Bail reform saves lives, "The Ogg Blog," pay-per-surveillance, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends that merit Grits readers' attention:

Kim Ogg oppo blog launched
The Justice Collaborative has launched The Ogg Blog, providing background on various criticisms vs. embattled Harris County DA Kim Ogg as she faces a bevy of opponents in the coming March primary. Grits is grateful; I'd intended to compile a long, greatest-hits post for Ogg as a bookend to this one about Travis County DA Margaret Moore, so they've saved me the trouble.

Bexar County Jail deaths argue for bail reform
At the Texas Observer, Michael Barajas examines recent deaths in the Bexar County Jail, a topic which  led the Express-News recently to call for an audit. At root, the problems implicate a broken bail system that incarcerates low-risk defendants because they don't have money: "Don’t lose sight of the broad strokes," admonished the Express-News. "Three defendants in their 60s. All charged with criminal trespass. All given nominal cash bonds that kept them incarcerated pretrial. All dead in our jail. All of this in the span of about a year." But local judges, including one who ran a bail-bond company before ascending to the bench, have consistently opposed any move toward reforming bail processes.

To be clear, despite plaintive cries that bail reform will harm public safety, the real reason bail-bond companies oppose reform is all about preserving their anachronistic business model. Continuing to subsidize this industry in the 21st century is akin to subsidizing buggy whip manufacturers in the 20th: Their time has passed.

Fact checking the Governor on homeless policies
PolitiFact fact-checked Governor Greg Abbott on his claims about Austin's homeless. Guess how he fared?

Levin on reducing Big-D murder rate
Marc Levin from Right on Crime appeared on the Point of View podcast to discuss Dallas' plan to reduce its murder rate.

Pay-to-surveil
Google wants to begin charging law enforcement for requests for location information and other user data. The big telecoms already do so.

'A Very Carpenter Christmas'

From the intro to the latest Reasonably Suspicious podcast, apropos of Christmas Eve, please enjoy 'A Very Carpenter Christmas,' a bit of seasonal verse in honor of US v. Carpenter - the case pending before the US Supreme Court which will decide whether the government must secure a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment in order to access personal location tracking data on individuals from their cell-phone service providers:

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the home, 

The smartphones pinged cell towers, ne'er did they roam. 

Their location was fixed there all through the night, 

Could be proven in court with no warrant in sight. 

Then what to my wondering eyes did appear, 

But Chief Justice Roberts like a red-nosed reindeer,

Leading the way for SCOTUS to hone 

A warrant requirement for tracking your phone. 

On Roberts, on Gorsuch, on Sotomayor. 

Tracking us isn't what phones are for. 

On Thomas, on Ginsburg, on Breyer, on Kagan. 

Please give Fourth Amendment fans something to cheer again. 

And clearly explain, before it goes out of sight, 

Why not being tracked by our phones is a right.

Or, here's an audio excerpt from the podcast with your correspondent reading this sure-to-be-a-classic selection:


Merry Christmas, y'all.

Christmas and the Surveillance State: December Reasonably Suspicious podcast

Check out the December edition of Just Liberty's Reasonably Suspicious podcast, covering Texas criminal justice policy and politics. Two great interviews this month - one with reporter Brandi Grissom Swicegood about the alleged abuse and turmoil at the Gainesville State School, and another with Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the national Innocence Project, regarding forensic-science reform. You can listen to the latest episode here, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, or SoundCloud.


If you haven't subscribed yet, take a moment to do so now to make sure you won't miss an episode. Topics this month include:

Top Stories
US v. Carpenter: SCOTUS appears likely to require a warrant for cell-phone location data.

Interview

Brandi Grissom, discussing the staff-on-youth sex scandal at the Gainesville State School.

Home Court Advantage

Evaluating a sharply split decision from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upholding a first-degree felony drug conviction in which a police officer stole the product and laced sheetrock with less than a gram of cocaine to frame the defendant. (See prior Grits coverage.)

Interview

Peter Neufeld of the national Innocence Project, discussing forensic science reform.

Errors and Updates

• Forensic hypnosis
• Austin City Council rejected police union contract
• DNA mixture evidence

The Last Hurrah

• TDCJ prison understaffing and staff safety
• Death penalty use declining: A first for Harris County in 40 years
• Dallas pilot program de-escalates mental-health calls by sending medical staff instead of cops

Find a full transcript of the podcast below the jump.

Training too late, parsing crime data, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends which merit Grits readers attention but may not make it into independent posts:

Trooper who shot unarmed schizophrenic man should have already taken remedial training on 'Effective Decision Making'
Eva Ruth Moravec's Point of Impact series on unarmed people shot by Texas law enforcement last year has its latest installment out: the story of state trooper Timothy Keele who killed Garrett Steven McKinney, a schizophrenic man who'd been waving his arms at passing traffic by the highway. Unbeknownst to the trooper, McKinney's father had earlier dropped him off at a nearby hospital for treatment, but he never went inside. After a cordial initial encounter, McKinney allegedly sucker punched the trooper. They struggled, the trooper's arm was dislocated, and he shot the man four times.

Eva Ruth's story includes a good discussion of the training requirements at DPS related to dealing with mentally ill suspects compared to other law enforcement agencies. She also points out that new state-mandated reporting on police shootings doesn't include information on the mental health status of the victim. Speaking of training, the trooper had been "suspended without pay for one day in February 2015 and told to attend an 'Effective Decision Making' course after tracking down and scolding a 17-year-old driver who had cut him off in traffic the previous day." Trooper Keele did not take the "Effective Decision Making" course, however, until after Moravec began to inquire with the agency, with the shooting occurring during the intervening period. Could what he learned in that course have saved McKinney's life? We'll never know.

Pointing fingers over rampant use of junk science in courtroom
Judges are becoming defensive at charges they aren't performing an adequate gatekeeper function when it comes to junk forensic science. This short Pass-the-Buck essay from Kerrville District Judge Robert Barton typifies this sort of self justifying reasoning. Everyone is to blame but him for junk science in the system, even though he's the only one in the courtroom with authority to exclude it. As the Republican presidential nominee might say ... "Sad."

Surveillance matters
Grits doesn't consider racial profiling the biggest problem with widespread use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement, but you can add that to the list. One wonders if federal surveillance in Texas is increasing at the rates documented in these jurisdictions?

A call for new agency to handle capital appeals
Grits contributing writer Jennifer Laurin argued in an op ed for creating a designated appellate defender for capital cases in Texas comparable to the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs on the habeas side. Good idea. But creating a new government agency during a budget-starved session with a 2-1 Republican  majority at the Legislature seems like a heavy lift. There will be lots of other demands on the state's limited resources.

