Matthew Guariglia
@mguariglia.bsky.social
Historian of race, policing, surveillance, and technology. Senior Policy Analyst at EFF. Sometimes teach at Emory. The Church Committee Report is out now! My views are not my employers. MatthewGuariglia.com
In the wide world of dishonest polls, this one is bad. Justifying mass expansion in real-time, constant, and city-wide surveillance by saying it will just watch "hotspots" and "open-air drug markets"---people will point to this skewed nonsense to justify policy that could have wild consequences.
Hey, so I’ll be at #DEFCON34 talking about the national fight against ALPRs with my @eff.org friends. (Friday 4pm @ Crypto / Privacy Village) But like, I need @404media.co to slow down its reporting, I’m trying to finalize our slide deck. bsky.app/profile/jaso...
Jason Koebler@jasonkoebler.bsky.social · yesterdayNew: Police are being told to hide the fact that they're using Flock to pull people over and arrest them in both encounters with citizens but ALSO in their official police reports: www.404media.co/do-not-menti...
Processing DNA for nearly a million people in a year? No problem, ICE says. Attaching a $300 camera to an agent’s vest? Logistical nightmare. That's one of the most remarkable ironies of this great story (based on FOIA requests by @georgetownlaw.bsky.social's Center on Privacy and Technology).
ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children
Internal documents show ICE's DNA collection has skyrocketed in the second Trump administration. Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.
wired.com
New: Police are being told to hide the fact that they're using Flock to pull people over and arrest them in both encounters with citizens but ALSO in their official police reports: www.404media.co/do-not-menti...
‘DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE’: How Cops Are Trying to Hide Their Use of Flock
“DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE. DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE IN YOUR REPORT OR COMPLAINT."
404media.co
In light of the revelation today of DHS’s massive operation to spy on social media critics of their policies, remember this I posted a few months ago about the tech they bought that can do just this—and how the company markets itself to do political surveillance.
Matthew Guariglia@mguariglia.bsky.social · 5mo agoJust learning that ICE has a $4.2 million contract for social media surveillance/AI analysis with Fivecast. A few years ago I came across a brochure of theirs which used as an example for potential police customers their ability to map left-wing groups. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...
Many people asked me early on: if ICE seems to just be rounding up random brown people on the street, why are they on a shopping spree for massive amounts of surveillance capabilities. The answer was always for this.
Udi Ofer@uofer.bsky.social · yesterdayBombshell report from the Wall Street Journal: DHS has been tracking down Americans at work and on the road who are critical of immigration policies, spending millions on contractors to surveil First Amendment protected speech and create political dossiers. Outrageous. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
The fall semester is starting in a few weeks. If you're teaching about US political history, surveillance, intelligence, national security, foreign policy, protest movements of the 20th century, etc---might I suggest you assign our abridged 50th anniversary edition of the Church Committee Report!
Matthew Guariglia@mguariglia.bsky.social · 8mo agoIt's time to read the Church Committee Report! Published by a major press for the first time for it's 50th anniversary, we abridged it to its most jaw-dropping findings chronicling the abuses of the FBI, CIA, and Military from the 1950s to the 1970s. Order here: bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
Course prep/syllabus writing for my American Urban History course is getting exciting!
The fall semester is starting in a few weeks. If you're teaching about US political history, surveillance, intelligence, national security, foreign policy, protest movements of the 20th century, etc---might I suggest you assign our abridged 50th anniversary edition of the Church Committee Report!
Matthew Guariglia@mguariglia.bsky.social · 8mo agoIt's time to read the Church Committee Report! Published by a major press for the first time for it's 50th anniversary, we abridged it to its most jaw-dropping findings chronicling the abuses of the FBI, CIA, and Military from the 1950s to the 1970s. Order here: bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
New: We found 50 cops who misused Flock cameras and other license-plate readers for personal purposes, often to spy on their girlfriends or ex-wives. He "watched every single move I made. ... Who do you turn the chief of police in to?" wapo.st/3S6rTuo
She left her ex. He secretly tracked her through a network of policing cameras.
Flock’s array of license-plate cameras was built to fight crime. But at least 50 law enforcement officers were charged with or accused of misusing it and other systems.
wapo.st
I’m just counting down the minutes until I can get my hands on this book.
Ruby@rubyhosh.bsky.social · 2w agoBlessed by the ARC gods today!
I worry that most cynical among us, hopped up on 30 years of law and order rhetoric, will say "this is the system working: he didn't do anything wrong and now he's free." As if the terror and wide-scale publicity of an arrest and federal prosecution is not a horrible punishment in and of itself.
CNN@cnn.com · 5d agoThe Justice Department is admitting that a $14 million renovation on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC, was flawed, and is dropping the criminal case against a former Olympian that accused him of damaging the pool, according to a new court filing. https://cnn.it/3RJJnwj
This is horrible news. Dr. Fernandez was a brilliant and determined scholar who not only wrote & taught about struggles for racial and economic justice but understood how historians could serve those movements themselves. Her book on the Young Lords is simply elite. She’ll be so deeply missed. RIP
Simon Balto@simonbalto.bsky.social · 5d agoDevastated to hear of Dr. Johanna Fernandez’s passing. I’ve had the privilege of sharing some spaces with her, and she always kept the main thing the main thing. Power, in/justice, organizing — these weren’t abstractions to study but forces to confront and possibilities to engage. Rest in power.
