At least six empty houses owned by the estates of Philadelphians ended
up in the hands of William Ernest Johnson III, a violent felon currently
on parole; the houses were then sold on to developers who renovated and
flipped them.
The houses were stolen by providing Philadelphia’s city deeds office
with forged deed transfers, either bearing the stamps of notaries who
say they were tricked, or forged notary stamps (either from nonexistent
notaries, or from notaries who say the stamps were forged – including
the wife of a former state senator).
Pennsylvania does not require that notaries capture a thumbprint when notarizing a document.
There have been other waves of house thefts in the past,
but those were sophisticated identity-theft crimes that involved
merging multiple data-sets from online breaches to impersonate the
house’s owner and secure a duplicate deed. However, in this case, it
seems that a combination of poor checking at the Philadelphia city deeds
office and lax standards for Pennsylvania notaries meant that even a
dumdum could simply rip off houses wholesale.
Johnson denies being that dumdum. However, at least one of the flipped
houses was laundered through his wife, who was convincingly angry and
surprised when the Philadelphia Inquirer asked her about it, implying
that she’d been scammed by him. Then Johnson called the reporter and
said, “I wanted to know if I could offer you something. What is it going
to take for you not to mention my wife’s name?”
The stolen houses had been owned by longtime residents who died without
clear estates, or whose distant relations had not moved quickly to sell
them on.
The Safe Face Pledge
launched last month as a “pledge to mitigate abuse of facial analysis
technology,” with four themes: “Show Value for Human Life, Dignity, and
Rights;” “Address Harmful Bias”; “Facilitate Transparency”; and “Embed
Commitments into Business Practices” (SAFE).
The full pledge is inspirational and comprehensive, covering bias,
secret and discriminatory state surveillance, risking human life, law
enforcement abuse, auditing customer compliance, communicating the
systems’ workings, and making your legal documents (from vendor
contracts to terms of service) reflective of your values.
The pledge’s announcement describes how the UK’s notoriously inaccurate
police facial recognition systems are more likely to falsely accuse
black people of being a match for a criminal than people of different
ethnic or racial backgrounds.
That reminded me of something that EFF executive director Cindy Cohn described on a panel last month:
Cindy pointed out that there’s a danger in centering the critique of
facial recognition in racial bias, because this bias is the result of
the systems not being trained with enough images of racialized people.
When a Chinese state facial recognition system ran into this problem,
the Chinese government simply bought the driver’s license database from
an African client state and used it as training data, eliminating bias
in the algorithm’s false positive rate, by massively invading the
privacy of millions of African people, and now the system is even better
at tracking black people.
Last year saw a massive surge in the right to repair movement,
which seeks to limit manufacturers’ power to undermine repairs, by
mandating certain design decisions to facilitate independent servicing
of goods, as well as access to parts and manuals.
More than a dozen states introduced right to repair legislation, which
met with fierce opposition, led by Apple, whose recent shareholder
disclosures revealed that the company views the longevity of its
products as a serious threat to its profitability; in the EU, right to
repair regulation took on epic proportions, with grassroots fighters taking on a massive, well-funded corporate lobby.
The momentum for right to repair is only growing: independent repair is
anti-oligarchic (allowing local businesses to benefit from fixing their
neighbors’ property), environmentally necessary, and it enables
self-reliance and the ability to customize or modify your property to
suit your needs.
In an excellent roundup on Naked Capitalism, Jerri-Lynn Scofield
enumerates the many Right to Repair fights being waged across the world,
with notes on their progress.
