A veteran crime reporter explains how police under- and overpolice black Americans

Final Call

Nine years ago, Barbara Pritchett-Hughes lost her 16-year-old son, Dovon Harris, to gun violence in the streets of Los Angeles. And a little more than a month ago, she lost her surviving son, 30-year-old DeAndre Hughes, to the same kind of horrific gun violence.

The loss of her first son opens Ghettoside, the incredible 2015 book by journalist Jill Leovy, who won the PEN Center USA’s award for research nonfiction this week. It is a book that leans heavily on the neglect black communities face when it comes to these murders — the kind of neglect that creates the circumstances in which a mother has to bury two of her sons.

The loss of multiple family members, Leovy told me over the phone on Wednesday, isn’t a rare occurrence in violence-torn minority communities.

“It makes you view the numbers in a different way. The concentration is quite startling,” Leovy said. “I’ve talked to lots of people who have lost two sons, some people who have lost three sons. I did a story way back in the mid-aughts about a random block in Compton, where for other reasons I went up and down the streets to interview people, and it turned out every house had lost somebody.”

“”

But it’s impossible to overstate the impact these kinds of losses have on mothers like Pritchett-Hughes. “If your child is murdered, you are in some sense maimed,” Leovy said. “You go on in life, but you are a different shape than you used to be.”

This is the tragedy at the heart of Leovy’s book: While America’s violent crime rate has plummeted by roughly half since the 1990s, shootings and homicides in many black communities remain astonishingly common. Although black people make up roughly 13 percent of the US population, they made up more than half of homicide victims in 2014 across the country, according to FBI statistics.

While this epidemic may seem like it should be the top priority of the criminal justice system, Leovy demonstrates in Ghettoside that it is not. She points to, for example, homicide clearance rates, which measure how many murders are solved by police.

In New York City, for instance, 86 percent of 2013 homicides involving a white victim were solved, compared to 45 percent of those involving a black victim, according to an analysis by the New York Daily News. And David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Mother Jones that in minority communities, clearance rates for murders and nonfatal shootings can get “pathetically low. They can easily fall down to single digits.”

“Explicitly confronting the reality of how murder happens in America,” Leovy writes in Ghettoside, “is the first step toward deciding that it is not acceptable, and that for too long black men have lived inadequately protected by the laws of their own country.”

For Leovy, this is the grand flaw in the criminal justice system today: While the system is well-known, particularly in black communities, for its excessive harshness against black people for drug crimes and other low-level offenses, the system is often absent when people, particularly black Americans, most require it. [MORE]

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad: The Right of Self-Defense

Final Call

The so-called Negroes of Birmingham, Alabama, would have been justified by the law of justice if they had killed every dog sicked upon them by the hired, tax-paid policemen, for the taxpayers did not hire dogs to police their lives and property.

And if the policemen had fired upon those who defended themselves against the bites of savage dogs that the Police Department trained expressly for the purpose of attacking so-called Negroes, they would have been justified by God and the Divine law of self-defense to fight and defend themselves against such savage dog and human attack.

Surely the American so-called Negroes would have God and world sympathy on their side if they would take the right steps or actions. The present actions being taken by them are wrong, for this action consists of demanding that the slave-masters accept their slaves (so-called Negroes) as their equals and as equal sharers in whatever the master has, such as social respect (which will destroy both as a people), and equal share in the government, decent housing conditions, and equal employment (not that they do not deserve it).

No master of anything can accept an unequal as his equal. This law of nature is divinely respected. If they (Martin Luther King and his followers) would accept the right way, which is the belief in Allah as God and Islam as a religion, and demand a place on this earth for our 20 million or more people that they can call their own, I would demand that every one of my followers join forces in a minute!

And if what they are asking for would be granted them, it would only be short-lived; nothing permanent is in it for the so-called Negroes. It would be very foolish for a leader of 22 million once-slaves to ask for temporary employment from their slave-masters’ children, who now use the 22 million for sport. (Sicking dogs on the so-called Negroes was done only for sport to see the frightened so-called Negroes run for their lives.)

