情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　陸上無線通信委員会　900MHz帯自営用無線システム高度化作業班（第8回）

自治紛争処理委員令和7年第1号−第1回会議

Another federal appeals court has ruled on controversial geofence warrants—sort of. Last week, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sitting en banc issued a single sentence opinion affirming the lower court opinion in United States v. Chatrie. The practical outcome of this sentence is clear: the evidence collected from a geofence warrant issued to Google can be used against the defendant in this case. But that is largely where the clarity ends, because the fifteen judges of the Fourth Circuit who heard the en banc appeal agreed on little else. The judges wrote a total of nine separate opinions, no single one of which received a majority of votes. Amid this fracture, the judges essentially deadlocked on important constitutional questions about whether geofence warrants are a Fourth Amendment search. As a result, the new opinion in Chatrie is a missed opportunity for the Fourth Circuit to join both other appellate courts to have considered the issue in finding geofence warrants unconstitutional.

Geofence warrants require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or devices located within a geographic area and time period both specified by law enforcement. This creates a high risk of suspicion falling on innocent people and can reveal sensitive and private information about where individuals have traveled in the past. Following intense scrutiny from the press and the public, Google announced changes to how it stores location data in late 2023, apparently with the effect of eventually making it impossible for the company to respond to geofence warrants.

Regardless, numerous criminal cases involving geofence evidence continue to make their way through the courts. The district court decision in Chatrie was one of the first, and it set an important precedent in finding the warrant overbroad and unconstitutional. However, the court allowed the government to use the evidence it obtained because it relied on the warrant in “good faith.” On appeal, a three judge panel of the Fourth Circuit voted 2-1 that the geofence warrant did not constitute a search at all. Later, the appeals court agreed to rehear the case en banc, in front of all active judges in the circuit. (EFF filed amicus briefs at both the panel and en banc stages of the appeal).

The only agreement among the fifteen judges who reheard the case was that the evidence should be allowed in, with at least eight relying on the good faith analysis. Meanwhile, seven judges argued that geofence warrants constitute a Fourth Amendment search in at least some fashion, while exactly seven disagreed. Although that means the appellate court did not rule on the Fourth Amendment implications of geofence warrants, neither did it vacate the lower court’s solid constitutional analysis.

Above all, it remains the case that every appellate court to rule on geofence warrants to date has found serious constitutional defects. As we explain in every brief we file in these cases, reverse warrants like these are very sort of “general searches” that the authors of the Fourth Amendment sought to prohibit. We’re dedicated to fighting them in courts and legislatures around the country.

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　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　いせフィルム　重度のてんかんで知的障害があり、幼児期には医師から「長くは生きられない」と言われた西村奈緒さんが、一昨年50歳を元気に迎えるまでの家族の日常を撮り続けてきた伊勢真一監督。「奈緒ちゃんシリーズ」第5弾として昨春の完成以来約1年、劇場公開のほか、福祉団体などによる自主上映活動も地道な広がりをみせており、注目したい。　「いのちのことに思いを巡らせる50年の記憶です」。伊勢監督は奈緒さんの母、信子さん（82）の弟で、初めは「..

We all leave digital trails as we navigate the internet – records of what we searched for, what we bought, who we talked to, where we went or want to go in the real world – and those trails usually are owned by the big corporations behind the platforms we use. But what if we valued our digital autonomy the way that we do our bodily autonomy? What if we reclaimed the right to go, read, see, do and be what we wish online as we try to do offline? Moreover, what if we saw digital autonomy and bodily autonomy as two sides of the same coin – inseparable?

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(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.)

Kate Bertash wants that digital autonomy for all of us, and she pursues it in many different ways – from teaching abortion providers and activists how to protect themselves online, to helping people stymie the myriad surveillance technologies that watch and follow us in our communities. She joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss how creativity and community can align to center people in the digital world and make us freer both online and offline. 

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• Why it’s important for local communities to collaboratively discuss and decide whether and how much they want to be surveilled
• How the digital era has blurred the bright line between public and private spaces
• Why we can’t surveil ourselves to safety
• How DefCon – America's biggest hacker conference – embodies the ideal that we don’t have to simply accept technology as it’s given to us, but instead can break, tinker with, and rebuild it to meet our needs
• Why building community helps us move beyond hopelessness to build and disseminate technology that helps protects everyone’s privacy  

Kate Bertash works at the intersection of tech, privacy, art, and organizing. She directs the Digital Defense Fund, launched in 2017 to meet the abortion rights and bodily autonomy movements’ increased need for security and technology resources after the 2016 election. This multidisciplinary team of organizers, engineers, designers, abortion fund and practical support volunteers provides digital security evaluations, conducts staff training, maintains a library of go-to resources on reproductive justice and digital privacy, and builds software for abortion access, bodily autonomy, and pro-democracy organizations. Bertash also engages in various multidisciplinary civic tech projects as a project manager, volunteer, activist, and artist; she’s especially interested in ways that artistic methods can interrogate use of AI-driven computer vision, other analytical technologies in surveillance, and related intersections with our civil rights. 

Resources:

• Digital Defense Fund and its 2022 EFF Award
• Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (U.S. Supreme Court No. 19–1392, decided June 24, 2022)
• EFF: Two Years Post-Roe: A Better Understanding of Digital Threats
• EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
• DEF CON 

What do you think of “How to Fix the Internet?” Share your feedback here.

Transcript

KATE BERTASH: It is me, having my experience, like walking through these spaces, and so much of that privacy, right, should, like, treat me as if my digital autonomy in this space is as important as my bodily autonomy in the world.
I think it's totally possible. I have such amazing optimism for the idea of reclaiming our digital autonomy and understanding that it is like the you that moves through the world in this way, rather than just some like shoddy facsimile or some, like, shadow of you.

CINDY COHN: That’s Kate Bertash speaking about how the world will be better when we recognize that our digital selves and our physical selves are the same, and that reclaiming our digital autonomy is a necessary part of reclaiming our bodily autonomy. And that’s especially true for the people she focuses on helping, people who are seeking reproductive assistance.
I’m Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

JASON KELLEY: And I’m Jason Kelley – EFF’s Activism Director. This is our podcast series How to Fix the Internet.

CINDY COHN: The idea behind this show is that we're trying to make our digital lives BETTER. Now a big part of our job at EFF is to envision the ways things can go wrong online-- and jumping into the action to help when things then DO go wrong.
But this show is about optimism, hope and solutions – we want to share visions of what it looks like when we get it right.

JASON KELLEY: Our guest today is someone who has been tirelessly fighting for the safety and privacy of a very vulnerable group of people for many years – and she does so with compassion, creativity and joy.

