What To Read/Watch
By situating the rise of the police body camera within its actual legal, political, and economic contexts, I suggest that the body camera is one of the most important Trojan horses in contemporary U.S. history. What follows is a case study of how the police bureaucracy used its own violence as the perfect alibi to get well-meaning people who lacked sufficient information to support greater police procurement budgets, more advanced and efficient technologies of control and incarceration, an explosion of profit for a small group of companies, and an expansion of the capacity of the government to surveil us. And most remarkably: All of it happened under the guise of making the police bureaucracy more “accountable” and “transparent.”
Get the article here.
In this Article, we
contend that scraping must undergo a serious reckoning with privacy law. Scraping violates nearly all of the key principles in privacy laws, including fairness; individual rights and control; transparency; consent; purpose specification and secondary use restrictions; data minimization; onward transfer; and data security. With scraping, data protection laws built around these requirements are ignored.
Get the article here.
The Fourth Amendment—the constitutional protection meant to limit police search powers—has not kept up with the privacy and security threats of these new digital technologies. Current doctrine has remained stymied by legal tests asking all the wrong questions about “reasonable expectations of privacy” and “trespass” searches. While the Supreme Court has acknowledged that “digital is different,” it has not yet provided a coherent theory to protect individuals from growing digital surveillance.
This Article offers an alternative Fourth Amendment theory based on the harm of rummaging.
Get the article here.
THE RECALL: REFRAMED examines the 2018 recall of California Judge Aaron Persky, who lost his judgeship after handing down a sentence deemed too lenient by many in the infamous sexual assault case involving Stanford swimmer Brock Turner. The recall came at the height of the #MeToo movement, and some hailed it as a victory against rape culture, white privilege, and a system stacked against survivors of sexual violence. But there’s more to the story. The film offers competing perspectives and asks the difficult question: Who actually bears the burden when we demand harsher punishment for a privileged white defendant? [Now streaming on Peacock]
The Riders Come Out At Night - by Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
From the Polk Award–winning investigative duo comes a critical look at the systematic corruption and brutality within the Oakland Police Department, and the more than two-decades-long saga of attempted reforms and explosive scandals.
No municipality has been under court oversight to reform its police department as long as the city of Oakland. It is, quite simply, the edge case in American law enforcement.
The Riders Come Out at Night is the culmination of over twenty-one years of fearless reporting. Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham shine a light on the jackbooted police culture, lack of political will, and misguided leadership that have conspired to stymie meaningful reform. The authors trace the history of Oakland since its inception through the lens of the city’s police department, through the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights struggle, the Black Panthers and crack eras, to Oakland’s present-day revival.
Readers will be introduced to a group of sadistic cops known as “The Riders,” whose disregard for the oath they took to protect and serve is on full, tragic, infuriating display. They will also meet Keith Batt, a wide-eyed rookie cop turned whistleblower, who was unwittingly partnered with the leader of the Riders. Other compelling characters include Jim Chanin and John Burris, two civil rights attorneys determined to see reform through, in spite of all obstacles. And Oakland’s deep history of law enforcement corruption, reactionary politics, and social movement organizing is retold through historical figures like Black Panther Huey Newton, drug kingpin Felix Mitchell, district attorney and future Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, and Mayor Jerry Brown.
The Riders Come Out at Night is the story of one city and its police department, but it’s also the story of American policing—and where it’s headed.
Order your copy here.
“For the record, I still blame these two for turning me into an activist by breaking the Domain Awareness Center story in Oakland and changing (derailing?) my life” - Brian Hofer
After hiQ Labs, Is Scraping Public Data Legal? (Guest Blog Post)
Last year, the most important case in the history of web scraping—hiQ Labs, Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp.—settled. After two trips to the 9th Circuit, a remand from the Supreme Court, and nearly six years of motions and posturing, the outcome of the litigation was a permanent injunction against hiQ, a win for LinkedIn, and insolvency for scraper hiQ Labs.
