The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/the-terrifying-surveillancecaseofbrandonmayfield.html

by _0nac • 12 years ago

215 107 12 years ago

america.aljazeera.com

Horrifying story that will change absolutely nothing. The government isn't willing to back away from the power (even after it became known) and people aren't upset enough in mass to actually do things about it - things that would probably be done in vain for some time. And changing the minds of many people in the 'innocent people have nothing to hide' I find to have a general delusion, believing the government (or at least the law) is mostly infallible.

It is not a new pattern, either. Look back to what we (americans) did to each other in the 50's (are You a communist? Do you act like one?). Had we had the tech then to spy like now, we'd have done so. Which means that despite the sensational news stories, I find almost apathy from normal people I meet - the paranoid has known for years (don't talk on that cell phone, they can listen in on those easily... does anyone remember this attitude?). Privacy intrusions simply exist. They are. You aren't escaping them. It might make one angry, but there is nothing people feel they can do about it. I personally disagree, but also feel the path to balance in this area is an uncomfortable one.

nhaehnle• 12 years ago

I disagree. Every such story has the potential to make people re-think their false belief that "I've got nothing to hide".

I for one have added it to my list of bookmarks, and hope I remember to pass it on when somebody downplays the dangers of surveillance the next time.

Ultimately, scaling back the mass surveillance state can only be done using popular support. Stories like this one are the best way to get that support, because they are concrete evidence of its danger (rather than the abstract worries that are usually repeated).

There's a difference between reading 1984 and seeing articles of how things play out in real life in your own country.

sillysaurus2• 12 years ago

There's a difference between reading 1984 and seeing articles of how things play out in real life in your own country.

There is no difference. Nothing has changed. Nothing will change.

I was going to make a lengthy comment detailing all the possible ways that Americans could effect change, and then going point-for-point with reasons why none of those ways could possibly work in this case. But it's too depressing. Besides, I would love to wrong.

Our only hope is if a website manages to act as a "vote multiplier" in the sense that it serves a function analogous to a lightning rod: it focuses people by telling them who to vote for and who not to vote for, and when to vote, and even how to vote. No one will do their own research. Want to make a difference? Make that website, and then achieve popularity large enough to make a difference.

Ma8ee2• 12 years ago

I disagree. Every such story has the potential to make people re-think their false belief that "I've got nothing to hide".

Most people will easily rationalize this away and just think that he was a Muslim after all. Good Christians don't have to worry about a thing (except Muslim terrorists of course).

chestnut-tree• 12 years ago

Even without the Snowden revelations, collection of personally identifibale information is increasingly common and often unavoidable.

The US, for example, takes fingerprints from all non-residents entering the country. In the EU, most of the countries that make up the borderless Schengen Area require you to provide your fingerprints when applying for a passport (usually from both hands). Last year, a German man refused to give his fingerprints to the German authorities when applying for a passport. His application was rejected. The case went to the European Court of Justice who ruled in favour of fingerprinting. The court stated that, yes, fingerprinting was a violation of an individual's privacy, but was neccesary to prevent fraud.

Whatever the pronouncements of officials about the protection of your personal info, it's certain, as in the story posted, that law enforcement agencies will have access to this data.

ajb• 12 years ago

Please reflect on what this kind of comment does. This kind of struggle is conducted almost entirely in the mind. If you want to win, you have to believe that you can win, you have to look for ways to win, you have to find hope and give it to other people on your side. The other side are out there trying to convince you that you can't win, that no-one really cares, that their victory is inevitable. Don't help them do that. Yes, it looks kind of bleak right now, but don't give up.

Daniel_Newby6• 12 years ago

What, exactly, is terrifying? The FBI did an excellent job of making connections between suspicious facts, the sort of connections that should have been made to prevent the 9-11 attacks.

