Larosa’s murder, on July 17, 2008, was one of hundreds of extrajudicial killings carried out in Davao City, now a city of 1.6 million, while Rodrigo Duterte, now president of the Philippines, was mayor there. Years before launching his notorious, bloody “drug war” across the country, Duterte presided over similar tactics at the local level. During his tenure as mayor, according to a 2009 investigation by Human Rights Watch, death squads assassinated street children, drug dealers, and petty criminals; in some cases, researchers found evidence of the complicity or direct involvement of government officials and police.

Duterte has consistently denied any connection to this campaign of killings, but at times, his support for the violence was barely concealed. As mayor, Duterte would publicly announce the names or locations of “criminals,” and some of them would later be killed, according to human rights groups and local newspapers. Although it stopped short of accusing Duterte himself of misconduct or direct involvement, the Philippines’ Office of the Ombudsman partially acknowledged in 2012 the police’s role in tolerating the killings, finding that 21 Davao City police officials and officers were “remiss in their duty” for failing to solve them.

But this potential complicity in human rights violations did not stop IBM from agreeing to provide surveillance technology to law enforcement in Davao City. On June 27, 2012, three years after the devastating Human Rights Watch report, IBM issued a short news release announcing an agreement with Davao to upgrade its police command center in order to “further enhance public safety operations in the city.” IBM’s installation, known as the Intelligent Operations Center, promised to enhance authorities’ ability to monitor residents in real time with cutting-edge video analytics, multichannel communications technology, and GPS-enabled patrol vehicles. Less than two months later, the Philippine Commission on Human Rights published a resolution condemning Davao authorities for fostering a “climate of impunity” with regard to the killings, recommending that the National Bureau of Investigation undertake an impartial investigation into potential obstruction of justice by local police officials. (Duterte has recently condemned the commission, questioning its motives and suggesting that it should be abolished.)

The 2012 IBM deal was signed by Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter, Sara Duterte, who was Davao City’s nominal mayor at the time, while her term-limited father served as vice mayor; under Sara Duterte, the killings continued. The system, according to local news reports, was deployed in June 2013, just as Rodrigo Duterte was about to return to the mayoral seat he had already held for nearly two decades. The police command center, Sara Duterte told the Durian Post, “is now infused with IBM’s IOC technology,” allowing police to “shift from responding to critical events to anticipating and preventing them.”

While The Intercept and Type Investigations were unable to locate any reference to Davao’s death squads in IBM’s public corporate documents about the program, a 2014 company overview of the installation made clear that IBM knew “illegal drugs,” predictive policing, and crime suppression were among Davao City security forces’ “priority areas.” From 2013 through late 2016, when one Davao security official estimated the IBM program stopped being in active use, Filipino human rights activists who worked closely with the Commission on Human Rights claimed to have documented at least 213 extrajudicial killings carried out by Davao death squads.

Davao City officials did not respond to queries related to IBM’s video surveillance system or its potential role in extrajudicial killing operations during its run. But three police and city security officials interviewed in Davao City last year said the program had strengthened police video monitoring capabilities, which they said had proved useful in Davao’s controversial war on so-called drug syndicates. That war, human rights reports and former death squad participants have shown, often targeted low-level drug users and peddlers, rather than major traffickers.

Amado Picardal, a former spokesperson of the Coalition Against Summary Executions, a Davao-based human rights group, called IBM’s work “unethical,” given that some of the killings had been linked to Duterte’s police in the years before its deal with Davao City.

IBM declined to respond to queries about its human rights record in Davao City. IBM spokesperson Edward Barbini briefly noted that the company “no longer supplies technology to the Intelligent Operations Center in Davao, and has not done so since 2012,” though he declined to clarify whether IBM serviced the technology after that point, and IBM’s public filings mention the program as ongoing after that date. “The Philippines city of Davao’s 1.5 million citizens will be the first in Asia to benefit from an Intelligent Operations Center,” an April 3, 2013, IBM disclosure reads. “A new early warning system will monitor key risk indicators so agencies can take quick action before situations escalate.”

In the years since the IBM program was phased out, Philippine police interest in cutting-edge surveillance infrastructure has hardly waned. National authorities are now looking to deploy real-time facial recognition across the country, in a project called “Safe Philippines,” and have considered technology from a variety of international vendors, including the Chinese telecom Huawei.

In December, a local newspaper reported that the Philippines had secured a 20 billion-peso loan for the installation of thousands of surveillance cameras across Davao City and metro Manila in collaboration with a Chinese firm, an installation that would reportedly include a national command center and feature facial and vehicle recognition software. In a January interview on Filipino television, Epimaco Densing III, undersecretary of the Department of the Interior and Local Government, said that a goal of the project is to detect the faces of terrorist suspects and prevent crimes before they take place.

Filipino activists worry that such capabilities could facilitate human rights violations. Over the last three years, parts of the country have been under temporary declarations of martial law, and Duterte’s “war on drugs” has left at least 5,000 and possibly as many as 27,000 dead (police and human rights groups’ estimates vary widely). Those killed have included anti-Duterte activists, elected officials, and outspoken Catholic priests. Currently, Duterte is campaigning to modify the constitution, a move that could afford powers to the executive to further the suppression of political opponents.

Surveillance Capabilities in Davao

In June 2012, Mayor Sara Duterte announced a 128 million-peso deal, worth just over $3 million at the time, with IBM to improve its real-time monitoring capabilities. The announcement promised to “scale up” Davao’s Public Safety and Security Command Center, or PSSCC, with improved communications and surveillance technology.

Sayaji Shinde, a former IBM sales leader who says he was part of the team that secured the command center deal, recalls that his team was eager to partner with the Duterte administration. “If you look at the Dutertes as such, they focus a lot on public-sector security,” said Shinde. “And I think that is one of the drivers, for even us, to go and spend our time and advise them because we saw that they are really keen to ensure that the city become more safer.”

To seal the deal, Shinde said, IBM pointed to the international recognition that such a project would bring Davao. “That is precisely what we sold them: ‘You know if you do this, work with us, and it becomes first of its kind, then this will be highlighted globally.’”

In the initial phase of the project, IBM mapped Davao’s police cameras onto a geographic information system, allowing operators to quickly access camera feeds near locations of interest, Shinde said.

According to Shinde, the rollout also featured a multichannel communications system, allowing police, traffic, and defense personnel to communicate with one another. It also included video analytics technology that automatically tagged objects captured on camera, like cars and people, by their physical attributes. The tags included the objects’ size, speed, color, trajectory, and direction, according to a November 2014 IBM presentation to the Asian Development Bank, allowing command center operators to comb through camera footage in search of suspects by their descriptions. (IBM had refined these kinds of surveillance capabilities using secret access to New York Police Department camera footage, as The Intercept and Type Investigations reported in September.)

“That was probably the first-ever video analytics surveillance that was done in Asia,” said Shinde, noting that the system could be used in the wake of robberies or murders to track a suspect’s car before and after a crime. The software was “very user-friendly,” he noted, so Davao security officials at the command center could easily have become competent in the program’s object search capabilities.

The program also helped authorities monitor “crowd behavior” and instances of “loitering” — a crime that Duterte has cracked down on nationally as president — according to the 2014 IBM presentation.

IBM’s Technology in Duterte’s War on Crime

When asked what assurances he was given about how the surveillance program would be used, Shinde defended IBM’s sale, saying that it was intended for legitimate public safety activities, such as responding to fires. “That particular implementation was not meant to track people,” he said. “It was meant to track the incidents and faster responses to those incidences.”

But in interviews in the command center, the nearby 911 center, and other locations in Davao City, local law enforcement officials familiar with the IBM program told The Intercept and Type Investigations that the technology had assisted them in carrying out Duterte’s controversial anti-crime agenda.

Manuel Gaerlan, a former regional Philippines National Police chief superintendent, said the command center, which IBM substantially upgraded, functions as a force multiplier in counter-drug operations. “It records events so it’s easier to identify the perpetrators, then you can go after the member of the syndicates,” he said. “If you can see more areas, you can send patrol to respond. It’s like putting more men on the ground. And you can put more cameras in drug areas.”

Jaldon, the 911 chief, pointed to IBM’s object tagging and search feature as the most useful tool the program gave law enforcement in counter-drug operations, especially when it came to “backtracking,” or investigating incidents after the fact. “After an event, the system helps find them quickly, give you awareness,” he said. “It helps in investigations to slice and dice by time, color, type of physical feature.” Most significantly, he said the program’s real-time alerts could also increase authorities’ “awareness of suspects’ presence.”

