"Is that a law?" Sharpe asks in the recording. "That's not a law."
A majority of American parents want kids to have access to their phones at school, a new survey finds. In addition, most parents think cellphones have a positive effect on their kids' lives.
Debates over teens and smartphones often contain the (assumed or explicit) premise that parents want their kids to stop living what author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a "phone-based childhood." Popular wisdom today says parents think phones are negatively impacting their childrens' lives and want kids to have less access to phones but feel powerless to change the situation—a premise baked into Haidt's new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (read my review here).
But a survey conducted earlier this month by the National Parents Union challenges this narrative.
In The Anxious Generation, Haidt looks at the rise of various problems among young people and pinpoints two interlocking culprits: the ascendancy of a "phone-based childhood" and the decline of a "play-based childhood." Many folks see this as a simple one-way flow: phones came along and simply wiped out time or motivation for other pursuits. Haidt suggests a somewhat different sequence of events. As parents began to fear everything in the offline world (and instill this fear into their children), individual families and American society more broadly started denying children independence, autonomy, and unstructured free time. "Screen time" started to fill a void that parents, politicians, police, and our culture as a whole had already created.
The new National Parents Union survey perfectly illustrates the way fear-based parenting is driving phone-based childhoods.
In the survey—conducted in February among 1,506 parents of public school students grades K-12—66 percent of parents said their kids have a cell phone and most of these kids (79 percent) take their phones to school. Asked why parents' wanted this, the most common answers were so that kids could "use their phone if there is an emergency" (79 percent agreed) and so parents could get in touch with their children "or find out where they are when needed" (71 percent). Forty percent said it was important for communicating with kids "about their mental health or other needs during the day."
In other words, a lot of parents want their kids to have phones at school because these parents are anxious, afraid, and/or overzealously policing their progeny's whereabouts and feelings.
Hat tip to Bonnie Kristian for first identifying this paradox. "It is increasingly fashionable to talk about the risk phones pose to American kids, especially teenage girls," writes Kristian on Substack:
The dysfunction of the phone-based childhood has become impossible to ignore, thanks in no small part to Haidt's own work. We're all saying it: Make the kids put down their phones at dinner! Ban phones in school! Kick teenagers off social media or confine them to flip phones or take the phones away altogether!
But then there's the second level: When push comes to shove, whatever ideals they may spout about rejecting the phone-based childhood, average American parents want their middle and high schoolers to have phones, preferably smartphones with location tracking kept on their persons at all times.
It seems parents are as attached to their kids having phones as their kids are. In light of this, it's unsurprising that many parents frown on policies that totally deny kids access to phones at school (even though the popular/political narrative around kids and phones suggests this is what parents want).
Fifty-six percent of the people surveyed by the National Parents Union said "students should sometimes be allowed to use their cell phones" in school, while just 32 percent said "students should be banned from using their cell phones, unless they have a medical condition or disability for which they need to use a cell phone."
Even among the group who said most students should be banned from using phones, only 30 percent wanted this ban to apply broadly (i.e., outside of class). Most said phones should be banned during academic instruction but allowed at other times, such as during lunch or recess or during periods between classes.
In keeping with this, relatively few of the parents surveyed supported school policies that keep kids' entirely away from their phones during the day.
Fifteen percent said schools should "require students to place their cell phones in a central location in their classroom, such as a cubby or holder, but don't lock them up" and 14 percent said they should "require students to place their cell phones in a locked cabinet or cell phone lockers in their classroom." Another 8 percent said schools should "lock up students' cell phones in secure pouches or containers that they can carry with them but that prevent them from using their phone."
The most popular answer—shared by 59 percent of the parents surveyed—was that schools should "allow students to keep their phones in their backpack or bag (not locked
up) as long as they don't take them out and keep them on silent."
Reassuringly, very few people (5 percent) think the federal government should make decisions about school phone policies and only 10 percent say it should be a state-level government decision.
Most parents think phone policies should be made at the school district level (29 percent), the school level (28 percent), or at the classroom level (18 percent).
Some of the data in this survey fits popular narratives about kids and phones, like the ideas that they're starting young and spending a lot of time on them.
Among parents who allowed their children to have cellphones, the most popular ages to have given phones to them was between 10 and 13 years old. (The survey does not say what type of phones were given, so it's possible many kids received dumb phones to start.) Only 13 percent of parents waited until a kid was age 14 or older.
Among those whose kids had cell phones, only 18 percent estimated that their child spends less than 2 hours per day on it. Some 28 percent estimated that their kid spends between 2 and 3 hours per day on their phones, with 29 percent suggesting their kid uses it for 4 or 5 hours per day, 12 percent saying 6 or 7 hours per day, and 9 percent saying their kids are on phones for upwards of 8 hours per day.
And yet, most parents seem pretty unalarmed by this phone usage. Just 9 percent said phones had a mostly or entirely negative effect on their kids.
Nearly half—46 percent—said the phone had a mostly or entirely positive effect on their child, while 42 percent said the effect was "about equally positive and negative."
This stands out as at odds with what we commonly hear in the media and from legislators about how parents view kids' phone use. But it's in keeping with what many kids themselves say. In a 2022 survey of American 13- to 17-year-olds, conducted Pew Research Center, kids identified all sorts of plus sides to social media (which is, of course, one of the main things that kids use phones for). And a majority—59 percent—said social media is neither a negative nor a positive in their lives, while 32 percent said it's mostly positive and just 9 percent said it's mostly negative.
It's also in keeping with some earlier research on phone adoption among kids. For instance, a 2022 study from Stanford Medicine researchers followed 250 tweens and teens for five years during which most got a first cellphone, tracking study participants' well-being during this transition. The kids were 7 to 11 years old when the study started and 11 to 15 years old when it ended. The researchers "found that whether or not the children in the study had a mobile phone, and when they had their first mobile phone, did not seem to have meaningful links to their well-being and adjustment outcomes," according to lead author Xiaoran Sun.
• Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law restricting teen use of social media platforms. Under the new law, 14- and 15-year-olds can old start social media accounts with their parents' permission. "This law puts all users' privacy at risk by mandating age verification," said Competitive Enterprise Institute's director of the Center for Technology & Innovation, Jessica Melugin. It also "ignores parents' rightful role in deciding what is and is not appropriate for their child, and may sacrifice too much of the free flow of speech to be constitutional. It's political click bait, but it's not good public policy."
• California lawmakers are considering a bill that would require large online platforms to verify the identities of "influential" users. Influential here is defined to include basically any user that's been at it for a while (that is, if content they've shared "has been seen by more than 25,000 users over the lifetime of the accounts that they control or administer").
• Mother Jones has an interesting interview with Lynn Paltrow, founder of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (now called Pregnancy Justice). "For much of the past 50 years, the mainstream pro-choice groups were focused almost exclusively on the right to abortion," said Paltrow, who believes this was a mistake. "There was no campaign to explain abortion as necessary to the full equality and citizenship—the personhood—of women in this country. They were defending abortion as opposed to the people who sometimes need abortions but always need to be treated as full constitutional persons under the law, whatever the outcome of their pregnancies."
The post Parents Don't Want Schools to Confiscate Kids' Phones appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press, 400 pages, $30
Jonathan Haidt opens The Anxious Generation with what is supposed to be an analogy for kids' use of smartphones and social media: Would you let your child travel to Mars, he asks, if some Silicon Valley CEO said it was safe? It's an absurd comparison: Whatever harms may or may not befall minors with iPhones, they're light-years less apparent, substantial, or universal than those facing kids shuttling through outer space to a desert planet with an atmosphere mainly made of carbon dioxide.
Happily, most of this volume is far less hysterical than that opening might lead you to believe. Yes, this book is filled with unwarranted pessimism, unjustified conclusions, and unsavory solutions. But as he lays out his case that a "phone-based childhood" is replacing a "play-based childhood," Haidt makes many points that even the most ardent opponents of tech panic and state intervention should be able to appreciate. Unfortunately, he can't keep the spirit of that opening analogy from periodically seeping back in.
***
Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, believes that young people's rising use of screens and rising rates of emotional fragility both stem from our overprotection of kids in nondigital spaces. He rails against policies that punish parents for letting children have some independence, and against the mindset that tries to shield the young from every possible emotional harm. Parts of the book were even written with Free-Range Kids author (and regular Reason contributor) Lenore Skenazy, with whom Haidt helped found Let Grow, a nonprofit that pushes back against helicopter parenting.
Haidt also stresses that many of his ideas for curbing teen tech use shouldn't be legislated, though he does favor a number of new regulations too. He recognizes the guidelines he offers parents are not one-size-fits-all—that activities OK for most minors might be problematic for some and that things that are generally bad at a certain stage of development may be OK for individual kids.
He also marshalls a lot of data as he tries to tie the recent rises in youthful depression, anxiety, suicide, and learning loss to phone-based childhoods. But here we run into trouble. Haidt seems convinced there is one right way to interpret this data: the way that implicates technology.
Pointing to Jean Twenge's research, for example, Haidt reports that "teens who spend more time using social media are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and other disorders, while teens who spend more time with groups of young people (such as playing team sports or participating in religious activities) have better mental health." But what does this really tell us? Not that these platforms are causing these problems. That's possible. But it's also possible that teenagers use more social media and avoid more group activities because of their depression or social anxiety—or that some third factor triggers both mental health difficulties and problematic internet use.
Haidt points to data showing rates of depression and anxiety in young people rose at the same time that smartphone and social media adoption skyrocketed among the same age group. But this was also a time period in which awareness of those conditions increased and the stigma around them decreased. And it was a period in which identity politics and a sort of victimhood cache began to permeate places where many young people gravitated online. If phones and social media play a role here, it might not be as a direct trigger—perhaps the veneration of various psychological diagnoses in certain online spaces led more kids to embrace those labels.
Haidt responds to the awareness/destigmatization theories by pointing out that we have been seeing more suicides and self harm in young people. Kids aren't just saying they're struggling, he argues; they're taking action that shows it. But the suicide picture is complicated. Yes, U.S. suicides have been rising. But the rate among older adults—the group least likely to be heavy social media users—has also increased sharply and in fact is much higher than for the youngest cohort. (In 2021, the rate for Americans ages 65 and up was 17.3 suicides for every 100,000 people. For 12- to 17-year-olds, it was 6.5 per 100,000.) In 2022, suicide rates actually went down among younger Americans while increasing among men over 34 and women over 24. (Depression, too, is up across American age groups, even preceding the pandemic.)
It's also notable that youth suicide rates in the U.S. started rising before the advent of smartphones and social media (something Haidt acknowledges) and that their rise over time has not been linear. (The same goes for the general population, with the 2022 suicide death toll about equal to what it was in 1950.) It's also much higher in some states than others, something we'd be less likely to see if a nationwide phenomenon like social media was a leading cause. The rise has not been consistent around the world, even in countries with similar phone and social media adoption patterns. In many places with widespread phone use—France and Russia, for example—teen and young adult suicide rates have fallen, sometimes precipitously.
***
Haidt argues that no single thing other than "the great rewiring of childhood" can explain the breadth of data suggesting young people are faring worse than before on an array of measures. Maybe no single thing can do this. Yet for each data point, a variety of nontech explanations could work.
For instance: Haidt cites a 2023 survey in which 68 percent of college students said they felt anxious at least half of the time. Social media could be a culprit, but so could doom coming from professional media and gloom coming from politicians. So could the anxiety emanating from adults around them. So could shifting sexual norms, fears of another pandemic, or a lifetime of what Haidt calls "modern overprotective parenting."
Or take the rise in 12- to 17-year-olds who answered national survey questions in ways suggesting they've suffered a major depressive episode. This rise started in the early 2010s and continued throughout the decade (from 8 percent in 2010 to 11.4 percent in 2014, 14.4 percent in 2018, and 19.5 percent in 2022)—a time period that corresponds with increasing smartphone adoption and the introduction of platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. But this was also a time of economic downturn, a pandemic, unrest in the streets, and extreme turbulence in U.S. politics. Surely some of this could also explain self-reports of hopelessness, sadness, etc. Maybe other health issues, such as rising obesity rates, had a role. Maybe shifts in academic expectations played a part. Or maybe the depression isn't related to events that took place during this period at all; it could stem from something in the way kids coming of age during this period were raised in the preceding decade, or even from genetic factors. Plenty of counterevidence and rival interpretations are available.
That doesn't mean we should simply throw up our hands and declare unlimited screen time to be fine at any age. Parents who look at the evidence may deem it wise to adopt some or all of Haidt's agenda—measures like limiting phone or laptop use to certain times of day, or waiting until your kids are a certain age before letting them own a phone or participate on social media. Tech companies could offer more options—including device-based options—for parents who want to prevent their kids from creating social media accounts or visiting certain sites. Individual schools or school districts could experiment with tough-on-phone policies. Of course, there's the other half of Haidt's prescription: more time for unsupervised play, more play at school, and more autonomy in general for kids.
But the data just aren't strong enough to unequivocally back up Haidt's claims about what smartphones and social media are doing to kids, which seems like a good reason to hold off on government mandates, and not just out of first-principles libertarianism.
Even if we could somehow overcome the privacy and First Amendment concerns that something like a minimum age for social media would pose for adult users (and that's a big if), we still don't know what sort of unintended consequences it might have for young people. Could a lack of online community lead to worse mental health outcomes? Would kids turn to more private methods of communication that make it harder to prevent harm or punish perpetrators? Separated from their digital distractions, would teens start drinking more and having more unintended pregnancies—both of which have decreased in recent decades?
Haidt says that if we wouldn't send our kids to Mars without having all the evidence and knowing all the risks, we shouldn't give them unfettered access to the digital world either. That goes for cutting off their connections to the digital world too.
The post Blaming Tech for Teen Troubles appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman assess the Justice Department's nonsensical antitrust case against Apple before turning their attention to Donald Trump's $464 million bond payment deadline in his New York civil fraud case.
