The death of George Floyd after
a white police officer knelt on
his neck for nearly nine minutes,
was caught on camera by not
one but several witnesses as they
begged officers to let Floyd
up.
The footage following so many
incidents of systemic racism and
police brutality filmed in recent
years ignited protests around
the world. This for us to stand
up in George's name and say,
'get your knee off our necks.'
To have our dear brother
George Floyd's murder televised.
No one in their right mind,
regardless of their ethnic identity
, could deny that.
So that's where surveillance
works in our favor.
That our people new to survey.
They knew to bear witness.
They knew to record because no
one ever believed them if they
told their story. As hundreds
of thousands joined the protests,
cameras on both sides ignited debates
over privacy and the right
to photograph. In the 1950s,
news cameras expose the brutal
horror of legalized racism in
the form of segregation.
Seventy years later, it is the
cell phone camera that has
exposed the continuation of
violence directed at
African-Americans by the police.
Law enforcement flew drones over
protests in Minneapolis and New
York. Facial recognition software is
being used with some police
body cameras. Law enforcement can
use signals from your cell
phone or automatic license plate
readers to follow your
movements. Images of unity or
chaos spread across social media
in an instant. Every time they turn
on social media, they get to
see in real time vivid
HD pictures of Black pain.
In the age of surveillance, we wanted
to find out how police are
tracking protests, how the data is
used, and how cameras on
every officer and in every
pocket have fundamentally changed the
way we protest.
Police surveillance of the Black
community is not new.
From 18th century ordinances that required
slaves in New York to
carry lanterns after dark to
the FBI wiretapping of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., to
stop and frisk policies that
disproportionately target people
of color.
We have lived a certain level
of surveillance since we lived on
these shores. And they're walking around
waiting for you to do
something wrong, a reason
to jump in.
What's different with the surveillance
of recent protests is just
how powerful the
technology has become.
The mentality is often, let's put
the technology out there, let's
use the surveillance, and then
we'll deal with the problems
after the fact. And so often
the problems after the fact have
been substantial and they've been
problems that have been borne
disproportionately by communities
of color.
Surveillance of these protests
has involved multiple federal
agencies using groundbreaking tech
from private vendors.
You see vendors bragging that
they can identify hundreds of
people from a single photograph.
Right? Or identify people as
they walk by a camera.
There's also things like drone
technology and the integration of
drone technology with
face recognition.
Four days after George Lloyd
was killed in Minneapolis, Customs
and Border Protection flew an
unarmed Predator drone over
protesters there. DEA, CBP and ICE do
not have a role in this,
and they should not be
using their surveillance technologies and
militarized equipment to
combat protesters.
This increased presence of these
officers is something that, you
know, not only chills individuals
right to protest and makes
them more afraid, but it's
just not contravention overall feel
of safety in the community. In an
e-mail, CBP told CNBC that it
has resources deployed in several states
at the request of law
enforcement in order to protect
our communities and ensure that
the rights of Americans to
peacefully protest are protected.
The drone was deployed to feed
live video to law enforcement on
the ground to aid
in situational awareness.
You want to have pinpoint accuracy
if somebody is throwing things
at the police. You don't want the
police to have a broad based
response and then go after
everyone in front of them.
So having cameras and having video
footage is going to help the
police identify who the
bad people are.
Protesters have also reported drone
surveillance in New York,
where the NYPD's Technical Assistance
Response Unit operates a
fleet of 14 surveillance drones with
thermal sensors to detect a
person's heat energy.
I've literally been at a protest staring
kind of eye level at a
drone. So I know that
my face is on camera.
But a lack of transparency makes
it hard to identify exactly what
tech each jurisdiction is using
to identify and track
protesters. When you think
about surveillance technologies, in
the vast majority of
cases, they're required secretly.
They're not approved by publicly
elected city councils or
legislative officials.
Often we find out about them,
you know, decades after they've
been deployed. Street level surveillance
tools are also rapidly
advancing and remain
largely unregulated.
The government has made so
many, so many partnerships with
private surveillance
tech vendors.
Big platforms like Clearview A.I.,
which is this giant facial
recognition platform which scrubbed a
bunch of images from the
internet and are currently using
them to run against people's
faces in real time.
Another example is cell site simulators
or Stingrays used by law
enforcement to track
precise location.
So your phone rather than going to
a cell phone tower will ping
off this piece of surveillance technology
and it will be able to
identify maybe who is in the area,
how many phones are in the
area. It'll be able to link your
phone to a certain location at
a certain time.
There's currently no federal law
protecting the privacy of adults
in public spaces. But one Supreme
Court ruling did deal with
this issue. Carpenter v.
USA, which just came out in
2018, said that kind of aggregate
tracking of people's location
through cell phone data
constitutes a violation
of privacy.
Movement of protesters can also be
tracked using a number of
other tools. Stingray data can be
combined with the number of
other things like face recognition, which
can identify you at a
protest or an automated
license plate reader.
