Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 18th, ’20

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January 18th, 2020




How Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits

The boom in copyright lawsuits is rattling the music industry — to the point where some artists and songwriters are spending tens of thousands of dollars on insurance policies
Amy X. Wang

Most of the world knows Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams, and T.I.’s “Blurred Lines” as a half-forgotten hit song from 2013. The music industry remembers it as its worst nightmare.

In the five years since a court ruled that “Blurred Lines” infringed on Marvin Gaye’s 1977 “Got to Give It Up,” demanding that Thicke and Williams fork over $5 million to the Gaye estate for straying too close to the older song’s “vibe,” the once-sleepy realm of music copyright law has turned into a minefield. Chart-topping musicians have been slapped with infringement lawsuits like never before, and stars like Ed Sheeran and Katy Perry are being asked to pay millions in cases that have many experts scratching their heads. Across genres, artists are putting out new music with the same question in the backs of their minds: Will this song get me sued?

“There is a lot of confusion about what’s permissible and what’s not,” says Sandy Wilbur, a forensic musicologist who served as an expert witness for the defense in the “Blurred Lines” case. Because cases are decided by “the average listener, who is not an educated musicologist or musician,” she notes, “labels are very afraid.” Since that game-changing ruling in 2015, Wilbur says, she’s received triple the number of requests from music companies to double-check new songs before they are even considered for release.

How did this culture of fear drift into the recording studio? The answer is twofold. While copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies (a prime example is the Chiffons’ successful suit against George Harrison in 1976 for the strong compositional similarities between his “My Sweet Lord” and their “He’s So Fine”), the “Blurred Lines” case raised the stakes by suggesting that the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song are also eligible for protection — and thus that a song can be sued for feeling like an earlier one. Sure enough, a jury in 2019 ruled that Katy Perry owed millions for ostensibly copying the beat of her hit “Dark Horse” from a little-known song by Christian rapper Flame, stunning both the music business and the legal community. “They’re trying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone,” Perry’s lawyer Christine Lepera warned in the case’s closing arguments.

That case, which Perry’s team is currently in the process of appealing, suggests a second point: Plaintiffs in copycat cases are largely targeting megahit songs because they’ve seen where the money is, and the increasing frequency of those court battles in headlines is causing an avalanche effect of further infringement lawsuits.

All of this is striking fear into professional musicians’ hearts. A few months ago, Emily Warren, a songwriter who’s worked with the likes of Shawn Mendes and Dua Lipa, released a song with a country artist that had a similar chorus to a pop song released at the exact same time — a total coincidence, she says. “Even though I’d never heard [the other song], it still felt like a tricky thing,” Warren says. Neither of the two artists took any action against each other, but the situation opened Warren’s eyes to how easily sticky situations can arise by accident. “The more cases are publicized, the more fearful people are,” she says.

“We all feel like the system has failed us.” — Lucas Keller, founder of music management company Milk and Honey

While some record labels may have the budget to hire on-call musicologists who vet new releases for potential copyright claims, smaller players who can’t afford that luxury are turning toward a tried-and-true form of protection: insurance. Lucas Keller — the founder of music management company Milk and Honey, which represents writers and producers who’ve worked with everyone from Alessia Cara and Carrie Underwood to 5 Seconds of Summer and Muse — recently began encouraging all his songwriter clients to purchase errors-and-omissions insurance, which protects creative professionals from legal challenges to their intellectual property. “We all feel like the system has failed us,” Keller says. “There are a lot of aggressive lawyers filing lawsuits and going ham on people.” (He’s particularly critical of publishers whose rosters are heavier on older catalogs than new acts: “Heritage publishers who aren’t making a lot of money are coming out of the woodwork and saying, ‘We’re going to take a piece of your contemporary hit.’ ”)

Under E&O policies, insurance companies can cover several million dollars of an artist’s costs if they lose a copyright lawsuit. Joe Charles, senior vice president at insurance provider Alliant Insurance Services, says that as many as half of his personal A-list music clients — a roster of stars who already pay for tour insurance and other standard entertainment-industry policies — have recently shown interest in E&O coverage. “When a major claim is all over the press, we’ll get 10 to 20 calls from musicians asking how they can protect themselves and what it will cost,” Charles says. The number who’ve actually purchased the insurance is smaller due to the high costs, which can run from $20,000 to $250,000 a year, depending on the artist’s prior legal run-ins, their audience size, and how much they want to insure.

Artists are understandably reluctant to publicly disclose that they have copyright insurance, which could open them up to an increase in lawsuits. But music attorney Bob Celestin, who’s helped represent acts like Pusha T and Missy Elliott, says it is safe to assume that the majority of artists who show up in Top 10 chart positions are covered in this way. Big labels, too, usually have comprehensive insurance policies that protect them against copyright issues. Yet these policies have gaps. “An artist could find themselves uninsurable if they’ve had numerous claims and the insurance companies have already paid out millions in costs and settlements,” Charles says. “Or they might find a carrier willing to write it, but the rates are going to be astronomical.”

“When a major claim is all over the press, we’ll get 10 to 20 calls from musicians asking how they can protect themselves and what it will cost.” — Joe Charles, senior vice president at Alliant Insurance Services

Songwriters, who may not have the financial wherewithal of celebrity artists but are equally liable for copyright claims, are often the most vulnerable. “We’re all nervous and afraid to fall into a battle over something as minor as a few notes or words,” says Ross Golan, a producer and songwriter who has released songs with stars like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber. Warren says she’s even heard of some megawatt artists keeping musicologists on personal retainer to help them avoid lawsuits.

“There’s more conversation on the front-end as songs are being created,” says Joel Timen, vice president of A&R and publishing at Curb Word Entertainment. “A lot of my songwriters have been asking more questions: ‘Does this melody or pre-chorus section remind you of anything? Should we be careful?’”

The popularity of cheap music-production software, which offers the same features to every user, has added another layer of risk. “Music is now more similar than it is different, for the first time,” Golan says. “People are using the same sample packs, the same plug-ins, because it’s efficient.” Then there’s the issue of the finite number of notes, chord progressions, and melodies available. Or, as Wilbur puts it, “There are no virgin births in music. Music comes out of other music.”

The copyright lawsuit boom, and its unintended side effects, may be just getting started. In 2014, rock band Spirit accused Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of lifting the opening guitar riff of “Stairway to Heaven” from a 1968 instrumental called “Taurus”; a jury threw out the case in 2016, determining that Plant and Page didn’t plagiarize the musical motif — only to see the case turned around two years later on appeal, when a three-judge panel ruled that the original trial involved errors in jury proceedings. (“The jury is a whole other conversation,” says Keller, the music manager. “In British court, they’d just ask a musicologist to decide. In American court, we bring in 10 random people.”) In 2019, the court of appeals decided to reconsider the original panel’s ruling; it will likely issue a decision in the spring of 2020.

Artists, songwriters, producers, and labels are now awaiting the next Zeppelin verdict, with many hoping that a judgment in Page and Plant’s favor could unwind some of the headache-inducing ambiguity introduced by the “Blurred Lines” ruling. Others see the case, which has a chance of going all the way up to the Supreme Court, as a reopening of Pandora’s box. Will the latest ruling clarify the scope of music copyright — or muddy it even further? “At what point is an element of creative expression protectable?” says media intellectual-property attorney Wesley Lewis. “Litigators are all hoping for more clarity.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...effect-935310/





Audible Settles Copyright Lawsuit with Publishers Over Audiobook Captions

Seven publishers had sued the audiobook giant last July, claiming that its audio-to-text service Captions was unauthorised
Sian Cain

After months of back and forth, Audible has settled in a copyright lawsuit with major publishers over its plan to introduce captions to their recordings, a proposal that the publishing houses argued was simply reading.