It is absurd to claim that this should not have happened. All detection methods have a false positive rate. Judging by what has shown up in the media, the FBI has a counterterrorism false positive rate of one person every few years. That is a stupendously low rate for such a rare yet politically-charged task.

Let's not forget their other famous false positive terrorism case: the anthrax case. Their needle in a haystack search turned up a false positive, but it also turned up the true positive.

The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy.

mschuster91• 12 years ago

The only terrifying thing here is that they suspected him of being a serial mass murderer, and then proceeded to apply such poor spycraft that a false positive was spooked. There are going to have a hard time catching real baddies being that sloppy.

And this is why truly independent oversight of any and all police/justice/secret service-activity is required.

Daniel_Newby6• 12 years ago

Indeed. That's why he was also protected by the FBI internal reviews that freed him, the prosecutors who know just how silly a bad fingerprint match will look in court, the compulsory defense lawyer and defense investigation budget, the judge with whom the admissibility of evidence is negotiated before trial, the trial judge, the more or less fairly selected jurors, the observers and free press in the trial courtroom, the appellate.

Please, please, stop wallowing in this idiotic paranoia or persecution fantasy or whatever it is. This guy looked suspicious as hell during a period of raving government paranoia, in a case involving a public safety emergency, and got interviewed for two weeks.

Yes, that is scary and obnoxious for him, but what more do you want? Investigate mad bombers slowly, carefully, like a stolen car case? Invest $500 billion to raise the false positive rate to one in 10 billion?

jpatokal2• 12 years ago

This is the part I find terrifying:

The only reason Mayfield is a free man today is that the Spanish police repeatedly told the FBI that the print recovered from the bag of detonators didn’t match Mayfield’s fingerprints. The FBI, however, continued to stand by its lab’s findings until Spanish authorities conclusively matched the print to the real culprit, Algerian national Ouhane Daoud.

That "only" is not rhetorical -- the guy would probably be entombed in a supermax or frying in the electric chair if he had been flagged for a terrorism case in the US, in which case the FBI would have had sole jurisdiction and there would have been nobody with the power to say that a) you guys are mistaken and b) we've nabbed the actual culprit.

rtpg6• 12 years ago

It is rhetorical, because in front a judge, you would have to have actual evidence.

Of course the burden of proof for investigating someone's behavior is lower than to get a conviction: if it wasn't, why would there be investigations? I don't want to defend the FBI's idiotic handling of this (namely ignoring all the evidence against the theory), but acting like the FBI has sole discretion to throw someone into prison with so much evidence against their theory is very bizarre.

The only reason he might not be a free man would be that the court system can be very slow.

gaius2• 12 years ago

This sort of stuff is deeply worrying because it means that law enforcement are perfectly happy for the actual perpetrator to go free, so long as they tick their boxes. It would be like doctors prescribing the nearest drug to hand without bothering to find out what was wrong with the patient. A restaurant that took your order then brought you whatever was easiest to cook would go out of business in a day!

Daniel_Newby6• 12 years ago

Stop regurgutating that idiotic political spew. Start thinking for yourself or shut the fuck up.

The FBI has no jurisdiction. Courts have jurisdiction.

A single partial fingerprint would have been laughed out of the prosecutor's office. If the prosecutor was idiotic or careless, the judge would have thrown it out. If by some reverse miracle the judge had believed it, the jury, defense lawyer, and expert witnesses would have stopped it.

There are dozens of layers of reviews and protections, not the ignorant "FBI has sole jurisdiction" theory you are spouting.

Honestly, have you never in you life watched a single episode of a police procedural TV show? Even an episode of Cops?

There is also the matter of the DNA that goes along with every fingerprint, which would have definitively exonerated the suspect.

The FBI was simply doing their job: vacuum up as much information as possible and look for patterns. Their only legal obligation to the suspect is to get search warrants before searching and not torture him. Period. Cops incriminate, the rest of the system sorts it out.