00:41—Bonkers antitrust suit against Apple
20:27—Congress passes $1.2 trillion spending package
29:54—Weekly Listener Question
42:20—Trump contests $464 million bond payment in New York civil fraud case
50:52—This week's cultural recommendations
Mentioned in this podcast:
"The Absurd Apple Antitrust Lawsuit," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"European Union's AI Law Will Heavily Regulate a Technology Lawmakers Don't Understand," by Varad Raigaonkar
"Antitrust's Greatest Hits," by David B. Kopel and Joseph Bast
"Competition, Not Antitrust, Is Humbling the Tech Giants," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Don't Let E.U. Bureaucrats Design Americans' Tech," by Jennifer Huddleston
"Joe Biden's Endless River of Debt and Regulation," by Nick Gillespie
"Marjorie Taylor Greene Introduces Measure To Oust Mike Johnson as House Speaker," by Joe Lancaster
"A GOP Plan To Raise the Retirement Age Reveals How Unserious Washington Is About Social Security," by Eric Boehm
"The National Debt Is a National Security Issue," by Eric Boehm
"'Emergency' Spending Is Out of Control," by Eric Boehm
"3 Reasons To Abolish Social Security Now!" by Nick Gillespie
"3 Reasons to Fix Social Security Now!" by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg
"Brian Riedl: Who Bankrupted Us More—Trump or Biden?" by Nick Gillespie
"Science Fiction Fans Are Fighting About Politics. It's Not the End of the Universe." by Peter Suderman
Nick Gillespie's take on X on Trump's latest award:
And yet I continue to place out of the money in the annual NICK GILLESPIE AWARDS held at the Nick Gillespie Apartment and voted on by Nick Gillespie. Kudos, Donald, kudos. pic.twitter.com/nF0tB1vac6
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) March 25, 2024
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsors:
Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Biden's Antitrust Case Against Apple Is Truly Stupid appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 16 states are suing Apple over its alleged monopoly of the smartphone market. It's an absolutely bonkers lawsuit, based on weird ideas about business and even weirder ideas about government.
The latest in a long series of antitrust suits filed against tech companies, the Apple lawsuit shows just how eager the Biden administration is to bring business decisions under federal control.
The case "illustrates a shift among enforcers towards a 'big is bad' mentality more generally," said Jennifer Huddleston, who works on technology policy for the libertarian Cato Institute. "Such an approach seeks to achieve preferred political goals or penalize politically disfavored companies based on the size of a company, the number of competitors, or the welfare of those competitors rather than asking if the large company achieved success in the market by providing a product consumers prefer or through anti-competitive means."
There hasn't been a ton of outrage over the suit's radical premises yet, perhaps because it's a tech company being attacked. The relative novelty of the topics this lawsuit deals with—apps, interfaces, etc.— allows authorities to portray Apple's actions as uniquely nefarious.
Applying the government's arguments to a physical retailer helps highlight how crazy they are. Let's use a popular chain store like Target as an example.
When I walk into Target, I know I'm going to be presented with a finite number of products that Target bigwigs somewhere have approved for sale. Not just anyone can walk into Target and start selling their own stuff. Nor are rival retailers like Walmart or Kohl's able to set up shop within Target stores.
This may harm rival brands, or random people who aren't able to peddle their products in Target. And it means shoppers at this particular store see somewhat less choice and perhaps higher prices than they would otherwise—I can't go into Target and buy a Macy's dress or a thrift-store couch, for example. But these policies also add value for consumers, who can expect consistency across Target stores and have confidence that the products therein have been vetted in some way. And they benefit Target, too, in direct ways (like making it more likely that shoppers will buy Target-brand products) and indirect ways (like generating higher brand confidence and loyalty).
Stores like Target may also take other steps to boost their own products, like offering more markdowns on them, giving them better placement in store aisles, or marketing them more aggressively. They probably won't offer computer kiosks inside Targets where people can shop online at competitors. And again, nobody bats an eye at any of this. We understand there are other places where people can sell their products, and that shoppers can go elsewhere if they want products that Target doesn't sell.
It would be nuts if the federal government stepped in and said that Target must, within its own walls, give equal priority to all brands and allow shoppers to access storefronts for its competitors. Or if authorities said it's a crime to inconvenience shoppers by making them travel to different locations to shop at different stores.
Yet this is exactly what the government is doing when it comes to Apple.
In a civil complaint filed last Thursday, the DOJ and 16 state attorneys general accused Apple of violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a law allowing the government to intervene against companies said to be acting "in restraint of trade or commerce."
"Apple illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers," the DOJ states in a press release. "Apple undermines apps, products, and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone, promote interoperability, and lower costs for consumers and developers."
That sounds bad—until you read the government's theories about how Apple does this. The feds complain about practices like Apple limiting App Store offerings, charging fees to developers who sell their products there, and making iPhones more compatible with Apple products than with third-party offerings.
"When developers imagine a new product or service for iPhone consumers, Apple demands up to 30 percent of the price of an app whose content, product, or service it did not create," states the suit. "Then when a consumer wants to buy some additional service within that app, Apple extracts up to another 30 percent, again for a service Apple does not create or develop. When customers buy a coffee or pay for groceries, Apple charges a fee for every 'tap-to-pay' transaction, imposing its own form of an interchange fee on banks and a significant new cost for using credit cards."
Would app developers like to give Apple less of a cut? Undoubtedly. Would merchants like to pay no fees when people for their products? I'm sure. And they have an easy way to do this: Don't sell their apps through the Apple App Store and don't accept Apple Pay.
Again, an outside example may be instructive here. Consider a farmer's market or craft fair. Vendors often pay for a booth in such marketplaces. Vendors would probably prefer a free booth, but no one thinks this is a matter for federal intervention. Even if there are only one or two other farmer's markets or craft fairs in town, the seller still has options like opening up a new storefront or selling from a stand on the seller's existing property, just as app developers can offer their apps for download and sale on their own websites (or offer free versions within the App Store without being charged by Apple). Vendors choose to sell at centralized markets for the same reason that app developers choose to sell through the app store: It gives them a leg up. They have access to a wider consumer base, and also a level of vetting that may inspire consumer trust.
If an individual seller finds the fees make these upsides not worth it, they'll move on. If enough sellers do that, the market—in this case, the Apple App Store—will have incentive to change. It's unclear why the federal government needs to be involved at all, and it's especially unclear why it should be in the business of making more money for some companies at the expense of other companies
The Justice Department also scolds Apple for having "sole discretion to review and approve all apps and app updates" and for "prohibit[ing] the creation and use of alternative app stores curated to reflect a consumer's preferences with respect to security, privacy, or other values." And yet tech companies are increasingly being held legally liable for third-party misbehavior. If Apple exerts less control and an app that is dangerous gets through, Apple could be in trouble. And even if it won't be legally liable, it could face reputational damage if it allows too many scammy or otherwise terrible apps to be sold in its store.
Apple has a vested interest in keeping up certain standards in its app store, just as Target has a vested interest in preventing random snake oil from lining its store shelves and just as farmer's markets may want to exclude people selling buckets of moldy old crab apples.
Aside from objections to the fees and rules for app developers, the lawsuit lists five major objections related to Apple allegedly suppressing technologies that the government thinks would make iPhones better and/or more useful.
Apple makes its Apple Watch compatible only with iPhones and not with other phones. Apple allegedly suppresses "super apps" that can "provide a user with broad functionality in a single app," as well as cloud streaming game apps and third-party digital wallets. And while it doesn't prevent iPhone owners from using third-party messaging apps, it doesn't make these third-party tech tools as integrated or functional as it does it's own messaging app. For instance, Apple stops "third-party apps from sending or receiving carrier-based messages," which only Apple Messages can do. "By doing so," the complaint states, Apple "harms developers by artificially constraining the size of their user base."
It's a bizarre conception of business that says Apple should be legally obliged to help random developers—including those competing directly with Apple Messages—expand their user base.
Likewise, why should Apple have to make its smartwatch compatible with smartphones other than iPhones? Perhaps this helps steer Apple Watch owners to buy iPhones. But it may instead (or also) be true that owning an iPhone steers people to buy an Apple Watch, or that the exclusive arrangement leads some people to avoid both Apple Watches and iPhones. In any event, none of this is the government's business.
One of the dumbest parts of the complaint is where it says Apple could make more money if it had less rules for app developers, since "limiting the features and functionality created by third-party developers—and therefore available to iPhone users—makes the iPhone worse and deprives Apple of the economic value it would gain as the platform operator." The DOJ goes on to say that "it makes no economic sense for Apple to sacrifice the profits it would earn from new features and functionality unless it has some other compensating reason to do so, such as protecting its monopoly profits."
It's a funny definition of a monopoly being used here—like saying Kleenex has a monopoly on Kleenex. Obviously, it does. But people can buy other types of facial tissues, just as Apple's control of iPhones doesn't mean people can't buy other types of smartphones.
That part of the suit also demonstrates either a lack of imagination or disingenuous framing, because there are quite obvious reasons other than monopoly maintenance why Apple might want to limit the functionality or availability of third-party apps. Perhaps Apple sees it as better for its bottom line to streamline the iPhone user experience than to offer a wider array of messaging options. Perhaps it thinks iPhone users prize design uniformity and quality control over access to more apps. Perhaps Apple worries that it's not designed to function as well with certain third-party tools, and that users would blame the bugs not on the third parties but on Apple. The idea that Apple limits what can be on iPhones or in the App Store only out of some weird monopoly maintenance ploy is just silly.
As far as consumer complaints go, of course, there's nothing wrong with some of the DOJ's concerns. We might wish that every product we owned was compatible with every other product we owned and that they worked in perfect tandem. We might wish we never had to consider tradeoffs between price, function, design, compatibility, etc.
Where this gets crazy is the federal government saying: Consumers being able to choose whether to use a product is not good enough. We're going to step in and say that this business has to make a competitor's products more accessible. It has a legal duty to undermine its own business interests to help outside—and many would argue inferior—products compete.
In the vein of other recent antitrust actions against tech companies, particularly under the Biden administration, the Apple suit relies on an absurd conception of how the law should work. And it's a conception that could seriously harm innovation, weaken the position of U.S. tech companies, and mess with products many people like.
And many people really, really love Apple products, including iPhones.
The bottom line: Nobody has to use an iPhone, and no developer has to distribute its app through the App Store. There are other ways to communicate, other smartphone options, and other ways to distribute apps (including other ways to distribute apps to iPhone users). That many people still carry iPhones and distribute their apps through the App Store speaks to the fact that many people find the phone's upsides and the App Store's upsides stronger than any downsides.
The good news is that the Supreme Court has already ruled against suppositions like those the government makes in this lawsuit.
"Under US Supreme Court precedent (e.g., Verizon v. Trinko), Apple has no antitrust duty to assist its competitors or to afford them special access to aspects of its platform, and it appears unlikely that the DOJ will win in court," said Mercatus Center antitrust and competition scholar Alden Abbott, former general council with the Federal Trade Commission, in an emailed statement.
The suit "ignores the Supreme Court's teaching that antitrust protects the competitive process, not individual competitors," Abbott added. "Major globally powerful foreign firms would be the real beneficiaries of this lawsuit, weakening the competitive position of the US digital sector vis-à-vis China."
• Abortion is back before the Supreme Court this week.
• Having filed a lawsuit against Pornhub and its sister sites, Texas' attorney general is now suing two more adult platforms—xHamster and the webcam service Chaturbate—over an alleged failure to follow the state's age verification law.
• Corbin Barthold describes "the bizarre factions fighting over the TikTok ban bill."
The post The Absurd Apple Antitrust Lawsuit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Defying the snoops at the FBI, Apple has announced it is implementing end-to-end encryption options for the data people store on iCloud, making it all the more difficult for hackers, criminals, and the aforementioned government agency to access your info without your knowledge or permission.
Apple made the announcement Wednesday evening, and it should be treated as a big deal by anybody who values data security. Apple had been planning to offer users the ability to encrypt their backed-up iCloud data years ago, but it reportedly dropped the plan in 2018 after the FBI objected.
Apple currently offers end-to-end encryption on its iMessage services so that messages can't be intercepted or read by third parties (including government authorities). But most data stored on iCloud are not encrypted, leaving them available to be accessed by law enforcement with subpoenas or warrants. It also leaves those data susceptible to hacking, which has led to cases like this one from June, where a California man was convicted and sentenced to nine years in federal prison for breaking into thousands of iCloud accounts, stealing private photos and videos of nude women, and sharing them on the internet.
In its announcement, Apple invoked the increasing number of data breaches as justification for this transition: "Experts say the total number of data breaches more than tripled between 2013 and 2021, exposing 1.1 billion personal records across the globe in 2021 alone. Increasingly, companies across the technology industry are addressing this growing threat by implementing end-to-end encryption in their offerings."
As we've seen in China's attempts to crack down on protesters demonstrating against COVID-19 lockdowns, encrypted communications helped citizens organize against authoritarian surveillance from the government (and it appears as though those protests might actually be working). Apple noted that part of the reason for adding new protections is to provide an "optional level of security for users such as journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats."
This all sounds wonderful in terms of citizen privacy, so of course the FBI is grumpy about it. Never mind all the breaches. Never mind all the crimes that encryption prevents. The FBI only cares that encryption gets in the way of its own investigations.
In a statement emailed to media outlets, an FBI representative said that while the agency sees protecting data security and privacy as a "top priority," it nevertheless sees end-to-end encryption as a threat: "This hinders our ability to protect the American people from criminal acts ranging from cyber-attacks and violence against children to drug trafficking, organized crime and terrorism. End-to-end and user-only-access encryption erodes law enforcement's ability to combat these threats and administer justice for the American public."
The FBI and other law enforcement agencies in other countries are insistent that tech platforms create special backdoors that bypass encryption so that the government can access these secure data. End-to-end encryption defies warrants and subpoenas, making it difficult if not impossible for agencies to access protected data even when authorized by law.
But in practical terms, there is no such thing as a backdoor that only authorized government officials can access, even if we were to assume these officials would never abuse such access (and we shouldn't assume that). Keys and bypasses through encryption can and do escape controlled environments and risk everybody's safety. The federal government has faced a number of data breaches. It's extremely reckless for the FBI or any other government law enforcement agency to insist on these backdoors. The potential to facilitate crime, espionage, and secret government surveillance is most certainly worse than the assistance they provide.
Apple says the new bolstered iCloud encryption should be available to Americans by the end of the year and will roll out to the rest of the world in early 2023. It also announced a couple of new security features, including compatibility for physical security keys as a form of two-factor authentication, should users want that extra layer of security.
The Washington Post notes that Apple has also fully dropped its plan to scan all user photos for child porn. Apple announced this plan in 2021 to jeers from privacy experts. While few would object to the goal of wiping out child pornography, Apple's plan involved scanning every single iPhone user's images to see if any of them match a database of known images of child sex abuse. This was a significant unwarranted privacy intrusion, and experts noted that even with the best of intentions, such a system could be adapted and used for authoritarian purposes or censorship.
Apple quickly put its plans on pause, and now has apparently fully abandoned them. Federal law already requires that Apple report any images of child sexual abuse to authorities whenever it finds any in its systems, but it doesn't require monitoring of users' accounts. Violating our privacy just to make sure we weren't breaking the law seems like a pretty lousy way to treat customers, and it's good that Apple has shut that idea down.
The post Apple Announces Stronger Data Encryption, to the Dismay of FBI Snoops appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Lawsuit asks whether livestreaming cops is protected by the First Amendment. It's well-established that Americans have a First Amendment right to record police. But do we have the right to livestream that recording? That's the central question in a case currently before a federal appeals court.
The question stems from a 2018 traffic stop in Winterville, North Carolina. When police pulled over a car in which Dijon Sharpe was a passenger, Sharpe whipped out his phone and started a Facebook Live stream.
