Screen capture from the film The Lives of Others, based on the lives of citizens monitored by the Stasi in Communist East Germany.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continues to pour time and taxpayer money into convincing the American people that there’s an epidemic of sex trafficking here. So bad is this alleged epidemic that ordinary crime-control measures won’t work, hence the deparment is recruiting truck drivers and hotel workers to be its eyes and ears on the ground. Ugh.

Despite federal fearmongering, there’s no concrete evidence to suggest that sex trafficking is even prevalent in America, let alone on the rise. But you would never know that from listening to lawmakers, federal officials, and their local-media mouthpieces talk. And while some of this propaganda stems from good intentions, it also provides good fodder for all manner of civil-liberties abuses, from seizing sex-business assets to expanding police wiretapping power. Now it’s providing law enforcement with cover to convince citizens to spy on each other and report one another to police for perfectly normal activity.

“We would rather have you call anybody and report it to somebody,” a DHS spokeswoman told 9News Colorado, “even if it turns out to be nothing, than miss one of those victims that’s suffering.”

That’s why, as part of the “Safe Action Project,” DHS staff will train hotel and hospitality workers on how to spot the so-called signs of sex trafficking. Alleged “red flags” include:

• garbage cans containing many used condoms
• frequent use of “Do Not Disturb” sign on room door
• excessive foot traffic in and out of a room
• “excessive sex paraphernalia” in room
• an “overly smelly room” that reeks of “cigarette, marijuana, sweat, bodily fluids, and musk”
• a guest who “averts eyes or does not make eye contact”
• individuals “dressed inappropriate for age” or with “lower quality clothing than companions”
• guests with “suspicious tattoos”
• the presence of multiple computers, cell phones, pagers, credit card swipes, or other technology
• the presence of photography equipment
• minibar in need of frequent restocking
• guests with too many personal hygiene products, especially “lubrication, douches”
• guests with too few personal possessions
• rooms paid for with cash or a rechargeable credit card
• “individuals loitering and soliciting male customers”
• “claims of being an adult though appearance suggests adolescent features”
• refusal of room cleaning services for multiple days

Take heed, lovers on romantic getaways, photographers on assignment, beauty-product junkies, tech workers, cash carriers, alcoholics, late sleepers, slobs, immodest dressers, people on the autism spectrum, people with body-odor problems, single patrons seeking hotel-bar hookups, light packers, and those with a youthful appearance: DHS is onto you!

Meanwhile, in California, the Attorney General’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, and an organization called Truckers Against Trafficking have been teaming up to train truck drivers on how to identify and report suspected sex traffickers. The program essentially urges truckers to report people offering prostitution at truck stops, making sure to include “actionable information” such as a physical descriptions of the individual, car make and model, license plate number, etc.

“Given the cross-jurisdictional nature of the crime of human trafficking and the use of major thoroughfares by traffickers, truck drivers are particularly well-positioned to aid law enforcement,” states a press release from California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris. The training “will also feature The Freedom Drivers Project, a first-of-its-kind 48-foot mobile exhibit that includes artifacts from trafficking cases, portraits of Truckers Against Trafficking members, and ways members of the public can join the fight against human trafficking.”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a staff editor at Reason.com.

Since Edward Snowden exposed the extent of online surveillance by the U.S. government, there has been a surge of initiatives to protect users’ privacy.

But it hasn’t taken long for one of these efforts — a project to equip local libraries with technology supporting anonymous Internet surfing — to run up against opposition from law enforcement.

In July, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire, was the first library in the country to become part of the anonymous Web surfing service Tor. The library allowed Tor users around the world to bounce their Internet traffic through the library, thus masking users’ locations.

Soon after state authorities received an email about it from an agent at the Department of Homeland Security.

“The Department of Homeland Security got in touch with our Police Department,” said Sean Fleming, the library director of the Lebanon Public Libraries.

After a meeting at which local police and city officials discussed how Tor could be exploited by criminals, the library pulled the plug on the project.

“Right now we’re on pause,” said Fleming. “We really weren’t anticipating that there would be any controversy at all.”

He said that the library board of trustees will vote on whether to turn the service back on at its meeting on Sept. 15.

Used in repressive regimes by dissidents and journalists, Tor is considered a crucial tool for freedom of expression and counts the State Department among its top donors. But Tor has been a thorn in the side of law enforcement; National Security Agency documents made public by Snowden have revealed the agency’s frustration that it could only identify a “very small fraction” of Tor users.

