By AJ Vicens and Raphael Satter
(Reuters) -People who take part in Saturday’s mass “No Kings” protest against President Donald Trump’s administration may be targeted for federal government surveillance with a range of technology that could include facial recognition and phone hacking, civil libertarians said.
“No Kings” organizers expect 2,600 rallies across all 50 U.S. states. But the level of surveillance at protests and the type of technology in use is likely to be both location-specific and dependent on the police forces present, said Thorin Klosowski, a security and privacy activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said Friday.
For instance, crowds in Washington, D.C., where anti-scale fencing has been erected around the White House complex, are likely to be surveilled differently than those in a small rural town.
“Under previous administrations, law enforcement surveillance of peaceful demonstrations was already commonplace and corrosive of free expression,” Ryan Shapiro, executive director of government transparency group Property of the People, said in an email Friday.
“Given Trump’s open hostility to even minor dissent, such surveillance now poses an existential threat to what remains of American democracy and only underscores the need for mass protest.”
One federal law enforcement agency, the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been implementing Trump’s immigration crackdown and has amassed a digital surveillance arsenal, according to various news outlets.
That includes facial recognition and phone hacking tools, as well as cell site simulators, which can allow for granular surveillance of protesters’ mobile phones. Multiple federal agencies have deployed social media monitoring, according to the Brennan Center.
HIGH-TECH TOOLS
Earlier this year, the Trump administration deployed MQ-9 Predator drones, aircraft traditionally used to spot and kill enemies in combat zones, over Los Angeles during anti-ICE protests. The agency also uses lower tech tools, such as the high-definition cameras regularly seen at recent protests in Chicago.
Department of Homeland Security officials didn’t directly respond to a query about potential surveillance of “No Kings” protesters. “As it does every day, DHS law enforcement will enforce the laws of our nation,” the department said in a statement. An ICE spokesperson told Reuters in an email Saturday that “the First Amendment protects speech and peaceful assembly — not rioting. DHS is taking reasonable and constitutional measures to uphold the rule of law and protect our officers.”
Surveillance isn’t limited to federal agencies. Multiple local police departments have used facial recognition technology, with laws governing its use varying from state to state, news outlet Stateline reported in February.
Nate Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said that different technologies have different legal requirements and require specific court authorization for focused and limited use. But it’s not easy to prove that a specific person was included in an inappropriate collection of data, Wessler said.
“This is a recurring problem in trying to constrain government’s use of surveillance technologies,” he said in an interview. “They are often designed to work surreptitiously and it can be extremely hard to prove whether you or any particular person was swept up in this kind of surveillance.”
The Trump administration “sidelined or fired” Homeland Security staffers who might have curbed surveillance “excesses,” said Don Bell, policy counsel for the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight.
“One of the reasons why the use of these technologies is uniquely dangerous is that there are virtually no legal guardrails in place to prevent mass surveillance, and what did exist has been bulldozed,” Bell said in an email.
Wessler said drones collecting footage raise concerns about government chilling of First Amendment rights. “If you have a group of overwhelmingly peaceful protesters with a permit in the streets doing their thing, there’s no good reason why you should have a drone watching everything they do,” Wessler said.
SOME ANXIOUS PROTESTORS
Although the first “No Kings” protest in June overwhelmingly drew peaceful, festival-like crowds, Trump and his allies have increasingly criticized the follow-up event and described the protesters as terrorists, Hamas supporters and far-left agitators. The accusations, made without presenting any evidence, have made some observers anxious.
“Even just what lawmakers are saying is very different this time around,” Klosowski said. “I’m a little more worried this time than I was last time.”
The extent of any planned surveillance is unclear, in part because the Trump administration has declined to share details about how officials typically monitor demonstrators.
In July, Democratic senators asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem detailed questions about surveillance technology used to monitor protests. The agency never responded, according to the office of Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey.
“Donald Trump has shown he’ll aggressively weaponize government powers to squelch dissent,” Markey said in an email. “At this weekend’s ‘No Kings’ protests, the Trump administration must refrain from surveilling Americans who are exercising their constitutional rights.”
Plans for “No Kings” protests have drawn the attention of at least one of the U.S. government’s domestic intelligence “fusion centers” established after the 9/11 attacks, according to an alert obtained by Property of the People.
The document from the Central California Intelligence Center identified Sacramento, Fresno, and Stockton among dozens of “No Kings” protest sites.
Noting that while the protests were billed as “nonviolent action,” the center said additional intelligence reports were being planned on the rallies. The center did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The National Fusion Center Association did not directly address questions about October 18 plans, but referred Reuters to a 2011 federal document listing recommendations for law enforcement agencies regarding “First Amendment-Protected Events.”
(Reporting by AJ Vicens in Detroit and Raphael Satter in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Nick Zieminski)
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