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Law enforcement is compelling Apple and Facebook to hand over the personal information of users who were mass arrested at protests against the inauguration of Donald Trump in Washington, DC, AlterNet has confirmed. The tech giants appear to be complying with the data-mining requests, amid mounting concerns over the heavy-handed crackdown against the more than 200 people detained on January 20, among them journalists, legal observers and medics.
“This is part of an increasing trend of law enforcement attempting to turn the internet, instead of technology for freedom, into technology for control,” Evan Greer, the campaign director for Fight for the Future, told AlterNet. “This trend started long before Trump and seems to be escalating and growing in scale now.”
More than 200 of those picked up in the sweep at the anti-fascist, anti-capitalist bloc have been hit with felony riot charges, which carry penalties of up to ten years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Because the arrests took place in Washington, DC, the cases are being prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which is directly accountable to the Department of Justice, now overseen by the notorious white supremacist Jeff Sessions.
AlterNet viewed a “customer notice” email sent on February 14 by Apple to one of the defendants, who requested anonymity due to the ongoing charges. “On 2017-01-27, Apple Inc. (‘Apple’) received a legal request from United States Attorney’s Office requesting information regarding your Apple account,” the message states.
The individual who received the notice told AlterNet, “My phone wasn’t present at the time of arrest and wasn’t taken.” That individual does not know whether the data has been handed over to prosecutors.
“The most invasive form of surveillance is a warrant. A judge could authorize police to look through every byte of data on someone’s Facebook account,” Michael Price, counsel for the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told AlterNet. “A 2703(d) court order allows police to get metadata about communications, and that could possibly include location information about when communications took place and when a phone was connected to cell tower. A national security letter allows police to get that information but does not require a court order.”
“I don’t know the scope of information,” she said, “because I don’t know what legal instrument was used.”
The Metropolitan Police Department and the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia both refused to comment, citing the pending investigation.
According to Price, “As a general matter, it is not uncommon for law enforcement to seek information from a third-party service provider like Apple or Facebook. It happens all the time.”
“One of my biggest concerns,” he said, “is that police will attempt to use electronic surveillance to get information about the people who were at the protest, in order to compile a list of the people who were present. Is that information going to be mined and used for other purposes? What is the government doing with the data? Are they going to store it? Are they going to send it to an intelligence analyst?”
Lacambra said the investigation raises disturbing questions. “Why is the Department of Justice trying to intrude into the digital lives of people exercising their rights to protest?” she asked. “Is this to intimidate, silence or threaten people for exercising their constitutional rights? When you arrest 230 people, some of whom are medics and legal observers, and try to systematically get to the content of their digital life, that is troubling.”
The anti-capitalist, anti-fascist bloc was part of a day of disruptive protests across Washington, DC, and the world, to interrupt business as usual and register opposition to the rise of Donald Trump, whose cabinet has aggressively delivered on his white supremacist campaign pledges. Since Trump took the White House, millions have taken to the streets, flocked to airports and mobilized to defend their neighborhoods and communities against a multi-pronged assault.
Goldstone, who has defended protesters in Washington, DC, for more than 30 years, underscored that he has “never seen phones seized at protests, let alone phones that were not part of a protest.”
He also said that he has “never seen a felony riot charge in Washington, DC, let alone more than 200 of them.” According to news reports, 214 people have been indicted for these charges so far, indicating that the prosecution plans to move forward with the bulk of the charges.
On January 20, Washington, DC-based lawyer Jeffrey Light filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of those detained charging that “Without warning and without any dispersal order, the police officers kettled all of the plaintiffs.” The lawsuit states, “Defendants John Doe MPD Officers and/or John Doe Park Police Officers deployed a large amount of chemical irritants against the plaintiffs, as well as struck multiple plaintiffs with their batons, and deployed flash-bang grenades.”
The anonymous journalist told AlterNet that, while covering the protests, he was sprayed in the face with what he believes was OC gas. “Two flash-bang grenades fell within three or four feet of me. I had tinnitus in my ears for a couple of minutes. I yelled out for a medic, and by the time I could see, we were completely kettled. I was incapacitated. I had a press badge and tried to tell them I was press.”
Meanwhile, police departments have long been building up their capacity for surveillance. A 10-month investigation by CityLabs.com, a project of The Atlantic, revealed earlier this month that “major police departments around the country are spending millions on cellphone spy tools that can be used to build up massive surveillance databases — with few rules about what happens to the data they capture.” According to the investigation, most of the major police departments in the United States have either cell phone interception devices and/or “cell phone extraction devices, used to crack open locked phones that are in police possession and scoop out all sorts of private communications and content.”
“Tech companies are building business models based on collecting large amounts of personal information and then failing to protect that information from the government and others who attempt to access it,” said Greer, who attended the January 20 protests in Washington, DC. “People should be paying close attention and be concerned.”