9 ms·

The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield

215 points by jpatokal 13y ago

Broken_Hippo 13y ago
Horrifying story that will change absolutely nothing. The government isn't willing to back away from the power (even after it became known) and people aren't upset enough in mass to actually do things about it - things that would probably be done in vain for some time. And changing the minds of many people in the 'innocent people have nothing to hide' I find to have a general delusion, believing the government (or at least the law) is mostly infallible. It is not a new pattern, either. Look back to what we (americans) did to each other in the 50's (are You a communist? Do you act like one?). Had we had the tech then to spy like now, we'd have done so. Which means that despite the sensational news stories, I find almost apathy from normal people I meet - the paranoid has known for years (don't talk on that cell phone, they can listen in on those easily... does anyone remember this attitude?). Privacy intrusions simply exist. They are. You aren't escaping them. It might make one angry, but there is nothing people feel they can do about it. I personally disagree, but also feel the path to balance in this area is an uncomfortable one.
- nhaehnle 13y ago
  I disagree. Every such story has the potential to make people re-think their false belief that "I've got nothing to hide". I for one have added it to my list of bookmarks, and hope I remember to pass it on when somebody downplays the dangers of surveillance the next time. Ultimately, scaling back the mass surveillance state can only be done using popular support. Stories like this one are the best way to get that support, because they are concrete evidence of its danger (rather than the abstract worries that are usually repeated). There's a difference between reading 1984 and seeing articles of how things play out in real life in your own country.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    There's a difference between reading 1984 and seeing articles of how things play out in real life in your own country. There is no difference. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. I was going to make a lengthy comment detailing all the possible ways that Americans could effect change, and then going point-for-point with reasons why none of those ways could possibly work in this case. But it's too depressing. Besides, I would love to wrong. Our only hope is if a website manages to act as a "vote multiplier" in the sense that it serves a function analogous to a lightning rod: it focuses people by telling them who to vote for and who not to vote for, and when to vote, and even how to vote. No one will do their own research. Want to make a difference? Make that website, and then achieve popularity large enough to make a difference.
    - rtpg 13y ago
      Things have changed. They've changed many times in the course of modern history. The Church commission happened, the Senate Intelligence committee happened, the FISA court was set up, things change. Gov'ts are designed for slow change. The advantage of this being that it should avoid massive populism to dismantle everything in one go (imagine if the Tea Party had control of the Senate). There are movements both in the judicial and the legislative branches to start pulling back the excesses of the executive. Sure, Obama could "executive order" everything away, but why would the executive neuter itself? Luckily checks and balances are a thing, and we're fixing this.
      - unclebucknasty 13y ago
        >Gov'ts are designed for slow change. Except they haven't changed slowly. Think of how far we've come since 9/11. If the government is designed to change slowly, yet has experienced this period of rapid change, then it seems that we have to ask, "what force is being applied to overcome the slow-change inertia?"
        rtpg 13y ago
        the changes since 9/11 happened because the legislature and the executive agreed that the way the intelligence community was operating at the time wasn't effective. The environment of 9/11 was particularly unique (being the first major attack on American soil from a "foreign entity" in a long time), and it's important to understand a couple things. It's not the patriot act, but this story on the AUMF (http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-without-end-the-untold-story-of-the-most http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-w...) shows the sort of environment in which the AUMF and the Patriot Act were passed. It's slightly insane. Almost all of the "radical" change post-9/11 is based on things written in these laws written over a 2-month period that was patently different from the status quo. Policies developed from these acts have been struck down on multiple occasions, and there is a momentum towards rolling things back, rather than going further. But we still get the characteristic slowness of government. Without a strong event to do so, it will be hard. The Snowden leaks seem to be a good trigger for a Church committee-style event, but it won't be instant.
  - Ma8ee 13y ago
    > I disagree. Every such story has the potential to make people re-think their false belief that "I've got nothing to hide". Most people will easily rationalize this away and just think that he was a Muslim after all. Good Christians don't have to worry about a thing (except Muslim terrorists of course).
    - zachinglis 13y ago
      Where are you getting these 'facts' about how people are going to behave from? Truly, if it changes one person's mind then it's done some good. This alone won't change anything but spreading this to allow people to see there are kinks in the armour will allow people to perhaps vote in the future for difference. When the majority is against something, sometimes some good can be done. Not always. The government is all powerful, but there is a chance.
      - Ma8ee 13y ago
        Why don't you ask nhaehnle where he/she gets her facts?
    - unclebucknasty 13y ago
      In this case, I do think they will look at all of the factors and conclude that it was just a crazy set of coincidences that would rarely happen, and certainly not to themselves. In fact, some might conclude that such a set of circumstances warrants the investigation described, especially given this permanent state of fear in which many now live. In any case, I do believe the "it won't happen to me" rationalization is one of the biggest reasons people show little concern. And, for those who are concerned, a sense of powerlessness is probably the biggest obstacle to action.
