On the other hand, if done right, policies governing the collection and sharing of intelligence and the state and local police level can go a long way towards shielding our local communities and their most vulnerable members from unwanted federal harassment and repression. No study of American domestic surveillance gone wrong would be complete without mention of the horrible example of J.
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From the s through the early s, the FBI under Hoover ran a domestic surveillance and espionage program targeting black Americans, suspected communists, Vietnam War resisters, and left-wing dissidents. At its height, the FBI had five thousand informants on its payroll, working in the civil rights and antiwar movements to try to cripple them from within.
An infamous memo from FBI headquarters urged agents to get more aggressive with their field interrogations of members of radical leftist groups. Congressman Frank Church led a committee to investigate domestic political spying. Edgar Hoover was a master at political blackmail, making him an untouchable for decades in D. In light of these and other disturbing revelations about the activities of U. Also, for the first time in U. The FBI was supposed to focus on people committing serious, interstate crimes—not people with unpopular political views, or religious or racial minorities. The guidelines aimed to create and enforce a new institutional culture at the FBI, one focused on crime instead of policing dissent.
Those attorney general guidelines generally held for nearly thirty years, until September 11, After the attacks, everything changed. DHS immediately got to work building an infrastructure to connect law enforcement and intelligence agencies, up and down and across government, from the local level all the way up to the National Security Agency NSA. That policy change set the tone for a federally integrated state and local law enforcement community, suddenly focused on counterterrorism and newly recognized as intelligence partners in the national effort.
From the local level all the way up, the wall between intelligence and criminal matters came down, the gloves came off, and the consequences have been devastating. The institutional culture, once reformed, had swung back in the direction of limitless state power. These were changes for the worse—both for civil liberties and public safety.
'ER,' 'Stand and Deliver' actress fatally shot by police
The institutional table was set to repeat the worst excesses of the Hoover era, but this time, the federal intelligence bureaucracy had two powerful new tools: advanced information sharing systems integrating state and local police with the federal intelligence architecture, and digital technologies that facilitate mass surveillance and data overload. But this overly broad approach to suspicious activity reporting has not, in practice, worked to deter terrorism—even as it has caused real discriminatory harm.
But the SARs program is hardly unique in at least one core sense: law enforcement officials across the country have long engaged in racially discriminatory surveillance programs targeting people not suspected of crimes, through both gang databases and the notorious tactic of stopping, frisking, and questioning people on the street.
State and local enforcement officials at these fusion centers sit side—by-side with their federal counterparts, including agents from the FBI and ICE, and share intelligence. The results are predictably bad—particularly for black and brown youth. One recent case in Boston illustrates precisely the harms that can come to youth of color when the perfect storm of federal-local intelligence sharing, disparate enforcement and surveillance against people of color, and suspicionless monitoring is unleashed on a community.
In that case, documented by the Intercept , a teenaged El Salvadoran immigrant was at his high school in the predominately Latinx neighborhood of East Boston when an argument broke out near him in the cafeteria. Despite the fact that no physical violence occurred, Boston School Police later looked at video surveillance footage of the incident and documented the student as a suspected gang member in an incident report.
The report was then forwarded to the BRIC. I sincerely doubt that a lunchroom dispute would result in this information being sent to BRIC were they not poor kids of color. In November , an ICE agent told CBS News the agency relies on gang determinations, often made by state and local police departments without establishing a nexus to criminal activity, in order to prevent detained immigrants from being released at bond hearings. Alternatively, someone could be identified as a gang member by BPD if police officers conducting social media surveillance saw a photograph of someone wearing a certain color 4 points , using a certain nickname 4 points , and standing next to someone who is already included in the database 2 points.
Once the information about the young man in Boston was sent to the regional fusion center, the BRIC, it ended up in the hands of federal agents. These policies should bar the collection, retention, and sharing of information that is not directly linked to well-founded suspicion of specific criminal acts. Police departments and fusion centers should institute policies mandating a criminal predicate requirement for intelligence collection, retention, and sharing. Doing so will go a long way toward preventing scenarios like the one that unfolded in East Boston that led to an innocent student landing in immigration detention, fighting a deportation order.
Better intelligence policy will also protect young people of color who are citizens from law enforcement harassment and even incarceration due to often arbitrary and secretive inclusion in gang databases. Specifically, policies should require that law enforcement officials have reasonable suspicion to believe someone is involved in criminal activity before collecting, maintaining, or sharing information about that person—with specific, clearly delineated exceptions, for example in missing persons cases.
