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On Monday, Special Counsel John Durham released the conclusions of his three-year investigation into the FBI's surveillance of former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, arguing that the FBI used uncorroborated evidence to secure search warrants against a former Trump campaign aide and "displayed a serious lack of analytical rigor" toward information they received from partisan sources.

Durham's 316-page report found that the FBI failed to act with "appropriate objectivity or restraint in pursuing allegations of collusion or conspiracy between a U.S. political campaign and a foreign power" and that the agency "discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia."

Former Attorney General William Barr appointed Durham in 2020 to investigate whether any federal officials had violated the law in connection with the intelligence and law-enforcement activities directed at the 2016 presidential campaigns. On that score, Durham's investigation has been long on expectations from Trump and his supporters, but short on results. After three years, Durham has secured one guilty plea and lost two cases at trial after the defendants were acquitted.

However, the investigation has highlighted serious deficiencies with the FBI's warrant applications before the highly secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which is supposed to provide oversight of surveillance activities by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The Durham report found that the FBI's decision to open an investigation into possible foreign influence on several members of Trump's campaign team and apply for electronic surveillance search warrants against them was "based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence" that likely did not meet the standard for probable cause.

Some of the Durham report's findings have been corroborated by other investigators. In 2019, the Justice Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a bombshell report that FBI agents made a number of significant omissions and errors in their four warrant applications to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide. It also found that FBI personnel "did not give appropriate attention to facts that cut against probable cause." However, unlike Durham, the OIG did not conclude that anti-Trump bias fueled the investigation.

But if FBI agents were willing to cut corners to get a FISA warrant against a presidential campaign aide, it seems highly unlikely Page was the only victim. Follow-up investigations revealed just that.

In a 2020 report, the OIG determined that the FBI regularly ignored its own procedures to make sure FISA warrant applications were accurate. In a review of 29 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrantapplications to surveil Americans, the OIG found that 25 of them had errors or "inadequately supported facts."

As Reason's Scott Shackford wrote, the fact that the FBI was regularly botching search warrant applications before a court with no outside review or oversight should be alarming: "This should be seen as a big dealthe secrecy of the FISC means that Americans who are targeted for surveillance don't know they've been singled out and don't have any defense or due process to stop it. The court itself serves as oversight to protect citizens' Fourth Amendment rights. But until all of this came out, we had little idea how carelessly these warrants were written and reviewed."

Durham's report notes one suggestion from former National Security Agency general counsel Stewart Baker to improve oversight of potentially partisan FBI investigations: having an FBI official who will challenge them at every stepessentially a devil's advocate, or in this case perhaps an angel's advocate.

"As a way to ensure full consideration of the issues in applications that may present very difficultand vitally importantissues, we recommend that the Department seriously consider Baker's proposal for an official to challenge both a politically sensitive FISA application and other stages of the investigation," says the report.

Trump's fantasies of Durham prosecuting and locking up a coterie of deep state agents who orchestrated the "crime of the century" against him are just thatfantasiesbut the civil liberties problems inside the FBI are very real.

More:
The Durham Report Is Right About the Need for More FBI Oversight - Reason

Can an AI become sentient? As fantastic as it sounds, maybe its already happened. Skeptical. Me too. But when I read the conversation between a researcher and Googles LaMDa, I didnt know what to think. Listen to it on Hashtag Trending the weekend edition when it goes live on Saturday morning and judge for yourself.

The US government is using invasive, AI-powered monitoring to track refugees, asylum seekers and their own citizens. OpenAI puts ChatGPT on the iPhone. And Microsoft is placing a bet on nuclear fusion.

These top tech news stories and more for Friday May 19, 2023, Im your host Jim Love, CIO of IT World Canada, and Tech News Day in the US.

According to a report in Vice, Customs and Border Protection in the US is using an invasive, AI-powered monitoring tool to screen travelers.

Theyll be using this on refugees, people seeking asylum and even citizens and permanent residents.

The tool is called Babel X and it can take a specific piece of information about a person name, email, telephone number or social security number and get back an enormous amount of data from social media and other sources. The data includes things like name, address, date of birth, email, phone number, drivers license, social security number and even employment history. But it doesnt stop there. It gets info from social media postings, location data linked and even the unique identifiers from their mobile phone used by advertisers.