CINDY COHN: Kate Bertash is a major force in the world of digital privacy and security. Her work with the Digital Defense Fund started in 2017 as a resource to help serve the digital security needs of people seeking abortions and other reproductive care, and they have \ expanded their purview to include trans rights, elections integrity, harm reduction and other areas that are crucial to an equitable and functional democratic society. She’s also an artist, with a clothing line called Adversarial Fashion. She designs clothes that do all sorts of deliciously sneaky things – like triggering automatic license plate readers, or injecting junk data into invasive state and corporate monitoring systems. We’re just delighted to have her with us today - welcome Kate!

KATE BERTASH: Thank you so much for having me on. What an introduction.

CINDY COHN: Well, let's start with your day job, privacy and reproductive rights. You've been doing this since long before it became, you know, such a national crisis. Tell us about the Digital Defense Fund.

KATE BERTASH: So after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I had started running some, what I would call tech volunteering events, the most well known of which is the Abortion Access Hackathon in San Francisco, we had about 700 people apply to come and hundreds of people over the weekend who basically were able to help people with very functional requests.
So we went to different organizations in the area and worked to ensure that they could get help with, you know, turning a spreadsheet into a database or getting help working on open source that they use for case management, or fixing something that was broken in their sales force. So, very functional stuff.
And then I was approached after that and asked if I wanted to run this new fund, the Digital Defense Fund. So we spent the first couple years kind of figuring out what the fund was going to do, but sort of organically and learning basically from the people that we serve and the organizations that work at Abortion Access, we now have this model where we can provide hands-on, totally free digital security and privacy support to organizations working in the field.
We provide everything from digital security evaluations to trainings. We do a lot of project management, connecting folks with different kinds of vendor software, community support, a lot of professional development.
And I think probably the best part is we also get to help them fund those improvements. So I know we always talk a lot about how things can improve, but I think kind of seeing it through, uh, and getting to watch people actually, you know, install things and turn them on and learn how to be their own experts has been a really incredible experience. So I can't believe that was eight years ago.

JASON KELLEY: You know a lot has changed in eight years, we had the Dobbs decision, um, that happened under the Biden administration, and now we've got the Dobbs decision, under a Trump administration. I assume that, you know, your work has changed a lot. Like at EFF we've been doing some work, with the Repro Uncensored Coalition tracking the changes in take downs of abortion related content. And that is a hard thing to do just for, you know, all the reasons, um, that it, you know, tracking what systems take down is sort of a thing you have to do one at a time and just put the data together. But for you, I mean, out of eight years, you know what's different now than, than maybe not 2017 or, but, but certainly, you know, 2022.

KATE BERTASH: I think this is a really excellent question just because I think it's kind of strange to look backwards and, and know that, uh, abortion access is a really interesting space in that for decades it's been under various kinds of different legal, and I would say ideological attacks as well as, you know, dealing with the kind of common problems of nonprofits, usually funding, often being targets of financial scams and crime as all nonprofits are.
But I think the biggest change has been that, um, a lot of folks who I think sort of. Could always lean on the idea that abortion would be federally legal, and so your job may be helping people get their abortions or performing abortions or supporting folks with funding to get to their procedures, that that always sort of had this like, color of law that would always kind of back you up or provide for you a certain level of security.
Um, now we kind of don't have that safety, mentally, even to lean on anymore as well as legally. And so a lot of the meat and potatoes of the work that we do, um, often it was always about, you know, ensuring patient privacy. But a lot of times now it's also ensuring that organizations are kind of ready to ask and answer kind of hard questions about how they wanna work. What data is at risk when so much is uncertain in a legal space?
Because I think, you know, I hardly have to tell anybody at EFF that, often, uh, we kind of don't know what, what quote unquote qualifies or what is legal under a particular new law or statute until somebody makes you prove it in court.
And I think a lot of our job at Digital Defense Fund really then crystallized into what we can do to help people sort of tolerate this level of uncertainty and ensure that your tools and that your tactics and your understanding even of the environment that you're operating in at least buoys you and is a source of certainty and safety when the world cannot be.

CINDY COHN: Oh, I think that's great. Do you have a, an example?

KATE BERTASH: Yes, absolutely. I think one of the biggest changes that I've seen in how people tend to work and operate is that, uh, I think you know, this kind of backs into many other topics that I know get discussed on this podcast, which is that when we reach into our pocket for the computer that is on us all day, you know, our phone and we reach out to text people, it's, it's a very accessible way to reach somebody and trying to really wrap around the understanding of the difference between sending an SMS text message to somebody, or responding to a text message asking about services that your organization provides or where to get an abortion or something like that, and the difference of how much information is kept, for example, by your cell phone carrier. Usually, you know, as all of you have taught all of us very well, uh, in plain text as far as we know forever.
Uh, and the absolute huge difference then of getting to really inform people about this sort of static understanding of our environment that we operate in, that we kind of take for granted every day, when we're just like texting our friends or, you know, getting a message about whether something's ready for pickup at the pharmacy. Uh, and then instead we get to help move people onto other tools, encrypted chat like Signal or Wire or whatever meets their needs, helping meet people where they're at on other platforms like WhatsApp, and to really not just like tell people these are the quote unquote correct tools to use, because certainly there are many great, uh, you know, all loads roads lead to Rome as they say.
But I think getting to improve people's sort of environmental understanding of the ocean that we're all swimming in, uh, that it actually doesn't have to work this way, but that these are also the results of systems that, are motivated by capital and how you make money off of data. And so I think trying to help people to be prepared then to make different decisions when they encounter new questions or new technologies has been a really, really big piece of it. And I love that it gets to start with something as simple as, you know, a safer place to have a sensitive conversation in a text message on your phone in a place like Signal. So, yeah.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, no, I think that makes such sense. And we've seen this, right? I mean, you know, we had a mother in Nebraska who went to jail because she used Facebook to communicate with her daughter, I believe about getting reproductive help. And the shifting to a just a different platform might've changed that story quite a bit because, you know, Facebook had this information and, you know, one of the things that, you know, we know as lawyers is that like when Facebook gets a subpoena or process asking for information about a user, the government doesn't have to tell them what the prosecution is for, right? So that, you know, it could be a bank robber or it could be a person seeking reproductive help. The company is not in a position to really know that. Now we've worked in a couple places to create situations in which if the company does happen to know for some reason they can resist.
But the way that the baseline legal system works means that we can't just, you know, uh, as much as I love to blame Facebook, we can't blame Facebook for this. We need actual tools that help protect people from the jump.

