Private firms provide software and information to police, documents show
Scores of private firms, consultants and non-governmental organizations have provided software, equipment, training and information to law enforcement agencies in a burgeoning profitmaking industry, according to documents from the so-called Blueleaks information dump.
The documents show how private actors – from major corporations to small-scale contractors – have aided police in militarizing their operations, expanding their surveillance capacities, and pursuing the so-called “war on drugs”.
Those firms not directly profiting from their interactions with police can often be seen attempting to influence the agenda of law enforcement, or prioritizing police interests over those of their customers.
The documents reveal that police are training in the use of military and surveillance technologies of which there may be little public awareness.
A 2013 flyer advertises training on the Fats L7 firearms training simulator by two drug enforcement bodies – the New England High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (Hidta), and the Northeast Counterdrug Training Center (CTC).
Hidtas were created in 1988, at the height of the so-called “war on drugs”, to facilitate cooperation and intelligence sharing between different levels of law enforcement. CTCs began in 1999 when Congress earmarked $494m dollars in the Defense Appropriations Act for the military to provide counter-drug training.
The Fats L7 is an adapted version of military firearms training simulators. Current equivalent systems allow users to train either in marksmanship or in a “judgmental mode for heightened situation awareness and intense de-escalation of force training” using a large screen, a projector and a simulated weapon in videogame-like scenarios. Online videos of Fats demonstrations often show law enforcement trainees firing on simulated perpetrators.
Federal contract records suggest that as of 2016, a Fats L7 machine cost about $40,000, and publicity materials from the former manufacturer, formerly Meggitt, since renamed InVeris, claims to have sold 5,100 such systems around the world.
Also repeatedly advertised throughout the trove are training sessions between 2017 and 2020 in the use of license plate and facial recognition software from Vigilant Solutions, acquired by Motorola in 2019, which sells the PlateSearch and FaceSearch systems.
The company has been the center of controversy over its massive nationwide collection of license plates.
In 2016, the Atlantic reported the company had collected 2.2bn photographs of number plates, and that it had some 3,000 law enforcement agencies as clients. In 2018, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation issued a report showing that shopping malls in Southern California had been capturing license plates and adding the images to a pool used by law enforcement agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).
In the training flyer, Vigilant Solutions promises that “attendees will see how using billions of plate detections within PlateSearch can maximize their investigative efforts in almost every facet of the job, including both areas of proactive field enforcement and investigations”.
Their FaceSearch training promises to show “nationwide, cloud-based databases of 18 million open-source images of LEA mugshots and known sex offenders”, and that “attendees will see how using millions of opensource images in an established gallery complements their current local booking images”.
Facial recognition technology has also attracted recent controversy over privacy concerns, and last month the city of Portland, Oregon, became the first US jurisdiction to ban the use of the technology by law enforcement.
Records of police communications contained in the Blueleaks dump of documents, reports and emails show law enforcement officers throughout the country asking for number plates to be run through the company’s system. Spreadsheets of training events show they attracted attendees from all levels of law enforcement and beyond, from police departments, to the California department of insurance.
Besides free training, and the features of their products, Vigilant Solutions has found other ways to keep their law enforcement clients happy. In October 2018, a flyer for the annual training day for TXLEAN, the Texas
Law Enforcement Analyst Network, the company sponsored lunch on both days of the event.
Portland-based Kristian Williams is the author of Our Enemies in Blue and other critical accounts of American policing. He said that “it’s not surprising” that companies have seen an opportunity to provide such equipment to law enforcement.
Williams added that “the enormous funding that goes into the criminal legal system does not stop at the criminal legal system. It has created a domestic market for military equipment.”
Other Blueleaks documents show that telecommunications giants have regularly assisted police with using and accessing the data of their customers.
On 15-16 August 2019, representatives from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and Google were advertised as speakers at a seminar entitled
“Wireless Carrier and Internet Provider Capabilities for Law Enforcement Investigators”.
Topics advertised included “legal track to obtain cellular data, “interpretation and usage of cellular data” and “vast array of data that can be obtained by LE investigators”.
The flyer for the event also promised “case studies presented by FBI Cellular Analysis Survey Team (Cast) as well as the US Marshals Tech Ops Group”.
A galaxy of smaller firms offer training in weapons, drug interdiction and surveillance.
A course advertised by South Lake Tahoe PD, run by a company called “International Mobile Training Team”, offers training in the use of armored vehicles including “MRAPs, Strikers and Up-armored Humvees”.
The flyer advises that “the instructor is a current member of the US military” and that the course would cover topics including “deployment considerations, general hazards of operation, public perception … ballistic capabilities & vulnerabilities … pre-planned and unplanned use of vehicle as cover … deployment of chemical agents”.
The course is advertised at a cost of $400 a person. Over summer, the deployment of such vehicles in crowd control situations fed into protests about police violence.