, founding partner of a sliding-scale criminal defense firm in Austin; UT Law Clinical Professors Bill Allison and Patricia Cummings of the Criminal Defense Clinic, who are being recognized for their work on the Michael Morton case; and Jordan Pollock, a third-year UT Law student."

Corrupt in Covington?
Attorney Michael Lowe writes about a Texas Ranger investigation of alleged police corruption in Covington, TX.

Felony pranks
In College Station, a young Aggie has been charged with a third degree felony for online impersonation after posting a woman's cell phone number in the Craig's List casual encounters section as a prank. Though not a Texas case, in Georgia a valedictorian and senior class president has been charged with a felony for participating in ritual graff writing with a group of classmates as the end of their senior year approached. Texas has a similarly harsh law making any graffiti on school property a felony.

'Affidavit: Texas constable admits ordering bugging'

Out of the East Texas town of Tenaha, another remarkable story from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about an asset-forfeiture scandal, this time centered around an elected constable. The story opens:

A small-town Texas constable told the FBI he secretly bugged other officials' offices after they were accused of illegally forcing motorists to forfeit their cash, according to a search warrant affidavit.

The affidavit, based on interviews conducted by FBI agents and Texas Rangers, quotes Shelby County Constable Fred Walker as saying he authorized the installation of hidden surveillance cameras and digital recorders even though he didn't have legal authority. It also includes a statement from a witness who claims Walker helped organize a scheme to sell drugs seized from suspects.

It's just another chapter in a longtime drama in Tenaha, a town of 1,160 near the Louisiana border, where nearly $800,000 in cash seized from motorists stopped for traffic violations along U.S. Highway 59 has led to lawsuits and a federal criminal investigation of the county's former district attorney and other officials.

Walker, 53, was Tenaha's city marshal at the time the alleged bugging occurred. He was elected constable in 2010. ...

According to the affidavit, McClure told authorities that Walker had him install surveillance cameras disguised as smoke detectors and hidden voice-activated digital recording equipment in the offices of Tenaha Mayor George Bowers and deputy city marshal Barry Washington. Walker said he wanted to "cover" himself over the traffic stops, most of which were conducted by Washington, McClure said in the affidavit.

Walker acknowledged in an interview the same day that he had authorized the installation of the devices in Washington's office and at City Hall, the affidavit states.

What a pit! This story just keeps getting worse and worse.

Surveillance Tech: Fantasies of tin-foil hat crowd coming true

Examining the array of high-tech gadgetry available to law-enforcement to monitor people, Wired magazine identifies "Nine reasons Wired readers should wear tinfoil hats." They are:

• Warrantless Wiretapping
• Warrantless GPS Tracking
• Tracking Devices in Your Pocket
• Fake Cell Phone Towers
• The Border Exception
• The “6 Months and It’s the Government’s” Rule under ECPA
• The Patriot Act
• Government Malware
• Known Unknowns

License plate readers coupled with roadside cameras would've made my Top 9 list, but it's hard to fault these choices. Problem is, Fourth Amendment issues are a political nightmare, with a sturdy bipartisan consensus among  elite circles for gutting its protections like a fish. For those who think voting Democrat will save you from such abuses, please read this paragraph from the Wired story carefully:

The Obama administration claims Americans have no right to privacy in their public movements. The issue surfaced this month in a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if law enforcement agents should be required to obtain a probable-cause warrant in order to place a GPS tracking device on a citizen’s car. The government admitted to the Supreme Court that it thinks it would have the power to track the justices’ cars without a warrant.

As for Republicans, short of a Ron Paul upset victory in the primaries, I doubt any current presidential candidate would be better than Obama on the subject and some would be much worse. So in the near term we're not going to vote our way out of this.

In the government arena, that leaves the courts (which are sharply divided on the subject), or else constructing bipartisan legislative coalitions on narrow, popular elements of a Fourth Amendment reform agenda. Examples that might have legs could be: Rolling back routine TSA frisks at the federal level, requiring warrants to access cell-phone data (which the states could do), or empowering drivers at traffic stops to refuse searches and avoid arrest for fine-only offenses (bills passed by the Texas Lege that Rick Perry vetoed).

Grits also continues to believe that the market may provide better short-medium term preventives than the courts to abuse of such technologies as detection devices become cheaper and more widespread.