A lot of this information is publicly or commercially available from providers who gather it on the so-called dark web, where hackers exchange information and the deep web which is not necessarily nefarious but consists of content that is not indexed by standard web search.

Critics say that even legitimately purchasing some of this data without a warrant may violate Fourth Amendment rights.

For example, warrants are required to access location data from cell towers, but the location data obtained by Babel X is generated from a variety of other sources using location data generated by smart phone apps.

In addition, the system not only collects information, but it also uses AI tools to do sentiment analysis from social and other data. But that data can be used to geo-fence a person and very accurately track a person, without them ever knowing.

The use of these tools was uncovered by a Freedom of Information filing by journalists at Motherboard. Organizations are required to file a document called a Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) when they are initiating or updating a program that is regarded as privacy invading.

While these assessments must be done every three years, the data that is captured may be stored in other systems for up to 75 years.

Opponents of the program, like Carrie DeCell, an attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute, argue that the government has no legitimate interest in collecting and retaining such sensitive information on an immense scale.

Customs and Border Services, it turns out are just the tip of the iceberg. The company that makes Babel X has also sold their system to the TSA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Navy, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI and the State Department according to public records.

Sources include: Vice

Open AI has released a version of ChatGPT for the iPhone.

While the app largely functions much like the web version, it does address a concern about the vast number of apps that have proliferated, many of which contain malware or are used as a part of cyber scams. Microsoft has already addressed these same concerns with an app for their Bing AI.

The iOS app will bring this same security to those who want to use ChatGPT directly.

Like the web offering, it allows users to subscribe for a fee and get the more advanced capabilities of GPT-4.

The app does have one difference from the web version. Speech input is supported using Whisper, OpenAIs open-source speech recognition system.

The app will be available in the U.S. and expanding to other countries in the coming weeks. Android users may take heart. In a posting announcing the app and the timing, they noted:

P.S. Android users, youre next. ChatGPT will be coming to your devices soon.

Sources include: Axios

And the US Supreme Court upheld the legal protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that protect internet companies from lawsuits regarding content posted by users.

Section 230 provides safeguards for what it terms interactive computer services by ensuring that they are not regarded as a publisher or speaker.

The Supreme Courts 9-0 ruling reversed a lower court decision where a family had sued Twitter maintaining that their son had been killed in a New Years celebration by Islamist gunmen arguing that the presence of militant groups on their platforms on Twitter was related to the killing. The family argued Twitter had aided and abetted the Islamic State by failing to police the platform for the groups accounts or posts and that this was a violation of the Anti-Terrorist act.

Controversial conservative Justice Clarence Thomas authored the Supreme Court ruling and said, the allegations point to no act of encouraging, soliciting or advising the commission of the attack and didnt constitute anything that could be described as aiding or abetting an act of terrorism.

While Twitter was the party in the suit, other companies like Google and Facebook were certainly watching this closely, but one of the most interested parties may have been Reddit and Wikipedia, who worried that their armies of volunteer moderators would have been severely affected if Twitter had been found liable.

Sources include: Reuters

And Microsoft is placing a big bet on an incredible technological leap to cut its carbon emissions fusion power.

Fusion is a nuclear reaction that has been used to develop bombs that have immense destructive power. But fusion reactors dont explode. Nor do they use uranium or other radioactive elements.

They use hydrogen and turn it into harmless gases like helium and the process generate huge amounts of heat energy. Its the same reaction that powers the sun.

The catch is, its amazingly difficult to contain that reaction which happens at temperatures of over 100 million degrees Kelvin, which for those who are still struggling with Fahrenheit or Celsius, is six times hotter than the core of the sun.

The other catch is that it takes an enormous amount of energy to start the reaction and until recently, nobody has been able to get more power from the reaction than it took to heat it up and contain it. That is, until recently.

Last year, researchers at Lawrence Liverpool National Laboratories made a major breakthrough and, if you do a little fuzzy accounting, could make the claim that they generated more energy than it took to kick off the reaction. They got 3.15 megajoules of energy and it took 2.05 megajoules to kick it off. Success.

Well, unless you count the fact that it need power to run the lasers that start the reaction and those lasers take 322 megajoules.

And before we get carried away about megajoules 3.15 megajoules is about .875 kilowatt hours not even enough to run a small air conditioner.

