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A powerful coalition of senators on Thursday introduced a highly anticipated bill that would holdtech companies accountable for the millions of images and videos ofchildren being sexually abusedspreading across their platforms,a proposalthathas already riled up the tech industry and its most adamant supporters.

The EARN IT Act, introduced by Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey GrahamLindsey Olin GrahamUS intel indicates Taliban does not plan to honor deal: report Surveillance deal elusive as deadline looms Hillicon Valley: Barr offers principles to prevent online child exploitation | Facebook removes misleading Trump census ads | House passes bill banning TSA use of TikTok MORE (R-S.C.) andSen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) alongside several top members of the committee, is one of the most significant congressional threats yet tothe tech industry'svaluable liability shield, which allows companies such as Facebook and Google to avoid lawsuits over what people say and post on their platforms.

The bill, which was met with a sea of opposition Thursday from tech trade groups as well as the privacy-focused American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), would establish a government-backed commission to recommend "best practices" around identifying and reporting online child sexual exploitation.

The EARN IT Act received endorsements from more than 70 groups,including top victim's rights advocacy organizations.

I appreciate my colleagues working with me on this bill to ensure tech companies are using best business practices to prevent child exploitation online,Graham said in a statement.This bill is a major first step. For the first time, you will have to earn blanket liability protection when it comes to protecting minors."

Reports of child sexual exploitation online have skyrocketed in recent years, as criminals use popular platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to spread imagesand videos of minors in violation of federal law. But so far, the companies have been largely protected from facing lawsuits over the child sexual abuse material due to Section 230 protections.

"Our goal is to do this in a balanced way that doesnt overly inhibit innovation," Graham said, addressingthe burgeoning concerns that amending Section 230 could undermine the internet ecosystem that it helped create,"but forcibly deals with child exploitation.

Thebill was introduced just as the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced aseparate but related initiative, with the backing of tech companies including Facebook and Google, laying out11 voluntary steps the companies can take toward confronting theserious challenge of online sexual abuse.

The EARN IT Actwould go further thanDOJ's efforts,requiringthe companies to take certain steps to combatchild sexual exploitationon their platforms in order to "earn" that liability shield, which is laid out in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The Internet Association, the tech trade group tasked with speaking for Silicon Valley in Washington, D.C., said ithas "very strong concerns" that the bill could "impede existing industry efforts" to eradicate child exploitation online.

"We look forward to working with Chairman Graham and Senator Blumenthal on a path forward," said Michael Bloom, the trade group's senior vice president of global government affairs.

Behind the scenes, even some Republicans on the committee have declined to back Graham's bill, raising concerns about government overreach and the Fourth Amendment,three sources told The Hill on Wednesday. The final bill has 10 co-sponsors, with six Democratic backers and four Republicans.

A spokeswoman for Sen. Mike CrapoMichael (Mike) Dean CrapoSenators introduce controversial bill to combat child sexual exploitation online On The Money: Stocks soar as Biden victories, central banks calm anxious investors | House passes .3B measure to fight coronavirus | Trump touts economic success at Hispanic summit Mnuchin details IRS challenges with cash-only marijuana businesses MORE (R-Idaho), a member of the committee, said in an email to The Hill, "SenatorCrapowill review the final text as introduced and looks forward to listening to testimony next week about the merits of the bill."

The Senate Judiciary Committee will be holding a hearing specifically dedicated to the EARN IT Act on Wednesday.

Critics worrythat the billis ultimately an effort toundermine the tech industry's efforts to implement end-to-end encryption, afeature that makes it impossible for the companies or government to access private communications.

The DOJ andmembers of the Judiciary Committee, including Graham,in recent months have ramped up anaggressive public fight against end-to-end encryption, pressing the tech companies to build "backdoors"that allow law enforcement officials to access private messagesduring criminal investigations.

Barr has specificallywarned that encryption allows "criminals to operate with impunity" including thosewho disseminate images of children being sexually exploited.

Encryption can make it more difficult for law enforcement officials to identify and take action against online predators. But tech experts and privacy activists have continually argued that building any "backdoor" to encrypted communications would allow bad actors, such as hackers and authoritarian governments, to access private messages. They say there's no way to create a loophole that only allows law enforcement into encrypted communications.