One cop tried to grab Sharpe's phone, saying "we ain't gonna do Facebook Live, because that's an officer safety issue."
"Facebook Live … we're not gonna have, okay, because that lets everybody y'all follow on Facebook that we're out here," said another officer. He told Sharpe that "in the future, if you're on Facebook Live, your phone is gonna be taken from you … and if you don't want to give up your phone, you'll go to jail."
"Is that a law?" Sharpe asks in the recording. "That's not a law."
Sharpe is right—there's no law explicitly saying one can't livestream interactions with police officers. But there's also little legal precedent for what happens when one attempts to and cops curtail that attempt.
"No circuit court has yet ruled on whether passengers in traffic stops can be blocked from recording police or on whether live-streaming is different from merely recording," notes The Washington Post. And the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which will hear this case, "has not ruled on the right to record at all."
The 4th Circuit heard oral arguments for the case—Dijon Sharpe v. Winterville Police Department—in October.
"This case is important; it's going to affect thousands of thousands," Sharpe's attorney, Andrew Tutt, told the court. "This case has important consequences for every police-citizen interaction in this circuit."
Sharpe said he had wanted to livestream the traffic stop because he thought it was suspicious (the cops said the car's driver ran a stop sign, something Sharpe said did not happen) and because of previous negative interactions he and family members have had with police. His cousin, Dontae Sharpe, was imprisoned for 24 years on murder charges despite a key witness recanting testimony after trial (Dontae was finally released and formally pardoned in 2021). "Since getting involved in efforts to free Dontae, Dijon says his encounters with police grew increasingly hostile, culminating in his being Tasered and beaten by police officers in 2017," notes the Post. "With no video to support his version of events" that time, "he was forced in court to apologize to them."
This time around, Sharpe wanted to make sure there was a real-time recording of events that police could not later alter or delete. After an officer told him this wasn't OK, he sued.
A U.S. district court sided with the cops. "The Fourth Circuit has not held in a published opinion that an individual's right under the First Amendment to record a traffic stop is clearly established, much less held that an individual has a right to record and real-time broadcast a traffic stop from within the stopped car," wrote the judge in an August 2020 decision. Thereby the police could not have known their actions were wrong, and were entitled to qualified immunity.
"Seven federal appellate courts have affirmed that there is a First Amendment right to film the police," notes the Post. "But all said there can be 'reasonable' restrictions on that right, and the U.S. Supreme Court has not clarified what counts."
Sharpe then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. And a slew of civil liberties organizations have filed briefs on behalf of Sharpe's position.
The appeals court "should hold that…the right to record is not limited to recording for future publication," states the American Civil Liberties Union in one such brief. "Rather, it protects—and, if anything, derives from—the right to publish and disseminate video, including the right to do so instantaneously. The First Amendment protects the choice of when to publish just as it does the choice of what to publish, and whether to publish at all. In other words, the First Amendment protects the right to livestream, which
enables individuals to simultaneously record and broadcast."
"Any reasonable officer should have known that preventing Mr. Sharpe from livestreaming his encounter with police would violate his clearly established First Amendment rights," states a brief from the Institute for Justice. "After all, six federal circuit courts, the Department of Justice ('DOJ'), and numerous local governments have long agreed that the First Amendment protects an individual's right to record police in public."
"Police have great power. Civilian recording of police officers serves the public's vital interest in ensuring that police exercise this power lawfully," states a brief from the National Police Accountability Project.
In holding that qualified immunity applied in this case, "the district court heavily emphasized that the many other cases on this subject did not involve the exact facts as Mr. Sharpe's case—specifically, that he was not just recording the encounter, but also 'real-time broadcasting with the ability to interact via messaging applications in real-time with those watching a traffic stop from inside the stopped vehicle,'" notes the Cato Institute in its brief.
"But this approach to assessing whether rights are clearly established is exactly the sort of misapplication of qualified-immunity precedent that the Supreme Court recently warned against in Taylor v. Riojas," the Cato brief continues. "Taylor reaffirmed that the fundamental question in qualified immunity cases is whether the defendant had 'fair warning' that their conduct was unlawful, not whether there is a prior case with functionally identical facts."
"Unfortunately, the sort of misapplication of qualified immunity employed by the district court—construing 'clearly established law' to effectively require a case with identical facts—is no isolated error, but rather part of an all-too-common practice in lower courts," the brief reads. "That persistent misunderstanding of qualified immunity not only gets the law wrong, but its application to police officers has exacerbated a growing crisis of accountability for law enforcement officers generally."
Appeals court won't pause ruling against student loan forgiveness plan. After a Texas judge ruled President Joe Biden's student loan debt forgiveness plan unconstitutional, the Biden administration appealed to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to pause the judge's order as the administration's appeal plays out. The court said no.
"A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit in Wednesday's brief order declined to put Pittman's ruling on hold while the administration appealed his decision, but the court directed that the appeal be heard on an expedited basis," reports Reuters. "The White House had no immediate comment but the administration has said that if the 5th Circuit declined to halt Pittman's order it would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene."
Ohio arrests journalist covering murder trial. "An ongoing murder trial involving multiple defendants has resulted in the editor of small local paper being arrested for performing an act of journalism," reports Techdirt.
The case revolves around recorded testimony from one of the defendants, Jake Wagner. In general, "courts permit recordings and broadcasting of criminal trials," but "the relevant exception here is that witnesses can request their testimony not be recorded or broadcast and, if the court agrees, this permission is revoked during this testimony," Techdirt's Tim Cushing explains. Wagner "made this request and had it granted. Nonetheless, someone attending the trial recorded it and passed it on to Derek Myers, who runs the Scioto Valley Guardian."
Myers and the Guardian published some of the audio with this note:
The Guardian received a portion of Jake Wagner's testimony on his first day on the witness stand. The Guardian wants to disclose that the audio was not recorded by a member of the media and was submitted to the Guardian's newsroom by a courthouse source who is authorized to have their cell phone in the room.
Nonetheless, officers with the Pike County Sheriff's Office arrested Myers and seized his laptop and his phone.
Myers was charged with having used the contents of an illegally obtained recording. But the First Amendment protects Myers and his paper from prosecution for merely publishing information or audio of public interest that it obtained legally, even if that audio was illegally obtained by someone.
As Cushing puts it: "This wasn't wiretapping. This was journalism."
While Myers should ultimately beat this, he still "had to post a $20,000 bond, must submit to alcohol/drug tests [???], and keep his schedule open to attend any court hearings until the charges are either dropped, or he's cleared by the court," notes Cushing. "Why must he do this? Because the government is clearly in the wrong, yet has the luxury of being wrong until proven otherwise."
More bad news for the crypto industry: One of the world's largest crypto exchanges, Kraken, is laying off nearly a third of its work force, to the tune of around 1,100 people being let go. CEO and co-founder Jesse Powell called the move necessary "in order to adapt to current market conditions."
"Over the past few years, hundreds of millions of new users entered the crypto space and millions of new clients put their trust in Kraken during that time. We had to grow fast, more than tripling our workforce in order to provide those clients with the quality and service they expect of us," writes Powell in a blog post on the Kraken website. "Since the start of this year, macroeconomic and geopolitical factors have weighed on financial markets. This resulted in significantly lower trading volumes and fewer client sign-ups. We responded by slowing hiring efforts and avoiding large marketing commitments. Unfortunately, negative influences on the financial markets have continued and we have exhausted preferable options for bringing costs in line with demand."
• Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) has been voted House Democratic leader, replacing Nancy Pelosi.
• Officials keep finding new ways to access private records without a warrant.
• Indiana's attorney general continues to try and punish a doctor who provided an abortion to 10-year-old girl.
• "Today might not be a great time to buy a home. Tomorrow might not either," writes Annie Lowrey.
• On the demise of Amazon's Alexa.
• "A new expanded law on 'foreign agents' in Russia comes into force Thursday, signifying an intensifying crackdown on free speech and opposition under President Vladimir Putin that has accelerated as his fortunes in Ukraine have deteriorated," reports CNN.
The post You Can Record Video of Police in Action. But Can You Livestream That Video? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>You would think that the midst of yet another international scandal over governments spying on people who annoy them would be an inopportune time to call for curbs on tools that protect privacy, but that underestimates the compulsion that drives authoritarians. The world keeps offering evidence that encrypting communications is important, especially as a shield against the powers that be, but petty officials can't help but find such barriers frustrating to their eavesdropping impulses, even when they already have plenty of tools at their disposal for investigations legitimate and otherwise.
"As our two agencies work to protect citizens on both sides of the Atlantic, we have come to conclude that the single most problematic barrier to doing so stems from unregulated encryption," write Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., district attorney of New York County, and Catherine De Bolle, executive director of Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union. "To be clear, we both support strong encryption, just not unregulated encryption. No sector — in this case, the tech industry — should be allowed to dictate the rules of access to digital data for all of society, with limited regard to the wider impact those rules might have."
Despite the two officials engaging in popular tech-bashing, it's obvious that companies don't "dictate the rules of access to digital data for all of society." Through their actions and the tools they adopt, people communicating with one another have the greatest input into the security of their data. Vance and De Bolle would replace those multitudes of individual choices with one rule-maker: government. That letting government mandate some sort of access to private communications has a down side is apparent from the reactions of people who understand the technology and point out that you can't punch holes in privacy protections and be sure they'll only be used by good guys against bad guys.
"No matter what you call it, a backdoor is a backdoor," the Internet Society's Jeff Wilbur and Ryan Polk pointed out last year. "Any method that gives a third-party access to encrypted data creates a major vulnerability that weakens the security of law-abiding citizens and the Internet at large."
"Backdoors to encryption are like chinks in an otherwise impenetrable chain — once you've opened up a vulnerability, you cannot choose who can exploit it," agrees Adam Hadley of the UN-sponsored Tech Against Terrorism project in a letter written as a rebuttal to Vance and De Bolle.
Vance and De Bolle aren't specific in what they want in terms of regulation for encryption, but they demand access for government agencies—which means weakened privacy protections. They are specific in the list of horribles they cite as threats protected by encryption: child sex trafficking, organized crime, ransomware, and terrorists are all supposedly the main beneficiaries of encryption. Left off that list, though, are the activists, journalists, and thorns-in-the-side recently found to be targeted by many governments through the use of a single package of commercially available spy software.
"NSO Group's spyware has been used to facilitate human rights violations around the world on a massive scale, according to a major investigation into the leak of 50,000 phone numbers of potential surveillance targets," Amnesty International noted on July 18. "These include heads of state, activists and journalists, including Jamal Khashoggi's family."
"Amid the varied cast of people whose numbers appear on a list of individuals selected by NSO Group's client governments, one name stands out as particularly ironic," reports The Guardian. "Pavel Durov, the enigmatic Russian-born tech billionaire who has built his reputation on creating an unhackable messaging app, finds his own number on the list."
Apologists for the surveillance state will object that the United States government isn't like its authoritarian counterparts in Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia, which used the spyware to monitor political opponents. But sometimes, there's good reason to fear the state in supposedly free countries.
"The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the 'war on domestic terrorism,' and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people," writes John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, about U.S. torture. "This is the same FBI that tried to force Martin Luther King to commit suicide. This is the same FBI that illegally spied on U.S. citizens who were opposed to the Vietnam War. It's the same FBI that had an agent illegally impersonate an Associated Press reporter and illegally infect a 15-year-old's computer with malicious software."
As officialdom turns against not just those who expose misdeeds, but also those who support out-of-power political factions, we have all the more reason to keep our communications private. What we say may be less important than how creatively it can be interpreted by government officials determined to make an arrest, and there's no reason to make their jobs any easier.
Not that intercepting emails, text messages, and phone calls is universally impossible for government investigators willing to put in the effort. In addition to NSO, companies including Grayshift and Cellebrite specialize in helping governments bypass or crack encrypted communication. Success isn't guaranteed, but few things are. Vance and De Bolle even concede the existence of these capabilities.
"Where tools are available to unlock encrypted devices, however, they are often expensive," they write. "For agencies with fewer resources, funding expensive decryption techniques is impossible."
So, Vance and De Bolle's big complaint seems to be that conducting criminal investigations involves time and expense. If only catching bad guys didn't take such a bite out of weekends and budgets!
Of course, "regulated" encryption sounds like exactly the sort of compromised technology that real criminals and terrorists want to avoid. Earlier this year, law enforcement in a dozen countries stung criminal organizations with a network of encrypted phones created by the agencies themselves. It was a significant policing coup, but demand for the phones, and for devices offered by an earlier actual underground service, demonstrate that criminals and terrorists aren't interested in communications services that offer access to cops. They'll seek alternatives that remain unregulated even if that's illegal.
"Terrorists are highly mobile online and would be quick to migrate to services unwilling to cooperate with law enforcement," writes Tech Against Terrorism's Hadley.
The ultimate targets of regulated encryption, then, will be regular people using commonly available technology to share messages that annoy powerful people. Vance and De Bolle talk a lot about curbing privacy protections for criminals and terrorists, but the regulations they demand would increase risk less for bad actors than for you and me.
The post Top Cops Pick the Midst of an International Spying Scandal To Demand Encryption Curbs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Despite much whining on the part of law enforcement about the alleged perils to public order posed by encryption, it's no secret that cops can often bypass measures intended to protect privacy. Now, documents obtained by Vice's Motherboard describe just how police agencies use one tool to extract data from Apple devices. It's more evidence that officials aren't stymied by encryption half as often as they claim, but just want to paw through our information without effort or expense.
"'How to unlock and EXTRACT DATA from Apple Mobile Devices with GrayKey,' the instructions, seemingly written by the San Diego Police Department, read," Vice's Joseph Cox reveals of the documentation obtained with a public records request. "The instructions describe the various conditions it claims allow a GrayKey connection: the device being turned off (known as Before First Unlock, or BFU); the phone is turned on (After First Unlock, or AFU); the device having a damaged display, and when the phone has low battery," he adds.
GrayKey's existence isn't a revelation, though the documentation provides interesting insight into its capabilities. Georgia-based Grayshift openly markets the product on its website, including a recently released version that works on Android phones.
"Annual licensing for GrayKey with iOS and Android support begins at USD $9,995," the company notes.
Malwarebytes Labs got a glimpse of a GrayKey device in 2018 and published images along with a description of its operation.
"GrayKey is a gray box, four inches wide by four inches deep by two inches tall, with two lightning cables sticking out of the front," Thomas Reed wrote for the security firm. "Two iPhones can be connected at one time, and are connected for about two minutes. After that, they are disconnected from the device, but are not yet cracked. Some time later, the phones will display a black screen with the passcode, among other information. The exact length of time varies, taking about two hours in the observations of our source."