Antonio Boquiren, a training and research officer at the Davao command center, said the video capabilities helped police crack down on low-level quality of life violations.

“Whether it’s criminality, smoking, or jaywalking, any violation of ordinance is a crime and a police is sent,” he said, laughing. “People who smoke complain, ‘How did you catch us before we even lit?’ The police officer will point to the CCTV.”

The targeting of petty criminals, gang members, and street children by Davao death squads figures prominently in the 2009 Human Rights Watch report. And a 2015 promotional video featuring IBM’s technology shows authorities aggressively going after low-level crimes. One clip highlights a young man, caught on CCTV, stealing a bag from a truck. Later, the narrator notes that the technology gives police faster response times and cuts to footage of police officers chasing after a group of people on the street. One then raises his baton as if to hit one of them.

A former Philippine Army security consultant with close ties to Philippine intelligence, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, claimed that IBM’s program assisted police not only in monitoring criminal activities, but also in gathering intelligence on the activities of the political opposition in Davao. Based on his dealings with Davao City law enforcement officials, he said he couldn’t rule out that the data feed was implicated in extrajudicial killings.

Even if IBM’s program was solely used to assist in legitimate police responses to crime and fires, as Shinde said it was designed to do, surveillance researchers point out that it could well have enabled extrajudicial killings, simply by helping police capture or monitor everyday criminal suspects. The government has long denied the existence of police death squads, but in the Dutertes’ Davao, victims of extrajudicial killing were sometimes targeted immediately after being released from police custody, and police frequently killed suspects during planned raids.

In October 2015, for example, Duterte warned a group of drug dealers on a street called Dewey Boulevard that they had 48 hours to leave the city or be killed. “If you are into drugs, I’m warning you,” he announced, according to local press reports. “I’m giving you 48 hours, 48 hours. If I see you there, I’ll have you killed.” Police reportedly monitored the area and relayed that some known dealers had left. But a day after the warning, police fatally shot Armanuel Atienza, a 38-year-old community leader, claiming that he had resisted arrest during a buy-and-bust operation and that they found a handgun and drugs on his person. Such claims are suspect. According to 2016 Senate testimony by Edgar Matobato, who allegedly served as a death squad member from 1988 to 2013, Davao police regularly planted guns and drugs on suspects after killing them. (Duterte has asserted that he does not know Matobato and has implied that he may have committed perjury in this testimony. The Duterte administration’s communications office did not respond to detailed queries related to the IBM program, or its potential role in human rights violations.)

IBM’s object-tagging capability, for example, could have been used to locate a suspect by their physical attributes, someone who may then have become a target of extrajudicial violence, explains Kade Crockford, a technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, whose research focuses on police surveillance. “Maybe the system identifies three to four people, then law enforcement are sent to find those people,” Crockford said. “Maybe that person isn’t executed on the spot by law enforcement, but police question him about him and his associates; now he and some of the people he named make their way on to a list which ends up in the hands of a death squad.”

Social media posts from a PSSCC department head, archived on a local blog, suggest that the center, using IBM’s technology, was effective at nabbing suspected criminals.

In August 2014, that official claimed that police monitored and caught a group of street kids stealing from a cab driver “through the coordination” of the PSSCC and city police. That December, he claimed that the Intelligent Operations Center was a factor in the police surveillance and capture of a man cruising around Davao City with a gun.

IBM’s “Face Capture” feature, if deployed, also could have helped authorities locate wanted people in near real time — including residents on watchlists, according to Crockford. “Imagine a scenario in which someone in the police force, who has access to this system and works with the local death squad, producing lists of people to be killed,” she said. “This technology could help the police leader to ID a person on the kill list in real time and then have them deploy the death squads to go get them.”

The Davao command center, according to a local news report, did have facial recognition capabilities in place by 2014, though the technology was not identified with IBM. And according to the 2009 Human Rights Watch report, Davao’s death squads were known to rely in part on photos of targets on their watchlists.

In August 2016, Artemio Jimenez Jr., a neighborhood political leader and vocal supporter of Duterte’s war on drugs, turned himself in to Davao City police after apparently discovering that he was on a government watchlist of suspected drug users, offering to be tested for drugs in order to clear his name. Police tested his urine for methamphetamine and cannabinol, according to The Inquirer, tests that came up negative. Nonetheless, the next month, “unidentified gunmen” drove up to his car and fired repeatedly, killing him and wounding his driver and bodyguard. Police claimed that they were investigating, but never announced a suspect or motive in the shooting. Nor did they explain how the assassins knew Jimenez’s location.

IBM’s Public Human Rights Commitments

IBM publicly claims to be “committed to high standards of corporate responsibility” and to consider the “social concerns” of the communities in which it operates. IBM’s Human Rights Statement of Principles cites a number of international standards, including the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which calls on corporations to perform due diligence on the “human rights context prior to a proposed business activity,” identify “who may be affected,” and project “how the proposed activity and associated business relationships could have adverse human rights impacts on those identified.” These standards also call on companies to proactively track potential human rights abuses related to their business activities and require “active engagement” in the remediation of any identified abuses.

IBM’s Securities and Exchange Commission documents and annual reports between 2012 and 2016 contain a few scattered mentions of its project in Davao, but no discussion of any potential human rights concerns or any preventative measures taken by the company. None of IBM’s corporate social responsibility reports have ever mentioned its collaboration with Duterte in Davao.

Despite reporting by Human Rights Watch and local papers, Shinde claimed that the human rights allegations against the Duterte regime were “not in the news at all during those days.” There was “nothing said like that about him at that time,” he continued, pointing out that IBM contracted with Sara Duterte, not her father, who, he said, “didn’t have such a kind of record.”

Yet when IBM agreed to work with the Duterte family’s administration in 2012, his regime’s support of extrajudicial killings in Davao City had been well-established; as early as 2009, he had described criminals as “a legitimate target for assassination.” In 2012, the year IBM signed the deal with Sara Duterte, local human rights activists claimed to have documented 61 death squad killings.

According to IBM documents and law enforcement officials, the Philippine National Police also received information from the surveillance command center. Before the IBM deal was signed, the Philippine National Police had also been criticized for failing to investigate death squad killings, and since Duterte became president, it has played a role in the deadly national “war on drugs.”

“If they had the technology then, I have no doubt that they used it and continue to use it to locate the targets for elimination,” said Picardal, formerly of the Coalition Against Summary Executions. “And not only drug users but human rights defenders, activists, and anyone they consider as enemies of the state.”

IBM had to have known about the Dutertes’ track record at the time, said a U.S. official who recalled being briefed by IBM about its Davao City project. “I can’t see how they wouldn’t have known about it. They have local people working for them,” said the official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on U.S. government matters.

Joshua Franco, head of technology and human rights at Amnesty International, noted that Rodrigo Duterte’s record as mayor was so well-documented that any company engaging with the Davao police at that time would have had a responsibility to investigate and avoid potential complicity in human rights violations before signing any agreements.

“There is documentation of the killings, by persons believed to be linked to the police, that went on in Davao City while Duterte was mayor,” he said. “Human rights organizations have documented that, during this period, as many as 1,000 people were killed, including street children, people who used and sold drugs, as well as petty criminals. Without implementing a rigorous human rights due diligence process, companies supplying the local police forces suspected of having been involved in the killings with policing equipment and technology may have enabled or facilitated the commission of human rights violations.”

Asked about the human rights implications of the surveillance program, Philippine law enforcement officials familiar with the IBM system made light of such concerns.

“If police do some human rights abuses, who cares?” said one official, claiming that such tactics had resulted in significant crime reductions.

Gaerlan, the regional police superintendent, joked about the extrajudicial killing of alleged drug lord Melvin Odicta Sr., who was shot, according to police, by two “unidentified assailants.” Gaerlan’s agency, the Philippine National Police, officially speculated that he may have been killed by other drug dealers. But the commander waved off that version of events. “He was shot right off the ship,” he said, laughing. “He was trying to evade authorities by not coming here on a plane. He never holds drugs. You can’t catch him, but he was killed. Not by anyone in uniform! It was just some vigilantes, but they weren’t in uniform!”