Read Kieran McCarthy blog post here.
A guiding framework to vetting public sector technology vendors
The Challenge
Numerous technology-related proposals compete for attention in the philanthropic space. Approaches and themes vary, but many share an assumption that in addition to reducing inefficiency, technology can also increase equity and justice. Evaluating potential project costs and benefits is complex. Utilizing a “follow the money” approach, advocates have called on philanthropies to fund more responsibly by considering unintended and longer-term consequences of digital technology-enabled and data-driven proposals. This guiding framework was designed to inform those assessments.
What’s in the Report
This guiding framework supports thoughtful evaluation of how new digital technology-based proposals can affect the U.S. public sector, with a particular focus on their impacts on human rights, social and economic justice, and democratic values. It will benefit funders, procurement officers, and advocates evaluating proposed projects that are often framed as “tech for good,” “justice tech,” or public interest technologies.
The framework contains a list of red flags across seven categories: theory of change and value proposition; business model and funding; organizational governance, policies, and practices; product design, development, and maintenance; third-party relationships, infrastructure, and supply chain; government relationships; and community engagement. Each category includes key takeaways, hypothetical scenarios, and suggested questions, in addition to deeper dive resources for areas of interest. The framework can be used in conjunction with your current due diligence process and during multiple proposal evaluation stages.
This project was spearheaded by: Cynthia Conti-Cook, Technology Fellow at Ford Foundation
The Foundation commissioned: Taraaz to carry out the project.
The research was developed and undertaken by: Roya Pakzad, Sarah Ariyan Sakha, and David Liu.
Secure Justice Exec. Dir. Brian Hofer served on the advisory team for this report.
Download Report Here.
by Catherine Crump (Advisory Board Member, and UC Berkeley Professor of Law)
Download the May 15, 2022 version here.
This document provides an overview of how lower courts have applied the Supreme Court’s landmark location tracking case, Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. ___, 138 S. Ct. 2206 (2018), to other digital searches. Below I identify various government electronic surveillance techniques and flag cases where courts have addressed whether the technique at issue is a search in light of Carpenter. I have tried to identify the major cases, but this document is not comprehensive, and focuses primarily on federal circuit court and state Supreme Court decisions that decide the issue on federal Fourth Amendment grounds.
I plan to update this document occasionally. The most recent version will be viewable at https://n2t.net/ark:/85779/j4ww8w
by Andrew Ferguson
(American University Washington College of Law Professor, and author of The Rise of Big Data Policing)
Download the paper here.
How should society respond to police surveillance technologies? This question has been at the center of national debates around facial recognition, predictive policing, and digital tracking technologies. It is a debate that has divided activists, law enforcement officials, and academics and will be a central question for years to come as police surveillance technology grows in scale and scope. Do you trust police to use the technology without regulation? Do you ban surveillance technology as a manifestation of discriminatory carceral power that cannot be reformed? Can you regulate police surveillance with a combination of technocratic rules, policies, audits, and legal reforms? This Article explores the taxonomy of past approaches to policing technologies and—finding them all lacking—offers the “tyrant test” as an alternative.
The tyrant test focuses on power. Because surveillance technology offers government a new power to monitor and control citizens, the response must check that power. The question is how, and the answer is to assume the worst. Power will be abused, and constraints must work backwards from that cynical starting point. The tyrant test requires institutional checks that decenter government power into overlapping community institutions with real authority and enforceable individual rights.
The tyrant test borrows its structure from an existing legal framework also designed to address the rise of a potentially tyrannical power—the United States Constitution and, more specifically, the Fourth Amendment. Fearful of a centralized federal government with privacy invading intentions, the Fourth Amendment—as metaphor and methodology—offers a guide to approaching surveillance; it allows some technologies but only within a self-reinforcing system of structural checks and balances with power centered in opposition to government. The fear of tyrannical power motivated the original Fourth Amendment and still offers lessons for how society should address the growth of powerful, new surveillance technologies.