You want an investigator that analyzes the value of evidence and lays criminal charges too, you convene a grand jury. But not the FBI, not cops of any kind.

girvo2• 12 years ago

Huh? The facts of his life were suspicious? Seemed like bullshit confirmation bias to me, coupled with ignoring Spain telling them they had the wrong man, over and over again. None of this is okay, and he should've received compensation for the ordeal.

Is it because he converted to Islam? That covers 1.25 billion people. In fact, the fact he did army service (yes I know there was the Fort Hood shooter, but for the most part people who do voluntary military service aren't your best bet for finding a terrorist, least of all one to bomb Spain of all places...), he had no valid passport (travelling under a fake ID In the western world is far harder than other places), etcetera. They ignored anything that would push them in the direction of "Oh he's not a terrorist". That's not very good, and that's horrifying as that could literally happen to any of us by nothing more than some bad luck.

And yeah, I agree with you on the spycraft thing. Those agents should be removed from field work if they're that terrible :/

mgkimsal• 12 years ago

They ignored anything that would push them in the direction of "Oh he's not a terrorist".

==================

It seems in some cases they didn't just ignore it, they made up stuff to make it look worse. The "false identity" thing is just insane.

Agent 1: "Hrmm.... there's absolutely 0 evidence that he travelled internationally. That must mean that he's an ubercriminal who has the ability to travel undocumentedly - he's even more powerful and criminal than we thought! This has to be our guy! Anyone who can travel internationally without leaving any trace of it is that much more dangerous!"

Agent 2: "Well, he may just not have travelled at all, and this might not be the bomber."

Agent 1 (speaking in to sleeve): "HQ, we've got a 827 in progress - please proceed with plan XPJ - repeat, 827 in progress, request immediate XPJ."

Daniel_Newby6• 12 years ago

That's not very good, and that's horrifying as that could literally happen to any of us by nothing more than some bad luck.

Try reading my comment again, you fucking dumbass. EVERY DETECTION METHOD HAS A FALSE POSITIVE RATE, AND THE FBI'S FOR COUNTERTERRORISM APPEARS TO BE ABOUT 0.5 PER YEAR.

It could not "literally happen to any of us with a little bad luck". You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be struck by lightning. More people have won $100,000,000 in a lottery than have been held in non-criminal custody by the FBI due to investigation mistakes.

That's an error rate so low it would make jetliner engineers faint with envy. (You are orders of magnitude more likely to be killed by such an engineer than inconvenienced for a few days by the FBI.)

dantheman• 12 years ago

In the US you have rights, and being denied your freedom requires a high bar evidence. They clearly did not have it.

Living in a free society requires a certain toleration of risk. That means letting suspicious people go, even if they 1 in 100 might be guilty. We don't lock up the other 99 just in case. In fact, we do the opposite as expressed in Blackstone's formulation: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone's_formulation

SideburnsOfDoom2• 12 years ago

The FBI did an excellent job of making connections between suspicious facts,

Define "excellent" here?

If you mean "the search returned a result" then great, it was technically excellent that they found a best match.

If you mean that the best result was actually relevant and useful, then nope. And they harmed a person and his whole family because of it.

Daniel_Newby6• 12 years ago

Excellent means that they went from a tiny sliver of evidence to someone who raised pretty much every red flag there is.

And the excellent response was ... investigate harder. They did not drag him into a jail and torture a confession out of him, Japanese style. They did not torture him and his wife for anything they could get, Russian style. They did not disappear his entire family and business partners, Columbian style.

While waiting for the next few hundred people to be blown up, they ... investigated quietly. When the whole thing fell apart, they sent in a team of trained assassins to, well, actually there were no assassins or torture chambers, just a couple weeks in Club Fed as a material wotness. You know, like all the other witnesses locked up for a few days when they are trying to sort out who is the deranged killer and who can be safely released.

