Eating Stingrays for breakfast
Here are some of the technologies law enforcement can use to surveil protesters
WASHINGTON — When Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz sparked confusion last month by asserting that the National Security Agency, the nation’s electronic spying organization, was involved in monitoring domestic protests, his remarks drew renewed attention to surveillance of protesters.
The governor later backtracked on the claim, which would have been unlikely, since the NSA’s remit is collecting foreign digital communications and signals. Yet it is true that the government is using a wide range of capabilities and technologies to monitor the growing nationwide protests, which were set off by last month’s killing of George Floyd, an African-American man, in police custody.
Attorney General William Barr recently announced he’d be activating a broad network of FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces in all 56 field offices, multi-agency partnerships that investigate terrorism that predate the attacks of 9/11 but surged in number afterward. And last week, the Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed to Yahoo News it had set up an internal working group to respond to “appropriate requests” from other government agencies on potential foreign connections with the protests, though there has not been any evidence of such ties.
Law enforcement’s surveillance capabilities are powerful and growing. Here are some of the top technologies that police and other agencies can use to monitor protesters:
Airborne surveillance
As thousands of Baltimore residents flooded the expressway last Monday night to protest the killing of Floyd, they stood under the watchful eye of spy planes carrying powerful wide-angle cameras tracking their every movement.
At the end of March, the Baltimore Police Department came to an agreement with Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems to deploy a “pilot program” in which three private planes would constantly fly over Baltimore for six months, tracking its more than 619,000 residents in an effort to investigate crime. Local officials have insisted they wouldn’t use the footage for real-time monitoring and that the test would help demonstrate how effective the technology is in “reducing violent crime,” said Police Commissioner Michael Harrison.
However, those same planes, which began flying over Baltimore at the end of April, were also deployed secretly in 2016, including during political protests in response to the Justice Department’s decision to drop charges against the Baltimore police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray, another black man who died as a result of injuries suffered in police custody. That deployment led to an outcry from citizens and privacy advocates.
When the proposal arose to return the planes to Baltimore’s skies just a few years later, the City Council had little authority to object, as the Baltimore Police Department uniquely falls under state control.
Now that protesters are once again taking to the streets across the country in massive numbers, demanding justice for the deaths of more black Americans in police custody, activists’ concerns about surveillance have only increased.
“I think what the current environment highlights is the danger of giving any government in this country, but particularly the Baltimore Police Department, this incredibly powerful technology, the likes of which has never existed anywhere in this country,” said David Rocah, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, during a phone interview. The ACLU’s Maryland chapter warned protesters on Facebook and Twitter multiple times over the past week that the spy planes were flying over Baltimore, recording their every move.
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