Tag: warrantless surveillance

A Connecticut Couple Challenges Warrantless Surveillance of Their Property by Camera-Carrying Bears

Mark and Carol Brault, who own 114 acres of forested land in Hartland, Connecticut, operate a private nature preserve that charges admission to visitors interested in seeing bears and other wildlife. In a 2020 lawsuit, the town of Hartland accused Mark Brault of violating a local ordinance against feeding bears, a charge that he denies. The latest wrinkle in that ongoing dispute involves the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP), which the Braults say has defied the Fourth Amendment by attaching a camera to a black bear that is known to frequent their property.

“Turning wildlife into unguided surveillance drones is unbearable,” Institute for Justice (I.J.) senior attorney Robert Frommer, a Fourth Amendment specialist who is not involved in this case, writes in an email. “Connecticut should paws its animal camera program so as not to infringe on Nutmeggers’ privacy and security.”

DEEP’s bear-borne camera is a twist on longstanding warrantless surveillance of private property by wildlife agents, which I.J. has challenged as a violation of state constitutional protections in Pennsylvania and Tennessee. In a complaint that the Braults filed last week in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, they argue that DEEP’s deployment of an ursine spy, identified by a state tag as Bear Number 119, violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.

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SCOTUS Allows IRS to Carry Out Secret, Warrantless Searches of Innocent Taxpayers’ Bank Accounts

In a unanimous opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court is allowing the IRS to go on secret, warrantless fishing expeditions through innocent taxpayers’ bank records in order to identify and collect unpaid taxes from family members and associates who have no legal interest in those bank accounts.

Despite acknowledging that “the authority vested in tax collectors may be abused, as all power is subject to abuse,” and that “Congress has given the IRS considerable power,” the Supreme Court’s 9-0 ruling in Polselli v. IRS declined to restrict the IRS’s authority. Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute and Cato Institute had filed an amicus brief in Polselli arguing that the sweeping investigatory power wielded by the IRS—to circumvent the Fourth Amendment by carrying out warrantless searches of the bank accounts and records of innocent people, who are given no notice or right to object to the search, merely because they may be associated with a delinquent taxpayer—offends every constitutional sensibility on the right to privacy.

“This practice of investigating the bank records of innocent taxpayers because they may have family members or associates who are delinquent on their taxes is merely a perverse form of guilt by association,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “At a minimum, Fourth Amendment protections should not disappear just because sensitive information is shared with third parties, such as banks and attorneys.”

The case arose after an IRS Revenue Officer, seeking to collect underpaid federal taxes by Remo Polselli, served summonses on the banks of Polselli’s wife and attorney in order to find account and financial records concerning Polselli. The IRS agent did not notify Polselli’s wife or attorney of the summonses, but the banks voluntarily did so. Polselli’s wife and attorney subsequently filed motions in federal district court to quash the IRS’s summonses. In siding with the IRS, the district court held that Polselli’s wife and attorney are not entitled to notice of the summons and have no right to even be heard on their motions to quash the summonses.

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Over 10,000 FBI Agents Can Access Data From Secretive Surveillance Program: Inspectors General

More than 10,000 federal employees could have access to data revealed by a secretive government surveillance program that has come under scrutiny because of alleged abuses, lawmakers were told by U.S. inspectors general.

At an April 27 House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, lawmakers heard from a panel of three witnesses associated with the U.S. Office of the Inspector General (OIG) responsible for oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The legislation gives intelligence agencies broad powers to conduct surveillance on foreigners suspected of spying for a foreign power or belonging to a terrorist group.

However, bipartisan concerns have been raised because the program also has the ability to collect information about U.S. citizens.

During the hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) queried panelists about how many FBI agents could have access to FISA-acquired data.

A court-ordered report released in May 2022 revealed that the FBI had made more than 3.3 million queries of Americans under FISA authority. This, in turn, prompted a crisis of confidence in the FBI’s respect for civil liberties among members of both parties.

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Over One Million Secret FBI Searches Made in Error: Watchdog

More than one million secret searches of Americans conducted by the FBI were made erroneously, a watchdog testified to Congress on April 27.

Around 30 percent of the approximately 3.4 million searches were done in error, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz testified.