In July, the audiobook company owned by Amazon announced Captions, an additional function for the existing app that would allow customers to read the text as it was read, as well as looking up words and translating them. Captions had been slated to launch in September 2019.

But while Audible maintained that Captions “does not replicate or replace the print or ebook reading experience” and said it worked within the framework of copyright law, the publishers were unconvinced after seeing demonstrations.

Seven publishers, including the “Big Five” – Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Macmillan – sued Audible in August, a move that was also backed by bodies representing authors and agents.

“Audible Captions takes publishers’ proprietary audiobooks, converts the narration into unauthorised text, and distributes the entire text of these ‘new’ digital books to Audible’s customers,” said the lawsuit.

Audible attempted to have the case thrown out, arguing that it was a contract dispute and not a copyright issue. It claimed Captions was an educational tool, saying it was “developed because we, like so many leading educators and parents, want to help kids who are not reading engage more through listening”.

In court, lawyers for the publishers said Audible had no right to generate and distribute text, while lawyers for Audible argued that it was not the equivalent of reading. Publisher’s Weekly reported that judge Valerie Caproni interjected: “What do you mean it’s not a reading experience? It’s words.”

In a letter filed this week in federal court in New York, Audible’s attorneys, writing on behalf of both sides, announced that the parties had resolved their disputes and expected to submit the settlement documents by 21 January. No other details were provided.

Audible is the dominant player in the booming audio market. In 2018, there were $940m (£722m) of sales in the US alone, up 24.5% on the previous year, while sales in the UK increased 43% to £69m.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...shers-captions





Twitch Has Become a Haven for Live Sports Piracy

As the platform gains more mainstream popularity, illicit livestreams of soccer, boxing, and MMA matches have become trivial to find.
Cecilia D'Anastasio

As Liverpool soccer player Roberto Firmino clutched out the only goal of the club's December 21 FIFA Club World Cup match before a live audience of over 45,000, at least twice as many fans were tuned in somewhere better suited to FIFA 20, the videogame: the streaming platform Twitch.

While the game roiled on, three of the top 10 livestreams listed in Twitch’s directory were simulcasts of the FIFA Club World Cup match—with 14,000, 33,000, and 53,000 viewers respectively. The usual Twitch suspects filled out the rest of the list: a couple of Fortnite streams, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament, and, a little cutely, a livestream of FIFA 20. The pirated sports streams were live for hours and hours.

The parade of copyright violations wasn’t a Club World Cup anomaly. Twitch has been and remains home to illicit sports broadcasts; a late December boxing match attracted over 86,000 viewers—some of whom spammed ASCII genitalia in chat—and a mid-January soccer match drew more than 70,000 over three livestreams. Although Twitch often stomps them out mid-match, plenty of livestreams posted by throwaway accounts with innocuous names like “Untitled” slip through the cracks and garner tens of thousands of viewers.

Pirated live sports broadcasts have prompted hand-wringing from both government and private companies for over 15 years. At a stern 2009 hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Texas representative Lamar Smith noted the dramatic increase in the unauthorized distribution of live sports programming. “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free,” he asked. “Why pay the sporting event when you can watch it online for free?”

A senior vice president of Twitch’s predecessor, Justin.tv, testified back then that the company used special filtering software that matched live streams with copyrighted content and removed offending feeds. Virginia representative Bob Goodlatte contended that, compared to a platform like YouTube, the speed and simultaneity of livestreaming presents a slew of challenges when it comes to taking down, say, a pirated UFC stream before the damage is done. That was over 10 years ago.

As the value of sports media rights has climbed to over $20 billion, copyright holders have more incentive than ever to guard their treasure. Yet piracy persists, in part because it’s so burdensome for copyright holders to catch it. Stream aggregation site FirstRow Sports lays out a buffet of illicit livestreams for games ranging from ice hockey to basketball and attracts over 300,000 daily visitors, according to data from web analytics firm SimilarWeb. In January 2019 alone, sports fans accessed sports piracy sites 362.7 million times, according to data from digital piracy research firm Muso. On Discord, anonymous benefactors distribute links to soccer livestreams like handfuls of pigeon feed at the park. Once a stream is taken down, another immediately manifests. It’s like 40 games of Whac-A-Mole simultaneously taking place in 40 adjacent arcades.

Increasingly, those links lead to Twitch, whose credentials as a mainstream platform make it a relatively safe option—especially after Reddit shut down the popular soccer piracy subreddit r/soccerstreams. “The older days of streams (5+ years ago) was [sic] littered with ads and viruses,” says a soccer stream Discord moderator who goes by Tom. “even though it is considered illegal, I see it being the same as watching porn and being under 18.” He adds that some of the hairier-looking piracy sites are still more popular, offer higher-quality streams, and have live chats that utilize Twitch chats’ code.

The same subscription fatigue that’s fueled the resurgence in pirating streamed television and movies appears to have hit sports as well. “Whenever a game isn’t on the biggest channels that I have under my subscriptions, Twitch seems to be the place to go to,” says sports reporter Luis Paez-Pumar. Paez-Pumar says he has access to NBC, Fox, ESPN, and BeIN, yet once a week he’ll catch a game of soccer on Twitch. “It’s not the ideal viewing experience, but sometimes there are no options besides subscribing to a billion premium things.”

Twitch’s DMCA guidelines specify that copyright owners can submit takedown requests, and asks the people who submit them to add a “statement under penalty of perjury” that they’re authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner. Occasionally, media companies file claims to Twitch impacting legitimate streamers who commentate over or react to games, television, or YouTube clips. Last year, Time Warner reportedly sent three top streamers copyright strikes under the DMCA for livestreaming the Democratic debate. They were pulled off-air mid-stream. Sometimes, a streamer will catch a suspension for playing copyrighted music.

“Generally speaking, FIFA takes infringements of its intellectual property very seriously,” a FIFA spokesperson told WIRED, “and works closely with partners and the relevant authorities to enforce and uphold its property rights and put an end to potential issues linked to illegal broadcasting.”

Copyright holders can also choose to sue, as the third-largest internet company in Russia did against Twitch in December for broadcasting an English Premier League streams. The suit, which claimed $2.8 billion in damages, alleged that Twitch facilitated 36,000 violations against its rights to soccer games. “We were forced to go to court against Twitch Interactive with a demand to cease the spread of pirated broadcasts,” Rambler Group’s project manager Mikhail Gershkovich told Russian news outlet Kommersant.

It’s a rare escalation, and one that underscores how serious an issue Twitch sports piracy has become. Interactive Entertainment Law Group attorney Mona Ibrahim says that it’s difficult to calculate the damages for a pirated simulcast. In the age of Twitter spoilers, that could deflate the tension of a two-hour sports match, so much of a game’s broadcast value is ephemeral. Ibrahim says that copyright holders “hesitate to litigate on this issue because they don’t want to lose ... We see a lot of chicken and nothing really going to court.”

