State Surveillance Amid Mass Protest
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On Tuesday I felt the Earth shake. It rumbled, not from a sudden shifting of tectonic plates, but from the mass chorus of thousands of masked men and women shouting words of protest, cries of rage, and pleas for justice and peace. All around me, sharpie splattered cardboard boxes bobbed up and down amid a sea of protestors shouting through the swampy Manhattan summer head, their mouths shielded by an ensemble of technicolored masks.
These protests, in the wake of brutal police killing, continue on across the country and even beyond the nation’s borders. In some cases, as the sun sets, its warm embrace has been replaced by a furious fiery frustration engulfing buildings, vehicles, and police precincts in flames. Via passing whispers I’ve heard members of older generations compare the current mass protests to those of 1968, where America reeled from the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. In many ways they are similar, but in at least one way, the stakes have changed. Now, in 2020, just about every protestor is under state surveillance.
Surveillance, as a singular act, isn’t’ new to protests. Most readers will undoubtedly have read or heard the extents to which the FBI went to wiretap the private conversations Martin Luther King and other civil rights activists in the 1960s. Leaders of opposition groups have been monitored for decades, but now, thanks to the growing adoption of artificial intelligence and facial recognition by local and federal law enforcement, police can potentially surveil mass cohorts of people peaceful protesting with nothing more than a blurry image.
The rapid expansion of surveillance technology in recent years, along with law enforcement’s increased appetite for them, has created a seemingly perfect privacy nightmare for protests. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Saira Hussain outlined some of the new tools at the police’s disposal in a recent interview with Marketwatch.
“Law enforcement has access to things like CCTV networks, gunshot detection, stingrays (more commonly known as cell-site simulators), face recognition, possible aerial surveillance. Oftentimes, law enforcement also has the ability to access private networks like [Amazon’s] Ring. Law enforcement agencies many times are acquiring these technologies without any sort of public process where the public may not even be aware that they’re using it.”
There’s a long history of law enforcement surveillance of protests in the United States.
During the first Black Lives Matter protests in 2015, The Christian Science Monitor found evidence that police were using “stingrays” — devices that mimic cell phone towers to trick devices into pinging them and giving up thier location — to track protestors. Five years ago in Baltimore, following the death of Freddie Gray, Hussain said police used a tool called “Geofeedia,” which scanned pubic social media feeds to identify protestors. In that same protest, the Department of Homeland Security reportedly monitored communications on Twitter and other social platforms to gather intelligence on protestors.
Leading the current charge in facial recognition is the shadowy start-up Clearview AI, which has earned a reputation as the creepiest facial recognition company in the world. The company has built up a database of over a billion faces scraped from public social media pages and other sources. Clearview has reportedly partnered with over 200 local police departments across the country, which sends images of supposed suspects to Clearview to run through their algorithm. With just a simple snapshot, Clearview and its competitors can provide police a treasure trove of personal information, as OneZero reporter Thomas Smith learned first hand.
Through a public records request, Smith obtained the information Clearview could mine from one of his photos. With just an image of his face, Clearview could determine Smith’s name, occupation, home city, name of family members, and even the name of his college adviser.
Even if the police don’t detect you individually at a protest, there’s a possibility you might still be outed by other protesters. As has been demonstrated over the course of the past week, demonstrators and bystanders alike are ravenously and instantly posting images of crowds, protests, police abuse, and any other number of real-time events related to the demonstrations.
This has obvious benefits, exposing the realities of police brutality and human resistance to the world, but it also produces the side effect of publicly exposing the images of protesters without their consent. Law enforcement can then use surveillance algorithms to identify individuals in images posted online. That’s not a wild hypothesis, it’s already happened. Last year In Minneapolis, which currently sits at the epicenter of the current worldwide protests, The Star Tribune reported how local law enforcement used facial recognition to determine the identity of a suspect from a simple Instagram photo.
Minnesota police are reportedly still using Clearview AI’s tech.
All of that reinforces the notion that, as Smith wrote, “The Age of the Anonymous Protest is Over.” Yet even with these all-encompassing tools at their disposal, law enforcement across the country in the past week has pressed even further, opting for such extreme surveillance methods that they would border on the comical if not for their real-world effects. Here, I’m specifically talking about the decision to fly a Predator Drone overhead Minneapolis protesters last week.
Last Friday, a Customs and Border Patrol Predator with the call sign CBP-104 was seen circling over clashing protestors and police at around 20,000 feet. These drones, normally resigned to foreign battlefields, are unmanned surveillance vehicles capable of capturing highly precise images from extreme distances. In an interview with Insider, a CPB spokesperson said the drone was there to, “provide live video to aid in situational awareness at the request of our federal law enforcement partners in Minneapolis.” The drone was reportedly deployed for just over three hours.
The drone’s arrival was met with immediate protest from civil liberties groups. In an emailed statement, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel Neema Singh Guliani expounded on what she sees as the dangers of flying in military-grade surveillance vehicles to monitor civilians.
“No government agency should be facilitating the over-policing of the Black community, period. And CBP has no role in what’s happening in Minneapolis at all. This rogue agency’s use of military technology to surveil protesters inside U.S. borders is deeply disturbing, especially given CBP’s lack of clear and strong policies to protect privacy and constitutional rights. This agency’s use of drones over the city should be halted immediately.”
Other examples of aerial surveillance to monitor protestors abound.