DanBC3• 12 years ago

It is absurd to claim that this should not have happened. All detection methods have a false positive rate

Getting a partial match is a false positive. Using that partial match to investigate the 20 people who have a partial march is the consequence of that false positive.

To then say that he travelled as a terrorist u der a fake passport because they doscovered that his passport had lapsed and that he hadnot travelled abroad - that should not have happened and I do not feel absurd for saying that.

Surveilling someone so poorly that they know you're following them, and using their awareness of being surveilled as evidence of their guilt should not have happened.

Locking him up for 2 weeks should not have happened.

Daniel_Newby6• 12 years ago

The article claims they deduced he was an international spy. But the article is a political hatchet job. It is entirely likely that "we put a lot of effort into investigating how he could have traveled" was ninja translated to "we knew he was flying under false papers".

His awareness was not used as evidence of guilt, silly. Not even that idiotic article said that. It was used as evidence that he was a flight risk.

betterunix• 12 years ago

"What, exactly, is terrifying?"

This:

"Because the FBI agents had no concrete evidence that Mayfield was linked to the Madrid train bombings, they decided not to apply for a criminal wiretap...Rather, they applied for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant..."

This:

"They couldn’t arrest him because their intrusive surveillance still could not find any evidence of any crime. He spent two weeks in jail..."

This:

"The FBI’s belief that it had their man, despite all contrary evidence, was so strong that it provided misleading sworn statements to a judge."

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of all, though, is that the fact that this lawyer represented a terrorist was considered to be evidence that he himself was a terrorist. Let that sink in for a minute. An accused terrorist hired a lawyer for a child custody case, and the FBI concluded that the lawyer has a connection to a terrorist organization. Replace "lawyer" with "plumber" and "child custody case" with "leaky faucet" if you do not understand the problem.

atlantic• 12 years ago

There isn't a name for the political system we find ourselves in at the moment. It works like this: you free to act as you wish as long as you respect a series of red lines that are never clearly formulated. All these red lines pertain to making changes of substance in the dominant political and economic system.

If you do cross over them, then you find yourself inside the prison system, in a psychiatric ward, or simply disappeared altogether. If large numbers of people cross these lines at once, I suspect we will find ourselves overnight in a totalitarian system, since all the tools for mass control of the population are already in place.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

Actually, there is a name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism

Also called "managed democracy."

philovivero• 12 years ago

This is simply brilliant.

I always call the United States a fascist dictatatorship, but it leaves a bitter taste, since I know that's not entirely true.

There are subtle elements I'm not accounting for.

A "Managed Democracy" is perfect. It accounts for that the corporations took over the government instead of the other way around. It accounts for that protests and free speech are "allowed." It accounts for why people are at the same time militantly patriotic but apathetic at the polls. It accounts for propaganda being distributed rather than centralised.

This guy Wolin has put a lot of thought into this.

zxcdw• 12 years ago

The worst part, I believe, is that these systems which are set in place are placed there in good faith of someone. I don't think that there's some huge government official conspiracy spanning thousands of people orchestrating this to control the "sheeple".

It's just that to understand implications of privacy violations and mass surveillance is quite complex topic and definitely something you can't explain to a layman in a few minutes and expect them to understand the importance. If the result is not immediately obvious with concrete examples, "nobody" will give a damn.

Those same "nobodies" act in good faith to increase surveillance to fight crime or terrorism. Then of course there are people who don't believe surveillance is effective against terrorism(as some of the leaks indicate) but have ulterior motives to support it, whatever they may be.

abrichr• 12 years ago

I don't think that there's some huge government official conspiracy spanning thousands of people orchestrating this to control the "sheeple".

Have you ever heard of Edward Bernays? It's not a conspiracy; it's in the public domain.

If you want to find out more, The Century of the Self [1,2] is a very accessible introduction.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

[2] http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-century-of-the-self/

tbastos• 12 years ago

I propose we call it a Techno-Militarized Surveillance-and-Incarceration Pseudo-Democratic State. Here are the basics on how to create one:

1) Education: provide a relatively weak public education system that teaches patriotism and not a lot about the rest of the world, so the masses are easier to fool. At the same time, have the best graduate schools in the world so you can have the best scientists and engineers (and technology).

