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Content Type: News & Analysis
In a judgment of 14 October 2022, the UK High Court ordered the UK Home Office to provide remedy to the thousands of migrants affected by its unlawful policy and practice of seizing mobile phones from people arriving by small boats to UK shores.
The availability and spread of new technologies, and the exponential amounts of data they generate, are regularly being abused by governments to surveil and control people - but these new forms of surveillance are only starting to make their way through…
Content Type: Examples
Since the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, Minnesota law enforcement agencies have carried out a secretive, long-running surveillance programme targeting journalists and civil rights activists known as Operation Safety Net, a complex surveillance engine that has expanded to include collecting detailed facial images, scouring social media, and tracking mobile phones. Documents obtained via public records requests show that the police continued using the powers granted under OSN to monitor…
Content Type: Examples
According to internal documents obtained by the Brennan Center, the Polish “strategic communications” specialist Edge NPD, whose business is helping companies with market research, provided the Los Angeles Police Department with a free 40-day trial in which it collected nearly 2 million tweets, including thousands relating to six topics, including Black Lives Matter and “defund the police”. LAPD did not ultimately enter into a contract with the company; the documents do not say what the agency…
Content Type: Examples
According to internal documents, the San Francisco Police Department illegally spied on thousands of Bay Area residents protesting in 2020 against the murder of George Floyd and racist police violence. To conduct its surveillance, the SFPD used a network of more than 300 video cameras in downtown’s Union Square even though the city had passed an ordinance in 2019 that banned SFPD and other city agencies from using facial recognition and requiring them to get approval before using other…
Content Type: Examples
At his 2021 trial, prosecutors used previously-unseen infrared footage from FBI airplane surveillance at 9,000 feet to attempt to show that 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse chased one of the two people he later claimed to have shot in self-defence. Rittenhouse travelled from his home in Illinois to Wisconsin to join a protest following the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake. Aerial surveillance of people in public places is legal in the US, but illegal if directed at a single person for an…
Content Type: Press release
Today, the High Court ruled that the Home Secretary acted unlawfully and breached human rights and data protection laws by operating a secret, blanket policy of seizing, retaining and extracting data from the mobile phones of asylum seekers arriving by small boat.
This claim for judicial review was brought by three asylum seeking claimants: HM represented by Gold Jennings, and KA and MH represented by Deighton Pierce Glynn. The Claimants, like thousands of others arriving by small boat, all…
Content Type: News & Analysis
It is difficult to imagine a more intrusive invasion of privacy than the search of a personal or home computer ... when connected to the internet, computers serve as portals to an almost infinite amount of information that is shared between different users and is stored almost anywhere in the world.
R v Vu 2013 SCC 60, [2013] 3 SCR 657 at [40] and [41].
The controversial Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Bill includes provision for extracting data from electronic devices.
The Bill…
Content Type: Explainer
What are ‘cloud extraction tools’ and what do they do?
Cloud extraction technology enables the police to access data stored in your ‘Cloud’ via your mobile phone or other devices.
The use of cloud extraction tools means the police can access data that you store online. Examples of apps that store data in the Cloud include Slack, Instagram, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and Uber.
How might cloud extraction tools be used at a protest?
In order to extract your cloud data, the police would…
Content Type: Explainer
What do mobile phone extraction tools do?
Mobile phone extraction (MPE) tools are devices that allow the police to extract data from mobile phones, including:
contacts;
call data (i.e. who you call, when, and for how long);
text messages (including who you texted and when);
stored files (photos, videos, audio files, documents etc);
app data (including the data stored on these apps);
location information history;
wifi network connections (which can reveal the locations of any…
Content Type: Case Study
Anyone who is arrested should be informed of the reasons for their arrest and any charges against them. Anyone who is detained is also entitled to a trial within a reasonable time, or to be released if no charges are held against them.
Privacy enhances these protections. It provides limitations on the manner in which information can be obtained about you, and the kind of information that can be accessed about you by law enforcement, who can access that information and how they can use it.…