How Governments Spy On Protestors—And How To Avoid It

Protests, almost by definition, are points of contention

between citizens and their governments.

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Police tracking of protestors is multifaceted

and includes a variety of tactics

and gear that generate different data.

Some surveillance is done at the protests,

while other methods are used outside of it.

It's just like all different ways

to get at this core thing of who was there,

what are they up to, what do they think about things?

I think that's sort of how I break it down

because so many of these technologies

are unseen or not intuitive.

In this episode,

we'll discuss the technologies used by law enforcement

that put citizens' privacy at risk.

This is Incognito Mode.

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The movies were way ahead on this, right?

Like they were depicting, it's like the yellow box

that goes around the face type of thing.

Now, that is very real.

This technology is more and more available

to law enforcement.

Although law enforcement have had access

to facial recognition tools for about 20 years,

they previously were only able

to search government images such as mugshots.

This changed in 2018 when many police departments

started using Clearview AI, a facial recognition app

that allows them to match photos from around the web.

Once a photo is uploaded,

the app pulls up matches found online

along with links to the source of those photos.

than 600 law enforcement agencies across the country

use this software.

Based on the person's facial geometry,

the images are converted by the system

into a formula measuring things like eye distance.

This means that law enforcement can use any image

to search for a person

who doesn't currently have a police record

and isn't known to authorities,

and potentially identify them in seconds.

I wanted to ask you, since you've covered this a lot,

how do you view the risk of these platforms

as they proliferate?

To be quite frank, it freaks me the hell out.

Image recognition is just really, really good now

and cheaper to deploy

and so you know, I think it's more just kind of accepting

that this is just part of life.

Like just commuting every day,

you're probably being subjected

to some of these systems in one form or another.

It's not just the systems where you have face rec built in.

It can be deployed after the fact

if you're in people's pictures

that are posted on social media,

it can get uploaded to these systems

and then you can get picked out of a crowd in that way.

[Rioters] USA! USA!

We saw that with, you know,

the January 6th Insurrection videos

that were posted to Parler and other social media platforms.

[Newsreader] News tonight, an Auburn man

has been found guilty of federal charges

for his actions during the January 6th insurrection.

You know, the FBI took those,

they saw people in the videos,

they went back and and kind of looked to see

like, Okay, here's proof you were there.

Governments in 78 countries

use public facial recognition systems

with varying degrees of support from their citizens.

Many countries use the technology

without transparent regulations.

In Russia, facial recognition tools have been used

not only to detain people protesting the war in Ukraine,

but also to identify and arrest opponents of the government

before they joined any demonstrations.

Reuters reported that the facial recognition systems

used in Moscow are powered by Western companies

including NVIDIA and Intel.

Other companies such as Amazon have also launched software

that allows users to build a facial recognition database

using their own photos.

These systems, they're everywhere

and things that you might think

could kind of thwart these systems,

even like wearing a mask and these kinds of things,

some of the technologies can get around that.

I don't know what to do with that information to be honest.

There are a lot of police here. Are you not frightened?

We are, but you know, we are together.

That gives a real power.

I am frightened. Of course I'm frightened.

That's why I'm just covering up all my face

just so that they cannot even, you know, find my ID,

but me being afraid doesn't mean

that I'm not going to be here today and fight for my future.

I agree 100% with what you were saying

about how masks and other deterrent measures

aren't always effective

at defeating these identification technologies.

But clearly they are at least somewhat effective sometimes

because you know, in a lot of crackdowns

we've seen in the last few years by multiple governments,

like one thing they'll do

is try to ban mask wearing in certain settings.

Yeah, are there any other things,

please tell me that you have more.

Yeah, I mean I think there are ways to minimize the data

and thus minimize the risks.

Just simple things like not shooting pictures

and videos while you're at a protest

so you're not capturing yourself

and anybody else who's around you

is one way to keep it out of some types of systems.

Avoiding some systems is better than avoiding no systems.

You are going to be subjected to this technology

in one way or the other

and you just kind of have to proceed as best you can

and minimize your contributions to those systems

as much as as possible.