But as soon as the so-called Negroes turned upon the dogs and policemen with stones, Washington, D.C., ordered the Army to intervene—not to help the so-called Negroes against the White southerners, but to help the White devils against the so-called Negroes if they tried to defend themselves. But as long as the dogs and policemen were biting and clubbing Black so-called Negroes, it was all right.

This clearly shows how much we are in dire need of unity, but the unity must be backed by a power superior to the power of our enemies. This power is in Allah and the Nation of Islam whose arms are outstretched if we would only accept them.

It is ignorant to look for heaven from the devils who only seek to take you to their doom (hell fire). They (Reverend King and followers) want the rights that the constitution offers to White citizens, but they are learning the hard way that the constitution does not apply to the Black slaves with respect to the right to vote. Certainly there is power in voting if there is justice for the so-called Negroes. But the crooked political machine of America can always keep the once-slaves, free slaves.

Who prepares and teaches politics? Is it not the White man (the enemy of so-called Negroes)? Who will the poor so-called Negroes vote for? Would it not be for a White man or a Black man whom the Whites would back? We could not hope for anything but more bloodshed at the polls in seeking justice from crooked politicians. [MORE]

Will the US #PROMESA Act lead to the Haitization of #PuertoRico? 12817 documents on Puerto Rico from Wikileaks archives

WikiLeaks

Court Documents Show FBI Had To Bail Out Oakland Police With Its Bigger, Better Stingray

Tech Dirt

Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica has obtained court documents showing the Oakland Police Department had to call in the feds -- and their IMSI catcher -- to track down a suspect wanted in connection with a shooting of an off-duty police officer.

According to new government affidavits filed earlier this week, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) used its stingray without a warrant in 2013 for several hours overnight as a way to locate a man accused of being involved in shooting a local police officer. The OPD called in the FBI when that effort was unsuccessful. The FBI was somehow able to locate the suspect in under an hour, and he surrendered to OPD officers.

The only reason these affidavits even exist is because the judge presiding over the prosecution of Purvis Ellis ordered the government to submit declarations detailing how the devices were used to locate him. Two declarations -- one from the FBI [PDF] and one from the Oakland PD [PDF] -- shed some additional light on the now-ubiquitous cell phone-tracking technology.

Neither law enforcement agency sought a warrant for their Stingray deployments. Both declarations claim none was needed because of "exigent circumstances." Given that this occurred before the DOJ instituted a warrant requirement for the FBI's Stingray use, it's unlikely any evidence is in danger of being tossed.

The Oakland PD's declaration states the same thing: no warrant was sought because of "exigent circumstances." Similarly, there appears to have been no warrant requirement in place for the Oakland Police Department at that time. That doesn't mean the court won't find that the use of a Stingray device (or, in this case, two of them) requires the use of a warrant, but even if it does, the good faith exception is likely to apply -- especially in the FBI's case, as its warrant requirement was still thee years away. In both deployments, pen register orders were used to obtain subscriber info. Because exigent circumstances dictated the requests, no judicial approval of the orders was needed.

Ellis' lawyers are hoping the judge will find the circumstances surrounding the Stingray deployments to be not nearly as "exigent" as the government claims.

Prosecutors argued that because the three men involved in the altercation were at large, there was a clear exigency. Ellis’ defense, meanwhile, has countered that because the OPD had declared the scene “secure” 14 minutes after Karsseboom was shot, there was no exigency. This issue remains unresolved. [MORE]

Legal question: How do you cross-examine a computer?

Post Gazette

In the homicide case against Michael Robinson, accused of killing two people in Duquesne in 2013, the computer program, TrueAllele, found that DNA from a black bandanna recovered near the crime scene was 5.7 billion times more likely his than coincidence.

Mr. Robinson’s attorneys want to know how it is that the program reached the results it did.

“The witness in this case is a computer,” defense lawyer Ken Haber said. “You can’t cross-examine a computer. The Constitution demands, and justice requires, we be permitted to find out what the computer is doing to come up with its answer.”

But when he and co-counsel Noah Geary sought the source code for the program, they were denied. The judge ruled that it could cause harm to Cybergenetics, the Oakland-based company that created TrueAllele, which uses probabilities and statistics to determine if a suspect’s DNA is in a complex biological mixture.