KATE BERTASH: Absolutely, and I think that case is a really important example of, especially I think, how unclear it is from platform to platform, sort of how that information is kept and used.
I think one of the really tragic things about that conversation was that it was a very loving conversation. It was the kind of experience I think that you would want to have between a parent and child to be able to be there for each other. And they were even to talking to each other while they were in the same house. So they were just sharing a conversation from one room to the next. And that's something that I think like, to see the reaction the public had to, that I think, was very affirming to me that, that it was wrong, uh, that, you know, that just the way that this platform is structured somehow then, uh, put this extra amount of risk on this family.
I think, because, you know, we can imagine that it should be a common experience or common right to just have a simple conversation within your household and to know that like that's in a safe place, that that's treated with the sensitivity that it deserves. And I think it helps us to understand that. You know, we are actually, and I mean this in a good sense of the word, entitled to that, and I know that seeing actually, uh, Meta respond to the sort of outcry, there was also a very, like, positive flag for me, because they don't typically respond to, uh, their, their comms department does not typically respond to any individual subpoena that they received, but they felt they had to come out and say why they responded and what the, the problem was there. Um, I think as sort of an indication that this is important.
These different kinds of cases that come up, especially around abortion and criminalization, one of the reasons I think they're so important for us to cover is that, you know, on this podcast or within the spaces that both you and I work with so much about digital security and privacy kind of exists in this very like cloudy, theoretical space.
Like we have these, like, ideals of what we know we want to be true and, and often, you know, when you, when you're talking to folks about like big data, it's literally so large that it can be hard to like pin it down and decide how you feel. But these cases, they provide these concrete examples of how you think the world actually should or should not work.
And it really nails it down and lets people form these very strong emotional responses to it. Um, that's why I'm so grateful that, um, you know, organizations like yours get to help us contextualize that like, yes, there's this like, really personal, uh, and, and tragic story – and it also takes place within this larger conversation around your digital civil liberties.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, so let's flip that around a little bit. I've heard you talk about this before, which is, what would the world look like if our technologies actually stood up for us in these contexts? And, you know, inside the home is a very particular one. And I think because the Fourth Amendment is really clear about the need for privacy. It's one of the places where privacy is actually in our constitution, but I think we're having a broader conversation, like what would the world look like if the tools protected us in these times?

KATE BERTASH: I think especially, it's really interesting to think about the, the problems that I know I've learned so much from your team around the, the problem of what is public and what is private. I think, you know, we always talk about abortion access as a right to privacy and then it suddenly exists in this space where we kind of really haven't decided what that means, and especially anything that's very fuzzy about that.
People are often very familiar with the image of the protestor outside of the abortion clinic. There are many of the same problems kind of wrapped up in the fact that protestors will often film or take photographs or write down the license plates of people who are going in and out of clinics, often for a variety of reasons, but mostly to surveil them in in some way that we actually see then from state actors or from corporations, this is done on a very personal basis.
And it has a lot of that same level of damage. And we frequently have had to capitulate that like, well, this is a public space, you know, people can take photos in, in a public area, and that information that is taken about your personal abortion experience is unfortunately, you know, can be used and, and misused in, in whatever way people want.
And then we watched that exact same problem map itself onto the online space. So yeah, very important to me.

CINDY COHN: I think this is one of the fundamental, things that the digital era brought us was an increasing recognition that this bright line between public spaces and private spaces isn't working.
And so we need a more, you know, it's not like there aren't public spaces online. I definitely want reporters to be able to, you know. Do investigations that give us information about people in power and, and what they're doing. Um, so it's not, it's, it's not either or, right, and I think that's the thing we have to have a more nuanced conversation about what public spaces. Are really not public in the context. You know, what we think of as Bright Line public spaces aren't really rightfully treated as public. And I love your reframing about this as being about us. It's about us and our lives.

KATE BERTASH: Absolutely. Uh, I think one of the larger kind of examples that has come up also as well, uh, is that your experience of seeking out medical care actually then travels into the domain of, of the doctor that you see they often use in electronic health records system. And so you have this record of something that I don't think any of these companies were really quite adequately prepared for, for the policy eventuality that they would be holding information that would be an enshrined human right in some states’ constitutions, but a crime in a different state. And you know, you have these products like Epic Everywhere, and they allow access to that same information from a variety of places, including from a state where, you know, that, to that state, it is evidence of a crime to have this in the health record versus just it's, you know, a normal continuity of care in a different state.
And kind of seeing how, you know, we tend to have these sort of debates and understandings and trying to, like you say, examine the nuance and get to the bottom of how we wanna live in these different contexts of policy or in court cases. But then so much of it is held in this corporate space and I think they really are not. Ready for the fact that they are going to have to take a much more active role, I think, than they even want to, uh, in understanding how that shows up for us.

JASON KELLEY: Let’s take a quick moment to say thank you to our sponsor.
“How to Fix the Internet” is supported by The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology. Enriching people’s lives through a keener appreciation of our increasingly technological world and portraying the complex humanity of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
We also want to thank EFF members and donors. You’re the reason that we exist. You can become a member if you’re not for just $25 and for a little more you can get some great, very stylish gear. The more members we have, the more power we have - in statehouses, courthouses, and on the streets. EFF has been fighting for digital rights for decades, and that fight is bigger than ever, so please, if you like what we do, go to eff.org/pod to donate.
And now back to our conversation with Kate Bertash.
So we've been talking a lot about the skills and wisdom that you've learned during the fight for reproductive rights, but I know a lot of that can be used in other areas as well. And I heard recently that you live in a pretty small rural town, and not all your neighbours share your political views. But you've been building sort of a local movement to fight surveillance there – and I’d love to hear about how you are bringing together different people with different sort of political alignments to come together on this privacy issue.

KATE BERTASH: Yeah, it actually had started so many years ago with Dave Moss, who's on the EFF team and I having a conversation about the license plate surveillance actually at clinics and, and kind of how that's affected by the proliferation of automated license plate reader technology. And I had come up with this, this like line of clothing called Adversarial Fashion, which, uh, injects junk into automated license plate readers.
It was a really fun project. I was really happy to see the public response to it, but as a result, I sort of learned a lot about these systems and kind of became a bit of an activist on the privacy issues around them.
And then suddenly, I now live in a rural community in southwest Washington and I then suddenly found out on Facebook one day that our sheriff's department had purchased Flock automated license plate reader cameras, and just installed them already and just announced it. Like there was no public discussion, no debate, no nothing. There had been debate in neighboring counties where they decided, oh, kind of not for us. You know, where a lot of rural communities, uh, and, and like, I wanna give you a sense of the size. Our county has 12,000 people in it. My town has a thousand people in it. So very tiny, like, you kind of almost wonder why you would even need license plate for surveillance when you could just like literally ask almost anybody what's going on with, like, I've seen people before on, on Facebook where they're like, Hey, is this your car? You know, somebody stole it. Come pick it up. It's on our, on our hill.

CINDY COHN: I grew up in a very small town in Iowa and the saying in our town was, you know, you don't need turn signals 'cause everybody knows where you're going.

