According to documents recently obtained by in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the government is surveilling the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
Records from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Operations Coordination show that since August 2014, DHS officials have been trolling public social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, to map and collect information on #BlackLivesMatter protests –and supposedly related events. Targeted activities include silent vigils held across the country following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, an anti-police brutality protest in Philadelphia, and an April 2015 #BlackLivesMatter protest in Washington D.C. The documents even show a plan to gather information on a funk music parade in a historically Black neighborhood in the nation’s capital.
Perhaps most troubling are the tracking, minute-by-minute, the movements of participants in an April 2015 #BlackLivesMatter protest in Washington, D.C. A released to the Intercept confirms that on the day before the event, several DHS officials were aware of a Federal Bureau of Investigation joint intelligence bulletin characterizing the protest as a “First Amendment-protected event,” and noting that there was “no information suggesting that violent behavior is planned for Washington, DC.”
What will be done with this trove of information? We know that DHS shares what it gathers with local and federal law enforcement for targeting police stops and investigations. Information about specific individuals can also be funneled into the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting system, which provides reports to the FBI through regional fusion centers.
The problem with this is obvious. Modern protest movements speak, associate, and organize through social media. Their tweets, blogs, protests, marches, and die-ins are the trumpets by which they call for reform and social justice. Government monitoring of activists’ protests – simply because these activists dissent and without any evidence of wrongdoing – threatens to discourage them from speaking, associating, and expressing as is their right under the First Amendment. Surveillance of #BlackLivesMatter protests also opens the door to racial profiling because the movement is Black-led.
Throughout our country’s history, the federal government has used the fear of threats – real or perceived – to conduct surveillance on domestic groups and people who look or act different. Civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s and 1970s, American Muslim civil rights leaders and academics post-9/11, and the FBI’s recent, expansive racial, religious, and ethnic mapping program are a handful of examples.
Today, at a time when the public is outraged and sickened that Black men and women are killed by police in too many incidents raising concerns about racial profiling, excessive force, and , the tracking of #BlackLivesMatter threatens to harm that movement and all others seeking equal treatment for minority Americans.
Progress toward racial justice in America has been made precisely because brave people, particularly people of color, have raised their voices to hold America accountable to its promises of equality and liberty. Courageous men and women of color have stood up in order to call for the abolition of the chattel slavery, to urge the adoption of a constitutional amendment promising equal protection of the law, to demand an end to the legalized racial segregation that ruled America for 90 years, and to insist on federal protection for Black people’s right to vote after decades of disenfranchisement through enforced terror.
The generations of civil rights activists who made these calls were branded as “dangerous,” “terrorist,” and “subversive.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his family, his colleagues in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Congress for Racial Equality, and countless other individuals and groups heralded today for their vision of racial equality in America were victims of FBI surveillance in the 1960’s.
Surveillance of today’s civil rights activists is equally wrong. We do not need to wait 50 years to understand that.