Legal protections for the accused, such as due process, may be good in theory, argued Boquiren, the PSSCC officer, but they aren’t practical because of a court system he characterized as inefficient and corrupt. “Due process is good on the point of lawyers, but if we are talking about the criminal justice system, it’s weak. Even clear-cut cases of murder take years, witnesses die, so something is wrong,” he said.

“If people don’t have discipline, they don’t obey,” he continued. “But if there is fear, they will obey.”

Duterte’s Mass Surveillance Plans

In November, Jaldon said that IBM’s surveillance program was no longer active in Davao. He said that authorities switched over to an in-house software system in 2016. Still, he and Boquiren said that the urban surveillance center model IBM helped build in Davao City has served as an inspiration for the Duterte administration. “Within the next few years, the president will have replicated our system everywhere,” Boquiren said last January. “Every time he goes somewhere, he keeps telling local leaders, go to Davao City and replicate the PSSCC.”

Duterte’s plan is to expand and unify public safety and emergency response centers at a regional and national level in the coming years, Jaldon said. “The hard part before was the budget costs, but that won’t be a problem anymore with the president prioritizing this.”

Jaldon and Boquiren said national authorities — including Duterte himself — are interested in expanding surveillance centers across the country and upgrading their video capabilities to include real-time facial recognition, which could compare the faces of suspects to facial images caught on CCTV.

In February 2018, a local news report cited anonymous sources indicating that Duterte was pursuing a partnership with Huawei, a Chinese telecom firm, to provide facial recognition technology, a development Boquiren confirmed at the time.

Then in December 2018, the Philippine legislature learned that a different Chinese firm, the state-owned China International Telecommunications and Construction Corp., had loaned the Philippines Department of the Interior and Local Government 20 billion pesos to install 12,000 surveillance cameras across Davao City and metro Manila. The “Safe Philippines” infrastructure, according to a report in the Philippine Star, will include a national command center and a backup data center, equipped with facial and vehicle recognition software. At a Senate hearing, Sen. Ralph Recto raised concerns about China’s involvement in the project, and officials from the national Department of Information and Communications Technology testified that they had not been consulted about the deal.

Several other Chinese firms had originally been proposed by the Chinese Embassy for the project, including Huawei. But, according to a January 2019 Senate resolution introduced by Recto, Huawei was slated to become only a major subcontractor as the “primary equipment supplier.”

According to Boquiren, Huawei promised that its facial recognition product could capture someone “even with an image of the side of their face” and “store up to a million faces.” In a November 2018 call, Boquiren reiterated that unspecified police authorities were looking at Huawei technology, but declined to discuss any additional details, citing a lack of technical expertise. Jaldon cautioned that while the Chinese firm had “a good system,” authorities were still in the process of assessing a variety of facial recognition vendors as part of the implementation of the “safe city project” across the country.

The Philippines’ potential collaboration with Chinese firms, which resulted from an agreement reached during the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping last November, reflects Duterte’s ongoing pivot to China and away from the United States. Huawei, in particular, is alleged to have such close ties to the Chinese state that it has been banned from U.S. government contracts and from providing some security products to Australia for fear of backdoor intrusions by Chinese intelligence actors.

The former consultant to the Philippine Army said his understanding is that the Safe Philippines installation will be modeled after Chinese facial recognition infrastructure, uniting CCTV installations and intelligence databases from security agencies across the country into one unified system. “The project aims to establish new CCTV networks and cascade them with all existing CCTV installations,” he said. “Patterned after the Chinese police state, the system is intended to tap databases from a variety of agencies of the government and integrate them with the data streams from the CCTV networks.”

In a more recent interview, the former consultant said that, given the scrutiny Huawei has drawn, the Department of the Interior and Local Government may opt for another technology equipment supplier, a claim that Densing, the Department of the Interior official, echoed in the January television interview.

Maya Wang, senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch, said the potential adoption of a Chinese-style surveillance infrastructure, facilitated by Chinese companies, is very concerning given the “context of Duterte’s increasing abuses, drug war, and large-scale extrajudicial violence.” But Wang cautioned that the costs and expertise required for such systems are not easily replicable. The Philippine government could potentially “replicate one or some of the systems, but not all of the overlapping, multitiered mass surveillance systems seen in China,” she said.

Anti-Duterte activists worry that this planned consolidation of surveillance capabilities could further enable Duterte-aligned forces to stamp out pockets of political resistance. An integrated national system of real-time facial recognition technology, according to Picardal, the former spokesperson for the Coalition Against Summary Executions, would ensure the fulfillment of what he called Duterte’s “plan to exercise full authoritarian/dictatorial rule and repress dissent.” Picardal, who is currently in an undisclosed location, said such a system would also threaten him personally, as he believes that Duterte’s deaths squads want him dead. Since Duterte came to power nationally, several other dissident priests in the Philippines have been murdered. (Duterte has denied condoning extrajudicial killings as president. A presidential spokesperson said last year that Picardal should seek court protection if he feels threatened.)

“I have transferred to a more secure location,” he said. “But with that technology, it would be more difficult for me to come out in the open and that will restrict my freedom of movement. That technology will be used not just to locate, arrest, and charge dissidents in court, but, worse, to inform the death squads of their whereabouts.” He warned that the technology will increase extrajudicial killings, “instill fear on those who oppose his rule,” and curtail citizens’ “right to free assembly and redress of grievances. This type of technology will weaken democracy and will advance authoritarian rule all over the country.”

Since taking power, the Duterte administration has attempted to shut down or mitigate critical news coverage, including, in January, the online news site Rappler, and numerous political activists have been among those assassinated. Meanwhile, the president’s notorious “drug war” has left thousands more dead. “It’s not just the killing of thousands,” the former army security consultant warned. “It results in a killing organization, the police, that is easy to expand. The drug war is a mirror to the larger future.”

Gaerlan, the recently retired national police commander, scoffed at such concerns. “The human rights activists, Rappler, all of them act like this is a dictatorship, but if that is so, tell me how are they protesting and not being suppressed?” he said. “Obedience to the law, before what you think is right, above all else.”

This article was reported in partnership with Type Investigations.

The post Inside the Video Surveillance Program IBM Built for Philippine Strongman Rodrigo Duterte appeared first on The Intercept.

Dukes did not know why he was being asked to make this decision, but he felt troubled as he heard other men ahead of him speaking into the phone and repeating certain phrases from the sheets the counselors had given them.

“I was contemplating, ‘Should I do it? I don’t want my voice to be on this machine,’” he recalls. “But I still had to contact my family, even though I only had a few months left.”

So when it was his turn, he walked up to the phone, picked up the receiver, and followed a series of automated instructions. “It said, ‘Say this phrase, blah, blah, blah,’ and if you didn’t say it clearly, they would say, ‘Say this phrase again,’ like ‘cat’ or ‘I’m a citizen of the United States of America.’” Dukes said he repeated such phrases for a minute or two. The voice then told him the process was complete.

“Here’s another part of myself that I had to give away again in this prison system,” he remembers thinking as he walked back to the cell.

Dukes, who was released in October, says he was never told about what that procedure was meant to do. But contracting documents for New York’s new prison phone system, obtained by The Appeal in partnership with The Intercept, and follow-up interviews with prison authorities, indicate that Dukes was right to be suspicious: His audio sample was being “enrolled” into a new voice surveillance system.

In New York and other states across the country, authorities are acquiring technology to extract and digitize the voices of incarcerated people into unique biometric signatures, known as voice prints. Prison authorities have quietly enrolled hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people’s voice prints into large-scale biometric databases. Computer algorithms then draw on these databases to identify the voices taking part in a call and to search for other calls in which the voices of interest are detected. Some programs, like New York’s, even analyze the voices of call recipients outside prisons to track which outsiders speak to multiple prisoners regularly.

Corrections officials representing the states of Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, along with Arizona’s Yavapai and Pinal counties; Alachua County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas, also confirmed that they are actively using voice recognition technology today. And a review of contracting documents identified other jurisdictions that have acquired similar voice-print capture capabilities: Connecticut and Georgia state corrections officials have signed contracts for the technology (Connecticut did not respond to repeated interview requests; Georgia declined to answer questions on the matter).

Authorities and prison technology companies say this mass biometric surveillance supports prison security and fraud prevention efforts. But civil liberties advocates argue that the biometric buildup has been neither transparent nor consensual. Some jurisdictions, for example, limit incarcerated people’s phone access if they refuse to enroll in the voice recognition system, while others enroll incarcerated people without their knowledge. Once the data exists, they note, it could potentially be used by other agencies, without any say from the public.

