Ars Technica - Law & Disorder

Biden vows to electrify the federal government’s 600,000-vehicle fleet

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 16:54:54 GMT

Enlarge / WASHINGTON, DC: President Joe Biden speaks before signing an executive order related to American manufacturing in the South Court Auditorium of the White House complex on January 25, 2021 in Washington, DC. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

The federal government owns more than 600,000 civilian vehicles—trucks, vans, and passenger vehicles—with a large large majority running on gasoline or diesel fuel. On Monday, Joe Biden vowed to change that.

"The federal government owns an enormous fleet of vehicles, which we're gonna to replace with clean electric vehicles made right here in America," Biden said at a press conference to announce a new "Buy American" initiative.

This won't be easy. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, the federal government owned fewer than 3,000 battery electric vehicles—less than one half of one percent of the federal vehicle fleet.

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Deactivation of Flash may have crippled Chinese railroad for a day [Updated]

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 22:49:46 GMT

Enlarge / Dalian Railway Station. (credit: akiradhin / Wikipedia)

In 2017, Adobe announced it would deactivate Flash at the end of 2020. Earlier this month, on January 12, Adobe carried through on its plans, deactivating Flash installations around the world. One result, according to Apple Daily, was chaos in a Chinese railroad in Liaoning province.

Officials at China Railway Shenyang use Flash-based software to plan each day's railroad operations. As a result of the outage, Apple Daily says, "staffers were reportedly unable to view train operation diagrams, formulate train sequencing schedules, and arrange shunting plans."

As a result, the railroad was unable to dispatch its trains, "leading to a complete shutdown of its railroads in Dalian, Liaoning province," according to Apple Daily.

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This site posted every face from Parler’s Capitol Hill insurrection videos

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 11:40:51 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Wired)

When hackers exploited a bug in Parler to download all of the right-wing social media platform's contents last week, they were surprised to find that many of the pictures and videos contained geolocation metadata revealing exactly how many of the site's users had taken part in the invasion of the US Capitol building just days before. But the videos uploaded to Parler also contain an equally sensitive bounty of data sitting in plain sight: thousands of images of unmasked faces, many of whom participated in the Capitol riot. Now one website has done the work of cataloging and publishing every one of those faces in a single, easy-to-browse lineup.

Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site's creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people's deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone.

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Military intelligence buys location data instead of getting warrants, memo shows

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 21:04:51 GMT

Enlarge / If your phone knows where you are, the feds can, too. (credit: Luis Alvarez | Getty Images)

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which provides military intelligence to the Department of Defense, confirmed in a memo that it purchases "commercially available" smartphone location data to gather information that would otherwise require use of a search warrant.

The DIA "currently provides funding to another agency that purchases commercially available geolocation metadata aggregated from smartphones," the agency wrote in a memo (PDF) to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), first obtained by the New York Times.

The Supreme Court held in its 2018 Carpenter v. United States ruling that the government needs an actual search warrant to collect an individual's cell-site location data. "When the Government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in his opinion. "The retrospective quality of the data here gives police access to a category of information otherwise unknowable."

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Home alarm tech backdoored security cameras to spy on customers having sex

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 20:54:42 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)

A home security technician has admitted he repeatedly broke into cameras he installed and viewed customers engaging in sex and other intimate acts.

Telesforo Aviles, a 35-year-old former employee of home and small office security company ADT, said that over a five-year period, he accessed the cameras of roughly 200 customer accounts on more than 9,600 occasions—all without the permission or knowledge of customers. He said he took note of homes with women he found attractive and then viewed their cameras for sexual gratification. He said he watched nude women and couples as they had sex.

Aviles made the admissions Thursday in US District Court for the District of Northern Texas, where he pleaded guilty to one count of computer fraud and one count of invasive visual recording. He faces a maximum of five years in prison.

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Google: We’ll shut down Australian search before we pay news sites

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 19:53:21 GMT

Enlarge / Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, criticized the Australian proposal. (credit: Oliver Berg/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Google says it would have "no real choice" but to shut down its search engine in Australia if Australia passes a new law requiring Google to pay news sites to link to their articles. This would "set an untenable precedent for our business and the digital economy," said Google's Mel Silva in Friday testimony before the Australian Senate.

News organizations around the world have been struggling financially over the last decade or two. Many have blamed Internet companies like Google and Facebook that—in their view—have diverted advertising revenue that once went to news organizations. Some in the news industry argue that Google benefits from including news stories in its search results and should compensate news sites for the privilege of doing so.

