American Civil Liberties Union

Police around the country continue to violate individuals’ right to photography. A photographer named Carlos Miller maintains a web site in which he chronicles this problem. Now, Miller himself has obtained information about his own arrest for photography, which took place during the eviction of Miami Occupy protesters in January. Using an open-records request, he found that officials at the Miami-Dade Police Homeland Security Bureau, aka Fusion Center, had exchanged numerous e-mails over a period of months, in which they discuss their monitoring of Miller and his activities.

A gathering of cyber-crime specialists in Massachusetts last week provided a glimpse into the tactics used by prosecutors and police to access digital data. Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts has done a nice writeup of the conference. As she points out, the event was closed to the press and the public, but the schedule of events was posted online, and included sessions with titles such as:

Our new infographic details some of the ways the National Security Agency is spying on Americans.

Yesterday 22 Members of Congress sent a letter to the Inspector General of the Department of Justice urging him to launch an investigation into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's improper recording and dissemination of information about the First Amendment-protected activities of American Muslims. Several of the members who joined the letter-including Representatives Pete Stark (D-CA-13), Anna Eshoo (D-CA-14), Sam Farr (D- CA-17), Mike Honda (D- CA-15), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA-16), and Barbara Lee (D-CA-09) -represent districts in Northern California in which FBI memoranda document the use of community outreach for intelligence purposes.