If they know that they're going
to be maybe followed home by
some of this technology so that
police can learn where they
live, people are going to be
afraid to participate in our
democracy, in politics, as is our
First Amendment right to do
so. That EFF has a tip sheet
for how to spot street level
surveillance talk like this and
others, including tattoo and
iris recognition software and
acoustic gunshot detection
systems, which record the sound and
location of a shot and alert
law enforcement.
Surveillance very often, it doesn't
leave a very visible paper
trail for us on the outside.
It takes a lot
of investigative journalism.
It takes a
lot of accountability.
It takes public records requests
to figure out exactly the
extent of the surveillance
that we're seeing now.
So we might not know what's
being deployed right now for a
little while. While surveillance
tech remains fairly unregulated
for now, legislation is showing
up at the local level.
And 35 members of Congress signed
a letter in early June asking
federal authorities from the FBI, CBP,
DEA and National Guard to
stop spying on Americans
who are peacefully protesting.
One of the best ones is
CCOPS, Community Control Over Police
Surveillance, which would, among other
things, give citizens of
a town more control over
what surveillance measures police are
buying, what they're deploying.
At police departments in some
cities, facial recognition software
is now integrated into the body
worn cameras that have been in
widespread use for years.
A 2016 study found that half of
American adults are in a law
enforcement facial
recognition database.
So far, a handful of cities
have banned the use of facial
recognition software, and statewide bans
of its use with body
worn cameras are in place in
Oregon, New Hampshire and most
recently, California.
Companies are also chiming in.
In June, both Amazon and
Microsoft announced they won't sell
their facial recognition software
to police until stronger
regulation is in place.
And IBM announced it's getting
out of the facial recognition
business altogether. Axon who is
a manufacturer body cameras
has said that they will not
integrate face recognition into body
cameras given, you know, many
issues, including the privacy and
civil rights concerns.
Body cameras are were intended
to be tools of accountability.
To turn them into surveillance cameras
now targeted at the very
communities they were intended to
protect is certainly not how
they're supposed to be used, not how
they should be used and how
they should be permitted
to be used.
We want to make sure that all
our troopers are equipped with body
worn cameras, and one of the
primary reasons is to ensure the
safety of not only our troopers,
but the community at large.
We want to ensure that there
is accountability on our end and
what we are reporting is
the most accurate information.
Connecticut state troopers wear body
cameras, but they're not
equipped with facial
recognition software.
In Connecticut and elsewhere, police have
acted in ways to mend
trust, showing solidarity
with protesters.
The police have a fiduciary
responsibility to protect the
protesters as well.
Once they walk up onto the
highway, you'll really have to stop
traffic because you need to
keep the protesters safe.
And if you acknowledge the pain
of the protesters, then that's
mostly what we want.
Stop ignoring our pain.
Stop ignoring the plight
that we go through.
As a mother of Black
kids, something has to change.
When you're interacting with the
public, you're either doing one
or two things, either building the
trust that they have in our
police agency, or
diminishing that trust.
While cameras are nothing new.
The fact that they're on many
police officers and in almost
every pocket has a profound
impact on protesting and policing.
For many of us who've been
living this life, we understand it's
reality have always been here.
There's enough video out there
of seeing white face hurting
Black bodies. And there's enough video
up there of seeing Black
faces, quote, looting.
So it's perpetuating
stereotypes and fear.
Still, the ability to record from
almost any cell phone has
shifted the power dynamics.
There is power because we had
been disempowered in so many ways,
our ability to pick up
and record for ourselves.
And it's being validated by others
around the world of African
ancestry who are having the
exact same similar experiences.
The videos of peaceful protesters
being sprayed with teargas,
essentially, and having rubber bullets
used on them before
curfew and at a time
when people were just peacefully
protesting, I think has prompted a
lot of public officials to
not just sort of ask what
happened, but it has made it
impossible for them to pretend
like nothing wrong happened.
In 1991, a witness recorded on
his camcorder as four LAPD
officers beat Rodney King.
The line of demarcation with policing
and video was the Rodney
King situation.
And people in Los Angeles said
for the first time ever,
'finally, we've got video proof
of what we've been complaining
about for generations.
So clearly now the system is going
to do the right thing.' And
they didn't. Experts say
that filming changes nothing
if those caught on
camera aren't held accountable.
Citizens are now policing the police
because we've seen that the
police cannot police themselves.
We want levels
of accountability.
And if police officers aren't
arrested, charged and convicted,
then there's not going to
be a change in policing.
Even when we've had the camera
and we've clearly seen what we
saw, somehow that law enforcement
person was not held
accountable. And psychologists like
Jackson point out the
instant gratification of sharing images
to social media also
changes how we protest.
Why? Why am I under arrest, sir?
For those who carry cameras
professionally and journalists like
CNN's Omar Jimenez documenting
the protests, the heightened
tensions have led to an unprecedented
number of arrests and even
violent clashes with
law enforcement.
To see reporters being arrested on
live TV, it's just shocking in
this country. And it's because
people are blindly following
orders, blindly
following directions.
