Albuquerque Police Engaged in Secret Intelligence Gathering Operation
counterpunch.org
counterpunch.org
There has, of course, been no real evidence of success. A promising change in local crime trends seems to be more a result of significant reform of the DA's office than anything APD has done. APD's main contribution to the effort has been harassing anyone who happens to be near downtown at night, including people who live and work there. That and shooting someone on occasion.
What is perhaps most surprising about these programs is how little attention they have received from the public. While APD's abuse of force and corruption problems are widely known and one of the area's foremost political issues, there is almost no discussion of APD's mass surveillance programs even among police abolition groups. It seems to reflect the general trend that mass surveillance is a much great topic of discussion in the tech community than outside of it.
All that said, my real comment is that this program seems unsurprising and of little import compared to the real-time crime center, its privacy implications, and ongoing internal problems including chronic high turnover and sudden dismissals (which tends to suggest problems that were not publicized), hiring a director with a history of internal affairs problems, etc. And then even that seems like a small matter in the context that APD has been under a department of justice consent decree resulting from a pattern of excessive force for six years now and has only just in the last few months finished making the policy changes required by DoJ, with the independent monitor reporting that compliance with those new policies is extremely poor.
I guess it's just hard to get too fired up about APD being run by major retailers when it's been clear for years that APD does not answer to the people, the city government, or the federal government. Being in the pocket of Target is downright wholesome compared to what we expect from APD.
Look on the bright side: APD has it together compared to BCSO. Sheriff Gonzales resisted implementation of body cameras for years until the state legislature took the matter into their own hands and mandated cameras for all law enforcement agencies. After a series of gaffs including Sheriff Gonzales announcing that he thought officers owning smart phones was sufficient to meet the mandate, the media has enjoyed discussing what will happen when they blow through the deadline and BCSO no longer meets statutory requirements to exercise law enforcement authority.
It appears that the specific colo being used was also a major NSA bulk intel collection point. The site was codenamed WAXTITAN and it was part of the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program (we know this because of the Snowden leaks).
I wrote a small script to take screenshots of every DHS Fusion a Center site that was part of #BlueLeaks [1]. Some of the sites are very strange looking.
Data Foundry and Netsential were also part of a series of bizarre allegations made by a former employee back in 2014 and posted to Cryptome.org in some detail. They were serious enough Data Foundry had to write a series of articles and posts denying then. I tried to merge what we know now with what was originally claimed back in 2014 here [2].
[1] - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qyqd8m7goj6uruh/AADM-6C7L7sy4XTad...
We are watching police departments attempt to seize power and form isolated fiefdoms in real time. Outside of the scope of this article but the NYPD, and Portsmouth, Va police are just a few egregious examples.
This sticky relationship will only amplify when the public sector gains more and more capability from the private sector folded into SOP.
Our civilization--our contract with each other and the government--includes a reasonable expectation of privacy and of freedom from unreasonable searches: basic human rights. A court would be needed to violate privacy. It was sufficient in the distant past to use that kind of language before tech.
With tech, you have a massive data wake as you go about an ordinary life, largely open source for anyone to buy, share, and aggregate. Nobody needs to tail you or subpoena your records. The aggregation from widely disparate sources allows connections and inferences as well as allowing inverse searches: fishing expeditions.
Remember how Target was figuring out who was pregnant before they even knew? That was 2012 and it was only one store. Now you can add in many, many aggregations like license plates and face rec and credit history, assistant devices recording every utterance, browsing and lingering behaviors in stores with cameras. All corporate assets. It's in the government's interest to buy and sell along with the retailers.
Not only don't you need a court order to look into someone's mind, but it's a valuable commodity now.
Everyone leaving a data wake, as you describe it, is a good thing if you're not committing crimes and/or are the victim of one. As an example, we had case locally where an elderly couple were found dead from arson in their house. The cops arrested the Son and he spent 9 months in jail until the geofence warrant came back from Google. There was a hit in the house 20 minutes before the 911 call. Son is released and the real killer arrested. Without that data wake that story (probably) ends up with the son in jail for life and the real killer free.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ajc.com/news/man-no-longer-...
* The Panopticon experiment shows that constant surveillance has deleterious effects on all people, not just "bad" ones. It is a form of control. [1]
* Authoritarian regimes everywhere deploy information apparatus to control their people. Eg the Stasi [2], and now everywhere.
Do you really want to participate in a global, authoritarian, totalitarian society? That's what we're building here.
"Those Who Would Give Up Liberty for Safety, Deserve Neither"
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument
1. https://exploringyourmind.com/the-panopticon-effect-someones...
If you don't trust the police department not to abuse information to intimidate their critics, which we don't, you don't want them to have this kind of unmonitored, unregulated access to private intelligence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... (sort by total property crime)
I don't think they need much help with that sort of thing, it seems to be pretty throughly figured out.
If we wanted to solve property crime, we would probably do two things - arrest the fences who buy stolen goods, and give addicts free drugs.
First home after college, we didn't own anything worth more than ten bucks, minimum wage it was crazy. But someone broke in and gave it a go anyway.
It felt awful.
Felt better after the police arrived, but seriously what else are they going to do?
The police should arrest the fucking fences and openly advocate giving addicts drugs.
Seriously, the fences aren't hard to find: they openly do things like sellobviously near-new and second hand cordless drills with battery but no charger, while at the same time advertising a rather odd collection of other random items.
People are doing carriable item theft for only handful of reasons: fun, or they need the cash.
Edit: typo and grammar errors galore!
But whatever, mate.
Arresting an obvious fence and charging them with possessing stolen properly wouldn't be a complete waste of resources like half of policing already is.
But no, that's too hard. They've got their hands full choking people to death for selling loose cigarettes.