- chestnut-tree 13y ago
  Even without the Snowden revelations, collection of personally identifibale information is increasingly common and often unavoidable. The US, for example, takes fingerprints from all non-residents entering the country. In the EU, most of the countries that make up the borderless Schengen Area require you to provide your fingerprints when applying for a passport (usually from both hands). Last year, a German man refused to give his fingerprints to the German authorities when applying for a passport. His application was rejected. The case went to the European Court of Justice who ruled in favour of fingerprinting. The court stated that, yes, fingerprinting was a violation of an individual's privacy, but was neccesary to prevent fraud. Whatever the pronouncements of officials about the protection of your personal info, it's certain, as in the story posted, that law enforcement agencies will have access to this data.
- ajb 13y ago
  Please reflect on what this kind of comment does. This kind of struggle is conducted almost entirely in the mind. If you want to win, you have to believe that you can win, you have to look for ways to win, you have to find hope and give it to other people on your side. The other side are out there trying to convince you that you can't win, that no-one really cares, that their victory is inevitable. Don't help them do that. Yes, it looks kind of bleak right now, but don't give up.
Daniel_Newby 13y ago
What, exactly, is terrifying? The FBI did an excellent job of making connections between suspicious facts, the sort of connections that should have been made to prevent the 9-11 attacks. It is absurd to claim that this should not have happened. All detection methods have a false positive rate. Judging by what has shown up in the media, the FBI has a counterterrorism false positive rate of one person every few years. That is a stupendously low rate for such a rare yet politically-charged task. Let's not forget their other famous false positive terrorism case: the anthrax case. Their needle in a haystack search turned up a false positive, but it also turned up the true positive. The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy.
- mschuster91 13y ago
  > The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy. And this is why truly independent oversight of any and all police/justice/secret service-activity is required.
  - Daniel_Newby 13y ago
    Indeed. That's why he was also protected by the FBI internal reviews that freed him, the prosecutors who know just how silly a bad fingerprint match will look in court, the compulsory defense lawyer and defense investigation budget, the judge with whom the admissibility of evidence is negotiated before trial, the trial judge, the more or less fairly selected jurors, the observers and free press in the trial courtroom, the appellate. Please, please, stop wallowing in this idiotic paranoia or persecution fantasy or whatever it is. This guy looked suspicious as hell during a period of raving government paranoia, in a case involving a public safety emergency, and got interviewed for two weeks. Yes, that is scary and obnoxious for him, but what more do you want? Investigate mad bombers slowly, carefully, like a stolen car case? Invest $500 billion to raise the false positive rate to one in 10 billion?
atlantic 13y ago
There isn't a name for the political system we find ourselves in at the moment. It works like this: you free to act as you wish as long as you respect a series of red lines that are never clearly formulated. All these red lines pertain to making changes of substance in the dominant political and economic system. If you do cross over them, then you find yourself inside the prison system, in a psychiatric ward, or simply disappeared altogether. If large numbers of people cross these lines at once, I suspect we will find ourselves overnight in a totalitarian system, since all the tools for mass control of the population are already in place.
- Zigurd 13y ago
  Actually, there is a name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism Also called "managed democracy."
  - philovivero 13y ago
    This is simply brilliant. I always call the United States a fascist dictatatorship, but it leaves a bitter taste, since I know that's not entirely true. There are subtle elements I'm not accounting for. A "Managed Democracy" is perfect. It accounts for that the corporations took over the government instead of the other way around. It accounts for that protests and free speech are "allowed." It accounts for why people are at the same time militantly patriotic but apathetic at the polls. It accounts for propaganda being distributed rather than centralised. This guy Wolin has put a lot of thought into this.
- zxcdw 13y ago
  The worst part, I believe, is that these systems which are set in place are placed there in good faith of someone. I don't think that there's some huge government official conspiracy spanning thousands of people orchestrating this to control the "sheeple". It's just that to understand implications of privacy violations and mass surveillance is quite complex topic and definitely something you can't explain to a layman in a few minutes and expect them to understand the importance. If the result is not immediately obvious with concrete examples, "nobody" will give a damn. Those same "nobodies" act in good faith to increase surveillance to fight crime or terrorism. Then of course there are people who don't believe surveillance is effective against terrorism(as some of the leaks indicate) but have ulterior motives to support it, whatever they may be.
XorNot 13y ago
Trying to link this to the NSA data mining is absurd. They're tangentially related, but there is no process or regulation which is going to somehow help you when there's an active investigation and agents are digging through your garbage and talking to past contacts. That's the exact purview of the FBI - they weren't mining databases, all they have to do is send a guy out to chat with some local base personnel, find out where he used to live, look up neighbours etc. This is all active, in-person investigative work.
- amirmc 13y ago