Parsing conflicting crime metrics
Soon I may have a separate post about crime rate data and its shortcomings. The two most important national sources are the Uniform Crime Reports which document "index crimes" (including most serious crimes with victims) reported to law enforcement at all levels, and the national crime victimization survey which performs in-depth public surveys with huge sample sizes and many cross-referenced questions to estimate crime victimization trends. They tend to sync up over time, but not always year to year. In September, UCR numbers came out showing murder rates are up, especially in a handful of large cities, after decades of reductions. Then this month, the new crime victimization survey shows violent crime as "flat," with all other types of crime down. "From 2014 to 2015, there was no statistically significant change in the overall violent crime rate. From 1993 to 2015, the rate of violent crime declined from 79.8 to 18.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older." Whichever metric you prioritize (and both have strengths and shortcomings relative to the other), crime, including violent crimes, remains at historic lows.

Beating (up) Devon Anderson, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends which haven't made it into independent posts but merit Grits readers' attention:

Beating (up) Devon Anderson
In Harris County, critics are now piling on incumbent District Attorney Devon Anderson, sometimes for things under her control and sometimes not. Texas Monthly compiled examples from the growing litany of allegations which could provide the margin for her defeat in what's expected (by me, anyway) to be a tight November race. As Republican DAs go, I like Devon Anderson. I think she's grown immensely since taking office (under what must have been weird and emotional circumstances). She's a sensible if modest reformer, not some tough-on-crime ogre. But her ouster by a candidate running essentially on a reform platform in the nation's fourth largest city would be significant. And lately, she hasn't done herself any favors.

Shortage of competency restoration beds worst in recent memory
Terri Langford at the Dallas News had an update on the shortage of competency restoration beds at Texas state mental hospitals, a longstanding Grits hobbyhorse. "The number of inmates [on the wait list] has jumped by more than 86 percent in the last 12 months to a record 278 in July. Their average wait time is 149 days." The crisis is now officially the worst its ever been:

Pointing fingers over Austin PD DNA mess
Seeking to take advantage of the ongoing SNAFU at Austin PD's DNA lab, the Austin Criminal Defense Lawyers Association this week alleged that, “'For years, the Austin Police Department has known its DNA lab was taking shortcuts to save time and money at the expense of science,' the defense attorneys organization said. 'Prosecutors in the DA’s office questioned the lab’s shoddy practices and were rebuffed.'” They accused APD officials of “shoddy practices” and “gross errors that could jeopardize the rights of thousands of defendants and victims.”

Federal statute inhibits Harris County jail reform
A Jimmy-Carter era federal statute explains why the Harris County Jail has been so slow to reduce unnecessary jail deaths, reported the Marshall Project. "[T]he result, at the Harris County jail, which has a population of about 9,000, and at some other large facilities, has been lots of talk, less action and, in some notable cases, scant sustainable improvement." To be fair, Harris County could have addressed these problems without being forced to do so without federal litigation. The failure to do so lies at the feet of the current and former Sheriffs and county commissioners. But it's also a fair point that federal oversight structures have few teeth.

State wants $4-5 million for Dawson State Jail site
The Dallas News reports the state of Texas will ask between $4 and $5.1 million for the old Dawson State Jail facility on the banks of the Trinity River. The city of Dallas hoped to purchase the land as part of its Trinity River redevelopment, raising the question: Will the city or one of its partners pony up that much?

Ranking Texas corrections population compared to cities
Attentive readers may recall Grits has pegged the size of the Texas prison system by declaring that it's larger than the city populations of Waco or Midland. Here's a column and chart establishing precisely where TDCJ's population falls on that scale. Now, if you include all Texans under supervision of the state criminal justice system - in prison, county jails, on probation and on parole - the system would come in 6th, just outdistancing El Paso's municipal population.

Stingray data dump
The Intercept's Sam Biddle reveals the results from the biggest open records haul yet regarding so-called Stingray devices (or, technically, IMSI catchers, see here, here and here) in a must-read piece for anyone interested in electronic surveillance questions. In Houston, notably, local police refuse to share details of the device's use with prosecutors, citing the confidentiality agreement now largely mooted with the release of these documents. Now it's just when, where and why the device is used that they're hiding; the how is out there.

Debate: How best to manage police departments?
This Harvard Business Review article suggested that the best way to manage police departments post-Ferguson is (apparently) to ignore demands from the community for justice and instead myopically hone in on what they dub "organizational justice" as viewed from the perspective of police officers and no one else. Thanks, guys. Advising police administrators to pander to the biggest, most aggressive opponents of reform, that's really helpful. To their credit, the same publication ran a much better article last month titled, "The Organizational Reasons Police Departments Don't Change."

EFF: License plate readers shift traffic enforcement priorities to debt collection

The Electronic Frontier Foundation yesterday offered Grits an "I told you so" regarding legislation passed last year allowing Texas cops to become debt collectors, accepting credit cards for traffic ticket debt at traffic stops. I'd much rather have been wrong.

Grits had suggested that Rep. Allen Fletcher's HB 121, combined with automatic license plate reader technology, could allow police to “cherry pick drivers with outstanding warrants instead of looking for current, real-time traffic violations.”

Wrote EFF's Dave Maass (formerly of the San Antonio Current):

As it turns out, contracts between between Vigilant and Guadalupe County and the City of Kyle in Texas reveal that Henson was right to worry.

The “warrant redemption” program works like this. The agency gets no-cost license plate readers as well as free access to LEARN-NVLS, the ALPR data system Vigilant says contains more than 2.8-billion plate scans and is growing by more than 70 million scans a month. This also includes a wide variety of analytical and predictive software tools.

The government agency in turn gives Vigilant access to information about all its outstanding court fees, which the company then turns into a hot list to feed into the free ALPR systems. As police cars patrol the city, they ping on license plates associated with the fees. The officer then pulls the driver over and offers them a devil’s bargain: go to jail, or pay the original fine with an extra 25% processing fee tacked on, all of which goes to Vigilant.1 In other words, the driver is paying Vigilant to provide the local police with the technology used to identify and then detain the driver. If the ALPR pings on a parked car, the officer can get out and leave a note to visit Vigilant’s payment website.

But Vigilant isn’t just compensated with motorists’ cash. The law enforcement agencies are also using the privacy of everyday drivers as currency.

 

From Vigilant Solutions contract with City of Kyle

Buried in the fine print of the contract with Vigilant is a clause that says the company also get to keep a copy of all the license-plate data collected by the agency, even after the contract ends. According the company's usage and privacy policy, Vigilant “retains LPR data as long as it has commercial value.” Vigilant can sell or license that information to other law enforcement bodies, and potentially private companies such as insurance firms and repossession agencies.

