After a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, the F.B.I. admitted today that it secretly used aircraft to conduct surveillance of protests following Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore..
An FBI spokesperson insisted that the aircraft were not monitoring –quote- “lawfully protected First Amendment activity”, though it was unclear how this was defined in F.B.I. policy, or how they could have avoided doing so under the circumstances.
Baltimore police have also revealed that they used so-called StringRay tracking devices to secretly access data from citizens’ cell phones.
The request for information to the Justice Department was issued after Twitter and Reddit users, along with eyewitnesses in Baltimore, were able to track the origin of a mysterious aircraft circling the city, and plot its flight path.
The issue is also tied to concerns over so-called fusion centers, which are used by local and federal law enforcement, and national intelligence agencies like the NSA, to share information such as that collected by the spying in Baltimore.
For more, KBOO’s Jenka Soderberg spoke with Jared Ball, an associate professor at Morgan state university in Maryland
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