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Paul Beaty/AP Chicago Activists Turn the Tables on Police Surveillance GEORGE JOSEPH   OCT 25, 2016 A new tool called OpenOversight matches names and badge numbers with photos of police. But some fear it could put officers’ lives in danger. SHARE TWEET Last week, the ACLU of California  released emails  showing that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provided Geofeedia, a social media monitoring company used by several law enforcement agencies nationwide,  specialized access  to feeds of bulk public data. Geofeedia used the feeds to spy on Black Lives Matter activists in Ferguson and Baltimore, the ACLU  also revealed . Companies like Twitter  stipulate  that data should not be used to “investigate, track or surveil” users, and Twitter and Facebook both  moved to restrict Geofeedia’s bulk access to user data. But the controversy inspired one group of digital activists to turn the tables on law enforcement.  Lucy Parsons Labs , a Chicago collective of web developers—the

Memphis MLK50 demonstrations   Shawn Escoffery The Evolution of Domestic Spying Since MLK in Memphis BRENTIN MOCK   APR 9, 2018 Memphis began spying on local activists around the time when Martin Luther King came to advocate for city sanitation workers. A 1976 consent decree was supposed to put an end to that, but a new pending lawsuit against the city suggests it's still happening. SHARE TWEET Last week, on April 4, the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination,  thousands of people poured into the streets of Memphis , where King was killed, holding signs that read “I AM A MAN,” which were the signs held in protest by striking city sanitation workers that King had aligned with in 1968. The marchers from last week were commemorating the 1968 strikes even though the city of Memphis treated the workers, at the time, in the same way that a nation treats its enemies, by spying on them. And it’s not just the kind of spying that the FBI was already c

Demonstrators gather in Memphis, Tennessee, earlier this year to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Shawn Escoffery Memphis Police Spying on Activists Is Worse Than We Thought BRENTIN MOCK   JUL 27, 2018 As ACLU lawyers prepare for an upcoming trial with the Memphis Police Department, the things they’ve learned about the law enforcement agency’s spying habits have “surprised” them. SHARE TWEET When the ACLU of Tennessee  filed a lawsuit against the Memphis Police Department  in March 2017, its lawyers accused the police department of spying on local protesters in violation of a consent decree. The lawsuit was based on the existence of a “City Hall Escort List” created by Memphis police, at Mayor Jim Strickland’s request, and mostly filled with names of Black Lives Matter activists to be flagged by police if ever on City Hall grounds. However, after deposing key police officials and collecting hundreds of pages of documented evi