Secure Liberties Newsletter
Covering War, Peace, Militarism and Everything in Between
TOP LINE
ICE accused of torture to force “Cameroonian asylum seekers to force them to sign their own deportation orders, in what lawyers and activists describe as a brutal scramble to fly African migrants out of the country in the run-up to the elections.” According to The Guardian, one victim said ICE “pepper-sprayed me in the eyes and [one officer] strangled me almost to the point of death. I kept telling him, ‘I can’t breathe.’ I almost died.” ICE then “forcibly obtain[ed] my fingerprint on the document.”
Concerns around possible Biden nominees continue, as some close to the candidate continue to promote people like Avril Haines as possible senior intelligence officials (we covered issues with Haines in our first newsletter). Meanwhile, some groups are skeptical that olive-branch appointments will win a Biden administration more than headaches. Some, including Demand Progress, are in talks with Biden advisers about all of the above and are organizing to stop a repeat of the 2008 transition.
Reps. Eshoo, Rush, and Sen. Wyden demand investigation into surveillance of BLM, in a recent letter to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, point to the various surveillance practices deployed against protesters. The administration’s cries of terrorism might have come back to bite them, since that’s PCLOB’s primary jurisdiction. At a minimum, we’d like to know what authorities the DEA is relying on for all this. More here.
ARMS, INTEL, and NDAA
NDAA Conference: Reps. Bass, Brown, and 41 more keep aim on controversial 1033 program, through which the Pentagon sends military equipment to local cops. The members called for reform through “additional conditions and limitations” on the program. See the letter here.
30+ groups called for investigation and hearings into DHS coverup of white supremacy threat, in a letter late last month led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The orgs were responding to news that the white supremacist threat was downplayed while DHS inflated the threat posted by Antifa.
ICYMI, “Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor.” The Washington Post had the story, involving a “$1 billion fund Congress gave to the Pentagon in March … mostly funneled to defense contractors.” 40+ groups called for an investigation here.
SURVEILLANCE
As NSA tries to dodge questions, Eshoo calls on the ICIG to investigate surveillance of Congress and SCOTUS, in another letter from earlier this month. DirNSA Nakasone’s response, included in the ICIG request, conspicuously evaded questions about how much information had been sucked up about the executive’s coequal branches.
Law enforcement phone hacking more common than thought, according to a NY Times review of documents obtained by Upturn. “At least 49 of the 50 largest U.S. police departments have the tools.” An Oregon town with 100,000 people “spent more than $62,761 on the technology since 2017.” In Wisconsin, a town of 9,000 and two nearby agencies spent $32,706 since 2013.
For what? Well, in Baltimore and Colorado, “a majority of warrants … involved drug investigations.” Upturn also obtained warrants to search phones in cases involving $220 worth of pot in Texas and a fight over $70 at McDonald’s in Minnesota.
Illegal use of COVID-19 database, eh? In Ontario, two civil rights groups are claiming police forces “engaged in broad, illegal searches of a now-defunct COVID-19 database.”
About those Portland wiretaps, we thought this thread, ostensibly from a former Signals Intelligence Operator/analyst, was useful in understanding what’s going on.
RELEVANT, TOO
US Cyber Command “forcibly altered the functioning of U.S.-based computers, unbeknownst to their users,” per Axios, in “aggressive” botnet disruption effort. Here’s the inestimable Brian Krebs’s blow-by-blow. Big questions: 1) is it legal to use these tools against a criminal enterprise, rather than a state actor, and 2) will this actually hinder the botnet?
BOTTOM LINE
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