It has come to this for thee and we: For civil rights and public safety reasons, Local News Pasadena will no longer publish photos of identifiable political protesters unless they are elected officials.
And we strongly recommend that you don’t photograph yourself holding a protest sign, or the faces of other protesters, either. The risks to your freedom and theirs are simply too severe.
As journalists, we’ve noted several disturbing local and national trends related to government use of facial recognition technology, political retribution and surveillance “law enforcement.” The quotes around that phrase are intentional, signifying how far down the slippery slope of normalizing government overreach we’ve slid.
Those trends include warrantless searches (smartphone seizures and searches of digital contents – especially social media posts and photographs – conducted without court-issued search warrants), facial recognition technology applied to Web and social media images by law enforcement agencies, and how American citizens could be incarcerated as domestic terrorists for protesting corporate or government actions.
That’s not a comprehensive list, by the way.
Recently we’ve covered large-scale “Hands Off!” protests in Pasadena, and these are likely to grow larger and more frequent. We applaud our fellow citizens for making their voices heard in a non-violent manner. Unfortunately, there are some who view mass demonstrations as threats to their political and economic power. People in those situations won’t be laughing about your clever protest sign. If they can, they will find ways to identify you and retaliate.
How Governments Spy On Protestors — And How To Avoid It. Video: Wired
Last year, Local News Pasadena broke the story about the Pasadena Police Department’s planned acquisition of a manned, mobile “observation” tower designed to surveil and photograph locals and visitors alike. We reported how, at the time, PPD said it wanted to deploy the tower in retail shopping areas and at “area events, especially those with large crowds.”
After the Community Police Oversight Commission excoriated PPD leadership about the proposal for over an hour, the City Council eventually approved the purchase but severely limited the locations where and circumstances when the tower would be deployed. If the community hadn’t responded to our coverage the way it did, the tower may have been cranked-up to photograph you last weekend.
Vigilance is critically important.
So folks here’s the deal, as a recent POTUS was fond of saying. We want you to seriously consider protecting your identity during all upcoming protests. That means taking some or all of the following precautions:
- Do not bring your new iPhone to demonstrations. Leave it home. If necessary, bring a back-up phone you won’t mind having confiscated and searched. Do not have anything incriminating, including photos taken at other demonstrations, on your back-up phone and do not have it automatically logged into your social media accounts. You are NOT legally required to provide law enforcement with the lock screen password or PIN for your phone, even if you are arrested. But that won’t stop police from confiscating it as evidence.
- Sadly, this same advice also applies to all travelers entering the United States.
- Do not photograph identifiable faces of protestors or yourself at demonstrations.
- Make it difficult for facial recognition software to identify you. This can be tricky, but if your own smartphone’s facial recognition algorithm can’t identify you, it’s less likely the government can either.
- Do not ignore lawful orders to disperse. Remain free to demonstrate another day.
- Most importantly, stay safe and do not resort to property damage or violence.
About the title of this article. It comes from a 2015 satirical tweet (and yes, it was still Twitter then) from Adrian Bott that read, “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
Protect your face during protests. Going forward, we’ll do our best to help with that.
Thank you!
More info in how to erase cyber footprints (dummy 101 version) would be helpful.
Hi Leah,
That’s a longer story.
The simple message when it comes to protests is to avoid helping law enforcement invade your privacy. That means not letting your phone serve as a willing witness for the prosecution. The dummy 101 advice is to use a screen lock password or PIN (not facial recognition or fingerprint unlock), and to refuse to provide the password or PIN if asked for it.
Could the FBI hack into an encrypted phone anyway? Perhaps, but the simplest approach is to not have a phone with you at all.
Phil
Thanks, Yes. Good; and I was thinking of that bigger picture. Perhaps another article sometime.