Despite that, it was a victory. Based on that, a company named Helion has convinced Microsoft that it will have a commercial reactor producing commercial levels of power by 2028.

One critic calls their claims voodoo fusion.

Despite that, and other issues, Microsoft has agreed to buy power from the company to run its many data centres.

It seems a little fantastic, but Microsoft is serious enough to agree to buy the power no one knows if theyve invested money in the company as well.

Is it a good decision? Well, lets ask our WWBD. What would Bill do? Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft is investing in small nuclear reactors, using standard nuclear fission but on a small scale to make them safer and generating less nuclear waste. Its also a technology that is proven and functioning.

Who will win the bet on this one? We dont care. But with data centers using about one per cent of electrical energy and expect to grow to eight per cent of global electrical energy by 2030, we just know that we cant power our lust for computing on current carbon burning technology.

Source: The Register

And Montana became the first state to ban TikTok on personal devices. Governments around the world have insisted that users removed TikTok from government supplied devices, but this is the first instance of it being banned on private devices.

TikTok responded saying that there were hundreds of thousands of users in Montana and that the ban infringes on the first amendment rights of the people of Montana. TikTok is expected to challenge the ban.

There are going to be difficulties in enforcing this ban because the penalties apply only to corporations and not individual users. That would mean that Apple or Google or others who have an app store could be fined up to 10,000 dollars if they fail to comply with the Montana ban which, unless the penalty was per download would be minimal. Plus, almost everyone in Montana who wants TikTok probably has downloaded it already.

But the ban might be the thin edge of the wedge. Despite its popularity with over 150 million users in the US, just under half of the population of the country use TikTok governments seem inclined to weather the storm and take action against what they perceive is a threat from the Chinese government. Early in March the US government said that the Chinese parent company ByteDance should sell TikTok or face a ban.

Even the claim that the data is stored and protected by Oracle, a US company, has not reduced the criticism.

So if Montana, where perhaps a third of the population use the app, is willing to face the heat and ban it, it could encourage others. And if other governments join in, it could become a trend the ban could go viral.

Just a matter of time.

TikTok.

Sources include: BBC

Thats the top tech news for today. We go to air with a daily newscast five days a week, as well as a special weekend interview with an expert on topics relevant to todays tech news.

Follow Hashtag Trending on Google, Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can even get us on your Alexa or Google smart speaker. You can even find us on YouTube only. We are called TechNewsDay.

We love your comments. You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or on Mastodon as @therealjimlove on our Mastodon site technews.social. Or if thats too much, just leave a comment under the text version at itworldcanada.com/podcasts and you can find all of the links in those text versions.

Im your host, Jim Love. Have a Fantastic Friday!

Originally posted here:
Hashtag Trending May 19- U.S. government use invasive AI to track refugees; OpenAI releases iOS ChatGPT app; Microsoft bets on nuclear fusion - IT...

United States v. Rederick, 2023 WL 3014781 (8thCir. 2023)

An investigator was monitoring Larry Rederickscell phone locationas part of an investigation into methamphetamine sales. After learning Rederick was driving to Nebraska to visit an individual known by police to be involved with drug dealing, the investigator called troopers, told them about his investigation and asked them to stop Rederick. He asked the troopers to try to establish an independent basis for the stop, but if not, to stop Rederick to investigate drug trafficking.

A trooper stopped Rederick for towing a trailer that did not have a light illuminating the rear license plate. A sedan was on the trailer. The trooper spent 16 minutes writing a warning ticket for the traffic violation. Within the first 12 minutes, he asked a detector dog team to come to the scene. The dog team arrived 22 minutes into the stop. Five minutes later, the dog gave a positive indication of the presence of a narcotic at both doors of the pickup and at the back of the sedan. A subsequent search revealed meth in the sedans trunk.

The trial court denied Redericks motion to suppress the evidence; a jury convicted Rederick for possession of methamphetamine. The court of appeals held the trooper had two independent, lawful bases on which to stop Rederick. First, there wasprobable causeto stop him for the traffic violation. Second, applying the collective knowledge doctrine, the troopers had reasonable suspicion to stop Rederick to investigate possible drug trafficking.