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Racial Justice
ACLU Statement on House AI Task Force ReportACLU Statement on House AI Task Force Report
WASHINGTON — Today, the House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence (AI) issued its final report, marking an important step in recognizing the serious risks of discrimination and bias posed by AI systems — particularly in law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology. The report recognizes that discrimination and bias may arise in AI systems due to their design, training data, or failures by end users. The report also investigates the complex considerations around deepfakes, open AI systems, and free speech, and urges Congress to pass narrow legislation to address concrete harms. In response to the House AI Task Force final report, Cody Venzke, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, issued the following statement: “The ACLU commends the Task Force for recognizing that AI systems are harming people right now through discriminatory outcomes and supercharged surveillance. Curbing those abuses of AI is not a partisan issue, and more concrete action is needed to protect civil rights, while maintaining states’ authority to build on those protections. The Task Force is appropriately cautious when wrestling with issues around deepfakes, open-source AI, digital identity, and other issues, recognizing that legislators should consider a wide array of tailored tools to address real, not speculative, harms while respecting civil rights and civil liberties.” The House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence report can be found here. -
News & CommentaryDec 2024
Racial Justice
Human Rights
Why the Fight for Racial Justice is a Human Rights IssueWhy the Fight for Racial Justice is a Human Rights Issue
On International Human Rights Day, the ACLU is advocating for a long-sought after reparatory justice to end the continued abuses against Black and brown communities. -
Press ReleaseOct 2024
National Security
+2 Issues
ACLU Warns that Biden-Harris Administration Rules on AI in National Security Lack Key ProtectionsACLU Warns that Biden-Harris Administration Rules on AI in National Security Lack Key Protections
WASHINGTON — The Biden-Harris administration today released its National Security Memorandum on Artificial Intelligence (AI), establishing guidelines for how the U.S. government uses AI in national security programs, such as counterterrorism, intelligence, homeland security, and defense. The use of AI to automate and expand national security activities poses some of the greatest dangers to people’s lives and civil liberties. Agencies are increasingly exploring the use of AI in decisions about who to surveil, who to stop and search at the airport, who to add to government watchlists, and even who is a military target. While the government’s policy includes some important steps forward — such as requiring national security agencies to better track and assess their AI systems for risks and prohibiting a subset of dangerous AI uses — it falls far short in other critical areas, leaving glaring gaps with respect to independent oversight, transparency, notice, and redress. The policy imposes few substantive safeguards on a wide range of AI-driven activities, by and large allowing agencies to decide for themselves how to mitigate the risks posed by national security systems that have immense consequences for people’s lives and rights. As we have repeatedly seen before, this is a recipe for dangerous technologies to proliferate in secret. “Despite acknowledging the considerable risks of AI, this policy does not go nearly far enough to protect us from dangerous and unaccountable AI systems. National security agencies must not be left to police themselves as they increasingly subject people in the United States to powerful new technologies,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “If developing national security AI systems is an urgent priority for the country, then adopting critical rights and privacy safeguards is just as urgent. Without transparency, independent oversight, and built-in mechanisms for individuals to obtain accountability when AI systems err or fail, the policy’s safeguards are inadequate and place our civil rights and civil liberties at risk.” For years, the American Civil Liberties Union has been urging far stronger safeguards and transparency about the AI tools that national security agencies are deploying, the rules constraining their use, and the dangers these systems pose to fairness, privacy, and due process. -
Press ReleaseOct 2024
Racial Justice
ACLU Comment on the Department of Labor’s AI Guidelines for Employers and VendorsACLU Comment on the Department of Labor’s AI Guidelines for Employers and Vendors
WASHINGTON — Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) released a roadmap for artificial intelligence (AI) best practices, designed to ensure that emerging technologies such as AI enhance job quality, benefit workers, and comply with existing employment laws when they are used in the workplace. The best practices, pursuant to President Biden’s executive order on the development and use of AI, include recommendations for AI system developers and employers that prioritize workers’ experiences and empowerment throughout the entire AI lifecycle – from design to use and oversight. These practices also call on employers and developers to create standards and processes to identify and mitigate risks from AI systems, such as threats to health and safety, civil rights, privacy, fair labor rights, and labor organizing prior to a developer marketing them or an employer deploying them, and recommend turning to different systems when sufficient mitigation is not possible. “We applaud DOL for issuing best practices for use of AI that center workers’ empowerment, civil rights, privacy, and safety protections and call on developers and employers to adopt critical guardrails in developing, procuring and using AI systems. Employers and developers should take note, as many have been burying their heads in the sand on their risk of legal liability with respect to AI tools,” said Olga Akselrod, senior staff attorney of the ACLU Racial Justice Program. “Following these best practices for AI can help employers and developers ensure that they do not violate existing civil rights and other employment laws that protect workers.” The best practices also recommend transparency measures through conducting and publishing impact assessments, notice and recourse for impacted workers, and measures to minimize worker displacement. The DOL also stated that employers should minimize electronic monitoring and avoid unnecessary collection or retention of worker data.