It’s particularly alarming, they add, that the technology’s use in prisons can ensnare people beyond their walls. “Why am I giving up my rights because I’m receiving a call from somebody who has been convicted of a crime?” asks Jerome Greco, a digital forensics attorney at New York’s Legal Aid Society. Greco argues that the mining of outside parties’ voice prints should require a warrant. “If you have a family member convicted of a crime, yet you haven’t been, why are you now having your information being used for government investigations?”

The Spread of Voice Recognition Technology

Voice-print technology works by dissecting physical features that distinguish individuals’ voices, such as their pitch. With this data, the program’s algorithm generates a computer model of their vocal signatures, known as “voice prints,” which can be stored in a database for comparisons with utterances recorded in the future.

In recent years, voice recognition technology has come to be associated with consumer offerings, like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, but the technology was originally developed for military and intelligence applications. Over a decade ago, as The Intercept reported, U.S. intelligence agencies were using voice recognition programs to identify the voices of top Al Qaeda officials in their online audio postings.

Similarly, the algorithms and structure behind the prison telecommunications firm Securus Technologies’ particular voice software, known as Investigator Pro, were developed in part through a $50 million grant from the Department of Defense. The software was licensed to JLG Technologies, a company that Securus acquired in 2014. According to Securus’s 2017 proposal for New York, the technology was developed because “DOD needed to identify terrorist calls out of the millions of calls made to and from the United States every day.”

But it wasn’t long before major prison technology firms, such as Securus and Global Tel Link, began marketing the technology to U.S. jurisdictions that were seeking to extract and store voice prints associated with incarcerated people in their systems. “IPRO [Investigator Pro] has a 10-year track record of providing pinpoint voice accuracy capability country-wide in 243 states, county, and local correctional agencies,” notes Securus in the Pinal County contract.

The enrollment of incarcerated people’s voice prints allows corrections authorities to biometrically identify all prisoners’ voices on prison calls, and find past prison calls in which the same voice prints are detected. Such systems can also automatically flag “suspicious” calls, enabling investigators to review discrepancies between the incarcerated person’s ID for the call and the voice print detected. Securus did not respond to a request for comment on how it defined “suspicious.” The company’s Investigator Pro also provides a voice probability score, rating the likelihood that an incarcerated person’s voice was heard on a call.

Michael Lynch, an intelligence coordinator for the Alachua County Jail in northern Florida, confirmed that his county recently agreed to purchase Securus’s voice recognition program. Lynch said that the voice prints produced by the program will be permanently archived at Securus’s facility in Texas. He said the jail hopes the technology will address the problem of incarcerated people using each others’ personal identification numbers, or PINs. “The problem is inmates that are committing other criminal acts or contacting victims or witnesses and using other inmates’ PIN to do that,” he said in a phone call. “Voice [biometrics] will tell us who’s making the calls.”

Securus’s voice recognition program can also identify the voices of people outside prisons, both former prisoners and those who have never been incarcerated but communicate with people inside.

New York and Texas state corrections officials confirmed that their agencies retain the voice prints of formerly incarcerated people, like Dukes, allowing them to identify them by name if currently incarcerated people call them in the future.

And New York and Pinal County, Arizona, confirmed that their voice recognition programs can identify the voices of outside callers.

New York’s contract proposal with Securus states that outsiders’ voice samples can be used to “search for all other calls” in their recorded call database to find where those voices occur. In an email, New York prison officials confirmed that this program will give investigators the ability to extract a voice print from an outside caller and use it to “identify that a call recipient has participated in multiple phone calls.” They added that the program will not have names associated with outsiders’ voice prints.

In a statement, Pinal County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Navideh Forghani also confirmed this outsider voice-tracking capability, noting that while their software does not identify non-incarcerated people by name, it can track “suspicious activities,” such as “multiple inmates speaking to one person on the outside on a reoccurring basis.”

With this technology, a press release for Investigator Pro notes, an investigator can now answer questions like, “What other inmates are talking to this particular called party?” and “Are any of my current inmates talking to this released inmate?”

Prisoners’ rights advocates worry that outsider voice surveillance technology could also be used to coordinate crackdowns against prison organizing campaigns.

“Using this technology to trace the voices of outside callers and flag those who speak with more than one person in a system, staff can use calls with outside organizers to quickly identify the incarcerated activist they support,” said Bianca Tylek, director of the Corrections Accountability Project, which works to curb the influence of commercial interests in the criminal justice system. Tylek noted that during the 2018 national prison strike, corrections staff routinely retaliated against incarcerated activists by using tactics like solitary confinement, job termination, and facility reassignment.

The Pressure to Participate

Advocates assert that corrections agencies have been building up large-scale voice-print databases with limited input from the public or from incarcerated people and their families. While some state corrections agencies have put out public notices to families about payment options for new phone systems, they seldom mention the voice-print databases, which are rarely discussed outside of industry conferences and internal talks with contractors.

“Every time there’s a new contract, there’s new surveillance, but they don’t say anything,” said Tylek. “I’ve never seen authorities post a public notice about new surveillance updates or tell families.”

Keeping their plans opaque has allowed authorities to quietly pressure incarcerated people into giving up their biometric data — or to enroll them without their knowledge. According to Securus’s 2019 Investigator Pro contract with Alachua County, Florida (which includes Gainesville), “Inmates will participate in a covert voice print enrollment process.”

In Texas, state prisoners must enroll in the voice recognition program if they want to make calls. According to Jeremy Desel, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Investigator Pro’s voice enrollment process is “the lock and key” to the Texas state prison phone system. Likewise, in Pinal County, Arizona, phone access is severely limited for prisoners who decline to enroll in the voice recognition program. “If inmates choose not to participate, they can still utilize the phone system but only to make phone calls to their attorneys,” said Forghani, the county sheriff’s office spokesperson.

In some cases, prisoners participate without even knowing, said Martin Garcia, a 33-year-old who is incarcerated at Sing Sing in New York.

“A lot of guys don’t know technology,” he said. “They’ve been in there so long, they’ve never heard of Google.” The voice enrollment procedure, he continued, is seen as “just another thing they follow to talk to their family.”

Garcia was upset to hear that Securus’s voice-tracking capabilities, as described in its approved contract with the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, could mine prison call databases to identify which other prisoners outside callers had contacted. “Are they criminals just because they’re talking to someone incarcerated?” he said. “To me, you’re criminalizing relationships. Some people may be hesitant to interact with me if they could be put in a database.”

After being briefed by The Appeal and The Intercept about the program, New York State Assembly Member David Weprin publicly called on the state Department of Corrections to give incarcerated people more choice regarding the voice recognition program. At a Tuesday hearing, Weprin, chair of the Assembly’s Committee on Correction, asked the Department of Corrections’ acting commissioner, Anthony J. Annucci, to add a provision that allows incarcerated people with legitimate concerns about voice surveillance to “not be denied phone privileges.” Annucci did not immediately agree to the request, instead pointing out that people have the option to make unmonitored calls to their attorneys.

In a statement to The Appeal and The Intercept, Weprin said he is “concerned with the deployment and use of voice recognition software” in New York state prisons and will be working with his colleagues to further investigate the technology.

Building the Databases

The rapid, secretive growth of voice-print databases is “probably not a legal issue, not because it shouldn’t be, but because it’s something laws haven’t entertained yet,” noted Clare Garvie, a senior associate at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “It’s not surprising that we’re seeing this around prisons, just because it can be collected easily,” she continued, referring to biometric voice data. “We’re building these databases from the ground up.”

The scale of prisons’ emerging voice biometric databases has not been comprehensively documented nationwide, but, at minimum, they already hold more than 200,000 incarcerated people’s voice prints.

New York’s Department of Corrections, which incarcerates just under 50,000 people, confirmed that approximately 92 percent of its population had been enrolled in the voice recognition system. State corrections authorities for Florida, Texas, and Arkansas, which hold about 260,000 prisoners combined, also confirmed that they are using Investigator Pro’s voice recognition technology. Connecticut and Georgia’s state corrections systems, which incarcerate roughly 13,000 and roughly 52,000 people, respectively, have also purchased Securus’s voice-print technology.

