Digital Fourth (Restore The Fourth – Boston)
The Massachusetts campaign to protect digital data from warrantless government surveillance
The Intercept’s publication of the criteria for the terrorism watchlists throws some light at least on what the government tells itself a terrorist is. This is a matter of keen interest to many of us, since a close reading of the following text tells you a lot about the values and priorities of our new-minted surveillance state overlords.
Not to go all mise en abyme about it, but this definition is, well, abysmal. Let’s take it a step at a time.
On Tuesday, April 15 the New York City Police Department (NYPD) announced it was disbanding a controversial unit that had been spying on Muslims since its inception in 2003. The NYPD’s “Demographics Unit” specifically gathered intelligence on Muslims living in New York City, New Jersey, and even as far away as Philadelphia. It sent plain clothed detectives to cafes, restaurants, and other community centers frequented by Muslims with the stated purpose of identifying potential centers of terrorist activity. Detectives were told to speak with the employees at such establishments about political issues in attempt to identify anti American sentiment. The NYPD also sent informants to Muslim student groups on various college campuses. Despite the wide breadth of surveillance, even the NYPD acknowledged that the program has failed to create a single lead.
Continue reading Racial profiling, Muslim surveillance, and the NYPD
The Atlantic picks up on a story from the Center for Investigative Reporting that in 2012, the LA County Sheriff’s Department secretly tested a civilian surveillance aircraft by flying it over a town in their jurisdiction and taking high-resolution footage of everything visibly happening there, over a period of up to six hours (highlights are ours):
If it’s adopted, Americans can be policed like Iraqis and Afghanis under occupation – and at bargain prices:
McNutt, who holds a doctorate in rapid product development, helped build wide-area surveillance to hunt down bombing suspects in Iraq and Afghanistan. He decided that clusters of high-powered surveillance cameras attached to the belly of small civilian aircraft could be a game-changer in U.S. law enforcement.
“Our whole system costs less than the price of a single police helicopter and costs less for an hour to operate than a police helicopter,” McNutt said. “But at the same time, it watches 10,000 times the area that a police helicopter could watch.”
A sergeant in the L.A. County Sheriff’s office compared the technology to Big Brother, which didn’t stop him from deploying it over a string of necklace snatchings.
The town they chose? Compton. Yes, that Compton, but it’s not the same Compton as yesteryear. Its boosters are now touting it as the hip, countercultural Brooklyn of the LA area. It has an inspirational new Millennial mayor, Aja Brown, who has garnered comparisons to Cory Booker. Its crime rate is down sixty percent, and it’s now majority-Latino. But it still has a median household income of $42,335, and still, even after all its struggles, somehow found itself the first city selected for mass surveillance, over, say, majority-white, tony Santa Clarita (median household income $91,450). Well, blow me down with a post-racial colorblind goddamn feather.
In related news, the NSA, under its MYSTIC and RETRO programs, was revealed last month to have been collecting the contents of the phone communications of an entire country (unnamed, but probably Iraq).
These two stories are essentially the same. Developments in technology allow law enforcement surveillance to sweep past legal constraints intended for an era where collecting, storing and analyzing so much data was inconceivable. In luckless Compton, the Supreme Court’s 1989 decision in Florida v. Riley renders “wide area surveillance” presumptively constitutional. In luckless Iraq, the expansive powers of Executive Order 12333 and the FISA Amendments Act impose effectively no constraints on the NSA in intercepting the communications of foreign nations.
May I draw your attention to three salient points?
Continue reading High Over Compton: “Wide Area Surveillance” Surveils Entire Town
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.”
Massachusetts has two “fusion centers”, mostly state-funded, which aggregate enormous amounts of data on innocent Massachusetts residents, with the notion of preventing terrorist attacks. When you call the “See Something, Say Something” line, the information goes into “Suspicious Activity Reports.” The ACLU of Massachusetts documented that the Boston fusion center (“BRIC”) had actually spent its time harassing peaceful activists rather than thwarting terrorism, which is one of the reasons why there will be nationwide protests against fusion centers on April 10, including in Boston.
