Docs Show Police Also Sought (And Obtained) Phone Records For Police Shooting Victim's Girlfriend

from the Sprint-totally-cool-with-indefinite-gag-orders dept

As we recently covered, Minnesota law enforcement tried to snatch victory from the expiring body of a black driver shot by a St. Anthony police officer by immediately asking an uninvolved social media company to turn over information on Philando Castile's girlfriend. The reason for this? The "affiant" swore criminals often used social media services to discuss criminal activities. This was an attempt to mine for dirt that might be used to justify an unjustifiable shoot.

One warrant was served to Facebook, along with an indefinite gag order. Facebook challenged the gag order. Ill-prepared for pushback and having no solid reason to demand the release of Facebook posts and private messages, the warrant was rescinded.

Unfortunately, another company was far more compliant.

Facebook opposed the gag order and, after weeks of discussion between the BCA and a lawyer at Facebook, the warrant was rescinded altogether. Sprint, however, complied with the warrant, and turned over Reynolds’ call records, voicemails, and cell tower information that revealed her location.

Facebook, on one hand, has a policy of notifying users about law enforcement requests for their information. Sprint, apparently, does not. That's why the gag order became a point of contention and resulted in the warrant being withdrawn. Sprint did not challenge the gag order and three days' worth of phone records -- including location info and text messages -- were turned over to law enforcement whose primary interest was finding some reason for Officer Yanez to have shot a compliant Philando Castile.

This highlights a major difference between internet service providers and telcos. Sprint may be in the cellphone business these days, but it's the offshoot of an 118-year-old phone company. The history of telcos' close relationship with law enforcement is long and unseemly. Cell service providers are more than willing to act as proxy Stingrays and provide near real-time location info to law enforcement. Both AT&T and Verizon voluntarily handed over more than the NSA was demanding, paving the way for a successful exploitation of Section 215 until its recent shutdown. AT&T was behind the inadvertently-disclosed "Hemisphere" program, which allowed federal law enforcement agencies to warrantlessly trawl its millions of phone records to search for almost any form of criminal activity.

That Sprint would put up less of a fight than Facebook is disappointing, but it's far from surprising. Similarly unsurprising is law enforcement's kneejerk response to the killing of a citizen by a police officer: disparage the dead as quickly as possible using any means necessary.

Filed Under: diamond reynolds, philandro castile, privacy, subpoena
Companies: facebook, sprint

Two Days, Two Shootings, Two Sets Of Cops Making Recordings Disappear

from the command-control dept

There are cameras everywhere. But when cops start shooting, it's usually bullets and never footage. The first recordings that ever make their way to the public are those shot by bystanders. Anything else captured during a shooting remains under strict control of law enforcement… even when the recordings don't belong to law enforcement.

Minutes after two cops killed Alton Sterling outside of a convenience store, police confiscated all surveillance video of the incident without a warrant and allegedly without permission.

An attorney for the owner of the Triple S Mart, Abdullah Muflahi, told The Daily Beast a hard drive containing the complete recording of the Sterling’s death at the hands of Baton Rouge Police Department Officers Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake was unlawfully taken by police. Muflahi showed The Daily Beast the barren cabinet where the hard drive had been.

All that’s left of the storage unit is a sole barren wire.

If this tactic sounds familiar, it's because we've seen it on multiple occasions. After Laquan McDonald was shot by Chicago police officers, several cops went to a nearby restaurant and seized its surveillance recordings. It took the city of Chicago over a year to release dashcam footage of the incident -- footage that was oddly missing the audio that normally would have been captured when the camera was turned on.

In California, cops raided a marijuana dispensary. Before helping themselves to edibles and playing a game of darts, officers attempted to disable the store's surveillance cameras and seized recording devices.

In Baton Rouge, officers were wearing body cameras. Chances of seeing this footage is nil. According to reports, the cameras "came loose" during the shooting and apparently did not record "quality" footage of the incident. And, as of now, city attorneys, the police department, and the FBI (which is conducting its own investigation of the shooting) are refusing to discuss the missing surveillance equipment.

When The Daily Beast requested both the surveillance video and the supposed warrant from the Baton Rouge Police Department, a lawyer from the department first denied the request by saying they could not turn over any documents from a “criminal investigation.” When told that a warrant is a public court document and could not be withheld, the lawyer then outright refused to confirm or deny if a warrant for the surveillance video even existed.

After backtracking on the existence of the warrant, the attorney backtracked on the possession of the surveillance video, saying that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the hard drive.

“My client has not been informed of that,” said Porter, the attorney for the store owner.

The FBI refused to confirm or deny the police department’s claim.

What has been confirmed is that it was a warrantless seizure. Both the Baton Rouge District Attorney and the clerk of courts have admitted there is no record of a warrant being issued or even an affidavit submitted.

Another controversial shooting, following one day after the Baton Rouge incident, has also resulted in missing footage -- albeit only temporarily.

The driver of the car in which passenger Philandro Castile was shot by police officers posted a horrifying video of the aftermath to Facebook using its live-streaming option. Not too long after it was posted, the video vanished. Facebook blamed it on a "technical glitch" and restored the recording an hour later. The details behind the video's disappearance now suggest this wasn't a glitch, nor was it Facebook inappropriately flexing its content policies.

Castile, his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter were pulled over by police in the Falcon Heights suburb of Minneapolis for a broken tail light. Using her cellphone and Facebook Live, Reynolds web-streamed footage of her dying boyfriend after he was shot by a police officer as he reached for his ID in his wallet. The video was mysteriously removed from her Facebook profile as it went viral across the internet.

On Thursday, Facebook said a “technical glitch" caused the recording to be pulled from its social network. However, Reynolds claimed officers seized her phone and took over her Facebook account to delete the evidence.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the event have tonight confirmed to The Register that someone – highly suspected to be the city's police – used her phone to remove her recording from public view shortly after the shooting.

This, too, is a common occurrence. While the Supreme Court's Riley decision may provide an easy way to determine whether someone's Fourth Amendment rights have been violated by a search/seizure of their cell phone, it doesn't prevent an officer from simply taking a cell phone and deleting incriminating footage. The path for redress is clearer, but it's powerless against those whose first reaction is to vanish away evidence of their misconduct. [Update: For what it's worth, Facebook is standing by its "technical glitch" story and says the cops did not delete the video]. To quote law professor Butler Shaffer [h/t Faultline's Matt Brown]:

The Constitution is that sacred document which prevents the government from doing all the terrible things it does.

Fortunately, a number of streaming options and cloud services will keep some recordings from disappearing just because a phone is illegally seized and accessed. But both of these shootings -- and their responses to "uncontrolled" recordings -- show law enforcement has a long way to go before it can be considered trustworthy.

Filed Under: alton sterling, evidence, philandro castile, police, shootings, videos
Companies: facebook