For its part, Twitch followed the line that companies of its ilk—YouTube, Reddit, etc.—maintain when under scrutiny for hosting unsavory content: It “only provides users access to the platform, does not post its own content, cannot change the content posted by users, or track possible violations of rights,” Twitch lawyer Yuliana Tabastayeva told Kommersant. She added, “Twitch took all necessary measures to eliminate violations, despite the fact that Rambler did not send any official notifications, only screenshots of pages, and at that without specific dates.”

Rambler Group dropped the lawsuit December 18. In a statement to WIRED, Twitch said that it will “continue to, as has always been the case, effectively and swiftly address any violation of its terms of service with the removal of unlicensed copyrighted content. We look forward to working together with Rambler to achieve this.” Twitch would not respond on the record to requests for comment about the continued posting of pirated sports broadcasts.

Piracy is ubiquitous. But some combination of Twitch’s recent mainstream popularity mixed with the super-fragmentation of sports television subscriptions has made the Fortnite hub a piracy destination—as Paez-Pumar puts it, “for the love of the game.”
https://www.wired.com/story/twitch-s...acy-streaming/





Piracy, Account Sharing Resulted in $9B Lost Revenue in 2019 for U.S.

If trends continue, cost to pay-TV and OTT operators could reach $67 billion worldwide by 2023, per Parks Associates.
Michael Balderston

Pay-TV and OTT operators in the U.S. took a hit of $9.1 billion in 2019 due to consumers sharing accounts and pirating content, according to a report from Parks Associates. Looking forward, Parks says that it expects the value of pirate video services to exceed $67 billion worldwide by 2023.

A 2019 Parks Associates report detailed U.S. operators’ $9.1 billion loss revenue in 2019, about which $2.5 billion was lost directly because of pirating; across North America, pirating generated $8.4 billion in losses. Pirating methods that Parks highlighted in its report include theft of video content from production, from distribution, from jail-broken consumer devices and from hosting by other pirates.

However, Parks found that the most antipiracy efforts in the U.S. focus on detecting and reducing credential sharing and account abuse. A Parks survey of U.S. broadband homes found 5% used someone else’s credentials to access a pay-TV service, while 6% did so to access an online video service. Another report from Hub detailed how prevalent password sharing is, particularly among teens and young adults, 80% of which have said they have shared or have used a shared password for streaming services.

“Credential sharing falls into two categories,” said Steven Hawley, contributing analyst at Parks Associates. “Most sharing is casual, with no intent to profit. But the bigger risk is from pirates that purchase large stolen consumer databases via the ‘Dark Web’ and use automation to discover penetrable end user accounts.”

Overall, Parks says that 12.5 million pay-TV households accessed pirated video in the U.S. in 2019, but that number is still low compared to the Asia and Pacific region.

The full “Video Piracy: Ecosystem, Risks and Impact” report is available online.
https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/pi...n-2019-for-u-s





T-Mobile/Sprint Urge Court for Deal Approval, States Warn of Price Hikes
Arriana McLymore, Sheila Dang

A group of U.S. states suing to block T-Mobile US Inc from merging with Sprint Corp on Wednesday told a federal judge that the deal would raise prices for consumers, while the phone companies pushed back and emphasized they would compete aggressively to push prices down.

The states filed a lawsuit in June to block the merger, saying it would harm low-income Americans in particular.

T-Mobile and Sprint contend that the merger would enable the combined company to compete more effectively with dominant carriers Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T Inc.

U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero, who will decide the fate of the merger, heard closing arguments in the case on Wednesday. Marrero did not ask any questions of either party and said he would make a decision “as promptly as possible.”

Glenn Pomerantz, a lawyer for the states, said that the case would impact at least 130 million customers, since a merger would leave the United States with three major phone carriers instead of four.

“If this merger goes forward, they’re at risk for paying billions of dollars more every single year for those services,” he said.

When T-Mobile majority shareholder Deutsche Telekom first contemplated the deal in 2010, it “expressly and unambiguously admitted that it had potential to reduce price competition,” Pomerantz said.

David Gelfand, an attorney representing T-Mobile, said in his closing statement that the merger would offer cost savings, which would trickle down to lower prices for consumers.

The U.S. Justice Department approved the deal in July after the carriers agreed to sell some assets to satellite provider Dish Network Corp, which would create its own cellular network to ensure that there would still be four competitors in the market. The Federal Communications Commission signed off on the deal in October.

Executives from the companies, including outspoken T-Mobile Chief Executive John Legere, testified during the trial that Sprint’s business was deteriorating and would not survive if it did not merge with T-Mobile.

The carriers argued that selling Sprint’s prepaid business and some wireless spectrum to Dish Network Corp would help the satellite TV provider become a mobile competitor and preserve a fourth wireless company in the industry.

The states, led by New York and California, maintained that Dish was ill-equipped to become a competitive fourth wireless carrier, and said Wednesday that Dish lacks experience, scale and brand recognition in wireless.

In rebuttal, Pomerantz emphasized that Sprint could turn itself around the same way T-Mobile had previously when it launched 4G technology.

“They’re not in a dire position; they’re in an advantageous situation and they just need to invest in their business and compete,” he said.

Reporting by Arriana McLymore and Sheila Dang; Editing by Noeleen Walder, Cynthia Osterman and Jonathan Oatis
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...-idUSKBN1ZE1AS





Here’s how Just Four Satellites could Provide Worldwide Internet

A group of engineers thinks it’s found a cheaper way to use high-altitude satellites to deliver global coverage.
Neel V. Patel

In spite of what SpaceX and other companies suggest with projects like Starlink, you don’t need mega-constellations comprising thousands of satellites—and all the aggravations they cause—to provide global internet coverage to the world. We’ve known since the 1980s that if you’re okay with settling for a connection a notch below gamer-quality speeds (a half-second lag), then continuous worldwide coverage is possible with a constellation of just four satellites placed at much higher altitudes.

But HughesNet and ViaSat, the world’s biggest satellite internet providers that operate at these orbits, don’t offer anything close to global coverage. Other satellite networks that provide remote sensing and navigation services also fall woefully short of that standard. What gives?

Unsurprisingly, the big obstacle is cost. Several factors work to degrade a satellite’s orbit. These include natural drag, perturbations in Earth’s gravity field, the interfering gravitational pull of the sun and the moon, and even pressure caused by solar radiation. To combat these problems, you need a huge amount of propellant on the satellite to consistently stabilize its orbit—an amount that usually doubles the satellite’s mass. Manufacturing, launch, and operational costs are just too high for the four-satellite trick.

A new study led by engineers at The Aerospace Corporation and published in Nature Communications proposes a counterintuitive approach that turns these degrading forces into ones that actually help keep these satellites in orbit. If it worked, it would mean just four satellites could provide continuous global coverage for a fraction of the cost.

Currently, the orbits for these satellites are elliptical, which means they have to burn their thrusters at the closest approach to Earth to keep from falling out of orbit. Patrick Reed at Cornell University and his colleagues wanted to make the orbits more circular, letting the satellites get by with fewer propulsive maneuvers and lower propellant requirements. And they wanted to do this in such a way that the satellites could still provide nearly global coverage.

The team ran simulations that looked at what types of orbital configurations could best turn degrading forces into ones that actually fostered a stable, circular orbit. Instances where, say, the sun’s gravity or high elevations would normally drag a satellite back to Earth could now boost a satellite’s altitude higher. The simulations were for four-satellite constellations that would spend at least 6,000 days (16.4 years in orbit).