This and other similar cases bring up a key question as probabilistic DNA programs become more prevalent. [MORE]

Prison Secretly Video Recording Meetings of Inmates and their Attorneys

ABC News

Defense attorneys who represent inmates at a privately run federal prison in Kansas were livid after learning that their meetings with clients had been recorded on video, despite repeated assurances from the penitentiary that the conversations were private.

The recordings that came to light this month had no audio, but the complaints raise the question of whether nonverbal interactions such as body language or the exchange of legal documents are protected under attorney-client privilege.

"We never had any idea we were being recorded," said Laine Cardarella, a federal public defender in Missouri whose clients include detainees at the Leavenworth prison. "This has had a chilling effect."

A federal judge said the recordings might have violated the Sixth Amendment rights of hundreds of inmates and ordered them stopped.

The company that runs the prison, Corrections Corporation of America, insists that silent video recordings of inmate-attorney meetings "are a standard practice" throughout the country and are used solely to enhance the prison's safety and security.

Unlike prisons controlled by the federal Bureau of Prisons, which generally forbids any recording in attorney-client meeting rooms, private facilities set their own standards.

Concerns about prison recordings of attorney-client conversations are not necessarily new, but nobody has a real grasp of the extent of the problem, said Barry Pollack, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

"I certainly hope that this sheds light on a situation that has not gotten sufficient attention and is an impetus for change," Pollack said. "Criminal defense attorneys have been aware of this problem for years, but it's a difficult one to address." [MORE]

Clinton's foundation woes pale compared with Trump's

Orlando Sentinel 

Even the most ardent supporters of Hillary Clinton must concede that the latest revelation regarding her connection to the Clinton Foundation — that numerous big donors to the charity appear to have had ready access to her when she served as secretary of state — doesn't reflect well on the Democratic nominee for president. It's entirely possible that many of these affluent individuals and business owners would have gotten into her office anyway, but the appearance of "pay to play" exists nonetheless.

Such ethical entanglements seem to have dogged Clinton rather consistently — whether it's taking large speaking fees from Wall Street banks or using a private email server... while serving as President Barack Obama's top foreign-policy adviser. None have produced the proverbial "smoking gun," a clear case of quid pro quo (or an offense worthy of prosecution), but enough of them have stacked up to raise serious questions about her judgment.

The problem with this pattern of behavior is that, particularly in the context of the ethically murky world of Washington insider politics, it's not so cut and dried. What the latest report from the Associated Press revealed is that at least 85 of 154 people with private interests who met with her at the State Department had either given or pledged large sums to her charity.

Add that to email exchanges that demonstrate that her aides were looking out for the interests of foundation contributors is more than a little embarrassing.

Trump is a miserly billionaire who gives little to charity

NPQ

Donald Trump toyed with a Republican presidential run, then hinted at becoming a third-party candidate, then played political footsie with Newt Gingrich, and then finally endorsed Mitt Romney to be the Republican standard-bearer in November. But despite Trump’s characteristic bombast, one never hears much or anything about his charitable or philanthropic giving. During his putative campaign run, while he demanded disclosure of President Obama’s birth certificate and college records, Trump himself never disclosed his tax return, though he promised to do so when President Obama authorized the release of his birth certificate, so we don’t know exactly how much of “the Donald’s” taxable income was reduced by charitable deductions. 

But we do know what the Trump Foundation does and where it gets its money. The Smoking Gun calls Trump a “miserly billionaire,” noting that the foundation’s 2010 990 shows that he has donated just $675,000 to his foundation in the past five years,including nothing in the past two years.  In fact, the interesting aspect of the Trump Foundation is that its most significant source of contributions hasn’t been Trump, but Vince McMahon of Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Over the years, Trump has hosted WWE WrestleMania events at his properties in Atlantic City. He has also participated in WrestleMania events (such as appearing in the corner of a wrestler whose opponent had McMahon in his corner in a hair vs. hair event) and story lines (such as purportedly buying WWE Raw from McMahon). The $5 million in donations from WWE to the Trump Foundation is by far its largest source of income and rumored to be a tax-avoiding payment from McMahon to Trump for Trump’s involvement in a 2006 WrestleMania event. Out of a little more than $1 million in grants in 2010, the foundation gave $110,000 to the American Heart Association, $100,000 to the American Red Cross and that same amount to his son Eric’s foundation.  