2) Media: have a few corporations control 90% of your media. Make them work for you by providing news and shows that distract the masses from political topics, and at the same time instil fear in their hearts. Fear is very important for mass control. If possible, promote capitalist ideals such as meritocracy, free market, working hard, consumption, etc. through your media and school system.

3) Industries: your most important industries are armaments and defence technology, though your prison industry also plays a strategic role. Focus on having a steady flow of wars, preferably in unfamiliar faraway countries. But throw in a few domestic wars too, especially on "drugs"---to promote fear, help you with your prison industry and keep the masses away from the dangerous "psychedelics" that could make people question things. Use fear to gain power and reduce civil rights, then use your more rigorous laws and militarized police to keep the people in line and the prisons full.

4) Intelligence: your intelligence agencies work behind curtains to keep the system working in harmony and further the "national interests", using surveillance and their access to power---and the tools of fear, ignorance and propaganda---to make the masses work for the system while believing they are free and living in a true democracy. Beautiful.

Of course, these are not an US exclusive, many other countries are trying the same tricks, but it seems the US is far in the lead...

joehillen• 12 years ago

Don't forget Imprisonment. There are more people in prison in the US than anywhere else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

fennecfoxen• 12 years ago

The US public education system really isn't doing a grand job teaching "patriotism" per se. Public school teachers, taken as a group nationwide, are notorious for being left-wing (and pro-union, and such.) The left wing has kind of been been down on Patriotism since around Vietnam or so, with only a brief interlude around Sep. 2001 through 2003 or so.

Oh, sure, there are regional variations and exceptions, but Texas is probably the only one with a population behind it worth counting.

einhverfr2• 12 years ago

There isn't a name for the political system we find ourselves in at the moment. It works like this: you free to act as you wish as long as you respect a series of red lines that are never clearly formulated. All these red lines pertain to making changes of substance in the dominant political and economic system.

I may seem fairly jaded in saying this but you have described, quite literally, every society in the world, and every society in history. Of course, in the West we like to pretend we have broken this pattern but we never did.

jobu• 12 years ago

How is what we have today so different from McCarthyism of the 1950's?

stefantalpalaru2• 12 years ago

McCarthyism didn't completely vanish after the 1950s. Affiliation with communist organizations is still incompatible with naturalization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_restrictions_on_na...

specialist• 12 years ago

The way I heard it: Ambiguous rules, ruthlessly enforced.

XorNot3• 12 years ago

Trying to link this to the NSA data mining is absurd. They're tangentially related, but there is no process or regulation which is going to somehow help you when there's an active investigation and agents are digging through your garbage and talking to past contacts.

That's the exact purview of the FBI - they weren't mining databases, all they have to do is send a guy out to chat with some local base personnel, find out where he used to live, look up neighbours etc. This is all active, in-person investigative work.

amirmc• 12 years ago

"Because the FBI agents had no concrete evidence that Mayfield was linked to the Madrid train bombings, they decided not to apply for a criminal wiretap, which requires probable cause to believe there is criminal activity or intent. Rather, they applied for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant, ..." "The secret FISA court approved the request, as it almost always does, and the FBI began its surreptitious and incredibly intrusive blanket surveillance of Mayfield and his family."

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Why the hell is FBI allowed to ask for a FISA "warrant" (god, I hate their 1984 newspeak)?!

XorNot3• 12 years ago

Where did they dig up history? Where did they find details of his past? The FISA warrant was granted after the string of fairly notable coincidences. And was for ongoing active surveillance - not data mining his past.