In early December 2015, Vigilant issued a press release bragging that Guadalupe County had used the systems to collect on more than 4,500 warrants between April and December 2015. In January 2016, the City of Kyle signed an identical deal with Vigilant. Soon after, Guadalupe County upgraded the contract to allow Vigilant to dispatch its own contractors to collect on capias warrants.

So really, I wasn't cynical enough. Grits certainly didn't anticipate that license plate reader vendors would give away their systems in exchange for a 25 percent surcharge. EFF concluded that:

the system raises a whole host of problems:

• It turns police into debt collectors, who have to keep swiping credit cards to keep the free equipment.
• It turns police into data miners, who use the privacy of local drivers as currency.
• It not-so-subtly shifts police priorities from responding to calls and traffic violations to responding to a computer’s instructions.
• Policy makers and the public are unable to effectively evaluate the technology since the contract prohibits police from speaking honestly and openly about the program.
• The model relies on debt: there’s no incentive for criminal justice leaders to work with the community to reduce the number of capias warrants, since that could result in losing the equipment.
• People who have committed no crimes whatsoever have their driving patterns uploaded into a private system and no opportunity to control or watchdog how that data is disseminated. 

There was a time where companies like Vigilant marketed ALPR technology as a way to save kidnapped children, recover stolen cars, and catch violent criminals. But as we’ve long warned, ALPRs in fact are being deployed for far more questionable practices.

The Texas public should be outraged at the terrible deals their representatives are signing with this particular surveillance contractor, and the legislature should reexamine the unintended consequences of the law they passed last year.

RELATED: Bud Kennedy at the Star-Telegram offered up a column criticizing the shift in priorities:

Lawmakers originally said the system would save officers time — true — but justice reformers were concerned that collections would become the focus over traffic patrol.

EFF warned that “To Protect and Serve” would become “To Stop and Swipe.”

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-kennedy/article56747488.html#storylink=cpy

AT&T: Historical cell-phone location data provides 'detailed and intimate portrayal of the targeted person’s daily habits and work and leisure routines'

At a hearing Wednesday evening on HB 2263 by Rep. Bryan Hughes requiring warrants for the government to access personal location data from cell phone companies, cops from Dallas and Houston testified that historical information should be subject to a lower standard than a Fourth Amendment probable cause warrant because it's less accurate than real-time tracking. The argument is that you can only tell which cell tower someone connected to, further narrowed by which third of the tower's range the signal came through. They depicted the scope of a cell tower's expanse as up to ten miles, and in rural areas I suppose that could be true. But these were Dallas and Houston cops and, as a factual matter, coming from those urban jurisdictions that's some pretty weak tea.

Here's how AT&T described the accuracy of historical cell phone location data in an amicus brief on the issue in November 2014:

The precision of this location information varies according to the array of the towers and technology employed. As the density of the cell towers increases (decreasing the area covered by any particular tower), the precision of the CSLI increases correspondingly. Rural or sparsely populated areas generally have fewer cell towers, each serving a larger territory. In more densely populated areas, towers are much closer together and serve smaller areas, generating more specific location information. As customers demand more bandwidth to support smartphones, video services, and other high-volume Internet access, service providers are increasing the density of cell towers, further shrinking the size of particular cells. Service providers are also increasingly boosting their network coverage through small cells known as “microcells” or “femtocells” that may cover an area as small as a single floor of a building or an individual house.

Cellular communications technology may also generate other, more precise forms of location information. For example, some mobile devices, such as smartphones, are equipped with GPS technology which determines the device’s exact location based on signals received by the phone from a network of satellites.  In addition, because mobile devices are often in contact with more than one cell tower at a time, it is often possible to  locate the device through triangulation – i.e., determining the point of overlap among the areas covered by each of the multiple towers within range of a particular device. ...

CSLI at times may provide more sensitive and extensive personal information than the car tracking information at issue in Jones [ed. note: a SCOTUS decision declaring use of GPS trackers is a search]. Users typically keep their mobile devices with them during the entire day, potentially providing a much more extensive and continuous record of an individual’s movements and living patterns than that provided by tracking a vehicle; CSLI, therefore, is not limited to the largely public road system or to when the device user is in a vehicle. That difference, in turn, may enable officials to use historical and prospective CSLI to construct a more detailed and intimate portrayal of the targeted person’s daily habits and work and leisure routines – including activities related to the home.

If "historical data is inaccurate" is the best argument they've got (all law enforcement witnesses granted that real-time tracking should require a warrant), this bill with its 97 House authors ought to do fine!

The whole AT&T brief (pdf) is quite a remarkable document for those interested in the topic. It staked out the corporate arguments in a systematic and compelling way for installing a probable-cause warrant requirement for government to access this detailed personal information.

MORE: It's worth noting both AT&T and Verizon registered in favor of Hughes' bill at the hearing.

McCraw: Terrorist threat at Texas border a myth, or, In favor of reality-based border-security policy: A minority view

The dumbest part of Texas' border "surge": There are no, none, zilch, zero viable metrics for measuring success. It's a truism in public policy of any sort that one cannot solve a problem one cannot measure. A Dec. 4 Austin Statesman story said DPS claimed this week that the surge worked because of increased illegal-immigrant apprehensions. but Rep. Donna Howard called them on this particular line of bullshit, pointing out “that officials also have claimed success when the number of apprehensions is down, which she said has been described as a sign of deterrence. That makes it difficult for lawmakers to figure out 'how much money to appropriate for this activity,'” she said. That's an understatement!

It's not that data-driven policy isn't possible. The McAllen Monitor recently offered thoughtful, incredibly detailed suggestions for fixing federal immigration courts that made loads of sense. (Read them, a summary won't do them justice.) Problem is, at the federal level neither party is advocating an approach that actually processes cases faster. These are good ideas, though, showing the problems are not insoluble if politicians actually wanted to resolve them.

Instead, the state plans to add 4,000 cameras along the border, another initiative that Grits considers a complete waste. There's little evidence cameras work even in crime-ridden inner-city hotspots, much less out in the boondocks along hundreds of miles of border. Then you have to pay people to watch them as well as waste manpower on responding to lots of false positives.

Finally, in a rare moment of (post-election) candor, DPS Col. Steve McCraw affirmed to the committee what anyone with access to Google already knew: That "there is 'no credible information that a terrorist has crossed or will cross' the Texas-Mexico border." I'd add one caveat: There's no evidence that terrorists are coming from Mexico to the United States to do harm. There's evidence that Texas prison gangs crossed the border south to work as soldiers in the Juarez cartel wars and may be responsible for hundreds or even thousands of murders there. Whether one considers them "terrorists" is a political and semantic question.