We looked at a couple of the previous years’ 990PFs for the Donald J. Trump Foundation just to check the pattern spotted by the Smoking Gun. In 2009, the largest donation by far was $1 million from WWE. No donations were listed from Trump himself. Out of total grant making of $926,750, the foundation’s six-figure grants went to the Police Athletic League, the Tiger Woods Foundation, the William F. Clinton Foundation, New York Presbyterian Hospital, and the Arnold Palmer Medical Center Foundation. In 2008, the largest donations to the foundation were $250,000 from the Willard TC Johnson Foundation and $150,000 from the Celebrity Fight Night Foundation; Trump was listed as donating $30,000 to his foundation. Its only six-figure grant that year (out of $731,000 in total grants) was $107,000 to the Gucci Foundation. 

This Washington Times article by “the Donald” extols Romney’s Trump-like virtues as a tough-minded businessman and suggests Romney is best suited to do battle with China, Trump’s bête noire that he says is “cleaning America’s clock.” With his, Trump adds, “Mitt Romney does have his shortcomings: He’s never built a Mitt Romney Tower in New York City or 12 Mitt Romney championship golf courses. Not everyone can be a Donald Trump.”

What Trump didn’t add is that Romney, as the NPQ Newswire has detailed, uses a significant portion of his wealth for charitable and religious contributions. Whether one likes Romney’s choices or not, there’s no denying that he tithes to his religion and gives millions to public charities. It would appear that Donald Trump the businessman might have a little to learn from Mitt Romney the businessman philanthropist. —Rick Cohen

Clinton Foundation Contributors

ClintonFoundation

Jury Awards $1 in Damages to Family of Black Man Assaulted by Cops in Mistaken Identity Case

Atlantic BlackStar

The family of a Black man assaulted by police in a case of mistaken identity is outraged after a jury awarded them just $1 in damages stemming from the traumatic incident.

Four years ago, three police officers unlawfully entered the South Bend, Indiana home of DeShawn Franklin, 22, in search of a domestic violence suspect sporting dreadlocks.

According to the Indianapolis Star, officers roused Franklin from his sleep and repeatedly punched him in the face and upper body. They also used a Taser to subdue him. Franklin, who was just 18 at the time, was then handcuffed and detained in the back of a squad car for the whole neighborhood to see.

Officers quickly saw their mistake, however, realizing that they had the wrong guy.

Franklin’s family later filed a civil suit alleging excessive force, unlawful entry and false imprisonment among other things. Just this month, a federal jury in Fort Wayne found the officers liable for the unlawful entry and unlawful seizure of the Franklin’s home. However, the family’s pain and suffering was determined to be worth $1.

Per the Indy Star, each officer who ignored the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment was ordered to pay a dollar to Franklin and each of his parents for each rights violation. The family was awarded $18 in total.

The paper also reports that the city is requiring Franklin’s family and their attorney to shell out roughly $1,500 for expenses incurred by the city in defending their case. Thanks to an ambiguous federal law, the city can collect money due because the jury award was less than a settlement offered to the Franklin family.

“I think that’s shocking. I think that’s a travesty of justice,” said Rev. Mario Sims, a local pastor and activist in South Bend. “It creates a very difficult environment when you deal with African-American people you tell them to trust the system, and this family did all the right things, they did trust the system, and essentially, even though the jury found their rights were violated, the jury didn’t value those rights.” [MORE]

Psychopathic White man runs red light, causes accident, shoots black woman to Death (12 times) - had her hands up

Early Saturday morning, Deborah Pearl, a 53-year-old African-American mother and employee of a Cleveland area Harley Davidson Diner in Northeast Ohio, was on her to way work.

At 7:20 a.m., as she was driving her Ford Taurus, she had no idea that she was living her very last moments on this Earth. Matthew Ryan Desha, a 29-year-old white man, ran a red light at an intersection and hit Pearl's car with his Jeep.

