In 2020 Oregon passed Measure 110, decriminalizing possession of small amounts of drugs. But now "America's most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended," writes the Atlantic, "after more than three years of painful results." Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative... Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed... More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment... Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all... Measure 110 did not reduce Oregon's drug problems. The drug-overdose-death rate increased by 43 percent in 2021, its first year of implementation — and then kept rising. The latest CDC data show that in the 12 months ending in September 2023, deaths by overdose grew by 41.6 percent, versus 2.1 percent nationwide. No other state saw a higher rise in deaths... Neither did decriminalization produce a flood of help-seeking. The replacement for criminal penalties, a $100 ticket for drug possession with the fine waived if the individual called a toll-free number for a health assessment, with the aim of encouraging treatment, failed completely. More than 95 percent of people ignored the ticket, for which — in keeping with the spirit of Measure 110 — there was no consequence. The cost of the hotline worked out to about $7,000 per completed phone call, according to The Economist. These realities, as well as associated disorder such as open-air drug markets and a sharp rise in violent crime — while such crime was falling nationally — led Oregonians to rethink their drug policy. The article notes that Oregon was the first U.S. state to decriminalize marijuana back in 1973, and had long shown low rates of imprisonment for non-violent crimes (diverting offenders into so-called "drug courts which could mandate treatment or order court-directed supervision). "However, after Measure 110 was passed and the threat of jail time eliminated, the flow of people into these programs slowed." But "One thing Measure 110 got right, at least in principle, is that Oregon's addiction-treatment system was grossly underfunded," the article concludes. And it adds that the newly-passed law now "provides extensive new funding for immediate needs, including detox facilities, sobering centers, treatment facilities, and the staff to support those services." They recommend other states adopt "adequately funded, evidence-based prevention and treatment" — and instead of punitive incarcerations, "use criminal justice productively to discourage drug use."

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Why Oregon's Drug Decriminalization Failed

Legislation proposed in California "aims to repeal Daylight saving time and put California permanently on Standard time," reports a San Diego news station: In November 2018, California voters passed Prop 7, a measure that would allow the state legislature to change Daylight saving time by either keeping it year-round or getting rid of it altogether. However, this measure also requires approval by the U.S. Congress if California were to opt for year-round Daylight Saving Time. So far, nothing has materialized. "I am really, really passionate about this bill," said State Assembly Member Tri Ta, who added it is finally time to listen to the will of the voters. He has drafted new legislation that to do away with twice-yearly time changes. However, his bill would put the Golden State onto year-round Standard time: a move that would not require federal action. Oregon and Washington state are also considering similar moves [though Oregon's bill appears stalled]. "If my bill is passed, we do not need congressional approval," Ta told CBS 8, "so that's a win-win for everyone...." Ta said that his bill has the support of the California Medical Association, as well as sleep experts who say Standard time syncs better with our natural clocks. "So why don't we go along with science?" Ta added. "That's what I believe." One things most people seem to agree on: it's time to stop changing our clocks, which research has shown leads to higher rates of accidents as well as increased health risks. "While this new bill continues to work its way through Sacramento, Daylight saving time is still a go here in California," the article points out, "starting 2 a.m. Sunday, when we set our clocks forward one hour." But USA Today adds that across the rest of the country, "Most Americans — 62% — are in favor of ending the time change, according to an Economist/YouGov poll from last year."

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California State Legislator Proposes Ending Daylight Saving Time

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian: The U.S. is not secretly hiding alien technology or extraterrestrial beings from the public, according to a defense department report. On Friday, the Pentagon 'published the findings of an investigation conducted by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), a government office established in 2022 to detect and, as necessary, mitigate threats including "anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects".... AARO investigators, which were "granted full access to all pertinent sensitive [U.S. government] programs", reviewed all official government investigatory efforts since 1945. Investigators also researched classified and unclassified archives, conducted approximately 30 interviews, and collaborated with intelligence community and defense department officials responsible for controlled and special access program oversight, the report revealed. NPR writes that "Many of the sightings turned out to be drones, weather balloons, spy planes, satellites, rockets and planets, according to the report..." "AARO has found no evidence that any U.S. government investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology," Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said in a statement Friday. All investigative efforts concluded that most sightings were ordinary objects and the result of misidentification, Ryder said... The office plans to publish a second volume of the report later this year that covers findings from interviews and research done between November 2023 and April 2024." The report finds no evidence of any confirmed alien technology, the Guardian notes: It added that sensors and visual observations are imperfect, the vast majority of cases lack actionable data and such available data is limited or of poor quality. The report also said resources and staffing for such programs have largely been irregular and sporadic and that the vast majority of reports "almost certainly" are the result of misidentification. In addition, the report found "no empirical evidence for claims that the [U.S. government] and private companies have been reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology"... The report's public release comes as AARO's acting director, Timothy Phillips, told reporters on Wednesday that the US military is developing a UFO sensor and detection system called Gremlin. "If we have a national security site and there are objects being reported that [are] within restricted airspace or within a maritime range or within the proximity of one of our spaceships, we need to understand what that is ... and so that's why we're developing sensor capability that we can deploy in reaction to reports," Phillips said, CNN reports.