Otherwise, Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick and other state officials should adjust their rhetoric to reflect acknowledged reality from the state's top law enforcement official. Perhaps it would help to stand before a mirror each morning and recite McCraw's words aloud three times before the day begins - there is no credible information that a terrorist has crossed or will cross the Texas-Mexico border. (In particular, perhaps Breitbart Texas editors would benefit from such an exercise.) Barring that, I don't know what it will take to get Texas politicians to stop telling lies about border security threats.

Roundup: Of atonement, prison bankers, pot and imaginary terrorists

Lots going on and I won't have time to write about all of it. Here are several items clogging my web browser that merit Grits readers attention, even if they may not make it into independent posts:

Dallas PD will move to citations for pot possession
After revamping its systems, Dallas PD will attempt for the second time to exercise authority granted them by the Legislature in 2007 to issue citations instead of arrest people for marijuana possession and a handful of other Class B misdemeanors, reported the Dallas News. The main reason is to keep police officers on the street, saving: "each officer the two to four hours squandered in driving a nonviolent misdemeanor suspect to the county jail and going through the booking rigamarole." At a House County Affairs Committee hearing in May, legislators discussed simply reducing penalties for pot possession and driving with an invalid license (DWLI) because so few departments were using this authority and local jails were still too full of petty pot offenders. MORE: From Unfair Park.

Austin to eliminate rape kit backlog
Thanks to extra staff and funding, Austin PD plans to eliminate its rape-kit backlog - which is much smaller than was Houston's - within 12 months, the chief announced.

Dallas DA's race goes negative, gets personal
The Dallas DA's race is getting ugly and personal. This is the kind of election that both makes me miss performing opposition research in campaigns and simultaneously glad to stay miles away from the process. Watkins should, and may still, win this election going away. The only things keeping it close are inexplicable, self-generated gaffes. His opponent Susan Hawk may have strayed over the line implying he was drunk at a debate. There are various means for launching an attack and that wasn't the smartest way to stage that one. But Watkins doesn't look much better. He seems bent on providing fodder for critics instead of creating an alternative narrative voters can latch onto. Such races make me miss oppo research because this is the sort of race where well-crafted negative messages could make a big difference. (Neither side seems to have that sort of professional help, judging from the predominant messages in the campaign.) It makes me glad to stay away because the whole thing is becoming highly personal and will result in grudges held by the principals for many years to come. I don't need that kind of pointless, narcissistic drama in my life.

Bexar considers expanding public defender office
In San Antonio, Bexar County officials are mulling a full-blown public defender office, expanding on the appellate and mental health public defenders operating there now. This article by Michelle Cassady discussed obstacles to creating a public defender steps the county is taking to overcome them. The reason for the move: economics. "Defendants in 64 percent of all criminal cases filed in the county last year declared themselves indigent — too poor to afford representation — and were appointed an attorney, according to county records."

Do criminal laws rob offenders of atonement?
Hanna Liebman Dershowitz, a former staffer for state Sen. Rodney Ellis and now an attorney with the Jewish Council for public affairs, had an article in the Jewish Daily Forward (Oct. 6) which opened, "We are emerging from the Day of Repentance — a time for contrition for misdeeds, focusing on self-improvement and making a fresh start. But what about people who don’t have the luxury of wiping their slates clean, even for minor transgressions? Are our laws and policies robbing millions of citizens of their own opportunities to turn toward good, to achieve the possibility of teshuvah, atonement, that we claim for ourselves each year?"

ISIS still not infiltrating the Texas border
Politicians are going to keep repeating this garbage so it's worth highlighting the factual counter whenever it's offered: The "claim that Islamic State fighters were apprehended in Texas" was “categorically false” according to the Department of Homeland Security and “not supported by any credible intelligence.” The allegations "gained widespread attention on Wednesday, especially on conservative news websites." And remarkably, "The National Republican Congressional Committee, for example, is running an ad in Arizona that claims terrorists are entering the country through the state’s southern border." Rick Perry put similar, garbage allegations on TV in 2006. It was a lie then, just like now, but that didn't make the political message any less successful. The reason politicians just make stuff up and stick to their guns in the face of all evidence is that, as often as not, it works.

'Meet the prison bankers who profit from the inmates'
The subhed is the title of a recent Time magazine article focused on the little analyzed topic of moving inmates' money.

Police and private surveillance
Every time one turns around there are new stories out that make you question the vast scope of mass public surveillance, including these developments regarding private surveillance of public spaces.

Companies selling government detailed location data

At the Washington Post we find an article titled "For Sale: Systems that can secretly track where cell phone users go around the globe," (Aug. 24). Here's how the story begins:

Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments around the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent.

The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on their customers’ locations to deliver calls and other services.

Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people’s travels over days, weeks or longer, according to company marketing documents and experts in surveillance technology.

The world’s most powerful intelligence services, such as the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ, long have used cellphone data to track targets around the globe. But experts say these new systems allow less technically advanced governments to track people in any nation — including the U.S. — with relative ease and precision.

Users of such technology type a phone number into a computer portal, which then collects information from the location databases maintained by cellular carriers, company documents show. In this way, the surveillance system learns which cell tower a target is using, revealing his location to within a few blocks in an urban area or a few miles in a rural one.

It is unclear which governments have acquired these tracking systems, but one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive trade information, said that dozens of countries have bought or leased such technology in recent years. This rapid spread underscores how the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar surveillance industry makes advanced spying technology available worldwide.

See the Post's interactive addendum to the story.

One wonders: Are these services ever accessed by state and local law enforcement? In Texas? Perhaps this is another topic for the Texas Senate State Affairs to potentially consider when they meet to discuss their interim charges on electronic privacy September 16.

Reshuffling chairs benefits cell-phone privacy bill in Texas Senate

If, like me, you're prone to indulging in political tea-leaf reading, here's some potentially good news for Texans who favor keeping their cell-phone location data private!

In 2013, state Sen. Craig Estes (R) of Wichita Falls and Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa (D) of McAllen both filed ultimately unsuccessful legislation to require law enforcement to gain warrants to access cell-phone location data, except in emergencies or at the request of the phone owner. A similar provision by state Rep. Bryan Hughes passed the Texas House as an amendment on a 126-4 vote but was not included in the final bill.

Now, Sen. Estes chairs the Senate State Affairs Committee which has received an interim charge to recommend legislation on a topic he was already championing! That should give cell-phone privacy legislation a significant boost in the 84th session.