  "Because the FBI agents had no concrete evidence that Mayfield was linked to the Madrid train bombings, they decided not to apply for a criminal wiretap, which requires probable cause to believe there is criminal activity or intent. Rather, they applied for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant, ..." "The secret FISA court approved the request, as it almost always does, and the FBI began its surreptitious and incredibly intrusive blanket surveillance of Mayfield and his family."
  - higherpurpose 13y ago
    Why the hell is FBI allowed to ask for a FISA "warrant" (god, I hate their 1984 newspeak)?!
    - chris_wot 13y ago
      I didn't think it could be used for anyone but foreign citizens to the U.S.! The FISC is pathetic.
  - XorNot 13y ago
    Where did they dig up history? Where did they find details of his past? The FISA warrant was granted after the string of fairly notable coincidences. And was for ongoing active surveillance - not data mining his past. Of course I don't know why I'm bothering at this point - remotely seeming like you disagree with the HN groupthink on surveillance topics is just a magnet for downvotes and not discussion.
mjklin 13y ago
>He spent two weeks in jail, petrified that fellow inmates would learn he was somehow involved in the Madrid bombing and hurt him. This is surprising to me, that he knew what he was being investigated for. Is there any reason why they would tell him?
- veidr 13y ago
  They didn't technically arrest him (since they had no actual evidence), but instead detained him as a material witness in the Madrid bombing case. They would have had to disclose this as part of that process.
- scotty79 13y ago
  So he can confess. You'll get confession you want more often if a person that is supposed to confess knows what he's supposed to confess to.
zacinbusiness 13y ago
This is an excellent example of what I was talking about earlier. We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement, men and women who are not trained to think rationally about data and who probably have only a high school understanding of statistics (if that), who are given access to massive amounts of data. They take this data and they match it against a theory that they've already developed, and they assume they have "cracked the case." They act in a constant state of paranoia, fueled by fear and powered by tools that act on data in ways that they can't possibly understand. And so they fill in some (likely poorly designed) form in some FBI web app, and some names get spit out. Then they look at whoever matches their "profile" which was likely developed using, again, a high school level of psychology. It's ridiculous and frightening.
- d23 13y ago
  > We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement, men and women who are not trained to think rationally about data and who probably have only a high school understanding of statistics (if that), who are given access to massive amounts of data. Really though? > The FBI’s Portland field office, however, used that fingerprint match to begin digging into Mayfield’s background. Certain details of the attorney’s life convinced the agents that they had their man. Mayfield had converted to Islam after meeting his wife, an Egyptian. He had represented one of the Portland Seven, a group of men who tried to travel to Afghanistan to fight for al Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. and coalition forces in a child custody case. He also worshipped at the same mosque as the militants. I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion.
  - scotty79 13y ago
    > I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion. That's because confirmation bias is a human and common thing. Scientists have various tools to avoid fooling themselves like FBI did and like you and many of us would do.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement It's not patriotism, maybe it is nationalism or more probably plain idiocy. When some innocent guy gets framed up (even when there were only good intentions by the framer-upper), it usually means that the real perpetrator goes free. It is completely irrational to support a system that gets it so wrong so often.
jessaustin 13y ago
One of the examiners candidly admitted that if the person identified had been someone without these characteristics, like the Maytag repairman, the laboratory might have revisited the identification with more skepticism and caught the error. I know We're All Bayesian Now, but does this really seem like the way a "laboratory" ought to work? If fingerprinting really is a science, then it's a study of patterns and how they do or do not match. I'm pretty sure we have computers for that sort of task. Why isn't this totally automated by now? From the outside, the reason that springs to mind is because fingerprinting, as practiced by the FBI, is not scientific at all, and exists merely as window-dressing for the prejudice and misjudgment of agents.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  The software would anyway have some threshold of confidence. I'm also not sure your assertion that being scientific makes it easy to encode in software is true (easy of course being a relative term).
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    Skin and its details map pretty directly to the 2D Cartesian plane. (If that weren't the case, what would the concept of "fingerprint" even mean?) It is straightforward to represent values in that space in a computer, and to compare sets of such values to each other. It's true that there are affine transformations to consider, but computers are pretty good at those too (better than humans!). If there are actually any other considerations, throw some ML at them, but don't give us any "human interpretation" bullshit. In fact, Mr. Mayfield wouldn't even have suffered so if computers couldn't already do this job: it's quite unlikely that the FBI has enough staff to compare twenty-year-old military service records to Spanish bombing evidence by hand. The problem, as you nearly realized, was the threshold used in the query. There were no actual matches, yet the FBI required twenty "matches" to "investigate", so it produced twenty "matches". If the FBI had been a bit more overstaffed/bored, they would have pulled 100 "matches". It's like when we pull receivables out of the billing system to write off at the end of the fiscal year: the CFO tells us what the final number should be, and we just get the oldest accounts that sum to the proper total. You seem to have missed the point, though, which is that if fingerprinting must be done with detailed knowledge of the field agents' pet theories, that implies fingerprinting is not scientific.
