Portland is center stage in a federal crackdown on protests that relies largely on social media surveillance — but activists are adapting
With Portland at the center of the Trump administration’s push to quash protests and paint protesters as “violent anarchists,” law enforcement increasingly relies on social media to identify those involved, leading many to adopt stricter online practices.
On July 31, an affidavit from Amanda Johnson, an agent at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, alleged that Gabriel Agard-Berryhill threw a firework at the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse during a protest in downtown Portland. The bureau’s evidence was a combination of social media posts, YouTube videos and a product review for the protective vest Agard-Berryhill was wearing at the demonstration.
Many criminal complaints from Portland’s protest-related cases use social media and online video as evidence. But as nightly demonstrations continue well past their 100th night, activists are catching on and changing the way they share information.
Blank faces and code words
Portland’s nightly protests are well-documented, especially on social media platforms.
Before each demonstration, a handful of participants and activism-focused accounts share information via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram about where the protest will occur and what they are protesting.
Most use aliases to protect their identities, and groups increasingly urge others to be mindful of what, and who, they share images of.
Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front, a loose network of leftist activists with various chapters, has repeatedly posted on Twitter, asking photojournalists and livestreamers to censor protesters’ faces if their footage could incriminate them. Although major media outlets publish photos taken in public spaces without censoring faces, some activists covering the protests through their social media accounts choose to oblige, such as Twitter’s @gravemorgan.
Grace Morgan, a self-identified independent photojournalist, covers many of the Portland demonstrations and blurs people’s faces because protesters have asked her to do so.
“We all know that if police really wanted to identify someone, they could do so easily by their clothing,” Morgan said. “But I think blurring photos, in particular, is a fairly easy and fast thing to do that might at least help, in a minor way, to protect people’s identities.”
Thursday Bram, a member of Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Portland General Defense Committee, told Street Roots that often there are more “secure and thoughtful” ways protests can be documented.
Another local activist group, Defense Fund PDX, echoed the call to limit how and what journalists and protesters share on social media.
“The governor is sending reinforcements to track down protesters and arrest them. Consider this when sharing anything on social media that could be incriminating,” read a Sept. 1 Instagram post from the Portland-based group.
Similar attempts to protect people’s privacy during protests include using code, like replacing the word “protest” with “pr0t3st,” in an effort to stop authorities from tracking demonstrations.
On May 30, a series of coded tweets from Twitter user @xannyafi warned demonstrators to leave the Black Lives Matter protest in Los Angeles amid escalating violence.
Another user, @falsewatermelon, tweeted in alphanumerics urging others not to send information via the social network. The tweet claimed Twitter’s direct-messaging system is not private.
According to Twitter’s law enforcement support page, a warrant is required to access direct messaging contents on the platform.
In 2016, ACLU of Northern California revealed it had thousands of pages of public records showing law enforcement agencies across California were “secretly acquiring social media spying software that can sweep activists into a web of digital surveillance.” Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all provided user data access to Geofeedia, which developed the social media monitoring product, according to the records.
In June, journalist Ella Fassler detailed in an article posted to OneZero how easily law enforcement can access private user data with specific requests to Facebook.
Arthur Rizer is a senior fellow at R Street Institute who studies police and privacy.
“I do not think the intent (of online policing) is to make people cautious about openly sharing information,” Rizer wrote in an email, “but I do think that could be an effect. … It’s just an effective, cheap, accurate way to police and investigate.”
Police have drastically increased their social media presence over the last decade. A 2016 report from the Urban Institute found 91% of police departments used it in some way.
“The combo of everyone walking around with a camera and social media platforms means surveillance is everywhere,” William Staples, director of the Surveillance Studies Research Center, told Street Roots in an email. “Images can be used and manipulated by both protesters to expose authority for wrongdoing and the police to do the same.”
Social media monitoring and surveillance tech
Despite widespread concern and confusion about how law enforcement agencies are using social media and surveillance technology, there is a dearth of information on the topics.
Over three months into protests and with over 750 protesters arrested in Portland, as reported by Newsweek, an analysis of court documents from federal cases being tried in U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon between May 25 and Sept. 5 reveal some of the tools and practices federal law enforcement agencies are using.
Out of the total arrests, the Oregon U.S. Attorney’s Office is federally prosecuting at least 79 protesters, with at least 16 currently facing felony charges. Street Roots reviewed the criminal complaints and federal law enforcement personnel affidavits associated with these cases.
With the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office announcing it will not follow up many of the Portland Police Bureau’s arrests with charges and with Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, condemning the protests, federal agencies have taken center stage in the government’s legal response to protesters.
These federal investigations are carried out jointly by agencies in the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, including the Federal Protective Service, U.S. Marshals Service, FBI, ATF, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and Customs and Border Protection.
Street Roots reached out to all involved agencies, and of the agencies that responded to requests for comments, none provided any specifics on the tools and practices their respective agencies are using to investigate alleged criminal activities at protests.
