Bodycams Delay Will Cost About Four Lives In Boston Per Year

Another kid’s DNA for our database!

Commissioner Evans of the Boston PD came before the Boston City Council last week to counter activists’ arguments that adopting an ordinance mandating police body-worn cameras would decrease police uses of force and complaints. His favored alternative solutions were (1) more ice-cream socials, because Boston is a “model” city for community policing; (2) delay, because more research is needed on whether they would work in Boston; and (3) in a sit-down interview with the Boston Herald, calling for laws requiring citizens filming police to keep their distance and for them to help police subdue suspects.

We’ll get to the ice-cream socials in a minute, shall we?

Continue reading Bodycams Delay Will Cost About Four Lives In Boston Per Year

Our New Bill H. 2170 Mandates Police Bodycams, Protects Data

"Our police department in Lynn, MA likes both kinds of music - country AND western..."
“Our police department in Lynn, MA likes both kinds of music – country AND western…”

When Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, MO, there was no video of it. When Denis Reynoso was shot in Lynn, MA, there was no video of it. But what if there had been? And what if police bodycams could significantly reduce incidents of use of force by police?

Responding to this need, Digital Fourth took model legislation developed by the Harvard Black Law Students Association that mandates bodycams for police departments, modified it for Massachusetts, and got a bill filed on Beacon Hill. This session was the first time our gallant volunteers have tried anything like this, and we got a strong response. Sen. Jamie Eldridge filed the bill in the Senate; Rep. Denise Provost filed it in the House; and it has already attracted as cosponsors Rep. Benjamin Swan (D-Springfield), Rep. Mary Keefe (D-Worcester) and Rep. Byron Rushing (D-Boston).

The bill is a result of months of consultation with interested police departments and grapples with some difficult issues – how would bodycam data be used? When would officers be required to record? What about the consent of the people being filmed? It sets up a blue-ribbon committee to review traffic stops, pedestrian stops, and bodycam footage, requires police officers to carry bodycams in almost all circumstances, and sets strong controls on the use and dissemination of the footage.

As this appears to be the only bodycams bill that got filed in the 2015-16 session, we believe that our bill represents the best chance of fostering a discussion about reducing on-the-ground unreasonable searches and seizures – the bread and butter of the Fourth Amendment – and that it could substantially improve relations between the police and communities of color in particular. Community-police relations directly affects those working on policy initiatives: One of the people advising on our bill, Segun Idowu, chairman of the Boston Police Cameras Action Team, was arrested at a Black Lives Matter protest and is currently facing trial.

“Our research, inspired by current events, confirms that community/police relations may be improved with the use of this technology, as bodycams will provide a truth that has no color,” said McKenzie Morris, President of the Harvard Black Law Students Association. “This legislation, albeit a first step, is a necessary endeavor for the pursuit of transparency and accountability in policing.”

Mr. Anderson’s Rough Guide to Anonymous Protest

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Note: These methods are not foolproof. Even if you take every precaution described below, you should still assume that you are being watched, tracked, and recorded. Act accordingly.

I. Leave your cellphone at home. It is safe to assume that “Stingrays” (also known as “cell site simulators” or “IMSI catchers”) are being used at every #BlackLivesMatter protest around the country. These devices trick your phone into connecting to them by simulating a cell tower, allowing law enforcement to intercept your text messages and phone calls as well as your location information and International Mobile Subscriber Identity (your phone’s unique identifier). They are small enough to be mounted on vehicles and can even be placed on airplanes and helicopters to track protesters from the sky. It is probably best to leave your cellphone at home. If this is impractical for you, you might want to consider using secure messaging apps such as Wickr or TextSecure. Note that as long as your phone is turned on, your location information and IMSI information can still be intercepted.

II. Avoid exposing your face to cameras. Police love to video record protesters exercising their First Amendment rights. Unless you want to run the risk of having images of your face uploaded to a network of shadowy databases to be matched with driver’s license photographs and other government records for tracking purposes, it is wise to consider covering up your face or applying face paint in a manner that prevents facial recognition software from identifying you. Some believe covering your face is cowardly, but if the choice is between being indexed in a virtually boundless, unaccountable surveillance system and the right to protest anonymously without retribution, I’ll take the latter any day.

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III. Avoid advertising your location or other personal information on social media. Fusion centers and police departments like to track people using social media geolocation software to track social media posts in real-time. This is likely one of the tools used by the Massachusetts fusion centers for tracking #BlackLivesMatter protesters in Boston. You may want to avoid using social media altogether while at a protest; but if you feel the need, it might be a good idea to create a fake account to make it a little more difficult for spies to monitor you.

IV. Use PGP for encrypted emails. Encryption is your friend. “PGP” stands for “Pretty Good Privacy”, and it holds true to its name. Think of PGP as an airtight container that keeps your emails away from the eyes of anyone except the intended recipient(s). Sure, it can be a little tough to set up, but once you have it installed, it’s actually very easy to use.