KATE BERTASH: I love that. See exactly like I did not know that about you, Cindy. I love that. And that was kind of this initiating, uh, event where I was just, I, I'll be honest with you, I totally hit the ceiling. What I found out I was, I was really mad because, you know, you are active on all this stuff outside of, you know, your work and your, you know, I've been all over the country talking about the problems with this technology and the privacy issues that it raises and you know, how tech companies take advantage of communities and here they were taking advantage of my community.
It's like, not in my house! How is it in my house?

JASON KELLEY: Well, when did this happen? When? When did they install these?

KATE BERTASH: Oh my gosh, it had to be a couple of months ago. I mean, it was very, very recently. Yeah, it was super recently, and so I kind of did what I know best, which is that I took everything that I learned, I put it into a presentation to my neighbors. I scheduled a bunch of nights at the different libraries and community centers in my county, and invited everybody to come, and the sheriff and the undersheriff came too.
And the most surprising thing about this was that I think, A, that people showed up. I was actually very pleasantly surprised. I think a lot of people, when they move to rural areas, they do so because, you know, they want to feel freer to be not, you know, watched every day by the state or by corporations, or even by their neighbors, frankly.
And so it was really surprising to me when, this is probably the most politically diverse room I've ever presented to. And definitely people that I think would absolutely not love any of my rest of my politics, but both nights, one hundred percent of the room was in agreement that they did not like these cameras, did not think that they were a good fit for our community, that they don't really appreciate, you know, not being asked.
I think that was kind of the core thing we wanted to get through is that even if you do decide these are a good fit. We should have been asked first, and I got people, shaking my hands afterwards. We're like, thank you young lady for bringing up this important issue.
Um, it's still ongoing. We haven't had all of them. Some of them have been removed, uh, but not all of them. And I think there's a lot closer scrutiny now on like the disclosure page that Flock puts up where you get to see kind of how the data is accessed. Uh, but I think it was like, you know, I've been doing this like privacy and safety work for a while, but it made me realize I still have room to be surprised, and I think that like I was surprised that everybody in my community was very united on privacy. It might be the thing on which we most agree, and that was like so heartwarming in such a way. I really can't wait to keep, keep building on that and using it as a way to connect with people.

CINDY COHN: So I'd like to follow up because we've been working hard to try to figure out how to convince people that you can't surveil yourself to safety, right? This stuff is always promoted as if it's going to make us safe. What stories did you hear that were resonating with people? What was the counter story from, you know, surveillance equals safety.

KATE BERTASH: I think the biggest story that I knew really connected with folks was actually the way in which that data was shared outside of our community. And there was somebody who was sitting in the room who I think had elaborated to that point that she said. I might like you as the sheriff, you know, these are all people who voted for the sheriff. We got to actually have this conversation face to face, which was really quite amazing. And they got to say to the sheriff, I voted for you. I might like you just fine. I might think you would be responsible logging into this stuff, but I don't know all those people who these platforms share this stuff with.
And Flock actually shares your data, unless you specifically request that they turn it off, and I think that was where they were like, you know, I don't trust those people, I don't know those people.
I also don't know your successor. Who's gonna get this? If we give this power to this office, I might not trust the future sheriff as much. And in a small town, like, that personal relationship matters a lot. And I think it was like really helpful to kind of take it out of this, you know, I am obviously very concerned about the ways in which they're, you know, abusive of policing technology and power. I think though, because like so many of these people are people who are your neighbors and you know them, it was so helpful to kind of put it in terms of like, you know, I don't want you to think it's about whether or not I trust your confidence personally.
It's about rather what we maybe owe each other. And you know, I wish you had asked me first, and it became a very like, powerful personal experience and a personal narrative. And, and I think even at the end of the night, like by the second night, I think the sheriff's department had really changed their tune a lot.
And I said to them, I was like, this is the longest we've ever gotten to talk to each other. And I think that's a great thing.

CINDY COHN: I think that's really great. And what I love about this is landing, it really, you know, community has come up over and over again in the way that we've talked to different people about what's important about making technology serve people.

KATE BERTASH: Yeah, people make these decisions very emotionally. And I think it was really nice to be able to talk about trust and relationships and communication because so much of the conversation when it's just held online, gets pulled into, I think everybody in this room our least favorite phrase. If you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care about being surveilled?
And it's just sort of like, well, it's not about whether or not I'm committing a crime. It's about whether or not, you know, we've had a discussion about what we should all know about each other, or like, why don't you just come over and ask me first.
I still want our community to have the ability to get people’s stolen cars back or to like find somebody who is like a, a lost senior adult or, or a child who's been abducted, you know? But these are like problems. Then we get to solve together rather than in this like adversarial manner where everybody's an obstacle to some public good.

JASON KELLEY: One of the things that I think a lot of the people we talk with, but I think you in particular are bringing to this conversation is, I don't know, optimism, joy, creativity.
You're someone who is dealing with some complicated, difficult, often depressing stuff. And you think about how to get people involved in ways that aren't, you know, uh, using the word dystopia, which is a word we use too much at e fff because it's too often becoming true. Cindy, I think mentioned earlier the adversarial fashion line. I think you've done a lot of work in getting people who aren't necessarily engineers thinking about like data issues clearly.
Tell us a little bit about the adversarial fashion work and also just, you know, how we get more people involved in protecting privacy that aren't necessarily the ones working at Facebook, right?

KATE BERTASH: So one of the most fun things about the adversarial fashion line, uh, was in, in kind of researching how I was gonna do that. The reason I did it is because I actually spent some of my free time designing fabrics, like mostly stuff with little, you know, manatees or cats on them, like silly things for kids.
And so I was like, yeah, it's, it's a surface pattern. I could definitely do that. Seems easy. Uh, and I got to research and find out more about sort of the role that art has in a lot of anti-surveillance movements. There's a lot of really cool anti surveillance art projects. Uh, it has been amazing as I present adversarial fashion, uh, in different places to kinda show off how that works.
So the way that the adversarial fashion line works is that these clothes have basically, you know, see these sort of iterations of what kind of look like plates on them. And automated license plate readers are kind of interesting in that they're, what I guess the system with low specificity is, is the way that a software engineer might term it, which is that they are working on a highway at, you know, 60, 70 miles an hour.
They're ingesting hundreds, sometimes thousands of plates a minute. So they really have to just be generous in what they're willing to ingest. So they, they put the vacuum and things like picket fences and billboards. And so clothing was kind of trivial, frankly, to get them to pick that up as well.
And what was really nice about the example of, you know, like a shirt that. You know, could be read as a car by some of these systems. And it was very easy to show, especially on some of the open source systems that are the exact same models deployed in surveillance technology that's bought and sold, uh, that, you know, you would really think differently than about your plate being seen someplace as sort of something that might implicate you in a crime or determine a pattern of behavior or justify somebody surveilling you further if it can be fooled by a t-shirt.
And you know, much like the example we talked about, uh, with, you know, conversations being held on a place like Facebook, anti surveillance artworks are cool in that they get to help people who feel like they're not technical enough or they don't really understand the underlying pieces of technology to have a concrete example that they can form a really strong reaction to. I know that some of the people who had really thrilled me that they were very excited about were like criminal defense attorneys reached out and asked a bunch of questions.
We have a lot of other people who are artists or designers who are like, how did you learn to use these systems? Did you need to know how to code? And I'm like, no, you can just roll them up on, you know, there's actually a bunch of a LPR apps that are available on, you know, the Apple store or that you can use on your computer, on your phone and test out the things that you've made.
And this actually works for many other systems. So, you know, facial recognition systems, if you wanna play around and come up with really great, you know. Clothing or masks or makeup or something, you can actually test it with the facial recognition piece of Instagram or any of these different types of applications.
It's a lot of fun. I love getting to answer people's questions. I love seeing the kind of creative spark that they're like, oh yeah, maybe I am smart enough to understand this, or to try and fool it on my own. Or know that like these systems aren't maybe as complex or smart as I give them credit for.

