December 21, 2016 (fault Lines) — It might not seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things: A cop and his crew throw a significant amount of tow jobs to a local towing company and the proprietor gives them a few cars in exchange. But when you take a closer look and find a conspiracy involving top and former brass in a police department, and the victims were all targeted because of their ethnicity and economic status, it becomes a big deal.

Now a judge has released the already lightly punished mastermind of this scheme from jail because he’s depressed and has lost a significant amount of weight according to his attorney.

King City, California is home to about 13,000 residents, 90 percent of which are Hispanic. It’s an agricultural center for tomatoes, strawberries, lettuce, dairy, pistachios, walnuts and almonds. It’s been called the “Salad Bowl of the World.”

People there are hard working and generally low-income, and apparently ripe for picking by King City police Sgt. Bobby Carrillo and his crew. Carrillo alone had more than 200 vehicles towed and impounded, of which 95 percent or more were handled by Brian Millers’ tow yard. Miller is the brother of then acting-Chief Bruce Miller, who was charged with accepting one of the towed cars as a bribe.

Carrillo was having the cars towed and impounded over minor infractions such as inoperative tail lamps, or even towed from their spot in front of the owner’s home over an expired registration tag. Then, when the owner was unable to bail his or her car out, Carrillo and Miller sold it and split the profits.

People were afraid to speak out because many of these agricultural workers are undocumented.

That was until the FBI came to town on a murder investigation and found no one willing to say anything except “we don’t trust cops, they take our cars and property and we can’t do anything about it.” Complaints like this prompted an investigation, and since Carrillo and cohorts weren’t even trying hard to hide their scheme, it wasn’t long before they found themselves impounded.

Judge Julie R. Culver, a former prosecutor and corporate attorney, was appointed to the bench in 2010 by then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Carrillo was a veteran cop and, judging by his surname, he should be acutely aware of the hardships faced by poor Hispanic agricultural workers. Carrillo made the decision to become a predator, to seek out vulnerable people, to take their property and wreak havoc on their lives.

And now, Judge Culver gives him a break. After serving about two months of his already paltry sentence of one year in jail, the judge has granted a defense motion and he will be allowed to serve the remainder at home. Monterey County Deputy District Attorney Steve Somers doesn’t agree with the judge:

There are a lot of people who can make that same claim in the jail. And I don’t know how many of those would be released for the same reasons. When he was committing the crimes, he knew that if he was caught he would be put in jail and it would be very uncomfortable wherever he went because every officer knows that.

Jail is a horrible place. It’s easy to lose weight there because the food is barely nutritionally adequate, and tastes like crap. It’s prepared by fellow inmates who may or may not have had their training in an establishment sporting a Michelin star, or even a Zagat rating. (Mostly not.) The food is part of the punishment. Carrillo was in solitary confinement, likely for his own protection, because being a dirt bag with a badge who preys on his own community would make him quite unpopular with the non-badge-holding dirt bags that prey on their community and share the facility.

Yes, you would lose weight. Yes, you would become depressed. When your drinking water comes from an orifice on top of the exposed toilet in your cell, it’s depressing. You want to go home.

It’s a disgrace that this judge overlooked this former cop’s predatory nature and let him go home. Hopefully every criminal attorney with an inmate facing a year in Monterey County will now file a similar motion on behalf of their client so everyone can go home early.

The post Ex-Cop Bobby Carillo Is Sad in Jail, So Judge Orders His Release appeared first on Mimesis Law.

Uber launched a fleet of its much anticipated self-driving cars in San Francisco on Wednesday, and by late morning the effort already hit a bad-driver milestone: running a red light. [...]

Annie Gaus, a freelance writer and producer in San Francisco, tweeted Wednesday morning that she "Just passed a 'self-driving' Uber that lurched into the intersection on Van Ness [Avenue], on a red, nearly hitting my Lyft." [...] "It was close enough that both myself and the driver reacted and were like, 'Shit,'" she said. "It stopped suddenly and stayed like that, as you see in the photo."

SFPD traffic division unaware of self-driving Uber fleet on city streets

With Uber's self-driving cars now on the streets of San Francisco, the enforcement of traffic violations is in the hands of The City's Police Traffic Company, which was unaware Wednesday morning that the vehicles began roaming city streets that day. [...]

"I was unaware the cars have been released in the wild," said San Francisco Police Traffic Company Sgt. Will Murray. "Isn't that like the headless horsemen?"

"They are required to have someone seated in the front driver's portion of the vehicle," said Murray, who added that, "If they were committing flagrant violations, if they were not obeying the laws" then traffic officers will pull them over and ticket them.