So last year the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission proposed a new mandatory arbitration process designed to correct a supposed power imbalance between tech giants and Australian news sites. Under the new framework, news sites can demand that tech platforms (initially Google and Facebook) pay them for linking to their stories. Google and Facebook are required to negotiate "in good faith" toward a payment agreement.

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CenturyLink, Frontier missed FCC broadband deadlines in dozens of states

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:33:34 GMT

Enlarge / A CenturyLink service van parked in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on May 2, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Robert Alexander )

CenturyLink and Frontier Communications have again failed to meet broadband-deployment deadlines in dozens of states after taking money from the Federal Communications Commission.

When the FCC awarded Connect America Fund Phase II grants in 2015, CenturyLink accepted $505.7 million in annual support over six years in exchange for deploying broadband with 10Mbps download speeds and 1Mbps upload speeds to 1.17 million homes and businesses in 33 states. Frontier accepted $283.4 million in annual support over six years to deploy service to 659,587 homes and business in 28 states.

The deadline to hit 100 percent of the required deployments passed on December 31, 2020. Both CenturyLink and Frontier informed the FCC that they missed the deadline to finish deployment in numerous states.

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A look at all of Biden’s changes to energy and environmental regulations

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 00:58:59 GMT

Enlarge / US President Joe Biden signs an executive order with US Vice President Kamala Harris, left, looking on. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

The series of executive orders signed by Joe Biden on his first evening in office included a heavy focus on environmental regulations. Some of the high-profile actions had been signaled in advance—we're back in the Paris Agreement! The Keystone pipeline's been put on indefinite hold!

But the suite of executive orders includes a long list that targets plenty of the changes Trump made in energy and environmental policies, many of which will have more subtle but significant effects of how the United States does business. Many of those make major changes, in some cases by eliminating policies adopted during the Trump years, a number of which we covered at the time. So, we've attempted to take a comprehensive look at Biden's actions and their potential impacts.

Laws, rules, and policies

Environmental and energy regulations are set through three main mechanisms. The first is by specific laws, which would require the cooperation of both houses of Congress to change. Next are also more general laws, like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. These enable regulations to be put in place via a formal rule-making process run by the agencies of the executive branch. This process involves soliciting public feedback, incorporating economic considerations, and so on, a process that typically takes anywhere from eight months to over a year. Finally, the executive branch can set policies to cover details not spelled out by the law or the rule, such as how to handle things like deadlines and enforcement details.

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Parler’s attempt to get back on Amazon Web Services rejected by judge

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 22:30:40 GMT

Enlarge / Amazon Web Services (AWS) logo displayed during the 4th edition of the Viva Technology show at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 17, 2019, in Paris, France. (credit: Chesnot | Getty Images)

A federal judge today rejected Parler's motion for a preliminary injunction against Amazon Web Services (AWS), scuttling the social network's attempt to quickly get back onto Amazon's Web-hosting platform.

Parler, which bills itself as a conservative alternative to Twitter, had asked for a court order requiring Amazon to reinstate its Web-hosting service pending a full trial. But "Parler has fallen far short... of demonstrating, as it must, that it has raised serious questions going to the merits of its claims," and it has failed to prove "that the balance of equities tips in its favor, let alone strongly so; or that the public interests lie in granting the injunction," said the ruling by Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein in US District Court for the Western District of Washington.

Parler could still prevail in the case, but it won't be reinstated to Amazon's service in the meantime. Parler accused Amazon of conspiracy in restraint of trade, in violation of the Sherman Act; breach of contract; and tortious interference with business expectancy.

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Google agrees to pay French news sites to send them traffic

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 22:26:55 GMT

Enlarge / Google's corporate headquarters. (credit: Alex Tai | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

French news sites have prevailed in negotiations with Google over "neighboring rights," a new legal right granted by the 2019 EU Copyright Directive. An agreement between Google and the French news industry "establishes a framework within which Google will negotiate individual licensing agreements" with individual news organizations, according to Google. Under these deals, French news articles will be featured in a new Google product called News Showcase.

This isn't the outcome Google wanted. For years, European news organizations have tried to force Google to pay them for the privilege of indexing their articles, and for years Google flatly refused to do so. When Spain passed legislation to force Google to pay to link to Spanish News organizations in 2014, Google responded by shutting down Google News in Spain.

Google tried to use that same playbook in France after the passage of the EU copyright directive. France was the first country to transpose the EU directive into its own laws. In 2019, Google announced it was going to stop displaying "snippets" from French news articles in search results. Google believed that showing only news story headlines, not brief excerpts from articles, would bring it into compliance with the new law.