The idea to install Tor services in libraries emerged from Boston librarian Alison Macrina’s Library Freedom Project, which aims to teach libraries how to “protect patrons’ rights to explore new ideas, no matter how controversial or subversive, unfettered by the pernicious effects of online surveillance.” (The Library Freedom Project is funded by Knight Foundation, which also provides funding to ProPublica.)

After Macrina conducted a privacy training session at the Kilton library in May, she talked to the librarian about also setting up a Tor relay, the mechanism by which users across the Internet can hide their identity.

The library board of trustees unanimously approved the plan at its meeting in June, and the relay was set up in July. But after ArsTechnica wrote about the pilot project and Macrina’s plan to install Tor relays in libraries across the nation, law enforcement got involved.

A special agent in a Boston DHS office forwarded the article to the New Hampshire police, who forwarded it to a sergeant at the Lebanon Police Department.

DHS spokesman Shawn Neudauer said the agent was simply providing “visibility/situational awareness,” and did not have any direct contact with the Lebanon police or library. “The use of a Tor browser is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use,” Neudauer said, “However, the protections that Tor offers can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] will continue to pursue those individuals who seek to use the anonymizing technology to further their illicit activity.”

When the DHS inquiry was brought to his attention, Lt. Matthew Isham of the Lebanon Police Department was concerned. “For all the good that a Tor may allow as far as speech, there is also the criminal side that would take advantage of that as well,” Isham said. “We felt we needed to make the city aware of it.”

Deputy City Manager Paula Maville said that when she learned about Tor at the meeting with the police and the librarians, she was concerned about the service’s association with criminal activities such as pornography and drug trafficking. “That is a concern from a public relations perspective and we wanted to get those concerns on the table,” she said.

Faced with police and city concerns, library director Fleming agreed to turn off the Tor relay temporarily until the board could reconsider. “We need to find out what the community thinks,” he said. “The only groups that have been represented so far are the Police Department and City Hall.”

Fleming said that he is now realizing the downside of being the first test site for the Tor initiative.

“There are other libraries that I’ve heard that are interested in participating but nobody else wanted to be first,” he said. “We’re lonesome right now.”

Published by Julia Angwin at www.propublica.org

The US government’s prosecution of a South Korean businessman accused of illegally selling technology used in aircraft and missiles to Iran was dealt a devastating blow by a federal judge. The judge ruled Friday that the authorities illegally seized the businessman’s computer at Los Angeles International Airport as he was to board a flight home.

The authorities who were investigating Jae Shik Kim exercised the border exception rule that allows the authorities to seize and search goods and people—without court warrants—along the border and at airport international terminals. US District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia noted that the Supreme Court has never directly addressed the issue of warrantless computer searches at an international border crossing, but she ruled (PDF) the government used Kim’s flight home as an illegal pretext to seize his computer. Authorities then shipped it 150 miles south to San Diego where the hard drive was copied and examined for weeks, but the judge said the initial seizure “surely cannot be justified.”

After considering all of the facts and authorities set forth above, then, the Court finds, under the totality of the unique circumstances of this case, that the imaging and search of the entire contents of Kim’s laptop, aided by specialized forensic software, for a period of unlimited duration and an examination of unlimited scope, for the purpose of gathering evidence in a pre-existing investigation, was supported by so little suspicion of ongoing or imminent criminal activity, and was so invasive of Kim’s privacy and so disconnected from not only the considerations underlying the breadth of the government’s authority to search at the border, but also the border itself, that it was unreasonable.

The defendant was accused of unlawfully selling Q-Flex Accelerometers—models QA-2000-10, QA-2000-20, and QA-3000—manufactured by Honeywell Aerospace. They require an export license before they can be sold from within the US. Kim was accused of selling the technology to intermediaries in China and Korea before their ultimate destination of Iran.

“The government points to its plenary authority to conduct warrantless searches at the border. It posits that a laptop computer is simply a ‘container’ that was examined pursuant to this authority, and it submits that the government’s unfettered right to search cargo at the border to protect the homeland is the beginning and end of the matter,” the judge wrote.

Evidence discovered on his computer of his alleged involvement in the conspiracy that won an indictment is now suppressed, and it cannot be used against him according to the ruling. The authorities took the man’s computer in 2012 for national security reasons but allowed him to board his flight home. The government did not comment on the decision.