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New US Defense Department Report Finds 'No Evidence' of Alien Technology

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this article from Live Science: Manufacturers will no longer use harmful "forever chemicals" in food packaging products in the U.S., according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In a statement released February 28, the agency declared that grease-proofing materials that contain per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) will not be used in new food packaging sold in the U.S. These include PFAS used in fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, takeout boxes and pet food bags. The FDA's announcement marks the completion of a voluntary phase-out of the materials by U.S. food packaging manufacturers. This action will eliminate the "major source of dietary exposure to PFAS," Jim Jones, deputy commissioner for human foods at the FDA, said in an associated statement. Companies told the FDA that it could take up to 18 months to completely exhaust the market supply of these products following their final date of sale. However, most of the affected manufacturers phased out the products faster than they initially predicted, the agency noted... The FDA's new announcement marks a "huge win for the public," Graham Peaslee, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame who studies PFAS, told The Washington Post.

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PFAS 'Forever Chemicals' To Officially Be Removed from Food Packaging, FDA Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Oregon has joined the small but growing list of states that have passed right-to-repair legislation. Oregon's bill stands out for a provision that would prevent companies from requiring that official parts be unlocked with encrypted software checks before they will fully function. Bill SB 1596 passed Oregon's House by a 42 to 13 margin. Gov. Tina Kotek has five days to sign the bill into law. Consumer groups and right-to-repair advocates praised the bill as "the best bill yet," while the bill's chief sponsor, state Sen. Janeen Sollman (D), pointed to potential waste reductions and an improved second-hand market for closing a digital divide. "Oregon improves on Right to Repair laws in California, Minnesota and New York by making sure that consumers have the choice of buying new parts, used parts, or third-party parts for the gadgets and gizmos," said Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, in a statement. Like bills passed in New York, California, and Minnesota, Oregon's bill requires companies to offer the same parts, tools, and documentation to individual and independent repair shops that are already offered to authorized repair technicians. Unlike other states' bills, however, Oregon's bill doesn't demand a set number of years after device manufacture for such repair implements to be produced. That suggests companies could effectively close their repair channels entirely rather than comply with the new requirements. California's bill mandated seven years of availability. If signed, the law's requirements for parts, tools, and documentation would apply to devices sold after 2015, except for phones, which are covered after July 2021. The prohibition against parts pairing only covers devices sold in 2025 and later. Like other repair bills, a number of device categories are exempted, including video game consoles, HVAC and medical gear, solar systems, vehicles, and, very specifically, "Electric toothbrushes."

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Oregon OKs Right-To-Repair Bill That Bans the Blocking of Aftermarket Parts

An anonymous reader quotes an excerpt from a Wired article: In 2019, a government contractor and technologist named Mike Yeagley began making the rounds in Washington, DC. He had a blunt warning for anyone in the country's national security establishment who would listen: The US government had a Grindr problem. A popular dating and hookup app, Grindr relied on the GPS capabilities of modern smartphones to connect potential partners in the same city, neighborhood, or even building. The app can show how far away a potential partner is in real time, down to the foot. But to Yeagley, Grindr was something else: one of the tens of thousands of carelessly designed mobile phone apps that leaked massive amounts of data into the opaque world of online advertisers. That data, Yeagley knew, was easily accessible by anyone with a little technical know-how. So Yeagley -- a technology consultant then in his late forties who had worked in and around government projects nearly his entire career -- made a PowerPoint presentation and went out to demonstrate precisely how that data was a serious national security risk. As he would explain in a succession of bland government conference rooms, Yeagley was able to access the geolocation data on Grindr users through a hidden but ubiquitous entry point: the digital advertising exchanges that serve up the little digital banner ads along the top of Grindr and nearly every other ad-supported mobile app and website. This was possible because of the way online ad space is sold, through near-instantaneous auctions in a process called real-time bidding. Those auctions were rife with surveillance potential. You know that ad that seems to follow you around the internet? It's tracking you in more ways than one. In some cases, it's making your precise location available in near-real time to both advertisers and people like Mike Yeagley, who specialized in obtaining unique data sets for government agencies. Working with Grindr data, Yeagley began drawing geofences -- creating virtual boundaries in geographical data sets -- around buildings belonging to government agencies that do national security work. That allowed Yeagley to see what phones were in certain buildings at certain times, and where they went afterwards. He was looking for phones belonging to Grindr users who spent their daytime hours at government office buildings. If the device spent most workdays at the Pentagon, the FBI headquarters, or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency building at Fort Belvoir, for example, there was a good chance its owner worked for one of those agencies. Then he started looking at the movement of those phones through the Grindr data. When they weren't at their offices, where did they go? A small number of them had lingered at highway rest stops in the DC area at the same time and in proximity to other Grindr users -- sometimes during the workday and sometimes while in transit between government facilities. For other Grindr users, he could infer where they lived, see where they traveled, even guess at whom they were dating. Intelligence agencies have a long and unfortunate history of trying to root out LGBTQ Americans from their workforce, but this wasn't Yeagley's intent. He didn't want anyone to get in trouble. No disciplinary actions were taken against any employee of the federal government based on Yeagley's presentation. His aim was to show that buried in the seemingly innocuous technical data that comes off every cell phone in the world is a rich story -- one that people might prefer to keep quiet. Or at the very least, not broadcast to the whole world. And that each of these intelligence and national security agencies had employees who were recklessly, if obliviously, broadcasting intimate details of their lives to anyone who knew where to look. As Yeagley showed, all that information was available for sale, for cheap. And it wasn't just Grindr, but rather any app that had access to a user's precise location -- other dating apps, weather apps, games. Yeagley chose Grindr because it happened to generate a particularly rich set of data and its user base might be uniquely vulnerable. The report goes into great detail about how intelligence and data analysis techniques, notably through a program called Locomotive developed by PlanetRisk, enabled the tracking of mobile devices associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin's entourage. By analyzing commercial adtech data, including precise geolocation information collected from mobile advertising bid requests, analysts were able to monitor the movements of phones that frequently accompanied Putin, indicating the locations and movements of his security personnel, aides, and support staff. This capability underscored the surveillance potential of commercially available data, providing insights into the activities and security arrangements of high-profile individuals without directly compromising their personal devices.

