Court to Hear Arguments in Lawsuit Demanding Trump Admin Publicly Release Legal Rationale for Illegal Boat Strikes

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a new report today about the increasingly central role that surveillance and tech companies are playing in US police departments and how that threatens to give private companies unfettered access to Americans’ sensitive data. The report examines the major companies involved, the potential ways this information could be abused or exploited, and the history of close ties between corporations and police. Every day, police across the country use body cameras, drones, dash cams, and fixed surveillance cameras gathering hours upon hours of footage of people going about their daily lives. And now, some of the biggest surveillance tech companies, including Axon, Flock, and Motorola, want to gather, analyze, and control this data by providing “operating systems” for police departments that, like operating systems on computers and phones, can see and control all the data in the system. This will threaten the civil rights and civil liberties of everyone who interacts with one of these cameras — knowingly or not. Part of this trend is the movement towards police cloud services, which facilitates the consolidation of data from thousands of U.S. police departments within corporate servers and gives these private actors live remote control over the surveillance tech even after it’s deployed in communities. Or as Axon puts it on their website, “integrating hardware devices and cloud software solutions” in “the Axon ecosystem” and connecting “every officer, responder and agency.” “Putting private, for-profit companies at the heart of modern police departments — what could go wrong? The answer is: plenty, and that’s what this paper outlines” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.“Policymakers, the public, and the policing profession need to grapple with the implications of this corporatization of police departments — especially for people’s civil rights and liberties — and address it before this becomes normalized and leads to new forms of abuse we’ve never seen before.” These new corporate efforts to expand their work with police are especially worrying given how quickly surveillance technology is proliferating across the country — and how few places have strong guardrails or oversight in place. As the report details, there are many ways providers could exploit their insider access to this data, including using it to go after critics, journalists, labor unions, regulators, and competitors, or to try and fend off investigations into their products. The lack of safeguards also means that company employees could use this data to target exes, manipulate prediction markets, or even alter evidence. Unfortunately, it’s not just the companies selling these products that the public needs to be worried about. According to the report, there is another set of players that raise many of the same concerns about private companies’ access to police data and the corporate role in policing: cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, which currently also have access to the growing mountain of data generated by surveillance-based policing. The report lays out six recommendations that policymakers could implement to protect their constituents. Recommendations include contract requirements restricting private vendors’ access to law enforcement data, mandating the use of local rather than cloud services, and passing both the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act and Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) laws.

NEW YORK — A United States District Court in the Southern District of New York heard arguments today in a lawsuit seeking the immediate release of an Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that the Trump administration is using to justify and govern its illegal campaign of lethal strikes on civilian boats in international waters. In today’s hearing, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), and the Center for Constitutional Rights argued that the Trump administration cannot keep its legal justification for the boat strikes campaign secret from the American people while repeatedly referencing it in public. The groups asked the presiding judge to order the release of the OLC opinion after personally reviewing it to ensure that the administration discloses all of the disclosable legal analysis to the public. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the government must by default disclose its records to the public. However, in court, the Trump administration took the radical position that the U.S. Constitution permits it to withhold from public view records protected by the presidential communications privilege — a privilege meant to protect advisory documents held closely to the president and his immediate staff — even if those records contain binding agency law or have been distributed to administration officials who play no role in presidential decision-making. The judge questioned the administration’s attorney about the limits and novelty of this expansive view of presidential privilege, which the government presented for the first time at oral argument, and asked him why the government has opted to keep its legal justification for the boat strikes campaign secret even after having made other similar types of legal memoranda public. During the hearing, the government’s attorney also acknowledged that there are parts of the memo’s legal analysis that could be isolated and released to the public without revealing classified information. “People across the country, politicians across the aisle, and the families of victims have been demanding answers as to how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians,” said Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Trump administration has murdered over 210 civilians with no sound legal or moral basis. At a minimum, the administration must disclose to the American people why it thinks this killing spree is lawful.” The groups are suing to force the disclosure of a legal opinion authored by OLC — a part of the Justice Department whose opinions are generally treated as binding within the executive branch — that supposedly validates the ongoing strikes as lawful acts in an alleged “armed conflict” with unspecified “drug cartels.” Reportedly, the memo also purports to immunize personnel who authorized or took part in these unlawful strikes from future criminal prosecution for what would otherwise simply be homicides. “The Trump administration is displacing the fundamental mandates of international law with the phony wartime rhetoric of a basic autocrat,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “If the OLC opinion seeks to dress up the obvious illegality of these serial homicides in legalese in order to provide cover, the public needs to see this analysis and ultimately hold accountable all those who facilitate murder in the United States’ name.” Contrary to the government’s public assertions, the U.S. is not, and could not be, in an armed conflict with Latin American drug cartels. Under international law, an armed conflict between a state and a non-state actor exists only if the non-state actor is an “organized armed group” that is structured and disciplined like regular armed forces and is engaged in “protracted armed violence” against the state. There is no plausible argument that any drug cartel satisfies this test vis-a-vis the United States. “The public deserves to know how the Trump administration is rubber-stamping the killing of civilians in the Caribbean,” said Ify Chikezie, staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union. “By claiming that these attacks are legal while refusing to provide any evidence or rationale, President Trump shows once again his disdain for basic transparency, human rights, and the rule of law. The court must step in and order the administration to release these documents immediately.” Since Sept. 2, the Trump administration’s lethal strikes on boats have murdered at least 200 civilians, in clear violation of domestic and international law. In addition to a lawsuit enforcing a FOIA request on the OLC memo, the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights have also filed a lawsuit on behalf of two families from Trinidad & Tobago who are seeking redress after a U.S. boat strike killed their loved ones, and held a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on how the problematic lethal-strike policy violates international law and is an unconstitutional claim of executive power. This press release is available online here and here. To learn more about the case: see here and here.