The databases of recorded calls from which prison authorities could search for outsiders’ voice samples could also potentially include millions of recorded calls for state and countywide systems. According to the design requirements New York’s Department of Corrections gave to Securus, for example, the company must be able to record every call, archive all call recordings for a year, and maintain any calls flagged for investigative purposes “indefinitely” through the life of the contract, which ends in 2021. (In the documents, Securus estimated that 7 percent of prison calls made per year would total 1.5 million calls, suggesting that the call database could retain over 20 million calls.)

Greco of the Legal Aid Society says he understands the value of such monitoring capabilities, pointing out that incarcerated people do sometimes have to deal with other prisoners taking their PINs or threatening their families for money. But the extension of this technology into the monitoring of people outside prisons, and the lack of transparency and regulation of these new databases concerns him. If voice prints were shared with police, for example, they could try to compare them with voices caught on a wiretap, he notes, despite scientists’ skepticism about the reliability of voice print matches for criminal prosecutions. New York State’s Department of Corrections declined to answer questions regarding whether it would share the data with other agencies.

Either way, Greco said, there’s cause for concern. “Once the data exists, and it becomes an accepted part of what’s happening, it’s very hard to protect it or limit its use in the future,” he said.

That has implications far beyond prisons, argues Garcia, the man incarcerated at Sing Sing. “First you use this on the people marginalized in society, criminalizing the families of those incarcerated,” he said. “But, especially in Trump’s America, the sky is the limit with this.”

The post Prisons Across the U.S. Are Quietly Building Databases of Incarcerated People’s Voice Prints appeared first on The Intercept.

The video analytics software captured stills of individuals caught on closed-circuit TV footage and automatically labeled the images with physical tags, such as clothing color, allowing police to quickly search through hours of video for images of individuals matching a description of interest. At the time, the software was also starting to generate alerts for unattended packages, cars speeding up a street in the wrong direction, or people entering restricted areas.

Over the years, the NYPD has shared only occasional, small updates on the program’s progress. In a 2011 interview with Scientific American, for example, Inspector Salvatore DiPace, then commanding officer of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, said the police department was testing whether the software could box out images of people’s faces as they passed by subway cameras and subsequently cull through the images for various unspecified “facial features.”

While facial recognition technology, which measures individual faces at over 16,000 points for fine-grained comparisons with other facial images, has attracted significant legal scrutiny and media attention, this object identification software has largely evaded attention. How exactly this technology came to be developed and which particular features the software was built to catalog have never been revealed publicly by the NYPD.

Now, thanks to confidential corporate documents and interviews with many of the technologists involved in developing the software, The Intercept and the Investigative Fund have learned that IBM began developing this object identification technology using secret access to NYPD camera footage. With access to images of thousands of unknowing New Yorkers offered up by NYPD officials, as early as 2012, IBM was creating new search features that allow other police departments to search camera footage for images of people by hair color, facial hair, and skin tone.

IBM declined to comment on its use of NYPD footage to develop the software. However, in an email response to questions, the NYPD did tell The Intercept that “Video, from time to time, was provided to IBM to ensure that the product they were developing would work in the crowded urban NYC environment and help us protect the City. There is nothing in the NYPD’s agreement with IBM that prohibits sharing data with IBM for system development purposes. Further, all vendors who enter into contractual agreements with the NYPD have the absolute requirement to keep all data furnished by the NYPD confidential during the term of the agreement, after the completion of the agreement, and in the event that the agreement is terminated.”

In an email to The Intercept, the NYPD confirmed that select counterterrorism officials had access to a pre-released version of IBM’s program, which included skin tone search capabilities, as early as the summer of 2012. NYPD spokesperson Peter Donald said the search characteristics were only used for evaluation purposes and that officers were instructed not to include the skin tone search feature in their assessment. The department eventually decided not to integrate the analytics program into its larger surveillance architecture, and phased out the IBM program in 2016.

After testing out these bodily search features with the NYPD, IBM released some of these capabilities in a 2013 product release. Later versions of IBM’s software retained and expanded these bodily search capabilities. (IBM did not respond to a question about the current availability of its video analytics programs.)

Asked about the secrecy of this collaboration, the NYPD said that  “various elected leaders and stakeholders” were briefed on the department’s efforts “to keep this city safe,” adding that sharing camera access with IBM was necessary for the system to work. IBM did not respond to a question about why the company didn’t make this collaboration public. Donald said IBM gave the department licenses to apply the system to 512 cameras, but said the analytics were tested on “fewer than fifty.” He added that IBM personnel had access to certain cameras for the sole purpose of configuring NYPD’s system, and that the department put safeguards in place to protect the data, including “non-disclosure agreements for each individual accessing the system; non-disclosure agreements for the companies the vendors worked for; and background checks.”

Civil liberties advocates contend that New Yorkers should have been made aware of the potential use of their physical data for a private company’s development of surveillance technology. The revelations come as a city council bill that would require NYPD transparency about surveillance acquisitions continues to languish, due, in part, to outspoken opposition from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD.

Skin Tone Search Technology, Refined on New Yorkers

IBM’s initial breakthroughs in object recognition technology were envisioned for technologies like self-driving cars or image recognition on the internet, said Rick Kjeldsen, a former IBM researcher. But after 9/11, Kjeldsen and several of his colleagues realized their program was well suited for counterterror surveillance.

“After 9/11, the funding sources and the customer interest really got driven toward security,” said Kjeldsen, who said he worked on the NYPD program from roughly 2009 through 2013. “Even though that hadn’t been our focus up to that point, that’s where demand was.”

IBM’s first major urban video surveillance project was with the Chicago Police Department and began around 2005, according to Kjeldsen. The department let IBM experiment with the technology in downtown Chicago until 2013, but the collaboration wasn’t seen as a real business partnership. “Chicago was always known as, it’s not a real — these guys aren’t a real customer. This is kind of a development, a collaboration with Chicago,” Kjeldsen said. “Whereas New York, these guys were a customer. And they had expectations accordingly.”

The NYPD acquired IBM’s video analytics software as one part of the Domain Awareness System, a shared project of the police department and Microsoft that centralized a vast web of surveillance sensors in lower and midtown Manhattan — including cameras, license plate readers, and radiation detectors — into a unified dashboard. IBM entered the picture as a subcontractor to Microsoft subsidiary Vexcel in 2007, as part of a project worth $60.7 million over six years, according to the internal IBM documents.

In New York, the terrorist threat “was an easy selling point,” recalled Jonathan Connell, an IBM researcher who worked on the initial NYPD video analytics installation. “You say, ‘Look what the terrorists did before, they could come back, so you give us some money and we’ll put a camera there.”

A former NYPD technologist who helped design the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, asking to speak on background citing fears of professional reprisal, confirmed IBM’s role as a “strategic vendor.” “In our review of video analytics vendors at that time, they were well ahead of everyone else in my personal estimation,” the technologist said.

According to internal IBM planning documents, the NYPD began integrating IBM’s surveillance product in March 2010 for the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center, a counterterrorism command center launched by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly in 2008. In a “60 Minutes” tour of the command center in 2011, Jessica Tisch, then the NYPD’s director of policy and planning for counterterrorism, showed off the software on gleaming widescreen monitors, demonstrating how it could pull up images and video clips of people in red shirts. Tisch did not mention the partnership with IBM.

During Kelly’s tenure as police commissioner, the NYPD quietly worked with IBM as the company tested out its object recognition technology on a select number of NYPD and subway cameras, according to IBM documents. “We really needed to be able to test out the algorithm,” said Kjeldsen, who explained that the software would need to process massive quantities of diverse images in order to learn how to adjust to the differing lighting, shadows, and other environmental factors in its view. “We were almost using the video for both things at that time, taking it to the lab to resolve issues we were having or to experiment with new technology,” Kjeldsen said.

At the time, the department hoped that video analytics would improve analysts’ ability to identify suspicious objects and persons in real time in sensitive areas, according to Conor McCourt, a retired NYPD counterterrorism sergeant who said he used IBM’s program in its initial stages.

“Say you have a suspicious bag left in downtown Manhattan, as a person working in the command center,” McCourt said. “It could be that the analytics saw the object sitting there for five minutes, and says, ‘Look, there’s an object sitting there.’” Operators could then rewind the video or look at other cameras nearby, he explained, to get a few possibilities as to who had left the object behind.