After analyzing the simulations using the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the team found two models that could work. In one, the constellation completes an orbit in a 24-hour period, at an altitude of 22,000 miles, and achieves continuous coverage for about 86% of the globe. The other works on a 48-hour period at an altitude of 42,000 miles and covers 95% of the globe. Any areas that experienced outages would face no more than about 80 minutes of downtime a day.
Granted, the internet speeds would be slower because of the extra time it takes to send the signal from a much higher orbit. “For most people using data systems, however, an additional quarter-second delay is difficult to sense, since there are so many other delays in computers and data networks,” says Roger Rusch, the president of telecom consulting firm TelAstra.

In these systems, the satellites (each weighing about 1.2 tons) would need about 60% less propellant over the entire 6,000-day period than if they were orbiting in more conventional configurations, potentially reducing their mass by over one-half and making it much easier to build and launch them. It could also make room to install better instrumentation and power systems (high-altitude satellites need more power to beam signals back to Earth).

Reed says the work was motivated by a desire to let smaller countries or companies operate constellations that give near-continuous coverage. The argument goes that with costs down, it would be easier for these groups to build, launch, operate, and track just a few satellites in a higher orbit, versus a sprawling constellation of thousands in low Earth orbit.

Experts like Rusch are bullish about the new study’s findings: he says the capital and operating costs of a LEO satellite system are three to five times higher than those of a high-altitude system with the same capability. Astronomers and space debris experts who are nervous about the negative effects of projects like Starlink might also appreciate the concept.

Others are a bit more cautious. Anton Dolgopolov, a senior analyst with analytics and engineering firm Bryce Space and Technology, points out that LEO systems still have some powerful advantages—for example, they have an easier time ensuring coverage for communities near the poles. Besides, in a network made of hundreds to thousands of satellites, it won’t really disrupt service if a few fail to launch or work properly. And LEO satellites can be deorbited and replaced much more quickly.

In other words, the new models are just theoretical possibilities, interesting though they may be. In the real world, engineering and economic obstacles might dim hopes for an easy solution.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6...wide-internet/





‘Techlash’ Hits College Campuses

Facebook, Google and other major tech firms were every student’s dream workplaces. Until they weren’t.
Emma Goldberg

In 2006, Google bought YouTube for more than $1 billion, Apple was preparing to announce the first iPhone, and the American housing bubble began to deflate. Claire Stapleton, then a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, faced the same question over and over: What did she plan to do with that English degree? She flirted, noncommittally, with Teach for America.

Then, a Google recruiter came to campus and, Ms. Stapleton said, she “won ‘American Idol.’” The company flew her out to Mountain View, Calif., which felt to her “like the promised land” — 15 cafeterias, beach volleyball courts, Zumba classes, haircuts and laundry on-site.

But for Ms. Stapleton, now 34, the real appeal in a job at Google was what seemed to be a perfect balance of working for income and according to one’s conscience. Naturally, she said yes to an offer in the corporate communications department.

“There was this ambient glow of being part of a company that was changing the world,” Ms. Stapleton said. “I was totally googly-eyed about it.”

More than a decade later, college seniors and recent graduates looking for jobs that are both principled and high-paying are doing so in a world that has soured on Big Tech. The positive perceptions of Google, Facebook and other large tech firms are crumbling.

Many students still see employment in tech as a ticket to prosperity, but for job seekers who can afford to be choosy, there is a growing sentiment that Silicon Valley’s most lucrative positions aren’t worth the ethical quandaries.

“Working at Google or Facebook seemed like the coolest thing ever my freshman year, because you’d get paid a ton of money but it was socially responsible,” said Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, 21, a senior at the University of Michigan. “It was like a utopian workplace.”

Now, he said, “there’s more hesitation about the moral qualities of these jobs. It’s like how people look at Wall Street.”

Investment Banking, but Worse

The growing skepticism of Silicon Valley, sometimes referred to as the “techlash,” has spared few of technology’s major players.

In 2019, Facebook was fined nearly $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission for mishandling user data. Amazon canceled its plans for a New York City headquarters after residents, union leaders and local legislators contested the idea that the behemoth should receive $3 billion from the state to set up shop. Google, in 2018, faced internal protests over its plans for a censored search engine in China and handling of sexual harassment. (High-ranking Google employees have stated that the company never planned to expand search into China, but also that plans for a China project had been “terminated.”)

The share of Americans who believe that technology companies have a positive impact on society has dropped from 71 percent in 2015 to 50 percent in 2019, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.

At this year’s Golden Globes, Sacha Baron Cohen compared Mark Zuckerberg to the main character in “JoJo Rabbit”: a “naïve, misguided child who spreads Nazi propaganda and only has imaginary friends.”

That these attitudes are shared by undergraduates and graduate students — who are supposed to be imbued with high-minded idealism — is no surprise. In August, the reporter April Glaser wrote about campus techlash for Slate. She found that at Stanford, known for its competitive computer science program, some students said they had no interest in working for a major tech company, while others sought “to push for change from within.”

Belce Dogru, who graduated from Stanford with a degree in computer science last year and is completing a master’s program at the university, said: “There has definitely been a shift in conversation on campus.”

Stanford is the second-biggest feeder school for jobs in Silicon Valley, according to data from HiringSolved, a software company focused on recruiting. Some companies pay as much as $12,000 to advertise at the university’s computer science job fairs; recruiters at those events didn’t always have to make a hard sell.

“It felt like in my freshman year Google, Palantir and Facebook were these shiny places everyone wanted to be. It was like, ‘Wow, you work at Facebook. You must be really smart,’” said Ms. Dogru, 23. “Now if a classmate tells me they’re joining Palantir or Facebook, there’s an awkward gap where they feel like they have to justify themselves.”

Palantir, in particular, has drawn the ire of students at Stanford for providing services to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (also known as ICE).

Last summer, a campus activist group, Students for the Liberation of All People, visited the company’s office, a 15-minute walk from campus, and hung a banner nearby that read: “Our software is so powerful it separates families.” Similar protests took place at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown and Yale, according to Recode. The protests, and the attitudes they reflected, were also covered in The Los Angeles Times.

Audrey Steinkamp, a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale, which sends about 10 percent of each graduating class into tech, said that taking a job in Silicon Valley is seen as “selling out,” no different from the economics majors going into consulting who are “lovingly and not-so-lovingly called ‘snakes.’”

That is especially true, some of the students said, when a classmate chooses to work for Facebook, whose products have spread disinformation and helped influence a presidential election.

“The work you do at a place like Facebook could be harmful at a much larger scale than an investment bank,” Ms. Dogru said. “It’s in the pockets of millions of people, and it’s a source of news for millions of people. It’s working at a scary scale.”

Many students still believe that technology can help change the world for good. As Ms. Glaser put it for Slate, some of them are opting out of the Big Tech pipeline and trying, instead, “to use technical skills as an insurance policy against dystopia.”

“Students have an opportunity to look at where they can have the most impact that’s in line with their values,” said Leslie Miley, a former director of engineering at Google and Slack. “The fact of the matter is Google, Facebook, Twitter are not in line with those values because they’re huge companies beholden to a lot of different masters.”

Still Got That College Spirit

Anna Geiduschek, a software engineer who graduated from Stanford in 2014, was working at Dropbox last year when she received an email from an Amazon Web Services recruiter. She replied that she wouldn’t consider a job with the company unless Amazon cut its contract with Palantir.