Of course I don't know why I'm bothering at this point - remotely seeming like you disagree with the HN groupthink on surveillance topics is just a magnet for downvotes and not discussion.

aet• 12 years ago

I agree, this was more about problems with fingerprint technology.

mjklin• 12 years ago

He spent two weeks in jail, petrified that fellow inmates would learn he was somehow involved in the Madrid bombing and hurt him.

This is surprising to me, that he knew what he was being investigated for. Is there any reason why they would tell him?

veidr• 12 years ago

They didn't technically arrest him (since they had no actual evidence), but instead detained him as a material witness in the Madrid bombing case. They would have had to disclose this as part of that process.

scotty793• 12 years ago

So he can confess. You'll get confession you want more often if a person that is supposed to confess knows what he's supposed to confess to.

zacinbusiness• 12 years ago

This is an excellent example of what I was talking about earlier. We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement, men and women who are not trained to think rationally about data and who probably have only a high school understanding of statistics (if that), who are given access to massive amounts of data. They take this data and they match it against a theory that they've already developed, and they assume they have "cracked the case." They act in a constant state of paranoia, fueled by fear and powered by tools that act on data in ways that they can't possibly understand. And so they fill in some (likely poorly designed) form in some FBI web app, and some names get spit out. Then they look at whoever matches their "profile" which was likely developed using, again, a high school level of psychology. It's ridiculous and frightening.

d23• 12 years ago

We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement, men and women who are not trained to think rationally about data and who probably have only a high school understanding of statistics (if that), who are given access to massive amounts of data.

Really though?

The FBI’s Portland field office, however, used that fingerprint match to begin digging into Mayfield’s background. Certain details of the attorney’s life convinced the agents that they had their man. Mayfield had converted to Islam after meeting his wife, an Egyptian. He had represented one of the Portland Seven, a group of men who tried to travel to Afghanistan to fight for al Qaeda and the Taliban against U.S. and coalition forces in a child custody case. He also worshipped at the same mosque as the militants.

I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion.

scotty793• 12 years ago

I can't help but think I would have fallen for the same conclusion.

That's because confirmation bias is a human and common thing. Scientists have various tools to avoid fooling themselves like FBI did and like you and many of us would do.

fnordfnordfnord3• 12 years ago

We have FBI field agents, men and women who are so overly patriotic that it clouds their rational judgement

It's not patriotism, maybe it is nationalism or more probably plain idiocy. When some innocent guy gets framed up (even when there were only good intentions by the framer-upper), it usually means that the real perpetrator goes free. It is completely irrational to support a system that gets it so wrong so often.

jessaustin5• 12 years ago

One of the examiners candidly admitted that if the person identified had been someone without these characteristics, like the Maytag repairman, the laboratory might have revisited the identification with more skepticism and caught the error.

I know We're All Bayesian Now, but does this really seem like the way a "laboratory" ought to work? If fingerprinting really is a science, then it's a study of patterns and how they do or do not match. I'm pretty sure we have computers for that sort of task. Why isn't this totally automated by now? From the outside, the reason that springs to mind is because fingerprinting, as practiced by the FBI, is not scientific at all, and exists merely as window-dressing for the prejudice and misjudgment of agents.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

The software would anyway have some threshold of confidence.

I'm also not sure your assertion that being scientific makes it easy to encode in software is true (easy of course being a relative term).

jessaustin5• 12 years ago

Skin and its details map pretty directly to the 2D Cartesian plane. (If that weren't the case, what would the concept of "fingerprint" even mean?) It is straightforward to represent values in that space in a computer, and to compare sets of such values to each other. It's true that there are affine transformations to consider, but computers are pretty good at those too (better than humans!). If there are actually any other considerations, throw some ML at them, but don't give us any "human interpretation" bullshit.