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Facebook calls in its Oversight Board to rule on Trump ban

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 21:53:16 GMT

Enlarge / Facebook's Menlo Park, California, headquarters as seen in 2017. (credit: Jason Doiy | Getty Images)

Facebook's Oversight Board is getting its highest-profile case yet, as the company kicks its decision to boot former-President Donald Trump off its platforms to the largely untested "Supreme Court" of social media for review.

Facebook suspended Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts on January 7 in the immediate aftermath of the insurrectionist riots at the US Capitol. "The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden," company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time. "We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete."

Although that two-week period is now complete, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg confirmed to Reuters last week that the company expected to continue the bans indefinitely and had "no plans" to let Trump resume posting content to their platforms.

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Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel replaces Ajit Pai, is now acting FCC chairwoman

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 21:03:25 GMT

Enlarge / Jessica Rosenworcel answers a question during a Senate Commerce Committee oversight hearing to examine the Federal Communications Commission on June 24, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Jonathan Newton)

President Joe Biden today appointed Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel to be the acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission. Rosenworcel became an FCC commissioner in 2012 and served in a Democratic majority during the Obama years and in a Democratic minority during the Trump years.

"I am honored to be designated as the Acting Chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission by President Biden," Rosenworcel said in a statement. "I thank the President for the opportunity to lead an agency with such a vital mission and talented staff. It is a privilege to serve the American people and work on their behalf to expand the reach of communications opportunity in the digital age."

With ex-Chairman Ajit Pai having left the FCC yesterday, there is a 2-2 split between Democrats and Republicans. To form a 3-2 Democratic majority, Biden will have to nominate a new commissioner and secure confirmation from the Senate—which shouldn't be too difficult now that Democrats control the chamber. Biden's decision to promote Rosenworcel from commissioner to acting chairwoman does not require Senate approval.

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QAnon in crisis as day of reckoning fails to materialize

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:12:59 GMT

Enlarge / A demonstrator holds a "Q" sign outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

QAnon adherents called it “the storm.” At midday on Wednesday, there were supposed to be blackouts across the US, military tribunals led by Donald Trump, and the mass execution of Democrats in the streets.

It did not happen. Instead, Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th US president and the day of reckoning anticipated by the pro-Trump conspiracy cult failed to materialize, dismaying the faithful.

“QAnon believers invested all their remaining hopes in false beliefs that Trump would take action validating their theories before or during inauguration,” said Jared Holt, a research fellow focused on extremism at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “For some followers, watching Biden and [Vice President Kamala] Harris sworn into office was a breaking point in their beliefs.”

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Treasury nominee Yellen is looking to curtail use of cryptocurrency

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 22:45:40 GMT

Enlarge / Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's nominee to be Secretary of the Treasury, at a December press conference. (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Cryptocurrencies could come under renewed regulatory scrutiny over the next four years if Janet Yellen, Joe Biden's pick to lead the Treasury Department, gets her way. During Yellen's Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) asked Yellen about the use of cryptocurrency by terrorists and other criminals.

"Cryptocurrencies are a particular concern," Yellen responded. "I think many are used—at least in a transactions sense—mainly for illicit financing."

She said she wanted to "examine ways in which we can curtail their use and make sure that [money laundering] doesn't occur through those channels."

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Amazon offers Biden help to speed up vaccine distribution

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 21:58:59 GMT

Enlarge / An Amazon warehouse on a sunny day in Germany on April 2, 2020. (credit: Patrick Pleul | picture alliance | Getty Images)

Amazon is one of the country's largest businesses—and despite its faults and flaws, the company overall excels at logistics and distribution at scale. Therefore, Amazon suggests, the brand-new Biden administration should give the company a call to help ramp up COVID-19 distribution nationwide.

"Amazon stands ready to assist you in reaching your goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days of your administration," Dave Clark, the head of Amazon's consumer business, wrote in a letter (PDF) to President Joe Biden Wednesday.

Amazon's more than 800,000 employees should be in the vaccine queue as soon as possible, Clark noted, as individuals working in Amazon warehouses, AWS data centers, and Whole Foods stores are essential workers who cannot work from home. The company has inked a deal with a third-party health care firm to administer vaccines on-site at Amazon-owned facilities, Clark added—if they could just get vaccines to administer.

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3Mbps uploads still fast enough for US homes, Ajit Pai says in final report

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 19:45:57 GMT

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says goodbye to members of a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee afters testifying during a hearing on June 16, 2020, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)

In one of his last acts as Federal Communications Commission chairman, Ajit Pai decided to stick with the FCC's 6-year-old broadband standard of 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds.

