[Pnews] Forget the NSA, the LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks

[Prisoner News]

  Forget the NSA, the LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks

by Darwin Bond-Graham 
<http://www.laweekly.com/authors/darwin-bond-graham/> and Ali Winston 
<http://www.laweekly.com/authors/ali-winston/> Thursday, Feb 27 2014
*http://www.laweekly.com/los-angeles/forget-the-nsa-la-cops-spy-on-millions-of-innocent-folks/Content?oid=4473467&mode=print*

Edward Snowden ripped the blinds off the surveillance state last summer 
with his leak of top-secret National Security Agency documents, forcing 
a national conversation about spying in the post-9/11 era. However, 
there's still no concrete proof that America's elite intelligence units 
are analyzing most Americans' computer and telephone activity --- even 
though they can.

Los Angeles and Southern California police, by contrast, are expanding 
their use of surveillance technology such as intelligent video 
analytics, digital biometric identification and military-pedigree 
software for analyzing and predicting crime. Information on the identity 
and movements of millions of Southern California residents is being 
collected and tracked.

In fact, Los Angeles is emerging as a major laboratory for testing and 
scaling up new police surveillance technologies. The use of 
military-grade surveillance tools is migrating from places like Fallujah 
to neighborhoods including Watts and even low-crime areas of the San 
Fernando Valley, where surveillance cameras are proliferating like 
California poppies in spring.

The use of militarized surveillance technology appears to be spreading 
beyond its initial applications during the mid-2000s in high-crime areas 
to now target narrow, specific crimes such as auto theft. Now, LAPD and 
the Los Angeles County Sheriff are monitoring the whereabouts of 
residents whether they have committed a crime or not. The biggest 
surveillance net is license plate reading technology that records your 
car's plate number as you pass police cruisers equipped with a rooftop 
camera, or as you drive past street locations where such cameras are 
mounted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties 
Union of Southern California are suing LAPD and the Sheriff's 
Department, demanding to see a sample week's worth of that data in order 
to get some idea of what cops are storing in a vast and growing, 
regionally shared database. (See our story "License Plate Recognition 
Logs Our Lives Long Before We Sin," 
<http://www.laweekly.com/2012-06-21/news/license-plate-recognition-tracks-los-angeles/> 
June 21, 2012.)

Two dozen police agencies have gathered more than 160 million data 
points showing the exact whereabouts of L.A.-area drivers on given dates.

Despite growing concerns among privacy-rights groups, LAPD hopes to 
greatly expand its mass surveillance: The city traffic-camera system --- 
460 cameras set above major roads and intersections by the Department of 
Transportation --- which now are used to monitor traffic jams, could be 
folded into LAPD's surveillance network.

Los Angeles City Councilman Mitchell Englander wants to convert the 
system's video feeds to a digital format used by automated license-plate 
readers. Despite L.A. crime levels being at historic lows, Englander 
insists, "It is vital that the LAPD have instant split-feed access to 
the 460 traffic cameras ... and be able to review this data to catch 
suspected criminals and protect our community."

LAPD's mild-sounding "predictive policing" technique, introduced by 
former Chief William Bratton to anticipate where future crime would hit, 
is actually a sophisticated system developed not by cops but by the U.S. 
military, based on "insurgent" activity in Iraq and civilian casualty 
patterns in Afghanistan.

Records obtained by /L.A. Weekly/ from the U.S. Army Research Office 
show that UCLA professors Jeff Brantingham and Andrea Bertozzi 
(anthropology and applied mathematics, respectively) in 2009 told the 
Army that their predictive techniques "will provide the Army with a 
plethora of new data-intensive predictive algorithms for dealing with 
insurgents and terrorists abroad." In a later update to the Army, after 
they had begun working with LAPD, they wrote, "Terrorist and insurgent 
activities have a distinct parallel to urban crime."

This month, LAPD sent a team to Israel, the /Jewish Journal/ reports, to 
visit drone manufacturers and Nice Systems, a cyber-intelligence firm 
<http://www.jewishjournal.com/nation/article/lapd_scopes_out_israeli_drones_big_data_solutions1> 
that can "intercept and instantly analyze video, audio and text-based 
communications." Reporter Simone Wilson quoted Horace Frank, commander 
of LAPD's Information Technology Bureau, as telling an Israeli 
conference of data intelligence experts: "Let's be honest ... We're here 
to steal some of your great ideas."