In fact, Mr. Mayfield wouldn't even have suffered so if computers couldn't already do this job: it's quite unlikely that the FBI has enough staff to compare twenty-year-old military service records to Spanish bombing evidence by hand. The problem, as you nearly realized, was the threshold used in the query. There were no actual matches, yet the FBI required twenty "matches" to "investigate", so it produced twenty "matches". If the FBI had been a bit more overstaffed/bored, they would have pulled 100 "matches". It's like when we pull receivables out of the billing system to write off at the end of the fiscal year: the CFO tells us what the final number should be, and we just get the oldest accounts that sum to the proper total.

You seem to have missed the point, though, which is that if fingerprinting must be done with detailed knowledge of the field agents' pet theories, that implies fingerprinting is not scientific.

aestra• 12 years ago

http://science.howstuffworks.com/fingerprinting4.htm

Fingerprint matching is automatically done by computers. The FBI has 1/6th of the American population in its database. Prints found in the wild aren't whole, the are usually partial prints. They ran the partials, found 20 people who it could be from that database with whatever degree of probability, probably very small. This of course was misused, but it wasn't the science was wrong so to speak rather the humans utilizing it were wrong and acting without good judgement and ethics.

jessaustin5• 12 years ago

The problem then is that the FBI laboratory, without consequence, utilizes the science "without good judgement [sic] and ethics." Are there any forensic laboratories in the USA that operate with good judgment and ethics?

stefantalpalaru2• 12 years ago

The FBI has 1/6th of the American population in its database.

And all the foreign tourists who crossed its border at least once.

robterrell• 12 years ago

If fingerprinting really is a science

Fingerprinting isn't really a science. The law-enforcement practice pre-dates the common use of the empirical scientific method. The assertion that fingerprints are unique is unproven.

http://www.michaelspecter.com/2002/05/do-fingerprints-lie/

rikacomet• 12 years ago

I think some of us are forgetting and are underestimating the human capacity for compassion. This is not just about American public, but all of the humans. What is struck between this uproar is the data security of all the 6billion+ people on this earth.If someone is to think, that it would be over, if they just stop spying on American citizens and their activity, he is grossly underestimating the rest of humanity, this wave won't end until lines are drawn, about what is totalitarian and what is the right line of conformity.

Whats happening right now is a organization and its supporting organizations, finding it hard to stay on the line of justice in a world, where America is a small word, compared to what it was like before. Patriotism is nice, but it has reduced meaning today, this is no longer a world, where you can stay within your borders and hurt everybody outside it.

A good example, is from the movie Hobbit 2, where the elf king is reluctant to look outside of his wooden kingdom.

With great power comes great responsibility.. if you have power over Americans, you have responsibility over Americans, but in case of NSA, they have power over the data of all the people, thus their responsibility is towards everybody.

pmorici3• 12 years ago

"The only reason Mayfield is a free man today is that the Spanish police repeatedly told the FBI that the print recovered from the bag of detonators didn’t match Mayfield’s fingerprints. The FBI, however, continued to stand by its lab’s findings until Spanish authorities conclusively matched the print to the real culprit"

Even if you are hardline nut and totally support the surveillance state it has to be frightening alarming that they were so dead set on harassing this one guy that they would have let the real culprit go free had the Spanish police not called them on their BS.

javajosh2• 12 years ago

I would wager money that there are many FBI agents to this day who lament that they let Mayfield get away with his crimes.

mox1• 12 years ago

I would wager money that there are just as many FBI agents who to this day are disgusted by what the idiots at the Portland Field Office of the FBI did to this guy.

1272• 12 years ago

When you give police power, they will use that power.

mildtrepidation• 12 years ago

Well-reasoned and supported statements about the corruptibility of human beings are done absolutely no favors by this kind of faux wisdom. You might as well stick to something people will recognize, like "absolute power corrupts absolutely," if you want to come off as edgy without actually contributing to the discussion.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

One can always phrase things in a positive or negative way. I don't condone the FBI's behavior but I've noticed that law enforcement agencies tend to operate a bit like computer programs in that they get a lead, they follow it until they can either say "relevant" or "not relevant" and in this case they had a lead from their lab which was unresolved. So they kept pushing on it.

