Methodology
Investigative Lenses
Recurring investigative frames we apply across all research. These are the patterns that show up in story after story, regardless of which beat we are working.
Chilling Effects
The harm is often not the surveillance itself. It comes in the form of anticipatory obedience: things people stop doing because they know or suspect they are being watched. Immigrants stop calling 911. Activists stop organizing publicly. Witnesses stop cooperating. Chilling effects are documented behavioral changes that flow from surveillance awareness, and they are among the hardest harms to quantify, the easiest to ignore, and often the greatest overall effect of surveillance itself. Transparent surveillance practices responsibly focused on those who harm community safety can be a win-win: the public is safer while law enforcement has effective tools, trust, and the respect of the public.
Surveillance Saturation
The ability to track people is only accelerating. From phones to faces, we are approaching a point where anonymous actions, in person or online, will be nearly impossible. Gait recognition, facial recognition, hardware fingerprinting, and pattern recognition mean that soon we can be tracked as we move through the world, browse the internet, travel, seek medical attention, or attend religious ceremonies. As we rapidly approach a world where anonymity is effectively gone, those conducting the surveillance become more powerful, and it becomes harder to call out bad behavior. The surveillance economy is still being built. The time to build guardrails and promote a culture of responsible surveillance is now.
Obscurity through Complexity
Simple systems are easy to discover, report on, and understand. When the goal is transparency, this is a common route. When the goal is to hide behavior, organizations act like criminal enterprises: using shell companies and laundering valuable things through various platforms and programs. When a police department shares contracts with Motorola to engage LexisNexis to upload data to PSDEX, which then provides ICE access to that data, it quickly becomes difficult for citizens and even local governments to understand and properly oversee. When agencies buy an add-on app to avoid the scrutiny that comes with contracting directly with a facial recognition vendor, they add complexity to avoid transparency. Ultimately, obscuring bad behavior is often easier than behaving responsibly. Good journalism, public pressure, and policy change the calculation, rewarding responsibility and bringing accountability to unethical deployments of surveillance technology.
Slippery Slopes & Legal Loopholes
Advanced surveillance technologies used to be the business of local and national governments. As people and politicians became worried about spying, rules were put in place to protect citizen privacy from prying government eyes. The regulations protected from government surveillance, so the surveillance loophole was introduced: pay private entities to do the surveillance for you. Instead of creating and managing a database of civilian movements, interests, associates, and purchases, the government pays a private, often foreign-owned company for an "investigative database subscription" that provides access to even more data. The surveillance ownership has shifted from government to private sector, and the rules about government surveillance no longer apply. A few examples:
Situation
A city or state has sanctuary policies preventing the sharing of information with ICE, but local police are still interested in cooperating with federal immigration authorities.
Loophole
The city contributes data to LexisNexis's Public Safety Data Exchange (PSDEX), which ICE subscribes to and can access directly. The data is not shared directly with ICE. Instead it flows from the local records management system to LexisNexis every 15 minutes or daily, into PSDEX, and then into ICE's investigative case management system. Per the contract, even if the contributing agency requests that all data be deleted, any agency that has downloaded the data is allowed to keep it indefinitely. ICE buys what it cannot compel. The loophole is the product LexisNexis sells.
Situation
A local police department wants to purchase facial recognition, automated license plate recognition, or social media monitoring software, but is unlikely to get public or city council approval.
Loophole
Add the app to your Accurint subscription as an additional charge on your current investigative software. Instead of contracting directly with the vendor, group it in with your already-approved Accurint subscription.
Mass Surveillance
Targeted surveillance focuses investigative resources on a specific person once a reasonable suspicion or probable cause threshold has been met. Mass surveillance gathers data on everyone, treating us all with reasonable suspicion. Gathering and storing the movement of every driver through a city just in case a crime is committed is mass surveillance. Having a system that alerts when a stolen vehicle drives past but does not gather or store data on every vehicle is targeted surveillance.
Undiscerning
Many of our surveillance stories are about systems that are undiscerning between suspects and the general public, or that are unconcerned about collateral damage. Reporting criminal records into a database makes sense, but having your data fed into ICE's investigative system because you called 911 about a stray dog does not. We look for surveillance stories that intentionally sweep up the general public, knowingly surveil bystanders, or justify the harm their system causes as worth the outcome. You don't have to be a suspect. Victim, witness, neighbor, 911 caller, registered vehicle owner: no criminal nexus required to end up in the database.