The agencies provided similar statements. A spokesperson for the ATF wrote in an email that the agency does not discuss “tradecraft or investigative techniques.” Spokespeople for Customs and Border Protection and the Portland office of the FBI echoed this.
But court documents provide more clarity, revealing that since the first federal protest-related case was filed on July 6, the majority of arrests have followed a similar pattern: Federal law enforcement officers allege they have seen a protester engaged in criminal activity and arrest them during that same event, occasionally after watching them from afar for more than an hour.
Evidence from these cases included in criminal complaints is generally limited to a written statement from the officers who made the arrests about what they believe they saw the protester do. Occasionally, images from surveillance footage are included.
But as the severity of the crime goes up, the resources put toward solving it do as well.
The FBI and Oregon U.S. Attorney’s Office have both signaled that they particularly want to arrest and charge individuals who are believed to have committed assault, arson or property damage.
Cases involving these offenses are often tried as federal felonies. And while Street Roots found there have been at least 16 federal felony charges, The Oregonian reported more may be forthcoming stemming from federal attorneys’ use of civil disorder laws adopted amid unrest in 1968.
Law enforcement agencies have gone to great lengths to identify protesters believed to have committed higher-level crimes, such as in the case of Agard-Berryhill.
In July, agents, in search of the person who threw the firework, tracked down Agard-Berryhill (who has not been convicted) by going through social media posts from the night and finding the incident to gather images of the suspect.
The agents then went through livestreams and social media posts of the whole night’s events in search of the suspect, eventually finding someone they believed to be them shielding a naked person from officers firing impact munitions.
Writing on the suspect’s protective vest, seen in that footage, led officers to a product review that the suspect’s grandmother had left on the item, apparently a gift, where it was purchased online.
A photo of the suspect included in the review led agents, likely through Google’s reverse image search function or a similar tool, to a Facebook account with the same photo. From there, agents found Agard-Berryhill, who soon turned themself in.
The investigation resulted in 18-year-old Agard-Berryhill being charged with felony arson, which carries a sentence of five to 20 years in prison for those who are convicted.
While this investigation was particularly meticulous, Street Roots found similar practices have been used by federal law enforcement officers to identify and charge at least six other protesters so far, with officers routinely checking social media for livestreams, videos and photos to compare with images from surveillance cameras and, on occasion, officers’ personal photos.
Affidavits from law enforcement personnel used in criminal complaints reveal they review immense volumes of social media from the entirety of protests, giving them the ability to find images of people of interest that are often clearer or more revealing than when a person engaged in alleged criminal activities.
From there, agents hone in on identifying markers such as facial features, hair, clothing, shoes, tattoos and accessories.
These practices are widespread locally. Prior to a late-July ACLU of Oregon lawsuit, which prevented the Portland Police Bureau from livestreaming, the bureau’s stream had been used to zoom in on protesters’ faces and shoes.
Over the past decade, these tools and practices have become essential to law enforcement. In addition to being used in investigations where criminal charges have been filed, images sourced from social media appear to be used on an FBI wanted poster for the May 29 storming of the Justice Center — an event that has since made the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s famed “Most Wanted” list.
Besides using social media to identify people of interest, agents also use it to monitor protests from a distance.
In late July, Twitter users such as @possumkratom69 pointed out that photos from an Oregonian article showed federal agents sitting at their command center around a giant TV full of protest livestreams.
In a statement to Street Roots, an FBI spokesperson noted their use of similar practices: “The FBI uses lawfully-accessible and publicly accessible sources to obtain information about potential threats and those committing criminal activity.” A March 2019 “Privacy Assessment” from the Department of Homeland Security revealed these practices are also standard for their agencies.
Cases of federal law enforcement agencies using these practices have sprung up around the country in the wake of protests and uprisings following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.
In Seattle, protester Margaret Channon was arrested for allegedly burning a number of police cars after an investigation used her tattoos, an old missing-persons report and social media accounts to identify her, according to court documents.
In Philadelphia, investigators identified protester Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal, who allegedly also burned police cars, through her clothing, an Etsy account, purchase records, a tattoo and her work’s website.
Similar investigations have happened across the country, including in New York City and Minneapolis. In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced in August that in response to looting, police were establishing a 20-person unit to exclusively focus on social media monitoring and investigations.
These practices aren’t new. Reporting from The Washington Post among other publications showed protesters faced similar patterns at Standing Rock protests in 2016 and Ferguson uprisings in 2014.
But privacy and civil liberties advocates worry about how else these agencies use social media.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, deputy director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Street Roots the “lack of transparency” has at times been intentional on the part of law enforcement agencies.
While agencies rarely discuss their use of social media to monitor activists and roundly deny the use of facial recognition technology, evidence shows that the practices and tools are widespread.