“It’s obviously very concerning that there’s that volume of searches,” Horowitz told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee, adding that he was particularly concerned with the high error rate.

The searches in question were conducted by FBI personnel with authority under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill enables U.S. authorities to gather information on U.S. citizens suspected of being involved with possible spies or terrorists.

Some 3.39 million searches were conducted by the FBI in 2021, U.S. intelligence officials have said. That was up from just 1.2 million in 2020.

Sharon Bradford Franklin, chair of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, told members that Congress should pass new legislation imposing greater safeguards into the system to protect Americans. That should include requiring probable cause or court review for each query of an American, she said.

“Congress certainly has the authority to do that. And I think that’s one of the key issues for this committee in the Congress to consider,” Horowitz said. Adding new requirements, though, could increase the FBI’s workload, he said.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) indicated support for adding new requirements.

“The solution is simple right? Require probable cause if you’re going to query this database on American citizens,” he said.

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Are Game Wardens Watching You? – Part 1: The Case of the Hidden Trail Camera

Imagine you go hunting one morning, on your own land, and you find a cellular trail camera that isn’t yours. Now imagine that the camera was obviously placed in such a way as to be entirely hidden from you—except for a hole cut through the brush so that it could surveil the comings and goings on your property.

You’d probably be creeped out and pull that camera down, right? That’s what Hunter Hollingsworth of Camden, Tennessee, did when he spotted an unknown trail camera pointed toward the gravel road through his family farm.

Then a few months later, he found his home surrounded by armed law-enforcement officers who threatened to kick his door down if he didn’t let them inside to search for the camera. This was just the beginning of a series of events that snowballed into a lawsuit that would eventually put a national spotlight on the near century-old practice of game wardens entering private land without a search warrant. The case would go on to fundamentally change how officers with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency are able to do their jobs—and it could set precedents for similar cases in other states, too.

But no matter where you live and hunt, the Hunter Hollingsworth case—and the cases it continues to inspire—could ultimately decide whether you might one day find a camera hidden in your trees, or a game warden on your property without a warrant.

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New Zealand spy agency uses ‘computer network exploitation’ to take digital information

One of the country’s two spy agencies has revealed it retrieves information directly from where it is stored or processed on computers.

The “computer network exploitation” operations have been a highly-classified secret at the GCSB until now.

US commentators refer to computer network exploitation as a form of cyber warfare, or the “theft of data”.

“Our legislation … allows us to access information infrastructures, which is more than just interception,” the Director-General of the Government Communications Security Bureau, Andrew Hampton, said.

It “also allows us to retrieve digital information directly from where it is stored or processed”.

The GCSB refers to this as “accessing information infrastructures”.

The spy watchdog, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Brendan Horsley, cited Hampton’s speech to the Institute of International Affairs in May, for making the revelation.

This had freed Horsley up to be able to assure the public that the exploitation operations were scrutinised, he said in his annual report released on Friday.

Previously, he had had to refer to “certain operations”.

“Although it was subject to oversight, it was not possible to provide any clear public assurance of this.”

In fact, he had conducted a review that found the compliance systems around CNE “to be generally effective and appropriate”.

However, he was still not allowed to go into details “on the bureau’s use of this important capability”.

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Police Need Warrants to Search Homes. Child Welfare Agents Almost Never Get One.

The banging on Ronisha Ferguson’s apartment door in the Bronx started on a Thursday afternoon as she waited for her two sons to get home from school.

Ferguson, a nurse working 16-hour double shifts, knew instantly who she’d find in her hallway that day in February 2019.

For years, caseworkers from the Administration for Children’s Services, New York City’s child protective services bureau, had been showing up unannounced like this and inspecting her kitchen, her bathroom and her bedroom — and her children’s bodies — without a warrant.

A domestic violence survivor who previously lived in a shelter, Ferguson had never been accused of child abuse, ACS case records show. But she had faced repeated allegations of parenting problems largely stemming from her long hours at work, including that she’d provided inadequate supervision by having her 14-year-old daughter babysit the boys when they were 5 and 2, and had also allowed the kids to miss dozens of days of school.