JASON KELLEY: What I like about this especially is that you are, you know, pointing out that this stuff is actually not that complicated and we've moved into a world where often the kind of digital spaces we live in, the technology we use feels so opaque that people can't even understand how to begin to like modify it, or to understand how it works or how they would build it themselves.
It's something we've been talking about with other people about how there's sort of like a moment where you realize that you can modify the digital world or that you can. You, you know how it works. Was there a moment in your work or in your life, um, where you realized that you could sort of understand that technology was there FOR you, not just there like to be thrust upon you?

KATE BERTASH: You know, it might be a little bit late in my life, but I think when I first got this job and I was like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do to really help kind of break through the many types of like privacy and safety problems that are facing this community, somebody had said, Kate, you should go to Def Con, and I went to Def Con, my very first one, and I was like blown back in my chair.
Defcon is America's largest hacker conference. It takes place every single year in Las Vegas and I think going there, you see, not only are these presentations on things that people have broken, but then there are places called villages that you walk through and people show you how to break systems or why, actually, it should be a lot harder to break this than it is.
Like the voting village. They buy old voting machines off of eBay and then, you know, teach everyone who walks in within, you know, 20 minutes how you can break into a voting machine. And it was just this, like, moment where I realized that you don't have to take technology as it is given to you. We all deserve technology that has our back and, and can't be modified or broken to hurt us.
And you can do that by yourself, sort of like actively tinkering on it. And I think that spirit of irreverence Really carried through to a lot of the work that we do with Digital Defense Fund, where we get people all the time who, like, they come in and they are worried about absolutely everything. It's so hard to decide what bite of the elephant to take first on, you know, improving the safety and privacy for the team and how they work and the patients that they serve.
But then we get to kind of show people some great examples of how actually this. Isn't quite as complicated as you might think. I'm gonna walk you through sort of the difference of like getting to use, like, one app text versus another, or turning on two factor.
We love tools like have I been pwned because they kind of help shape that understanding. You know, like you think about how a hacker gets a password, it feels so abstract or like technical, and then you realize, oh, actually when somebody breaks these, they buy and sell them, and then somebody just takes old passwords and reuses them.
That seems far more intuitive. I can now understand the ecosystem and the logic that's used behind so much of security and it builds on itself. And I think the thing that I'm most proud of is that we not only have this community of folks that we've worked with to improve their safety that we introduced to personal, you know, professional development opportunities to keep growing that understanding. We also manage an amazing community of technologists who build their own systems.
There's one group called the DC Abortion Fund who built their own case management platform because they were not being served by any of these corporate or enterprise options that charge way too much. They have like, you know, dozens of case managers, so that many seats was never gonna be affordable. And so they just sat down and they, you know, worked with Code For DC and they built it out, hand in hand.
And that is a project that I always point to as like, you know, it took somebody saying to themselves, I deserve better than this, and I can learn from everything I like about, you know, systems that you can buy and sell, but also like our community's gonna build what we need.
And to be supported to do that and have that encouragement is, is one of the reasons that I'm so proud that, um, over these years, the number of sort of self-built and community built software projects and other types of like ways that people deploy more secure technology to each other and teach each other has grown by leaps and bounds.
My job is so different now than what it was eight years ago because people are hungry for it. They know that they are, you know, ready to become their own experts in their communities. And the requests that we get then for, for more train the trainer type of material, or to help equip people to bring this back to their space the way, you know, I brought my ALPR presentation back to my own community. It's great to see that everyone is so much more encouraged, especially in these times when like systems are unstable, nonprofits spin up and down. We all have funding problems that have very little often to do with the demand for those resources, that that's not the end of the story.
So, yeah, I love it. It's been a wonderful journey, seeing how everything has changed from, like you said, that spirit of, of being always worried that things are getting worse, focusing on this dystopia, to seeing sort of, you know, how our own community has expanded its imagination. It's really wonderful. //

CINDY COHN: What a joy it is to talk to someone like Kate. She brings this spirit of irreverence that I think is great that she centers on Defcon because that's a community that definitely takes security seriously, but don't take themselves very seriously. So I really, I love that attitude and how important that is, I hear, for building community, building resilience through what are pretty dark times for the community that she fundamentally, you know, works with.

JASON KELLEY: And building that understanding that you have the not just ability, but like the right to work with the technology that is presented to you and to understand it and to take it apart and to rebuild it. All of that is, I think, critical to, you know, building the better internet that we want.
And Kate really shows how just, you know, going to the DEF Con Village can change your whole mind about that sort of thing, and hopefully people who don't have technical skills will recognize that you actually don't necessarily need them to do what she's describing. That's another thing that she said that I really liked, which is this, that, you know, she could show up in a room and talk to 40 people about surveillance and she doesn't have to talk about it at a, you know, technical level really, just saying, Hey, here's how this works. Did you know that? And anyone can do that. You know, you just have to show up.

CINDY COHN: Yeah. And how important these, like hyperlocal conversations are to really getting a handle on combating this idea that we can surveil ourselves to safety. What I really loved about that story, about gathering her community together, including the sheriff, is that, you know, they actually had a real conversation about the impact of what the sheriff was, was, is doing with Alps and really were able to be like, you know, look, I want you to be able to catch people who are stealing cars, but also there are these other ramifications and really bringing it down to a human level as one of the ways we get people to kind of stop thinking that we can surveil ourselves to safety. Then that technology can just replace the kind of individual community-based conversations we need to have.

JASON KELLEY: Yeah. She really is maybe one of the best people I've ever spoken to at bringing it down to that human level.

CINDY COHN: I think of people like Kate as the connective tissue between the communities that really need technologies that serve them, and the people who either develop those technologies or think about them or advocacy groups like us who are kind of doing the policy level work or the national level or even international level work on this.
We need those, those bridges between the communities that need technologies and the people who really think about it in the kind of broader perspective or develop it and deploy it.