rikacomet 13y ago
I think some of us are forgetting and are underestimating the human capacity for compassion. This is not just about American public, but all of the humans. What is struck between this uproar is the data security of all the 6billion+ people on this earth.If someone is to think, that it would be over, if they just stop spying on American citizens and their activity, he is grossly underestimating the rest of humanity, this wave won't end until lines are drawn, about what is totalitarian and what is the right line of conformity. Whats happening right now is a organization and its supporting organizations, finding it hard to stay on the line of justice in a world, where America is a small word, compared to what it was like before. Patriotism is nice, but it has reduced meaning today, this is no longer a world, where you can stay within your borders and hurt everybody outside it. A good example, is from the movie Hobbit 2, where the elf king is reluctant to look outside of his wooden kingdom. With great power comes great responsibility.. if you have power over Americans, you have responsibility over Americans, but in case of NSA, they have power over the data of all the people, thus their responsibility is towards everybody.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
pmorici 13y ago
"The only reason Mayfield is a free man today is that the Spanish police repeatedly told the FBI that the print recovered from the bag of detonators didn’t match Mayfield’s fingerprints. The FBI, however, continued to stand by its lab’s findings until Spanish authorities conclusively matched the print to the real culprit" Even if you are hardline nut and totally support the surveillance state it has to be frightening alarming that they were so dead set on harassing this one guy that they would have let the real culprit go free had the Spanish police not called them on their BS.
- javajosh 13y ago
  I would wager money that there are many FBI agents to this day who lament that they let Mayfield get away with his crimes.
  - mox1 13y ago
    I would wager money that there are just as many FBI agents who to this day are disgusted by what the idiots at the Portland Field Office of the FBI did to this guy.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      Those agents need to speak up. They especially need to speak up when they observe their colleagues conducting themselves as the article describes.
      - deegles 13y ago
        I don't think there will be much love for whistleblowers at any federal agency in the post-Snowden era.
    - nate_meurer 13y ago
      Awesome. This will be a great solace to the victim, I'm sure.
- 127 13y ago
zb 13y ago
Possibly the worst part: the courts ruled that what they did to him was unconstitutional (duh), but that it's perfectly OK to keep doing it to other people because he already got his payout: http://blogs.findlaw.com/ninth_circuit/2009/12/mayfield-v-us-no-07-35865.html http://blogs.findlaw.com/ninth_circuit/2009/12/mayfield-v-us...
- Zigurd 13y ago
  If the individual agents and prosecutors were bonded for the purpose of funding liability like this, we would know the cost of liability up front, and it would make it difficult for the same individuals to be involved in many such cases. Making the government as a whole pay is too diffuse.
javajosh 13y ago
No concerned citizen can allow themselves to be "terrified" by this story, if only because terror is the death of rational, effective action. We must be able to look at this situation, empathize with both sides, and determine how things could have gone better. (Empathizing with law enforcement is particularly difficult for me, but I've come to realize that it is a crucial part of the puzzle.) It is normal for law-enforcement to chase down a false lead. Most leads are dead-ends, from my lay understanding of detective work. In retrospect, Mayfield was a dead-end, but the key question is: when should the FBI have realized this? The actions that they took would have been justified, I think, if their suspicions had turned out to be valid. (all except the 2 week incarceration - and even that would have been clearly justified if Mayfield had been charged.) In any event, this is one of those cases which highlights a growing problem in the US legal system, which is the redefinition of "punishment" to exclude pre-trial incarceration and harassment. Law-enforcement has attained an ever growing list of exceptions and ad hoc powers that override a man's right to a fair trial before being punished. City police can "detain" you for up to 72 hours, for no reason. The FBI (apparently) can "detain" you for at least 2 weeks, again without charges. I believe that these rights to ad hoc, extra-judicial incarceration need to be rescinded, by an act of Congress, as these rights enable systematically arbitrary and abusive behavior on the part of law-enforcement at both the local and federal level. I believe they make the general population, whether they know it or not, unsafe from predatory police behavior.
codex 13y ago
Nobody is perfect and institutions are no exception. However, I'd have to see more than a single datapoint to indite an entire system. Those who are anti-surveillance will no doubt exhibit confirmation bias when reading this article, which is ironic.
einhverfr 13y ago
I don't see this as a question of confirmation bias but rather a more deeper problem in investigative law enforcement, namely the need to see things as part of a narrative relating to the sort of investigation. This isn't confirmation bias as usually understood, but goes one step before, namely in filtering out the details one can tell a story about. In the end what criminal investigators do is they find details and piece together a narrative from those. One huge problem with massive surveillance is the ability to piece together whatever narrative the investigator wants to put together based on a much larger field of information to mine.
dllthomas 13y ago
Cardinal Richelieu had something to say on the topic.
revelation 13y ago
The FBI is the modern day Gestapo, a bunch of poorly trained policemen with the right ideology turned secret agency.