Despite those arguments, last year, top law enforcement officials including FBI Director Christopher Wray specifically called out Facebook for its plans to implement end-to-end encryption across its services with billions of total users. And senators on the Judiciary Committee warned they would push through legislative solutions to the problem of encryption if the companies did not act to address law enforcement's concerns.

Graham's bill does not explicitly mention encryption, but the ACLU in a press release saidthe EARN IT Act"would lead to a 'backdoor' inencryptedservices, thereby jeopardizing the security of every individual."

"The EARN It Act threatens the safety of activists, domestic violence victims, and millions of others who rely on strongencryptionevery day," said ACLU senior legislative counsel Kate Ruane. "This legislation would empower an unelected commission to effectively mandate what Congress has time and again decided against, while also jeopardizing free expression on the Internet in the process."

"This bill is not the solution to the real and serious harms it claims to address," Ruane said.

Graham's bill immediately riled up at least onecritic within the upper chamber Sen. Ron WydenRonald (Ron) Lee WydenOvernight Energy: Watchdog blasts planning behind BLM relocation | Progress on Senate energy bill | Dems eye two measures for inclusion ahead of vote Democrats focus on two amendments for Senate energy bill Vulnerable Republicans dodge questions on support for ObamaCare lawsuit MORE (D-Ore.). He slammed it as a "Trojan horse to give Attorney General [William] Barrand Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump to award Medal of Freedom to golfers Annika Sorenstam and Gary Player Democratic senator requests classified briefing ahead of Burisma-related subpoena vote Poll finds both Republicans and Democrats describe Trump as 'self-centered' MORE the power tocontrolonline speech and require government access to every aspect of Americans' lives."

Wydensaid he will introduce legislation "in the coming days" to combat child sexual exploitation by increasing the number of prosecutors and agents hunting down predators.

Blumenthal told The Hill on Thursday that he has a message for those who are concerned that the bill could threaten private, encrypted communications: "This is not an encryption bill."

He argued that the bill is explicitly written to ensure that the tech industry and privacy experts have a say in the "best practices" created by the commission. The Connecticut senator, a former state attorney general, said the technology company representatives on the panel could band together to vote down any anti-encryption proposals.

The bill is also facing headwinds from another direction: the Senate Commerce Committee, which claims near-total jurisdiction over Section 230 and has continually battled with the Judiciary committee when it tries to encroach on the law.

"The Commerce Committee is reviewing the EARN IT Act as it relates to Section 230, which is under the purview of the committee, to determine whether statutory updates are needed in the battle to protect children online," a senior aide on the panel told The Hill in an email.

Updated at 5:31 p.m.

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Senators introduce controversial bill to combat child sexual exploitation online | TheHill - The Hill

The entrance to the Department of Public Safety.

Last July, the New Jersey State Assembly unanimously passed Bill A-4553, which would have granted qualified immunity to public-safety officers who patrol private institutions. The Universitys Department of Public Safety (DPS), which, as of June 2019, employed 33 of the approximately 70 officers who work at private universities in New Jersey, offered testimony in support of the measure. Though the bill did not reach the floor of the State Senate, this Board finds the Universitys advocacy for qualified immunity disturbing.

The doctrine of qualified immunity protects officers from liability if they violate a plaintiffs rights, with the exception of cases in which they breach a clearly established statutory or constitutional right. By blocking avenues for legal recourse, qualified immunity renders citizens constitutional rights meaningless.

Qualified immunity was first invoked in a 1967 Supreme Court case, Pierson v. Ray, to shield white police officers from a lawsuit they faced for enforcing segregation. Today, it continues to be used to protect officers who engage in horrific acts of abuse, often towards people of color.

In 2004, Malaika Brooks, a black woman who was seven months pregnant, was driving her 11-year-old son to school in Seattle when she was pulled over for speeding. When she refused to sign the speeding ticket, fearing that doing so would be an admission of guilt, the officers demanded she get out of her car. After she refused, they tased her three times, dragged her across the street, and placed her in handcuffs.

Brooks sued the officers for use of excessive force, but her case was dismissed. The judges admitted that the officers had used excessive force, but, citing qualified immunity, concluded the officers could not have known their actions amounted to a constitutional violation. This is just one of countless examples.