That two-hour extraction time still seems valid based on information on the Grayshift website. GrayKey uses a brute-force approach to gain access to devices, and the instructions obtained by Vice reveal that alphanumeric passcodes offer greater challenges to the approach than number-only codes—especially if users avoid using real words. Even after a device is returned, the intrusion isn't necessarily over. "As part of a feature called HideUI, GrayKey also allows agencies to install the agent which surreptitiously records the user's passcode if authorities hand their phone back to them," Cox cautions.
But Grayshift wasn't the first company to help law enforcement agencies break into encrypted devices. In 2016, Apple repeatedly told the FBI to pound sand when asked to bypass the privacy protections on its phones. The FBI then turned to Cellebrite, based in Israel, to gain access to a locked iPhone.
"Cellebrite, the Israeli company, said its sales increased 38 percent in the first quarter to $53 million as more police departments bought its tools to hack into suspects' phones," The New York Times reported earlier this month, indicating the company is still active in that market (that very busy market, I'll add).
"[H]igh-profile cases in which law enforcement cannot access the contents of a phone overshadows a more significant change: the rise in law enforcement's ability to search the thousands of phones that they can access in a wide range of cases," according to an October 2020 report from Upturn, a nonprofit that scrutinizes police use of technology. "Our records show that at least 2,000 agencies have purchased a range of products and services offered by mobile device forensic tool vendors. Law enforcement agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia have these tools."
"We found that state and local law enforcement agencies have performed hundreds of thousands of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant," the report adds.
That doesn't mean that tech companies are complacent about hacking tools and flaws in their security. Grayshift "is constantly in a cat-and-mouse game with Apple, which tries to fix security issues that GrayKey takes advantage of," observes Vice's Cox. The result, undoubtedly, is improved technology all around, with vulnerabilities ultimately detected and closed off not only to law-enforcement contractors, but also to criminal hackers.
That said, police and intelligence agencies aren't restricted to waging technological cold war against cryptographers and tech companies; they also rely on old-fashioned sneakiness. After taking down Phantom Secure, an organization that specialized in offering secure communications to criminals, law enforcement set up a fake outfit to take its place.
"In an innovative effort, the FBI, with the help of the Australian Federal Police, launched their own encrypted communications platform and supplied more than 12,000 devices to hundreds of criminal organizations that operate around the globe," the FBI announced on June 8. Needless to say, the provided devices protected nobody's privacy and resulted in hundreds of arrests.
So, law enforcement would seem to be doing just fine, sucking the information out of the vast majority of targeted devices (often indiscriminately) while occasionally running up against the occasional tougher nut. Even in those cases, some jurisdictions allow for the issuance of warrants to compel the surrender of passwords, or else. That's a lot of arrows in cop quivers.
But governments still insist that "tech companies should include mechanisms in the design of their encrypted products and services whereby governments, acting with appropriate legal authority, can gain access to data in a readable and usable format," as a multi-national manifesto signed by the United States reiterated just last fall. Privacy protections of any sort, no matter how frequently bypassed, just seem to offend the sort of people who go into government.
That said, turnabout is fair play. Matthew Rosenfield, the security researcher who, as Moxie Marlinspike, created the Signal secure messaging app, says it's possible to install software on your own device that will compromise the technology police use to extract data.
"[W]e found that it's possible to execute arbitrary code on a Cellebrite machine simply by including a specially formatted but otherwise innocuous file in any app on a device that is subsequently plugged into Cellebrite and scanned. There are virtually no limits on the code that can be executed," he wrote in April of this year.
The privacy wars won't be cooling down anytime soon.
The post Cops Say Encryption Hinders Investigations. These Documents Say Otherwise. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Turning on someone's cellphone counts as searching it, according to a new federal court ruling. This means that for law enforcement officers, merely pressing a phone's on button and looking at the screen could require a warrant.
"Generally, courts have held that law enforcement can compel you to use your body, such as your fingerprint (or your face), to unlock a phone but that they cannot compel you to share knowledge, such as a PIN," notes Kate Cox at Ars Technica. "In this recent case, however, the FBI did not unlock the phone. Instead, they only looked at the phone's lock screen for evidence."
The case involves a man in Washington state named Joseph Sam, who local police arrested in May 2019. At the time, the cops confiscated his Motorola smartphone and turned it on yet didn't unlock the phone or search it. But this past February, FBI agents turned on Sam's phone and took a picture of the locked screen—which displayed the name Streezy—for use as evidence in a robbery case against Sam.
Sam's lawyer objected, suggesting that the FBI needed a warrant to look at the phone and, since it had not had one, that any information the FBI gained front Sam's phone screen should be suppressed.
A federal judge agreed.
In a May 18 decision, John C. Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the District of Seattle noted that there was a legal difference between what local cops had done in this case and what the FBI did:
The police's examination took place either incident to a lawful arrest or as part of the police's efforts to inventory the personal effects found during Mr. Sam's arrest. The FBI's examination, by contrast, occurred long after the police had arrested Mr. Sam and inventoried his personal effects. Those examinations present significantly different legal issues…
The local cops' examination of the phone, Coughenour explained,
may have been a search incident to arrest or an inventory search—two special circumstances where the Government does not always need a warrant to conduct a search. Unfortunately, the Court cannot decide whether the police needed a warrant because the circumstances surrounding the police's examination are unclear.
The FBI actions are a different matter:
The Fourth Amendment protects people from "unreasonable searches and seizures" of "their persons, house, papers, and effects." The default rule is that a search is unreasonable unless conducted pursuant to a warrant.
This default rule makes the term "search" critically important because the term's definition often dictates when the Government needs to obtain a warrant. Over time, the Supreme Court has defined "search" in two distinct ways. The first establishes a "baseline" of Fourth Amendment protections: the Government engages in a search if it physically intrudes on a constitutionally protected area to obtain information. The second definition expands Fourth Amendment protections beyond notions of property. Under that definition, the Government also engages in a search if it intrudes on a person's reasonable expectation of privacy.
Here, the FBI physically intruded on Mr. Sam's personal effect when the FBI powered on his phone to take a picture of the phone's lock screen….The FBI therefore "searched" the phone within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment.
Since it did this without a warrant, the judge ruled, "the search was unconstitutional."
Good news for Virginians:
BREAKING: VA Gov. Ralph Northam just signed a law to decriminalize marijuana possession. The new law reclassifies marijuana possession as a civil penalty with a fine up to $25.
— Kellan Howell (@kellanhowell) May 21, 2020
"We are not going to close the country" again. Once again, President Donald Trump is pretending that he has the authority to dictate whether companies across the country can operate. At a Thursday press conference, Trump told reporters that no matter what happens with COVID-19, "we are not closing our country" again.
"We are going to put out the fires," Trump said. "We're not going to close the country."
For months now, Trump has been acting like he has the authority to make this call. But the law is clear on this: Whether businesses can open—and what precautions people must take to use them—rests with state and local leaders. Trump can offer them advice on what to do, and he can rant and rave on TV and Twitter to his heart's content, but the decisions are not his to make.
Alas, a lot of the press likes to play along with the president's delusions. For weeks, we were regaled with stories about how Trump was forcing meat processing plants with infected employees to get back to business. It wasn't true.
• No, it's not true that one in three children coming across America's southern border are victims of sex trafficking (despite the ridiculous claims of the perennially truth-challenged folks at Prager U).
• More than a third of the people who have COVID-19 are asymptomatic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In addition, the agency's "best estimate" is that 0.4 percent of people with COVID-19 systems will die.
• At both the CDC and some state health departments, the authorities have been lumping together tests for active COVID-19 infections with tests for COVID-19 antibodies. This skews the data in several important ways.
• The Biden campaign has allegedly asked Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) to undergo vetting as a potential running mate.
• The FBI is investigating the police murder of Breonna Taylor.
• Study: Sweden's "herd immunity" strategy isn't panning out.
• Despite being the first state to start reopening, "Georgia now leads the country in terms of the proportion of its workforce applying for unemployment assistance," reports Politico.
• Facebook announced yesterday that it will let most employees continue to work from home—wherever that home might be—indefinitely, although workers switching from San Francisco to lower-cost-of-living locales may have to take a pay cut.
The post Judge to FBI: You Should've Gotten a Warrant Before Turning On That Phone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If you've ever walked through a shopping center and received a text-messaged coupon for the store you've just passed, you have a hint that your location isn't exactly a secret. Somebody out there knows where you are and is putting that information to use.
That sort of proximity marketing might be super-creepy or really helpful, depending on your tastes. But location-tracking can be dangerous if you're up against a government agency, which are more prone to shackles than to special offers. Your cellphone is tracking your movements and, despite legal protections, federal, state, and local officials are finding new and disturbing ways to use that information.
Some cops saw the potential for tracking people through their phones long before the law formally caught up.
Cory Hutcheson, the former sheriff of Mississippi County, Missouri, was sentenced last April to six months in federal prison and four on house arrest for illegally tracking people's phones without a warrant. Among the people he tracked without legal cause were his predecessor in office, state troopers, and a county judge.
"For a three year period, including after being elected Sheriff of Mississippi County, Hutcheson uploaded false and fraudulent documents to a law enforcement database to obtain the location of over 200 mobile phone users," according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Missouri. "Hutcheson submitted thousands of requests and obtained the location data of hundreds individual phone subscribers without valid legal authorization, and without the consent or knowledge of the targeted individual."
Hutcheson did his tracking through Securus, a prison phone provider that offered law enforcement officials location services on communications devices.* According to a 2018 ZDNet investigation into the relationship, Securus got its cellphone location data from LocationSmart, which partners with major mobile communications providers. The arrangement bypassed restrictions on government agencies acquiring such data directly from telecoms.
Fourth Amendment protections for cellphone location records gained a boost from Carpenter v United States in 2018, which found that "historical cell-site records present even greater privacy concerns" than GPS tagging of vehicles. But it's not yet clear how far the new protections go. Besides, Securus already required legal documentation for location requests—Hutcheson just dummied-up the paperwork.
But bad cops gonna bad cop, and they're going to do their worst with whatever tools you give them. That should be taken as a cautionary tale about the inevitable abuse of everything provided to government agencies.
Good cops—or at least, those playing by the rules—like to know where your cellphone is, too, and their actions aren't necessarily much more reassuring.
"U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement … has used [cellphone location] data to help identify immigrants who were later arrested," The Wall Street Journal reported last week. "U.S. Customs and Border Protection, another agency under DHS, uses the information to look for cellphone activity in unusual places, such as remote stretches of desert that straddle the Mexican border."
Homeland Security draws its location data from Venntel, an aggregator which itself acquires information not from telecoms, but from app companies. Think about your mapping apps, or the weather app that adjusts its forecast as you move around, or the food-ordering app that tells you which vendors are nearby. Those handy capabilities require tracking your movements, and those movements are valuable to end-users that include the Department of Homeland Security.
That said, most apps obscure individual identities in their shared data. The information purchased by the Department of Homeland Security should reveal where phones are and their movements to and from places, but unlike the LocationSmart/Securus tracking, it shouldn't connect to actual identities. That pseudonymized data, available from commercial vendors and escaping (officials believe) the restrictions of the Carpenter ruling, is still useful to government officials.
"The data was used to detect cellphones moving through what was later discovered to be a tunnel created by drug smugglers between the U.S. and Mexico that terminated in a closed Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet on the U.S. side near San Luis, Ariz., said people with knowledge of the operation," the Journal notes.
But if you correlate the data from several apps, or put together a pattern of life, you can reconnect a moving dot on a map with a human identity. "Several people in the location business said that it would be relatively simple to figure out individual identities in this kind of data," according to a New York Times report on the industry.
Most of the safeguards, it should be noted, are intended to protect people from hackers and private sector misuse of personal information. Even the Carpenter decision doesn't make specific location data on people's movements, linked to their names, unavailable—it just says that government officials need to get a warrant to track individuals. The sort of individual cellphone tracking that Sheriff Hutcheson applied to his political enemies remains available to government agencies who are willing and able to secure a search warrant.
The phones in our pockets act as location beacons, signaling generic movements of people to agencies who might want to know where groups are gathering, and broadcasting our personal locations to officials who are willing to jump through the legal hoops (or pretend to do so) to map out our travels.
Just remember that, no matter what safeguards are in place, your super-helpful cellphone is a terrible tattletale. When you carry it, your phone creates a continuous trail of where you've been, and it will tell anybody who asks in the right way.
*CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article suggested that Securus was still in operation and may be available for general use. Before its discontinuation in 2018, the service was offered only to law enforcement officials who provided documentation.
The post Where Have You Been? Your Cellphone Knows and Is Willing to Tell appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Today, I am asking our chairmen to proceed with articles of impeachment." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced this morning that she's asking the House Judiciary Committee to start drafting up impeachment articles. Watch here.
Sen. Rand Paul misleads on Devin Nunes' phone records. In an interview with Louisville TV station WHAS, the Kentucky Republican said that Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) "has been spying on Devin Nunes' phone records, has confiscated his phone records."
Nunes, a Republican, is ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, which is presiding over the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. Schiff chairs the committee.
"I think that's alarming that one member of Congress could be looking at the phone records of another member of Congress," Paul told the station. "Sounds to me as if it would be illegal, and I think it needs to be investigated." He continued:
If we're going to live in a world where one party can subpoena the phone records or look at the phone records of another party, that's a very worrisome world….I'm very, very concerned about the abuse of power coming from Adam Schiff.
Coming from a civil libertarian like Paul, such accusations carry more weight than when coming from other Trump sycophants. But Paul's version of events here leaves out a key detail: Schiff never set out to obtain records of Nunes' phone activity.
Some of Nunes' phone calls were unearthed as part of the impeachment inquiry, because Nunes was on the phone with a lot of folks suspected of doing weird shit involving Ukraine and the Bidens. Here's the relevant part of the Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report:
Phone records obtained by the Committees show frequent communication between key players during this phase of the scheme. Between April 1 and April 7, [Lev] Parnas exchanged approximately 16 calls with [Rudy] Giuliani (longest duration approximately seven minutes) and approximately 10 calls with [John] Solomon (longest duration approximately nine minutes).
Solomon authored several op-eds suggesting that when Joe Biden was vice president, he tried to get Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin fired in order to protect his son, Hunter Biden.
Over the course of the four days following the April 7 article, phone records show contacts between Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Parnas, Representative Devin Nunes, and Mr. Solomon. Specifically, Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Parnas were in contact with one another, as well as with Mr. Solomon. Phone records also show contacts on April 10 between Mr. Giuliani and Rep. Nunes, consisting of three short calls in rapid succession, followed by a text message, and ending with a nearly three minute call. Later that same day, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Solomon had a four minute, 39 second call.
No one went specifically looking for Nunes' phone records, and certainly not in the willy-nilly witch-hunt manner that Paul implies. But there he is, on the calls with the folks at the center of impeachment inquiry conduct.
Moreover, the phone records were requested and reviewed by the bipartisan House Intelligence Committee, not some rogue gang of surveillance-happy Democrats. And they were obtained (likely via subpoena) directly from AT&T, not via some secret federal fishing expedition blessed by the FISA court.
