How Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Helped Police Target Black Activists
Calling it a “stroke of luck” that the BPD renewed their Geofeedia contract only days before the protests, the study reveals that law enforcement used facial recognition software to identify specific protestors from social media photos. They then matched that information to outstanding warrants and arrested protestors “directly from the crowd.”
Police secretly track cellphones to solve routine crimes:
The crime itself was ordinary: Someone smashed the back window of a parked car one evening and ran off with a cellphone. What was unusual was how the police hunted the thief.
Detectives did it by secretly using one of the government’s most powerful phone surveillance tools — capable of intercepting data from hundreds of people’s cellphones at a time — to track the phone, and with it their suspect, to the doorway of a public housing complex. They used it to search for a car thief, too. And a woman who made a string of harassing phone calls.
In one case after another, USA TODAY found police in Baltimore and other cities used the phone tracker, commonly known as a stingray, to locate the perpetrators of routine street crimes and frequently concealed that fact from the suspects, their lawyers and even judges. In the process, they quietly transformed a form of surveillance billed as a tool to hunt terrorists and kidnappers into a staple of everyday policing.
Source: USA Today