resistance survival guide

RSG #340: How To Investigate Intelligence Bulletins About Lawful Protesters

Law enforcement agencies sometimes create intelligence bulletins before demonstrations, marches, strikes, public meetings, and political actions. A legitimate bulletin may address a documented threat, planned violence, traffic control, emergency access, or credible risks to participants. The problem begins when an agency treats lawful political activity as intelligence simply because officials dislike the politics, fear criticism, …

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https://realresistancekitty.substack.com/p/rsg-338-how-to-plan-build-and-accredit

RSG #338: How To Plan, Build, and Accredit a Government SCIF

A Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, commonly called a SCIF, is an accredited space where authorized personnel may handle Sensitive Compartmented Information. It is not simply a secure conference room with thick walls, stern signage, and a basket where everyone reluctantly abandons a telephone. Planning a government SCIF requires an authorized mission, a government sponsor, qualified …

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RSG#336: How To Investigate Government Use of Social Media Monitoring Tools

Your local police department may describe social media monitoring as nothing more than checking public posts. That sounds delightfully harmless, rather like saying a surveillance camera is merely enjoying the scenery. Modern social media monitoring can involve keyword searches, location filters, relationship mapping, automated alerts, covert accounts, image analysis, and commercial software that collects posts …

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RSG #337: How To Investigate Government Purchases of Commercial Location Data

Your phone knows where you sleep, work, worship, shop, protest, receive medical care, and spend Tuesday evenings when you told everyone you were staying home. That location history can travel through mobile applications, advertising systems, software development kits, data aggregators, and commercial brokers. Government agencies have purchased access to commercially available information rather than obtaining …

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RSG#335: How To Audit Predictive Policing Systems and Their Hidden Feedback Loops

Predictive policing systems promise to help police anticipate where crime might happen or who might become involved. The sales pitch usually arrives carrying words such as objective, efficient, intelligent, and data driven. Nothing says impartial justice quite like a vendor presentation with a glowing heat map. The problem is that these systems do not observe …

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RSG #334: How To Investigate Parallel Construction and Intelligence Laundering

A criminal case may appear to begin with a traffic stop, an informant, or one officer experiencing a miraculous burst of curiosity. Sometimes that visible beginning is not the beginning. Parallel construction occurs when investigators protect an original source by creating a separate path to the same evidence. Civil liberties advocates sometimes call the abusive …

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RSG #332: How To Trace Public Money Through Pass Through Nonprofits and Fiscal Sponsors

Public money rarely travels in a straight line. Congress funds an agency. The agency awards a state, city, university, or nonprofit. That recipient sends part of the award to another organization. A fiscal sponsor may then hold the money for a project that has no separate tax exemption, public filing, or obvious legal identity. By …

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RSG #331: How To Reconstruct the Chain of Custody for Missing Digital Evidence

Digital evidence rarely disappears with a theatrical puff of smoke. It is copied, renamed, converted, moved, redacted, separated from attachments, or excluded from a production. By the time the public notices, five offices may possess five versions and everyone has developed a sudden devotion to passive voice. Reconstructing the chain of custody means documenting where …

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RSG#329: How To Audit Government Other Transaction Agreements

Resistance Survival Guide #329 The federal government has contracts. It has grants. It has cooperative agreements. Then it has Other Transaction Agreements, a category whose name sounds as though somebody forgot to finish the form. Other Transaction Agreements can help agencies develop prototypes, conduct research, work with companies that avoid traditional federal contracting, and move …

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RSG#328: How To Investigate an Interagency Program Nobody Truly Owns

Resistance Survival Guide #328 Interagency programs sound impressively coordinated when officials announce them. Several departments will combine expertise, share resources, eliminate duplication, and deliver one seamless government response. There may even be a diagram featuring circles, arrows, and the word synergy behaving suspiciously. Then something fails. Suddenly, the lead agency was only coordinating. The funding …

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