“These companies go out of their way to try and woo software engineers, and I realized it would send a powerful message for me as a potential employee to tell them no,” Ms. Geiduschek, 27, said, noting that top tech companies sometimes spend roughly $20,000 to recruit a single engineer. “You could basically cut them off at their supply.”

Her recruiter responded: “Wow I honestly had no idea. I will run this up to leadership.” Days later, Ms. Geiduschek received another template email from an Amazon hiring manager, so she scheduled a call and aired her grievances by phone.

Some engineers are sharing screenshots of their protest emails on Twitter with the hashtag #TechWontBuildIt. Jackie Luo, an engineer, sent an email to Google saying that she wouldn’t consider a job there given its plans to re-enter China with a censored search engine.

Kelly Carter, a web developer, emailed a Tesla recruiter with her concerns about the company’s anti-union tactics. Craig Chasseur, a software engineer, emailed the H.R. department at Salesforce to critique the company’s contract with ICE.

These protests echo mounting public concerns about the power of these corporations. But it’s not clear whether they have moved the needle for prospective hires.

Former recruiters for Facebook told CNBC in May that the acceptance rate for full-time engineering job offers at the company had dropped precipitously, as much as 40 percent.

After the article’s publication, Facebook disputed the figure; the company “regularly ranks high on industry lists of most attractive employers,” a spokesman said. Data published the same month by LinkedIn showed that tech firms continued to hire at high rates, especially for entry-level employees.

But at campus career centers, students are struggling with the dual, and sometimes dueling, desires for prestige and purpose.

“It started with millennials, but now Gen Z-ers are getting educated because they want to do good in the world,” said Sue Harbour, the senior associate director of the career center at the University of California, Berkeley, which is Silicon Valley’s top feeder, according to HiringSolved. “And as we’ve seen tech companies grow, we’ve also seen the need for more tech oriented to social responsibility.”

Some recent graduates are taking their technical skills to smaller social impact groups instead of the biggest firms. Ms. Dogru said that some of her peers are pursuing jobs at start-ups focused on health, education and privacy. Ms. Harbour said Berkeley offers a networking event called Tech for Good, where alumni from purpose-driven groups like Code for America and Khan Academy share career opportunities.

Ms. Geiduschek said she recently left Dropbox for Recidiviz, a nonprofit that builds technological tools for criminal justice reform.

But those so-called passion jobs are more challenging to come by, according to Amy Binder, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, and the lead author of a 2015 paper about elite colleges “funneling” graduates into certain kinds of “prestigious” careers.

“For other sectors like tech it’s easier to get on the conveyor belt and fill these positions,” Dr. Binder said. “I graduated from Stanford in the ’80s, and even back then there was talk on campus about people selling out and going to investment banks, but those jobs are still getting filled. The self-incrimination hasn’t stopped the juggernaut.”

Dr. Binder said elite schools have long steered students toward certain “high-status” industries — the C.I.A. in the 1950s, finance and consulting in the aughts and tech today. It’s a “prestige system,” she said, that universities enable.

“As tech firms get more negative reviews in the media and it becomes clear what their political toll can be, students may have more circumspection about taking these jobs,” she said. “At the same time, they’ll continue taking these jobs because of the security and reputation that comes with them. And universities will keep sponsoring all this recruitment.”

Good Luck Changing the Culture

For years, students were told they could tackle ethical concerns about technology from the inside, working within the mammoth structures of companies like Google. Ms. Stapleton said that was part of the company’s allure: its ostensible commitment to empowering even its youngest employees to weigh in on critical problems.

She spent 12 years at Google and YouTube on various teams, including internal communications, where she wrote company talking points. Her weekly emails to staff, she said, were the stuff of corporate legend. At a 2012 all-hands, Larry Page, one of the company’s founders, called her onstage to celebrate her work as colleagues presented her with a wooden plaque that read: “The Bard of Google.”

Then, in 2018, Ms. Stapleton helped organize a Google walkout, after reporting in The New York Times revealed that the company gave a $90 million severance package to the Android creator Andy Rubin, who was accused of sexual misconduct.

Twenty-thousand workers left their desks in protest. Within six months, Ms. Stapleton said, she was demoted and pushed to resign. In December, she wrote about her experience in an essay for Elle.

Google maintained that Ms. Stapleton was not sidelined for her role in the walkout. “We thank Claire for her work at Google and wish her all the best,” a Google spokesperson responded. “To reiterate, we don’t tolerate retaliation. Our employee relations team did a thorough investigation of her claims and found no evidence of retaliation. They found that Claire’s management team supported her contributions to our workplace, including awarding her their team Culture Award for her role in the Walkout.”

But Ms. Stapleton said her story should give bright-eyed students pause about whether Big Tech and altruism are aligned.

“I don’t know if Google can credibly sell young people on the promise of doing good in the world anymore,” she said. “That’s not to say there aren’t wonderful people there and interesting things to work on. But if you care about a company’s values, ethics and contributions to society, you should take your talents elsewhere.”

Mr. Miley, who left Google in 2019, echoed her sentiment: “It’s hard to change a system from within when the system doesn’t think it needs to be changed.”

A spokeswoman for Google said the company continues to see job application numbers grow annually, and noted that the practice of having employees raise concerns about policies, whether on data privacy or human rights reviews, is part of the corporate culture.

The outside attention those concerns may draw is a reflection of Google’s growth and evolution from a search company to a larger entity with many products and services, the spokeswoman said.

But even companies with a market cap of over $970 billion (Google’s parent company, Alphabet) or over $614 billion (Facebook) aren’t immune to the punches of potential talent. John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University who also advises companies on recruitment, estimated that criticisms of Uber’s sexual harassment and discrimination policies cost the company roughly $100 million, largely because of talent lost to competitors.

Sarah Soule, a professor and senior associate dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said in an email that there is a long history of students protesting questionable corporate ethics, with several cases of protest directed toward recruiters, yielding powerful effects.

Take the case of Dow Chemical Company, which in 1965 accepted a $5 million Department of Defense contract to manufacture the flammable gel napalm during the Vietnam War. When recruiters turned up at New York University, they were met with hundreds of angry student demonstrators, The Times reported.

Brendon Sexton, the student government president at N.Y.U. at the time, demanded a moratorium on Dow’s campus recruitment efforts in 1968. “They don’t care that a sin is being committed here,” he told protesters near the job interview site.

Public pressure continued to mount, fueled largely by young activists. The company halted its production of napalm a year later.

Ms. Geiduschek said the behavior of tech companies is especially difficult to challenge because their products are ubiquitous.

“It’s hard to avoid spending your money at Amazon. I sometimes do it, especially in that Christmas-season binge,” she said. “If you want to sway this company to do the right thing, you have to attack it at places that are higher leverage, where it hurts.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/11/s...ecruiting.html





The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.
Kashmir Hill

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos.

Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security.

His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it and get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system — whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites — goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.

Federal and state law enforcement officers said that while they had only limited knowledge of how Clearview works and who is behind it, they had used its app to help solve shoplifting, identity theft, credit card fraud, murder and child sexual exploitation cases.

Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of its radical erosion of privacy. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls.

While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.

Facial recognition technology has always been controversial. It makes people nervous about Big Brother. It has a tendency to deliver false matches for certain groups, like people of color. And some facial recognition products used by the police — including Clearview’s — haven’t been vetted by independent experts.

Clearview’s app carries extra risks because law enforcement agencies are uploading sensitive photos to the servers of a company whose ability to protect its data is untested.