In 2016, an investigation from the ACLU of Oregon discovered the Oregon Department of Justice was monitoring all posts on social media sites that included #BlackLivesMatter. The revelation was followed by a number of similar discoveries around the country — including that the Department of Homeland Security did the same at a national level — and led some social media companies to change their policies.
While the companies never stopped sharing data about specific cases with law enforcement, their policies against data collection en masse also did not stop the FBI, which has continued to look to skirt those policies with practices such as using private companies to collect user data, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal and the Intercept.
Levinson-Waldman said that while “technological abilities always outpace the law,” this has been accelerated by increasing involvement of private companies in surveillance and the development of military technology, which is often brought stateside.
The involvement of private companies happens in two main ways, she said: developing technologies for law enforcement and gathering data that is sold to the government.
In mid-August, ICE signed a contract with Clearview AI. The company “scrapes” social media to create a database of images for facial recognition software to work with. At present, the database has over 3 billion images, Business Insider reported.
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A 2019 article from The Washington Post found that ICE and the FBI, as well as other agencies, use similar facial recognition technology, populated by driver’s license photos, extensively.
Customs and Border Protection has long this type of technology to target people who are not U.S. citizens, research from the ACLU found, noting the programs are only expanding.
Not only are those technologies being used in a racially discriminatory manner, but an analysis by Privacy SOS of a 2019 federal government National Institute of Standards and Technology report noted that government researchers found “face recognition algorithms perform more poorly when examining the faces of women, people of color, the elderly and children.”
While social media has proved to be a key way law enforcement agencies monitor protests from afar, a series of recent extended surveillance flights above Portland conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Portland Police Bureau and the Air Force have raised questions about how else they do this and what technologies these aircrafts are equipped with.
In a statement to Street Roots, Customs and Border Protection denied that their surveillance flights have facial recognition capabilities and said Air and Marine Operations “does not own or have access to any facial recognition algorithms or software.”
Levinson-Waldman, when asked about how the public finds out about what technologies federal law enforcement agencies have access to, said the agencies rarely acknowledge what tools they have and to what extent they use them until it comes out in other ways like a suppression hearing or in court documents such as unsealed federal warrants.
This was the case in 2017 when the Brennan Center uncovered ICE’s use of StingRay technology in New York. The device, The device, first used in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, simulates a cell tower to gather data from nearby cellphones.
Although Customs and Border Protection told Street Roots it “does not have any StingRay or data-collecting technology,” the ACLU found otherwise, as noted in a 2018 report it released on law enforcement agencies’ access to them.
Further casting doubt on federal law enforcement agencies’ claims, on Sept. 21, The Nation reported that federal law enforcement agencies have tapped protesters’ phones in Portland to gain “an inside view into (surveillance) targets, who they are, who they’re talking to — the hierarchy.”
Portland’s privacy push
As the Trump administration’s National Cyber Security Strategy seeks to expand Obama-era surveillance and monitoring and “enhance law enforcement’s (technological) capabilities to lawfully gather necessary evidence of criminal activity,” Portland has taken a different path.
In June 2018, the Portland City Council created the Smart City PDX Priorities Framework, a department in the city’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability that reviews how to responsibly use emerging technologies in local government.
On Sept. 9, the City Council reviewed two separate ordinances to regulate facial recognition in city limits, set forth by Smart City PDX. Hector Dominguez, the organization’s open data coordinator, said the ordinances included two proposals that would limit the technology in private businesses and prevent it from being used by government agencies, including local police.
“Without a structure that involves technology governance, transparency and accountability measures, face recognition cannot be safely used in law enforcement,” Dominguez wrote in an email.
Levinson-Waldman echoed this, saying prohibitions and regulations on law enforcement’s use of surveillance and social media monitoring technologies are “going to have to come through individual advocates pushing in their cities for limitations or activity at the federal level.” She added, “It’s not going to happen organically, it’s not going to happen voluntarily — it’s going to be because of a push to actually impose those limitations.”
After two hours of testimony from members of Smart City PDX, community members and privacy advocates, the City Council voted in favor of the ban.
Mayor Ted Wheeler concluded the online meeting by praising Portland for being the first U.S. city to pass regulation on facial recognition in private businesses, in addition to local government.
“Portlanders deserve peace of mind,” Wheeler said. “They deserve transparency from private institutions just as they do (from) public institutions.”
While protests continue, as do efforts to limit police surveillance and online abilities, advocates stress caution and common-sense behavior on the internet.
Bram pointed to practices such having your information removed from data harvesters such as fastpeoplesearch.com, not speaking to law enforcement without a lawyer present, and knowing the people you’re working with.
While “it’s a little trite to say,” she said, it’s prudent “not to put anything on social media that you wouldn’t want to have read back to you in a court of law.”
Street Roots is an award-winning, weekly publication focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. The newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Street Roots newspaper operates independently of Street Roots advocacy and is a part of the Street Roots organization. Learn more about Street Roots. Support your community newspaper by making a one-time or recurring gift today.
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