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Since the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, Minnesota law enforcement agencies have carried out a secretive, long-running surveillance programme targeting journalists and civil rights activists known as Operation Safety Net, a complex surveillance engine that has expanded to include collecting detailed facial images, scouring social media, and tracking mobile phones. Documents obtained via public records requests show that the police continued using the powers granted under OSN to monitor…
Content Type: Examples
According to internal documents obtained by the Brennan Center, the Polish “strategic communications” specialist Edge NPD, whose business is helping companies with market research, provided the Los Angeles Police Department with a free 40-day trial in which it collected nearly 2 million tweets, including thousands relating to six topics, including Black Lives Matter and “defund the police”. LAPD did not ultimately enter into a contract with the company; the documents do not say what the agency…
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
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…