He did not say if that had yet occurred or how one goes about ticketing a car driven by a computer.

Uber ordered to halt self-driving cars on SF streets

Uber's action is illegal, California DMV Deputy Director Brian G. Soublet wrote in a letter to Uber late Wednesday, which was also sent to press. Soublet added that the ride-hail behemoth was required to obtain an autonomous vehicle testing permit before operating self-driving vehicles on city streets.

"If Uber does not confirm immediately that it will stop its launch and seek a testing permit, DMV will initiate legal action," the DMV wrote, "including, but not limited to, seeking injunctive relief."

Suggesting that this was more than first day jitters, KRON 4 got its hands on a set of photos that the channel says show an autonomous Uber driving through a red light on Harrison at 4th Street. The pictures were taken on Sunday morning, which means that the car was likely being used for testing or mapping purposes and did not carry a paying passenger. Still, it would suggest that the software piloting the autonomous vehicles had problems as recently as three days before the much publicized launch of the autonomous ride-hail service. That is, unless these incidents are all the result of human error -- a.k.a. Uber drivers.

"These incidents were due to human error," an Uber spokesperson told the Guardian about the both the Van Ness incident and the 3rd Street incident. "This is why we believe so much in making the roads safer by building self-driving Ubers. The drivers involved have been suspended while we continue to investigate."

Isn't that neat? It's the humans, not the un-permitted software, that is at fault according to Uber. Unfortunately, that argument likely won't sway the DMV.

So let's see...

The self-driving software is bad enough that they run red lights and make dangerous turns... but they have humans in the drivers' seat! Who are also so terrible at their jobs that they can't prevent the car from running red lights and must be fired.

I guess none of us are as incompetent as all of us? The software is so bad that it makes human drivers even worse?

The usual argument for self-driving cars is that they will be safer for everyone than human-piloted cars. If that hypothesis turns out to be true, then I'm all for them! One can even imagine a shiny Starfleet future where self-driving cars lead to the end of personal car ownership and dramatic emissions reduction. Enter the shimmering arc!

Uber, of course, does not give the slightest fractional shits about whether self-driving cars are safer or cleaner: they are interested in them because they are cheaper. Allow me to remind you of this bit from Fight Club:

I'm a recall coordinator. My job is to apply the formula. It's a story problem.

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 miles per hour. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now: do we initiate a recall?

Take the number of vehicles in the field, (A), and multiply it by the probable rate of failure, (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement, (C). A times B times C equals X... If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

And now we get to the part where the Uber software, operating as designed, is now literally trying to murder me:

SF Bicycle Coalition: A Warning to People Who Bike: Self-Driving Ubers and Right Hook Turns

Before the surprise launch of Uber's autonomous vehicles on San Francisco streets this week, I rode in one. I can tell you firsthand: Those vehicles are not yet ready for our streets.

I was at one of the demonstrations covered in the SF Examiner, along with others who Uber hoped to impress with their new technology. None of us were told that just two days later, Uber would be releasing this technology on our streets on a large scale. I did tell Uber some things about the shortcomings of that technology, however.

In the ride I took through the streets of SoMa on Monday, the autonomous vehicle in "self-driving" mode as well as the one in front of it took an unsafe right-hook-style turn through a bike lane. Twice. This kind of turn is one featured in a 2013 blog post that is known to be one of the primary causes of collisions between cars and people who bike resulting in serious injury or fatality. It's also an unsafe practice that we address in all of the safety curriculum we offer to professional drivers, including the videos we consulted on for Uber as recently as this fall.

I told staff from Uber's policy and engineering teams about the safety hazards of their autonomous vehicle technology. They told me they would work on it. Then, two days later, they unleashed that technology on San Francisco's streets. Your streets.

Since yesterday, we have been told that "safety drivers" in these vehicles have been instructed to disengage from self-driving mode when approaching right turns on a street with a bike lane and that engineers are continuing to work on the problem. In the meantime, Uber is continuing to operate autonomous vehicles for passenger service in San Francisco.

There's no other way to put it: Launching autonomous vehicle technology before it's regulated and safe for our streets is unacceptable. If you support safe streets, please sign the petition to tell Uber to address this dangerous and illegal turning behavior immediately.

The people who wrote this software do not understand the traffic laws and programmed it with a set of rules that they figured was close enough. And then released them into the public.

"Disrupt transportation! Move fast, release early, and crush innocent people under two tons of fast-moving steel!"

