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Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241112122700/https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/11/12/protest-surveillance-technologies

JUHASZ: DiBenedetto now works for Louisiana's Department of Education and is in charge of bringing Amira into more classrooms. He says by the time the state's two-year pilot is over...

DIBENEDETTO: I think we're going to see some interesting impacts, and we'll definitely have some data to make prudent decisions in the future.

JUHASZ: Like whether to spend even bigger money on AI. The company behind Amira says 2 million children already use the tool. Experts caution the technology isn't a replacement for teachers or even all tutors. It can't build relationships with students like humans can.

MONTAGNINO: I'm old-school. I still believe people, especially with reading for little kids - that's where it's at.

JUHASZ: Montagnino, the principal in Gretna, says for that reason, she was skeptical at first.

MONTAGNINO: But this, to supplement good science of reading instruction in the classroom? This is great.

JUHASZ: And it's likely to get better because just as kids are learning from Amira, it's learning from them, too.

[Bolding added]

So it seems an alternative headline for this story would be "Private for profit company gets paid to collect training data for its AI from children who could face disciplinary or legal consequences for non-compliance"

Archived at https://archive.is/Th1Sq

Justyna Rzewinski, who recently left her job as a social worker with Correctional Health Services, the agency that provides healthcare to the city’s detainees, told the city’s Board of Correction during its monthly meeting on Tuesday that the Department of Correction frequently “deadlocks” detainees with mental illness inside cells as a form of punishment.

The alleged practice, which the DOC did not confirm or deny on Tuesday, would appear to be a violation of the BOC’s rules that govern the rights of detainees on Rikers Island, a jail complex where half of the incarcerated population has been diagnosed with a mental illness.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/0982c

New York City’s jails are in a state of perpetual crisis, documented over many years in a steady flow of reports on the violent and inhumane conditions inside for both people in custody and people working in the facilities. Violence, unmet needs, sexual abuse, mismanagement, and the unsanitary and decrepit nature of the buildings themselves have all featured prominently in the news, in our own reports, and in the reports of the federal monitor overseeing the jails as the result of Nunez v. City of New York and Benjamin v. Maginley-Liddie, among many others. The entrenched nature of these problems is now in stark relief as the judge overseeing the Nunez case has ordered the parties to begin developing a proposed structure for a federal receiver. Appointment of a federal receiver to take over control of the jails is an extraordinary measure, and the fact that New York City is the closest it has been to one in its history is a marker of both the seriousness of the problems and their resistance to change.

Yet while we know things are bad, the picture of conditions in the jails remains woefully incomplete. The information that does exist is fragmented — held in different locations, sometimes by different entities, which often conflict with one another. While there are exceptions, much of it is made available only in PDF format, making it much more labor-intensive to identify trends, and there are often inconsistencies in when it is made available. And, of course, some information becomes public only when it makes it into a monitor or news report, which makes it less likely that it will be tracked consistently.

With all of that said, here we present a picture of conditions in the jails as we know them: Who’s being held, what it’s like to be inside, and who’s responsible for oversight.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/UBCUX

Incidentally, this article comes from a whole special issue this NYC based magazine did recently devoted to Riker's Island - https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/issues/inside-rikers-jails-can-be-safer-and-more-humane

Unlike most states, Idaho lacks regulatory oversight of local jails. Sheriffs and jail commanders set their own standards. Annual inspections are voluntary, scheduled months ahead of time, and the sheriff’s association conducting the inspections is exempt from the state’s public disclosure law.

If jails fail the inspections, there’s nobody who can force them to comply.

Results of the voluntary inspections, obtained by InvestigateWest, offer a grim picture of the current state of many Idaho jails. All of the jails that failed inspections this year were overcrowded, understaffed or both.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/eZJYs

Standing in the North Carolina woods, Chris Arthur warned about a coming civil war. Videos he posted publicly on YouTube bore titles such as “The End of America or the Next Revolutionary War.” In his telling, the U.S. was falling into chaos and there would be only one way to survive: kill or be killed.

