Tag Archive for: Pretend

UK Tribunal To Decide Whether Gov’t Agencies Can Continue To Pretend There’s A Residency Requirement For FOI Requests

The UK’s Freedom of Information law is pretty straightforward when it comes to residency requirements. There aren’t any.

Anyone can make a freedom of information request – they do not have to be UK citizens, or resident in the UK. Freedom of information requests can also be made by organisations, for example a newspaper, a campaign group, or a company.

And yet, some UK government agencies have decided to read a residency requirement into a law that doesn’t contain one. As Owen Bowcott reports for The Guardian, these seemingly illegal non-responses to requests are about to be tested in court.

A combined hearing involving the Home Office, Metropolitan police, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and 13 separate cases is to be held at an information tribunal in London.

At issue is whether applicants overseas are entitled to a response when submitting freedom of information requests to UK government departments and agencies.

Nothing in the UK’s Freedom of Information law appears to institute a residency requirement for FOI requesters. Nor does it hint at territorial limitations that could allow agencies to withhold documents from certain requesters. But the agencies handling these 13 cases seem to feel there is a residency requirement and they appear to be applying this novel interpretation to screw with requesters they’d rather not respond to.

One set of requests deals with the UK’s government’s involvement with attempts to extradite Julian Assange for prosecution.

One of the blocked cases is an appeal by the Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, who works for daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano and writes about WikiLeaks.

She has been pursuing information about how the Crown Prosecution Service dealt with its Swedish counterpart during initial attempts to extradite Assange to Sweden.

So, it appears that at least one of the 13 cases is about documents being withheld because the agency doesn’t want to release them, not because there’s a genuine question about whether the agency is obligated to respond to non-UK residents. Meanwhile, the government says it’s going to continue following the law… by not following the law in these 13 cases — at least until the tribunal says otherwise.

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Senators Pretend That EARN IT Act Wouldn’t Be Used To Undermine Encryption; They’re Wrong

On Wednesday, the Senate held a hearing about the EARN IT Act, the bill that is designed to undermine the internet and encryption in one single move — all in the name of “protecting the children” (something that it simply will not do). Pretty much the entire thing was infuriating, but I wanted to focus on one key aspect. Senators supporting the bill, including sponsor Richard Blumenthal — who has been attacking the internet since well before he was in the Senate and was just the Attorney General of Connecticut — kept trying to insist the bill had nothing to do with encryption and wouldn’t be used to undermine encryption. In response to a letter from Facebook, Blumenthal kept insisting that the bill is not about encryption, and also insisting (incorrectly) that if the internet companies just nerded harder, they could keep encryption while still giving law enforcement access.

“This bill says nothing about encryption,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal…, said at a hearing Wednesday to discuss the legislation…

[….]

“Strong law enforcement is compatible with strong encryption,” Blumenthal said. “I believe it, Big Tech knows it and either is Facebook is lying — and I think they’re telling us the truth when they say that law enforcement is consistent with strong encryption — or Big Tech is using encryption as a subterfuge to oppose this bill.”

No, the only one engaged in lying or subterfuge here is Blumenthal (alternatively, he’s so fucking ignorant that he should resign). “Strong” encryption is end-to-end encryption. Once you create a backdoor that lets law enforcement in, you’ve broken the encryption and it’s no longer stronger. Even worse, it’s very, very weak, and it puts everyone (even Senator Blumenthal and all his constituents) at risk. If you want to understand how this bill is very much about killing encryption, maybe listen to cryptographer Matthew Green explain it to you (he’s not working for “Big Tech,” Senator):

EARN IT works by revoking a type of liability called Section 230 that makes it possible for providers to operate on the Internet, by preventing the provider for being held responsible for what their customers do on a platform like Facebook. The new bill would make it financially impossible for providers like WhatsApp and Apple to operate services unless they conduct “best practices” for scanning their systems for CSAM.

Since there are no “best practices” in existence, and the techniques for doing this while preserving privacy are completely unknown, the bill creates a government-appointed committee that will tell technology providers what technology they have to use. The specific nature of the committee is byzantine and described within the bill itself. Needless to say, the makeup of the committee, which can include as few as zero data security experts, ensures that end-to-end encryption will almost certainly not be considered a best practice.