Max Blumenthal, a journalist and fierce critic of Israel, tweeted: "LAPD 
delegation heads to Israel to learn lessons in control, domination and 
exclusion."

With L.A. and most U.S. cities --- including those that don't use 
predictive algorithms and license-plate recognition --- enjoying a huge 
drop in violent crime, some are indeed questioning this liberal city's 
embrace of war and spy technology.

Ana Muniz, an activist and researcher who works with the Inglewood-based 
Youth Justice Coalition, says, "Any time that a society's military and 
domestic police force become more and more similar, where the lines have 
become blurred, it's not a good story."

The military is supposed to "defend the territory from so-called 
external enemies," Muniz says. "That's not the mission of the police 
force --- they're not supposed to look at the population as an external 
enemy."

L.A. residents may not yet grasp that more and more military technology 
is being aimed at them in the name of fighting routine crime. But Hamid 
Khan, an Open Society Foundations fellow who studies LAPD surveillance, 
warns, "Counterinsurgency principles are being incorporated on the local 
policing level."

In 2010, LAPD announced a partnership with Motorola Solutions to monitor 
the Jordan Downs public housing project with surveillance cameras. 
Then-chief Bratton called it the start of an ambitious buildout to use 
remote "biometric identification," which can track individuals citywide.

In a letter to the Los Angeles City Council, Bratton claimed that CCTV 
"will enable police to respond more effectively to criminal conduct," 
and that "facial-recognition technologies will be used to enable law 
enforcement to more effectively enforce the gang injunction already in 
place."

Then in January 2013, LAPD announced the deployment of more than a dozen 
live-monitored CCTV cameras in the Topanga and Foothill divisions in the 
San Fernando Valley. The cameras are equipped with facial-recognition 
software --- purportedly programmed to ID people named on "hot lists" 
for having open warrants or because they were documented as active gang 
members.

Operated by LAPD's Tactical Technology Section, these cameras feed 
facial imagery to LAPD's Real-time Analysis and Critical Response Center 
(RACR), a digital "war room" 
<http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2012/02/08/lapd-pioneers-high-tech-crime-fighting-war-room/> 
that also creates up-to-the-minute crime mapping.

RACR opened in early 2012. The /Weekly/ could not obtain a comment from 
LAPD on the efficacy of its live-monitored facial ID rollout, but the 
question remains whether all this is necessary.

Raytheon, which last year sold $13 billion in weapons to the Department 
of Defense, has a major contract with LAPD to outfit patrol vehicles 
with video cameras.

"Smart video" programs can use facial recognition to ID people by 
comparing live CCTV footage to mugshot databases built from facial scans 
collected by police using mobile devices or during bookings. Computer 
programs also can learn "acceptable behavior" by humans --- such as 
pedestrian or vehicular traffic patterns --- and alert cops when 
something "abnormal"' occurs.

LAPD already is using a sophisticated intelligence-analysis program from 
Silicon Valley firm Palantir, which is partially funded by In-Q-Tel, the 
Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital firm. Palantir 
<http://timshorrock.com/?p=1811> sells data-mining and analysis software 
to the NSA and other intelligence agencies.

LAPD did not respond to requests for comment about the Palantir 
intelligence program. But Peter Bibring, a staff attorney with the ACLU 
of Southern California, has seen at least one Suspicious Activity Report 
from LAPD in which investigators used Palantir's intelligence-analysis 
software to delve into "license plates, leads and suspect profiles."

(Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs, are citizen- or police-generated 
tips about potential terrorist activities; they are controversial 
because they rely on the "reasonable indication" standard for 
investigating, rather than the tougher crime standard of "reasonable 
suspicion.")

Whitney Richards-Calathes, a doctoral student at the City University of 
New York, who studies predictive policing and other tech-centric law 
enforcement trends, warns, "We have to be really critical about the 
built-in assumptions made when ... databases are created for 'public 
safety,' yet youth as young as 9 and 10 years old are put in these 
secret databases, automatically labeled as gang members."

Hamid Khan sees a situation developing in L.A. that might give some 
people pause: the spread of intelligence gathering by local police, 
using the lower standard of "reasonable indications" instead of 
"reasonable suspicion," thus fueling "a culture of suspicion and fear" 
in many of L.A.'s nonwhite communities.

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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