I know we're all used to it by now but it's still pretty crazy there's no political penalty to be paid for just pretending the facts are completely different from what they are anymore. https://t.co/rhVsNbBofT
— Andrew Egger (@EggerDC) December 4, 2019
In Paul's interview with WHAS, he also claimed that Adam Schiff had spied on Solomon's phone records, using this to launch into some somber rhetoric about how "abhorrent" it is to live in a world "where Congress can look at a journalist's phone records."
A Democratic aide told the Washington Examiner:
The Republican minority of the three committees has had access to these subpoenaed records, and knows full well that neither Mr. Nunes nor Mr. Solomon were subpoenaed, nor were their call record.
This week Nunes filed a lawsuit against CNN for reporting on Lev Parnas' claim that Nunes went to Vienna to discuss the Bidens with Shokin, the prosecutor that Trump associates say Joe Biden tried to get fired.
The post Pelosi Moves Forward With Impeachment; Rand Paul Wrong on Devin Nunes' Phone Records appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A recent court ruling highlights the importance of strong legal protections for smartphone privacy–and should remind us that current law does only a scattershot job of protecting our electronic data.
In an opinion published January 10, a federal magistrate judge in Oakland, California, ruled that the Fifth Amendment's protections against self-incrimination extend to phones equipped with biometric locks. Federal police can search a residence, the court ruled, but may not force anyone present during a search to hold their finger, thumb, iris, or other body part up against a phone to try to unlock it.
This opinion follows a series of cases involving compelled disclosures of passphrases that unlock mobile phones. Some courts, but not all, have reached the conclusion that forcing a criminal defendant to divulge a passphrase runs afoul of the Fifth Amendment, which says no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
There are good reasons to think this is the right result, at least in this case. Despite determined efforts by the cypherpunks in the 1990s, as technology has advanced, so has the amount and variety of data that law enforcement can access. Most electronic communications, including email and Facebook Messenger, are stored in unencrypted form and can be obtained by police. AT&T, Verizon, and other wireless providers record the locations of customers' mobile devices, which are accessible with a warrant. Records of calls receive less privacy protection than that.
Our society's databasification has reached an advanced stage. The vast majority of transactions at stores, restaurants, and gas stations use credit and debit cards instead of cash, and law enforcement can obtain those records without a warrant (sometimes even in real time). Cloud storage has largely replaced local storage. Traffic cameras, automatic license plate identification, and electronic toll tags add to this pool of data.
Any one of these developments might not have had a dramatic impact on privacy. Taken together, they've handed law enforcement an all-encompassing suite of investigative powers: the Justice Department's Electronic Surveillance Manual (2005 edition) weighs in at no fewer than 228 pages. As databases balloon and governmental authority expands, electronic privacy has shrunk.
Taking a muscular view of Fifth Amendment protections for mobile devices can tilt this balance back toward the individual.
This brings us to the January 10 ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge Kandis Westmore, which involves a criminal investigation into alleged extortion. Some suspects allegedly used Facebook Messenger to threaten to distribute an embarrassing video unless the victim paid them off. Police sought a court order allowing them to raid an Oakland residence and use the biometrics–faces, irises, fingerprints, thumbprints–of anyone present to unlock any electronic devices discovered in that search.
It's not a perfect test case for either law enforcement or privacy advocates. First, because law enforcement has the ability to use legal process to obtain the communications and other account data including IP address directly from Facebook, it's not clear that unlocking any mobile devices is necessary. Second, the request to unlock mobile devices seized from "any individual present at the time of the search"–even if that person is an innocent guest and not a suspect–is overly broad and intrusive. A narrower request from prosecutors would avoid these constitutional questions.
If the Justice Department appeals, it will be able to raise fairly strong arguments: if criminal defendants can be forced to provide fingerprints, blood tests, cheek DNA swabs, handwriting samples, and voice samples, why not biometric samples as well? Courts have ruled such compelled activities are not "testimonial," meaning the Fifth Amendment presents no obstacle to the government demanding them.
On the other hand, courts have taken a dim view of governmental fishing expeditions into a potential defendant's records. Clinton crony Webb Hubbell, who was investigated by Ken Starr in a case that ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, objected to Starr's demands for tens of thousands of pages of personal files. A majority of the justices agreed with Hubbell's arguments, saying it has "long been settled that [the Fifth Amendment's] protection encompasses compelled statements that lead to the discovery of incriminating evidence." (Also off-limits under the Fifth Amendment, because of its testimonial nature, is a compelled polygraph test.)
Courts should extend the same logic to our phones, which store far more data than appeared in Hubbell's Whitewater Development Corporation files. As we use our phones for increasingly personal, intimate purposes, police should need more than mere suspicion that a crime was committed–not even by you, but by someone you're visiting!–to force you to unlock it and divulge the contents.
In some cases, as virtual assistants become more capable and trusted, perhaps certain deeply personal data should simply become off-limits to the government. This would follow other legal privileges, including the attorney-client privilege, the marital privilege, the clergy privilege (protecting both formal confessions as in the Catholic Church and confidential communications to other clerics), the accountant-client privilege, and the physician-patient privilege. Not one is absolute; exceptions exist for future crime or fraud, and a privilege can be waived in other ways.
This will not happen anytime soon, if it ever does. So for now, a friendly reminder: if you have a newer iPhone, squeezing the side button and volume up or down will turn off Touch ID and Face ID. Newer Android devices have lockdown mode, which requires a passphrase to unlock your device. Perhaps future smartphones will lock themselves down when taken to a police station that's not whitelisted in advance. If the law lags behind, technology can help to fill in the gaps.
The post Judge Rules Police Cannot Require People to Unlock Their Own iPhones With Thumb or Iris appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The State of California wants to tax text messages. And not just the messages that people send after the tax passes: The California Public Utilities Commission, which cooked up the proposal, wants the levy to apply to texts sent up to five years ago.
The concept of taxing cellphone and landline use isn't actually new (see: all those surcharges at the bottom of your phone bill). But a fee specifically associated with text messages is.
The reasoning behind the new tax is relatively simple. The state's Public Purpose Program (PPP) currently funds communication services for low-income earners as well as deaf and otherwise disabled residents. The budget for that program has risen from $670 million in 2011 to $998 million in 2017. Over that same period, the telecom revenue that's subject to PPP surcharges has dropped from $16.5 billion to $11.3 billion. That's not surprising: As Engadget explains, people simply don't make as many phone calls as they used to.
The proposed fee wouldn't be imposed on a per-message basis. Instead, it would be an added surcharge based on what kind of texting service a user pays for.
Some important details of the plan are unclear. "Does the sender pay? Does the receiver pay?" asks Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of a California business group called the Bay Area Council, in an interview with USA Today. "What if you move out of state but you keep the California number? What if you drive down to Reno, Nevada and get a phone? Can you avoid the charge then? These are all things that would be really hard to resolve."
It's unclear what the text tax's impact would be on a per-customer basis. But the Bay Area Council, the California Chamber of Commerce, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and other business advocacy groups tell the San Jose Mercury News that it would cost consumers as a group roughly $44.5 million a year.
And not just future years. "Wireless carriers who have not reported and remitted surcharges on text messaging within the last five years shall identify the amount of intrastate surcharges owed on text messaging services and propose a payment plan in their advice letter filings," the proposal states. In plain Engligh, that means the proposal would retroactively apply to the past five years. Taxpayers would be on the hook for roughly $220 million right off the bat.
The tax would not apply to internet messaging services such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and iMessage—platforms that many people use instead of traditional texting. That raises the question of unequal enforcement. "Subjecting wireless carriers' text messaging traffic to surcharges that cannot be applied to the lion's share of messaging traffic and messaging providers is illogical, anti-competitive, and harmful to consumers," the CTIA, a telecommunications industry trade group, argues in a legal filing.
It's not even a given that the California Public Utilities Commission has the legal right to do this. Thanks to a rule adopted by the Federal Communications Commission yesterday, text messages are now considered an "information service," which the commission may not have the authority to tax. According to the CTIA's legal filing:
The FCC has explicitly stated that "revenues from information services…have never been included in the contribution base," and states may surcharge information service revenues only if the FCC has specifically authorized such surcharges and prescribed a jurisdictional allocation methodology for the service at issue. Because text messaging is an information service as to which the FCC has never authorized state surcharges nor prescribed an allocation methodology, the surcharges contemplated…are contrary to federal law.
The utilities commission will vote on the proposal on January 10.
The post California Regulators Want to Tax Texts You Sent 5 Years Ago appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The trope that millennials ushered in a "narcissism epidemic" can be pinned squarely on one crackpot generational consultant, Jean M. Twenge, whose cherry-picked data and superficial analysis have somehow made it into just about every major media outlet over the past decade. Now Twenge is turning her techno-panic-fueled farce to the post-millennial cohort, Gen Z, in an Atlantic magazine cover story asking, "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"
Short answer: no, and nothing in Twenge's shoddy research reasonably leads to this conclusion.
For a longer answer, check out my recent Buzzfeed article. As I point out there, "almost all of the problems with Twenge's millennial bullshit are on display in her somber analysis of Gen Z," defined as folks currently between the ages of five and 23 years old.
Perhaps aware that she needed a new shtick to stay at the top of the generational-guru game, Twenge is now claiming that, around 2012, data started showing that "many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear" (she does not say what data shows this). And Gen Z isn't just psychologically far-removed from millennials, she says—they spend their time in far different ways, too.
All of this she blames on smartphones—and it's a superficially appealing idea. Elementary school kids now have their own iPhones. My best friend's 3-year-old can take a selfie. It's quite possible that growing up with smartphones and social media may produce distinct psychological and social effects.
But it's way too early to call them yet. And Twenge's data doesn't back up her attempt to do so.
Instead, she makes grave proclamations based purely on anecdotes, correlations—such as smartphone ownership rising alongside higher rates of teen depression—and selectively wielded data. For instance, she brings up a study suggesting more unhappiness among eighth graders who are heavy social media users, but doesn't mention that the same study found no effect for 12th graders.
Twenge "reviews only those studies that support her idea and ignores studies that suggest that screen use is NOT associated with outcomes like depression and loneliness," objected psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh in Psychology Today. And "nowhere is Twenge's bias more obvious…than in some research that she actually does review but then casts aside as seemingly irrelevant to her thesis—namely, the vast counter-evidence to the 'destroyed generation' thesis contained in her headline."
So far, the counterevidence shows that the youth of Gen Z—like millennials—have lower rates of suicide, unprotected sex, teen pregnancy, illicit drug use, cigarette smoking, car accidents, and alcohol consumption than their Gen X and Boomer predecessors. As Cavanagh comments: "This is what a destroyed generation looks like?"
Read the whole thing here. For some still-relevant millennial myth-busting, see:
The post Move Over, Millennial 'Narcissists,' There's a New Generation for the Olds to Get Wrong appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Today is Jim Stewart's birthday. Reply to post a wish on his Timeline or reply with 1 to post 'Happy Birthday!'" That's the text, from Facebook to Colin Brickman, that launched a legal battle between Brickman and the social-media giant.
You see, Brickman had opted out of receiving texts from Facebook via the platform's notification settings. In response to the unwanted birthday reminder, Brickman filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook, representing "all individuals who received one or more Birthday Announcement Texts from [Facebook] to a cell phone through the use of an automated telephone dialing system at any time without their consent."
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, argues that Facebook's sending unauthorized text messages is a violation of the federal Telephone Communications Privacy Act (TCPA). "A valid TCPA claim requires plaintiff to allege (1) a defendant called a cellular telephone number; (2) using an automated telephone dialing system ('ATDS'); and (3) without the recipient's prior express consent," explains lawyer Jack Greiner in the Cincinnati Enquirer. "A text message is a 'call' within the meaning of the TCPA."
In its defense, Facebook alleged that the TCPA in unconstitutional. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court's 2015 decision in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Facebook attorneys argued that the TCPA's allowed exceptions—for emergency communications and debt collectors—render it an umpermissable, content-based restriction on speech. But the judge, while agreeing that the TCPA's restrictions are content-based (and thus subject to strict scrutiny, legally speaking), found that the law passed constitutional muster nonetheless.
The case will go forward with Facebook defending its text messages on technical grounds; it argues that the texts were not automated because Brickman and others who received them had supplied Facebook with their phone numbers. But, for now, Facebook's argument that it has a First Amendment right to send people text messages against their will has been rejected.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has twice found the TCPA to be constitutional in previous cases—Moser v. Federal Communications Commission (1995) and Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez (2016)—the Department of Justice pointed out in a memorandum in support of TCPA's constitutionality. In the latter case, the 9th Circuit rejected the idea that the government's interest with the law "only extends to the protection of residential privacy, and that therefore the statute is not narrowly tailored to the extent that it applies to cellular text messages."
"There is no evidence that the government's interest in privacy ends at home," ruled the 9th circuit in Campbell-Ewald. Furthermore, "to whatever extent the government's significant interest lies exclusively in residential privacy, the nature of cell phones renders the restriction of unsolicited text messaging all the more necessary to ensure that privacy."
The post Facebook Has No First Amendment Right to Send Unauthorized Texts, Says Court appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In yesterday's South by Southwest keynote address, President Obama took a firm stand against strong encryption. Standing before an audience of over two thousand technology enthusiasts, Obama explained why the government needs back door access to all personal communication devices.
If it was technologically possible to make an impenetrable device where there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we disrupt a terrorist plot? How do we even do a simple thing like tax enforcement? If government can't get in, then everyone's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket. There has to be some concession to get into that information somewhere.
Obama didn't specifically discuss Apple's case with the FBI, though the inference is clear. The president is not content with unlocking the individual phones of suspected criminals. He's asking for specific security protections to be permanently removed from all electronic devices. Because terrorists, child pornographers, and tax dodgers exist, no private citizen should have the right to secure communications.
Buried inside the President's appeals to fear is a principle that's widely understood by security professionals: A back door for the government is, in practice, indistinguishable from a security flaw that makes communication devices vulnerable for everyone.
As Alex Abdo of the ACLU put it, "If the FBI can force Apple to hack into its customers' devices, then so too can every repressive regime in the rest of the world."
The sentiment was echoed by Edward Snowden, who has called Apple's legal battles with the FBI, "the most important tech case in a decade." In a recent interview with Reason TV, Snowden characterized the issue in stark terms. "It's a binary choice: Either all of us have security or none of us have security."
Watch Snowden's extended comments on Apple vs. the FBI below, starting at the 0:53 minute mark.
In the coming months, Obama's hypothetical concerns may become a lot less speculative. Apple is widely believed to be making an impenetrable iPhone, possibly for sale within the coming year, which could render recent legal wrangling moot.
Paradoxically, Obama also used his keynote address to encourage citizens to use technology to reclaim American democracy. "We systematically make it harder for our citizens to vote," he said. "It is much easier to order pizza or a trip than it is for you to exercise the single most important task in democracy."