In his testimony before the State Assembly, DPS Executive Director Paul Ominsky defended qualified immunity, which already applies to DPS officers in their interactions with students and other beneficiaries of the University. He argued the doctrine should also apply to officers interactions with non-affiliates on campus, because DPS officers require the same legal privilege as local police officers with whom they work side-by-side.

Indeed, we do take DPS officers as seriously as their counterparts. We stand against qualified immunity for campus police, as well as for all other officers. As Ominsky said himself, at a town hall hosted yesterday by Whig-Clio and Students for Prison Education and Reform (SPEAR), officers should be held accountable.

Other supporters contend that qualified immunity allows law enforcement to perform the discretionary functions of their job without fear of liability. There are scenarios, they argue, in which an officer might need to exercise force to uphold public safety, and the fear of facing a lawsuit might prevent them from doing so.

Yet, studies show that police officers rarely think about the possibility of getting sued while performing their jobs. As Micah Herskind 19 told The Appeal last August, you only need immunity for police violence if you plan on allowing for police violence.

Strengthening the relationship between the community and the Public Safety Officers who exist to protect us is essential to keeping campus safe for all, a point the officers repeatedly emphasized at last nights town hall. Qualified immunity only tilts the balance of power away from the community, fraying this crucial bond.

This Board opposes qualified immunity on principle and finds no reason for the University to support the expansion of this practice. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor 76, qualified immunity renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow and sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.

144TH EDITORIAL BOARD

Chair

Zachariah W. Sippy 22

Members

Benjamin Ball 21

Shannon E. Chaffers 22

Rachel Kennedy 21

Kate Lee 23

Madeleine Marr 21

Jonathan A. Ort 21

Elizabeth Parker 21

Emma Treadway 22

Ivy Truong 21

Cy Watsky 21

Originally posted here:
A disservice to the community: Against qualified immunity - The Daily Princetonian

Photo: Protesters surround an ICE van holding Samuel Oliver-Bruno at the US Citizenship & Immigration Services office in Morrisville in November 2018. (photo by Anna Carson-DeWitt)

Ten people involved in November 2018 protest attempting to block the deportation of a man who had been in sanctuary in a Durham church saw their charges dropped in a Wake County courtroom today.

Samuel Oliver-Bruno had been staying at CityWell United Methodist Church in Durham, and the day after Thanksgiving 2018 he went to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Morrisville for what he expected to be a routine fingerprinting as a good-faith step in his quest for reprieve from a deportation order. Video published by the News & Observer shows Oliver-Bruno being tackled inside the immigration office, followed by a chaotic scene as ICE officers rushed him to a van, and supporters surrounded the vehicle while singing Amazing Grace.

Charges against 17 other defendants charged in the protest were previously dismissed after they completed community service under deferred prosecution agreements.

The remaining 10 defendants were each charged with failure to disperse and resisting, delaying and obstructing an officer.

Scott Holmes, the lawyer representing the 10 defendants, told Judge Eric Chasse that the failure to disperse charge requires a reasonable belief that a riot or disorderly conduct is occurring, and nothing like that took place during the incident.

Morrisville police Chief Patrice Andrews testified that an individual who was not among the defendants said f*** the police to her.

It gives me pause for concern that I potentially am going to lose control of a situation that until this point have worked very hard to control and to de-escalate, she said.

But the individual who said f*** the police was not arrested, and Andrews said she thought it would have been counterproductive to do so.

Assistant District Attorney Daniel Watts argued that the utterance of f*** the police was disorderly conduct.

Judge Chasse agreed with Holmes.

In so far as there was a belief that a riot or disorderly conduct was occurring, I cannot find under these facts that thats a reasonable belief, he said. And that is a predicate to issuing an order to disperse.

Chief Andrews testified that she responded to a call about ICE agents apprehending someone and not being allowed to leave. She said she was not familiar with the US Customs & Immigration Services building in her town.

So, I will tell you on that day it was actually a shock to all of us that this particular location was a location in which ICE was present at, to be quite honest with you, she said. Its a very unassuming building.

When she arrived on the scene, Andrews said she approached the ICE agents to figure out what was going on.

They were sitting in the car, Andrews said. I will be quite honest with you: They did not want to give me a lot of information. And I had to really press to talk to someone about what was going on.

Andrews said she viewed the federal arrest warrant for Oliver-Bruno, adding that she considered it her duty to do so and justify why we were being called there.