CCTVs or security cameras

have been ubiquitous for a few decades now.

One could have thought 20 or 30 years ago,

like, Well now everything is going

to be captured on film all the time.

But there are limitations still

to just how much data is stored, for how long.

You know, there've been a lot of high-profile events

around the world in recent years

where there wasn't adequate security footage

to really know what had happened.

It's not like every step you take,

someone is paying to run the system

and store the data to identify you.

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In 2010, Wired reported on federal agents

friending crime suspects on sites like MySpace

in order to see their photos, communications,

and personal relationships.

More recently, police have used companies like Dataminr

to more easily sift through massive amounts of data

in order to glean information

about how protests are organized,

to identify activists,

and to piece together people's connections to each other.

So social media accounts, right?

It's a lot of data on everyone who's using these platforms.

But I kind of think of these surveillance technologies

in two buckets.

One would be if authorities want

to find out more about a specific person, right?

What has Andrew been posting about or saying

and are there photos you know, of Andrew online?

Things like that.

But then the other one would be coming at it the flipped

where it's like they're looking

for anyone who has been talking about X thing,

or you know, anyone marking their location

in a certain place on a certain day.

Authorities can go directly to the sites

or they might wanna use a service

that kind of pulls a ton of data

from social platforms together, you know,

aggregates all of it and getting kind of lists of names.

It gives the ability to like have this vibe check.

Like those platforms themselves

aren't inherently a surveillance tool, right?

Sometimes we use them for journalism.

I've used some of these services like Dataminr before

and once you see just the fire hose of information

that you can get access to when you use it,

it's becomes clear just how easy it is

to kind of figure out what is going on.

Even if it's not obvious to you

in your own like curated timeline.

Just the use of them has become more widespread.

You wouldn't know without doing some investigating,

Definitely my local police department

is using this or not.

That creates an environment

where you have to assume that that's what's happening.

Steps like making your account private

or setting something to expire quickly.

Maybe they can help.

But I wouldn't assume those types of settings

can really truly protect data on big mainstream platforms.

An example of how social media surveillance was used

can be found through the MPD surveillance

of the George Floyd protests in 2020.

It was found that the MPD collected data

about protest events including dates, locations, organizers,

and estimated crowd sizes.

The MPD shared this information with the Secret Service,

National Park Service, and the Department of Defense.

So I think the other huge advice

is about data minimization

and not posting about things

that you worry about getting into other people's hands.

There's a tension here with chilling speech, right?

The nature of the internet is to share information, right?

That's like the whole purpose of the platform.

When you put stuff out there, it's hard to say like,

Okay, it's out there

but only for certain people, and control it.

Our perspective on it is probably a little bit different

because we're journalists,

we're kind of in the public eye

in a way that some other people aren't,

but I think anybody,

no matter if you have one follower or a million,

you should be really careful

about what you post online and when you post it online.

You know, if you're gonna post vacation pictures,

I never post them while I'm actually on vacation.

Because then that signal to somebody like,

Hey, my house is empty.

You can apply that to all different types of risks

and I think generally posting less is the way to go.

But also some people really wanna post

or that's their like job,

or you know, that's how they make money.

It's just helpful to understand

that the greater volume you're posting,

the more there could be things you didn't think of

that's exposing information

that you didn't realize is now out there.

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IMSI catchers, also known as cell site simulators

and formerly referred to as StingRays,

are devices that impersonate cell towers

causing cell phones within a certain radius

to connect to them.

Initially designed for military

and national security purposes,

this technology has emerged in routine police use.

Until recently, the use of IMSI catchers

was withheld from the public.

The FBI has even forced state and local police agencies

to sign NDAs in order to use their devices.

I mean, I find IMSI catchers fascinating

just in that their use is really secretive,

like there was a long time

that police weren't allowed to say that they had them

or that they were using them,

so there's just- And no one had seen one.

Right. Yeah, exactly.

Can you tell us just a little bit about how that works?