215 points by jpatokal 13y ago

Horrifying story that will change absolutely nothing. The government isn't willing to back away from the power (even after it became known) and people aren't upset enough in mass to actually do things about it - things that would probably be done in vain for some time. And changing the minds of many people in the 'innocent people have nothing to hide' I find to have a general delusion, believing the government (or at least the law) is mostly infallible. It is not a new pattern, either. Look back to what we (americans) did to each other in the 50's (are You a communist? Do you act like one?). Had we had the tech then to spy like now, we'd have done so. Which means that despite the sensational news stories, I find almost apathy from normal people I meet - the paranoid has known for years (don't talk on that cell phone, they can listen in on those easily... does anyone remember this attitude?). Privacy intrusions simply exist. They are. You aren't escaping them. It might make one angry, but there is nothing people feel they can do about it. I personally disagree, but also feel the path to balance in this area is an uncomfortable one.

nhaehnle 13y ago
I disagree. Every such story has the potential to make people re-think their false belief that "I've got nothing to hide". I for one have added it to my list of bookmarks, and hope I remember to pass it on when somebody downplays the dangers of surveillance the next time. Ultimately, scaling back the mass surveillance state can only be done using popular support. Stories like this one are the best way to get that support, because they are concrete evidence of its danger (rather than the abstract worries that are usually repeated). There's a difference between reading 1984 and seeing articles of how things play out in real life in your own country.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  There's a difference between reading 1984 and seeing articles of how things play out in real life in your own country. There is no difference. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change. I was going to make a lengthy comment detailing all the possible ways that Americans could effect change, and then going point-for-point with reasons why none of those ways could possibly work in this case. But it's too depressing. Besides, I would love to wrong. Our only hope is if a website manages to act as a "vote multiplier" in the sense that it serves a function analogous to a lightning rod: it focuses people by telling them who to vote for and who not to vote for, and when to vote, and even how to vote. No one will do their own research. Want to make a difference? Make that website, and then achieve popularity large enough to make a difference.
  - rtpg 13y ago
    Things have changed. They've changed many times in the course of modern history. The Church commission happened, the Senate Intelligence committee happened, the FISA court was set up, things change. Gov'ts are designed for slow change. The advantage of this being that it should avoid massive populism to dismantle everything in one go (imagine if the Tea Party had control of the Senate). There are movements both in the judicial and the legislative branches to start pulling back the excesses of the executive. Sure, Obama could "executive order" everything away, but why would the executive neuter itself? Luckily checks and balances are a thing, and we're fixing this.
    - unclebucknasty 13y ago
      >Gov'ts are designed for slow change. Except they haven't changed slowly. Think of how far we've come since 9/11. If the government is designed to change slowly, yet has experienced this period of rapid change, then it seems that we have to ask, "what force is being applied to overcome the slow-change inertia?"
      - rtpg 13y ago
        the changes since 9/11 happened because the legislature and the executive agreed that the way the intelligence community was operating at the time wasn't effective. The environment of 9/11 was particularly unique (being the first major attack on American soil from a "foreign entity" in a long time), and it's important to understand a couple things. It's not the patriot act, but this story on the AUMF (http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-without-end-the-untold-story-of-the-most http://www.buzzfeed.com/gregorydjohnsen/60-words-and-a-war-w...) shows the sort of environment in which the AUMF and the Patriot Act were passed. It's slightly insane. Almost all of the "radical" change post-9/11 is based on things written in these laws written over a 2-month period that was patently different from the status quo. Policies developed from these acts have been struck down on multiple occasions, and there is a momentum towards rolling things back, rather than going further. But we still get the characteristic slowness of government. Without a strong event to do so, it will be hard. The Snowden leaks seem to be a good trigger for a Church committee-style event, but it won't be instant.
- Ma8ee 13y ago
  > I disagree. Every such story has the potential to make people re-think their false belief that "I've got nothing to hide". Most people will easily rationalize this away and just think that he was a Muslim after all. Good Christians don't have to worry about a thing (except Muslim terrorists of course).
  - zachinglis 13y ago
    Where are you getting these 'facts' about how people are going to behave from? Truly, if it changes one person's mind then it's done some good. This alone won't change anything but spreading this to allow people to see there are kinks in the armour will allow people to perhaps vote in the future for difference. When the majority is against something, sometimes some good can be done. Not always. The government is all powerful, but there is a chance.
    - Ma8ee 13y ago
      Why don't you ask nhaehnle where he/she gets her facts?
  - unclebucknasty 13y ago
    In this case, I do think they will look at all of the factors and conclude that it was just a crazy set of coincidences that would rarely happen, and certainly not to themselves. In fact, some might conclude that such a set of circumstances warrants the investigation described, especially given this permanent state of fear in which many now live. In any case, I do believe the "it won't happen to me" rationalization is one of the biggest reasons people show little concern. And, for those who are concerned, a sense of powerlessness is probably the biggest obstacle to action.
chestnut-tree 13y ago
Even without the Snowden revelations, collection of personally identifibale information is increasingly common and often unavoidable. The US, for example, takes fingerprints from all non-residents entering the country. In the EU, most of the countries that make up the borderless Schengen Area require you to provide your fingerprints when applying for a passport (usually from both hands). Last year, a German man refused to give his fingerprints to the German authorities when applying for a passport. His application was rejected. The case went to the European Court of Justice who ruled in favour of fingerprinting. The court stated that, yes, fingerprinting was a violation of an individual's privacy, but was neccesary to prevent fraud. Whatever the pronouncements of officials about the protection of your personal info, it's certain, as in the story posted, that law enforcement agencies will have access to this data.
ajb 13y ago
Please reflect on what this kind of comment does. This kind of struggle is conducted almost entirely in the mind. If you want to win, you have to believe that you can win, you have to look for ways to win, you have to find hope and give it to other people on your side. The other side are out there trying to convince you that you can't win, that no-one really cares, that their victory is inevitable. Don't help them do that. Yes, it looks kind of bleak right now, but don't give up.