Andrews could not recall exactly what offense was described on the warrant. If I remember correctly, she said, it was something to the effect of, it was failure to comply or something along those lines.

Holmes pressed Andrews on whether she knew Oliver-Brunos arrest was a criminal as opposed to a civil matter, challenging the local law enforcement agencies authority to assist ICE.

I have training on proper Fourth Amendment search and seizure, Andrews said. I have over 20 some years of experience of being a law enforcement officer who is just and true. If I didnt feel ICE was there for a lawful reason, certainly we would not number one, there wouldnt be charges for the delay and obstruct of an officer. And there certainly would not have been the failure to disperse. There wouldnt have been one without the other.

Judge Chasse indicated he was having trouble ascertaining whether the resist, delay and obstruct charges were legally supportable considering he didnt know the name of the ICE agent, jestingly referring to him as Agent Voldemort.

I just dont have the evidence in front of me, he said, and I think Im stuck in that regard.

Chasse dismissed both charges against Susanna Barcus, Elizabeth Johnson, Hannah Hawkins and Frank Chambers. Afterwards, Assistant District Attorney Watts dismissed charges against Harold May, Lauren Park, Manju Rajendran, Jose Romero, Corey Summers and Scott West.

Rajendran said the dismissal was a bittersweet experience.

Ifeel so relieved that we were able to get our charges dismissed, she said. Imalso holding a lot of grief with the awareness that Samuel was unjustlydeported, and the suffering that their family and the whole community thatloves them has gone through. No family should ever have to go through that.

Rajendran was one of many Triangleactivists who responded to support Oliver-Bruno and suddenly found themselves makingthe decision to put themselves at risk of arrest after federal immigration authoritiesunexpectedly took Oliver-Bruno into custody.

What pulled me there that day with my daughter and family was a feeling that weve just got to create a system of solidarity so that when ICE agents are showing up to kidnap a member of our community, we all stand up for each other and protect each other, Rajendran said. I felt proud of our family for making a really swift decision that required very little deliberation to race there and show our support.

My mother was undocumented, shecontinued. And I felt like we had the chance that day to show up for ourneighbors in a way we would have hope our neighbors would have showed up forour family if something like that had happened to us.

Rajendrans daughter, who was2-years-old at the time, witnessed her arrest, and she said her daughter stillasks why Oliver-Bruno was taken away.

Rajendran said it was not difficultfor her as a mother to make the decision to put herself in a situation whereshe could be arrested.

But there was a police officer whowas trying to pressure me to break away, saying that it was not where Ibelonged as a mother, she recalled. And I said I was there because I wantedto be a part of building a world that my daughter and all children could thriveand be safe in.

Visit link:
Charges dropped against 10 who attempted to block an ICE van in Wake County - Triad City Beat

President Trump did not campaign as a civil libertarian. On the trail in 2015, he went hard in the other direction, making clear he "tend[s] to err on the side of security" and endorsing a full restoration of the NSA's Patriot Act-authorized bulk data collection, which was partially curtailed by that year's USA Freedom Act.

But now, in an apparent reversal, Trump is angling to be the president who dismantles some key parts of the post-9/11 surveillance state.

It's not because he suddenly cares about privacy at least, not your privacy. The evidence suggests Trump has become an unlikely champion of Americans' privacy rights for the simple reason that he is an American and would like his personal communications to be safe from federal snoops. This is possibly the stupidest scenario under which surveillance reform could happen, but let's not look a gift Trump in the tan line.

The president met Tuesday night with leading Republicans from both houses of Congress, reportedly directing them to craft a bipartisan bill that will not simply extend Patriot Act features (like the demonstrably useless phone metadata collection) ahead of a March 15 deadline. "The president made it exceedingly clear he will not accept a clean re-authorization ... without real reform," Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said after the meeting. "He was told by the attorney general, 'We can massage around the edges, and we can fix this through regulation,' [but] the president didn't accept that, pushed back very vigorously and said, 'We're not doing this.'"

For Paul, a longtime mass surveillance critic, this is a matter of constitutional principle. He was the sole Republican to vote against Attorney Gen. William Barr, his rival in the present battle for Trump's will, on the grounds that Barr is a "chief advocate for warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens." Paul regularly speaks against metadata collection, calling it a "bullshit" security measure, and wants to end the use of warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendment (FISA) court originally intended to monitor foreign spies to surveil U.S. citizens.