These are devices that, at its core,

just identify that your phone

was physically in a certain location,

like that's the baseline thing it's trying to achieve.

Sometimes called an IMSI catcher

because of this IMSI number that it's trying to pick up.

They can work in different ways,

they can work passively to just sort of sweep around

and say what devices are in the area

and let me try to, you know, decrypt their signal

and catch that you know, an ID number.

More often, they work actively as like a fake cell tower,

taking advantage of the way the system works,

that your phone is going to connect to the cell tower

that's emitting the strongest signal in the area

to give you the best service and then grab that ID number.

Sometimes they can also

potentially grab other stuff

like unencrypted communications, like SMS text messages.

It's important to know that one of the things

that can happen when you bring a phone

to an event like a protest

is that the fact that you were there

and potentially some other information

could be sort of pulled out of the air

by one of these devices.

Records show that IMSI catchers are used

by 23 states and the District of Columbia,

the DEA, ICE, FBI, NSA, and DHS,

along with many additional agencies.

In terms of how people gauge the risk of these,

I mean for one thing, like you said,

a lot of times they're looking

to target one person or maybe a couple of people

and it does end up looping in a lot of people

just by the nature of how it works.

But it's also one that I think

is expensive and complicated to deploy

and so it's probably not gonna be the top concern.

If I were going to a protest,

I don't think it's the thing I would be so concerned about,

just as an average person.

Another thing in that vein,

you know, if this technology that we're talking about

is rogue cell towers,

it means that actual cell towers

also have all this information, right?

Like your wireless provider knows where you go.

So that data exists anyway

and there are potentially other ways

that, you know, authorities can get that information.

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Geofence warrants, or reverse location warrants,

allow law enforcement to request location data from apps

or tech companies like Google or Apple

for all devices in a specific area during a set time.

Authorities can then track locations,

identify users and collect additional data

like social media accounts.

This is yet another layer in this multiple approaches

to getting the same information:

who was at a certain place at a certain time

and what can we find out about what they were up to?

A lot of it's advertising data

or what's being shared all the time from your device

that you probably aren't paying much attention to

and is used in a much more innocuous way typically.

And it's sort of slurping up all the data from this area,

which is constrained in a way

but doesn't account for passersby,

people, you know, getting coffee at the deli next door,

people just sort of coming up to a location

to see what's going on.

Like this is just bulk indiscriminate data.

I am worried about it, but maybe not specifically.

Like it's in the category to me of all the reasons

that I might consider leaving a device at home

or putting it in a Faraday bag.

It's sort of just on that list of reasons

that you might wanna minimize the data

that your device is emitting.

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Data brokers collect and sell personal data

from public sources, websites,

and apps people use every day.

They aggregate all this info

to build detailed profiles of people

and to group them into simplified categories

such as high income, new moms, pet owners,

impulse buyers, and more.

While advertisers are usually their primary clients,

police can also purchase this data.

Some of the largest data broker companies

include Experian, Acxiom, and Equifax.

The amount of data Equifax collected came to light

in 2017 when a data breach

exposed 147 million people's personal data.

I think it just fuels this ability

to identify someone

and track kind of their behavior across the web

and potentially their speech.

Similar to the way law enforcement can track people

and surveil people through social media platforms,

information from data brokers

can aid investigations in two ways.

They can be coming at it from a person of interest

who they're trying to find out more about

or authorities can be coming at it from,

I want information on anyone

who has had an IP address in this area

or anyone who has keyword searched, you know,

and been shown these types of ads.

So how do data brokers collect information?

The most common ways include web browsing history,

everything from your Google searches,

sites or apps you visit, cookies, social media activity,

or even a quiz you just filled out for fun.

All of that can be scraped and tracked.

This data creates each person's online history map,

which in turn allows brokers

to build a profile on each user.

The data that companies collect often include:

name, address, phone number and email address,

date of birth, gender, marital and family status,

social security number, education, profession,

income level, cars and real estate you own.

It also comes from public sources.