While military-grade drones were first flown overhead Minneapolis last week, a Motherboard report found that aerial surveillance tactics have spread to multiple US cities. Those include Las Vegas, Washington D.C., and Portland, where the National Guard and local law enforcement flew surveillance planes according to flight data obtained by VICE.
One such plane was the RC-26B which was reportedly flown over Las Vegas and the nation’s capital. Security researcher John Scott-Railton of The Citizen Lab saw the plane in Las Vegas and posted about it on Twitter. The RC-26B, according to Motherboard is a military-grade aerial surveillance vehicle equipped with infrared and electro-optical cameras. Before being used in US cities, the plane was previously deployed on counter-narcotics missions and on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The RC-26B plane in Washington D.C. was reportedly assisted by a small Cessna 560. In the past, according to Motherboard, the FBI has equipped these Cessna’s with “Dirtboxes,” — devices that pose as fake cell phone tower and trick cell phones into connecting with them. Once connected to the fake tower the FBI can then learn the device’s unique identifier and use to it track the real-time location of its owner.
Martin Shelton, a Principal Researcher at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, speculated to Motherboard that it’s possible these Dirtboxes are being used on planes to surveil protestors around the country.
“Multiple federal agencies are flying surveillance planes over protests, and it’s likely that some of these planes are outfitted with a Dirtbox or similar technology,” Shelton said. “What this means for protesters and journalists covering these events is that phone numbers, as well as voice calls and text messages, are likely being scooped up for analysis.”
For the record, I could not independently verify whether or not Dirtboxes are being deployed in this current case. If these devices are being used though, Shelton said protestors could largely avoid having their location intercepted by putting their phone on Airplane Mode.
“In 2020, this is what ‘Airplane Mode’ is for,” he told Motherboard.
The expanded aerial surveillance has impacted nearly every corner of the continental US. In Portland, police reportedly flew a Cessna 172N over protestors earlier this week. Aircraft belonging to the Texas Department of Public Safety were also reportedly found flying overhear Houston, Texas. As I write this in Brooklyn, the rippling sound of NYPD helicopter rotors chimes in from multiple directions.
While police are in their right to legally surveil active protests, University of California Berkeley professor Catherin Crump explained in an interview with Salon how that can easily rub against wider claims of mass surveillance.
“Mass surveillance of protesters merely because they are exercising their First Amendment rights, or because a small handful may engage in unlawful activity, is oppressive and bad policy. Today there are powerful technologies — automatic license plate readers, cell phone tracking devices — that can work to identify everyone who was in a given area.”
To make matters worse, there’s some evidence to suggest that some of the nation’s most powerful actors are working to make the state’s already expansive surveillance powers even less constrained.
Since last week, President Trump has repeatedly referred to looters and violent protestors as “THUGS,” and claimed, without evidence, that the protests were being edged on by the left-wing extremist group known as Antifa. On Sunday, Trump went a step further, declaring he intended to designate Antifa a “terrorist organization.”
Similar utterances were voiced by Attorney General William Barr, who blamed looting on “Antifa,” and characterized the acts as “domestic terror.”
This focus specifically on Antifa and the word terrorism are important. By officially designating a given group a terrorist, law enforcement are able to skirt by privacy protections reserved for American citizens. By focusing in on “Antifa,” which has no real organization and who’s ties to recent looting are dubious at best, a terrorist designation would potentially allow the government to lump in any looter, or any protestor with the “terrorist” marker. That poses grave long term surveillance risks.
Whether or not the president decides to act on his proclamation by Tweet remains to be seen. Even if he holds off, the federal government is already taking unprecedented action to increase surveillance during the protests. Just this week, the Drug Enforcement Agency has been given the authority to “conduct surveillance,” and collect intelligence on protestors, according to a two-page memorandum acquired by BuzzFeed News. According to the documents, The DEA requested its expanded access for fourteen days. The memo added that DEA agents could share information gathered with local law enforcement.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, ACLU staff attorney Hugh Handeyside argued that such surveillance could be unconstitutional.
“Drug enforcement agents should not be conducting covert surveillance of protests and First Amendment protected speech,” said. “That kind of monitoring and information sharing may well constitute unwarranted investigation of people exercising their constitutional rights to seek justice.”
The rise in real-time surveillance over the past week of protests has turned what are normally “theoretical,” or “hypothetical,” qualms over issues like facial recognition, into real-world case studies. For those of you who are still interested in joining the protests, there are some steps you can take to limit your exposure to surveillance. Helpful resources for keeping clear from prying eyes can be found here, here, and here. While these are useful and I encourage you to read them, it should be clear by now that the idea of simply being absorbed into a crowd of protestors immune from identification is a fallacy.
The past week’s seemingly sudden, but long overdue call to action by millions of furiously frustrated citizens has inspired an onslaught of thought on my end, and I’m sure many of you can say the same thing. There are many things the protests have brought to light, some complicated and some scarily straightforward. This post is focused on surveillance, and as recent events have shown, state use of monitoring technology has rarely felt so urgent. But at the same time, there’s a much larger conversation to be had.
While attending the protest in New York, I was struck, not just by the size and scale and energy of the voices present, but also in the diversity of their pleas. A senseless act of police brutality was the spark that engulfed a mound of kindling, but if you listen closely, the frustration, and anger, and desperation expands beyond one single issue. Law enforcement may be using surveillance from thousands of feet in the sky to gaze upon protestors, but at the same time, the world is gazing upon the United States. All around the world, onlookers are watching carefully to see how the world’s most powerful nation responds to the out crying of citizens, whose concerns have been buried and ignored for far too long.
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