Over the years, IBM employees said, they started to become more concerned as they worked with the NYPD to allow the program to identify demographic characteristics. By 2012, according to the internal IBM documents, researchers were testing out the video analytics software on the bodies and faces of New Yorkers, capturing and archiving their physical data as they walked in public or passed through subway turnstiles. With these close-up images, IBM refined its ability to search for people on camera according to a variety of previously undisclosed features, such as age, gender, hair color (called “head color”), the presence of facial hair — and skin tone. The documents reference meetings between NYPD personnel and IBM researchers to review the development of body identification searches conducted at subway turnstile cameras.

“We were certainly worried about where the heck this was going,” recalled Kjeldsen. “There were a couple of us that were always talking about this, you know, ‘If this gets better, this could be an issue.’”

According to the NYPD, counterterrorism personnel accessed IBM’s bodily search feature capabilities only for evaluation purposes, and they were accessible only to a handful of counterterrorism personnel. “While tools that featured either racial or skin tone search capabilities were offered to the NYPD, they were explicitly declined by the NYPD,” Donald, the NYPD spokesperson, said. “Where such tools came with a test version of the product, the testers were instructed only to test other features (clothing, eyeglasses, etc.), but not to test or use the skin tone feature. That is not because there would have been anything illegal or even improper about testing or using these tools to search in the area of a crime for an image of a suspect that matched a description given by a victim or a witness. It was specifically to avoid even the suggestion or appearance of any kind of technological racial profiling.” The NYPD ended its use of IBM’s video analytics program in 2016, Donald said.

Donald acknowledged that, at some point in 2016 or early 2017, IBM approached the NYPD with an upgraded version of the video analytics program that could search for people by ethnicity. “The Department explicitly rejected that product,” he said, “based on the inclusion of that new search parameter.” In 2017, IBM released Intelligent Video Analytics 2.0, a product with a body camera surveillance capability that allows users to detect people captured on camera by “ethnicity” tags, such as “Asian,” “Black,” and “White.”

Kjeldsen, the former IBM researcher who helped develop the company’s skin tone analytics with NYPD camera access, said the department’s claim that the NYPD simply tested and rejected the bodily search features was misleading. “We would have not explored it had the NYPD told us, ‘We don’t want to do that,’” he said. “No company is going to spend money where there’s not customer interest.”

Kjeldsen also added that the NYPD’s decision to allow IBM access to their cameras was crucial for the development of the skin tone search features, noting that during that period, New York City served as the company’s “primary testing area,” providing the company with considerable environmental diversity for software refinement.

“The more different situations you can use to develop your software, the better it’s going be,” Kjeldsen said. “That obviously pertains to people, skin tones, whatever it is you might be able to classify individuals as, and it also goes for clothing.”

The NYPD’s cooperation with IBM has since served as a selling point for the product at California State University, Northridge. There, campus police chief Anne Glavin said the technology firm IXP helped sell her on IBM’s object identification product by citing the NYPD’s work with the company. “They talked about what it’s done for New York City. IBM was very much behind that, so this was obviously of great interest to us,” Glavin said.

Day-to-Day Policing, Civil Liberties Concerns

The NYPD-IBM video analytics program was initially envisioned as a counterterrorism tool for use in midtown and lower Manhattan, according to Kjeldsen. However, the program was integrated during its testing phase into dozens of cameras across the city. According to the former NYPD technologist, it could have been integrated into everyday criminal investigations.

“All bureaus of the department could make use of it,” said the former technologist, potentially helping detectives investigate everything from sex crimes to fraud cases. Kjeldsen spoke of cameras being placed at building entrances and near parking entrances to monitor for suspicious loiterers and abandoned bags.

Donald, the NYPD spokesperson, said the program’s access was limited to a small number of counterterrorism officials, adding, “We are not aware of any case where video analytics was a factor in an arrest or prosecution.”

Campus police at California State University, Northridge, who adopted IBM’s software, said the bodily search features have been helpful in criminal investigations. Asked about whether officers have deployed the software’s ability to filter through footage for suspects’ clothing color, hair color, and skin tone, Captain Scott VanScoy at California State University, Northridge, responded affirmatively, relaying a story about how university detectives were able to use such features to quickly filter through their cameras and find two suspects in a sexual assault case.

“We were able to pick up where they were at different locations from earlier that evening and put a story together, so it saves us a ton of time,” Vanscoy said. “By the time we did the interviews, we already knew the story and they didn’t know we had known.”

Glavin, the chief of the campus police, added that surveillance cameras using IBM’s software had been placed strategically across the campus to capture potential security threats, such as car robberies or student protests. “So we mapped out some CCTV in that area and a path of travel to our main administration building, which is sometimes where people will walk to make their concerns known and they like to stand outside that building,” Glavin said. “Not that we’re a big protest campus, we’re certainly not a Berkeley, but it made sense to start to build the exterior camera system there.”

Civil liberties advocates say they are alarmed by the NYPD’s secrecy in helping to develop a program with the potential capacity for mass racial profiling.

The identification technology IBM built could be easily misused after a major terrorist attack, argued Rachel Levinson-Waldman, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “Whether or not the perpetrator is Muslim, the presumption is often that he or she is,” she said. “It’s easy to imagine law enforcement jumping to a conclusion about the ethnic and religious identity of a suspect, hastily going to the database of stored videos and combing through it for anyone who meets that physical description, and then calling people in for questioning on that basis.” IBM did not comment on questions about the potential use of its software for racial profiling. However, the company did send a comment to The Intercept pointing out that it was “one of the first companies anywhere to adopt a set of principles for trust and transparency for new technologies, including AI systems.” The statement continued on to explain that IBM is “making publicly available to other companies a dataset of annotations for more than a million images to help solve one of the biggest issues in facial analysis — the lack of diverse data to train AI systems.”

Few laws clearly govern object recognition or the other forms of artificial intelligence incorporated into video surveillance, according to Clare Garvie, a law fellow at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy and Technology. “Any form of real-time location tracking may raise a Fourth Amendment inquiry,” Garvie said, citing a 2012 Supreme Court case, United States v. Jones, that involved police monitoring a car’s path without a warrant and resulted in five justices suggesting that individuals could have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public movements. In addition, she said, any form of “identity-based surveillance” may compromise people’s right to anonymous public speech and association.

Garvie noted that while facial recognition technology has been heavily criticized for the risk of false matches, that risk is even higher for an analytics system “tracking a person by other characteristics, like the color of their clothing and their height,” that are not unique characteristics.

The former NYPD technologist acknowledged that video analytics systems can make mistakes, and noted a study where the software had trouble characterizing people of color: “It’s never 100 percent.” But the program’s identification of potential suspects was, he noted, only the first step in a chain of events that heavily relies on human expertise. “The technology operators hand the data off to the detective,” said the technologist. “You use all your databases to look for potential suspects and you give it to a witness to look at. … This is all about finding a way to shorten the time to catch the bad people.”

Object identification programs could also unfairly drag people into police suspicion just because of generic physical characteristics, according to Jerome Greco, a digital forensics staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, New York’s largest public defenders organization. “I imagine a scenario where a vague description, like young black male in a hoodie, is fed into the system, and the software’s undisclosed algorithm identifies a person in a video walking a few blocks away from the scene of an incident,” Greco said. “The police find an excuse to stop him, and, after the stop, an officer says the individual matches a description from the earlier incident.” All of a sudden, Greco continued, “a man who was just walking in his own neighborhood” could be charged with a serious crime without him or his attorney ever knowing “that it all stemmed from a secret program which he cannot challenge.”

While the technology could be used for appropriate law enforcement work, Kjeldsen said that what bothered him most about his project was the secrecy he and his colleagues had to maintain. “We certainly couldn’t talk about what cameras we were using, what capabilities we were putting on cameras,” Kjeldsen said. “They wanted to control public perception and awareness of LMSI” — the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative — “so we always had to be cautious about even that part of it, that we’re involved, and who we were involved with, and what we were doing.” (IBM did not respond to a question about instructing its employees not to speak publicly about its work with the NYPD.)

The way the NYPD helped IBM develop this technology without the public’s consent sets a dangerous precedent, Kjeldsen argued.

“Are there certain activities that are nobody’s business no matter what?” he asked. “Are there certain places on the boundaries of public spaces that have an expectation of privacy? And then, how do we build tools to enforce that? That’s where we need the conversation. That’s exactly why knowledge of this should become more widely available — so that we can figure that out.”