This can be anything in the public domain

such as: birth certificates, drivers or marriage licenses,

court or bankruptcy records,

DMV records and voter registration information.

It can also include commercial sources

such as: your purchase history, loyalty cards,

coupon use, and so forth.

And finally, some websites or programs will ask

for your consent to share your data.

Sometimes it's anonymized in certain ways,

especially when it comes to advertising data,

but it's pretty trivial for law enforcement

or other investigators to tie certain advertising behavior

to a specific device,

especially if it's collecting precise location data

and there's also data brokers

that are building network profiles

so you can not just get information about yourself,

but everybody you've interacted with,

whether it's on social media or actually in real life.

In the United States at least,

we just lack laws that kind of regulate

what these companies are able to collect.

And if you have to participate in modern society,

as nearly everyone does,

it's almost impossible to avoid.

I think in the context of protests,

it's not an acute concern I would say,

but it is generally speaking really freaky

when the sky's the limit on what they could potentially use

because there's just so much data.

I agree with what you said,

sort of low on the acute scale,

but high on the existential scale.

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One of the big surveillance technologies

that probably everyone who's driven on a highway knows about

is license plate readers.

Really just capturing what your license plate is

and showing that your vehicle was

at a certain place at a certain time.

Similar to like your phone,

your car, it's a proxy for you.

Maybe you were in the car, maybe you weren't,

but that's where your car went.

There are three types of ALPR systems:

stationary or fixed ALPR cameras,

which are installed in a fixed location

like a traffic light, telephone pole or a freeway exit ramp.

The second type are mobile ALPR cameras,

which are attached to police patrol cars,

garbage trucks, and other vehicles,

and allow them to capture data from license plates

as they drive around the city.

They can also assist law enforcement in gridding,

which is when police officers

drive up and down a neighborhood

collecting license plates of all parked cars.

There are also private vendors like Vigilant Solutions,

which collect license plate data

and sell that back to police.

The third type are ALPR trailers,

which are trailers police can tow to a particular area

and leave for extended periods of time.

It's been reported that the DE has disguised ALPR trailers

as speed enforcement vehicles

and placed them along the US-Mexico border.

The things I'm concerned about aren't necessarily even

it being used for license plates.

Our colleague, Dhruv Mehrotra has done some reporting

showing that license plates readers

can also capture any words that are visible,

so that can be what's on your t-shirt,

that could be political signs in your yard.

This technology may be able to be used

in ways that we're not even familiar with or would imagine.

You know, a lot of times when we're talking about

any surveillance technologies,

it's really about creating data that then is there

and could potentially be used

in any number of ways at any point in the future

depending on who gets access to it

and what they want to do with it.

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The key thing here is that these drones,

even small quadcopters,

like what we think of as consumer drones,

they can carry a fair amount of cargo, meaning like cameras.

There are a number of different drones

used by law enforcement varying in size and ability.

For example, some drones have thermal imaging capabilities

for night operations

while others specialize in long periods of surveillance.

Protestors have in the past reported drones flying overhead,

for example in Minneapolis during the George Floyd protests.

Police and government drones usually fly

in the range of 11,200 feet above the ground.

However, it's been reported that the drone used

to surveil protests in Minneapolis in 2020

flew at 20,000 feet,

nearly invisible to protestors on the ground.

This was a Customs and Border Protection drone,

which are often equipped with advanced cameras, radar,

and potential cell phone geolocation tools.

In terms of how freaked out are you about drones,

how do you think about that?

Yeah, I would say fairly freaked out.

But again, like you were saying

about the layering of these technologies,

I think it's not the drones themselves,

it's everything they can do and how cheap they are

and how easy it would be to deploy even more of this tech.

When we talk about sort of evolution

of different technologies,

this capability is sort of similar to police helicopters

and now it's just cheaper, lighter, easier.

Even these sort of benign-seeming quadcopters

that we see around all the time

could be carrying equipment on them

to do like very granular, detailed surveillance

of something like a protest.

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There are some technologies that are really just emerging

and we don't even know if they've been used at protests

or even used by authorities in the United States.