I really can't express how unsettling it was today, riding my bicycle in traffic in the rain -- a time when San Francisco drivers are notoriously even less competent and more erratic than under normal conditions -- and wondering what fresh new hell of unpredictability I might encounter from poorly-behaving software in an alpha-test that I most assuredly did not click "Agree" on.

Fuck Uber.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Some kids are just too cool for school.

And some security experts are too cool for OpenPGP.

It's almost become a rite of passage for security folks: work in the trenches, build a reputation, climb the ivory tower, write a detailed epiphany about why you've given up on PGP. Suggest we all buy an iPhone and use Signal, start giving people phone numbers instead of e-mail addresses...

Wait, what?

Please take a moment to go ask any young woman if she thinks giving random strangers her phone number will improve her security. I'll wait.

...

Of course, the experts are right about many things. OpenPGP is old and more recent tools with more modern designs have a lot going for them. But I still think they're mostly wrong.

The experts, by and large, have yet to offer any credible replacements for PGP. And when they suggest abandoning PGP, what they're really saying is we should give up on secure e-mail and just use something else. That doesn't fly. Many people have to use e-mail. E-mail is everywhere. Not improving the security of e-mail and instead expecting people to just use other tools (or go without), is the security elite proclaiming from their ivory tower: "Let them eat cake!"

Furthermore, if that "something else" also requires people use their phone number for everything... well, that's the messaging world's equivalent of the widely despised Facebook Real Name Policy. If you ever needed a clear example of why the lack of diversity (and empathy) in tech is a problem, there it is!

Compartmentalization, presenting different identities in different contexts, is a fundamental, necessary part of human behaviour. It's one of the basics. If you think taking that away and offering fancy crypto, forward secrecy, deniability instead is a win... well, I think your threat models need some work! You have failed and people will just keep on using insecure e-mail for their accounting, their work, their hobbies, their doctor visits and their interaction with local government. Because people know their needs better than you do.

But I digress.

The ridiculous phone number thing aside, I also take issue with the fact that when our opinionated experts do suggest replacements, the things they recommend are proprietary, centralized and controlled by for-profit companies. Some of them (mostly the underdogs) may be open source, but even the best of those use a centralized design and are hostile to federation. In pursuit of security and convenience (and, let's be honest, control, power and money), openness has been hung out to dry.

This is short-sighted at best.

These cool new apps may be secure today. But what about tomorrow? Odds are, they will be compromised by government mandate, blocked or shut down. Or just dead because messaging is a cut-throat business and the money runs out. Anyone remember ICQ? MSN? GChat? Sprinkling these new messaging apps in security pixie dust doesn't make them qualified to replace e-mail.

But what if I'm wrong? What if one of these businesses succeeds, e-mail dies and all our comms become dependent on proprietary protocols mediated by for-profit monopolies? Is that a problem?

Here, let me google that for you.

I really hope it doesn't happen.

Interlude

Please, if you are at risk, if you have powerful adversaries, follow the advice of the cool kids. The experts are absolutely right when they say PGP is too confusing and messy today for most people to use safely. It takes training, practice and diligence.

So sure, get an iPhone if you can afford it. Use Signal or iMessage. Use Tor, carefully. For e-mail, create as many GMail accounts as you need to blend in with the crowd and not draw attention to yourself; their security team is the best in the world, let them protect you! Enable two-factor auth, use HTTPS.

But most importantly; if you can avoid digitizing incriminating information, do that. Rubber hose cryptanalysis is real and it's much easier to avoid creating data in the first place, than it is to keep it secure after the fact.

Mental Models and Deniability

A rule of thumb for creating usable software, is don't make me think.

What this means in practice, is software should match the mental models of its users as closely as possible. If it doesn't, users will inevitably make mistakes. If your tool is a security tool, those mistakes may compromise their security.

PGP in e-mail has failed this on many fronts. The lack of protection for message headers (the subject line) is one, as is pretty much anything to do with encryption keys (too much math). But it's not all bad! OpenPGP gets other things right, and actually corrects some of the things insecure e-mail gets wrong.

One of the most vexing things about e-mail, is people actually think e-mail is already secure. They just assume e-mail is like regular mail, in an opaque envelope that will prevent tampering and keep postal workers from reading it. Encryption and signatures bring e-mail closer to user expectations, which means if we can get it working smoothly, users won't have to think as much to make good security choices.

One thing people don't expect from e-mail, is deniability. Deniability means after a message has been delivered, it can no longer be strongly linked to the sender. It's like an anti-signature... which most sane people would consider a horrible misfeature in any communication system. Explicitly designing a system so people can disavow their statements and go back on their word? What is this, a system for assholes??