JASON KELLEY: I think the thing that I'm gonna take away from this most is again, just Kate's creativity and the fact that she's so optimistic and this is such a difficult topic and, and we're living in such, you know, easily described as dystopic times. Um, but, uh, she's sort of alive with the idea that it doesn't have to be that way, which is really the, the whole point of the podcast. So she embodied it really well.

CINDY COHN: Yep. And this season we're gonna be really featuring the technologies of freedom, the technologies we need in these particular times.
And Kate is just one example of so many people who are really bright spots here and pointing the way to, you know, how we can fix the internet and build ourselves a better future.

JASON KELLEY: Thanks for joining us for this episode – and this new season! – of How to Fix the Internet.
If you have feedback or suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Visit EFF dot org slash podcast and click on listener feedback. While you're there, you can become a member, donate, maybe even pick up some merch and just see what's happening in digital rights this week and every week.
Our theme music is by Nat Keefe of BeatMower with Reed Mathis
How to Fix the Internet is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program in public understanding of science and technology.
We’ll see you next time.
I’m Jason Kelley.

CINDY COHN: And I’m Cindy Cohn.

Milesightが提供するUG65-868M-EAには、ブートコードがコピーされる揮発性メモリに対するアクセス制御が不適切な脆弱性が存在します。

BrightSignが提供するBrightsignプレーヤーには、不要な権限での実行の脆弱性が存在します。

オムロン製マシンオートメーションコントローラNJ/NXシリーズには、パストラバーサルの脆弱性が存在します。

第32回共同ワーキング・チーム

自治紛争処理委員の任命

The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) recently joined a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) task force geared towards finding and deporting immigrants, according to a report from the Washington Post. Now, immigration officials want two sets of data from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS). First, they want access to what the Post describes as the agency’s “broad surveillance systems, including Postal Service online account data, package- and mail-tracking information, credit card data and financial material and IP addresses.” Second, they want “mail covers,” meaning “photographs of the outside of envelopes and packages.”

Both proposals are alarming. The U.S. mail is a vital, constitutionally established system of communication and commerce that should not be distorted into infrastructure for dragnet surveillance. Immigrants have a human right to data privacy. And new systems of surveilling immigrants will inevitably expand to cover all people living in our country.

USPS Surveillance Systems

Mail is a necessary service in our society. Every day, the agency delivers 318 million letters, hosts 7 million visitors to its website, issues 209,000 money orders, and processes 93,000 address changes.

To obtain these necessary services, we often must provide some of our personal data to the USPS. According to the USPS’ Privacy Policy: “The Postal Service collects personal information from you and from your transactions with us.” It states that this can include “your name, email, mailing and/or business address, phone numbers, or other information that identifies you personally.” If you visit the USPS’s website, they “automatically collect and store” your IP address, the date and time of your visit, the pages you visited, and more. Also: “We occasionally collect data about you from financial entities to perform verification services and from commercial sources.”

The USPS should not collect, store, disclose, or use our data except as strictly necessary to provide us the services we request. This is often called “data minimization.” Among other things, in the words of a seminal 1973 report from the U.S. government: “There must be a way for an individual to prevent information about him that was obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without [their] consent.” Here, the USPS should not divert customer data, collected for the purpose of customer service, to the new purpose of surveilling immigrants.

The USPS is subject to the federal Privacy Act of 1974, a watershed anti-surveillance statute. As the USPS acknowledges: “the Privacy Act applies when we use your personal information to know who you are and to interact with you.” Among other things, the Act limits how an agency may disclose a person’s records. (Sound familiar? EFF has a Privacy Act lawsuit against DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management.) While the Act only applies to citizens and lawful permanent residents, that will include many people who send mail to or receive mail from other immigrants. If USPS were to assert the “law enforcement” exemption from the Privacy Act’s non-disclosure rule, the agency would need to show (among other things) a written request for “the particular portion desired” of “the record.” It is unclear how dragnet surveillance like that reported by the Washington Post could satisfy this standard.

USPS Mail Covers

From 2015 to 2023, according to another report from the Washington Post, the USPS received more than 60,000 requests for “mail cover” information from federal, state, and local law enforcement. Each request could include days or weeks of information about the cover of mail sent to or from a person or address. The USPS approved 97% of these requests, leading to postal inspectors recording the covers of more than 312,000 letters and packages.

In 2023, a bipartisan group of eight U.S. Senators (led by Sen. Wyden and Sen. Paul) raised the alarm about this mass surveillance program:

While mail covers do not reveal the contents of correspondence, they can reveal deeply personal information about Americans’ political leanings, religious beliefs, or causes they support. Consequently, surveillance of this information does not just threaten Americans’ privacy, but their First Amendment rights to freely associate with political or religious organizations or peacefully assemble without the government watching.

The Senators called on the USPIS to “only conduct mail covers when a federal judge has approved this surveillance,” except in emergencies. We agree that, at minimum, a warrant based on probable cause should be required.

The USPS operates other dragnet surveillance programs. Its Mail Isolation Control and Tracking Program photographs the exterior of all mail, and it has been used for criminal investigations. The USPIS’s Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) conducts social media surveillance to identify protest activity. (Sound familiar? EFF has a FOIA lawsuit about iCOP.)

This is just the latest of many recent attacks on the data privacy of immigrants. Now is the time to restrain USPIS’s dragnet surveillance programs—not to massively expand them to snoop on immigrants. If this scheme goes into effect, it is only a matter of time before such USPIS spying is expanded against other vulnerable groups, such as protesters or people crossing state lines for reproductive or gender affirming health care. And then against everyone.

　　毎年、締め切り近くの5月になると、JCJ事務局の部屋に、JCJ賞応募作品が、どさっと積みあがる。選考委員会には、候補作品に価すると判断した作品を絞って、提案する。その絞り込み作業は、推薦委員を中心に、何人かで下読みし回覧し議論する。昨2024年の新聞メディアでの議論は簡単だった。　「大賞は赤旗スクープの裏金。これだけ政治を動かした報道は、田中金脈以来か…」と、議論は一致して、選考委委員会に推薦した。　連載をまとめ大幅加筆した本書によると、取材の端緒は2021年12月、自民..