Thecollective knowledge doctrineconsiders the separate pieces of information held by multiple officers involved in an investigation: The collective knowledge of law enforcement officers conducting an investigation is sufficient to provide reasonable suspicion, and the collective knowledge can be imputed to the individual officer who initiated the traffic stop when there is some communication between the officers. It was not necessary for the troopers involved in the stop to know the details of the drug trafficking investigation. All they needed was a directive to stop Rederick that came from someone who hadreasonable suspicionto believe Rederick was trafficking in illegal drugs.

Rederick argued the troopers illegally delayed the traffic stop to conduct a detector dog sniff, citing the rule ofRodriguez v. United States(575 U.S. 348 (2015)). However, theRodriguezdecision is all about delaying a traffic stop to investigate. In this case, the troopers had an independent basis to detain Rederick. The troopers had reasonable suspicionbeforestopping Rederick and the reasonable suspicion remained throughout the stop. Only 27 minutes passed from the stop until the dogs indication: This delay did not violate the Fourth Amendment because the troopers acted diligently to pursue the mission of the stop: to assist with the investigation of Redericks drug-related activity.

Rederick relied on the testimony of Mary E. Cablk to argue the detector dog was unreliable. However, when directly asked whether the detector dog was reliable, Cablk quickly conceded, I cant tell you that he is or he isnt. (SeeUnited States v. Spikes(2021 WL 5014500 (D. Colo. 2021)) andUnited States v. Rederick(2021 WL 5547702 (D. So. Dakota 2021)).) As the trial court highlighted, Dr. Cablk has never trained any drug detection K-9 teams herselfDr. Cablk essentially found the records to be unavailing, in part because shedid not know howto interpret them. A trainer for the detection dog team testified that the agency used single-blind testing in certification. The handler produced training records showing positive, accurate field performance and certification. The court found no error in the assessment of the reliability of the detector dog because there were proper training records and certification done with single-blind testing.

Read more Ken Wallentine case reviews here.

View original post here:
Collective knowledge doctrine applies to a traffic stop - Police News

A hot potato: Fusus is a surveillance platform integrating public and private cameras into an accessible, cloud-based surveillance network. Law enforcement organizations tout the technology as an essential expansion of monitoring capabilities by creating a real-time crime lab. However, privacy advocates and civil rights watchdogs see it as a threat to the Fourth Amendment and a high-risk cybersecurity target full of personally identifiable information.

Fusus is designed to provide law enforcement organizations (LEO) and other public safety institutions access to accurate, relevant information via a cloud-based network of authorized video monitoring assets. The company claims the platform "enhances all public safety and investigations assets for law enforcement, first responders, and private security personnel." The system began rolling out in several small participating cities and organizations in 2019, later expanding to a footprint of more than 33,000 supported cameras in more than 60 cities and counties nationwide.

Click to enlarge.

Law enforcement and public safety professionals say the system gives them much-needed access to real-time incidents, allowing faster response times and decreased criminal activity without risking the safety of local contributors. For example, businesses and other organizations regularly receiving requests to review video footage for investigative purposes can choose to deploy specific hardware devices, known as FususCores, to their network. Once deployed, these devices make it possible to include the owner's cameras in the area's more extensive Fusus network.

The system then adds authorized camera feeds to FususOne, a map-based interface that combines all access points into a single feed. Access to this aggregated dashboard and its tools saves law enforcement and other first responders valuable time by directly accessing the cameras and information rather than going to the site and requesting permission to review the video.

The company says police and other officials do not have unfettered reign over the camera streams. The system relies on policy-based conditional access, which gives camera owners the final say regarding whether or not to grant or deny access to their camera streams. Fusus and its clients claim this makes the system a low-risk but high-return tool for expanding monitoring activities.

Opponents argue the platform creates a supersized network of cameras and personal data, increasing the potential for abuse and misuse. The Triad Abolition Project's Nia Sadler cites the potential for over-policing areas already receiving increased attention and potentially (and unfairly) targeting minority groups, protestors, or others based on demographics or affiliations.

Albert Fox Cahn, founder of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) in New York, believes Fusus creates many privacy and civil rights concerns to consider before implementation.

"Fusus takes surveillance tools that are constitutional on their own, and aggregates them into the kind of persistence tracking that is blatantly unconstitutional (when used by government bodies)," Cahn told Reuters.