Here is a guide to installing PGP for Mac OS X.
Here is a guide to installing PGP for Windows and GNU/Linux.

V. Use Tor and/or a VPN. Tor is free software that provides anonymity by routing your Internet activity through a series of other users running Tor relays. The goal is to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing the web pages you visit by bouncing your connection around the network, making it appear as if you are accessing the Internet from a completely random location. Similarly, Virtual Private Networks route your connection through a server of your choice, making it appear as if you are connecting to the Internet from France, Canada, Sweden, or pretty much anywhere. Unlike Tor, good VPNs are not free, but they can be as inexpensive as $3.33 per month.

Black, Brown & Targeted: ACLU Report Reveals Massive 4th Amendment Violations by Boston PD

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Finally, after many years of effort, the ACLU of MA has been able to secure release and analysis (by a third party) of data on police stops in Boston. What was found should grossly offend anyone with a belief that people ought to be equal before the law.

Their data spans 2007-2010, covering reported stops that did not result in arrest. During that time, for fully three-quarters of such stops, the reason the police stated for the stop was not suspicion of any identifiable crime, but simply “Investigate Person.”

Investigate Person?

Continue reading Black, Brown & Targeted: ACLU Report Reveals Massive 4th Amendment Violations by Boston PD

Are Boston Police Using Stingrays? Help MuckRock Find Out

Today’s news in Wired that the federal government is willing to send in the US Marshals to prevent disclosure of how local police departments are using stingrays, makes it seem that what they’re hiding is pretty important.

Our friends at public information service Muckrock.com are launching a new research project to find out exactly what police are doing with this kind of data. Shawn Musgrave describes their project below. We strongly encourage supporters of Digital Fourth to help them fund this important work. We don’t know yet whether any police departments in Massachusetts are using this secrecy-laden technology – wouldn’t you like to find out?

Continue reading Are Boston Police Using Stingrays? Help MuckRock Find Out

At 2014 Boston Marathon, bags searched without warrants at police checkpoints

UPDATE: The Bay State Examiner has informed us that the correct byline for this story is “Andrew.”

For the 2014 Boston Marathon, police established checkpoints on various streets near the finish line where private security guards searched the bags of any spectators who attempted to pass through. The checkpoints were part of a new security plan, which was put in place in response to last year’s Boston Marathon bombings, which killed three and injured more than 260 people.

Prior to the race, the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) published a list of recommendations for spectators including no backpacks, no loose clothing, no costumes or masks, no liquids in excess of one liter, and no weapons of any kind. MEMA also said that spectators may have their bags and bulky items searched at the aforementioned checkpoints.

We saw a number of these checkpoints in action and observed that the searches were primarily carried out by private security guards under the watch of Boston police officers. Once a person’s bag had been searched, the security guards would attach a tag to it and allow the person through.

The searches were not voluntary. Each checkpoint featured a banner reading “All bags and containers are subject to search.” We saw one man being forcibly removed from the area beyond a checkpoint by police officers who noticed that his mesh bag did not have a tag on it. Police took the bag away from the man and would not allow him back into the area until a security guard had searched it.

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A security guard searches through a man’s bag after police removed him from the area beyond a checkpoint

It was apparent that the police did not suspect the man had a bomb because they did not call a bomb squad to the scene. Instead, they asked the man for personal information such as his address, which they wrote down, and lectured him about the need to follow the rules the police had established.

“You got a bag, you put a tag on it. Okay? Simple,” one police officer told the man.

Continue reading At 2014 Boston Marathon, bags searched without warrants at police checkpoints

No Way To Complain = No Complaints = No Problem!

Boston’s fusion center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center, no longer hosts their privacy policy on their website – I was told that it was “under review” and that the new policy will be posted when it’s ready – so it’s lucky for all of us that the ACLU of Massachusetts has a copy of the policy. And it’s a doozy.

If you’re worried about the fusion center’s privacy practices, and that it may have gathered information on you that it shouldn’t, then you’re essentially out of luck. Sure, you can write to them (the address is Boston Regional Intelligence Center, Boston Police Department, Privacy Committee, One Schroeder Plaza, Boston, MA 02120, (617) 343-4328), but the Privacy Policy specifies that the only complaints they will accept or review are those where:

… an individual has a complaint with regard to the accuracy or completeness of terrorism-related protected information that:
(a) Is exempt from disclosure,
(b) Has been or may be shared through the ISE [Information Sharing Environment], or
(c) (1) Is held by the BRIC and
(2) Allegedly has resulted in demonstrable harm to the complainant

So, in essence, before a complaint can even be reviewed about a given piece of information, the complainant has to know what information the fusion center holds on them, and has to be able to make an allegation of “demonstrable harm” – harm, that is, in the eyes of the BRIC. And there’s no procedure for complaining about the collection of monstrous quantities of data in the first place – only for circumstances where they have collected, and acted upon, something provably false about you personally.