The story of the current interim charges on electronic privacy is an object lesson regarding the unpredictable vicissitudes of politics. Interim charges were first requested by the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, but were not assigned by Speaker Joe Straus. One hopes Straus is not blocking the effort to spite the House author, with whom he has feuded in the past on other matters. After all, the bill had 107 joint and co-authors including a majority of reps from both parties! Most of his members want this!

Anyway, those of us hoping for movement on this bill were a bit deflated. Then, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst revived the issue, assigning an excellent set of interim charges on these and related topics to the Senate State Affairs Committee. Suddenly, it looked like the issues would receive a thorough vetting before the 84th Legislative session after all. At least, right up until State Affairs Committee Chair Robert Duncan left his post to become Chancellor of Texas Tech and the Lt. Governor lost his primary and became a lame duck, as did the committee's vice chair, Robert Deuell (a great if under-remarked loss to the body on many levels). With the committee leaderless, a State Affairs staffer told me as recently as last month that they likely wouldn't hold hearings and would somehow generate a committee report without them.

Texas Senate State Affairs Chairman Craig Estes

Then, the Lt. Governor recently named state Sen. Craig Estes as the new chair of the State Affairs committee, a development I missed while vacationing in Mexico. As one of two Senate authors of legislation to require warrants in most cases for police to access cell-phone location data (Chuy Hinojosa was the other one), one would expect him to confront those aspects of the committee's interim charges with more than just a passing interest. These interim charges just got a LOT more interesting.

The House was already primed to pass the Hughes/Estes/Hinojosa legislation and this development sets the bill up to have a much better chance in the Senate in 2015.

Of course, there's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. If Dan Patrick comes in as Lt. Governor and replaces Estes as State Affairs chair, that could reverse what currently looks like home-field advantage for the bill in that particular committee, depending on the replacement. And who knows where Greg Abbott will come down on the topic? Time will tell. But the odds of a cell-phone privacy bill's passage next year improved tremendously with Craig Estes' ascension to chairman of State Affairs, no question about it.

Police tech roundup

Here are several items related to policing tech that caught my eye today:

Speeding and Tweeting
Cops in Keller, TX are posting on Twitter and Facebook where and when they'll be doing traffic enforcement in hopes that people who know they'll be there will avoid speeding in the first place. Seems like a sensible plan.

Police body cams and privacy
Grits is generally a fan of police wearing body cams because it generates better evidence in criminal cases and provides a prophylactic against wrongdoing. But there are a handful of legitimate privacy issues cameras bring with them - toilet time, talking to confidential informants, etc. - that are discussed in this article and especially, in much more detail, in the comments. Not insurmountable, but the issues need to be discussed as this tech become more widespread.

Utah Lege: Require warrants for location data, content
Utah this month passed several notable pieces of electronic privacy legislation, including a bill "to obtain the location, transmitted data, or stored data of an electronic device such as a mobile phone or laptop. The bill requires law enforcement to delete any data they collect that doesn’t pertain to the suspect named in the warrant. It also requires notification to the individual that the location or data was obtained, much like a person is served a copy of a traditional warrant when physical property is searched or seized."

The FBI and signals intelligence
Don't just worry about the NSA invading your privacy, worry about the FBI. This article from Foreign Policy delves into the FBI's growing domestic signals intelligence capacity aimed at foreign embassies, but the same tech could be and is used in domestic criminal investigations.

The 'spy in your pocket'
 Dave Lieber at the Dallas Morning News had a column last month about the nexus between government and commercial cell phone tracking. See also recent columns at Wired touting the benefits, or at least relevant benevolence, of the 21st century consumer surveillance society.

I spy with my little surveillance camera
Check out examples of concealed surveillance devices from the Middle East and Guantanamo Bay, the latter of which was used to listen in on conversations between prisoners and their defense counsel.

Police surveillance at schools: Doubling down on stupid

"Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze."

- Garrison Keillor

In Austin, "Currently, police are working on getting access to the Austin Independent School District's campus cameras. That way school video would feed directly to the Crime Center," reported KEYE-TV. Further, "The chief also wants to access traffic cameras to see crashes, as well as join existing public cameras around town, like those outside businesses."

The chief claims cameras are a "force multiplier," but for reasons this blog has discussed before at length, in practice the opposite is true. While Grits is sympathetic with concerns expressed in the KEYE story by privacy advocates, the more compelling reason to oppose mass camera surveillance is that the tactic fails to reduce crime and in fact wastes officers' time that would be better spent on traditional investigations.

Especially in the U.K., where cameras are ubiquitous, there's been a great deal of research documenting where cameras actually reduce crime, and schools aren't on the list. The public shouldn't oppose camera surveillance (only) because of privacy concerns, but mainly because it's an ineffective tactic that empirically doesn't work.

Via Pogo Was Right.

Currently, police are working on getting access to the Austin Independent School District's campus cameras. That way school video would feed directly to the Crime Center.

Read More at: http://www.keyetv.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/apd-plans-expand-police-cameras-16411.shtml

Currently, police are working on getting access to the Austin Independent School District's campus cameras. That way school video would feed directly to the Crime Center.

Read More at: http://www.keyetv.com/news/features/top-stories/stories/apd-plans-expand-police-cameras-16411.shtml

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze
Read more at http://quotes.dictionary.com/Selective_ignorance_a_cornerstone_of_child_rearing_You#qLlZakEymvaiG5ji.99

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

Read more at http://quotes.dictionary.com/Selective_ignorance_a_cornerstone_of_child_rearing_You#qLlZakEymvaiG5ji.99

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

Read more at http://quotes.dictionary.com/Selective_ignorance_a_cornerstone_of_child_rearing_You#qLlZakEymvaiG5ji.99

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

Read more at http://quotes.dictionary.com/Selective_ignorance_a_cornerstone_of_child_rearing_You#qLlZakEymvaiG5ji.99

Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely nearsighted gaze.

Read more at http://quotes.dictionary.com/Selective_ignorance_a_cornerstone_of_child_rearing_You#qLlZakEymvaiG5ji.99

Drone Civil Disobedience?

Image via Wikipedia

Regular readers will recall Grits was no great fan of Texas' new statute regulating unmanned aircraft passed in 2013, which is so poorly written that nobody including police and prosecutors really have a clue what's legal or illegal. So I had to laugh when I saw that MAKE magazine is sponsoring an event during SXSW dubbed a "Fly-in" (like a "sit-in" in the sky) that, I suppose, could be viewed as a de facto act of drone-based civil disobedience.