After his car flipped many times and hers was pushed into the intersection, what happened next was like something out of a horror movie.

As Deborah Pearl got out of her car to assess the situation, Matthew Desha did as well. Except he also grabbed his 5.56-millimeter high powered assault rifle. According to witnesses, Pearl then proceeded to put her hands in the air in attempt to save her life from the armed stranger who had narrowly avoided killing them both in the crash just seconds earlier.

It mattered not to Matthew Desha. A witness who called 911 reported hearing him fire off at least 12 shots. At first, they appeared to be random. The 911 caller heard Deborah Pearl, who was a sitting duck at that point, begin screaming. Desha then began aiming and firing at her. While it has not yet been released how many times she was hit, when police arrived at the scene, Deborah Pearl was found on the pavement mortally wounded and bleeding out.

Devastated and shocked, her husband and other family members came to the scene, and, understandably so, could not even muster the words to explain how they were feeling.

Matthew Desha was arrested near the scene. Early Monday morning he was charged with the murder of Deborah Pearl. Police have not mentioned a motive for the brutal murder, but the entire scene is riddled with awful implications. [MORE]

As Donald Trump Repels Non-White Voters, G.O.P. Fears Its Future in the West

NY Times

Republicans in Western states fear that Donald J. Trump could imperil their party for years to come in the country’s fastest-growing region as he repels a generation of Hispanics, Asians and younger voters who have been altering the electoral map.

Mr. Trump, with his insult-laden, culturally insensitive style of campaigning, is providing fuel for the demographic trends that are already reshaping the political composition of this once-heavily Republican territory. And now many Republicans are contemplating the possibility that states like Colorado or Nevada could soon become the next California: once competitive but now unwinnable in presidential contests.

In few places are the party’s woes over their nominee more immediate than here in Arizona, a state that has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate only once in the last 68 years.

Recent polls show Hillary Clinton is close to tying Mr. Trump here. And her campaign has responded by teaming up with local Democrats on a statewide get-out-the-vote operation, which has grown to 160 staff members across 20 offices.

While flipping Arizona has been a Democratic fantasy for years — and one that Clinton supporters acknowledge remains quite difficult — their efforts to register and recruit voters are part of a longer-term plan to capitalize on the Republican Party’s vulnerabilities with younger and minority voters.

Nonwhites are growing as a share of the electorate faster in the West than they are elsewhere. For the first time, minorities in 2012 accounted for at least 30 percent of the eligible voting population in Arizona, Nevada and Alaska — all states where Republicans currently hold top statewide offices. Colorado, where Mrs. Clinton’s campaign is so confident of a victory now that it has has no plans to buy advertising time through Election Day, is also approaching 30 percent.

The demographics were already daunting. But many Republicans now say Mr. Trump is only accelerating the flight of minority voters to the Democratic Party, like dry underbrush feeds an Arizona wildfire.

Asked how fellow Republicans could win election to statewide office in the West, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona offered some blunt advice: “Distance yourself from Donald Trump.”

“That’s difficult,” he added, “but I think we’ve got to do it if we’re concerned not just about this election but elections to come.”

Otherwise, Mr. Flake said, “this will last decades.”

Most demographers did not believe Arizona could be truly competitive for Democrats in a presidential election until 2020 at the earliest. But Mr. Trump’s unpopularity has spawned a demographic double threat that has implications in Arizona and beyond: He is not just weak among Hispanics, but also with with educated white professionals who have moved to places like Denver, Salt Lake City and Phoenix in search of better jobs and a lower cost of living.

The trouble signs for the November election have been building. In Colorado, the percentage of registered Republicans as a share of the electorate has dropped by four percentage points compared with 2012. Democrats, who now have about the same share of registered voters, carried the state in 2008 and 2012.

In Utah, Mr. Trump’s lack of support with Mormons has allowed Mrs. Clinton to come close to catching him in some polls.

And in Arizona, new voter registration numbers show Democrats have been registering people at a faster rate than Republicans this year. Registered Republicans, however, still outnumber Democrats over all.

