Tag Archives: police

Fool’s Mission: Asserting Open Carry Rights

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There is a cottage industry afoot that entails making an amateur video of yourself or a friend asserting the right to walk down the street with a gun, but without a badge. After all, we live in a country with a 2nd amendment (the right of citizens to bear arms) and some communities drive this point home by having explicit open carry laws.

LiveLeak.com has recently staked their fame on videos submitted by yahoos, often featuring gang members or reckless youth brazenly taunting police. (“I was just walking down the street officer…minding my own business!)”. In one particularly troubling video, a guy walks into a police station wearing full body armor and carrying an AR15 assault rifle. He calls this behavior a “2nd amendment audit”. Yeah, right! By the same logic, you could test your right of peaceful assembly by surrounding a midnight girl scout campfire with gang members carrying grenade launchers, hand cuffs and duck tape.

There is no confrontation in the police station audit, but check out this video, instead…

Drop to the ground!

This is not a video about race, guns or constitutional rights. It is a video about two individuals and their girlfriends making an a*s of themselves.

It’s not the message about race that bothers me…

In this video, one protagonist is white and the other is black. But before we get into the sub-plot, let’s address the main premise… Do these guys have a constitutional right to bear arms?

Yes they do! But there is no national consensus on what it means to “bear arms”. Do they have a constitutional right to display automatic weapons as they walk down a street? That’s certainly in doubt. If so, then you could extrapolate this to a right to carry grenades and chemical bombs. Do they have a right to openly carry weapons down the streets of this particular community? Perhaps. Maybe. I don’t know.

But even if their actions are intended to assert their rights or demonstrate a bias toward black males, they are still idiots. Regardless of laws and rights, a society lives on norms of conduct, safety and behavior. Quote me all the rights that you wish; we still can’t have citizens walking down the street with assault rifles or Uzis. Unlike the police, there is no way to know if they have been adequately trained, screened for mental health, enraged by a recent incident, or simply looking for trouble.

These guys are clearly jerks. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t understand their motives. I was once young, arrogant, with a chip on my shoulder, and also an idiot. Too bad that there isn’t a better way to communicate across generations and save these dolts from making the same mistakes in an effort to assert their ‘rights’.

The Narrator’s Other Message

To be fair, the accompanying article explains: “The white guy did not have a gun pulled on him, the black guy never got a chance to say anything before a gun was pulled on him.” The video shows two separate events. One in which a white man is challenged without apparent fear or violence and the other in which an officer draws a gun on a younger black man and yells for him to drop to the ground before engaging in any discussion. Is there a point here about race, balanced law enforcement and prejudice? Sure! But that doesn’t change the fact that both men are idiots.

Let’s be clear. Race is not a main point of the video. In the opening scene, a lunkhead states that he will stage a provocative exercise for “educational purposes” and to ensure that the state of Oregon does not trample on his rights. As to the race angle, there are certainly other ways to research and present sociological data. In fact, it can be done in a manner that solicits the viewer to reflect on their own bias and perhaps take action in changing perceptions and practices. But this certainly wasn’t a primary motive for the white guy wanting to demonstrate his rights. He just wanted to poke a bobcat with a sharp, flaming stick. In his book, it makes him hot stuff; a really big cheese. In my book, he demonstrates about as much sense as a soft boiled egg.

What do you think? I would particularly like to hear from some gun rights supporters. Is it reasonable to demonstrate your rights by walking down a busy street with an assault weapon?

U.S. Police Snoop Email, IMs, Phone Records

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I originally wrote this in April 2011 as feedback to this article in PC World.
Even this reprint appeared before Edward Snowden broke similar news.
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The article linked above begins with these words:

Law enforcement organizations are making tens of thousands of requests for private electronic information from companies such as Sprint, Facebook and AOL.

Police and other agencies have “enthusiastically embraced” asking for e-mail, instant messages and mobile-phone location data.

PC Wiretapping with a court order is one thing. But this amounts to preemptive forensics. It reeks of unreasonable search…

Intercepting and reading private communica- tions has no ethical leg to stand on, especially when initiated by a police force. It suggests that personal email (or data written to a disk) should have less protection than private thought. Personal communications must be rendered off limits to interlopers. I say “rendered” rather than legislated, because technology exits to foil overzealous acts of law enforcement. In security consulting, I rarely help courts to glean information that the author believed to be private. Applying forensic skills in this way puts blood on the hands of good technicians. (Quite literally, it had better involve a murder or bomb threat). Instead, I am more likely to help individuals and organizations confound any attempt to reconstruct, trace or decode information, including content, history, ownership, origin, transfer (including asset transfer) or digital fingerprints.

I call this practice “Antiforensics”. More like-minded privacy advocates are heading in this direction. In almost every case that forensics is employed without consent of the creator or archivist (i.e. the person being investigated), the practice is unethical. I would never claim that the field lacks all legitimate purpose, but it is too often used by courts concerned with porn, drugs, your marriage, disputes between corporations, or the money in your mattress. At the drop of a hat, a forensic specialist will roll over and sing like a jay bird for any court in the land. Must we sell out? Where does basic privacy fit into the picture?

Cryptography and stenography not only belong in the hands of every human (Thank you, Philip Zimmerman), they should be inherent in every email, fax and phone conversation. They should be part of private communication and every save-to-disk. If “The Man” has a compelling reason to catch you with your pants down, he should have both a court order and a good gumshoe. One who resorts to conventional means at either end of the communication, rather than mining for data at a nexus in New Jersey (AT&T) or Virginia (NSA).

As a security specialist for almost 30 years, I have seen “forensics” destroy families, lives and laudable civil movements. The art of a 3rd party using forensics for the improvement of society is far less prevalent than forensic activities that interfere with personal or political freedoms.

The spirit of prophylactic and preemptive antiforensics is embodied at Fungible.net, a data recovery lab in New England.* Mouse over the red words “Forensics” and “Security”. The lab uses the most sophisticated forensic tools, but they won’t sell out to a court unless someone has targeted the president.

Am I in the minority, practicing “anti-forensics” with zeal and passion? My concern for privacy (before and during an investigation) exceeds my allegiance to political jurisdiction.

How about you? Give us your opinion about antiforensics.   —Ellery Davies

Ellery Davies clarifies law and public policy. He is a privacy champion, antiforensics expert, columnist to tech publications and inventor or Blind Signaling and Response. Here at A Wild Duck, Ellery dabbles in economics and law.

* Fungible.net is a data recovery service. But they also host Ellery’s Wild Duck blog.