The decision was announced yesterday in the FCC's annual broadband-deployment report, released one day before Pai's departure from the FCC. As in all previous years of Pai's chairmanship, the report concludes that the telecom industry is doing enough to extend broadband access to all Americans—despite FCC Democrats saying the facts don't support that conclusion.

Pai's report said:

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Trump pardons engineer who copped to stealing a Google secret for Uber

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 15:57:54 GMT

Enlarge / Anthony Levandowski exits federal court in San Jose, California, on August 27, 2019. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On his final full day in office, Donald Trump pardoned Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of Waymo's epic 2017 trade secret battle with Uber. Last year, Levandowski pleaded guilty to stealing a single confidential Google document; prosecutors agreed to drop other pending charges against him.

Levandowski was a key early member of Google's self-driving car project, but he quit Google in early 2016 to found his own self-driving startup. Within months, the startup was acquired by Uber for a nine-figure sum, and Levandowski was put in charge of Uber's self-driving efforts.

But then, Google's self-driving unit—now known as Waymo—accused Levandowski of stealing trade secrets. According to Waymo, Levandowski had downloaded thousands of confidential documents from Google in his final days as a Google employee. Waymo says it was tipped off to the theft after Uber submitted a design for a lidar circuit board to a third-party vendor—a vendor also used by Waymo. Uber's design looked almost identical to Waymo's.

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Fired former data scientist Rebekah Jones arrested, tests positive for COVID-19

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 21:42:49 GMT

Enlarge / Florida's handling of the pandemic has been... a mixed bag. This beach was hopping on May 20, around the same time Jones publicly claimed the state fired her for refusing to manipulate Florida's COVID-19 data. (credit: Mike Ehrmann | Getty Images)

Florida police have arrested former state data scientist Rebekah Jones, accusing her of breaking state laws prohibiting accessing computer systems without authorization.

Jones on Saturday disclosed the arrest warrant herself, writing in a series of tweets that she and her lawyer had arranged with Florida police for her to present herself to law enforcement in Tallahassee on Sunday evening. (Jones and her family currently live in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.) Jones was released from jail Monday after posting $2,500 bail and reportedly testing positive for COVID-19 while in police custody.

The warrant alleges that Jones gained unauthorized access to state Department of Health systems in November to send an unauthorized message to employees and to download a list of contact information for approximately 19,000 people.

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Trump’s Clean Power Plan replacement gets thrown out by a court

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 21:22:41 GMT

Enlarge / DUNKIRK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2016/10/09: A NRG-owned coal-fired energy facility that plans to convert to a natural gas facility. (credit: John Greim / Getty Images)

Today, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia vacated the Trump administration's attempt to take a minimalist approach to the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions. The ruling was a lopsided victory for the long list of groups opposing the Trump EPA's approach, with the entire rule being vacated. Thus, the Biden administration will start unencumbered by its predecessors' attempts to gut carbon dioxide regulations.

Here we go again

Some of the legal issues here date back to the Clinton administration, when states sued to force the EPA to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. That issue was ultimately clarified by the Supreme Court, which, during the George W. Bush administration, ruled that carbon dioxide could be regulated as a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act. Early in the Obama administration, the EPA issued an endangerment finding for greenhouse gasses that provided the scientific rationale for regulations. Those regulations came in the form of the Clean Power Plan, issued during Obama's second term.

While the Clean Power Plan completed the federal rule-making process, it was held up by lawsuits when President Obama left office. Trump issued an executive order that directed the EPA to replace the Clean Power Plan. The EPA's eventual replacement, the Affordable Clean Energy rule (ACE), went well beyond simply ending or limiting the Clean Power Plan. Instead, ACE attempted to narrow the regulation allowed under the Clean Air Act by having states regulate each individual source of emissions, rather than regulating the state's total emissions. As an added bonus, it also stretched out the timeline for states to bring their emissions into compliance.

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As Ajit Pai exits FCC, Charter admits defeat on petition to impose data caps

Tue, 19 Jan 2021 18:36:07 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Andrzej Wojcicki)

Charter Communications has withdrawn a petition seeking government permission to impose data caps on broadband users this year.

Unlike other ISPs, Charter is subject to the prohibition on data caps and overage fees until May 2023 because of seven-year conditions applied to its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable. In June 2020, Charter petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to let the condition expire two years early, on May 18, 2021.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sought public comment on the petition but never took final action, even though he had opposed the merger conditions when they were imposed by the Obama-era FCC. With Pai leaving the FCC upon President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration tomorrow, Charter submitted a brief filing stating that it "respectfully withdraws its petition."

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