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

The post IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color appeared first on The Intercept.

Footage from the moments after the shooting, initially obtained by the Village Voice, shows that at least nine plainclothes officers were on the scene. Several of the plainclothes cops were taking aggressive action to clear the area of onlookers. One of the officers in the video is wearing a hat emblazoned with a large white skull. Another, who pushes his way through the intersection with sirens blaring, wears a shirt with the symbol of the vigilante comic book character, the Punisher.

The involvement of plainclothes police officers in Vassell’s death speaks to a dynamic of police violence in New York that frequently goes unmentioned: Despite being only a small fraction of the force, many police killings are carried out by on-duty officers who are not wearing uniforms.

An analysis by The Intercept, using data from the Fatal Encounters project, found that plainclothes cops play a role in such killings disproportionate to their relatively small numbers among the NYPD’s ranks. Plainclothes police have been involved in nearly a third of all fatal shooting incidents recorded since 2000, according to The Intercept study.

The analysis of the killings used cases in which the operational status of officers involved — whether they were uniformed or plainclothes — was originally reported or determined through subsequent review by The Intercept. In 68 cases, The Intercept’s review of public information and reporting could not determine if the officers were in uniform at the time of the shooting.

The NYPD did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment on exactly how the department defines its plainclothes and undercover work; NYPD reports refer to both as plainclothes. In shooting incidents reviewed for The Intercept’s analysis, press reports referred to officers wearing both casual clothes or specific disguises as either “plainclothes” or “undercover” officers. Because the NYPD does not release comprehensive data about shooting incidents, The Intercept’s analysis relied on Fatal Encounters, which uses open-source information to track police shootings but acknowledges that it does not supply a complete data set.

“The undercovers think they have the authority to do anything they want.”

The NYPD does not disclose how many of its roughly 20,000 officers operate in its plainclothes units. But Joe Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that a typical precinct will have a four-person plainclothes team for each tour of duty, or shift. The police service is composed of around 77 precincts across the city, with each day divided into three tours, so the number of plainclothes police working out of precincts on a given day is likely around 900 at a minimum. If officers working for the 20 or so transit, housing, and special-assignment commands work in plainclothes at the same rates as the precincts — about four per shift per command — the estimated number of plainclothes cops working on any given day would jump to approximately 1,200.

In other words, plainclothes officers, estimated to be around around 6 percent of the force, account for 31 percent of all fatal shooting incidents.

A 2016 NYPD report found that nearly half of officers involved in “adversarial conflicts” — “when an officer intentionally discharges his or her firearm during a confrontation with a subject,” according to the NYPD — were in plainclothes. The same report also found that specialty units, which include anti-crime teams, were involved in about one-third of incidents in which firearms were discharged in these encounters. The report attributes this to “the role of specialty units in proactively pursuing violent criminals.”

Locals in Crown Heights have taken note of this dynamic. “You’ll never see a blue suit cop doing crazy shit like that,” said Vern, a 21-year-old nurse, who only gave her first name. Sitting in the barbershop where Vassell used to work nearly a week after the killing, Vern said, “The undercovers think they have the authority to do anything they want. They hunt motherfuckers — like us black people — down.”

Plainclothes officers are part of elite, roving anti-crime units. They usually do not respond to 911 calls, instead directing their own investigations. This proactive role, however, can put plainclothes officers — and the people they approach — in volatile situations. “Because you’re not wearing a uniform, if you roll up on a couple of guys, they might think they’re getting robbed, they might start shooting right away,” said Giacalone, the retired NYPD sergeant.

Some such situations are spurred by an approach from police officers without clear identification, even involving chases on foot or by car. The police department routinely publishes images of plainclothes officers next to guns and seized caches of illicit items, from a single pistol to larger collections of narcotics and weapons.

NYPD Police Commissioner James O’Neill told the Associated Press that plainclothes officers are necessary for following and apprehending the “small segment of the population that commits most of the crime in New York City.”

It remains unclear why the plainclothes officers who shot and killed Vassell responded to a radio call that day. “If there’s a call for help or a robbery in progress, like if a cop is calling for help, they will come as a backup to those kind of jobs,” said Giacalone. “But their role is not to take things off the radio.”

Six days after Vassel’s death, customers and staff at his former workplace, Kev’s Unique Barber Shop, argued that plainclothes officers’ proactive mentality can be deadly. Had uniformed patrol officers from the 71st Precinct arrived that day, the outcome might have been different, argued Vern, the nurse. “The blue always tell you what they’re doing,” she said. “The 71st Precinct cops knew Saheed. They knew him.”

“The undercovers are doing whatever they want to do,” said Kevin Davis, a barber at the shop. “Mostly the undercovers want to provoke you. They ride up slowly, windows down, and then say, like, ‘What are you looking at?’ And then when you say something back, they get out of the car.”

Tye Wike, a customer who was getting his head shaved, agreed. “If they’re driving in an unmarked car, they’ll say, ‘What the fuck you looking at?’ And if you say something back to them, not knowing who they are, then they act like gangsters. It’s only in minority neighborhoods that they do that.”

NYPD plainclothes officers have been involved in numerous high-profile civilian killings in recent years.

In 1999, four plainclothes officers killed an unarmed Bronx resident, Amadou Diallo. According to a witness, the officers, who mistook Diallo for another man, got out of their car, guns drawn, and, without any warning, shot him 41 times. The officers were part of the NYPD’s street crimes unit, which was disbanded largely in the fallout from Diallo’s killing. At the time of its dissolution, the unit had a staff of roughly 400 officers.

The apparent phase-out of the street crimes unit after Diallo’s killing, however, was largely semantic, according to then-NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. “There is not a change in function,” Kelly told the New York Times in 2002. “It is a change in title because we no longer have anything called Street Crime.” Despite their controversial conduct, Kelly simply shifted the unit’s members into plainclothes anti-crime units and neighborhood detective squads. The shootings continued.

In 2006, undercover and plainclothes officers killed Sean Bell, a Queens resident, at a bachelor party; Bell was to be married that day. The officers shot at three men, including Bell, 50 times, after Bell’s car ran into an unmarked police vehicle.

In 2013, Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old Brooklyn resident, was shot by police who were working as part of a plainclothes anti-crime unit. Police claimed they had approached Gray after they saw him allegedly fidget with his waistband and shot him when he pulled out a gun. A witness testified under oath that Gray had his hands up when the cops opened fire.

In 2014, Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Eric Garner using a banned chokehold, was working in plainclothes at the time of the incident.

Plainclothes officers effectively evade accountability by design: They frequently don’t wear body cameras.

Crown Heights residents who knew Vassell argue that this track record demonstrates that plainclothes officers effectively evade accountability by design. They frequently don’t wear the body cameras that are proliferating among police departments across the country. When asked about plans to equip plainclothes officers with body cameras, a spokesperson for the NYPD’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which handles civilian complaints against members of the police department, deferred the question to the department. The spokesperson added in a statement that, in interviews with officers as part of the complaint process, the board has only identified one closed case involving a plainclothes officer with body camera footage. (Civil liberties advocates have criticized the NYPD’s body camera program, which does not require officers to turn on their cameras when attempting to question civilians.)

Additionally, plainclothes officers routinely drive cars that lack unit numbers. Standard NYPD vehicles are emblazoned with a unique number and precinct or command designation. But for plainclothes cops in unmarked vehicles, a witness may only be able to gather the car’s make, model, and license plate number — none of which are as clearly marked to the uninitiated eye — in order to report allegations of police misconduct. To make matters more complicated, unmarked NYPD vehicles have been spotted with altered or obscured license plates on numerous occasions.

Residents in Crown Heights say they are skeptical that further training measures will change plainclothes and undercover officers’ behavior, which they argue emanates from the nature of the work itself.

“They act tough like they’re from the hood, like they’re from a gang,” said Vern, “but they’re only like that because they have a badge.”

Top photo: NYPD officers stand outside their precinct to watch as demonstrators protest the killing of Saheed Vassell by local police officers in Brooklyn, N.Y., on April 5, 2018.

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The documents, which include FBI emails and intelligence reports from November 2014, suggest that federal surveillance of Black Lives Matter protests went far beyond the online intelligence-gathering first reported on by The Intercept in 2015. That intelligence-gathering by the federal government had employed open-source information, such as social media, to profile and keep track of activists. The newly released documents suggest the FBI put resources toward running informants, as well as physical surveillance of antiracist activists.

