People who take part in Saturday's mass "No Kings" protest against President Donald Trump's administration may be targeted for federal government surveillance with a range of technology that could include facial recognition and phone hacking, civil libertarians said.
"No Kings" organizers expect 2,600 rallies across all 50 U.S. states. But the level of surveillance at protests and the type of technology in use is likely to be both location-specific and dependent on the police forces present, said Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Friday.
"Under previous administrations, law enforcement surveillance of peaceful demonstrations was already commonplace and corrosive of free expression," Ryan Shapiro, executive director of government transparency group Property of the People, said in an email Friday.
"Given Trump's open hostility to even minor dissent, such surveillance now poses an existential threat to what remains of American democracy and only underscores the need for mass protest." One federal law enforcement agency, the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been implementing Trump's immigration crackdown and has amassed a digital surveillance arsenal, according to various news outlets.
Surveillance isn't limited to federal agencies. Multiple local police departments have used facial recognition technology, with laws governing its use varying from state to state, news outlet Stateline reported in February. Nate Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that different technologies have different legal requirements and require specific court authorization for focused and limited use. But it's not easy to prove that a specific person was included in an inappropriate collection of data, Wessler said.
"This is a recurring problem in trying to constrain government's use of surveillance technologies," he said in an interview. "They are often designed to work surreptitiously and it can be extremely hard to prove whether you or any particular person was swept up in this kind of surveillance." The Trump administration "sidelined or fired Homeland Security staffers who might have curbed surveillance "excesses," said Don Bell, policy counsel for the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight.
Although the first “No Kings” protest in June overwhelmingly drew peaceful, festival-like crowds, Trump and his allies have increasingly criticized the follow-up event and described the protesters as terrorists, Hamas supporters, and far-left agitators. The accusations, made without presenting any evidence, have made some observers anxious.
“Even just what lawmakers are saying is very different this time around,” Klosowski said. “I’m a little more worried this time than I was last time.”
Plans for "No Kings" protests have drawn the attention of at least one of the U.S. government’s domestic intelligence "fusion centers" established after the 9/11 attacks, according to an alert obtained by Property of the People.
The document from the Central California Intelligence Center identified Sacramento, Fresno, and Stockton among dozens of "No Kings" protest sites.
Noting that while the protests were billed as “nonviolent action,” the center said additional intelligence reports were being planned on the rallies. The center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The National Fusion Center Association did not directly address questions about October 18 plans, but referred Reuters to a 2011 federal document, listing recommendations for law enforcement agencies regarding "First Amendment-Protected Events."
Idk if this was a thing anywhere else, but in New Orleans, this rally felt so different than the last one. Not really in a good way.
Security was there in yellow vests with radios. Allegedly they were supposed to be local activists who has been trained by the organization Indivisible, but they definitely looked like either off duty cops or feds. Like they really stuck out, and we noticed them as soon as we got there bc we were kind of worried they might be with a nationalist group.
I'm not sure they were actually with Indivisible. They could have been feds who just got yellow vests and infiltrated/were impersonating the activist security, but they definitely weren't activists.
They were dispersed through the crowd, and at one point they got together in a huddle to discuss some stuff near the group I was with. We kind of eavesdropped bc they seemed so sheisty, and ended up overhearing them saying they had put detail on somebody in the crowd who seemed suspicious to them.
Did they do anything against the person?
Are you sure they weren’t just trying to protect you?
It is smart to look for MAGAts who could start problems.
I have no idea what they did after they dispersed again or who they were talking about. There were way too many people there to keep track of them.
I didn't even find out that Indivisible had supposedly trained local activists as security until after we left the rally. The group of people I saw huddled and discussing that protestor, were dressed as security, but didn't look like activists.
Discussing putting a surveillance detail on somebody doesn't sound like something you would learn as an activist via standard safety and de-escalation training.
If they were feds or state-federal partners, it's impossible to believe (now more than ever), that whatever they were doing undercover at a protest had to do with keeping the Americans protesting safe.
These are the loyalists who are acting as secret police all over the country to help overthrow the government for the far right, one city and town at a time. There is a frightening amount of overlap in the venn diagram of loyalists left in the state and federal government, and people who either hold extremist beliefs or are ok normalizing them for a paycheck.
The group (being dismissed by the media as kids despite being 24-40 y/o) who just got caught texting each other about Hitler and gas chamber showers, weren't even in a traditional extremist group. They were just leaders of their local Republican party.
The article mentions at least one known state fusion center targeting No Kings. These fusion centers are part of DHS, and were created after 9/11. They have always existed to surveill and spy on American citizens, and they work in conjunction with the task force (JTTF) that Trump directed to go after "Antifa" in NSPM-7.
Here are all the state-federal partners in my local fusion center that could have been doing this sort of surveillance even before Trump 2.0:
I actually saw some of those guys yesterday! I my situation they were escorting/ushering two pro-Israel counter protesters. I didn't notice anything like that last time. I also noticed several guys masked up and in gloves ready for battle, a few in helmets that were definitely cops or very serious protesters.