An absolute hero when it comes to fighting government secrecy and bringing to public one of the most important archives in the history of policing.
Old New York Police Surveillance Is Found, Forcing Big Brother Out of Hiding (Published 2016)
Boxes found in a Queens warehouse contain files about the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam and the Young Lords.
nytimes.com
Simon Balto@simonbalto.bsky.social · 5d agoDevastated to hear of Dr. Johanna Fernandez’s passing. I’ve had the privilege of sharing some spaces with her, and she always kept the main thing the main thing. Power, in/justice, organizing — these weren’t abstractions to study but forces to confront and possibilities to engage. Rest in power.
I'm declaring a moratorium on AI companies putting out, or the tech press reporting on, any new press releases containing the words "sentient, containment, unintentional, unexpected, autonomous, singularity" ...etc.
Consequences are coming. The question is: will democrats signal that it will extend beyond billionaires that act as Republican operatives to companies, like Palantir, which have been given bipartisan contracts in the past but have aided in the current anti- (little d) democratic push.
George Pearkes@peark.es · 6d agoNYT: Musk preparing 9 figure spending campaign in support of Republicans in "swing" states like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, and Texas.
Less than a year ago, I attended a police convention quasi-incognito to learn about what the police tech industry is selling to departments, how cops are using this tech, and what the future of policing looks like. These insights get more relevant every day:
Matthew Guariglia@mguariglia.bsky.social · 10mo agoI spent the week at the police surveillance convention and let me tell you my biggest observation: The name of the game now is consolidating as much information as humanely possible from surveillance devices, the internet, other governmental data, and literally a million other places. 🧵
Less than a year ago, I attended a police convention quasi-incognito to learn about what the police tech industry is selling to departments, how cops are using this tech, and what the future of policing looks like. These insights get more relevant every day:
Matthew Guariglia@mguariglia.bsky.social · 10mo agoI spent the week at the police surveillance convention and let me tell you my biggest observation: The name of the game now is consolidating as much information as humanely possible from surveillance devices, the internet, other governmental data, and literally a million other places. 🧵
I'm begging people to realize that since Irish & Germans immigrants in 1840s, there has always been attempts to say the current wave of recent immigrants are unassimilable and prone to crime--and fighting petty crime necessitates deportations and immigration restrictions. I wrote a book about it:
Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
dukeupress.edu
The Fauci hearing could inspire a discussion about how the very idea of "crime" is socially/ politically constructed, and, thus, make everyone reconsider their relationship to the law. Or it could not, I guess, and we can all just yell about who does more crimes.
Great work by the @brennancenter.org who compiled this resource of DHS surveillance tools and vendors with categorized charts that make it easier to see 2.9 billion in contracts www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...
DHS’s Domestic Surveillance, Data Collection, and Analytics Tools
Fueled by a budget boom, the Department of Homeland Security is expanding its technological arsenal, with little oversight or transparency around how these tools are used.
brennancenter.org
In December, I sent 115 requests to see if any of them had contracts with Palantir. 114 said no. The one that did... it took four months and a lawyer to get my hands on the contract. And yes, they used the firm to crunch student data. www.foiaball.com/p/public-uni...
The one university that contracted with Palantir
And yes, student data was involved.
foiaball.com
We’re losing our chance to prevent armed drones on our streets and in our schools.
Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones
This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to rein in the emergence of armed police drones and robots, we have precious little tim...
eff.org
Phil Lewis@phillewis.bsky.social · last wk.Schools are adding pepper-spraying drones to help combat active shooters The plastic, non-lethal aircraft, which can smash windows and ram attackers will be at the ready at certain schools in Colorado, Florida and Georgia www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/...
Finally able to go through this visualization of how AI is used in military kill chains. It's an invaluable resource to demonstrate all the points AI pushes the military toward killing civilians, justified under the banner of "impartial" tech. Bravo, @airwars.bsky.social @ainowinstitute.bsky.social
Interactive: Anatomy Of An AI Kill Chain
Breaking down how militaries are offloading life and death decisions to flawed technologies
ai-killchain.airwars.org
When journalists asked me about where we would see the effects of DOGE, my answer was a) during crises and b) for the big services that interact with the public like SSA, VA and IRS. So lets check in on the IRS: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
The IRS is imploding.
The CEO says the agency is proving it's possible to have “less people and better results.”
motherjones.com
"As we started producing the information...we found out, holy cow, we’re sharing with these people and actually when it was set up we shouldn’t have been sharing outside of California or with the federal agencies" Police don't even know who sees their surveillance--sometimes in violation of the law
Chico PD granted ICE, Border Patrol, access to its ALPR data - ChicoSol News
The Chico Police Department says it has shut off license plate reader data sharing that, until July 8, appears to have been in violation of California state law. Two weeks after ChicoSol requested pub...
chicosol.org
A supervisor at a real-time crime center, the regional surveillance hubs that are centralizing all information in an area---was spying on her partner using Flock license plate readers. This makes well over a dozen cases in Georgia alone. Let's call this system what it is: a stalking machine.
Police supervisor accused of using Flock License Plate Reader system to track domestic partner in Georgia
After auditing its Flock Safety Automated License Plate Reader system, the Conyers Police Department says it discovered one of its supervisors was misusing the technology.
cbsnews.com