And yet, all the cool kids in the security world seem to want exactly that. They keep bringing up the lack of deniability (and forward secrecy) in PGP as if it were some sort of fatal flaw.

Why? Are security people all assholes? I don't think that's it.

I think they're quite enamoured with the elegant math, and really, really pissed off with certain Three Letter Agencies. There is good reason to believe major governments plan to, or already have been recording all our encrypted communications in the hope of being able to decrypt them later. Forward secrecy (deniability's more attractive twin sister) prevents that sort of thing. But OpenPGP doesn't need to provide forward secrecy to thwart mass surveillance. If we just use TLS (with the right ciphers) for SMTP, IMAP and web-mail then that does the job just fine.

So I agree forward secrecy in transit is a good thing. Let's do that!

Let's put our mail in secure envelopes, and let's also drive it from place to place in nice, secure vehicles. Users don't expect the cops to routinely stop the mailman and photocopy all the mail, so let's make sure that doesn't happen to e-mail either. Let the mental models be our guide.

But we don't need or want deniability. Deniability for individual messages is, quite simply, a horrible misfeature to be avoided. People already assume e-mail is on the record; trying to change that means going against their mental models and setting them up for failure in new and exciting ways. The fact that OpenPGP wasn't designed to empower assholes is a feature, not a bug.

(Yes, there are other arguments for forward secrecy and deniability. They are in my oh-so-humble opinion, mostly bunk. And this post is already too long...)

Making Progress

Anyway, like it or not, e-mail is important.

E-mail is the most successful open messaging standard we've got and OpenPGP is the best tech we have to secure our mail. OpenPGP may be dated and a bit clunky, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Folks like myself, implementors who are not cryptographers, have long been admonished to not invent our own crypto. Over and over again, we are told to use tried and tested solutions. OpenPGP is that. It may have baggage, it may not be perfect, but it is mature and it solves certain problems. Most of the flaws can be avoided and worked around. If the security community really wants us to use something else, you're going to have to step up and provide something a bit more tangible than rants on the Internet.

OpenPGP is also not standing still, OpenPGP is still developing. The community is well aware that the technology is flawed and needs work. An update to the standard is in the works and there are multiple projects working on improving both the security and usability side of things.

Mailpile is one such project, but we're in good company: PEP, LEAP, OpenKeychain for Android, Mailvelope, and more. Even Google and Yahoo are developing solutions based on OpenPGP. There's actually quite a lot going on!

As an industry, we should be supporting these efforts, not writing and promoting self indulgent posts on how we've given up and moved on.

Oh, and stay in school kids! It's worth it!

Thankfully, no one was hurt. But you may have heard that a man from Salisbury, North Carolina, Edgar Maddison Welch, shot up a pizza joint in Washington, DC today in an effort to 'investigate' the "Pizza Gate" conspiracy theory.

What on earth is Pizza Gate, you may ask? It's a Reddit-based far right conspiracy theory alleging a child sex trafficking ring run by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta out of a DC pizza shop.

Here's a tweet tonight from the son of Michael Flynn, the incoming National Security Advisor.

Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many "coincidences" tied to it. https://t.co/8HA9y30Yfp

— Michael G Flynn🇺🇸 (@mflynnJR) December 5, 2016

November 28, 2016 (Fault Lines) — It’s no secret that police officers have access to tremendous amounts of sensitive data. As investigators, their powers are almost limitless. The have access to interdepartmental reports, state and national databases, and even reports of outlying agencies. With that power and access, law enforcement is entrusted to utilize these resources for legitimate purposes. Well, and if you are Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Mark Lillienfeld, for friendly favors as well.

Lucky for Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Craig Richman, he had a friend in Lillienfeld. After a confrontation with a housekeeper over dog poop, Richman found himself the subject of a criminal complaint. Judge Richman was accused of battery after the housekeeper suffered bruises and cuts to her face following her confrontation with Richman. Unfortunately, the battery had been investigated by the Los Angeles Police Department rather than Lillienfeld’s agency. Yet, that didn’t stop Lillienfeld from getting involved.

Like any good law enforcement officer, Lillienfeld was all too eager to help put away the bad guy. Oh wait, that’s not what he did. Shortly after the Los Angeles Times reported the charges against Richman, Lillienfeld jumped in to help his friend. Lillienfeld and Richman were longtime acquaintances.