The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it. And he said my photo had rung alarm bells because the app “flags possible anomalous search behavior” in order to prevent users from conducting what it deemed “inappropriate searches.”

In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.

Another early investor is a small firm called Kirenaga Partners. Its founder, David Scalzo, dismissed concerns about Clearview making the internet searchable by face, saying it’s a valuable crime-solving tool.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

Addicted to A.I.

Mr. Ton-That, 31, grew up a long way from Silicon Valley. In his native Australia, he was raised on tales of his royal ancestors in Vietnam. In 2007, he dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. The iPhone had just arrived, and his goal was to get in early on what he expected would be a vibrant market for social media apps. But his early ventures never gained real traction.

In 2009, Mr. Ton-That created a site that let people share links to videos with all the contacts in their instant messengers. Mr. Ton-That shut it down after it was branded a “phishing scam.” In 2015, he spun up Trump Hair, which added Mr. Trump’s distinctive coif to people in a photo, and a photo-sharing program. Both fizzled.

Dispirited, Mr. Ton-That moved to New York in 2016. Tall and slender, with long black hair, he considered a modeling career, he said, but after one shoot he returned to trying to figure out the next big thing in tech. He started reading academic papers on artificial intelligence, image recognition and machine learning.

Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.

Police departments have had access to facial recognition tools for almost 20 years, but they have historically been limited to searching government-provided images, such as mug shots and driver’s license photos. In recent years, facial recognition algorithms have improved in accuracy, and companies like Amazon offer products that can create a facial recognition program for any database of images.

Mr. Ton-That wanted to go way beyond that. He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo. Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition.

Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net” to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are. Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.” When a user uploads a photo of a face into Clearview’s system, it converts the face into a vector and then shows all the scraped photos stored in that vector’s neighborhood — along with the links to the sites from which those images came.

Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses, but the operation was bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on credit card debt,” Mr. Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had some of those.”

Going Viral With Law Enforcement

By the end of 2017, the company had a formidable facial recognition tool, which it called Smartcheckr. But Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That weren’t sure whom they were going to sell it to.

Maybe it could be used to vet babysitters or as an add-on feature for surveillance cameras. What about a tool for security guards in the lobbies of buildings or to help hotels greet guests by name? “We thought of every idea,” Mr. Ton-That said.

One of the odder pitches, in late 2017, was to Paul Nehlen — an anti-Semite and self-described “pro-white” Republican running for Congress in Wisconsin — to use “unconventional databases” for “extreme opposition research,” according to a document provided to Mr. Nehlen and later posted online. Mr. Ton-That said the company never actually offered such services.

The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners. Among other things, Mr. Thiel was famous for secretly financing Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit that bankrupted the popular website Gawker. Both Mr. Thiel and Mr. Ton-That had been the subject of negative articles by Gawker.

“In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”

Even after a second funding round in 2019, Clearview remains tiny, having raised $7 million from investors, according to Pitchbook, a website that tracks investments in start-ups. The company declined to confirm the amount.

In February, the Indiana State Police started experimenting with Clearview. They solved a case within 20 minutes of using the app. Two men had gotten into a fight in a park, and it ended when one shot the other in the stomach. A bystander recorded the crime on a phone, so the police had a still of the gunman’s face to run through Clearview’s app.

They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,” said Chuck Cohen, an Indiana State Police captain at the time.

The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he probably wouldn’t have been identified without the ability to search social media for his face. The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company. (The police declined to comment beyond saying that they tested Clearview’s app.)

Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool, according to Mr. Ton-That. (“I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to help Hoan build Clearview into a mission-driven organization that’s helping law enforcement protect children and enhance the safety of communities across the country,” Mr. Schwartz said through a spokeswoman.)

The company’s main contact for customers was Jessica Medeiros Garrison, who managed Luther Strange’s Republican campaign for Alabama attorney general. Brandon Fricke, an N.F.L. agent engaged to the Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren, said in a financial disclosure report during a congressional campaign in California that he was a “growth consultant” for the company. (Clearview said that it was a brief, unpaid role, and that the company had enlisted Democrats to help market its product as well.)

The company’s most effective sales technique was offering 30-day free trials to officers, who then encouraged their acquisition departments to sign up and praised the tool to officers from other police departments at conferences and online, according to the company and documents provided by police departments in response to public-record requests. Mr. Ton-That finally had his viral hit.

In July, a detective in Clifton, N.J., urged his captain in an email to buy the software because it was “able to identify a suspect in a matter of seconds.” During the department’s free trial, Clearview had identified shoplifters, an Apple Store thief and a good Samaritan who had punched out a man threatening people with a knife.

Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens and input into the software, without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the detective wrote in the email, provided to The Times by two researchers, Beryl Lipton of MuckRock and Freddy Martinez of Open the Government. They discovered Clearview late last year while looking into how local police departments are using facial recognition.

According to a Clearview sales presentation reviewed by The Times, the app helped identify a range of individuals: a person who was accused of sexually abusing a child whose face appeared in the mirror of someone’s else gym photo; the person behind a string of mailbox thefts in Atlanta; a John Doe found dead on an Alabama sidewalk; and suspects in multiple identity-fraud cases at banks.

In Gainesville, Fla., Detective Sgt. Nick Ferrara heard about Clearview last summer when it advertised on CrimeDex, a list-serv for investigators who specialize in financial crimes. He said he had previously relied solely on a state-provided facial recognition tool, FACES, which draws from more than 30 million Florida mug shots and Department of Motor Vehicle photos.

Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he said. Its nationwide database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES, Clearview’s algorithm doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the camera.

“With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.”

He uploaded his own photo to the system, and it brought up his Venmo page. He ran photos from old, dead-end cases and identified more than 30 suspects. In September, the Gainesville Police Department paid $10,000 for an annual Clearview license.

Federal law enforcement, including the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security, are trying it, as are Canadian law enforcement authorities, according to the company and government officials.

Despite its growing popularity, Clearview avoided public mention until the end of 2019, when Florida prosecutors charged a woman with grand theft after two grills and a vacuum were stolen from an Ace Hardware store in Clermont. She was identified when the police ran a still from a surveillance video through Clearview, which led them to her Facebook page. A tattoo visible in the surveillance video and Facebook photos confirmed her identity, according to an affidavit in the case.

‘We’re All Screwed’

Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the photos in Clearview’s database are taken at eye level. Much of the material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on ceilings or high on walls.

“They put surveillance cameras too high,” Mr. Ton-That lamented. “The angle is wrong for good face recognition.”

Despite that, the company said, its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency that rates the performance of facial recognition algorithms.

“We have no data to suggest this tool is accurate,” said Clare Garvie, a researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy and Technology, who has studied the government’s use of facial recognition. “The larger the database, the larger the risk of misidentification because of the doppelgänger effect. They’re talking about a massive database of random people they’ve found on the internet.”

But current and former law enforcement officials say the app is effective. “For us, the testing was whether it worked or not,” said Mr. Cohen, the former Indiana State Police captain.

One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.

“A lot of people are doing it,” Mr. Ton-That shrugged. “Facebook knows.”

Jay Nancarrow, a Facebook spokesman, said the company was reviewing the situation with Clearview and “will take appropriate action if we find they are violating our rules.”

Mr. Thiel, the Clearview investor, sits on Facebook’s board. Mr. Nancarrow declined to comment on Mr. Thiel's personal investments.

Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says its customer-support employees won’t look at the photos that the police upload.