Right, and your face isn't the only thing

sort of outside your body that can potentially identify you.

For example, analyzing your gait, like how you walk.

Gait recognition technology can identify individuals

by analyzing their unique walking patterns

using machine learning.

It captures movements

through cameras, motion sensors, or even radar.

It then processes this information,

breaking it down into contours, silhouettes,

and other distinguishing features.

It offers high accuracy,

but its effectiveness can be influenced

by things like injuries

or the types of terrain the subject is traversing.

This tech is especially useful for authorities

when people's faces are obscured.

While there haven't been any reports

of widespread use of this tech

by law enforcement agencies in the US,

Chinese authorities have been utilizing it

on the streets of Shanghai and Beijing since at least 2018.

In recent years, there have also been a number of companies

working on creating emotional detection technology

where AI uses biometric data

to determine a person's emotional state

and the likelihood they will become violent

or cause a disturbance.

Wired reporting found that Amazon-powered cameras

have been scanning passengers faces

in eight train stations in the UK

to trial this new technology.

The trials were testing the system

for age and gender recognition

as well as the emotional state of the person on camera.

While there's no current documentation

of this tech being used at protests,

the BBC reported that emotional-detection tech

has been used on Uyghurs in China.

Some of these could be really invasive

because you know, reading your emotions,

there start to be maybe inferences

that someone could make

about how you were feeling in a certain moment

that may or may not be accurate, right?

Because it's sort of being taken out of context.

So it's difficult to have an algorithm

just sort of come to one conclusion.

Like sometimes I think you're doing your angry walk

coming over when I haven't filed my story,

but really then you're really nice about it

and you're like, It's okay Lily, you can do it.

And you know, I took it totally the wrong way.

But potentially there are more sort of

in terms of just identifying someone in a certain place.

It is scary that there's something characteristic

about your walk.

They're not saying, Oh, it's Andrew's angry walk,

but they're saying, Oh, that's Andrew.

Certainly creating more systems that are replicating

what other things like facial recognition do

and applying it in to other biometrics of a person.

That definitely is gonna create all the same concerns

as we've seen with these other technologies

that were emerging, you know, years or decades ago.

But now it's your entire body, how you walk,

and like you mentioned,

like if we're having computers analyze

like how I'm feeling in a certain moment,

effectively establishing intent

of whatever my actions are in that moment,

that gets really scary

because it might be completely inaccurate.

Every time there's one of these new AI technologies,

there's always some bias built in.

There are gonna be people

who suffer consequences unnecessarily

because these systems are deployed

without being fully debugged.

Experts in the AI field have previously noted

that emotional-detection tech is unreliable, immature,

and some even call for the technology

to be banned altogether.

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Here are a few simple and effective ways

to protect yourself and your personal information

at a protest.

First, if you can, leave your phone at home,

I know this might sound drastic,

but the most effective way

to ensure that your personal data isn't compromised

and that your phone won't fall

in the hands of law enforcement

is by not having it with you.

If that's not an option,

you can put your phone in a Faraday bag

so data can't be accessed.

You should also turn off biometrics on your

like facial recognition or fingerprint scanner,

meaning you'll need a code to access it.

That way your face or fingerprints

can't be forcefully used

to access your personal information.

You can always say, You just don't remember the code.

Don't unlock it.

Another thing to keep in mind is posting on social media.

Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU says,

if you post something online,

you should do so under the assumption

that it might be viewed by law enforcement.

You should always check your sharing settings

and make sure you know what posts are public.

Try to minimize the amount of other people's faces

you capture in your photos or videos,

use end-to-end encrypted messaging services

like Signal when possible,

wear a mask in case photos or videos are taken,

and finally, know your personal risks.

Is your immigration status exposing you

to additional dangers?

Are you part of a minority group

that is more likely to be targeted by law enforcement?

Keeping these things in mind

for yourself and your loved ones

when deciding if you should go out to a protest.

For more information about surveillance at protests,

check out wired.com.

This was Incognito Mode. Until next time.

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