"FISA warrants should not be issued against Americans. Americans shouldn't be spied on by a secret court," Paul argued this past Thursday. "I think [Trump] agrees completely with that."

I think that's true, if by "Americans" we mean "Donald J. Trump."

The president has tweeted the word "privacy" precisely twice ever, both times reducing big topics NSA metadata collection and Fourth Amendment rights into entirely Trump-centric concerns. And we know exactly why the FISA court came on his radar as a Bad Thing: It was used to spy on his campaign with incompetent and unethical practices by the FBI, as the Justice Department's inspector general reported in December.

The DOJ report identified 17 "serious performance failures" in the FBI's process of obtaining of FISA warrants connected to the Trump campaign. This isn't the partisan malfeasance Trump has railed about for months, nor is it the unique conspiracy he seems to imagine. It's just how the FISA court operates. From 1979 to 2013, the court rejected only 11 of nearly 34,000 surveillance requests, a rate of 0.03 percent. In the last few years, the court has grown comparatively stringent, increasing its rejection rate all the way to 0.11 percent.

And it's impossible to say exactly what the FISA court has permitted thanks to its secretive organization. "FISA's inherent secrecy causes a chain reaction," explains cybersecurity reporter David Ruiz at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Because the [court's] surveillance orders are kept secret, it is hard to know if they are ever improper. Because criminal defendants are kept in the dark about what evidence was used to obtain a FISA order, they cannot meaningfully challenge if the order was wrongly issued."

With numbers and conditions like these, it's inconceivable the Trump-related application was the first to be approved with "serious performance failures." Indeed, we have every reason to think there's nothing wildly unusual about what happened to Trump's campaign. Still, if that's the case which gets us to meaningful surveillance reform well, I'll take it.

The president is interested in privacy right now because he thinks he's been subjected to special harassment. That's at best partially correct, and it has not produced a broader ethic of civil libertarianism in Trump, no matter how hard Paul tries to push him there. In a sense, Trump's demand for reform here isn't a reversal at all: He's changed his stance on the policy, but his core commitment to himself is as consistent as ever.

Continued here:
The most unlikely champion of privacy rights - The Week

A three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled on Tuesday that the smell of marijuana from inside a residence meant police officers in Richmond, Virginia were justified to search a mans entire house, including any locked boxes or safes.

Melvin Lee Jones appealed his conviction for possession of a firearm by a felon and lost.

All of this goes back to May 2016, when police say they got an anonymous tip that Jones was selling weed and crack out of his residence. The unnamed individual claimed that Jones had a gun. Police didnt investigate this tip until August, 24, 2016.

On that day, three officers went to Joness home for a so-called knock and talk. When Jones responded to the knock and opened the front door, police immediately smelled a strong odor of marijuana smoke coming from inside the house.

Jones was arrested, and police entered the residence. Once inside, they found a still-smoldering marijuana cigarette sitting on top of the trash in an open trash can in the kitchen. A responding officer proceeded to apply for a search warrant so they could search the rest of Joness house.

That warrant, much to Joness dismay, gave cops permission to search safes and locked boxes as part of an investigation that began with the smell of marijuana. During the search, cops found a pistol, marijuana, crack cocaine, and items commonly used for packaging an weighing narcotics.

Jones tried to get this evidence thrown out at the district court level, saying that his Fourth Amendment rights were violated by an extremely overbroad search warrant. That motion was denied, and Jones wasnt successful at the appellate level either.

Judge Paul Niemeyer wrote that the bottom line here was that the warrant was appropriately authorized.

We conclude that because the officers had probable cause to believe that a crime was being committed in Joness house, the warrant appropriately authorized the search of the house for evidence of that crime. We find Joness argument that the warrant should have been limited in geographic scope because the smoldering marijuana cigarette in the trash can was the likely source of the marijuana odor to be unpersuasive, he wrote. Put simply, the presence of one marijuana cigarette in the kitchen did not negate the fair probability that other evidence of the crime of marijuana possession would be found in the house. Accordingly, we affirm.

You can read the ruling below.

United States v. Melvin Jones by Law&Crime on Scribd

[Image via Richmond Police Department/Facebook]

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Federal Court: Smell of Marijuana Justified Police Search of Entire House, Including Safes and Locked Boxes - Law & Crime