You can file this one under: “What in the fuckety fuck?”
Surveillance in the U.S. may be entering a new high in terms of technological advances, while simultaneously hitting a new low in terms of privacy and other matters. And it appears that Fresno, California, is leading the way. You remember Fresno. It seems that the whole truth is just now being told in terms of how deeply committed to channeling Orwell’s Big Brother this town is.
Fresno’s police department is now using technology to assess the threat levels of its residents. Utilizing software that analyzes a variety of data, including social media postings, a threat level can be assigned pretty much the same way a credit score is assigned.
Fresno police swear by their system. It’s housed in a control room that brings to mind the one that Batman (Christian Bale) put Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) in charge of in an effort to key in on The Joker (Heath Ledger) in The Dark Knight. Oh yeah … it’s that kind of party. According to the Washington Post:
“On 57 monitors that cover the walls of the center, operators zoomed and panned an array of roughly 200 police cameras perched across the city. They could dial up 800 more feeds from the city’s schools and traffic cameras, and they soon hope to add 400 more streams from cameras worn on officers’ bodies and from thousands from local businesses that have surveillance systems.”
“The cameras were only one tool at the ready. Officers could trawl a private database that has recorded more than 2 billion scans of vehicle licenses plates and locations nationwide. If gunshots were fired, a system called ShotSpotter could triangulate the location using microphones strung around the city. Another program, called Media Sonar, crawled social media looking for illicit activity. Police used it to monitor individuals, threats to schools and hashtags related to gangs.”
What in the fuckety fuck? My bad—I said that already, didn’t I?
The threat-scoring software that makes sense of all this information is called Beware. So what, exactly, does it do?
“As officers respond to calls, Beware automatically runs the address. The searches return the names of residents and scans them against a range of publicly available data to generate a color-coded threat level for each person or address: green, yellow or red.”
“Exactly how Beware calculates threat scores is something that its maker, Intrado, considers a trade secret, so it is unclear how much weight is given to a misdemeanor, felony or threatening comment on Facebook. However, the program flags issues and provides a report to the user.”
“In promotional materials, Intrado writes that Beware could reveal that the resident of a particular address was a war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, had criminal convictions for assault and had posted worrisome messages about his battle experiences on social media.”
What in the … never mind.
Fresno is doing a lot of questionable things, but it’s not limited to that city. The Washington Post says:
“The number of local police departments that employ some type of technological surveillance increased from 20 percent in 1997 to more than 90 percent in 2013, according to the latest information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The most common forms of surveillance are cameras and automated license plate readers, but the use of handheld biometric scanners, social media monitoring software, devices that collect cellphone data and drones is increasing."
“Locally, the American Civil Liberties Union reports that police in the District, Baltimore, and Montgomery and Fairfax counties have cellphone-data collectors, called cell site simulators or StingRays.”
In Chicago, a judge ruled this week that the city’s police department had to turn over its records regarding the use of Stingrays so that she could review them. Once that’s done, the judge will decide if the records should be made public:
“Stingray devices can scan cellphones for call logs and text messages and have long been criticized as a potentially illegal way for police to monitor civilians without having to explain to a judge the reason for their surveillance. Police departments in at least 15 states have cell site simulators, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been involved in several lawsuits aimed at releasing public documents connected to Stingray use.”
“For years, the Chicago Police Department refused to acknowledge whether it used cell site simulators. Last year, Chicago police released limited records showing that since 2005 the department has been billed hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Florida-based Harris Corp. for the cellphone tracking technology, including upgrades.”
Both Chicago and Fresno have been confronted about spying on Black Lives Matter protest activity in the past year or so.
Not to fear, however. The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), which defends “civil liberties in the digital world,” is on the case. They have called on Congress to regain oversight of domestic surveillance in the U.S. and published a report on why such a move is necessary.
Hopefully, this will sound the wake-up call for the non-Black Lives Matter general public. James Baldwin’s words to Angela Davis in the early 1970s are still relevant: “If they come for you in the morning, they’ll be coming for me that night.”