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We're an investigative reporter and the director of infosec at The Intercept. We recently examinedBlueLeaks documents, which exposed the personal data of 700,000 law enforcement officers and revealed Homeland Security concerns that masks are breaking facial recognition. AMA

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We're an investigative reporter and the director of infosec at The Intercept. We recently examinedBlueLeaks documents, which exposed the personal data of 700,000 law enforcement officers and revealed Homeland Security concerns that masks are breaking facial recognition. AMA

Hi Reddit, I’m Mara Hvistendahl, an investigative reporter for The Intercept focusing on national security and technology — and I’m Micah Lee, Director of Information Security at The Intercept. We’re answering questions about BlueLeaks:

Last month, the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets published 269 gigabytes of law enforcement data. In all, the archive contains more than 16 million rows of data: not just personal information of officers, but descriptions of alleged crimes, website logs, and more. It also contains hundreds of thousands of documents, thousands of videos, and millions of images.⁠

Among those documents is a Homeland Security intelligence note which expresses the anxiety that mask-wearing is breaking facial recognition technology, as public health wisdom clashes with the prerogatives of local and federal police.

Proof:

UPDATE: Thanks for joining, we're going to wrap up now. You can follow the rest of The Intercept's ongoing BlueLeaks coverage here, including one of our latest pieces: Leaked Documents Show Police Knew Far-Right Extremists Were the Real Threat at Protests, Not “Antifa”

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level 1

Have you been surprised by the government's response to the leaks, for example having German police seizing the servers that hosted the data?

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level 2
Op · 2 yr. ago

I have been surprised. The actions against DDoSecrets publishing BlueLeaks data are a lot more aggressive than anything we've seen before in past data leaks. I think it's because American police have an incredible amount of political power and feel very threatened by this data being out there.
- Micah

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level 1

Is any agency of the US government expressing interest to purchase systems that have the ability to match faces even with a face covering? specifically to combat flaws in existing systems. Not too long ago there was a Recode article saying SenseTime, a leader in the field, was looking at selling a solution to this. Panasonic also had a demo.

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level 2
Op · 2 yr. ago

I haven't heard of any agencies trying to purchase anything of that sort, though NIST is looking into the issue. A lot of companies have made claims about their technologies' capacity to identify faces, but the evidence that they can actually do so is lacking. This report from IPVM is pretty telling. And there's a difference between identifying faces for building access or at border checkpoints (cases where people are looking at the camera straight on) and identifying individuals who are walking or running by a camera.

-- Mara

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· 2 yr. ago · edited 2 yr. ago

I read something in The Atlantic today (Sept. 2020 issue and a LONG read. China has something. They tested it for the Uighurs. Adding it for reference: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/china-surveillance/552203/

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level 2

The NSA already has systems that can identify a person by their gait and even use infrared to detect their heartbeat (apparently everybody's heartbeat is different akin to a fingerprint). The only difference is they don't have a database of these yet.

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level 2

All that's needed is better cameras. Iris's are already unique identifiers per human, so once a camera can adequately "see" the iris of a passing person in low light, masks won't affect the ability for cameras to identify people in public.

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[deleted]
· 2 yr. ago

269 GB is quite a bit, but when I looked through it, I found much of the data seemed to be extraneous files or images. What documents or communications do you think are the "must be studied" and what percentage of the leak comprise those?

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Op · 2 yr. ago · edited 2 yr. ago

That's a good question. The dispatches from fusion centers are revealing. We've reported on many of them, but there is much more to be done. Beyond that, the documents show communications that give insight into the day-to-day operations of law enforcement agencies. Some of these might be hard for the average user to dig into on their own, though. Technical skills definitely help.

-- Mara

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level 2
Op · 2 yr. ago

The data includes tons of Office documents and PDFs, but personally I think the most interesting information starts out in the CSV files, which are exported database tables. These include the content of bulk emails that fusion centers send out and who receives them, suspicious activity reports, and support requests from local police to fusion centers, often for things like help breaking into a locked phone or help spying on an upcoming protest.

- Micah

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level 1

In Blueleaks, a lot of the intel about activist groups seems to be pretty low-effort and based on media reports rather than law enforcement investigations. Do you suspect there are other law enforcement databases and files pertaining to current investigations of such groups that are not included in Blueleaks?

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level 2

Remember this is a leak of law enforcement sensitive/for official use information, not of classified information.

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level 2
Op · 2 yr. ago

Yes there definitely are. Like Mara said, BlueLeaks is mostly a leak of fusion centers. There are thousands upon thousands of police departments out there not included, and investigations into specific activist groups most likely would happen by local police departments or the FBI.

- Micah

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level 2
Op · 2 yr. ago

Definitely there is intelligence on activist groups that is not included in this leak. But what makes this leak interesting is that it provides a window into the operations of fusion centers, which are post-9/11 agencies that conduct domestic intelligence. The BlueLeaks docs also give a lot of insight into the way law enforcement agencies reacted to the George Floyd protests. In reporting on the documents I've learned a lot about the police response in my own city of Minneapolis, for example.

-- Mara

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level 1

DDoSecrets was banned from Twitter, r/BlueLeaks was banned from reddit, where can people go to share and discuss things they find within the blueleaks archive?

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Op · 2 yr. ago

Good question! At the moment there is no central discussion area that I'm aware of.

It's a shame that reddit banned the BlueLeaks subreddit -- it was definitely a bad choice, and I think points to the immense power that police have in the US.

It looks like twitter has maybe calmed down on their censorship, and I think it's definitely worth continuing to post findings there, and pressuring twitter to not censor anything that's within the public interest.

- Micah

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level 1

Hey guys,

What kind of changes do you think these leaks will bring about, if any?

With other large data leaks in the past it seems that they tend to be forgotten about in a relatively short amount of time. Do you believe this leak will be any different in that regard?

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level 2
Op · 2 yr. ago

It's hard to say at this point because we're still digging through the documents, and obviously the news cycle is really volatile right now. But what makes the BlueLeaks docs so interesting is that they shed light on a crucial moment for the United States, by showing how law enforcement responded to the most widespread protests against police violence in recent history. I do think that has immense value as we consider how to rethink policing in America.

-- Mara

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level 2
Op · 2 yr. ago

I can't predict the future, but I hope that the revelations in these leaks bring about serious reforms across the country. I think there is plenty of misconduct that will be covered, particularly related to unconstitutional spying on anti-fascist and Black activists, and distributing right-wing misinformation to police across the country.

I think there is most likely to be changes at specific fusion centers or police departments when specific instances of misconduct get reported on.

- Micah

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