Month: June 2020

Enlarge / This dog was part of widespread protests against the FBI's attempts to penetrate iPhone encryption. (credit: Dünzlullstein bild / Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced yet another bill attempting to poke holes in data encryption, called the Lawful Access To Encrypted Data Act. This bill follows previous US efforts to weaken encryption, including March's proposed EARN IT Act and demands US Attorney General William Barr made in his 2019 keynote address at the International Conference on Cyber Security.

A press release from the Senate Judiciary Committee—which is chaired by Graham—describes the bill as "a balanced solution that keeps in mind the constitutional rights afforded to all Americans, while providing law enforcement the tools needed to protect the public from everyday violent crime and threats to our national security." It goes on to emphasize—in both bold and italic text—that the bill would "only" require service providers to grant law enforcement a back door after a court issues a warrant.

Graham expresses his personal position in strong terms:

Enlarge / Repeated tests and studies have shown that existing facial recognition technology is more likely to generate false positives with Black faces—a major issue for policing, the ACLU argues. (credit: Prostock-Studio | Getty Images)

Civil rights activists have filed an official complaint against the Detroit police, alleging the department arrested the wrong man based on a faulty and incorrect match provided by facial recognition software—the first known complaint of this kind.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed the complaint (PDF) Wednesday on behalf of Robert Williams, a Michigan man who was arrested in January based on a false positive generated by facial recognition software. "At every step, DPD's conduct has been improper," the complaint alleges. "It unthinkingly relied on flawed and racist facial recognition technology without taking reasonable measures to verify the information being provided" as part of a "shoddy and incomplete investigation."

The investigation began when five watches, valued at about $3,800, were stolen from a Shinola luxury retail store in Detroit in October 2018. Investigators reviewed the security footage and identified a suspect: an apparent Black man wearing a baseball cap and a dark jacket. In March 2019, according to the complaint, Detroit police conducted a facial recognition search using an image from the surveillance footage; that search matched the image to Williams' driver's license photo.

Enlarge (credit: releon8211 / Getty)

Indiana's Supreme Court has ruled that the Fifth Amendment allows a woman accused of stalking to refuse to unlock her iPhone. The court held that the Fifth Amendment's rule against self-incrimination protected Katelin Seo from giving the police access to potentially incriminating data on her phone.

The courts are divided on how to apply the Fifth Amendment in this kind of case. Earlier this year, a Philadelphia man was released from jail after four years of being held in contempt in connection with a child-pornography case. A federal appeals court rejected his argument that the Fifth Amendment gave him the right to refuse to unlock hard drives found in his possession. A Vermont federal court reached the same conclusion in 2009—as did a Colorado federal court in 2012, a Virginia state court in 2014, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in 2014.

But other courts in Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania have reached the opposite conclusion, holding that forcing people to provide computer or smartphone passwords would violate the Fifth Amendment.

Enlarge / A T-Mobile logo at a store in New York on April 30, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

T-Mobile is already trying to get out of merger conditions imposed by state regulators in California less than three months after completing its acquisition of Sprint.

T-Mobile yesterday filed a petition with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), asking the agency to provide two extra years to meet 5G build-out requirements and to eliminate a requirement to add 1,000 new employees. T-Mobile, which had agreed to other conditions imposed by the federal government, completed the Sprint merger on April 1 without waiting for California's approval. T-Mobile claimed the state has no jurisdiction over wireless transactions. CPUC, which says it does have jurisdiction, imposed conditions when it approved the merger on April 16.

T-Mobile's petition to CPUC could be a prelude to a lawsuit against California if the carrier doesn't get what it wants. On 5G, T-Mobile's petition targets a condition requiring average speeds of 300Mbps to 93 percent of California by the end of 2024. T-Mobile asked the CPUC for an extra two years to comply, saying it should have until the end of 2026. T-Mobile claims the 2024 date was a mistake "because the 2024 date was a proxy—used [by T-Mobile] at the beginning of the regulatory approval process in 2018—for the period ending six years after closing (which of course occurred in 2020)." Changing the deadline to 2026 would bring the condition "in line with the company's network model, which includes coverage projections for three- and six-year periods from close," T-Mobile said.