By Nathan L. Walls
Monday, 1 January, 2018 — links civics
The team at Mapping Police Violence has released their 2017 report. The report covers general statistics behind the 1,129 people killed by police across the United States in 2017 with some effective visualizations.
Of note, the discrepancy in the number of killings against the number of incidents where an officer was charged with a crime. Related are the number of killings where a video record exists.
Sunday, 17 August, 2014 — civics
Yesterday, David Forbes of The Asheville Blade tweeted the results of a records request he made to the local law enforcement agencies in Asheville. He also published a story on The Asheville Blade resulting from the records request:
The unrest in Ferguson, Mo. has raised a multitude of important issues, including systemic racism in law enforcement and the level of violence directed at African-American citizens, like the disturbing shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer.
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On Thursday, Aug. 14, I made records requests with the Asheville Police Department and Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office to disclose all the military equipment obtained under this program over the past decade. The Sheriff’s Office responded within 30 minutes and wrote that they are in the process of gathering the information.
A city spokesperson replied the next morning with a similar response. Later that day, they revealed that the only item the APD had obtained through the 1033 program since 2004 was an armored car in 2007. According to city officials, the vehicle is no longer in use.
Just seeing Forbes’ tweets, I was wondering about local to the Triangle research on the same topic.
Would love for a Triangle news agency to look at tac. team usage for local law enforcement agencies as @DavidForbes is doing for Asheville.
— Nathan L. Walls (@base10) August 16, 2014Years ago, we had the RPD tac team in our yard, pursuing robbery suspects. Dogs, rifles, told to stay inside. When else does that happen?
— Nathan L. Walls (@base10) August 16, 2014What situations called for tac. team deployment? What was the result? Is an incident report available? Who decided response level?
— Nathan L. Walls (@base10) August 16, 2014So, @newsobserver, @wral, @RalPublicRecord, @indyweek, etc. Who wants to run with this?
— Nathan L. Walls (@base10) August 16, 2014The New York Times has a worthwhile interactive map that Forbes referenced in his story. That’s a start. Going back to my brief story about having the (a?) Raleigh Police Department tactical team in our backyard, I can tell you it was incredibly stressful seeing multiple officers carrying rifles, bringing dogs and shining flashlights in the dark of the woods behind our house looking for one or more armed robbery suspects.
To me, this instance seemed an appropriate instance to have a tactical team present. However, I want to know other instances where this team would be deployed. So, I’m thinking through some questions I would like to have access to the answers to:
A local news agency would do well to ask these questions and report the answers. They would do better to get an ongoing update of records from area law enforcement agencies and get at trending data or look at particular incidents in more detail. This is in the ballpark of something I could expect to see from EveryBlock, a local Code for America brigade – the Triangle has several – or again, any of the local news agencies as a public-facing, web accessible application.
I’m thinking through these questions because these are sorts of questions I would like answered in the wake of the police response to protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Mike Brown. I want you to think through questions of your own along these lines. These questions don’t replace community involvement in policing through oversight or review commissions. They don’t replace community policing. They don’t replace beat reporting. Instead, these questions that a tool helps answer should inform us for deeper conversations about what law enforcement agencies are doing in claim of protecting and serving the public. The goal should be to increase transparency and build trust that communities and governments understand where police powers are used, why they’re used and citizens believe these powers, when used, are used judiciously, proportionately, appropriately, equally and fairly.
Sunday, 9 February, 2014 — engineering civics
David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, reporting for the New York Times, have published an article titled “Snowden Used Low-Cost Tool to Best N.S.A.”. I know they’re reporting for a general audience, but I believe the article does a disservice by allowing anonymous national security “officials” to put simple automation into scare quotes:
Using “web crawler” software designed to search, index and back up a website, Mr. Snowden “scraped data out of our systems” while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. “We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,” the official said. The process, he added, was “quite automated.”
The findings are striking because the N.S.A.’s mission includes protecting the nation’s most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from cyberattacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from Russia and China. Mr. Snowden’s “insider attack,” by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators found.
Automation gonna automate, I suppose. Given that we’ve seen this dance with Aaron Schwartz, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, the national security-industrial complex has a disingenuously naïve view of automation tools, particularly around Schwartz at MIT and Snowden, suggesting there was a mix of luck and quite possibly something nefarious to all this automation. The New York Times should approach statements made by agency officials skeptically. This sort of programming is not hard. Moreover, no one has to work particularly hard to hide this. In fact, what might look to some like “hiding” would simply be polite engineering under a different lens.