So in short: this bill is a backdoor way to allow the government to ban encryption on commercial services. And even more beautifully: it doesn’t come out and actually ban the use of encryption, it just makes encryption commercially infeasible for major providers to deploy, ensuring that they’ll go bankrupt if they try to disobey this committee’s recommendations.

It’s the kind of bill you’d come up with if you knew the thing you wanted to do was unconstitutional and highly unpopular, and you basically didn’t care.

Or listen to Stanford’s Riana Pfefferkorn explain how the bill’s real target is encryption. As she explains, the authors of the bill (including Blumenthal) had ample opportunity to put in language that would make it clear that it does not target encryption. They chose not to.

As for the “subterfuge” Blumenthal calls out, the only real “subterfuge” here is by Blumenthal and Graham in crafting this bill with the help of the DOJ. Remember, just the day before the DOJ flat out said that 230 should be conditioned on letting law enforcement into any encrypted communications. So if Blumenthal really means that this bill won’t impact encryption he should write it into the fucking bill. Because as it’s structured right now, in order to keep 230 protections, internet companies will have to follow a set of “best practices” put together by a panel headed by the Attorney General who has said multiple times that he doesn’t believe real encryption should be allowed on these services.

So if Blumenthal wants us to believe that his bill won’t undermine encryption, he should address it explicitly, rather than lying about it in a Senate hearing, while simultaneously claiming that Facebook (and every other company) can do the impossible in giving law enforcement backdoor access while keeping encrypted data secure.

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California AG Steps Up To Help Cops Pretend New Public Records Law Doesn’t Apply To Past Misconduct Docs

The bullshit debate over California police misconduct records continues. A new law granting the public access to police misconduct records for the first time in decades has resulted in a slew of public records requests. It’s also resulted in a slew of refusals and legal challenges.

Some law enforcement agencies (and their unions) have chosen to believe the law erases their past misdeeds. Although the law says nothing limiting access to records created prior to January 1, 2019, some agencies have decided the lack of specific language allows them to draw this inference from the missing words. Multiple lawsuits have hit the California court system, which may soon force the state’s Supreme Court to deal with this miss, even if it took a hard pass on one law enforcement union’s attempt to get a preemptive declaration that past misconduct records are off-limits.

If these law enforcement agencies were truly seeking clarity, they were given a crystal clear explanation of the legislative intent from none other than the law’s author, Senator Nancy Skinner.

[I]t is my understanding in enacting SB 1421 that the change in the law applies to all disclosable records whether or not they existed prior to the date the statute went into effect…

This isn’t the answer cops wanted. They wanted someone to tell them they could whitewash the past and stonewall the future. Instead, the law’s author told them the law applies retroactively. If they missed their opportunity to destroy these records prior to the law’s enactment, that’s on them.

But they’re getting a little help from the state’s top cop. State attorney general Xavier Becerra has decided retroactivity is still an open question, despite Sen. Skinner’s statement on the issue.

The attorney general’s response to a public records request seeking that information references some superior court challenges to the law’s application to past records brought by police unions.

“We will not disclose any records that pre-date January 1, 2019 at this time,” Mark Beckington, supervising deputy attorney general, said in a response last Friday to a request from freelance reporter Darwin BondGraham.

This sentence follows a very dubious assumption by the attorney general’s office.

[U]ntil the legal question of retroactive application of the statute is resolved by the courts, the public interest in accessing these records is clearly outweighed by the public’s interest in protecting privacy rights.

Oh, really? But whose privacy rights? The public may want to protect their own privacy rights, but I doubt they’re more concerned about protecting the “privacy” of public servants who committed misconduct on the public’s dime.

AG Becerra is deliberately confused by the retroactivity non-question. Sen. Skinner, the law’s author, is honestly confused.

“I find the AG’s interpretation puzzling considering that we have law enforcement agencies up and down the state, including our California Highway Patrol, releasing records…”

Also confusing: the AG was sent a copy of the same letter Skinner sent to the Senate Rules Committee clarifying the law’s retroactive powers.

Cops have a friend in high places. With this action, he’s the best friend a bad cop could have. But he’s only delaying the inevitable. These records will be in the public’s hands. If the courts somehow find in favor of law enforcement agencies, this only keeps the past a secret. Unless police misconduct is somehow also only a thing of the past, California cop shops will still be generating a whole lot of publicly-accessible documents.

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