That’s some catch, that catch-22.

Wonder how many people have successfully complained?

And by definition, if nobody’s complaining, they must be respecting our privacy, right?

In fact, they’re respecting our privacy so much, that they are aggregating data from the following sources (this is just the ones they’re acknowledging, summarized from the list in the appendix of their privacy policy):

“Telephone analysis software”, state crime information systems, national crime information systems, the state drivers’ license database, the Lexis-Nexis “Accurint” database, Thomson-Reuters’ “CLEAR” database [now integrated with Palantir!], “intelligence data” [up to and possibly including unminimized data collected via FISA], the Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) System, the Law Enforcement Online system, the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) System, jail management databases, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) System, state sex offender registries, “crime-specific listservs”, RSS readers, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) Program database, EPIC hospital records, the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) database, state corrections/probation databases systems, and juvenile justice databases.

Based on information provided by BRIC employees on their LinkedIn profiles (thanks, guys!), we can also determine that the BRIC has access to gang databases, information from the Department of Youth Services, and “medical intelligence”, defined by the Department of Defense as “That category of intelligence resulting from collection, evaluation, analysis, and interpretation of foreign medical, bio-scientific, and environmental information that is of interest to strategic planning and to military medical planning and operations for the conservation of the fighting strength of friendly forces and the formation of assessments of foreign medical capabilities in both military and civilian sectors.”

So if you’ve never made an electronic financial transaction, never used the phone, never had a drivers’ license, never communicated with somebody abroad, never been in trouble with the law, never used drugs, and never been to a hospital abroad for treatment, then congratulations: you’re probably not in the fusion center’s database, and you still have a Fourth Amendment. And for the rest of us, they have records on you, that they aren’t going to allow you to review, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Why should you be concerned?

In related news, the BRIC is changing its slogan to “Share and Enjoy.”

Boston PD Suspends ALPR Program After Massive Privacy Violation

Just before Christmas, Muckrock and the ACLU of Massachusetts brought out excellent articles based on a full year of Muckrock’s investigative reporting into Boston PD’s use of automated license plate recognition technology.

ALPR systems automatically photograph and store in a police database the license plates of any car an ALPR-equipped police vehicle passes. The car may be parked or driving. It could be on the Pike, in a driveway, or anywhere a camera can reach. The question was, what does the Boston PD do with the mountain of data once it has it?

Continue reading Boston PD Suspends ALPR Program After Massive Privacy Violation

Sauce for the Gander: Boston Police Officers Apparently Don’t Like Being “Followed All Over The Place”

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From the ACLU of Massachusetts:

Boston Police Department bosses want to install GPS monitoring devices in every patrol car, to enable dispatch to more efficiently process 911 calls. But police officers and their union are outraged, saying that the ubiquitous tracking is too invasive of their personal privacy. Tracking the location of officers as they go about their days would reveal incredibly detailed information about their lives, the officers say.

It must be just awful to go about your daily life looking over your shoulder, conscious that your every movement and activity is being recorded and could be used against you. Oh, wait. That’s what the entire American public is already dealing with, in this age of mass electronic surveillance. But the way the police union is hissing’n’flapping about it, it’s almost as if there was something wrong with that. Don’t they know that you have nothing to fear, if you have nothing to hide?

The ACLU’s tack is that if the police don’t like the feeling of being followed, they shouldn’t be pushing for technologies like mass tracking of license plates or cellphone locations. That’s fair enough, but there’s a larger point here also.

Police officers are public employees, and they would be monitored during, and only during, the performance of their duties as public officials employees. We require elected officials to disclose their votes publicly, and require secrecy for private individuals at the ballot box, even though that’s inconsistent, because public disclosure of how public business is conducted is vital to maintain democratic accountability. In the same way, close monitoring of law enforcement is vital, to ensure that police don’t abuse the vast and special powers society gives them. When you put cameras on cops, complaints about police misbehavior and brutality drop like a stone. We have the right – affirmed by the federal courts in the First Circuit and across America – to record the police in the commission of their duties. The Fourth Amendment constrains the actions of the government, not the actions of members of the general public.

The Boston police may not like it – last week’s PINAC case shows that they’re willing even to threaten people with felonies to avoid public embarrassment over misconduct – but they are not entitled to a high level of privacy protection in their capacity as police officers. That distinction matters. Doxxing police officers’ personal names and phone numbers and addresses is not cool. But recording them, having them record themselves, and encouraging people to call their office numbers and hold them accountable to the public, is vitally important in order to preserve freedom for the rest of us.