Judge Berman Jackson questioned whether the border search exception should apply to laptops because they carry much more private information than, say, a briefcase. Judge Jackson cited last year’s Supreme Court case, known as Riley, in which the justices ruled unanimously that the authorities generally may not search the mobile phones of those they arrest unless they have a court warrant.

The Supreme Court said that “Modern cell phones, as a category, implicate privacy concerns far beyond those implicated by the search of a cigarette pack, a wallet, or a purse. A conclusion that inspecting the contents of an arrestee’s pockets works no substantial additional intrusion on privacy beyond the arrest itself may make sense as applied to physical items, but any extension of that reasoning to digital data has to rest on its own bottom.”

Seizing on that high court opinion, Judge Berman Jackson wrote:

Applying the Riley framework, the national security concerns that underlie the enforcement of export control regulations at the border must be balanced against the degree to which Kim’s privacy was invaded in this instance. And as was set forth above, while the immediate national security concerns were somewhat attenuated, the invasion of privacy was substantial: the agents created an identical image of Kim’s entire computer hard drive and gave themselves unlimited time to search the tens of thousands of documents, images, and emails it contained, using an extensive list of search terms, and with the assistance of two forensic software programs that organized, expedited, and facilitated the task. Based upon the testimony of both Special Agent Hamako and Special Agent Marshall, the Court concludes that wherever the Supreme Court or the Court of Appeals eventually draws the precise boundary of a routine border search, or however either Court ultimately defines a forensic – as opposed to a conventional – computer search, this search was qualitatively and quantitatively different from a routine border examination, and therefore, it was unreasonable given the paucity of grounds to suspect that criminal activity was in progress.

The American Civil Liberties Union has long maintained that the authorities invoke the border exception rule to the warrant requirement to build cases when they don’t have probable cause to get a warrant.

One such high-profile incident occurred in 2010, when the authorities detained and seized a laptop, thumb drive, and digital camera from David House at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when he returned from a vacation in Mexico. House was an outspoken supporter of WikiLeaks leaker Chelsea Manning, who at the time was facing a court-martial for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks. Manning is now serving 35 years for the leaks.

The Department of Homeland Security confiscated House’s gear for 49 days before it was returned after the ACLU complained. The government had waited for House’s return so it could search his digital properties. As part of a legal settlement, the government agreed to destroy copies of House’s seized data.

If you see something at Walmart, do not post it on People of Walmart, call Homeland Security instead.

The Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced the unusual alliance Monday on the department’s blog and in a promotional video posted to YouTube.

“Homeland security starts with hometown security, and each of us plays a critical role in keeping our country and communities safe,” she said. “This partnership will help millions of shoppers across the nation identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities.”

At least 200 Wal-Mart stores will roll out security announcements within 24 hours, Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman said. By month’s end, 588 stores in 27 states will be participating in the program. A short video featuring Napolitano will appear on TV screens at select checkout lanes, asking Wal-Mart shoppers to contact local law enforcement to report suspicious activity.

“If you see something suspicious in the parking lot or in the store, say something immediately,” Napolitano said in the video. “Report suspicious activity to your local police or sheriff. If you need help ask a Wal-Mart manager for assistance.”

Fogelman said employees won’t receive any special training as part of the program. But Wal-Mart managers do work closely with local police, he said.

“We work with local law enforcement all the time,” Fogleman said. “If someone needs help, we will certainly assist. If someone asks us to call police, we will call police.”

“If You See Something, Say Something” has become a familiar sight for New York subway riders since 2002. The campaign was created by The New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from a Homeland Security grant program.

The Homeland Security Department has subsequently expanded the program to other transit agencies and some private entities, including the Mall of America, the American Hotel & Lodging Association and sports and general aviation industries.

But some marketing experts say they aren’t sure how the message will play in a retail setting.

While the message may be  familiar one for people who use public transportation and airports, it’s new one for many in smaller hometowns, said Sarah Kerkian, insights supervisor at Cone Inc., a strategy and communications firm in Boston.

“It may make shoppers feel cared for,” Kerkian said. “But others may say, ‘Who are you to bring me this message?'”

But Fogleman, the Wal-Mart spokesman, said the Homeland Security alliance with the nation’s largest retailer makes perfect sense

“Wal-Mart is a place where people gather, it’s a place where you sometimes see your neighbor the most,” Fogleman said. “It is important to Wal-Mart that it help protect the safety of its community.”