In theory, voting online is long overdue. But at the very least, a digital election would seem to require the very kind of secure, encrypted communication that the president wants to abolish.
Bonus irony: President Obama still uses a Blackberry because he's not allowed to use the latest technology… for security reasons.
The post President Obama Wants a Back Door on Your Phone. But Not on His. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A victory for privacy advocates in California: Gov. Jerry Brown has signed the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act. This legislation actually does what the title says. It requires law enforcement in California to get a warrant or court order to access private personal electronic data in the hands of the citizenry. It's a pretty broadly written bill. From Ars Technica:
Notably, the law specifically says that the government is forbidden from "accessing electronic device information by means of physical interaction or electronic communication with the device," barring a short list of exceptions. …
Brian Owsley, a law professor at the University of North Texas, and a former federal judge, lauded the new law's wide berth.
"This legislation provides citizens and non-citizens alike when in California greater protections than they enjoy at the federal or in most other states," he told Ars by e-mail.
"My initial read of the statute is such that it has a broad scope of coverage, which is beneficial in that it does not apply to specific technologies. In the future, as technological developments happen, the statute will have some flexibility in changing with the times. This obviates the need to come back next year and amend the statute, which may or may not be as politically feasible regarding a specific new technology."
The law does include requiring court orders to use stingray devices, tools law enforcement agencies have been using, often secretly, to track location data of smart phones in real time. The American Civil Liberties Union in California is thrilled:
"Governor Brown just signed a law that says 'no' to warrantless government snooping in our digital information. This is a landmark win for digital privacy and all Californians," said Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Policy Director at the ACLU of California. "We hope this is a model for the rest of the nation in protecting our digital privacy rights."
The post Want Citizens' Private Electronic Data in California? Get a Warrant, Officer. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Quote of the day:
What a strange practice it is, when you think of it, that a man should sit down to his breakfast table and, instead of conversing with his wife, and children, hold before his face a sort of screen on which is inscribed a world-wide gossip!
That isn't a modern scold denouncing smartphones; it's the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley writing about newspapers in 1909. (And not, for the most part, in a scolding way: Cooley went on to reply to the critics who found newspapers vulgar, asking them if the papers were "any more vulgar than the older kind of gossip? No doubt it seems worse for venturing to share with literature the use of the printed word.")
His breakfast-table comment reminds me of a tweet that was making the rounds a couple years ago:
[Hat tip for the Cooley quote: the Berkeley sociologist Claude S. Fischer, in The Boston Review, doing an able job of replying to some of today's smartphone scolds.]
The post The Paper Smartphone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reviewing Christopher Beauchamp's book Invented by Law: Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent That Changed America, Graeme Gooday discusses "how the patent became a key weapon of market power and the cornerstone of a new legal-industrial complex." Here's an excerpt:
Bell's lawyers, who brought around 600 infringement cases, tailored an interpretation of his patent to suit standards of legal proof and maximize the scope of his claims—an interpretation often at odds with Bell's own. It was not Bell but his lawyers, Beauchamp stresses, who "prepared the contending positions, marshaled evidence, and argued publicly and bitterly over the origins and nature of the technology."…Beauchamp's title—Invented by Law—is thus to be taken literally: it was the practice of law that defined the identity and status of the telephone as a novel invention and crafted a patent robust enough to survive courtroom challenges.
And challenges there were. Bell had not been alone, after all, in experimenting with the aural possibilities of the electrical telegraph. [Elisha] Gray, Daniel Drawbaugh, Amos Dolbear, Peter Dowd, Antonio Meucci, and others defended rival claims to priority.
The Bell team's legal victories produced "one of industrial world's most lucrative patent-based companies," signalling "the rise of a great new corporate power that used the full force of law to ruthlessly eliminate direct competition." Meanwhile, events progressed differently overseas:
There had been significant doubts across Europe about both the public benefit and industrial necessity of patents. In July 1877, Germany finally introduced patent legislation, but before Bell's lawyers could obtain rights, the technical press had already circulated designs of the telephone, rendering it part of the public domain. Thus Germany saw the productive development of diverse telephonic equipment under conditions of open competition, without patent rights restricting the innovating activities of Bell's rivals, such as Siemens. Even within the United States, the railroad industry had seen vigorous growth without using patents to underwrite single-company monopolies. Those who would argue for the economic necessity of patenting will not find support in either the telephone or the railroad, two key inventions in America's growth to industrial supremacy.
Read the rest here.
The post Patent Lawyers, Crony Capitalism, and the Invention of the Telephone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>This morning an important—but limited—ruling from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals declared that the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass collection of all Americans' phone metadata was against the law.
The panel ruling in ACLU v. Clapper, written by Judge Gerard Lynch, bypasses the issue of whether the bulk collection was an unconstitutional violation of the Fourth Amendment (though the ruling does discuss these concerns at length). Rather, the court determined that the NSA and federal agencies are incorrect when they claim that section 215 of the PATRIOT Act authorized this sort of massive collection. Section 215 may authorize some very broad gathering of information, but it nevertheless requires that it be relevant to a specific investigation. Some choice paragraphs from the 97-page ruling:
The government takes the position that the metadata collected – a vast amount of which does not contain directly "relevant" information, as the government concedes – are nevertheless "relevant" because they may allow the NSA, at some unknown time in the future, utilizing its ability to sift through the trove of irrelevant data it has collected up to that point, to identify information that is relevant. We agree with appellants that such an expansive concept of "relevance" is unprecedented and warranted. …
The records demanded are not those of suspects under investigation, or of people or businesses that have contact with such subjects, or of people or businesses that have contact with others who are in contact with the subjects – they extend to every record that exists, and indeed to records that do not yet exist, as they impose a continuing obligation on the recipient of the subpoena to provide such records on an ongoing basis as they are created. …
It permits demands for documents "relevant to an authorized investigation." The government has not attempted to identify to what particular "authorized investigation" the bulk metadata of virtually all Americans' phone calls are relevant.
Before the ruling got to this point though, the judges had to establish that the plaintiffs in the case, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, have standing to sue. The federal government had been trying to get the case tossed out, using the secrecy of the program to insist that plaintiffs couldn't prove their metadata had even been collected.
Time to thank Edward Snowden again. The court ruling references him by name as the reason we all know about the phone metadata collection. He is the reason the ACLU succeeded in the argument for standing.
The court also did not accept the argument that metadata, itself, does not provide deeply private information:
A call to a single-purpose telephone number such as a "hotline" might reveal that an individual is: a victim of domestic violence or rape; a veteran; suffering from an addiction of one type or another; contemplating suicide; or reporting a crime. Metadata can reveal civil, political, or religious affiliations; they can also reveal an individual's social status, or whether and when she is involved in intimate relationships.
The court acknowledged that it is bypassing the constitutional arguments. Toward the end it notes that section 215 is set to expire at the end of May, and it appears that the judges' intent is to allow Congress the opportunity to fix the law first before tackling that debate in full (there is a lengthy discussion of the history of the third-party doctrine, which has allowed the government to demand personal data that has been held by communications providers, nevertheless).
The full ruling can be read here (pdf). As Jacob Sullum (and this very court panel) has noted, now is the time Congress to formally end this practice.
UPDATE: The ACLU responds:
"This decision is a resounding victory for the rule of law," said ACLU Staff Attorney Alex Abdo, who argued the case before the three-judge panel in September. "For years, the government secretly spied on millions of innocent Americans based on a shockingly broad interpretation of its authority. The court rightly rejected the government's theory that it may stockpile information on all of us in case that information proves useful in the future. Mass surveillance does not make us any safer, and it is fundamentally incompatible with the privacy necessary in a free society."
UPDATE II: Rep Justin Amash (R-Mich.) weighs in, noting that the proposed USA Freedom Act would actually provide the authorizations the court says Section 215 does not:
From day one following the revelation of the NSA's bulk collection program, I have said that the warrantless collection of records on all Americans violates both the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and the plain reading of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Today's Second Circuit ruling makes clear that the executive branch's interpretation of the statute—interpreting records "relevant" to a terrorism investigation to mean all records everywhere—is "unprecedented and unwarranted." In light of this ruling, Congress must not proceed with the latest version of the USA Freedom Act. While limiting certain types of bulk collection, the latest USA Freedom Act would authorize bulk collection of Americans' records for the first time, thereby undoing some of the progress resulting from the Second Circuit's decision. Instead, Congress should pass, and the president should sign, the original USA Freedom Act, as introduced in 2013 before amendments, that protects the liberty and privacy of all Americans while providing the intelligence community the authority necessary to deal with those who seek to harm us.
UPDATE III: And here's Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.):
This is a monumental decision for all lovers of liberty. I commend the federal courts for upholding our Constitution and protecting our Fourth Amendment rights. While this is a step in the right direction, it is now up to the Supreme Court to strike down the NSA's illegal spying program. It is the duty of elected officials to protect the rights of all Americans, and Congress should immediately repeal the Patriot Act provisions and pass my Fourth Amendment Preservation and Protection Act. I will continue to fight to prevent the Washington Machine from illegally seizing any American's personal communication.
The post Federal Court Rules Mass Metadata Collection Not Authorized by PATRIOT Act appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"If every call was killing somebody that didn't go through, what would you do? Well, you wouldn't do what the FCC asked because the killing would go on," says telecom activist and architect Daniel Berninger.
When the Federal Communications Commission passed the Rural Call Completion (RCC) order in 2013, they hoped to prevent telephone companies from delaying or dropping expensive long-distance calls to rural areas by relying on customer-driven complaints to lead investigations.
However since rural phone customers rarely take complaints to the FCC, the agency orders all telephone companies to submit quarterly reports of completed calls to find dropped calls: and therein lies the problem. "There isn't enough information in the data for them to find problems," says Bernginger. "No one is evaluating exactly what [the FCC's] contribution is; their existence is justified by this theory that government would be useful here."
The Other Dumb Thing the FCC is Doing: New Rural Call Completion Rules is the latest video from Reason TV.
Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.
The post The Other Dumb Thing the FCC is Doing: New Rural Call Completion Rules appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"If every call was killing somebody that didn't go through, what would you do? Well, you wouldn't do what the FCC asked because the killing would go on," says telecom activist and architect Daniel Berninger.
When the Federal Communications Commission passed the Rural Call Completion (RCC) order in 2013, they hoped to prevent telephone companies from delaying or dropping expensive long-distance calls to rural areas by relying on customer-driven complaints to lead investigations.
However since rural phone customers rarely take complaints to the FCC, the agency orders all telephone companies to submit quarterly reports of completed calls to find dropped calls: and therein lies the problem. "There isn't enough information in the data for them to find problems," says Bernginger. "No one is evaluating exactly what [the FCC's] contribution is; their existence is justified by this theory that government would be useful here."
"Rural call completion is not really rural call completion, it's call completion in general," Berninger explains. Rural customers don't need the FCC incentivizing telephone companies to not hamper their customers' service. "Our sense of reliability of that device is essential in terms of us buying that service. It's in the incentive of all the carriers to make sure call completion is high as it can be."
Reason TV's Nick Gillespie sat down with Berninger to discuss the FCC, the problems with the new Rural Call Completion rules, as well as Berninger's nonprofit, Voice Communication Exchange Committee, which seeks a transition to all-IP networks.
About 10 minutes.
Camera by Joshua Swain and Robert Mariani. Edited by Mariani.
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The post The Other Dumb Thing the FCC is Doing: New Rural Call Completion Rules appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The phone record database that the Drug Enforcement Administration officially acknowledged for the first time on Friday is in some ways less alarming than the National Security Agency's better-known collection. Both were assembled without individualized warrants, sweeping up the records of many innocents in the hope of catching a few bad guys. But while the NSA strives to collect information about every phone call in the United States and keeps it for years, the DEA's collection was limited to calls between the U.S. and countries "determined to have a demonstrated nexus to international drug trafficking and related criminal activities." Another mitigating factor: According to a Justice Department spokesman paraphrased by the Associated Press, "the program was discontinued in September 2013," and "all information held in the database has been deleted."
Then again, the DEA program demonstrates how easily surveillance justified by the extraordinary, life-threatening threat of terrorism, once accepted, can be extended to ordinary criminal investigations, including those aimed at disrupting peaceful transactions that violate no one's rights. As Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told A.P., "When one agency starts doing something, other agencies are going to look for ways to also do it." The ACLU's Patrick Toomey said the DEA program "shows yet again how the government has used strained legal theories to justify the surveillance of millions of innocent Americans under laws that were never written for that purpose,"
According to a court filing flagged by A.P., the DEA's phone record database, which included information on the timing, length, and destination of calls, "relied on administrative subpoenas," a kind of self-authorization that is about as reassuring as it sounds. To search the database for information about a particular number, an agent needed a "reasonable articulable suspicion that the telephone number was related to an ongoing federal criminal investigation." That standard is weaker than the "probable cause" standard for a warrant, and it seems to have been applied by the DEA itself without judicial oversight.
According to the Obama administration, no such oversight is required, because people do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy regarding information they voluntarily divulge to others. To be fair, that is also what the Supreme Court has said, although the doctrine cries out for reconsideration in an age when people routinely store huge amounts of sensitive material outside their homes.
A couple of years ago, J.D. Tuccille noted another DEA phone record program, which covered more information, including metadata for domestic calls and the locations of cellphone users. Unlike the one acknowledged last week, that database is maintained by AT&T for the DEA's convenience, and it can be queried via adminstrative subpoenas.
The post The DEA Fights Drugs by Collecting Your Phone Records appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A new study from the University of Missouri shows that cellphone separation anxiety could cause physical and cognitive effects. "iPhone Separation Anxiety Makes You Dumb," Time magazine reported. "Pining for your iPhone can numb the brain," warned CNET.
For the study, published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, student participants were told they were testing a new wireless blood pressure cuff. While testing it, they were to complete some simple word search puzzles. During the first testing round, participants were allowed to keep phones on them. But for the second round, researchers said phones needed to be placed further away because they were interfering with the cuff's Bluetooth capabilities.
All participants were iPhone users, though they were unaware this was a reason for their inclusion in the study. During the second testing round, researchers called participant iPhones, which they were then unable to answer. Many experienced higher blood pressure and an increased heart rate. They also performed worse on the word puzzles this time. "Our findings suggest that iPhone separation can negatively impact performance on mental tasks," lead study author Russell Clayton said.
Plausible enough, though it seems hard to distinguish the effects of phone separation per se from other possible causes for the changes: the fact of an interruption in general, wondering who might be calling, feeling guilt that a phone's volume hadn't been shut off. (In actuality, researchers switched on the volume for phones that had been placed on silent, adding confusion to the list of factors which may have provoked participant responses.)