“Arizona is on the cusp,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, who studies the political implications of population shifts. “And if it is on the cusp this fast, I think that means these other states become even farther out of reach.”

The entire West Coast is already a wasteland for Republicans. The last time one of the coastal states — with the exception of Alaska — went to a Republican nominee was California in 1988. Moreover, losses in Arizona and possibly Utah would leave Republicans safe in just Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Alaska. The peril for Republicans is evident looking at the Electoral College: Those states only have a combined 13 of the total 538 electoral votes. And even in the likely event that Republicans continue to carry Utah, a win in November would yield only six more electoral votes.

And even Alaska might not be safe for very long. Because of growth in the Asian, Hispanic and Alaska Native populations, the state’s eligible voting population is projected to be more than 40 percent minority by 2032, according to a report from the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute.

Every month for the next two decades, 50,000 Hispanics turn 18 and become eligible to vote, according to Resurgent Republic, a Republican research group. But low rates of registration have kept Hispanics from becoming as potent a political force as they could be.

Recognizing that the participation gap is part of what has kept states like Texas from becoming more Democratic — despite a voting age population that is 28 percent Hispanic — Democrats in Arizona have undertaken an aggressive registration drive.

“Phoenix is already a majority-minority city, but our voting numbers don’t really reflect that,” said Seth Scott, the Clinton campaign’s Arizona director.

Democrats are putting more resources behind their efforts than they did in 2012 when there were telegraphing similar — though ultimately misplaced — optimism about Arizona.

The Clinton campaign said it invested hundreds of thousands of dollars this month in a coordinated program with the Arizona Democratic Party to win races up and down the ballot, a commitment the Obama campaign decided not to make in 2012. Together they are targeting 450,000 people they have identified as likely Democratic voters whom they hope to place on the state’s early voting list.

The party receives frequent updates from local post offices on which people have sent back their early registration forms. “And if they haven’t, we go knock on their doors and remind them to,” said Sheila Healy, executive director of the party.

One afternoon this week Ms. Healy was overseeing about 20 staff members and volunteers in a campaign office in the middle-class Phoenix suburb of Glendale. The space, in a former strip mall boutique called In Your Dreams, was humming with optimism.

“We’re not going to settle for purple,” said one volunteer, Marguerite Mahalek, as she spoke to a potential Democratic voter on the phone. “We’re going navy blue all the way.”

Predictions that Arizona would turn blue have been wrong before. Many believed the state was on the verge of going irreversibly Democratic in 2010 — much the way California did after voters there approved Proposition 187 in 1994, which was intended to deny public services like schools and hospital care to undocumented immigrants. Arizona’s Republican-led Legislature passed a measure in 2010 known as the “show me your papers” law, which required law enforcement officials to determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if there is reason to suspect the person might be in the country illegally.

Despite anger over that law, Mitt Romney won the state in 2012 by 10 percentage points.

Democrats insist that even if their efforts do not pay off now, they will in the long term as the voting population becomes more Hispanic. But the Trump campaign says it is not leaving anything to chance. Mr. Trump’s staff members were scouting locations in Arizona this week for a speech he is expected to give on immigration.

And campaign officials said they have begun a phone bank program called “Trump Tuesdays.” They said they made more than 18,000 calls this week to rally support for his candidacy.

Still, even his supporters acknowledge what they are up against in Arizona and across the West. “I am concerned about my party going forward,” said Sean D. Reyes, Utah’s attorney general. Mr. Reyes is a Republican and backs Mr. Trump. He is also part Hispanic, Japanese and Filipino, and a Mormon.

So he was naturally taken aback when he heard Mr. Trump insult Filipinos this month. Mr. Trump told a crowd in Maine that the United States had to stop letting in “animals” from “terrorist nations,” among them the Philippines. Mr. Reyes said he called the campaign to register his displeasure.

“I talked to the Trump campaign and said, ‘Look, if I’m going to support Donald Trump, we’ve got to fix that,’” Mr. Reyes said. To the campaign’s credit, Mr. Reyes added, Trump staff members agreed.