Clearview also hired Paul D. Clement, a United States solicitor general under President George W. Bush, to assuage concerns about the app’s legality.

In an August memo that Clearview provided to potential customers, including the Atlanta Police Department and the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, Mr. Clement said law enforcement agencies “do not violate the federal Constitution or relevant existing state biometric and privacy laws when using Clearview for its intended purpose.”

Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them. Mr. Clement did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The memo appeared to be effective; the Atlanta police and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office soon started using Clearview.

Because the police upload photos of people they’re trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability to manipulate the results that the police see. After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a “software bug.”

“It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”

Mr. Ton-That said his company used only publicly available images. If you change a privacy setting in Facebook so that search engines can’t link to your profile, your Facebook photos won’t be included in the database, he said.

But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin.

Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States.

“We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,” Mr. Hartzog said. “I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

During a recent interview at Clearview’s offices in a WeWork location in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, Mr. Ton-That demonstrated the app on himself. He took a selfie and uploaded it. The app pulled up 23 photos of him. In one, he is shirtless and lighting a cigarette while covered in what looks like blood.

Mr. Ton-That then took my photo with the app. The “software bug” had been fixed, and now my photo returned numerous results, dating back a decade, including photos of myself that I had never seen before. When I used my hand to cover my nose and the bottom of my face, the app still returned seven correct matches for me.

Police officers and Clearview’s investors predict that its app will eventually be available to the public.

Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he said.

Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name. Strangers would be able to listen in on sensitive conversations, take photos of the participants and know personal secrets. Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity.

Asked about the implications of bringing such a power into the world, Mr. Ton-That seemed taken aback.

“I have to think about that,” he said. “Our belief is that this is the best use of the technology.”

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Gabriel J.X. Dance and Aaron Krolik contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/t...cognition.html





Tuesday Hearing: EFF Argues in New Jersey Supreme Court That Defendant Can’t Be Forced to Turn Over Password to Encrypted iPhone

U.S. Constitution Protects Rights Against Self-Incrimination

Trenton, New Jersey—On Tuesday, January 21, at 1 pm, EFF Senior Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker will ask the New Jersey Supreme Court to rule that the state can’t force a defendant to turn over the passcode for his encrypted iPhone under the Fifth Amendment, which protects American’s rights against self-incrimination.

The Fifth Amendment states that people cannot be forced to incriminate themselves, and it’s well settled that this privilege against self-incrimination covers compelled “testimonial” communications, including physical acts. However, courts have split over how to apply the Fifth Amendment to compelled decryption of encrypted devices.

EFF, ACLU, and ACLU of New Jersey filed a brief in the case State v. Andrews arguing that the state can’t compel a suspect to recall and use information that exists only in his memory to aid law enforcement’s prosecution of him.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Crocker will tell the court that reciting, writing, typing or otherwise reproducing a password from memory is testimony protected by the Fifth Amendment.

Read the amicus brief EFF filed in the Andrews case:
https://www.eff.org/document/effaclu...s-us-v-andrews

WHO: EFF Senior Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker

WHAT: New Jersey v. Andrews

WHERE:
Supreme Court of New Jersey
25 Market St.
Trenton, NJ 08611
The argument will also be live-streamed.

WHEN:
Tuesday
January 21
1 pm
https://www.eff.org/press/releases/t...be-forced-turn





Barr Asks Apple to Unlock Pensacola Killer’s Phones, Setting Up Clash

The request set up a collision between law enforcement and big technology firms in the latest battle over privacy and security.
Katie Benner

Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.

Mr. Barr’s appeal was an escalation of a continuing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety.

“This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr. Barr said. He called on technology companies to find a solution and complained that Apple had provided no “substantive assistance,” a charge that the company strongly denied on Monday night, saying it had been working with the F.B.I. since the day of the shooting.

Detailing the results of the investigation into the Dec. 6 shooting that killed three sailors and wounded eight others, Mr. Barr said the gunman, Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani — a Saudi Air Force cadet training with the American military — had displayed extremist leanings.

Mr. Alshamrani warned on last year’s anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that “the countdown has begun” and posted other anti-American, anti-Israeli and jihadist social media messages, some within hours of attacking the base, Mr. Barr said. “The evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology,” the attorney general said.

The government has also removed from the country some 21 Saudi students who trained with the American military, Mr. Barr said. He stressed that investigators found no connection to the shooting among the cadets, but said that some had links to extremist movements or possessed child pornography. Mr. Barr said the cases were too weak to prosecute but that Saudi Arabia kicked the trainees out of the program.

The battle between the government and technology companies over advanced encryption and other digital security measures has simmered for years. Apple, which stopped routinely helping the government unlock phones in late 2014 as it adopted a more combative stance and unveiled a more secure operating system, has argued that data privacy is a human rights issue. If Apple developed a way to allow the American government into its phones, its executives argued, hackers or foreign governments like China would exploit the tool.

But frustrated law enforcement officials accuse Apple of providing a haven for criminals. They have long pushed for a legislative solution to the problem of “going dark,” their term for how increasingly secure phones have made it harder to solve crimes, and the Pensacola investigation gives them a prominent chance to make their case.

In a statement Monday night, Apple said the substantive aid it had provided law enforcement agencies included giving investigators access to the gunman’s iCloud account and transaction data for multiple accounts.

The company’s statement did not say whether Apple engineers would help the government get into the phones themselves. It said that “Americans do not have to choose between weakening encryption and solving investigations” because there are now so many ways for the government to obtain data from Apple’s devices — many of which Apple routinely helps the government execute.

It will not back down from its unequivocal support of encryption that is impossible to crack, people close to the company said.

Justice Department officials said that they needed access to Mr. Alshamrani’s phones to see data and messages from encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp to determine whether he had discussed his plans with others at the base and whether he was acting alone or with help.

“We don’t want to get into a world where we have to spend months and even years exhausting efforts when lives are in the balance,” Mr. Barr said. “We should be able to get in when we have a warrant that establishes that criminal activity is underway.”

The confrontation echoed the legal standoff over an iPhone used by a gunman who killed 14 people in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., in late 2015. Apple defied a court order to assist the F.B.I. in its efforts to search his device, setting off a fight over whether privacy enabled by impossible-to-crack encryption harmed public safety.

The San Bernardino dispute was resolved when the F.B.I. found a private company to bypass the iPhone’s encryption. Tensions between the two sides, however, remained, and Apple worked to ensure that neither the government nor private contractors could open its phones.

Mr. Barr said that Trump administration officials have again begun discussing a legislative fix.

But the F.B.I. has been bruised by Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated complaints that former officials plotted to undercut his presidency and by a major inspector general’s report last month that revealed serious errors with aspects of the Russia investigation. A broad bipartisan consensus among lawmakers allowing the bureau to broaden its surveillance authorities is most likely elusive, though some lawmakers singled out Apple for its refusal to change its stance.

“Companies shouldn’t be allowed to shield criminals and terrorists from lawful efforts to solve crimes and protect our citizens,” Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, said in a statement. “Apple has a notorious history of siding with terrorists over law enforcement. I hope in this case they’ll change course and actually work with the F.B.I.”

Apple typically complies with court orders to turn over information on its servers. But said that it would turn over only the data it had, implying that it would not work to unlock the phones.

Investigators secured a court order within a day of the shooting, allowing them to search the phones, Mr. Barr said. He turned up the pressure on Apple a week after the F.B.I.’s top lawyer, Dana Boente, asked the company for help searching Mr. Alshamrani’s iPhones.

