The U.S. Government is Buying Your Location Data

Think you have privacy?  Think again. In early January I received an email from Google that laid out everywhere I had been in 2019, covering almost 23,000 miles and three different countries, not to mention several different states and numerous cities. Then, early this month I received something similar for the month of January, 2020.  Did I ask for this? No.  Did I know my phone apps were tracking my every move?  No. But what is more frightening is the the federal government is buying this information without your knowledge.  Do you really want the goons of the Trump/Pence regime knowing your every move? Most of us have nothing to hide, but this level of surveillance is scary and should not be happening as a column in the Washington Post notes.  Here are column highlights:

AMERICANS HAVE lately been learning that the apps they use to check whether they need an umbrella, or follow their favorite sports team, or hurl one animated animal at another for points are sucking up their location data and selling it. Now it turns out that it’s not only advertising companies and other private entities who end up buying this information en masse from brokers. The U.S. government is doing it, too.

The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that federal agencies have purchased access to a virtual trove that charts the movements of millions of citizens’ cellphones from a company called Venntel. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its components are reportedly harnessing this data for immigration enforcement: searching for activity in unexpected places to pin down smuggling rings, or detecting individuals who may have entered the country illegally.

Customs and Border Protection says it accesses only small quantities of the data on a case-by-case basis rather than examining the entire cache in bulk, and that the data is anonymized. But anonymity is a laughable concept when every individual’s day can be turned into a traveling dot that follows a path only they take. A New York Times investigation in 2018 revealed how simple it is to connect a dot to the person it represents — whether that person is a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory or an undocumented mother recently arrived from Mexico.

Authorities may hope to preempt some concerns about civil liberties by alleging they’re training their eyes only on suspected non-citizens, but it’s impossible to avoid roping in citizens, too, when information is requisitioned at so massive a volume. It’s also impossible not to imagine what else, and who else, officials might seek to track, once they’ve come up with the legal rationale for doing so. Americans shouldn’t have to rely on the good graces of the bureaucracy to protect them from overreach.

The rationale for warrantless surveillance in this case sidesteps Fourth Amendment law — or tries to. The Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that the government couldn’t subpoena geographic data directly from cellphone companies without going through the courts, precisely because of that data’s “depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach.” So the government started buying the exact same data from brokers on the open market instead, arguing that the purchases were fair game because any old company could make them.

This strategy is awfully cynical. Congress has failed to pass a comprehensive privacy statute that shields people from having their every move logged in a database such as the one in question today. Now, this lack of privacy from corporate actors has become an excuse for government to bypass the right to privacy from the state that the Constitution is supposed to enshrine. DHS insists this is legal. But should it be?

4th Circuit Panel Strikes Down North Carolina’s Gerrymandered Congressional Districts

4th Circuit Court of Appeals building, Richmond, Virginia.

With its base shrinking due to (i) the dying off of aging white voters, (ii) the growing minority population, and (iii) the toxicity with which the GOP is viewed by growing numbers of younger voters, the Republican Party has  relied on gerrymandered districts dating from eight years ago to cling to control of many state legislatures and the House of Representatives.  Here in Virginia, these districts have been struck down at the state level and several congressional districts have been ruled unconstitutional.  Now, for a second time all of the congressional districts in North Carolina have been ruled as unconstitutional and, depending on the ultimate outcome, could change voting districts for the 2018 midterm elections and help shift control of the House to Democrats.  The Washington Post looks at the unanimous ruling handed down by a three judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals (the opinion can be viewed here).  Here are excerpts:

A panel of three federal judges held Monday that North Carolina’s congressional districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to favor Republicans over Democrats and said it may require new districts before the November elections, possibly affecting control of the House.

The judges acknowledged that primary elections have already produced candidates for the 2018 elections but said they were reluctant to let voting take place in congressional districts that courts twice have found violate constitutional standards.

North Carolina legislators are likely to ask the Supreme Court to step in. The court traditionally does not approve of judicial actions that can affect an election so close to the day voters go to the polls.

But the Supreme Court has just eight members since Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s retirement last month; a tie vote would leave the lower court’s decision in place.

The North Carolina case is a long-running saga, with a federal court in 2016 striking down the legislature’s 2011 map as a racial gerrymander. The legislature then passed a plan that left essentially the same districts in place but said lawmakers were motivated by politics, not race.

The Supreme Court told the three-judge panel to take another look at the North Carolina case in light of the high court’s June decision in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case, in which the justices said those who brought that case did not have legal standing.