The detective and the judge had known each other since at least 1996, when Richman was a prosecutor handling an attempted murder case Lillienfeld investigated. The detective would later visit the judge’s home to get warrants signed. Lillienfeld’s wife worked in Richman’s courtroom, transcribing hearings as an official court reporter.

As detailed in a Los Angeles County prosecutor’s memo, on October 24, 2013, Lillienfeld contacted a Los Angeles Fire Department investigator to look in to any medical runs or calls involving the housekeeper that may have occurred on July 18, 2013, the date of the altercation between Richman and the housekeeper. It was clear Lillienfeld was looking for any information regarding emergency services that might have been rendered to the housekeeper. The fire department investigator responded that he did not have access to EMS records and that a search warrant could be served for further information.

The next day, Lillienfeld queried local and state databases for information on the housekeeper. Not satisfied with his investigation, Lillienfeld then accessed criminal history databases. Still coming up short, Lillienfeld assigned a crime analyst the task of further researching the housekeeper.

At some point during his investigation, Lillienfeld learned that the housekeeper had been pulled over and investigated for suspicion of driving under the influence. Though no charges were ever filed against the housekeeper, the Ventura County Sheriff maintained a report of that investigation. Lillienfeld promptly requested that report. Ventura County complied with the request and produced its report, bearing an official stamp indicating the records were not to be duplicated.

Finally, it appeared Lillienfeld came up with something that would help his friend. Apparently, he did not realize his friend would submit the ill-gotten report into official court documents.

It is a misdemeanor for a law enforcement officer to obtain information from confidential criminal records and reports for personal reasons or furnish it to someone not involved in the investigation.

Not only had Lillienfeld accessed confidential records for personal reasons, but he appears to have furnished it to his friend, Judge Richman. Surely, that’s not what happened here, right?

The city attorney handling Richman’s prosecution was surprised to find the police report submitted in a mitigation package by Richman’s lawyer, thus he made inquiries as to how the arrest report might have been obtained. The city attorney contacted Ventura County and learned the report had been released to Detective Lillienfeld upon his request. The city attorney attempted to contact Lillienfeld by phone and email to no avail.

Receiving no explanation from Lillienfeld, the city attorney turned the matter over to the Justice System Integrity Division to determine whether Lillienfeld might have run afoul of the law himself by accessing and then disclosing the confidential report. The Justice System Integrity Division, in turn, provided this information to the sheriff’s internal affairs bureau for investigation.

With the trial over and Richman acquitted in the battery charge, it seemed all was said and done. No harm, no foul. Ultimately the report was of no use in Richman’s case. Yet, that didn’t necessarily close out the internal investigation into why Lillienfeld had involved himself in this case and whether or not he released the report to Richman.

At best, the evidence revealed the report inexplicitly appeared in Richman’s lawyer’s office. Yet, not obtained by his private investigator or subpoena. In the face of his own computer trail, Lillienfeld offered up his defense: yes, he had made the inquiries into the housekeeper, but he did so at the bequest of Sheriff Lee Baca. Never mind that Baca had no recollection of asking the homicide detective to undertake such an inquiry. Surely, he’s just old and on the verge of dementia, or so responded Lillienfield when confronted with Baca’s lack of recollection. Never mind that this would have normally been handled by a different division, as Lillienfeld characterized the inquiry as a threat assessment. Under Lillienfeld’s account, he was checking to see if the housekeeper was a threat to the judge.

Never mind that Lillienfeld didn’t bother to respond to the city attorney’s inquires as he deemed those inquiries to be “unprofessional, snotty, snarky, [and] borderline unethical.” How dare a city attorney inquire of the homicide detective what he was investigating and whether or not he had released a report? Those types of questions were beneath him and such an affront to his own integrity that they didn’t even require a response regarding his legitimate threat assessment investigation as the behest of Sheriff Baca.

Never mind that Lillienfeld was the only person with access to the report. Perhaps some unknown person accessed the file in Lillienfeld’s drawer back at the office and disseminated it without his knowledge.

Never mind that the prosecutor declined to file charges against Lillienfeld for misuse of official information in a totally circumstantial case. We have his word, and his alone, that he was conducting official business when he joined in the investigation of his friend’s criminal case. Yeah, that’s it: it was all official. Nothing to see here folks, move along. There’s no logical explanation for how Lillienfeld’s copy of the housekeeper’s arrest report ended up in his friend’s hands. But just in case Judge Richman needed it, there it was. It’s good to have friends, especially when the friend is a cop.

The post All Evidence Points to Favors Between Judge Richman And His Pal, Det. Lillienfeld appeared first on Mimesis Law.