Texas' new law stipulates that "A person commits an offense if the person uses an unmanned aircraft to capture an image of an individual or privately owned real property in this state with the intent to conduct surveillance on the individual or property captured in the image." The term "surveillance," though, is undefined in the statute. Most of these unmanned aircraft will inevitably be equipped with cameras that may capture "an image of an individual or privately owned real property" as they fly around. But while there are many exceptions in the statute to for law enforcement, utilities, oil and gas companies, etc., there's no exception for simple hobbyists like most of the folks who'll be attending the SXSW event.

I doubt law enforcement will come out to arrest DIY drone flyers at the Austin "Fly-in," but the fact that in theory they could shows why the statute was misguided, over-broad, and premature. When the law passed at the Texas Legislature, prosecutors predicted no one would ever be charged under it because the statute is too vague and contains many, often confusing caveats and exceptions that no one - either in the public or among law enforcement - really understands.

Arguably, DIY drones aren't engaging in "surveillance" but "sousveillance," or the recording of an activity by a participant in that activity. Texas' statute doesn't make such a distinction, but the realities of unmanned aircraft and the rapidity of their adoption for innumerable legitimate uses, many of which involve photography, show why the law as written really isn't ready for prime time.

Costs of constant police surveillance plummet thanks to cell-phone tech

The cost of surveillance has plummeted in the era of cell-phone location tracking, reported Andy Greenberg at Forbes. His Jan. 9 article begins:

It’s no secret that the ability to track a cell phone has led to a sea change in law enforcement surveillance methods. But now a pair of researchers have actually put a number to the plummeting cost of that covert spying in the modern world: Tracking a cell phone’s location, they found, costs somewhere between 1.9% and .015 % of the price of tailing someone the old fashioned way.

In a paper published Thursday in the Yale Law Journal, privacy-focused researchers Ashkan Soltani and Kevin Bankston have calculated the per-hour cost to law enforcement of tracking a person’s location using every method from officers on foot to police-planted GPS devices to obtaining the suspect’s location from their cell carrier. The results show that the cost of 24/7 surveillance operations have been reduced from hundreds of dollars an hour to employ teams of agents to track individuals in shifts to just a few dollars or even just pennies to query AT&T or Sprint for the same location data. ...

With their study, the researchers intend to show that cell phone tracking, like GPS tracking, is so cheap that it enables surveillance on a massive scale. In fact, their paper deduces a “rule of thumb” from the Jones ruling and other lower-court rulings to determine when location tracking without a warrant should be considered unconstitutional: “If the new tracking technique is an order of magnitude less expensive than the previous technique, the technique violates expectations of privacy and runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment,” they write.

That means cell phone tracking, which is often even cheaper than the warrantless GPS tracking the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in Jones, require the same level of privacy regulations if not more, Soltani argues. “When it was physically impossible to track everyone at the same time, you didn’t need a law for it,” he says. “What we’re saying is that technology changes what’s possible, and as a result, we may need to add legal barriers to compensate for those changing technical barriers.”

Read Soltani and Bankston’s full paper here.

Electronic Privacy Roundup: What can states do to rein in NSA phone surveillance?

Here are a few recent items related to electronic privacy that may interest Grits readers:

Check out a recent GAO report titled,  "Information Resellers: Consumer Privacy Framework Needs to Reflect Changes in Technology and Marketplace" (pdf). Regarding location information, which has been a focus on this blog, GAO found that apart from a law regulating information about young children, "No federal privacy laws that we evaluated ... expressly address location data, location-based technology, and consumer privacy." (Texas came close to passing a statute this year regulating location data and several other states have done so since then.) The GAO report noted in passing that "In 2010, [the federal Department of] Commerce recommended that the Administration review [the Electronic Communications Privacy Act] to address privacy protection of location-based services." (Those interested can view that report here.)

Regrettably, while the GAO report included some discussion of the privacy implications for consumer information shared with third parties, it utterly failed to address the Fourth Amendment implications of the third-party doctrine as it applies to law enforcement accessing consumer data held by vendors. Meanwhile, the Obama Administration continues to apply a sweeping interpretation of the 1979 US Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, to claim that consumers have no significant privacy interests once data from their computer or smart phone is shared with a third-party vendor. For example, ACLU's Free Future blog has a post detailing the feds' arguments for allowing the Drug Enforcement Agency to access a massive database of phone calls maintained by ATT, apparently part of the "Hemisphere" program which was recently revealed in reporting at the New York Times. According to the civil liberties group:

The government relies on a 1979 case, Smith v. Maryland, to argue that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their phone records under the Fourth Amendment. But that case involved collection of just a few days’ worth of dialing information about a single phone. Hemisphere involves searching a database containing billions or trillions of phone records and analyzing individuals’ communications over an extended period of time. The Smith opinion simply can’t justify the kind of mass surveillance the government is engaged in now.

The sweeping implications of court-created exceptions to the Fourth Amendment authored in Smith v. Maryland cannot be overstated in the wake of the technological revolution witnessed in the 21st century. Offering just a glimmer of hope on that score, computer security guru Bruce Schneier recently suggested that "the public/private surveillance partnership between the NSA and corporate data collectors is starting to fray. The reason is sunlight. The publicity resulting from the Snowden documents has made companies think twice before allowing the NSA access to their users' and customers' data."

Finally, Truthout published an interesting item by Michael Boldin, executive director of the Tenth Amendment Center, posting the question, "How can the states provide Fourth Amendment protection against the NSA?" Boldin suggests that states could rely upon a longstanding legal principle called the anticommandeering doctrine" to potentially thwart mass surveillance of Americans by the NSA. In essence, "This means the federal government cannot require a state to carry out federal acts. The federal government can pass a law and try to enforce it, but your state isn't required to help them." He thinks the doctrine "can have a significant impact on the NSA's ability to continue its mass-spying programs." Moreover, Texas and Utah, in particular, are in unique positions to influence these national programs because, in the middle of the last decade, the NSA maxxed out its growth potential in the Washington D.C. area, turning to those two states for expansion:

To get around the physical limitation of the amount of power required to monitor virtually every piece of communication around the globe, the NSA started searching for new locations with independent resources.

A location was chosen in San Antonio because of the independent power grid in Texas. The new Utah Data Center was chosen for access to cheap utilities, primarily water. The water-cooled supercomputers there require 1.7 million gallons of water per day to function.

That water is being supplied by a political subdivision of the State of Utah. Under the anticommandeering doctrine, Utah isn't required to provide that water.

No water = No NSA data center.