From a technical standpoint, the amount of data aggregated in Fusus and the number of users accessing it raises concerns. The potential for exploiting connections to thousands of disparate feeds could make the technology a prime target for hackers looking to sow chaos or obtain unauthorized access to available personal or business information. If there's one thing we've learned about cloud-based technologies nothing is ever truly safe.

See the article here:
Privacy and civil rights groups warn against rapidly growing mass ... - TechSpot

The FBI is facing scrutiny regarding its use of a controversial provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) after they queried for communications of and about a Member of Congress without a warrant. The Bureau is defending its actions and arguing it should be able to conduct warrantless defensive searches that attempt to root out foreign influence or other nefarious actions targeting the person being queried. Thats an audacious demand because defensive surveillance is precisely the excuse the government has used to justify some of its most egregious political spying over the past 60 years.

Right now, Section 702 of FISA lets the government engage in warrantless surveillance of foreigners abroad, including all the communications they have with Americans. The FBI goes to that stockpile of private conversations and deliberately seeks out Americans emails and text messages, bypassing the Fourth Amendments warrant requirement entirely. After years of compliance violations and abuse, Congress may be poised to close this backdoor search loophole.

But now the FBI is pushing for a huge exception, arguing it should be allowed to keep the current warrantless system for defensive searches, such as the recently revealed case where they queried communications of and about U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood because they believed he was the target of foreign espionage and influence operations.

But history is filled with chilling examples of how easily the notion of conducting defensive surveillance to protect Americans from foreign influence can be a pretense for politically motivated surveillance abuse. For example, J. Edgar Hoover authorized the monitoring of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ostensibly to defend against alleged communist influence efforts aimed at King and other civil rights leaders. In reality, it was motivated by Hoovers racism and hatred of the civil rights movement.

Detecting and defending against purported foreign influence and subversion was a frequent excuse for monitoring political dissidentssuch as the antiwar movement, Black activists, students, and other left-leaning groupsthroughout the 1960s and 70s for the abusive COINTELPRO surveillance system. The FBI even described the notion of defensive surveillance as something that offers us a fertile field to develop valuable intelligence on leftist political groups despite a lack of evidence of actual foreign danger.

Justifying spying on vulnerable communities and dissidents as a defensive measure to protect against foreign actors has continued into the 21st century. After the September 11 attacks, the New York Police Department, with federal support, engaged in mass surveillance of Muslim communities. They justified monitoring mosques, community centers, student groups, and the daily lives of average Americansactions with serious harmsas necessary to guard against influence and infiltration by foreign actors like al Qaeda. Even more recently, the FBI and DHS have raised the idea of foreign influence as a basis for monitoring Black Lives Matter activists. In 2020, then President Donald Trump and Attorney General Bill pushed the notion that potential foreign subversion through Antifa justified broad surveillance and police action against protesters.

These examples also show the dangers of a split warrant standard for sensitive queries, as Privacy and Civil Liberties Board Member Beth Williams proposed at a Congressional hearing last week. Her proposal would keep warrantless queries as a general practice but add heightened protections for certain queries, such as those involving elected officials, members of the media, and religious figures. The types of surveillance abuse weve seen from the 1960s to the past decade are replete with examples of the government targeting individuals who do not fall into any of these categories, and are simply normal people. Past compliance reports have clearly demonstrated how problematic US person queries can target such a broad range of individualsrelatives of FBI personnel, crime victims, political commentators, students, law enforcement sources, and business leadersthat no such sensitive queries rule could shield all those in need of protection.

The decades-long pattern shows that a blank check for warrantless defensive searches of Americans communications collected pursuant to Section 702 could be abused for political or other purposes. To be sure, there are certain to be many genuine situations where the FBI and other intelligence agencies want to investigate and root out foreign influence efforts or other nefarious actions by foreign actors targeting Americans. The government should be able to pursue those investigations through its broad arsenal of lawful investigative tools, including appropriately predicated and judicially authorized searches of communications.

But theres a reason the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit unreasonable offensive search and seizuresno matter what the governments motive is or claims to be, we need a strong and consistent shield to protect our citizens and our democracy. Before searching for an Americans private communications, get a warrant.

More here:
There Is No Defensive Search Exception to the Fourth Amendment ... - Center for Democracy and Technology