One key is a not-at-all-advanced concept of throttling. Well-behaved web crawlers (also known as spiders) are respectful about how many requests they issue in a given amount of time. A lot of requests all at once will attract the very sort of attention unnamed officials seem beside themselves to acknowledge Snowden only barely called to himself.
First, lots of requests in a short amount of time shows up in log files as such and quickly becomes a pattern. Patterns attract attention. Assuming the NSA and it’s various contractors audit access logs (which itself is something I’d automate), spreading requests over time makes it less likely to arouse suspicion. Moreover, unless an audit is looking for a particular type of activity, that manual or automated audit will not care a whit about well-throttled crawler traffic, because it looks a lot like expected traffic. It’s “hiding” to the same degree someone of average height and dress is “hiding” as they walk on a Manhattan sidewalk.
Second, setting aside any activity logs, system activity monitors seem more likely to catch a misbehaving web crawler. System activity monitors look at how much work a machine is doing at a given time. Typical checks look at how busy the CPU is, how much RAM is in use, overall network activity, what processes (“programs”) are running and so on. Some servers have automated checks in place, some don’t. For sake of discussion, I assert the servers hosting the content Snowden accessed were monitored in such a fashion. Now, assume each server has a variable amount, but average band of activity. Unless what Snowden was doing with his web crawler caused one of these checks to go out-of-bounds, it was unlikely to attract attention. Normal activity gets ignored.
On to the alleged crawling software itself.
In interviews, officials declined to say which web crawler Mr. Snowden had used, or whether he had written some of the software himself. Officials said it functioned like Googlebot, a widely used web crawler that Google developed to find and index new pages on the web. What officials cannot explain is why the presence of such software in a highly classified system was not an obvious tip-off to unauthorized activity.
First, Snowden’s job was as a systems administrator. Systems administration and development jobs involve access to not in any way top secret technologies like *NIX servers which typically have a wide-array of built-in scripting languages (Perl and Python most likely, Ruby very possibly). Or, perhaps Snowden is a shell scripter. Bash will get the job done.
As software goes, a basic web crawler is not exceptionally hard. I assert if its written with tools likely already resident on any average server or *NIX-based laptop (e.g. Mac OS X, Linux, possibly Windows with PowerShell), there’s really nothing about one that would raise any particular suspicion. Effectively, the raw pieces of the web crawler were quite likely already present. Writing a text file to marshal these raw pieces together is unlikely to raise suspicion because a systems administrator or software developer already has scores of similar files laying around. There’s not a magic “web crawler” bit that flips and will alert anyone.
As a thought experiment, what happens if every machine is audited and new and modified files are flagged, logged and sent off somewhere for analysis? Probably nothing, because in a large working group, a lot of these files are going to look very similar to each other, have innocuous or cryptic names and it would be a nigh-impossible task to write meaningful software to determine what all of these new files are for and, if they’re programs, what they do. Surely, no one is going to look at each one of these files. It’d be soul-sucking work.
Put another way; hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, saws, knives aren’t noteworthy tools in a tool box. A new hammer on a construction site is unlikely to raise any attention. Similarly, just as carpenters use jigs, painters use scaffolding and auto mechanics use impact wrenches, ramps and hydraulic lifts to make their jobs easier, faster, more consistent and less tedious, systems engineers and developers use scripts. Now, imagine a construction site or factory inspecting everyone’s tool bag and workspace constantly for anything “inappropriate”. It wouldn’t be terribly effective and it’d be a huge burden and expense on the actual work. Imagine your average TSA security line at the office park.
There’s also some question about the web crawler having Snowden’s credentials:
When inserted with Mr. Snowden’s passwords, the web crawler became especially powerful. Investigators determined he probably had also made use of the passwords of some colleagues or supervisors.
But he was also aided by a culture within the N.S.A., officials say, that “compartmented” relatively little information. As a result, a 29-year-old computer engineer, working from a World War II-era tunnel in Oahu and then from downtown Honolulu, had access to unencrypted files that dealt with information as varied as the bulk collection of domestic phone numbers and the intercepted communications of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and dozens of other leaders.
Officials say web crawlers are almost never used on the N.S.A.’s internal systems, making it all the more inexplicable that the one used by Mr. Snowden did not set off alarms as it copied intelligence and military documents stored in the N.S.A.’s systems and linked through the agency’s internal equivalent of Wikipedia.