Boldin's group has put forward model legislation (pdf) called the 4th Amendment Protection Act to forbid "material support, participation or assistance, to any federal agency which claims the power, or with any federal law, rule, regulation, or order which purports to authorize the collection of electronic data or meta data of any person(s) pursuant to any action not based on a warrant that particularly describes the person(s), place(s) and thing(s) to be searched or seized." I don't know how that suggestion would jibe with existing Texas law regarding provision of electrical power, but it's a bold and fascinating proposal. Argued Boldin:

This same process was used effectively by northern abolitionists in resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Today, states like Washington and Colorado are helping end the war on cannabis by refusing to comply with federal prohibition.

We should follow their courageous path against the NSA as well.

Why 'privacy is a conservative cause'

Sentiments like these from conservative direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie on Politico (10-31) are among the reasons Grits thinks America may be on the verge of a Fourth Amendment revival. In a column at Politico, Viguerie declared that:

Privacy used to be a dirty word among many conservatives because the liberal Warren Court of the 1960s used concepts such as “penumbras” – words not expressly found in the Constitution — to overturn state laws that protected traditional moral precepts or valid law enforcement.

In recent years, however, beginning with the passage of the USA Patriot Act during the George W. Bush years, but expanded seemingly without limit under Barack Obama, conservatives have awakened to the threat of the massive surveillance state. ...

Even Republican hawks are turning. Some of the same lawmakers who helped usher in the surveillance state, including the co-author of the Patriot Act, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R.-Wis.), are pushing back with their own legislation.

So, what’s changed?

With the scandal-plagued IRS mucking around in our health care decisions and Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA snooping into our “private” communications, the constitutional stakes are simply much higher.

The NSA scandal, moreover, strongly suggests that intelligence officials can and do lie to get around the Fourth Amendment legal limits and the limply enforced limits imposed by the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), raising the privacy issue to a new level.

The recent scandals also dovetail with the rising influence of limited government constitutional conservatives and their quest to break with the George W. Bush era of Big Government and Big Surveillance.

The conservative icon concluded by extending his critique beyond government to corporate America:

Privacy used to be the exclusive realm of libertarians and the left, but the world that Edward Snowden unmasked has propelled conservatives to push forward on privacy.

It is time for conservatives to throw off the influence of surveillance state advocates, make common cause with libertarians and receptive liberals, and take the privacy fight a step further to rein in companies that – wittingly or unwittingly – have become the government’s partners in the massive surveillance state.

On the dangers and pitfalls of diminished electronic privacy

With the national press closely tracking the blow-by-blow, this blog has not been closely following revelations about NSA data gathering on Americans' phone calls, including at least for a time their cell-phone location data. But I wanted to point readers to this new story from the UK Guardian detailing more of the agency's internet surveillance capabilities. As depicted in training materials for a program called XKeyscore, "the ability to search HTTP activity by keyword permits the analyst access to what the NSA calls 'nearly everything a typical user does on the internet'." In  another major revelation, cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier has a fascinating (if rather technical) article about how the NSA is able to exploit vulnerabilities in Firefox web browsers to defeat the Tor online anonymity service, one of the more powerful encryption/anonymity methods available to the public. More on that here.

There have been a couple of other recent national news stories on electronic privacy that may interest Grits readers concerned about electronic privacy in the digital age:

• Center for Investigative Reporting: Easily obtained subpoenas turn your personal information against you
• NPR: Your Digital Trail: Data fuels political and legal agendas

The lengthy CIR story reminds us that "it’s not just an ultrasecret spy agency that can create a dossier on you." For example, "Law enforcement can create a map or timeline of a person’s whereabouts by accessing data from license-plate scanners, toll-bridge crossings and mobile phone carriers and, without much trouble, access records on your power consumption, purchasing habits and even snail mail." In some states, much of the same data can be acquired by divorce attorneys or other private litigants.

The latter article contains an interesting thought experiment from John Dean, who was Richard Nixon's White House counsel during the Watergate scandal:

Here's a question for the digital age: If you are one of those people who say, "I've done nothing wrong; I've got nothing to hide," do you have any reason to worry that someone might try to use your digital records against you?

We posed that question to John Dean, a man who has become immortalized in U.S. history books as President Richard Nixon's White House lawyer. His answer: "Think about the Nixon Enemies List."

"If Richard Nixon were alive today and in office," Dean says, "I'd have great concern about the data that's being collected."

Dean says the history of Nixon's Enemies List, which surfaced during the Watergate scandal, shows that even when people have done nothing wrong and think they have nothing to hide, unscrupulous government officials can still dig up personal information and use it to try to smear people.

Houston mayoral candidate promises to "just barely" uphold the Constitution

It's been several election cycles since we've seen crime become an election issue in a major Texas city, so it will be interesting to see how Houston mayoral candidate Ben Hall fares with his attacks on incumbent Mayor Annise Parker. He's put out a rather bizarre TV commercial telling voters, "we don't need more police, we need less criminals." To that end, says the 30-second spot, "I'll make their lives miserable -  cleaning the city, cutting weeds, just barely within the bounds of the Constitution," a line Hall delivered with a shit-eating grin. He also advocates expanding use of government surveillance cameras throughout the city because "criminals don't like to be caught." Here's the ad:



Charles Kuffner last month posted this analysis of Hall's "five point crime fighting plan."

I've never met the man, but it seems an open question whether this ad reflects pure, disingenuous demagoguery or mere simple-mindedness. Hall told Mike Morris from the Houston Chronicle (Sept. 10) that he doesn't want crime discussions to focus on the past, which is understandable given Houston's recent record of declining crime:

Data show crime has been falling nationally. In Houston, burglaries reached a recent peak of 29,279 in 2009, and have fallen each year since, with last year's total the lowest since 2003. Despite the increase in murders and robberies from 2011 to 2012, Houston's violent crime rate last year was its lowest since 1985, and last year's murder total of 217 is half what it was 20 years ago.

University of Houston-Downtown criminal justice professor Clete Snell dismissed both Hall and Parker's posturing. The shaky reliability of crime data is well known to researchers, he said.

"To take advantage of a decline in crime politically or to try to use an increase in crime politically, I think, indicates a lack of knowledge about how the statistics are developed," Snell said. "There's just many, many factors that can impact the rise or decline in crime."

So crime has declined during Mayor Parker's tenure, though I'd agree with Prof. Snell that, given the national crime decline and the wide variety of factors at play, one would be hard pressed to give any one local politician credit. Still, in context, it seems hard to justify assigning Mayor Parker blame.