The heavily redacted records were obtained by two civil rights groups, Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and are being published here for the first time. Internal communications from Department of Homeland Security officials, released through this lawsuit, also revealed the existence of a document described by DHS officials as the “Race Paper,” which was the subject of a filing by the civil rights groups on Monday.

Though cleansed of much substance by redactions, the released surveillance documents give rough sketches of the sort of activities the FBI engaged in surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement. The documents don’t directly mention Black Lives Matter, but they were released by the government in response to a request specifically about the movement.

One report, produced on November 21, 2014, shows an FBI agent alerting officials about a protester’s plans to travel from New York to Ferguson for a Thanksgiving Day protest starting at a facility of Monsanto, a multinational agrochemical corporation. The FBI narrative, which was provided “for coordination with Monsanto,” does not mention how authorities knew about the protester’s travel plans. The report also highlights money raised for bail funds and “direct action devices” — a reference to materials used in protest demonstrations — but does not reference any indications of potential violence.

The intelligence summary notes the activist in question, whose name was redacted, is “believed to have been arrested at a previous protest.” The report also refers to a separate document about the individual, suggesting that the FBI had compiled an individualized dossier on the protester, according to summaries of the documents provided by Color of Change. A search of two FBI databases found no derogatory information on the activist, according to the report narrative.

Some of the documents released as part of the lawsuit contradict the FBI’s claim that it does not police ideology and only targets individuals taking up violent action, said Michael German, a former FBI agent and now a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program.

“This is clearly just tracking First Amendment activity and keeping this activity in an intelligence database.”

“This is clearly just tracking First Amendment activity and keeping this activity in an intelligence database,” said German, in a phone interview, referring to the FBI report about an individual’s plans to travel for a protest. “Even if you made the argument that it is about a propensity for violence, why isn’t there a discussion of that propensity? Instead they are discussing bond money, not detailing a criminal predicate or even a possibility of violence.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the FBI denied it had surveilled anyone on the basis of exercising their rights. “The FBI does not engage in surveillance of individuals exercising their First Amendment rights,” said Rebecca Wu, a public affairs officer with the FBI in St. Louis. “However, the FBI is responsible for reviewing intelligence that indicates an individual may be involved in criminal activity or is a threat to national security.”

The FBI also released heavily redacted reports and emails suggesting FBI agents staked out the cars and residences of individuals somehow associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. A November 25, 2014, report released in response to the request for FBI records on Black Lives Matter surveillance shows that an FBI bomb technician and another officer from an unspecified task force observed a vehicle outside a residence and gathered registration information on vehicles parked in the vicinity. The FBI agents had identified the first vehicle thanks to a confidential human source.

An email chain, also from November 25, 2014, shows FBI agents discussing logistics for a continuous stakeout of a redacted physical location. One email from 2:08 a.m. that day indicates that FBI agents were camped outside an unknown location during the early-morning hours and planned to have other agents take over their monitoring shift at 6 a.m. Another email sent less than an hour later alerts agents at “approx 1 am, two cars came and parked at” the redacted location. It is unclear who was the focus of this surveillance operation and whether the operation was part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

The report was compiled on the day a grand jury declined to indict Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown. Three days earlier, the FBI had arrested two members of the New Black Panther Party after they bought three nonfunctional pipe bombs as part of a sting operation.

German, who reviewed the other released records for The Intercept, said it is impossible to tell whether the in-person surveillance that they reference was appropriate. “The fact that they have a confidential human source, why does this come up in a search of Black Lives Matter?” said German. “Because these documents are so redacted, we don’t know. Perhaps there was some justifiable reason to be following them.”

Since the FBI’s focus on “Black Identity Extremists” became known last October, the FBI has quietly investigated militant black activists advocating armed self-defense in locations ranging from Texas to Michigan to South Carolina, according to Foreign Policy. Black nationalist motivations accounted for five of the 34 extremist-related murders in 2017, compared to 18 white supremacist murders, according to an Anti-Defamation League report.

“Black identity extremism doesn’t exist, it’s a made-up term that they” — the FBI — “created for a guidance document on how to police young Black activists,” Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., vice chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said in a statement to The Intercept last week. “In addition to other efforts to win retraction of this document, a task force of the Congressional Black Caucus will be conducting a briefing next week featuring experts and activists from around the country to examine the troubling guidance that was released last year.”

For experts on the history of government surveillance of black social movements in the U.S., the tactics described in the documents are reminiscent of a rich American history of targeting black Americans. Perhaps most infamously, the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program was aimed at disrupting and infiltrating civil rights and black nationalist movements from 1956 to 1971.

“What we have learned from history is that policies aimed at surveilling and harassing social movements among black people in the United States have never really ended.”

“What we have learned from history is that policies aimed at surveilling and harassing social movements among black people in the United States have never really ended,” said Anika Navaroli, a legal expert and researcher on civil rights and privacy in the U.S. “It is important to recognize that the practices shown in these documents are not unprecedented. They are a continuation of policies that have systematically created an environment of fear for black people in America, while rendering their right to privacy nonexistent.”

The use of informants to surveil Black Lives Matter activists draws on a history that predates even COINTELPRO. In his 1999 book “Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925,” historian Theodore Kornweibel Jr. documented how federal authorities made “extensive use of black undercover officers and infiltrators” as part of an anticommunist crusade in which authorities accused black activists of Bolshevist sympathies in the decades following the 1917 Russian Revolution.

“There are real criminals out in the world, and there aren’t enough FBI agents to spend law enforcement resources against people who don’t pose any kind of threat,” said German, the former FBI agent. “I don’t understand why law enforcement is so enamored by this work. Unfortunately, this type of intelligence-gathering often has a racial component to it.”

The release of FOIA documents showing direct surveillance of Ferguson protest activists is part of a broader legal fight by advocates with the Center for Constitutional Rights and Color of Change to create more transparency about law enforcement efforts to surveil Black Lives Matter activists. But documents and emails released to lawyers may show much more than these kinds of direct surveillance activities.

Numerous emails between Department of Homeland Security officials also refer to something described internally as the “Race Paper.” While the government has not been willing to discuss the nature of this document, lawyers involved in the case say that internal DHS communications about the document may refer to a framework for evaluating the alleged radicalization of black activists. (DHS did not reply to a request to comment for this story.)

“In our review of the documents the court ordered DHS to turn over, we came across multiple emails between individuals in the DHS Intelligence and Analysis office referring to a document called ‘Race Paper,’ though every word of the document itself is blacked-out,” said Omar Farah, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “In the emails discussing the document, there is also more than one reference to ‘drivers’ and ‘indicators.’ These are terms that, in the absence of more information, hint at bunk analytical frameworks that attempt to predict criminality by ascribing behavioral tendencies to protected classes of people.”

On Monday, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and Color of Change filed a motion specifically demanding more information about the contents of the “Race Paper.” Notably, while many of the surveillance documents released so far focus on activities during the Obama administration, internal discussions about the “Race Paper” took place during the Trump administration, while now-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was running DHS.

“The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are at war with black activists.”

“CCR has focused its litigation on this newly identified document for several reasons, including DHS’s stated mission to provide ‘predictive intelligence’ to the government and the blanket secrecy it has applied to the Race Papers’ content,” said Farah. “In the absence of an open review, we are left with the disturbing possibility that DHS is using an unsound, racialized framework to surveil protected speech and activism. If that’s right, that is something the public desperately needs to know about.”

For those advocating on behalf of communities of color, they hope to see today’s activists, like those of the Black Lives Matter movement, operating without being hindered by the American security state.

“The FBI and Department of Homeland Security are at war with black activists,” said Rashad Robinson, the executive director of Color of Change. “Up until recently, we’ve known very little about the government’s surveillance of our communities. But, by forcing the disclosure of more information about these surveillance efforts, including our demand today for the full and unredacted ‘race paper,’ we can better understand these attacks on black activism and fight to prevent a new generation of black activists from demonization, incarceration, intimidation, and punishment.”

Top photo: A protester stands in front of police vehicles with his hands up during a demonstration on Nov. 24, 2014 in Ferguson, Mo.

The post FBI Tracked an Activist Involved With Black Lives Matter as They Traveled Across the U.S., Documents Show appeared first on The Intercept.