Daniel_Newby 13y ago

What, exactly, is terrifying? The FBI did an excellent job of making connections between suspicious facts, the sort of connections that should have been made to prevent the 9-11 attacks. It is absurd to claim that this should not have happened. All detection methods have a false positive rate. Judging by what has shown up in the media, the FBI has a counterterrorism false positive rate of one person every few years. That is a stupendously low rate for such a rare yet politically-charged task. Let's not forget their other famous false positive terrorism case: the anthrax case. Their needle in a haystack search turned up a false positive, but it also turned up the true positive. The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy.

mschuster91 13y ago
> The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy. And this is why truly independent oversight of any and all police/justice/secret service-activity is required.
- Daniel_Newby 13y ago
  Indeed. That's why he was also protected by the FBI internal reviews that freed him, the prosecutors who know just how silly a bad fingerprint match will look in court, the compulsory defense lawyer and defense investigation budget, the judge with whom the admissibility of evidence is negotiated before trial, the trial judge, the more or less fairly selected jurors, the observers and free press in the trial courtroom, the appellate. Please, please, stop wallowing in this idiotic paranoia or persecution fantasy or whatever it is. This guy looked suspicious as hell during a period of raving government paranoia, in a case involving a public safety emergency, and got interviewed for two weeks. Yes, that is scary and obnoxious for him, but what more do you want? Investigate mad bombers slowly, carefully, like a stolen car case? Invest $500 billion to raise the false positive rate to one in 10 billion?

atlantic 13y ago

There isn't a name for the political system we find ourselves in at the moment. It works like this: you free to act as you wish as long as you respect a series of red lines that are never clearly formulated. All these red lines pertain to making changes of substance in the dominant political and economic system. If you do cross over them, then you find yourself inside the prison system, in a psychiatric ward, or simply disappeared altogether. If large numbers of people cross these lines at once, I suspect we will find ourselves overnight in a totalitarian system, since all the tools for mass control of the population are already in place.

Zigurd 13y ago
Actually, there is a name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism Also called "managed democracy."
- philovivero 13y ago
  This is simply brilliant. I always call the United States a fascist dictatatorship, but it leaves a bitter taste, since I know that's not entirely true. There are subtle elements I'm not accounting for. A "Managed Democracy" is perfect. It accounts for that the corporations took over the government instead of the other way around. It accounts for that protests and free speech are "allowed." It accounts for why people are at the same time militantly patriotic but apathetic at the polls. It accounts for propaganda being distributed rather than centralised. This guy Wolin has put a lot of thought into this.
zxcdw 13y ago
The worst part, I believe, is that these systems which are set in place are placed there in good faith of someone. I don't think that there's some huge government official conspiracy spanning thousands of people orchestrating this to control the "sheeple". It's just that to understand implications of privacy violations and mass surveillance is quite complex topic and definitely something you can't explain to a layman in a few minutes and expect them to understand the importance. If the result is not immediately obvious with concrete examples, "nobody" will give a damn. Those same "nobodies" act in good faith to increase surveillance to fight crime or terrorism. Then of course there are people who don't believe surveillance is effective against terrorism(as some of the leaks indicate) but have ulterior motives to support it, whatever they may be.