The other suggestions reveal more about Mr. Hall's misunderstanding of the criminal-justice system than they do potential crime solutions. For example, does he fantasize that chain-gang crews cleaning the city or cutting weeds outside the jail won't need to be supervised by additional Sheriff's deputies? Or that the mayor has authority to make county government enact these schemes? Clearly he didn't check with the Sheriff's office about the idea. Morris' article had this to say on the subject:

As for Hall's plan to have inmates work off their sentences instead of sitting in their cells, Parker campaign spokeswoman Sue Davis said city inmates stay an average of 24 hours before being released or transferred to the county lockup, making it impractical to put them to work.

Hall said it is the same taxpayers footing the bill, regardless of the jail. He said he is interested in finding a way to put county or city inmates to work on behalf of the public.

"While we'd always want to work with the city to maximize that resource, there's not a lot of room for expansion," said Alan Bernstein, spokesman for Sheriff Adrian Garcia, who runs the county jail.

All low-level, nonviolent county jail inmates willing and eligible to participate in outside work already do so, Bernstein said. As of Monday, 196 inmates were approved for outside work, performing graffiti abatement, tree planting and beautification along bayous and other public rights of way, Bernstein said. That number is difficult to increase because more inmates - 793, on Monday - are needed inside the jail for chores the county otherwise would have to pay for, he said.

Next, to Hall's suggestion for expanding street-level surveillance tech instead of hiring more cops: Who would monitor all these new surveillance cameras? If it's police, wouldn't you need more cops to staff surveillance stations? And wouldn't that take more cops off the beat? If not police, then who would watch the monitors, who would pay for it, and what would prevent those surveillance resources from being misused? Responding to the ad, a Parker aide told the Chronicle that "there are many cameras downtown already and that a lack of manpower to monitor them makes it a more effective tool for gathering evidence after a crime occurs than in preventing it." Truth is, with limited exceptions, government surveillance cameras don't reduce crime and aren't even all that useful for investigating crime after the fact: After the Boston marathon bombings, one recalls, it wasn't city surveillance that captured the culprits, even though cameras were in place, but security video volunteered from nearby stores and cell-phone pics taken by bystanders. In more workaday settings, cameras can be vandalized or defeated by simple ploys like wearing hats, hoodies, or sunglasses. From a crime-fighting perspective, government surveillance cameras are a cost-benefit nightmare. 

So most of the ad is just foolish and ill-informed. Who knows if that's because Hall is ignorant about the issues or he (rightly) assumes the voters are. My bet would be the latter but you never can tell. Having worked for dozens of candidates over the years (Grits spent 14 years as a professional opposition researcher for candidates from both parties as well as non-partisan races like the Houston mayoral contest), I've long ago ceased to be surprised how ill-prepared many candidates are when they decide to run for office. It's entirely possible this fellow believes his own bullshit.

What gagged me most, though, was Hall's grinning, wink and a nod attitude toward diminishing constitutional rights. The Mayor takes an oath to uphold the Constitution so it's a bit surreal to see a candidate pledging to do all he can to circumvent it. Imagine his swearing in ceremony:

Judge: Do you pledge to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States?

Mayor Hall: Just barely.

Grits found Hall's cloying demeanor in the ad, promising laughably inartful policies "just barely within the bounds of the Constitution," not just off putting but offensive. 

We'll find out in November, but I seriously doubt this strategy will succeed for Mr. Hall. A recently released Texas Lyceum poll (Q4) asked voters to list the most important issues facing the country and the number saying "crime and drugs" came in at less than one-half of one percent. The relative lack of concern about crime by voters combined with the ham-handed, unworkable solutions proposed by Mr. Hall to me indicate the challenger hasn't chosen a particularly strong campaign message.

MORE: See Kuff and Texpatriate for analyses of the horse-race polling, which presently favors the incumbent by a significant but (theoretically) not-insurmountable margin.

With AT&T's 'Hemisphere' program, formerly 'Hudson Hawk,' high-dollar phone surveillance goes local

Several readers forwarded me a link to a New York Times story titled, "Drug agents use vast phone trove eclipsing N.S.A.'s." Here's the lede: "For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs." See more coverage from The Daily Dot, and AP's synopsis.

AT&T's records supposedly go back 26 years. In Europe there's a vigorous debate in electronic privacy circles over the "right to be forgotten," which to my surprise has never really caught on in the U.S. the way one might expect. But that concept springs to mind here. God help me, who knows what my phone records from 26 years ago might show?! I'm not surprised the DEA accessed these records. But I'm disappointed that AT&T kept them that long, apparently at the behest/direction of law enforcement. There's SCOTUS' "Third Party Doctrine" in action for you!

Local Texas agencies, at least in Houston and  likely elsewhere, also accessed the Operation Hemisphere database. Chris Soghoian tweeted out several; links with references to local agencies potentially using this "Hemisphere" database. One Harris County Commissioners Court agenda dated January 25, 2013 (pdf) included item 12(f) approving as a sole source, no-bid contract, "AT&T in the amount of $373,795 sole source for Operation Hemisphere investigative services for the Sheriff’s Department for the period ending June 30, 2013." And on a February 4, 2011 agenda item 10(a) under "19(c) Purchasing," included, "Request for approval of sole source (a) AT&T sole source for Operation Hemisphere, formerly Hudson Hawk, investigative services for the Sheriff's Department in the amount of $924,500."

Another agenda dated Jan. 20, 2012 included item 19(c)3 which read, "Accept High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Grant funds in the additional amount of $666,667 from the Office of National Drug Control Policy for the Houston Intelligence Support Center – Operation Hemisphere Initiative."  And what is the Houston Intelligence Support Center? Best I can tell, it's the Houston Regional Intelligence Service Center, one of many "fusion centers" that cropped up post 9/11. How are they utilizing the Hemisphere database? With whom are they sharing the information? Your guess is as good as mine. What we do know is that, including the fusion center money (which came from a federal grant), those three payments alone total $1,964,962 that the Harris County commissioners court spent on this one surveillance tool between 2011 and 2013 (so far). That's a big sum any way you look at it.

Grits has not covered the NSA metadata scandals extensively, as much as they intrigue me. Keeping this blog tightly focused on Texas criminal justice helps keep the task from getting utterly out of hand. But the Hemisphere program - especially if it turns out that other Texas counties or cities paid AT&T to participate, starts to get closer to this blog's wheelhouse. Lots of state and local-level questions here: For starters, which agencies use Hemisphere? Journalists should be checking old city council and commissioners court agendas to see who else has been paying AT&T for its "Hemisphere" service, or its predecessor, "Hudson Hawk." Houston reporters already have sufficient material to localize this story. I'll bet they're not the only Texas media market where that's possible.

MORE: From Mark Bennett, Scott Greenfield,