Immortal Technique Break His Silence To The Point Of No Return

"There Is Power in the Now" - Blue Pill: The Science of Breathing, Visualization, and Exercise

All the Ways Your Wi-Fi Router Can Spy on You

City dwellers spend nearly every moment of every day awash in Wi-Fi signals. Homes, streets, businesses, and office buildings are constantly blasting wireless signals every which way for the benefit of nearby phones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and other connected paraphernalia.

When those devices connect to a router, they send requests for information—a weather forecast, the latest sports scores, a news article—and, in turn, receive that data, all over the air. As it communicates with the devices, the router is also gathering information about how its signals are traveling through the air, and whether they’re being disrupted by obstacles or interference. With that data, the router can make small adjustments to communicate more reliably with the devices it’s connected to.

But it can also be used to monitor humans—and in surprisingly detailed ways.

As people move through a space with a Wi-Fi signal, their bodies affect it, absorbing some waves and reflecting others in various directions. By analyzing the exact ways that a Wi-Fi signal is altered when a human moves through it, researchers can “see” what someone writes with their finger in the air, identify a particular person by the way that they walk, and even read a person’s lips with startling accuracy—in some cases even if a router isn’t in the same room as the person performing the actions.

Several recent experiments have focused on using Wi-Fi signals to identify people, either based on their body shape or the specific way they tend to move. Earlier this month, a group of computer-science researchers at Northwestern Polytechnical University in China posted a paper to an online archive of scientific research, detailing a system that can accurately identify humans as they walk through a door nine times out of ten.

The system must first be trained: It has to learn individuals’ body shapes so that it can identify them later. After memorizing body shapes, the system, which the researchers named FreeSense, watches for people walking across its line of sight. If it’s told that the next passerby will be one of two people, the system can correctly identify which it is 95 percent of the time. If it’s choosing between six people, it identifies the right one 89 percent of the time.

The researchers proposed using their technology in a smart-home setting: If the router senses one person’s entry into a room, it could communicate with other connected devices—lights, appliances, window shades—to customize the room to that person’s preferences.

FreeSense mirrored another Wi-Fi-based identification system that a group of researchers from Australia and the UK presented at a conference earlier this year. Their system, Wi-Fi ID, focused on gait as a way to identify people from among a small group. It achieved 93 percent accuracy when choosing among two people, and 77 percent when choosing from among six. Eventually, the researchers wrote, the system could become accurate enough that it could sound an alarm if an unrecognized intruder entered.

Something in the way? No problem. A pair of MIT researchers wrote in 2013 that they could use a router to detect the number of humans in a room and identify some basic arm gestures, even through a wall. They could tell how many people were in a room from behind a solid wooden door, a 6-inch hollow wall supported by steel beams, or an 8-inch concrete wall—and detect messages drawn in the air from a distance of five meters (but still in another room) with 100 percent accuracy.

(Using more precise sensors, the same MIT researchers went on to develop systems that can distinguish between different people standing behind walls, and remotely  monitor breathing and heart rates with 99 percent accuracy. President Obama got a glimpse of the latter technology during last year’s White House Demo Day in the form of Emerald, a device geared towards elderly people that can detect physical activity and falls throughout an entire home. The device even tries to predict falls before they happen by monitoring a person’s movement patterns.)

Beyond human identification and general gesture recognition, Wi-Fi signals can be used to discern even the slightest of movements with extreme precision.

A system called “WiKey” presented at a conference last year could tell what keys a user was pressing on a keyboard by monitoring minute finger movements. Once trained, WiKey could recognize a sentence as it was typed with 93.5 percent accuracy—all using nothing but a commercially available router and some custom code created by the researchers.

And a group of researchers led by a Berkeley Ph.D. student presented technology at a 2014 conference that could “hear” what people were saying by analyzing the distortions and reflections in Wi-Fi signals created by their moving mouths. The system could determine which words from a list of lip-readable vocabulary were being said with 91 percent accuracy when one person was speaking, and 74 percent accuracy when three people were speaking at the same time.

Many researchers presented their Wi-Fi sensing technology as a way to preserve privacy while still capturing important data. Instead of using cameras to monitor a space—recording and preserving everything that happens in detail—a router-based system could detect movements or actions without intruding too much, they said. [MORE]