Surveillance Boosters Tout the Benefits of Deterrence, But There’s a Big Problem With That

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Robert Dillon is suing the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, as well as the Jacksonville and Pinellas County Sheriff’s Offices, after he was wrongfully arrested due to a faulty facial recognition match. The police relied on an incorrect result from facial recognition technology to get an arrest warrant, while concealing evidence that showed he could not have committed the crime he was being accused of. He is one of 15 known people to have this happen to them in the United States. “The night I spent in jail after they arrested me for a crime I did not commit still haunts me to this day. I will never get over how terrified and worried I was, wondering if I’d ever go home to my wife and daughter again,” said Robert Dillon. “Over a year later, I’m still picking up the pieces of my life, all because the police relied on this dangerous technology instead of doing their jobs and actually investigating. Florida police must implement safeguards and ensure this never happens to anyone else, because until they do, nobody is safe.” Fifty-two-year-old Robert Dillon lives in Fort Myers, Florida with his wife and daughter. His life was irreparably changed in August 2024, when police arrested him for a crime he never committed. Mr. Dillon was accused of trying to lure a child at a fast-food restaurant in Jacksonville Beach, more than 300 miles away from his home, after a Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office employee ran grainy surveillance photos of the suspect through an AI-assisted facial recognition program, which identified Dillon as a possible match. Using only that, and the statement of a restaurant employee who picked his photo out of a lineup, Jacksonville Beach police got an arrest warrant. As the lawsuit explains, the photo lineup was unreliable because when facial recognition technology generates a false match, it will often be to someone who looks similar to the suspect, thus misleading witnesses who are asked to choose between that innocent lookalike and a set of random filler photos. What police didn’t tell the court is that a McDonald’s employee said the suspect was a “regular” at the Jacksonville Beach restaurant, but that Mr. Dillon lived five hours away and had told police he had never even been to Jacksonville Beach in his life, and that an automatic license plate reader search showed no hits on his car anywhere near the Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s in the days surrounding the crime. The prosecutor has since dropped the charges against Mr. Dillon, and the record of his arrest has been wiped; however, the trauma remains. He was forced to borrow money and pledge the title to his truck to post bond, he lost income while he was subjected to months of criminal prosecution, he was publicly branded with a mugshot that remains accessible online, long after the charges were dropped, and community members still approach him in public to ask about the case. No law enforcement agency has ever apologized. “No one should lose their freedom or be scared to leave their house because an algorithm got it wrong,” said Nate Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “These Florida police departments owe it to Mr. Dillon to make amends and to take serious steps to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else. Police across the country are on notice: Unreliable face recognition technology is hurting people, and we will keep fighting to hold them accountable for these abuses.” Mr. Dillon is suing the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, and responsible police officers for damages. He is also demanding serious policy changes be instituted immediately. The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office operates the statewide facial recognition technology system that was used to misidentify Mr. Dillon. A second wrongful arrest by Florida police due to reliance on the Pinellas County system was reported earlier this year. And just last week, reporting revealed that the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office wrongfully arrested a North Carolina resident after relying on an incorrect result from facial recognition technology. That man spent three months in jail, losing his job, his home, and custody of his children, before charges were dropped. “One wrongful arrest is one too many — this should have never happened to Mr. Dillon,” said Nicholas Warren, staff attorney at the ACLU of Florida. “Florida’s growing reliance on facial recognition technology threatens us all. We must stop this dangerous pattern before it traps more innocent people. No one should have their freedom taken away because the police rely on faulty technology." The technology frequently gets it wrong, and testing has repeatedly shown that facial recognition systems exhibit higher rates of false matches when used on people of color, women, older people, and young people. To date, police in Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Florida, and Arizona are publicly known to have wrongfully arrested people due to reliance on this technology. “Robert’s case illustrates the stakes when police deploy AI-assisted identification tools without adequate safeguards. Digital information can be a powerful tool for law enforcement, but its proliferation, supercharged by the AI boom, carries profound Fourth Amendment implications,” said Steve Silverberg, counsel at Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, LLP. “We are proud to stand with Robert and the ACLU in holding these agencies accountable, and in making clear that technological advancements, however enticing, do not suspend constitutional obligations.” Mr. Dillon is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of Florida, and Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, LLP.