Officials said that the F.B.I. was still trying to gain access to the phones on its own and approached Apple only after asking other government agencies, foreign governments and third-party technology vendors for help, to no avail.

The devices were older models: an iPhone 7 with a fingerprint reader and an iPhone 5, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

Justice Department officials said that investigators have yet to make a final determination about whether Mr. Alshamrani conspired with others. They said that the Saudi government was offering “unprecedented” cooperation but that “we need to get into those phones.”

Mr. Barr and other law enforcement officials described a 15-minute shootout before security officers shot and killed Mr. Alshamrani. During the firefight, Mr. Alshamrani paused at one point to shoot one of his phones once, Mr. Barr said, adding that his other phone was also damaged but that the F.B.I. was able to repair them well enough to be searched.

Mr. Alshamrani also shot at photographs of President Trump and one of his predecessors, said David Bowdich, the deputy director of the F.B.I. A person familiar with the investigation identified the unnamed president as George W. Bush.

Mr. Alshamrani’s weapon was lawfully purchased in Florida under an exemption that allows nonimmigrant visa holders to buy firearms if they have a valid hunting license or permit, officials said.

Law enforcement officials have continued to discuss Mr. Alshamrani’s phones with Apple, they said.

“We’re not trying to weaken encryption, to be clear,” Mr. Bowdich said at a news conference, noting that the issue has come up with thousands of devices that investigators want to see in other cases.

“We talk about this on a daily basis,” he said. Mr. Bowdich was the bureau’s top agent overseeing the San Bernardino investigation and was part of the effort to push Apple to crack into the phone in that case.

But much has also changed for Apple in the years since Tim Cook, its chief executive, excoriated the Obama administration publicly and privately in 2014 for attacking strong encryption. Obama officials who were upset by Apple’s stance on privacy, along with its decision to shelter billions of dollars in offshore accounts and make its products almost exclusively in China, aired those grievances quietly.

Now Apple is fighting the Trump administration, and Mr. Trump has shown far more willingness to publicly criticize companies and public figures. When he recently claimed falsely that Apple had opened a manufacturing plant in Texas at his behest, the company remained silent rather than correct him.

At the same time, Apple has financially benefited more under Mr. Trump than under President Barack Obama. It reaped a windfall from the Trump administration’s tax cuts, and Mr. Trump said he might shield Apple from the country’s tariff war with China.

He had said last month that finding a way for law enforcement to gain access to encrypted technology was one of the Justice Department’s “highest priorities.”

Mr. Alshamrani, who was killed at the scene of the attack, came to the United States in 2017 and soon started strike-fighter training in Florida. Investigators believe he may have been influenced by extremists as early as 2015.

Mr. Barr rejected reports that other Saudi trainees had known of and recorded video of the shooting. Mr. Alshamrani arrived at the scene by himself, and others in the area began recording the commotion only after he had opened fire, Mr. Barr said. They and other Saudi cadets cooperated with the inquiry, he added.

Jack Nicas contributed reporting from San Francisco.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/u...g-iphones.html





Microsoft CEO Says Encryption Backdoors are a ‘Terrible Idea’

But won’t defend Apple in Pensacola case
Russell Brandom

As Apple squares off for another encryption fight, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered mixed messages on the encryption question. In a Monday meeting with reporters in New York, Nadella reiterated the company’s opposition to encryption backdoors, but expressed tentative support for legal and technical solutions in the future.

“I do think backdoors are a terrible idea, that is not the way to go about this,” Nadella said. “We’ve always said we care about these two things: privacy and public safety. We need some legal and technical solution in our democracy to have both of those be priorities.”

Along those lines, Nadella expressed support for key escrow systems, versions of which have been proposed by researchers in the past.
"“I do think backdoors are a terrible idea, that is not the way to go about this”"

Apple’s device encryption systems first became a point of controversy after a 2016 shooting in San Bernardino, which led to a heated legal push to force Apple to unlock the phone. That fight ultimately ended in a stalemate, but many have seen the recent shooting at a naval base in Pensacola as a potential place to restart the fight. Committed by a Saudi national undergoing flight training with the US Navy, the shooting has already been labeled a terrorist act by the FBI, and resulted in 21 other Saudi trainees being disenrolled from the program. Two phones linked to the assailant are still subject to Apple’s device encryption, and remain inaccessible to investigators.

But Nadella stopped short of simply saying companies could never provide data under such circumstances, or that Apple shouldn’t provide a jailbroken iOS modification under the circumstances. “We can’t take hard positions on all sides... [but if they’re] asking me for a backdoor, I’ll say no.” Nadella continued, “My hope is that in our democracy these are the things that arrive at legislative solutions.”

That’s a significantly milder tone than Microsoft took during the San Bernardino case in 2016. At the time, Microsoft expressed “wholehearted” support for Apple’s position in the case, and joined Apple in opposing some of the encryption bills pushed in the wake of the trial.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/13/2...sacola-privacy





Apple Responds to AG Barr Over Unlocking Pensacola Shooter's Phone: "No."

In no uncertain terms, Apple stands by its policy that backdoor access to its devices threatens every user.
Joshua Topolsky and Raymond Wong

Earlier today Attorney General William Barr called on Apple to unlock the alleged phone of the Pensacola shooter — a man who murdered three people and injured eight others on a Naval base in Florida in December. Apple has responded by essentially saying: "no."

"We reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation," the company said. "It was not until January 8th that we received a subpoena for information related to the second iPhone, which we responded to within hours," Apple added, countering Barr's characterization of the company being slow in its approach to the FBI's needs. However, it ends the statement in no uncertain terms: "We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys."

Despite pressure from the government, Apple has long held that giving anyone the keys to users' data or a backdoor to their phones — even in cases where terrorism or violence was involved — would compromise every user. The company is clearly standing by those principles. Apple sent its strongly worded statement on Barr to Input, which you can read in its entirety below:

We were devastated to learn of the tragic terrorist attack on members of the US armed services at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida on December 6th. We have the greatest respect for law enforcement and routinely work with police across the country on their investigations. When law enforcement requests our assistance, our teams work around the clock to provide them with the information we have.

We reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation. Our responses to their many requests since the attack have been timely, thorough and are ongoing.

Within hours of the FBI’s first request on December 6th, we produced a wide variety of information associated with the investigation. From December 7th through the 14th, we received six additional legal requests and in response provided information including iCloud backups, account information and transactional data for multiple accounts.

We responded to each request promptly, often within hours, sharing information with FBI offices in Jacksonville, Pensacola and New York. The queries resulted in many gigabytes of information that we turned over to investigators. In every instance, we responded with all of the information that we had.

The FBI only notified us on January 6th that they needed additional assistance — a month after the attack occurred. Only then did we learn about the existence of a second iPhone associated with the investigation and the FBI's inability to access either iPhone. It was not until January 8th that we received a subpoena for information related to the second iPhone, which we responded to within hours. Early outreach is critical to accessing information and finding additional options.

We are continuing to work with the FBI, and our engineering teams recently had a call to provide additional technical assistance. Apple has great respect for the Bureau’s work, and we will work tirelessly to help them investigate this tragic attack on our nation.

We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys. Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers. Today, law enforcement has access to more data than ever before in history, so Americans do not have to choose between weakening encryption and solving investigations. We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users' data.[/i]
https://www.inputmag.com/culture/app...statement-here

















Until next week,

- js.



















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