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After the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, the Department of Homeland Security expanded its monitoring of online activity and set up a new intelligence branch to counter domestic terrorism, including tracking platforms that have been linked to threats and “narratives known to provoke violence”. The agency warned law enforcement partners when appropriate when it saw upticks in activity on platforms linked to white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The Brennan Center for Justice warns in a new…
Content type: Examples
According to internal documents, the San Francisco Police Department illegally spied on thousands of Bay Area residents protesting in 2020 against the murder of George Floyd and racist police violence. To conduct its surveillance, the SFPD used a network of more than 300 video cameras in downtown’s Union Square even though the city had passed an ordinance in 2019 that banned SFPD and other city agencies from using facial recognition and requiring them to get approval before using other…
Content type: Examples
Internal documents show that local police coordinated with Enbridge, the oil company building the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota, to track and crack down on indigenous opposition to the development in an initiative known as Opposition Driven Operational Threats (ODOT). Enbridge designed ODOT to spot emerging outside threats to its business, defining “threat!” as anything from reputational harm to property damage. In 2021, ODOT tracked more than a dozen “threat actors”, including…
Content type: Examples
At his 2021 trial, prosecutors used previously-unseen infrared footage from FBI airplane surveillance at 9,000 feet to attempt to show that 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse chased one of the two people he later claimed to have shot in self-defence. Rittenhouse travelled from his home in Illinois to Wisconsin to join a protest following the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake. Aerial surveillance of people in public places is legal in the US, but illegal if directed at a single person for an…