Clayton added that study results "suggest that iPhones are capable of becoming an extension of ourselves such that when separated, we experience a lessening of 'self' and a negative physiological state." I don't know about all that. Anxiety over separation from a phone as an object seems a different thing entirely than anxiety provoked by lack of access to what the phone brings—a text from a friend, likes on a Facebook status, confirmation that the communications you've put out into the world are not totally awful and embarrassing. And this, too, seems different from negative reactions brought by missing a specific communication-in-progress.
The study didn't probe what underlie participant anxiety, and I think it's a bit rash to read results as some sort of meditation on 21st century selfhood. In any event, the study may be good news for folks who do like to keep their phones omnipresent. A University of Missouri press release about the study advises that "iPhone users should avoid parting with their phones during daily situations that involve a great deal of attention, such as taking tests, sitting in conferences or meetings, or completing important work assignments".
The post Cellphone Separation Anxiety: Real, and Making Us Dumber? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>What do California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers and nasty Internet trolls have in common? Like the hackers who stole and released nude celebrity pics from iCloud, these Cali cops think they have a right to view private images off women's phones and the law be damned. A team of CHP officers is now under investigation for a years-long "game" in which they stole and traded private photos from the phones of women they arrested.
None of the officers have been charged so far, but last week CHP Officer Sean Harrington, 35, confessed to stealing nude photos of a woman he arrested on DUI charges and admitted that he and other CHP officers have been swapping such images for years. According to the Contra Costa Times, the practice "stretches from (CHP's) Los Angeles office" to Harrington's office up in Dublin, California, near San Francisco. From the Times:
The five-year CHP veteran called it a "game" among officers, according to an Oct. 14 search warrant affidavit. Harrington told investigators he had done the same thing to female arrestees a "half dozen times in the last several years," according to the court records, which included leering text messages between Harrington and his Dublin CHP colleague, Officer Robert Hazelwood.
(…) In the search warrant affidavit, senior Contra Costa district attorney inspector Darryl Holcombe wrote that he found probable cause to show both CHP officers Harrington and Hazelwood and others engaged in a "scheme to unlawfully access the cell phone of female arrestees by intentionally gaining access to their cell phone and without their knowledge, stealing and retaining nude or partially clothed photographs of them." That behavior constitutes felony computer theft, the affidavit said.
Not only did the cops illegally access women's photos, they then proceeded to be judgmental dicks about them. Here's a sample text conversation between Harrington and Hazelwood:
Luckily, Officer Harrington's intelligence is also "like a 5 or 6 at best": the ruse was discovered when the last woman whose photos he stole noticed that the photos had been sent to an unknown number. Harrington had deleted evidence they had been sent from the woman's iPhone, but the phone was synced to her iPad as well.
CHP is of course trying to paint the situation as an isolated incident, but Rick Madsen, the lawyer representing the woman who discovered the activity, balked at this. "This particular instance was only discovered by my client by chance—and it's a reasonable speculation to imagine how often it has occurred undetected," Madsen said a statement. "Who knows how many officers have participated in this so-called 'game,' or how many more women have been victimized?"
As SearchSecurity editor Rob Wright tweeted this morning, yet another reason for phone encryption.
The post Don't Want Nude Selfies Stolen? Don't Let Cops See Your Phone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A trio of judges Tuesday heard the American Civil Liberties Union's challenge that the federal government's mass collection of telephone metadata is unconstitutional.
Media outlets have been quick to point out the skepticism of the judges—from the 2nd U.S. Court of Appeals in New York—that it was lawful for the National Security Agency (NSA) to engage in the mass collection of telephone metadata from people (including American citizens) under no suspicion of criminal or terrorist activity. Reuters reports:
Judge Gerard Lynch, one of three judges who heard the arguments, said it was "hard for me to imagine" Congress had envisioned such a sweeping effort when it passed an expansion of anti-terrorism powers known as the Patriot Act after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Stuart Delery, a lawyer for the Justice Department, told Lynch in response that Congress was fully informed when it voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act twice.
The two other judges, Robert Sack and Vernon Broderick, also expressed skepticism about the program's legality, although it can be difficult to infer judges' eventual rulings from questions at oral argument. The panel could take several months to issue a decision.
Note that this case only covers telephone metadata, not online metadata, e-mail information or anything else the government calls metadata, though the judges expressed concern that the government's arguments could be expanded to other areas like financial records. In August, the documents snagged by Edward Snowden introduced us to ICREACH, the search engine the federal government created to help agencies navigate all the information they've been collected. We discovered through these documents that the feds have added dozens of new forms of metadata, like passport information, visa application records, and cellphone location data, to the list of information it is collecting. But as this case winds its way toward the Supreme Court—and let's face it, eventually the Supreme Court is going to have to tackle this issue (another reason to thank Edward Snowden)—the nature of the court's ruling could affect more than just phone metadata collection.
If you've got two hours to spare, the hearing was televised on C-Span and can be watched here.
Below, Lily Tomlin breaks it all down:
The post Mass NSA Phone Metadata Collection in Federal Appeals Court Crosshairs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When I was a boy, I was puzzled by a page in the World Book Encyclopedia. The entry for "Telephone" included a sequence of 14 photos of phones through the years, ending with a videophone—one of those great near-future science-fiction concepts that I couldn't wait for someone to create in the real world, like the hovercar or the space colony. And there, next to that picture of the videophone of tomorrow, was the word "1970."
This was the 1977 edition of the encyclopedia. Apparently, the phone of the future already existed. So why didn't anybody I knew have one?
Matt Novak delves into that dead end of tech history in great post at Gizmodo. Here's an excerpt:
The videophone is one of those technologies that more or less snuck up on us. Promises that one day you'd not only be able to hear but see a person through your telephone are nearly as old as the telephone itself. The videophone spent nearly a century as every bit as much a "technology of the future" as the flying car and the jetpack. We were always this close to making our picturephone dreams come true. And then we did, in a way no one expected.
Communications companies, sci-fi authors, and popular futurists assured half a dozen generations of Americans that the videophone would soon be a reality at their homes, in their offices, and even in public places like airports or on the street next to those old fashioned payphones that only carried voices. The 1920s would see earnest prognosticators heralding videophone as being just over the horizon. The Germans even successfully tried a primitive public videophone service in the late 1930s, only to have it shuttered by the Nazis in 1940. An influx of cash for consumer goods and communications infrastructure during American postwar development in the 1950s would again make the videophone feel so close to reality. But despite commercial availability of the videophone in various iterations since the '70s, it never broke out of its very small niche. And then, one day, it was everywhere.
We were promised and were expecting the videophone to arrive as a standalone device—an appliance like a TV or a toaster or a blender that was dedicated to one purpose: Allowing us to see and hear the person we were talking to from any distance. Instead, we got videophone technology as part of our desktops, our tablets, and our phones. Rather than a dedicated machine, the videophone snuck in through the back door by attaching itself to nearly every multimedia gadget in our lives.
This is, among other things, a useful lesson in the limits of planning, and in the way innovation depends on a mix of trial, error, and serendipity. Bell correctly saw that this technology was possible, but it failed completely to anticipate whether anyone actually wanted a stand-alone picturephone enough to pay for it. "Service was expensive (about $169 per month, or almost $1000 adjusted for inflation) and by 1973 Bell only had 100 subscribers in the entire United States," Novak notes. "By 1977, that number had dwindled to just nine." For 12,000 bucks a year, you could call eight people. What's the opposite of a network effect?
It was a costly misstep—one of the many failures you'll find in the ongoing churn of the marketplace, though this one's lifespan perhaps was extended by the fact that Bell Labs had a government-protected monopoly for a parent company. Skype and FaceTime, by contrast, were free add-ons to technologies that had been developed without much thought for their picturephone possibilities. The future always gets here, but not always through the door you were expecting.
[Via Rob MacDougall, whose own book on telephone history is reviewed in the upcoming August/September issue of Reason. MacDougall also tweets his favorite videophone photo.]
The post The Secret History of the Videophone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>After the National Security Agency's routine collection of Americans' phone records came to light last summer, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee already knew about the program, did not understand what the big deal was. "This is just metadata," she told reporters. "There is no content involved." One of her colleagues on the intelligence committee, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), was less blasé, warning that "just metadata" can be very revealing. "If you know who someone called, when they called, where they called from, and how long they talked," he said in a speech the following month, "you lay bare the personal lives of law-abiding Americans to the scrutiny of government bureaucrats and outside contractors."
A recent study by Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler, computer science graduate students at Stanford, illustrates Wyden's point. Beginning last November, Mayer and Mutchler used a smartphone app called MetaPhone to collect metadata from 546 volunteers. They analyzed the information to see how much they could deduce about the people making the calls. Using publicly available directories (Yelp and Google Places), they identified specific parties called by the volunteers about one-fifth of the time (6,107 of 33,688 unique numbers). Among other things, they found that 57 percent of the subjects had made medical calls, 40 percent had called financial institutions, 30 percent had called pharmacies, 10 percent had called businesses offering legal services, and 8 percent had called religious organizations. The last sort of call allowed Mayer and Mutchler to correctly identify the subject's religion about three-quarters of the time.
"The degree of sensitivity among contacts took us aback," Mayer writes. "Participants had calls with Alcoholics Anonymous, gun stores, NARAL Pro-Choice, labor unions, divorce lawyers, sexually transmitted disease clinics, a Canadian import pharmacy, strip clubs, and much more. This was not a hypothetical parade of horribles. These were simple inferences, about real phone users, that could trivially be made on a large scale." Here are some examples of personal information uncovered by the study:
"We were able to infer medical conditions, firearm ownership and more, using solely phone metadata," Mayer writes. "Phone metadata [are] unambiguously sensitive, even over a small sample and short time window." As U.S. District Judge Richard Leon observed when he ruled that the NSA's metadata collection is probably unconstitutional, "Records that once would have revealed a few scattered tiles of information about a person now reveal an entire mosaic—a vibrant and constantly updating picture of the person's life."
Jess Remington noted Mayer and Mutchler's earlier work on linking phone numbers to people or businesses.
The post What the NSA Knows: Study Shows How Revealing 'Just Metadata' Can Be appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hey parents, aren't there days when you wish you could have a cop call and yell at your kids for you? Who doesn't occasionally want to invoke fear of a SWAT team busting down the door when Junior just won't pick up his Legos?
Now you can! Get your very own call from the cops for 99 cents. A new app will generate a fake call from "Sergeant Friendly" admonishing your kid by name for failing to do things like sleep in their own bed or clean up their toys. (There's a free version, but it doesn't have a full library of nags.)
"Hello, this is the police department," the call begins after a computer-generated voice bleats the child's name. "I heard you haven't been eating all of your food lately….I'll be checking in on you later to see that you're eating all of your food. I have to go now and catch some bad guys." And then there a police siren.
According to the press release I received today, this is the genesis of this not-at-all creepy app:
I was visiting a mall with my two youngest children when both of them began to misbehave. I was embarrassed by their behavior and was willing to do anything to get them to listen. I told them that the mall police were watching them on the security cameras and that they needed to be good. At that moment, I thought to myself, how nice would it be to have a personalized phone call from a police officer to correct or reward your child's behavior.
I contacted my wife to tell her my idea and she thought it was brilliant. After giving it some thought, the app was developed and now it's available on Apple and Android devices worldwide for FREE. The character I created is Sergeant Friendly. He is a police officer that children can look up to as a role model. I didn't want to scare the children, so I made him very approachable and likable. The first time I tried the app with my children, ages 3 and 5, they corrected their behavior immediately. About 10 minutes later, I arranged a second call to them so that Sergeant Friendly could praise them for being good. They were ecstatic and could not wait to tell me what Sergeant Friendly had said to them on the phone. "Daddy, Sergeant Friendly just called me and told me that he is proud of me for being good".
And the kicker: The creator of the app is a police officer.
The funny thing is that I happen to be a Friendly Police Officer myself with over 18 years of experience. I hope your child loves the app just as much as mine do. Thank you.
On a far more grim note, here's a reminder about what can happen when parents actually call the police on their kids.
The post Want to Scare the Bejesus Out of Your Kid With a Fake Call From the Cops? There's an App for That. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The post Samsung Galaxy S5 Scheduled For April Release appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Anybody who wants to switch now can," he said.
The post T-Mobile Offering to Cover Termination Fees Up to $350 for Customers Switching to Them appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Researchers surveyed hundreds of medical cannabis retailers, processors, dispensary owners and industry leaders over the course of six months this year, and estimated that more than $1.43 billion worth of legal marijuana will be sold in 2013. The report also predicts that figure to grow by 64 percent to $2.34 billion next year. Recent figures show the smartphone market expanded by 46 percent from 2012 to 2013.
"Cannabis is one of the fastest growing industries," said Steve Berg, a former managing director of Wells Fargo Bank and editor of the report, the second edition of the State of Legal Marijuana Markets.
The post Report: Legal Marijuana Market Poised To Outpace Expansion of Smartphone Market appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the proposal (.pdf) sets the stage for a major legislative battle with a competing measure unveiled Tuesday prohibiting the data collection that began in 2006 and was first disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in June.
"The NSA call-records program is legal and subject to extensive congressional and judicial oversight, and I believe it contributes to our national security," Feinstein said in a statement, after the committee approved the measure in private. "But more can and should be done to increase transparency and build public support for privacy protections…"
Among other things, the package specifically adds bulk phone-metadata collection to the business records provision of the Patriot Act. In 2006, lawmakers amended the act to authorize broad, secret warrants for most any type of "tangible" records, including those held by banks, doctors and phone companies.
The post Senate Committee Votes for Feinstein's Surveillance Non-Reform appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Federal Communications Commission rules, which previously allowed firms to make automated telemarketing calls with only oral consent, will now require "prior express written consent."
The regulations, published in July of last year, widen the scope of potential class action lawsuits against violators of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
The post New Robocall Regulations Set to Start appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday another Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinion was declassified (pdf), discussing the guidelines specifically for the collection of telephone metadata. This particular opinion was much more recent than previously declassified documents, dated August 29, and even makes notes of Edward Snowden's leaks.
The latest opinion by Judge Claire V. Eagan probably doesn't have any huge bombshells for those who have been following data privacy for years so much as it confirms already held theories. The opinion quickly disposes of any Fourth Amendment claims protecting metadata by invoking the Supreme Court case Smith v. Maryland. That case from 1979 ruled that phone users had no expectation of privacy of the phone numbers that they dialed because they voluntarily provided them to the phone company in order to make calls. Eagan went on to explain that this individual lack or protection didn't change when phone numbers were gathered in bulk. No matter how many numbers were selected for this phone metadata gathering, it could not be considered a Fourth Amendment violation under this Supreme Court decision (presuming that only this metadata was gathered, not call content information).
