LA activists worried by implicit police threats to deploy mass facial rec technology

An LAPD helicopter flew over demonstrators, warning them that they could be identified and visited at home. Experts claim this was a chilling statement, even if it was meant as a joke.

With demonstrations over immigration raids in Los Angeles and elsewhere in California continuing, an alarming line from a Los Angeles Times report has attracted attention from civil liberty and digital privacy groups.

The crackdown against protesters has been brutal enough. Law enforcement has deployed tear gas, bean bags, and rubber bullets against demonstrators and even journalists.

President Donald Trump, using California as an experiment, has sent thousands of National Guard members to LA, and federal authorities also said the military would be deploying roughly 700 active-duty Marines. This would be an extraordinary way of targeting people domestically.

But the aforementioned Los Angeles Times line just as chillingly read that an LAPD helicopter flew over a crowd in the city on Sunday, announcing: “I have all of you on camera. I’m going to come to your house.”

According to digital privacy activists, this is a clear escalation that could lead to “reprisals and retribution by the police for your politics.”

These are the words of Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which often opposes what it says are inappropriate or illegal surveillance measures.

“Many people would be less willing to attend a rally or march if they know that a drone or helicopter, equipped with a camera, will take repeated passes over the crowd, and police later will use face recognition to scan everyone’s faces and create a list of protest attendees,” Guariglia wrote.

“This would make many people rightfully concerned about surveillance and harassment from law enforcement.”

Trump also said on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Sunday that people shouldn’t be allowed to wear masks at protests because they allegedly have nothing to hide. Guariglia, obviously, strongly disagrees.

“Wearing a mask is a perfectly legitimate surveillance self-defense practice during a protest. There has been a massive proliferation of surveillance camera networks, face recognition technology, and databases of personal information,” he said.

Even if the threat emanating from the LAPD helicopter was meant as a joke, it was clearly designed to make the public afraid to go out and protest, even though they have the constitutionally-protected right to do so, Jonathan Markovitz, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, told Mother Jones.

Besides, the LAPD has used facial recognition since 2004. The Security Vision database says that the department also deploys facial recognition to create posters of wanted persons, and the data collected is also used to anticipate future crimes (predictive policing).