But Judge James A. Wynn Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, writing Monday for a special three-judge district court panel, said plaintiffs did have standing under the decision in Wisconsin’s Gill v. Whitford, which he said reinforced the judges’ earlier views that the congressional districts were drawn with improper partisan goals.

He proposed several unusual ideas: appointing a special master to draw new districts, holding general elections without party primaries or even turning the November elections into a primary and holding the general election sometime before the new Congress convenes in January. . . . . Wynn and his fellow judges called for immediate briefing from the parties about which remedy to pursue. Wynn said it should be clear that such partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

“A common thread runs through the restrictions on state election regulations imposed by Article I, the First Amendment, and the Equal Protection Clause: the Constitution does not allow elected officials to enact laws that distort the marketplace of political ideas so as to intentionally favor certain political beliefs, parties, or candidates and disfavor others,” he wrote.

Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine, said the case has national implications.

“If the lower court orders new districts for 2018, and the Supreme Court deadlocks 4-4 on an emergency request to overturn that order, we could have new districts for 2018 only, and that could help Democrats retake control of the U.S. House,” he wrote on his blog.

The combined cases are Common Cause v. Rucho and League of Women Voters of North Carolina v. Rucho.

The Feds vs. The Racists in Ferguson

In the wake of the murder of Michael Brown by a member of the Ferguson, Missouri police force, the Department of Justice has released a report summarizing the utterly devastating results of its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department.   Suffice it to say that racial discrimination is a huge problem and that the violation of citizens' - especially black citizens - constitutional rights was more or less the norm.   The findings are ugly, but I suspect that similar results would be produced if a similar investigation was conducted of many other police forces across America.   Moreover, the findings should be of little surprise when one of the national political parties engages in the use of "dog whistles" to stir white fear and resentment of blacks on a consistent basis.   A column in the New York Times looks at the report finding:  Here are highlights:

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice released the utterly devastating results of its investigation of the Ferguson Police Department.

The report contained charges that the Police Department and the municipal courts treated citizens less like constituents and more like a revenue stream, violating citizens’ constitutional rights in the process.

And it found that this burden was disproportionately borne by the black people in a town that is two-thirds black. This disproportionate weight is exacerbated when people are poor.

As the Justice Department report pointed out:

“Court practices exacerbate the harm of Ferguson’s unconstitutional police practices. They impose a particular hardship upon Ferguson’s most vulnerable residents, especially upon those living in or near poverty. Minor offenses can generate crippling debts, result in jail time because of an inability to pay, and result in the loss of a driver’s license, employment, or housing.”

The view that emerges from the Justice Department report is that citizens were not only paying a poverty tax, but a pigment tax as the local authorities sought to balance their budgets and pad their coffers on the backs of poor black people.

Perhaps most disturbing — and damning — is actual correspondence in the report where the authorities don’t even attempt to disguise their intent.

“In March 2010, for instance, the City Finance Director wrote to Chief [Thomas] Jackson that ‘unless ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year, it will be hard to significantly raise collections next year. . . . Given that we are looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall, it’s not an insignificant issue.’ Similarly, in March 2013, the Finance Director wrote to the City Manager: ‘Court fees are anticipated to rise about 7.5%. I did ask the Chief if he thought the PD could deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try.’”

Furthermore, the report made clear that “officer evaluations and promotions depend to an inordinate degree on ‘productivity,’ meaning the number of citations issued.”  The report read like one about a shakedown gang rather than about city officials.

And the racial disparities as charged by the Justice Department are unconscionable.  According to the report, “Ferguson’s approach to law enforcement both reflects and reinforces racial bias” and “there is evidence that this is due in part to intentional discrimination on the basis of race.”

Whatever one thinks about the case of the [Michael Brown] killing and how it was handled in the courts, it is clear that Brown’s death will not be in vain. It is clear that the frustration that poured out onto the streets of Ferguson was not without merit.

Once again, the oppression people feel as part of their lived experiences, and can share only by way of anecdote, is bolstered by data.

When people say “Black Lives Matter,” they’re not referring only to the lives lost, but also to those stunted and controlled by a system of power that sees them as pawns.

The cynic in me cannot help but wonder what percentage of the city officials and police officers engaging in these despicable conduct nonetheless go to church every Sunday and pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for their piety and godliness. It is with good reason that I no longer refer to myself as a Christian.  What moral and decent person would want to be associated with racists and bigots and hypocrites?