Good to Know — January 28, 2016
What we’re keeping an eye on this week.
Troubling surveillance contract “turns police into debt collectors.”
In Texas, police officers are patrolling the streets with credit card readers and automatic license plate reader (ALPR) data to seek repayment of unpaid court fees, reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, officers are seeking more than just unpaid balances: they are compelling motorists to pay an additional 25 percent “processing fee” to pay a company, Vigilant Solutions, that provides them with vehicle surveillance technologies and data. Moreover, police are handing back the company “all of the data they gather on drivers for nearly unlimited commercial use.” Texas law enforcement agencies have signed contracts that limit their ability to discuss this arrangement with the press.
“The Texas public should be outraged at the terrible deals their representatives are signing with this particular surveillance contractor,” concludes David Maas of the EFF. It’s hard not to agree.
Why should inmates pay 50 cents apiece for “digital stamps”?
A new report from Prison Policy Initiative, You’ve Got Mail: The promise of cyber communication in prisons and the need for regulation, reviews the state of communication systems for incarcerated individuals. For example, prisoners often send and receive electronic messages using special, proprietary services provided by contractors. These messages can be surprisingly expensive. In fact, as the report notes, “many facilities offer electronic messaging at 50¢ per message [which] suggests that prices are likely set with an eye toward the cost of the most similar competing product: a single-piece first-class letter.” On top of this per-message cost, other ancillary fees — like $8.95 “convenience fees” on deposits — drive the cost of electronic messaging even higher, which “suggests that [electronic messaging] prices are not based on [actual] provider costs.”
Beyond cost issues, the report also highlights how electronic messaging systems are subject to undue restrictions. For example, whereas the Postal Service is under a legal obligation to provide universal service, many electronic messaging providers “prohibit children (the minimum age for users is usually set at eighteen or thirteen) from using the service, which presumably means that if a twelve-year-old writes a message to her incarcerated father, she (and her non-incarcerated parent who created the account) are violating the terms of service.” On top of this requirement, electronic messaging services often require correspondents to relinquish, “some or all of their intellectual property rights,” which means incarcerated individuals don’t have the “same rights to collect and publish their electronic correspondence as they do with postal mail.”
Overall, though the Initiative finds that though there is substantial promise in electronic messaging systems for the incarcerated, “there are enough drawbacks — some inherent in the technology and others resulting from business practices — that electronic messaging should not be thought of as a replacement for regular mail.”
Read our past coverage on the harms and benefits of electronic prisoner communication here.
What it’s like to be on the federal government’s no-fly list.
Yaseen Kadura, an American citizen who, until recently, had been on the federal government’s no-fly list since 2012, tells his harrowing story to The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain.
In March 2011, after the mass uprising against Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government, Kadura left for Libya where “he spent six months helping run improvised civilian aid convoys over the border from Egypt and working as an English-language fixer for journalists.” What happened to Kadura next, writes Hussain, “in many ways exemplifies how placement on the no-fly list, an opaque, unchallengeable, and seemingly arbitrary database, can completely upend an individual’s life”:
The experience of the past several years has left Kadura anxious, pessimistic, and somewhat jaded. Having spent almost his entire life in the United States — he was born in Canada but came to the U.S. in his infancy — Kadura never expected to suddenly be treated like an outsider. At the height of the Arab Spring, when the world was full of optimism about the potential of the revolutions sweeping through the Middle East and North Africa, and when Libyan-Americans like himself were actively encouraged to travel, give aid, and do media work in support of the uprising, he did his part. Afterward, when the revolution soured, he and many others found themselves treated not as heroes but as pariahs.
Even now, after succeeding in removing his name from the no-fly list, Kadura remains uncertain about what his future will hold. “I feel relieved at the moment, but I also feel like these problems are not really going away,” he predicted. “The political environment is obviously getting very scary for Muslims in the U.S, and when you’ve been placed on secret lists like this, it’s always something that could be used against you in the future.”
Read our past coverage of the no-fly list here.
