{"id":71940,"date":"2016-04-11T12:01:17","date_gmt":"2016-04-11T11:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=71940"},"modified":"2016-04-11T09:54:16","modified_gmt":"2016-04-11T08:54:16","slug":"l-a-activists-want-to-bring-surveillance-conversation-down-to-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/04\/l-a-activists-want-to-bring-surveillance-conversation-down-to-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"L.A. Activists Want to Bring Surveillance Conversation Down to Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

6 Apr 2016 – <\/em>Government surveillance is\u00a0not an abstract thing, says Hamid Khan, coordinator for the\u00a0Stop LAPD Spying Coalition<\/a>.\u00a0For the communities Khan works with in Los Angeles \u2014 from transgender people to recipients of government benefits to the homeless on Skid Row \u2014 surveillance is a daily reality that impacts their lives and exacerbates other societal ills, like mass incarceration and police violence.<\/p>\n

\"STOP-lapd-spying-surveillance<\/a><\/p>\n

Khan\u2019s coalition works to track, publicize, and ultimately dismantle the highly intrusive ways the Los Angeles Police Department surveils the area\u2019s citizens, using an infrastructure of advanced intelligence gathering linked to federal government counterterrorism initiatives.<\/p>\n

The LAPD uses big data for \u201cpredictive policing,\u201d street cameras with highly accurate facial recognition capabilities, Stingrays, and DRT boxes \u2014 which imitate cellphone towers to track nearby phones or jam signals \u2014 automatic license plate readers, body cameras, and drones.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow many different ways are our bodies being constantly tracked, traced, and monitored, not just online?\u201d Khan asked in a phone interview.<\/p>\n

\"Hamid<\/a>

Hamid Khan (right) of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.
Photo: Paulo Freire Lopez<\/p><\/div>\n

Khan, originally from Pakistan, will be speaking at a much-anticipated Georgetown University Center on Privacy & Technology conference on Friday devoted to \u201cThe Color of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of the Black Community<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition had already been around for two years before the world learned about Edward Snowden and his trove of documents about the NSA\u2019s spying operations, Khan said.<\/p>\n

It started in the summer of 2011, when the coalition started inviting different groups of people to meet and talk about what surveillance \u2014 and \u201cbeing a suspect\u201d \u2014 meant to them. Meetings like that still take place every first Monday of the month.<\/p>\n

In March 2013, the coalition published a \u201cPeople\u2019s Audit\u201d of the Los Angeles Police Department\u2019s information sharing, suspicious activity reporting, and predictive policing tactics \u2014 the first of three reports.<\/p>\n

The group has since published<\/a> a diagram of the entire visible \u201carchitecture of surveillance\u201d in L.A., which they say is driven by a hunger for data, aggressive and predictive policing, and corporate profit from surveillance technology.<\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re in a public park picked up on a video camera, tracked through use of your Electronic Benefit Transfer card at the grocery store, or someone reports you for vague \u201csuspicious activity\u201d without any evidence \u2014 the regime of total monitoring takes shape, Khan explained.<\/p>\n

Many of the policies adopted in L.A., he says, were originally developed to fight terrorism overseas \u2014\u00a0including<\/a> predictive policing methods first funded by the U.S. military to track insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now<\/a> they\u2019re \u201cbecoming a part of local policing,\u201d Khan said.<\/p>\n

The coalition discovered that the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, launched in 2008, gives LAPD license to \u201cwrite up secret files on individuals based on speculation and hunches.\u201d The group learned<\/a> from an LAPD inspector general report in 2014 that over 30 percent of these reports are written about black people in L.A. \u2014 where less than 10 percent of the entire population is black. Khan says the LAPD argued those numbers weren\u2019t troubling, because the number of reports overall wasn\u2019t that large. But the group argues it\u2019s still disproportionate.<\/p>\n

And according to intelligence-gathering guidelines published<\/a> in 2012, the FBI can embed informants in political group advocacy meetings for up to six months based on a tip alone, or an \u201cinitial lead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Technology is a big part of the pervasiveness, Khan says. \u201cThe surveillance has always been there, but the rate of technology and information sharing\u201d has outpaced what\u2019s reasonable.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, surveillance and harassment are essentially one and the same. One man featured in a video<\/a> the group produced explained that police officers will linger nearby Skid Row and wait for people to leave for a few minutes, then seize their property as if it were\u00a0abandoned.<\/p>\n

Currently, the group is investigating<\/a> the practice of surveillance of public benefits programs involving the Department of Children and Family Services \u2014 conducting interviews with people who receive public benefits and submitting Freedom of Information Act requests for more information, to determine the extent of the monitoring and how it might affect particularly homeless and poor people.<\/p>\n

The group is also trying to learn more about the LAPD\u2019s predictive policing and the information used to inform the algorithms, to determine what factors indicate to police that a certain neighborhood or person might become dangerous.<\/p>\n

Besides actively challenging surveillance tactics employed by local police, Khan says the group wants to \u201cde-sensationalize\u201d the language of surveillance. We want to \u201cbring it down to every day, 24\/7,\u201d he told me over the phone. Because for many in L.A., \u201cprivacy is not a right but a privilege,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Most people he works with, he said, \u201cdon\u2019t care much about encryption\u201d \u2014 because physical privacy alone is so far out of reach.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Jenna McLaughlin<\/a> – \u2709jenna.mclaughlin@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The LAPD uses big data for \u201cpredictive policing,\u201d street cameras with highly accurate facial recognition capabilities, Stingrays, and DRT boxes \u2014 which imitate cellphone towers to track nearby phones or jam signals \u2014 automatic license plate readers, body cameras, and drones. \u201cHow many different ways are our bodies being constantly tracked, traced, and monitored, not just online?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}