If the matter involves First Amendment protected activity or association, policy should dictate that law enforcement may only collect, maintain, or share information that specifically relates to the suspected criminal activity. Some police departments and cities have already taken steps to align their information gathering with civil liberties and racial justice.
In June, , the Providence, Rhode Island mayor signed a far-reaching police oversight ordinance into law. The ordinance bars Providence police from considering race, political views, ethnicity, language, and housing status when determining whether they have reasonable suspicion to believe someone has engaged in—or will soon engage in—criminal activity.
Daily News Release
When state and local law enforcement officers work on JTTFs, they are deputized as federal agents. Memoranda of understanding MOUs obtained by the ACLU through public records requests show that when local departments and agencies assign officers to work on the task forces, those state and local employees follow federal rules for intelligence gathering and surveillance. For example, in California and other states, state and local police are required to obtain warrants to track cell phones. Federal agents operating in California, and those local police officers deputized as federal agents on JTTFs, are not necessarily required to do so—even if state law requires it.
These frameworks make it impossible to hold local and state law enforcement officials accountable for their work on JTTFs. Again, agents and task force members do not even need to suspect someone of involvement in criminal activity before opening such an assessment.
So, while a local community pays, the local officer is allowed to use more permissible federal rules regarding surveillance, and his or her local community members may be in the dark about what that local officer is actually doing with those local dollars. And worse still, if the local officer is sued as a result of his work with a JTTF, the local department is required, under the terms of the MOU, to pay out any adverse settlements or judgments.
Court of Appeals of Virginia Unpublished Opinions
But communities and individuals who have been monitored, harassed, or threatened by JTTF operations or their task force officers may see their role differently. To those groups, the JTTFs likely appear more interested in solidifying and expanding the power of their own bureaucracy, and protecting the political, social, and economic status quo—often at the expense and on the backs of marginalized communities. Other times, their operations have been even more nakedly political, involving the harassment, intimidation, and monitoring of dissidents.
In both types of cases recounted below, public trust in the FBI suffers—particularly among Muslim, immigrant, and dissident populations—with no demonstrable benefit to public safety. Department of Justice have been charged with material support for terrorism, criminal conspiracy, immigration violations, or making false statements—vague, nonviolent offenses that give prosecutors wide latitude for scoring quick convictions or plea bargains. But while the government may not actually view these people it has convicted of terrorism offenses as threats to the United States, its officials nonetheless marshal those prosecutions as supposed evidence of an existential threat requiring billions of dollars in annual expenditures and nearly limitless authority for law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
As you might expect, Muslims in the United States—like their coreligionists in foreign countries under attack by U. People in the United States are far more likely to die from routine gun violence than from acts of political terror, but the FBI and its top officials routinely describe Muslim terrorism as the greatest domestic security threat facing the United States. Despite those facts, the substantial number of FBI investigations targeting Muslims conducted each year is used to justify ever-expanding FBI budgets and surveillance powers.
The FBI budget would not be as flush if it were waging a global war against television sets, toddlers, the right-wing, or heterosexuality, nor would it be granted the sweeping powers it now holds. Muslims in America are a much easier and more politically useful target. The FBI has worked to develop a network of unpaid informants throughout all reaches of U. The dismissal of the s U.
Obituaries
But in the War on Terror era, the degree and intensity of JTTF spying on dissidents increased exponentially, fueled by new powers, resources, relationships, and technologies. In , a police officer in St. In recent years that abuse has continued, including sending undercover agents and informants to infiltrate peaceful social justice groups, as well as surveillance of, documenting, and reporting on lawful political activity under counterterrorism authorities.
What is clear is that the FBI and its JTTFs too often conflate activism that challenges powerful corporations and the government with terrorism. No state or local police department should collaborate with a federal agency that has done what the JTTFs have done.
Disclaimer
Communities of color, immigrants, Muslims, and dissidents already have good reason not to trust the FBI. Those concerns predate the Trump administration, but its outright hostility towards Muslims, immigrants, and dissidents makes this divorce from federal agencies all the more urgent. Some localities are already moving in this direction.
Furthermore, state and local officials should mandate that if any of their police officers are deputized as federal agents to work on federal task force operations must abide by state and local law, not federal law, when the former is more protective of civil rights and privacy. Our state and local police departments should not facilitate deportation, the use of immigration status as a coercive tool to force cooperation with law enforcement, unconstitutional surveillance, or racial or religious profiling.