XorNot 13y ago

Trying to link this to the NSA data mining is absurd. They're tangentially related, but there is no process or regulation which is going to somehow help you when there's an active investigation and agents are digging through your garbage and talking to past contacts. That's the exact purview of the FBI - they weren't mining databases, all they have to do is send a guy out to chat with some local base personnel, find out where he used to live, look up neighbours etc. This is all active, in-person investigative work.

amirmc 13y ago
"Because the FBI agents had no concrete evidence that Mayfield was linked to the Madrid train bombings, they decided not to apply for a criminal wiretap, which requires probable cause to believe there is criminal activity or intent. Rather, they applied for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant, ..." "The secret FISA court approved the request, as it almost always does, and the FBI began its surreptitious and incredibly intrusive blanket surveillance of Mayfield and his family."
- higherpurpose 13y ago
  Why the hell is FBI allowed to ask for a FISA "warrant" (god, I hate their 1984 newspeak)?!
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    I didn't think it could be used for anyone but foreign citizens to the U.S.! The FISC is pathetic.
- XorNot 13y ago
  Where did they dig up history? Where did they find details of his past? The FISA warrant was granted after the string of fairly notable coincidences. And was for ongoing active surveillance - not data mining his past. Of course I don't know why I'm bothering at this point - remotely seeming like you disagree with the HN groupthink on surveillance topics is just a magnet for downvotes and not discussion.

mjklin 13y ago

>He spent two weeks in jail, petrified that fellow inmates would learn he was somehow involved in the Madrid bombing and hurt him. This is surprising to me, that he knew what he was being investigated for. Is there any reason why they would tell him?

veidr 13y ago
They didn't technically arrest him (since they had no actual evidence), but instead detained him as a material witness in the Madrid bombing case. They would have had to disclose this as part of that process.
scotty79 13y ago
So he can confess. You'll get confession you want more often if a person that is supposed to confess knows what he's supposed to confess to.

zacinbusiness 13y ago

This is an excellent example of what I was talking about earlier. We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement, men and women who are not trained to think rationally about data and who probably have only a high school understanding of statistics (if that), who are given access to massive amounts of data. They take this data and they match it against a theory that they've already developed, and they assume they have "cracked the case." They act in a constant state of paranoia, fueled by fear and powered by tools that act on data in ways that they can't possibly understand. And so they fill in some (likely poorly designed) form in some FBI web app, and some names get spit out. Then they look at whoever matches their "profile" which was likely developed using, again, a high school level of psychology. It's ridiculous and frightening.

d23 13y ago
> We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement, men and women who are not trained to think rationally about data and who probably have only a high school understanding of statistics (if that), who are given access to massive amounts of data. Really though? > The FBI’s Portland field office, however, used that fingerprint match to begin digging into Mayfield’s background. Certain details of the attorney’s life convinced the agents that they had their man. Mayfield had converted to Islam after meeting his wife, an Egyptian. He had represented one of the Portland Seven, a group of men who tried to travel to Afghanistan to fight for al Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. and coalition forces in a child custody case. He also worshipped at the same mosque as the militants. I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion.
- scotty79 13y ago
  > I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion. That's because confirmation bias is a human and common thing. Scientists have various tools to avoid fooling themselves like FBI did and like you and many of us would do.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement It's not patriotism, maybe it is nationalism or more probably plain idiocy. When some innocent guy gets framed up (even when there were only good intentions by the framer-upper), it usually means that the real perpetrator goes free. It is completely irrational to support a system that gets it so wrong so often.

jessaustin 13y ago

One of the examiners candidly admitted that if the person identified had been someone without these characteristics, like the Maytag repairman, the laboratory might have revisited the identification with more skepticism and caught the error. I know We're All Bayesian Now, but does this really seem like the way a "laboratory" ought to work? If fingerprinting really is a science, then it's a study of patterns and how they do or do not match. I'm pretty sure we have computers for that sort of task. Why isn't this totally automated by now? From the outside, the reason that springs to mind is because fingerprinting, as practiced by the FBI, is not scientific at all, and exists merely as window-dressing for the prejudice and misjudgment of agents.

maxerickson 13y ago
The software would anyway have some threshold of confidence. I'm also not sure your assertion that being scientific makes it easy to encode in software is true (easy of course being a relative term).
- jessaustin 13y ago
  Skin and its details map pretty directly to the 2D Cartesian plane. (If that weren't the case, what would the concept of "fingerprint" even mean?) It is straightforward to represent values in that space in a computer, and to compare sets of such values to each other. It's true that there are affine transformations to consider, but computers are pretty good at those too (better than humans!). If there are actually any other considerations, throw some ML at them, but don't give us any "human interpretation" bullshit. In fact, Mr. Mayfield wouldn't even have suffered so if computers couldn't already do this job: it's quite unlikely that the FBI has enough staff to compare twenty-year-old military service records to Spanish bombing evidence by hand. The problem, as you nearly realized, was the threshold used in the query. There were no actual matches, yet the FBI required twenty "matches" to "investigate", so it produced twenty "matches". If the FBI had been a bit more overstaffed/bored, they would have pulled 100 "matches". It's like when we pull receivables out of the billing system to write off at the end of the fiscal year: the CFO tells us what the final number should be, and we just get the oldest accounts that sum to the proper total. You seem to have missed the point, though, which is that if fingerprinting must be done with detailed knowledge of the field agents' pet theories, that implies fingerprinting is not scientific.