This doesn't mean that other laws couldn't restrain the federal government's metadata collection, so the bulk of Eagon's opinion is about exploring the rules set forth by the PATRIOT Act. That exploration revealed one important tidbit of information: While there is a system for phone companies to challenge bulk metadata collection requests from the federal government, not a single telecom company has ever done so. David Kravets takes note at Wired:
"To this date, no holder of records who has received an Order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an Order," reads the ruling. "Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 Order has challenged the legality of such an Order, despite the explicit statutory mechanism for doing so."
The FISC orders cited Section 215 of the Patriot Act to require phone companies like Verizon and AT&T to hand over the phone numbers of both parties involved in all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI) number for mobile callers, calling card numbers used in the call, and the time and duration of the calls.
To be sure, any challenge to the surveillance program would have been done before the court in secret, and it's unlikely one would have been successful.
That carriers willfully provided the metadata without blinking a legal eye, however, is cause for alarm, as the telcos appear to be the only ones so far with legal standing to make a challenge to the bulk collection orders. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, American Civil Liberties and others have brought challenges, but the legal fight on whether they have the right to sue remains undecided.
Toward the end of her opinion, Eagon notes that because she doesn't see either constitutional or statutory violations in the National Security Agency's massive phone metadata operations, any issues with the existing system need to be handled politically:
"In the wake of these disclosures, whether and to what extent the government seeks to continue the program discussed in this Memorandum Opinion is a matter for the political branches of government to decide."
Today Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) put out a joint statement making note of the very loose standard of "relevance" referenced in the ruling and called for reform:
"The document also points to the Supreme Court's 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland as the basis for this broad interpretation of the government's surveillance powers. But the Smith decision was based on the limited technology of the rotary phone era. In an age of personal cell phones and mobile IP addresses, it is unrealistic to say that collecting Americans' phone records in bulk does not infringe on their privacy.
"As Judge Eagan clearly states, resolving the questions about the appropriate limits of the government's surveillance authority is not one that is properly suited to the courts, but 'is a matter for the political branches of government to decide.'
"We agree. We have argued for years that the government's domestic surveillance authorities need to be narrowed, and we will continue this fight in the weeks and months to come. These revelations about the low standard that the FISA Court has set for protecting Americans' liberties underscore why Congress must return to its proper role of defending our constitutional rights."
The post Latest FISA Court Declassification Shows an Adversarial System with No Willing Adversaries appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In all, police say, she wired more than $250,000 of her savings overseas to bail him out and hire legal counsel for him.
Problem was, her grandson was nowhere near a prison in Peru. And her money, police say, is now gone.
The scam artists, police say, spent weeks cultivating their lie with repeated phone calls. They said the grandson has been in a fight and that he was the aggressor. In one call, she thought she was talking to her grandson. Each time, they needed more money for the legal process. The calls started in the middle of August, including one call from a man claiming to be a U.S. embassy official.
(Hat tip to Mark Sletten)
The post St. Louis Grandmother Taken for $250,000 in Phone Scam appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The order was issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to a subsidiary of Verizon in April. Officials described it as the formal order underlying the directive that was disclosed in June by Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.
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]]>An investigation into the exact circumstances of his death is underway and out of consideration for the family no further details are being disclosed, Swisscom said in a statement.
"We can confirm that the first elements of the investigation make us think it was a suicide. It is impossible to say at this stage how long the investigation will take," said Pierre-Andre Waeber, spokesman at the cantonal police in Freiburg.
The post Swisscom CEO Found Dead in Apparent Suicide appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That represented a rejection of their father's life's work: Convincing car buyers to pay $1,500 or more for a dashboard navigation system with an 8-inch screen and elaborate graphics. Rather than scold his young-adult sons, Nixon came up with an answer: GM (GM) now offers a $50 map application for iPhones that can play on the dashboard touchscreen of a $12,170 Chevrolet Spark.
The post Dashboard Navigation Tools Threatened by Smartphones appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Military spokesman Lt. Col. Sagir Musa said anyone found with a satellite phone or accessories would be arrested, the BBC reported Thursday.
Musa said the phones were used in planning attacks on two schools during the weekend in which at least 16 students and two teachers died.
The post Satellite Phones Banned in Northern Nigerian State appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I un-fondly remember annoying Emergency Broadcast System tests interrupting my childhood television shows back in the days when such an intrusion could mean that you'd missed the punch line or even a chunk of plot. The annoying shriek and repeated "if this had been an actual emergency …" could drive my short-tempered self into a simmering rage at a tender age. What I didn't know until recently (how could I miss this?) is that the equivalent exists for smart phones, and you can't escape those damned Wireless Emergency Alerts, either.
According to the Federal Communications Commission:
WEA (formerly known as the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS) or Personal Localized Alerting Network (PLAN)) is a public safety system that allows customers who own certain wireless phone models and other enabled mobile devices to receive geographically-targeted, text-like messages alerting them of imminent threats to safety in their area. The technology ensures that emergency alerts will not get stuck in highly congested areas, which can happen with standard mobile voice and texting services. WEA was established pursuant to the Warning, Alert and Response Network (WARN) Act.
The Warning, Alert and Response Network (WARN) Act passed in 2006, shoehorned into the Safe Accountability for Every Port Act of 2006 (SAFE Act).
Wireless providers don't have to participate, but all of the big ones have fully opted in, including AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel and Verizon. You can find a list of participants here (XLS).
If your provider has opted in, is there any way for you to opt out? Well … A little. Says the FCC:
Alerts from WEA cover only critical emergency situations. Consumers will receive only three types of alerts:
- Alerts issued by the President
- Alerts involving imminent threats to safety or life
- Amber Alerts
Participating carriers may allow subscribers to block all but Presidential alerts.
One does not muzzle the emperor, of course.
Not all phones are yet equipped to receive the Wireless Emergency Alerts and their "unique attention signal and vibration, which is particularly helpful to people with hearing or vision-related disabilities," but you can count on receiving inescapable presidential missives within an upgrade or two.
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]]>Airdate: June 11, 2013
About 42 minutes.
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]]>In today's brief comments, President Barack Obama insisted that Congress is well aware of how the NSA was collecting phone records. It was part of the oversight we're all supposed to trust.
Below is how that trust works out. Here is Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March asking Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, "Does the NSA collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"
For those who can't view the video, Clapper's answer is, "No, sir. … Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly." Maybe the way Clapper rubs his forehead while responding is his "tell." Anybody ever play poker with the guy?
The post Here's National Intelligence Director Clapper Apparently Lying to a Senate Committee About Surveillance appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"After revelations that the Internal Revenue Service targeted political dissidents and the Department of Justice seized reporters' phone records, it would appear that this Administration has now sunk to a new low," the libertarian-leaning Republican said.
The post Rand Paul: NSA Phone Records Grab an 'Astounding Assault on the Constitution' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yesterday we published a review of Phil Lapsley's Exploding the Phone, a history of the old phone phreak subculture. If you didn't see the article because you were off having fun on Memorial Day, you ought to read it now. If you did see it, you may recall a reference to the publication known initially as Youth International Party Line and then as TAP, a zine run by some phreaks involved with the New Left group known as the Yippies.
As a postscript to the review, I'll point you to this site, where back issues of the zine have been put online. Unfortunately, they were put there by a raging anti-Semite, and to get to the pdfs you have to scroll past a long, dumb rant about The Jews. But about a third of the way down the page, the publications themselves are posted, and they're a pretty interesting window into that time and milieu. Recommended, despite the rancid context.
The post The Phone Phreaks in Their Own Words appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>During the Cold War, a shadowy group hacked its way into a system the technologist and entrepreneur Phil Lapsley calls "the world's largest machine." AT+T's phone network was a vast enterprise of early cyberinfrastructure, combining hardware, information architecture, and an army of human experts. It was an irresistible lure to the phone phreaks, a group of curious folk who saw the government-protected monopoly's empire as both a puzzle and a playground. Exploding the Phone, Lapsley's delightful account of their adventures, sheds light on an underappreciated chapter in the history of technology. It also reveals the forerunners to the hacking subculture of today.
Exploding presents the stories of individual phreakers in chronological order, starting with the first people (AT+T employees excluded) who figured out how to poke into the phone company's innards by generating unusual sounds. These included college students who built "blue boxes," devices that emitted signals the phone network understood as legitimate commands. They also included several blind teenagers who could imitate those sounds by whistling. These proto-phreaks communicated in the early '60s with free conference calls and other shared phone services, building a virtual community. Some created recordings and made them available via repurposed phone lines, and they sound like today's Web or yesterday's Usenet. "Most were comedy skits," Lapsley writes, and "some were horoscope readings, others were political commentary and humor."
Before they were labeled phreaks (that happened in 1971, via an Esquire article) these outside explorers built machines to imitate the phone system's signals and to link two phones to make an ad hoc conference call; they methodically discovered codes for bouncing long-distance calls across multiple cities, reaching hidden exchanges. Meanwhile, as AT+T gradually realized that they were being invaded, the company slowly developed policy responses, including working with the FBI, tracking users, and ultimately recording millions of phone calls.
Many Americans, we see, saw the phone company as powerful, frustrating, sometimes terrifying, even fantastically megalomaniacal, a Leviathan anyone who's seen the 1960s conspiracy comedy The President's Analyst will recognize:
The contrast with the scrappy phreaks gives Lapsley's book a David-and-Goliath flavor, an emotionally satisfying dynamic that gives life to his occasionally dry subjects. We can understand how outgunned the phreaks felt, then appreciate their boldness. The fact that so many phreaks were blind heightens the emotional investment. But Exploding the Phone doesn't get trapped in the available underdog vs. evil empire clichés. AT+T's enforcers sometimes appear as charming and clever, the phreaks' doubles on the other side of a war. (One of the book's revelations is that some phone workers were phreaks on the side.) Similarly, the phreaks are not always sympathetic. Nor are they always clever: In one particularly foolish mistake, the legendary phreak John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper, invites a warrantless FBI unit to search his belongings. The book's characters are never cyphers for the larger struggle. (Draper got his nom de phreak by discovering that a toy whistle given away in Cap'n Crunch cereal made precisely the 2600 Hz tone needed to convince the phone system not to charge for a call.)
By the early 1970s, that struggle had escalated into a multi-agency campaign, with trials and prison time for the enemies of the phone company. Some of the more criminally inclined were killed in their line of work. Draper was the first to be jailed. After making a very visible presence of himself and pulling some impressive pranks—Crunch claimed to have called then-president Nixon in the White House, at which point he complained about a toilet paper shortfall—he served several years behind bars.
The book ends by guiding us through the transition from phone phreaking to computer hacking. Some explorers used early computers to increase their capacities to find more numbers and codes, while others took jobs with the post-breakup remains of the once-giant Bell. Two men who used to build and sell blue boxes—a couple of fellows named Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs—founded a little company called Apple Computer. (Draper, meanwhile, created Apple's first word processor.) Other phreaks moved into other passions as digital telephony gradually replaced the old analog systems, closing off the playground.
Nearly every chapter of the book takes time to patiently introduce another one of AT+T's extraordinary technical achievements, either at the macro or micro scales. Lapsley introduces us to a shadow lexicon of terms: loop arounds, step-tandem switching, tandem stacking, open sleeve-lead conferences, inward operators, simultaneous seizures, to say nothing of blue boxes, black boxes, red boxes, and cheeseboxes. Yet this backgrounding never becomes overwhelming. Like a good teacher, Lapsley lays out small amounts of information at each encounter, carefully returning to those dollops in succeeding chapters.
Why should we care about this combination of technical minutiae, eccentric characters, and byzantine organization? For one thing, the phreaking story gives us a first draft of the world of hacking. We see similar groups of determined youth spooking their elders, developing new identities, forming virtual communities. The phreaks demonstrate the hacker's love of tinkering, for working through a puzzle for its own sake (plus the bragging rights). They use social engineering to winnow secrets and publish work through their own media – for the telephone it was the Yippie-spawned zine Youth International Party Line, later called TAP. They probe into the recesses of power, including the tools of a raging Cold War. (One FBI/AT+T/NSA investigation sought to determine if a phreaking method would let the proto-hackers scramble fighter planes.) The authorities fight and sometimes hire them.
History never repeats exactly, of course, and the differences between hackers and phreaks are instructive. We don't associate hackers with blindness, for example. And while hackers have inspired a lot of media panic, phreaking enjoyed mostly serious and supportive commentary from media outlets—not just Esquire but Ramparts, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR show.
Phone phreaks also speak to non-hacking concerns. Their activities elicited several sorts of surveillance, both corporate and governmental, which in turn raised questions of when such entities could violate individual privacy—a debate that, needless to say, is still ongoing. The use of a virtual world to make up for offline limitations, be they visual impairment or social constriction, is one we've become accustomed to at a global scale. Perhaps as we see surveillance and and other forms of social control rise at the expense of personal freedom, the phone phreaks' story will inspire some readers to probe other systems for weaknesses and mysteries. "If idle hands are the devil's tools," Lapsley informs us, "then a clever teenager with idle hands and a methodical personality is the devil's munitions factory."
The post Battling Ma Bell appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The figure has risen from 33% this time last year, to 60%, the research from global consultancy firm TNS found.
It surveyed the mobile use of 38,000 people in 43 countries, with 500 Kiwis taking part. The Mobile Life online study explored the behaviour, motivation and priorities of mobile phone useage.
The post Rate of Smartphone Ownership in New Zealand Doubles in One Year appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At the White House press corps briefing this afternoon, Jay Carney steadfastly declined to comment directly about the DOJ investigation of a leak that treated Fox News correspondent James Rosen as a potential criminal because it is an "ongoing investigation." So that probably failed to comfort any journalist anywhere, even with his limp effort to invoke President Barack Obama's support for a watered-down press shield law full of all sorts of national security loopholes.
For Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan), the news might help garner support for the legislation he introduced with Zoe Lofgren (D-California), Jared Polis, (D-Colorado) and Mick Mulvaney (R-South Carolina) to require a court order to get telephone records.
Like the proposed press shield law, the legislation probably wouldn't have stopped the federal government from getting the information it had gathered about Associated Press and Fox journalists, but at least there would have been another step involving some oversight from the judiciary. It may not have been much oversight, given the deference the judiciary gives to the executive branch in these matters, but at least it's a start.
According to Michigan Live (which seems to just now be reporting on the bill's introduction), the bill has picked up two more Republican supporters and Amash is hoping for the legislation to take off:
In a statement last week, Amash blasted federal officials for the AP case, saying the seizure "raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns."
"Regardless of whether DOJ violates the legitimate privacy expectations of reporters or ordinary Americans," Amash said, "we deserve to know that the federal government can't seize our records without judicial review."
Because of the high-profile nature of the Justice Department's seizure, [Amash Spokesman Will] Adams said the bill stood a good chance of passing quickly in the House.
It helps, he added, that cosponsor Lofgren is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which would be the first body to take up the bill.
"We think there's a lot of momentum," Adams said.
The post Now that the Obama Administration Has Alienated Most Journalists, Does the Phone Privacy Bill Have Legs? appeared first on Reason.com.
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