As noted above, there’s nothing particularly special about a web crawler versus any other manner of script. It’s easy to inform utilities like wget and curl about authentication parameters and keep login cookies. It’s also easy for such a web crawler to announce itself to the server it requests information from in any manner. There’s a convention around giving an identification string, as Google and Yahoo do for their web crawlers, but it’s just as easy to call a web crawler Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko or Internet Explorer 11. Add in polite engineering of not requesting every page the web crawler sees as soon as it processes each preceding page and it’s going to be far less obvious that traffic to a web server is coming from a script instead of a human clicking a link. There’s not necessarily anything nefarious going on.
If Snowden had access to all of these systems and accessing what sounds equivalent to a corporate intranet was not going to arouse suspicion, there’s little I can think about this conceptual web crawler that would tip the balance into being caught. If the NSA wasn’t going to catch Snowden doing all of the work himself, it’s no more likely they were going to catch an automated process he wrote.
I don’t find any part of this story surprising from a technical standpoint. What I do find somewhat distressing is that unnamed officials think this is special or conveys villainous status on Snowden. It doesn’t, just as it should not have with Aaron Schwartz. Said officials should actually know better and if they don’t, they need to find technical advisors who will correctly inform them.
I bring this all up because I would like for reporters on stories such as this to find an average systems administrator, security analyst or software engineer to talk to in order to provide perspective. The New York Times has an excellent digital staff with developers who could easily demonstrate what a similar script would look like and how it would work and look internally. Surely, a news organization that builds great interactive stories and is growing more comfortable in its own clothes online can use some agency and draw on some of the experience that’s helping to provide some of that comfort to call officials on bad, self-serving analysis like this.
Sunday, 19 May, 2013 — civics barcamprdu conference
Above: Cristóbal Palmer, Justis Peters and Dan Sterling open BarCampRDU 2013
May 18, 2013 marked the return of BarCampRDU after an 18-month absence. There were five session slots followed by lightning talks. All the sessions I attended were in some way interesting (see below for a list), but I want to start by focusing on one by Jason Hibbets, “Open Source All the Cities!”.
Overall, I was impressed at Hibbets’ passion for civic involvement. I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of Open Data/Open Government initiatives already in-progress in Raleigh. It’s something I’ve had a desire to see and participate in, but did not know was thriving. In particular, I’ll be making use of SeeClickFix to request some traffic calming in my neighborhood. I also want to have a look through Raleigh’s open data portal to see what I can pull out and futz with.
For as much as government is complained about, a lot of time, it’s just “there” for a lot of folks. I don’t know if there was ever a golden age of civic involvement, but I hypothesize that we have better neighborhoods and cities if we learn more about how to affect change in our neighborhood and follow-up on it. What I mean by that is making sure problems with infrastructure are reported, instead of assuming someone in Public Works knows. It means asking for sidewalks, crosswalks and traffic calming to help neighborhoods more walkable. It means reporting problem properties, starting a neighborhood watch, having a block party, cleaning a neighborhood creek or just clearing the storm drains down the block.
These aren’t partisan issues. Think of civics as a sense of stewardship for what’s around you. I am a steward, my neighbors are stewards, if they choose to be, city government is a stewardship, too, and one that I can influence. You can, too.
My raw notes for Jason’s talk:
The other sessions I attended were:
I took a few. Check out the set I put together over on Flickr.
The BarCampRDU 2013 organizing group and volunteers did a fantastic job with the event. Thank you, all, for your efforts in rebooting the event. Having BarCampRDU back is great for the local community. Thank you, too, sponsors.
I’m looking forward to BarCampRDU 2014.
Sunday, 21 October, 2012 — civics
With the November election in just another couple of weeks, it’s past time for me to get ready for early voting. In my last post, I pointed out info regarding early voting and registration info. Hopefully you’re already registered. If not, you can register and vote at one stop voting in North Carolina until Nov. 3.
What about selecting candidates? On my ballot, I have 32 offices and one bond referendum to vote for. Twenty one of those offices are contested and of those, only three have a third-party (Libertarian) or unaffiliated candidate. Several judicial races are uncontested. The race for North Carolina attorney general is also uncontested. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, partly related to North Carolina’s ballot access policies.
Outside of the presidential races, I have a fair amount of research to do. I use a mix of candidate websites and voting guides.
Checking around today, here’s what I found that covers North Carolina broadly, the Triangle or Raleigh:
My own approach is going to be breaking up my sample ballot into chunks and researching three or four races a day, instead of trying to get through everything at once.