The solution, Boyd suggests,
is different training.
Police training for 400 years has
been flawed and we trained from
the perspective of the police.
So what if we start studying
policing from the perspective of
the community? Because law enforcement
is not required to
disclose how they use the
data collected by surveillance,
experts are making educated guesses
about what comes next.
Eventually, they're going to start
collecting video footage and
people that they recognize, they're
going to try to prosecute.
Lack of trust around how data
is used has been heightened since
Google and Apple announced big
plans for Covid-19 contact
tracing, a perception that wasn't
helped when Minnesota Public
Safety Commissioner John Harrington
compared their methods of
analyzing those arrested at
protests to contact tracing.
We have begun analyzing the data
of who we've arrested and begun
actually doing what you would think
is almost very similar to
our Covid. It's contact tracing.
The data being analyzed in this
case was used to determine that
many of those being destructive
came from outside the state.
And they're out here instigating,
they are the rioters, the
leaders who are moving from one space
to the other to change the
game, to make a noise out
here, to distract the meaning.
We have people who are
rioting intentionally to cause harm.
Law enforcement has a
right to arrest them.
Footage from businesses closed circuit
TV cameras can catch
people looting after the fact
or track down terrorism suspects
like those responsible for the
Boston Marathon bombing in 2013
and the 2005 London bombings.
Whether it be CCTV footage or
footage from people's Ring cameras,
I mean, there were probably
even times when protesters' footage
from their cell phones pushed
on social media probably captures
the faces of somebody that police
want to confirm were at a
protest. Any footage out there can
be used by the police.
At the 2004 Republican National
Convention, the NYPD filmed
protesters. Later, the footage was
used to determine charges
against the protesters
they had arrested.
It was very central, actually,
to the litigation about the
protests and about this practice
they had of like kettling
people on the block and then
not get and then allegedly giving
order to disperse and then arresting
everyone on the block, which
was the subject of intense
litigation for many years.
During the Freddie Gray protests in
Baltimore in 2015, an ACLU
report found that law enforcement
used a tool called Geofeedia
to trace people's locations using
public social media feeds.
In that instant, they said that
they were scanning the protest
looking for people
with outstanding warrants.
And there were instances that
suggested that they then followed
up. Obviously, a massive
First Amendment concern.
Another criticism of surveillance is
the way it's used against
undocumented protesters, particularly
when federal authorities
like Immigration and Customs
Enforcement are involved.
ICE has targeted people who
they know to be protesters,
particularly given the current
administration is tweeting things
like, you know, threatening to
shoot people who are protesting.
I think that it's definitely clear
that they're going to use
every weapon at their
disposal, certainly including ICE.
Questions around surveillance have led
to organizations like the
ACLU putting out tips on how
to protect your privacy while
protesting. Make sure you've
encrypted your device.
Make sure that their device
has a strong password.
I think that what we have to
push towards is a world where people
can feel free to go to
protests and express themselves without
worrying that they're going to
be targeted by surveillance.
As surveillance tech reaches new
levels of intensity, civil
rights activists say protesters are
justified in being afraid
their privacy is being violated.
Why are there law enforcement officials,
you know, in full riot
gear? Why are there
drones flying up ahead?
These are protests against police
brutality that have largely
been peaceful. Why is there
this sort of increased militarized
presence that should not
exist in this context?
One reason is that President Trump
called for mobilization of the
military to quell the protests,
declaring himself the president
of law and order. As we
speak, I am dispatching thousands and
thousands of heavily armed soldiers,
military personnel and law
enforcement officers.
And in a tweet that was
censored by Twitter for inciting
violence, he said, 'when the
looting starts, the shooting
starts.' Debates over solutions
to privacy concerns, meanwhile,
are running strong. Should photographers
blur the faces of
protesters, for example?
I think if you are a protester,
though, and you are filming what
police are doing at the protest,
I think you absolutely should
be careful, though, what else
you get in that photo.
And to think about
other protesters' privacies.
Signal, the secure private messaging
app is sending out free
Encrypt Your Face masks.
Masks prevent facial recognition and
the spread of Covid-19.
Wearing sunglasses, covering up
tattoos and wearing generic
clothing makes tracking
even harder.
Those calling for defunding of police
want the millions spent on
surveillance to go into
community resources instead.
There is a longstanding movement of
people who have been trying
to block huge expenditures
on surveillance technology, whether
it's drones or helicopters or
Stingrays or other surveillance
technology, which is
tremendously expensive.
And we want those funds to be
invested in the things that we
know keep our communities safe.
In the age of surveillance, the
real question remains: will tech
help or hurt in the pursuit
of a more just society?
It's just a tool. So it's like if
you use a hammer to hammer in a
nail, it's good. If you use a
hammer as a weapon, it's bad.
So it just depends on how
you choose to use the technology.
So surveillance, unfortunately, is
part of our life.
It's like anything else, we can be
fearful of it or we can try
to make it work for us and
be intentional on how we protect
ourselves in that context.