「泊原発を再稼働させるな！　核ごみを北海道に持ち込ませるな！北海道大行進」が5月5日、札幌市内で開催され、約200人が参加。五月晴れの青空の下、元気にデモ行進した。この大行進は、道内約70の市民団体でつくる「泊原発を再稼働させない・核ゴミを持ち込ませない北海道連絡会」（札幌）が主催し、毎年、こどもの日に合わせて5月5日に行われている。福島第1原発事故翌年の2012年5月5日、最後まで稼働を続けていた泊原発3号機が「定期点検」を理由に停止し、画期的な原発ゼロが実現した。将来を担う子どもたちに「原発のない日本」という最高のプレゼントができた13年前、上京していた私は、会津に伝わる庶民の踊り「かんしょ踊り」を参加者一同で踊り、経産省を包囲した。あのときの感動は今なお忘れない。この日の集会では、連絡会の井上敦子事務局長があいさつ。「13年前の今日、泊原発が止まるとともに、原発ゼロが実現した。それから13年、政府はあろう事か、原発の最大限活用まで口にするようになった。泊原発を再稼働させない、北海道に核のごみを持ち込ませないことは、将来世代に対する私たちの責任だ」と泊原発再稼働や核ごみ持ち込みの阻止に向けた決意を表明した。（黒鉄好）

Nominations are now open for the 2025 EFF Awards! The nomination window will be open until Friday, May 23rd at 2:00 PM Pacific time. You could nominate the next winner today!

For over thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented awards to key leaders and organizations in the fight for freedom and innovation online. The EFF Awards celebrate the longtime stalwarts working on behalf of technology users, both in the public eye and behind the scenes. Past Honorees include visionary activist Aaron Swartz, human rights and security researchers The Citizen Lab, media activist Malkia Devich-Cyril, media group 404 Media, and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning.

The internet is a necessity in modern life and a continually evolving tool for communication, creativity, and human potential. Together we carry—and must always steward—the movement to protect civil liberties and human rights online. Will you help us spotlight some of the latest and most impactful work towards a better digital future?

Remember, nominations close on May 23rd at 2:00 PM Pacific time!

GO TO NOMINATION PAGE

Nominate your favorite digital rights Heroes now!

After you nominate your favorite contenders, we hope you will consider joining us on September 10 to celebrate the work of the 2025 winners. If you have any questions or if you'd like to receive updates about the event, please email events@eff.org.

The EFF Awards depend on the generous support of individuals and companies with passion for digital civil liberties. To learn about how you can sponsor the EFF Awards, please visit eff.org/thanks or contact tierney@eff.org for more information.

 

When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades. 

At the end of the day, public safety vendors are tech companies, and their representatives are salespeople using all the tricks from the marketing playbook. But these companies aren't just after public money—they also want data. 

And each new bit of data that police collect contributes to a pool of information to which the company can attach other services: storage, data processing, cross-referencing tools, inter-agency networking, and AI analysis. The companies may even want the data to train their own AI model. The landscape of the police tech industry is changing, and companies that once specialized in a single technology (such as hardware products like automated license plate readers (ALPRs) or gunshot detection sensors) have developed new capabilities or bought up other tech companies and law enforcement data brokers—all in service of becoming the corporate giant that serves as a one-stop shop for police surveillance needs.

One of the most alarming trends in policing is that companies are regularly pushing police to buy more than they need. Vendors regularly pressure police departments to lock in the price now for a whole bundle of features and tools in the name of “cost savings,” often claiming that the cost à la carte for any of these tools will be higher than the cost of a package, which they warn will also be priced more expensively in the future. Market analysts have touted the benefits of creating “moats” between these surveillance ecosystems and any possible competitors. By making it harder to switch service providers due to integrated features, these companies can lock their cop customers into multi-year subscriptions and long-term dependence. 

Think your local police are just getting body-worn cameras (BWCs) to help with public trust or ALPRs to aid their hunt for stolen vehicles? Don’t assume that’s the end of it. If there’s already a relationship between a company and a department, that department is much more likely to get access to a free trial of whatever other device or software that company hopes the department will put on its shopping list. 

These vendors also regularly help police departments apply for grants and waivers, and provide other assistance to find funding, so that as soon as there’s money available for a public safety initiative, those funds can make their way directly to their business.

Companies like Axon have been particularly successful at using their relationships and leveraging the ability to combine equipment into receiving “sole source” designations. Typically, government agencies must conduct a bidding process when buying a new product, be it toilet paper, computers, or vehicles. For a company to be designated a sole-source provider, it is supposed to provide a product that no other vendor can provide. If a company can get this designation, it can essentially eliminate any possible competition for particular government contracts. When Axon is under consideration as a vendor for equipment like BWCs, for which there are multiple possible other providers, it’s not uncommon to see a police department arguing for a sole-source procurement for Axon BWCs based on the company’s ability to directly connect their cameras to the Fusus system, another Axon product. 

Here are a few of the big players positioning themselves to collect your movements, analyze your actions, and make you—the taxpayer—bear the cost for the whole bundle of privacy invasions. 

Axon Enterprise's ‘Suite’

Axon expects to have yet another year of $2 billion-plus in revenue in 2025. The company first got its hooks into police departments through the Taser, the electric stun gun. Axon then plunged into the BWC market amidst Obama-era outrage at police brutality and the flood of grant money flowing from the federal government to local police departments for BWCs, which were widely promoted as a police accountability tool. Axon parlayed its relationships with hundreds of police departments and capture and storage of growing terabytes of police footage into a menu of new technological offerings. 

In its annual year-end securities filing, Axon told investors it was "building the public safety operating system of the future” through its suite of “cloud-hosted digital evidence management solutions, productivity and real-time operations software, body cameras, in-car cameras, TASER energy devices, robotic security and training solutions” to cater to agencies in the federal, corrections, justice, and security sectors.”

Axon controls an estimated 85 percent of the police body-worn camera market. Its Evidence.com platform, once a trial add-on for BWC customers, is now also one of the biggest records management systems used by police. Its other tools and services include record management, video storage in the cloud, drones, connected private cameras, analysis tools, virtual reality training, and real-time crime centers. 

axon_flywheel_of_growth.png An image from the Quarter 4 2024 slide deck for investors, which describes different levels of the “Officer Safety Plan” (OSP) product package and highlights how 95% of Axon customers are tied to a subscription plan.

Axon has been adding AI to its repertoire, and it now features a whole “AI Era” bundle plan. One recent offering is Draft One, which connects to Axon’s body-worn cameras (BWCs) and uses AI to generate police reports based on the audio captured in the BWC footage. While use of the tool may start off as a free trial, Axon sees Draft One as another key product for capturing new customers, despite widespread skepticism of the accuracy of the reports, the inability to determine which reports have been drafted using the system, and the liability they could bring to prosecutions.

In 2024, Axon acquired a company called Fusus, a platform that combines the growing stores of data that police departments collect—notifications from gunshot detection and automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems; footage from BWCs, drones, public cameras, and sometimes private cameras; and dispatch information—to create “real-time crime centers.” The company now claims that Fusus is being used by more than 250 different policing agencies.

