ACLU Urges Lawyers to Expose Government Secrets

American Civil Society The Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it is liberating this week’s online resources for criminal defense attorneys it is designed to reveal whether the police use it assessment technology-facial recognition, automatic license readers, gun detection systems, etc. -closing cases against their clients in private.

The tool, which the group says is the first of its kind, is built around hand-crafted rules that, when issued by a judge, compel prosecutors to reveal whether surveillance technology was used against a defendant. It covers a variety of technologies, ranging from “stingray” phone trackers and the place of sale and the sale of goods to AI-generated police reports and forensic tools that intercept calls and siphon data from car infotainment systems.

It also includes retention measures—which require that administrative data be backed up before being automatically deleted—targeting government agencies and private vendors. The document is based on the American criminal law, which was established in 1963, that prosecutors must present all the evidence that can help the defense. That information will be distributed through a password-protected library, the ACLU of Massachusetts says, available only to licensed attorneys.

The group is fighting the fight against unregulated surveillance equipment on two fronts, says Jennifer Herrmann, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and one of the tool’s authors. One front is forcing cities to drop weapons like Groupa network of reading plates, and ShotSpottera way to identify a gun, directly. Another is providing tools to defense attorneys to reveal what they have observed in court.

“The time it takes to use technology and preliminary research to get to court and to challenge the law is long,” says Herrmann – so the proposal gives lawyers a way to “challenge the precedent,” creating a record that carries over to every future instrument.

The project responds to what its authors describe as the long-term uncertainty between when police adopt a new surveillance tool and when courts decide whether its use is legal. Most Americans carried cell phones by the late 1990s, but the United States Supreme Court did not require police to obtain a warrant to search cell phones. until 2018. The delay is not just due to slow moving courts. Technology that has a reputation for revealing the worst has met with very few court rulings because a defendant cannot challenge a device they have not been told about.

Of the materials that accompany the deployment, the ACLU of Massachusetts says that police officers deploy these devices “sometimes without disclosing their use to those who prosecute the case.” For years, the FBI required local police departments to sign confidentiality agreements Before you use cell phones – suitcase-sized devices, often called stingrays, that act as platforms to secretly access calls. In Baltimore, one such agreement advised the plaintiffs that to settle all cases instead of revealing the device in court, as city police used it more than 4,300 times between 2007 and 2015. FBI records obtained later by the ACLU show the agreements. continued until 2020.

Missouri investigators used Fog Reveal, a commercial tool that shows people’s movements using terrain harvested by software, in a 2017 homicide investigation, the Associated Press has learned. there is no detail about it in the test shows that helped to convict the victim’s wife. And when Louisiana authorities obtained an arrest warrant in 2022 for Randal Quran Reid – a man from Georgia. unfamiliar with the face and was held in custody for about a week – the affidavit said he was not identified by the software but by a “reliable source,” according to The Washington Post. The document that authorized his arrest was not identified Why? the police came to suspect him.