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How the Pentagon Learned To Use Targeted Ads To Find Its Targets

In a series of tests using fake data, a U.S. government watchdog was able to steal more than 1GB of seemingly sensitive personal data from the cloud systems of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The experiment is detailed in a new report by the Department of the Interior's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), published last week. TechCrunch reports: The goal of the report was to test the security of the Department of the Interior's cloud infrastructure, as well as its "data loss prevention solution," software that is supposed to protect the department's most sensitive data from malicious hackers. The tests were conducted between March 2022 and June 2023, the OIG wrote in the report. The Department of the Interior manages the country's federal land, national parks and a budget of billions of dollars, and hosts a significant amount of data in the cloud. According to the report, in order to test whether the Department of the Interior's cloud infrastructure was secure, the OIG used an online tool called Mockaroo to create fake personal data that "would appear valid to the Department's security tools." The OIG team then used a virtual machine inside the Department's cloud environment to imitate "a sophisticated threat actor" inside of its network, and subsequently used "well-known and widely documented techniques to exfiltrate data." "We used the virtual machine as-is and did not install any tools, software, or malware that would make it easier to exfiltrate data from the subject system," the report read. The OIG said it conducted more than 100 tests in a week, monitoring the government department's "computer logs and incident tracking systems in real time," and none of its tests were detected nor prevented by the department's cybersecurity defenses. "Our tests succeeded because the Department failed to implement security measures capable of either preventing or detecting well-known and widely used techniques employed by malicious actors to steal sensitive data," said the OIG's report. "In the years that the system has been hosted in a cloud, the Department has never conducted regular required tests of the system's controls for protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access." That's the bad news: The weaknesses in the Department's systems and practices "put sensitive [personal information] for tens of thousands of Federal employees at risk of unauthorized access," read the report. The OIG also admitted that it may be impossible to stop "a well-resourced adversary" from breaking in, but with some improvements, it may be possible to stop that adversary from exfiltrating the sensitive data.

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Government Watchdog Hacked US Federal Agency To Stress-Test Its Cloud Security

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: San Francisco's leaders have spent the past few years desperately trying to figure out how to deal with a glut of empty offices, shuttered retail and public safety concerns plaguing the city's once vibrant downtown. Now, a California lawmaker wants to try a sweeping plan to revive the city's core by exempting most new real estate projects from environmental review, potentially quickening development by months or even years. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced SB1227 on Friday as a proposal to exempt downtown projects from the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, for a decade. The 1970 landmark law requires studies of a project's expected impact on air, water, noise and other areas, but Wiener said it has been abused to slow down or kill infill development near public transit. "Downtown San Francisco matters to our city's future, and it's struggling -- to bring people back, we need to make big changes and have open minds," Wiener said in a statement. "That starts with remodeling, converting, or even replacing buildings that may have become outdated and that simply aren't going to succeed going forward." Eligible projects would include academic institutions, sports facilities, mixed-use projects including housing, biotech labs, offices, public works and even smaller changes such as modifying an existing building's exterior. The city's existing zoning and permit requirements would remain intact. "We're not taking away any local control," Wiener said in an interview with the Chronicle on Friday. California Sen. Scott Wiener is proposing a bill that, he said, would make it easier for San Francisco's downtown area to recover from the pandemic. However, it's not clear how much of an impact the bill would have if it's eventually passed since other factors are at play. New construction has been nearly frozen in San Francisco since the pandemic, amid consistently high labor costs, elevated interest rates and weakening demand for both apartments and commercial space.Major developers have reiterated that they have no plans to start work on significant new projects any time soon. Last week, Kilroy Realty, which has approval for a massive 2.3 million-square-foot redevelopment ofSouth of Market's Flower Mart, said no groundbreakings are planned this year -- anywhere.

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California Bill Wants To Scrap Environmental Reviews To Save Downtown San Francisco

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