Forensics, as most people should know, isn't an "exact" science, its a statistical science. It is entirely credible that Mayfield's fingerprint in their database was the closest match in the database for someone who was known to be in the area. It reads like it wasn't all that close a match as the Spanish authorities had discounted it, but from the FBI's process perspective it was a "lead" to run down.

pmorici3• 12 years ago

The article says that the FBI didn't follow their _own procedures_ for matching prints. But procedures be dammed because the guy had an arrest record, which was also erroneous, and a Egyptian wife. It doesn't matter how exact or inexact the science is if you aren't even going to follow your own established procedures. The irony of your argument is that they would have reached the correct conclusion if they had in fact operated like a program.

"Despite finding that Mayfield’s print was not an identical match to the print left on the bag of detonators, FBI fingerprint examiners rationalized away the differences, according to a report by the Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG)."

It seems they need to totally separate the finger print examiner from the investigating officers so that they can't be influenced by outside circumstantial facts.

zb• 12 years ago

Possibly the worst part: the courts ruled that what they did to him was unconstitutional (duh), but that it's perfectly OK to keep doing it to other people because he already got his payout:

http://blogs.findlaw.com/ninth_circuit/2009/12/mayfield-v-us...

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

If the individual agents and prosecutors were bonded for the purpose of funding liability like this, we would know the cost of liability up front, and it would make it difficult for the same individuals to be involved in many such cases. Making the government as a whole pay is too diffuse.

javajosh2• 12 years ago

No concerned citizen can allow themselves to be "terrified" by this story, if only because terror is the death of rational, effective action. We must be able to look at this situation, empathize with both sides, and determine how things could have gone better. (Empathizing with law enforcement is particularly difficult for me, but I've come to realize that it is a crucial part of the puzzle.)

It is normal for law-enforcement to chase down a false lead. Most leads are dead-ends, from my lay understanding of detective work. In retrospect, Mayfield was a dead-end, but the key question is: when should the FBI have realized this? The actions that they took would have been justified, I think, if their suspicions had turned out to be valid. (all except the 2 week incarceration - and even that would have been clearly justified if Mayfield had been charged.)

In any event, this is one of those cases which highlights a growing problem in the US legal system, which is the redefinition of "punishment" to exclude pre-trial incarceration and harassment. Law-enforcement has attained an ever growing list of exceptions and ad hoc powers that override a man's right to a fair trial before being punished. City police can "detain" you for up to 72 hours, for no reason. The FBI (apparently) can "detain" you for at least 2 weeks, again without charges. I believe that these rights to ad hoc, extra-judicial incarceration need to be rescinded, by an act of Congress, as these rights enable systematically arbitrary and abusive behavior on the part of law-enforcement at both the local and federal level. I believe they make the general population, whether they know it or not, unsafe from predatory police behavior.

codex• 12 years ago

Nobody is perfect and institutions are no exception. However, I'd have to see more than a single datapoint to indite an entire system. Those who are anti-surveillance will no doubt exhibit confirmation bias when reading this article, which is ironic.

einhverfr2• 12 years ago

I don't see this as a question of confirmation bias but rather a more deeper problem in investigative law enforcement, namely the need to see things as part of a narrative relating to the sort of investigation. This isn't confirmation bias as usually understood, but goes one step before, namely in filtering out the details one can tell a story about.

In the end what criminal investigators do is they find details and piece together a narrative from those. One huge problem with massive surveillance is the ability to piece together whatever narrative the investigator wants to put together based on a much larger field of information to mine.

dllthomas• 12 years ago

Cardinal Richelieu had something to say on the topic.

revelation• 12 years ago

The FBI is the modern day Gestapo, a bunch of poorly trained policemen with the right ideology turned secret agency.

The terrifying surveillance case of Brandon Mayfield

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