rikacomet 13y ago

I think some of us are forgetting and are underestimating the human capacity for compassion. This is not just about American public, but all of the humans. What is struck between this uproar is the data security of all the 6billion+ people on this earth.If someone is to think, that it would be over, if they just stop spying on American citizens and their activity, he is grossly underestimating the rest of humanity, this wave won't end until lines are drawn, about what is totalitarian and what is the right line of conformity. Whats happening right now is a organization and its supporting organizations, finding it hard to stay on the line of justice in a world, where America is a small word, compared to what it was like before. Patriotism is nice, but it has reduced meaning today, this is no longer a world, where you can stay within your borders and hurt everybody outside it. A good example, is from the movie Hobbit 2, where the elf king is reluctant to look outside of his wooden kingdom. With great power comes great responsibility.. if you have power over Americans, you have responsibility over Americans, but in case of NSA, they have power over the data of all the people, thus their responsibility is towards everybody.

deleted 13y ago

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pmorici 13y ago

"The only reason Mayfield is a free man today is that the Spanish police repeatedly told the FBI that the print recovered from the bag of detonators didn’t match Mayfield’s fingerprints. The FBI, however, continued to stand by its lab’s findings until Spanish authorities conclusively matched the print to the real culprit" Even if you are hardline nut and totally support the surveillance state it has to be frightening alarming that they were so dead set on harassing this one guy that they would have let the real culprit go free had the Spanish police not called them on their BS.

javajosh 13y ago
I would wager money that there are many FBI agents to this day who lament that they let Mayfield get away with his crimes.
- mox1 13y ago
  I would wager money that there are just as many FBI agents who to this day are disgusted by what the idiots at the Portland Field Office of the FBI did to this guy.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    Those agents need to speak up. They especially need to speak up when they observe their colleagues conducting themselves as the article describes.
    - deegles 13y ago
      I don't think there will be much love for whistleblowers at any federal agency in the post-Snowden era.
  - nate_meurer 13y ago
    Awesome. This will be a great solace to the victim, I'm sure.
127 13y ago

zb 13y ago

Possibly the worst part: the courts ruled that what they did to him was unconstitutional (duh), but that it's perfectly OK to keep doing it to other people because he already got his payout: http://blogs.findlaw.com/ninth_circuit/2009/12/mayfield-v-us-no-07-35865.html http://blogs.findlaw.com/ninth_circuit/2009/12/mayfield-v-us...

Zigurd 13y ago
If the individual agents and prosecutors were bonded for the purpose of funding liability like this, we would know the cost of liability up front, and it would make it difficult for the same individuals to be involved in many such cases. Making the government as a whole pay is too diffuse.

javajosh 13y ago

No concerned citizen can allow themselves to be "terrified" by this story, if only because terror is the death of rational, effective action. We must be able to look at this situation, empathize with both sides, and determine how things could have gone better. (Empathizing with law enforcement is particularly difficult for me, but I've come to realize that it is a crucial part of the puzzle.) It is normal for law-enforcement to chase down a false lead. Most leads are dead-ends, from my lay understanding of detective work. In retrospect, Mayfield was a dead-end, but the key question is: when should the FBI have realized this? The actions that they took would have been justified, I think, if their suspicions had turned out to be valid. (all except the 2 week incarceration - and even that would have been clearly justified if Mayfield had been charged.) In any event, this is one of those cases which highlights a growing problem in the US legal system, which is the redefinition of "punishment" to exclude pre-trial incarceration and harassment. Law-enforcement has attained an ever growing list of exceptions and ad hoc powers that override a man's right to a fair trial before being punished. City police can "detain" you for up to 72 hours, for no reason. The FBI (apparently) can "detain" you for at least 2 weeks, again without charges. I believe that these rights to ad hoc, extra-judicial incarceration need to be rescinded, by an act of Congress, as these rights enable systematically arbitrary and abusive behavior on the part of law-enforcement at both the local and federal level. I believe they make the general population, whether they know it or not, unsafe from predatory police behavior.

codex 13y ago

Nobody is perfect and institutions are no exception. However, I'd have to see more than a single datapoint to indite an entire system. Those who are anti-surveillance will no doubt exhibit confirmation bias when reading this article, which is ironic.

einhverfr 13y ago

I don't see this as a question of confirmation bias but rather a more deeper problem in investigative law enforcement, namely the need to see things as part of a narrative relating to the sort of investigation. This isn't confirmation bias as usually understood, but goes one step before, namely in filtering out the details one can tell a story about. In the end what criminal investigators do is they find details and piece together a narrative from those. One huge problem with massive surveillance is the ability to piece together whatever narrative the investigator wants to put together based on a much larger field of information to mine.

dllthomas 13y ago

Cardinal Richelieu had something to say on the topic.

revelation 13y ago

The FBI is the modern day Gestapo, a bunch of poorly trained policemen with the right ideology turned secret agency.