In response to the ACLU revelations, Rep. Jason Lewis (now the newly elected Sen. Jason Lewis) filed a fusion center reform bill on Beacon Hill. Disconcerted at the prospect of more sunshine on their work, the Commonwealth Fusion Center, the fusion center in Maynard, offered him and other legislators a courtesy tour of their facility, to try to explain what good work they were doing. As an example of that work, they cited their First Amendment-violating harassment of an Arlington man who was not actually planning any violent crime, but who had tweeted about it being a good idea to shoot statists. They also provided to Rep. Lewis copies of various policies that they follow, including their Privacy Policy (updated 06.13.2013) and their policy on First Amendment investigations. Rep. Lewis then asked Digital Fourth to evaluate the policies they had provided, to assess whether they were constitutional. We enthusiastically agreed, and the resulting report is here.
Here are our main recommendations:
Continue reading Commonwealth Fusion Center Violates Constitution, New Report Says
[CORRECTED TIME: 2PM EST]
The New York Times revealed last week that the National Counterterrorism Center now has access to all data, not minimized for privacy in any way, that was authorized for collection via the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That includes the phone metadata dragnet on all US calls, and much else besides.
Sounds legit? It really isn’t. This is why. NCTC provides an enormous amount of data to the now-80+ “fusion centers” around the country. These spy centers act as clearinghouses where federal and local law enforcement data meet; Massachusetts’ ones are run out of the Massachusetts State Police and the Boston PD. So what does this revelation – again, coming to us courtesy of Edward Snowden & Co. – mean? It means that local police forces across America, without a warrant or subpoena of any kind, are able to access what the NSA has on you – and, as we already know, they’re collecting everything they can on everyone. In consequence, the Fourth Amendment now only exists for you if law enforcement (a) isn’t that interested in you or (b) has everything it wants on you already. That’s not much of a “right” at all. It’s more of a trivially revocable privilege. Imagine: any time you get stopped by the police, for any reason, they can now provably access the last five years of, say, your movements by car and your phone communications.
So, Digital Fourth, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Restore The Fourth, and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, have teamed up to launch a series of nationwide “Shut Down The Spy Centers” protests. Be there or be scared!
And if you find this idea as shocking as we do, and would like to help us, we’re accepting donations here and volunteers here.
The news this morning is full of the arrest of yet another American on charges of “attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.” Nobody’s suggesting that 20-year-old National Guardsman Nicholas Teausant of Acampo, CA is a terrorist, or that he provided any help whatsoever to terrorists, or that he was in contact, ever, with any actual terrorists. But, the media breathlessly report, he’s still facing charges that can put him in jail through to the 2030s.
Why?
Continue reading FBI: Look Mom, We “Found” Another Terrorist!
Kade Crockford reports that DHS has awarded the MBTA $7 million to refit its buses with fancy new surveillance cameras. Why? Oh, no reason in particular. But the MBTA is at pains to point out that they spent none of their own money on the project. What’s wrong with free money?
Let me tell you what’s wrong with free money. Whether it’s coming from MBTA, DHS, the NSA or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, it all comes from you and me in the end, and I care just the same about whether it’s being spent wisely.
I understand the politics. MBTA, being a local agency, tends to come under fire if it, say, has a massive budget crisis and hikes fares by 23% to help make up the shortfall. DHS, on the other hand, won’t be protested, and this one grant is a drop in the bucket. Nobody’s going to lose their job at DHS if the money does no good.
Crockford rightly comments:
Continue reading Turns out, MBTA has plenty of dollars – for surveillance.
After months of pressure, Essex County District Attorney Jonathan W. Blodgett has completed his investigation into the Sept. 5, 2013 killing of Army Specialist Denis Reynoso at his home in Lynn. Yesterday, he released his finding that police were justified in killing him. His findings could be summed up as, “Sure, he hadn’t committed any crime, and sure, the police came into his home without a warrant, but he was acting all cray-cray, so we’re good.”
DA Blodgett’s elaborate work of speculative fiction provides several specific reasons making it justifiable for armed intruders to have killed Spc. Reynoso in his home.
Continue reading DA Whitewashes Killing of Lynn Resident By Armed Intruders
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