Fusus claims to bring the power of the real-time crime center to police departments of all sizes, which includes the ability to help police access and use live footage from both public and private cameras through an add-on service that requires a recurring subscription. It also claims to integrate nicely with surveillance tools from other providers. Recently, it has been cutting ties, most notably with Flock Safety, as it starts to envelop some of the options its frenemies had offered.

In the middle of April, Axon announced that it would begin offering fixed ALPR, a key feature of the Flock Safety catalogue, and an AI Assistant, which has been a core offering of Truleo, another Axon competitor.

Flock Safety's Bundles and FlockOS

Flock Safety is another major police technology company that has expanded its focus from one primary technology to a whole package of equipment and software services. 

Flock Safety started with ALPRs. These tools use a camera to read vehicle license plates, collecting the make, model, location, and other details which can be used for what Flock calls “Vehicle Fingerprinting.” The details are stored in a database that sometimes finds a match among a “hot list” provided by police officers, but otherwise just stores and shares data on how, where, and when everyone is driving and parking their vehicles. 

Founded in 2017, Flock Safety has been working to expand its camera-based offerings, and it now claims to have a presence in more than 5,000 jurisdictions around the country, including through law enforcement and neighborhood association customers. 

flock_proposal_for_brookhaven.png flock_proposal_for_brookhaven_2.png A list of FlockOS features proposed to Brookhaven Police Department in Georgia.

Among its tools are now the drone-as-first-responder system, gunshot detection, and a software platform meant to combine all of them. Flock also sells an option for businesses to use ALPRs to "optimize" marketing efforts and for analyzing traffic patterns to segment their patrons. Flock Safety offers the ability to integrate private camera systems as well.

flockos_hardware_software.png A price proposal for the FlockSafety platform made to Palatine, IL

Much of what Flock Safety does now comes together in their FlockOS system, which claims to bring together various surveillance feeds and facilitate real-time “situational awareness.”

Flock is optimistic about its future, recently opening a massive new manufacturing facility in Georgia.

Motorola Solutions' "Ecosystem"

When you think of Motorola, you may think of phones—but there’s a good chance that you missed the moment in 2011 when the phone side of the company, Motorola Mobility, split off from Motorola Solutions, which is now a big player in police surveillance.

On its website, Motorola Solutions claims that departments are better off using a whole list of equipment from the same ecosystem, boasting the tagline, “Technology that’s exponentially more powerful, together.” Motorola describes this as an "ecosystem of safety and security technologies" in its securities filings. In 2024, the company also reported $2 billion in sales, but unlike Axon, its customer base is not exclusively law enforcement and includes private entities like sports stadiums, schools, and hospitals.

Motorola’s technology includes 911 services, radio, BWCs, in-car cameras, ALPRs, drones, face recognition, crime mapping, and software that supposedly unifies it all. Notably, video can also come with artificial intelligence analysis, in some cases allowing law enforcement to search video and track individuals across cameras.

motorola_offerings_screenshot.png A screenshot from Motorola Solutions webpage on law enforcement technology.

In January 2019, Motorola Solutions acquired Vigilant Solutions, one of the big players in the ALPR market, as part of its takeover of Vaas International Holdings. Now the company (under the subsidiary DRN Data) claims to have billions of scans saved from police departments and private ALPR cameras around the country. Marketing language for its Vehicle Manager system highlights that “data is overwhelming,” because the amount of data being collected is “a lot.” It’s a similar claim made by other companies: Now that you’ve bought so many surveillance tools to collect so much data, you’re finding that it is too much data, so you now need more surveillance tools to organize and make sense of it.

SoundThinking's ‘SafetySmart Platform’

SoundThinking began as ShotSpotter, a so-called gunshot detection tool that uses microphones placed around a city to identify and locate sounds of gunshots. As news reports of the tool’s inaccuracy and criticisms have grown, the company has rebranded as SoundThinking, adding to its offerings ALPRs, case management, and weapons detection. The company is now marketing its SafetySmart platform, which claims to integrate different stores of data and apply AI analytics.

In 2024, SoundThinking laid out its whole scheme in its annual report, referring to it as the "cross-sell" component of their sales strategy. 

The "cross-sell" component of our strategy is designed to leverage our established relationships and understanding of the customer environs by introducing other capabilities on the SafetySmart platform that can solve other customer challenges. We are in the early stages of the upsell/cross-sell strategy, but it is promising - particularly around bundled sales such as ShotSpotter + ResourceRouter and CaseBuilder +CrimeTracer. Newport News, VA, Rocky Mount, NC, Reno, NV and others have embraced this strategy and recognized the value of utilizing multiple SafetySmart products to manage the entire life cycle of gun crime…. We will seek to drive more of this sales activity as it not only enhances our system's effectiveness but also deepens our penetration within existing customer relationships and is a proof point that our solutions are essential for creating comprehensive public safety outcomes. Importantly, this strategy also increases the average revenue per customer and makes our customer relationships even stickier.

Many of SoundThinking’s new tools rely on a push toward “data integration” and artificial intelligence. ALPRs can be integrated with ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter can be integrated with the CaseBuilder records management system, and CaseBuilder can be integrated with CrimeTracer. CrimeTracer, once known as COPLINK X, is a platform that SoundThinking describes as a “powerful law enforcement search engine and information platform that enables law enforcement to search data from agencies across the U.S.” EFF tracks this type of tool in the Atlas of Surveillance as a third-party investigative platform: software tools that combine open-source intelligence data, police records, and other data sources, including even those found on the dark web, to generate leads or conduct analyses. 

SoundThinking, like a lot of surveillance, can be costly for departments, but the company seems to see the value in fostering its existing police department relationships even if they’re not getting paid right now. In Baton Rouge, budget cuts recently resulted in the elimination of the $400,000 annual contract for ShotSpotter, but the city continues to use it. 

"They have agreed to continue that service without accepting any money from us for now, while we look for possible other funding sources. It was a decision that it's extremely expensive and kind of cost-prohibitive to move the sensors to other parts of the city," Baton Rouge Police Department Chief Thomas Morse told a local news outlet, WBRZ.

Beware the Bundle

Government surveillance is big business. The companies that provide surveillance and police data tools know that it’s lucrative to cultivate police departments as loyal customers. They’re jockeying for monopolization of the state surveillance market that they’re helping to build. While they may be marketing public safety in their pitches for products, from ALPRs to records management to investigatory analysis to AI everything, these companies are mostly beholden to their shareholders and bottom lines. 

The next time you come across BWCs or another piece of tech on your city council’s agenda or police department’s budget, take a closer look to see what other strings and surveillance tools might be attached. You are not just looking at one line item on the sheet—it’s probably an ongoing subscription to a whole package of equipment designed to challenge your privacy, and no sort of discount makes that a price worth paying.

To learn more about what surveillance tools your local agencies are using, take a look at EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance and our Street-Level Surveillance Hub.