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Surveillance shift: San Francisco pilots program allowing police to live monitor private security cameras

Last week San Francisco city leaders approved a 15-month pilot allowing police to monitor live footage from surveillance cameras owned by consenting businesses and civilians without a warrant.

The 7-4 decision by the San Francisco board of supervisors was a major loss for a broad coalition of civil liberties groups that had argued the move would give police unprecedented surveillance powers. It also seemingly marked a departure from the progressive stance on surveillance the city’s leadership had previously maintained.

In May 2019, the board had made history by making the city the first to ban the use of facial recognition by any local government agency. At the time, supervisor Aaron Peskin said, the city had an “an outsize responsibility to regulate the excesses of technology”.

But more than three years, a pandemic and many protests against police injustice later, some members of the board now say they need to balance concerns for privacy with the need to allow law enforcement officials to “utilize certain technologies to make San Francisco safer”.

Privacy advocacy groups say the shift is part of a larger phenomenon in cities across the US, where fears of both perceived and real increases in crime have prompted police and elected officials to expand the use of surveillance technology, even if there isn’t always clear evidence those technologies are effective at deterring or solving crimes.

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Aretha Franklin and the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO)

“Queen of Soul” cited in 270 pages of documents declassified by the FBI as they pursued Black revolutionary and communist influences in political and cultural life during the 1960s and 1970s

On August 16, 2018, Aretha Franklin, popularly known as the “Queen of Soul”, passed away at her home in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 76.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942, Aretha came to Detroit in 1946 with her parents, vocalist Mrs. Barbara Siggers Franklin and Rev. Clarence L. Franklin, a well-known minister who originated in the Delta region of Mississippi. Franklin became a minister while he was a teenager in Mississippi.

Rev. Franklin was recruited to come to Detroit from Buffalo, New York in late 1945 and in subsequent years built the New Bethel Baptist Church into an internationally recognized religious institution located on Hasting Street on the eastside of Detroit. The community surrounding the church was later targeted in the late 1950s and early 1960s for demolition in a so-called “urban renewal” project fostered by the then City of Detroit government and the Federal Highway Administration based in Washington, D.C.

By the early 1960s, Detroit was seething with discontent over the massive displacement of more than 100,000 people from the lower east side communities known as Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. Many small businesses, social clubs, churches and as well as thousands of homes were destroyed by the racist white city administration.

New Bethel relocated on Linwood Avenue in the Virginia Park District on the west side in the Spring of 1963. This was the same year of the massive “Walk to Freedom” down Woodward Avenue on June 23. The demonstration was the largest civil rights manifestation in the United States and would set the stage for the “March on Washington” just two months later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was led by Rev. C. L. Franklin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Rev. Albert Cleage of the Central Congregational Church, also located in the Virginia Park District on Linwood Avenue, among other community and labor leaders.

Rev. Franklin was heavily involved with the SCLC as a board member and fundraiser. Dr. King and his organization, in which he served as president, were subjected to intense spying and disruption efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) along with segregationist southern state governments bolstered by law-enforcement agencies and business interests.

Aretha Franklin often traveled with her father during the 1950s in his highly popular gospel tours throughout the South and other regions of the U.S. By 1960, Aretha had signed a recording contract with Columbia Records in New York City. Later in 1967, she switched to Atlantic Records where her first album catapulted the soul artist to the top of the charts.

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USPS spied on ‘MAGA’ protesters, right-wing groups, gun rights activists, documents show

The U.S Postal Service spied on ‘MAGA’ protesters, gun rights activists and other right-wing groups between late 2020 and early 2021, according to records obtained by The Washington Times. ‘MAGA’ is former President Donald Trump’s slogan meaning “Make America Great Again.”

Patrick Eddington, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, obtained heavily redacted files detailing the USPS’ surveillance activities from September 2020 to April 2021, which included a secret effort to surveil social media known as the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP).

The USPS monitored the activities of gun rights activists, protesters planning to demonstrate against police in Louisville, Kentucky after the shooting of Breonna Taylor, and right-wing groups traveling to Washington, D.C. after the 2020 election. 

Eddington said the documents demonstrate the USPS’ surveillance capabilities.

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