Arthur was posting during a surge of far-right extremism in the years leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He wrote warcraft training manuals to help others organize their own militias. And he offered sessions at his farm in Mount Olive, North Carolina, that taught how to kidnap and attack public officials, use snipers and explosives and design a “fatal funnel” booby trap to inflict mass casualties.

While he continued to post publicly, military and law enforcement ignored more than a dozen warnings phoned in by Arthur’s wife’s ex-husband about Arthur’s increasingly violent rhetoric and calls for the murder of police officers. This failure by the Guard, FBI and others to act allowed Arthur to continue to manufacture and store explosives around young children and train another extremist who would attack police officers in New York state and lead them on a wild, two-hour chase and gun battle.

Arthur isn’t an anomaly. He is among more than 480 people with a military background accused of ideologically driven extremist crimes from 2017 through 2023, including the more than 230 arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Bolding added, archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/OOU0a

e; added a final period to the AP's headline because it looks weird without one

The Texas Supreme Court late Thursday halted the execution of Robert Roberson hours after it was set to take place, capping a flurry of litigation filed that same day by Texas state lawmakers in a last-ditch gambit to stop the state from killing a death row inmate they believed was most likely innocent.

The order was a stunning 11th-hour victory for Roberson and for the state lawmakers who opposed his execution and turned to novel legal maneuvers in an effort to buy him more time.

The stay arrived in response to a separation-of-powers conflict touched off by a group of Texas lawmakers when they subpoenaed Roberson the night before he was set to be put to death. The unprecedented step sought to give the man a final lifeline after a series of court rejections left him on track to become the first person in the country executed for allegedly shaking a baby to death.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/k8EPU

The [Environmental Protection Agency] has set a 10-year deadline for most utilities to replace lead service lines, but omitted requirements for schools to replace the water fountains or plumbing that have lead components.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/F5qXx

In June, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) signed an acquisition plan for a 5-year, nearly $5.3 million contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from tech firm PenLink, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer through a public information request. The deal is nearly twice as large as the company’s $2.7 million two-year contract with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Tangles is an artificial intelligence-powered web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark web. Tangles’ premier add-on feature, WebLoc, is controversial among digital privacy advocates. Any client who purchases access to WebLoc can track different mobile devices’ movements in a specific, virtual area selected by the user, through a capability called “geofencing.” Users of software like Tangles can do this without a search warrant or subpoena. (In a high-profile ruling, the Fifth Circuit recently held that police cannot compel companies like Google to hand over data obtained through geofencing.) Device-tracking services rely on location pings and other personal data pulled from smartphones, usually via in-app advertisers. Surveillance tech companies then buy this information from data brokers and sell access to it as part of their products.

WebLoc can even be used to access a device’s mobile ad ID, a string of numbers and letters that acts as a unique identifier for mobile devices in the ad marketing ecosystem, according to a US Office of Naval Intelligence procurement notice.

Wolfie Christl, a public interest researcher and digital rights activist based in Vienna, Austria, argues that data collected for a specific purpose, such as navigation or dating apps, should not be used by different parties for unrelated reasons. “It’s a disaster,” Christl told the Observer. “It’s the largest possible imaginable decontextualization of data. … This cannot be how our future digital society looks like.”

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240827115133/https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-dps-surveillance-tangle-cobwebs/

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240826162608/https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/14/1096534/homeland-security-facial-recognition-immigration-border/

Inconsistencies in phone call records; a confusing time stamp on a Google search to learn how long it would take for a person to die in the cold; health data that showed a person descending a stairway — or maybe in a car.

While some forensic work is well established, such as DNA evidence, other technologies aren’t quite as grounded, as the Read trial showed. In particular, the field of digital forensics continues to evolve, shaped by court challenges and advancing technology. So, questions around the validity of that data have become the latest frontier in what legal observers call the “battle of experts”: dueling interpretations of an unsettled science.

And, with enough legal prowess — and financial resources — defendants can line up parades of experts to try to undermine a prosecution witness’s interpretation of forensic data, from the timing of a Google search to the movement of a human body.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240814121648/https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/08/12/metro/karen-read-digital-forensics/