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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Governments make international commitments through treaties, executive agreements, memoranda of understanding, joint declarations, security arrangements, diplomatic notes, side letters, and documents wearing titles so harmless they sound like office supply requests. Some create legally binding obligations. Others carry political or moral weight without creating legal obligations. Both can influence foreign policy, military cooperation, migration, trade, …
Congress approves money. The president signs the legislation. Officials announce that help is on the way. Then the money enters the federal budget system and develops the survival instincts of a frightened house cat. Months later, communities are still waiting. Grants have not opened. Contracts have not been awarded. Agencies refuse to explain the delay. …