The kinds of technologies described by Wired concern me, but such controls can only go so far. Think of a game of chess: Both players can see all of the other player's pieces, but unable to peer into your opponent's mind, it's still easy to be defeated. Besides, all these new technologies are labor intensive: They mainly generate mountains of data that some government employee (or these days, perhaps a private contractor) must sort through then presumably do something with. In an era of government downsizing, there's a limit to the amount of resources which can be applied to such endeavors. So surveillance has practical limits and its wide application is antithetical to popular calls for budget cutting and government efficiency. That's the good news.

The bad news, says Wired: "a tinfoil hat won’t help you at all." Via FourthAmendment.com.

See related Grits posts:

• Most SCOTUS Justices seem inclined to require warrant for GPS tracking
• Whether SCOTUS says GPS tracking is constitutional, markets may decide if it's viable
• Droning on in Montgomery County: Unmanned aircraft could be mounted with weapons
• Is something in plain view if you can only see it by flying a toy helicopter with a camera over my back fence to peer onto my property?
• DPS spending millions on TDEX database while drivers license lines lengthen
• Is the Fourth Amendment dead or just in a coma? Debating when to pull the plug

Droning on in Montgomery County: Unmanned aircraft could be mounted with weapons

Must we? Really?

From Montgomery County, the headline of the Click2Houston story was "New police drone near Houston could carry weapons." "To be in on the ground floor of this is pretty exciting for us here in Montgomery County," Sheriff Tommy Gage said, reassuringly, adding "We're not going to use it to be invading somebody's privacy. It'll be used for situations we have with criminals." Got that? Move along. Nothing to see here. No, don't look up ...

How much you wanna bet this new technology spawns a new felony of some sort next session for shooting a paintball or throwing a rock at a police drone flying over your backyard? Do you remember the brilliant shot from the intro to The Wire where the kid hurls a rock at the surveillance camera, cracking the lens? Run this drone flying low in urban areas and you're going to get a little of that. Also, the headlines won't be so cheerful the first time the remote pilot crashes the thing or flies into a building or through the electrical wires.

Of course, DPS is already operating drones in border counties (and elsewhere in the state), as is the federal government. Several Texas jurisdictions have bandied the idea about, including larger Harris County to the south, but Montgomery County is the first to decide that the technology is worth the bang for the buck ($300K plus fuel and ground staffing). The Sheriff has said he won't use the drone for traffic enforcement, but that doesn't mean that he won't change his mind about that, or that the next guy won't.

The legal theory allowing them to fly over your house with a camera zooming in to snap your picture is that police aren't invading your privacy if they see something while in a "public space" - in this case public airspace flying over your house with a zoom lens - from a spot off your property where they don't need your permission to be. That makes it formally constitutional, I suppose, since existing Supreme Court precedents have failed in any meaningful way to apply 18th century privacy principles to 21st century technology. But just because Justices Alito, Thomas, Roberts, Scalia and Kennedy (at least) would probably consider it constitutional doesn't make it any less creepy. The Legislature could and should regulate police drone use or even ban it except for certain, limited circumstances.

Whatever they do, I'd prefer the Lege decide on the front end, i.e., in 2013: Don't wait around for years like they did with red-light cameras, where dozens of jurisdictions adopted the technology before the Lege got around to creating rules to govern them. This technology isn't going away, so lawmakers should get out in front of the privacy issues surrounding its use by police agencies.

This appears to be a promo video for the model UAV purchased by the Montgomery County Sheriff:


Noisier than I'd expected, and rather unnerving for use in an urban setting, particularly if it were armed. I wonder what the rules would be regarding private use, e.g., by paparazzi or something?

'Rick Perry's Intelligence Overreach'

A reporter from Mother Jones contacted Grits recently with questions about Governor Perry's record on the TDEX database, which is Texas' homegrown version of the nixed "Total Information Awareness" initiative promoted by Adm. John Poindexter during the Bush II Administration. The resulting story, with the same title as this post, may be found here.

See related Grits posts:

• DPS spending millions on TDEX databases while drivers license lines lengthen
• The case of the missing data
• DPS: Open criminal case data given to Northrop Grunman, never given back
• Don't do it! Perry moves to consolidate intelligence gathering in Governor's office
• Farrar: HB 13 won't secure border, risks letting political concerns interfere with law enforcement
• Bad Big Brother bill just won't die
• The Governor's Great Border Security Power Grab
• Biometrics slope got slippery mighty quick