Revs. Jeff Jones and Dave Dunn at the construction site of Cop City during a direct action in protest of the planned police training compound on Sept. 7, 2023. Photo: Courtesy of The People’s Stop Work Order

Five participants of the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement broke into the construction site of the planned police training compound known as “Cop City” on Thursday morning and chained themselves to a bulldozer. This is by no means the first direct action Stop Cop City protesters have taken to halt construction of the vast facility, but it carries renewed significance just two days after Georgia prosecutors announced extreme and overreaching racketeering charges against 61 other movement activists.

The charges, filed Tuesday under Georgia’s expansive Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, are an effort to chill the movement and paint one of the most resilient anti-racist, environmentalist efforts in history as a criminal enterprise. In response, activists on the ground are choosing solidarity and standing their ground.

The stakes are high. For one, activists want to ensure that Cop City — which would be the largest police training facility in the nation and would decimate crucial forest land in a majority Black community — will never be built. Thursday’s action also makes clear that efforts to criminalize whole social movements will only invite further resistance.

All five protesters, including two Unitarian Universalist clergy members, have been arrested by the DeKalb County Police. “Those five people have been taken into custody and we are working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation regarding charges on these individuals,” the department said in a statement to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This is just the latest example of Georgia law enforcement treating typical acts of civil disobedience with a heavy-handed, multiagency response.

Police also downed and confiscated a drone belonging to a documentary crew attempting to film the construction site protest, in a possible infringement on press freedoms.

“Despite the repressive tactics of authorities who wish to disenfranchise the community and charge protestors with domestic terrorism and RICO, people of faith will continue to act to resist the militarization of our society,” said Rev. Dave Dunn, who was among those arrested, in a statement released by organizers.

Thursday’s action offers a defiant lesson in how movement participants can choose to respond when faced with state repression — and the efforts by police, government leaders, and prosecutors to crush the Defend the Atlanta Forest movement have indeed been extraordinary.

“The domestic terrorism and RICO charges against protesters are meant to scare us, or else to orient all of our energy and resources around supporting protesters who have been arrested,” Darcy, an Atlanta resident and movement participant told me. Darcy, like many others in the movement, withheld their last name for fear of law enforcement retaliation — an understandable choice, given how weak grounds for arrest and serious charges have been.

“By shutting down Cop City construction today, clergy and students showed that everyday people can take bold actions to block this facility from being built,” they said, “and that our biggest protection against repression is a movement that wins.”

The sweeping, 109-page RICO indictment paints the decentralized and diverse movement as a criminal enterprise, citing social justice activities such as “mutual aid,” writing “zines,” and “collectivism” as proof of criminal conspiracy. Dozens of people named in the indictment also face malicious state domestic terrorism charges, based on flimsy grounds.

Others facing RICO and money-laundering charges did little more than raise and distribute donations to support arrestees and provide materials for engaging in First Amendment activities, like making protest signs. Also named in the indictment are individuals previously arrested on felony charges for handing out flyers that named a police officer connected to the killing of Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, a forest defender who was shot 57 times during a multiagency raid on the Atlanta Forest protest encampment in January.

Whether the RICO, domestic terrorism, or other extreme charges stick, the prosecutions alone are chilling. If the Stop Cop City movement has offered a model for intersectional, abolitionist, environmentalist, and diverse anti-racist struggle, the charges participants now face present a blueprint for a totalizing approach to repression.

It is no accident that the RICO indictment lists the start of the alleged racketeering conspiracy as the date of George Floyd’s murder by police — May 25, 2020 — which predates the announcement of plans for Cop City. The indictment is explicit in tracing the birth of the Stop Cop City movement back to the 2020 Black liberation uprisings in order to treat any involvement in these connected struggles as grounds for criminal prosecution.

The activists involved in Thursday’s action delivered what they called “The People’s Stop Work Order” against Cop City construction. In a statement , they noted that activists who have attempted to use official, democratic routes to oppose Cop City have been consistently stymied by undemocratic government actions.

“The construction of this project and the destruction of the South River Forest have continued despite over 100,000 Atlanta residents signing a ballot initiative calling for a referendum on the issue,” organizers said. “The city of Atlanta has fought the referendum with lawsuits and technical obstructions.”

Participants in Thursday’s action engaged in just the sort of activity that the government is attempting to cast as criminal conspiracy with the RICO indictment: civil disobedience with a civil rights movement legacy , especially in Atlanta. In the face of such authoritarian responses, ongoing and widespread movement action that uses a range of protest tactics undermines government and police efforts to delegitimize a popular movement. Solidarity rallies and marches have already been organized in over a dozen cities and towns nationwide.

“As we see in the indictment, the act of mutual aid, the acts of our connectedness, are seen as a threat,” Mary Hooks, an Atlanta-based organizer and activist in the Movement for Black Lives, told me. “But these things are exactly what we need for our safety and what we need in the face of rising fascism.”

“Hopefully today does give hope,” she said. “Afraid? Yes we are, but we will choose courage over fear every day in the face of repression and oppression.”

The post Defying RICO Indictment, Faith Leaders Chain Themselves to Bulldozer to Stop Cop City appeared first on The Intercept .

Body camera footage shows undercover U.S. Forest Service police officers shooting Brooks Roberts on May 19, 2023.

Still: U.S. Forest Service body camera

Before U.S. Forest Service police repeatedly shot Brooks Roberts in May, he was already disabled and required the use of a wheelchair. Now, at 39 years old, Brooks is unlikely to ever walk again: He is paralyzed from the waist down, has limited use of his right arm, and cannot control his bowels. Such is the punishment for being unhoused in America.

In late August, Brooks and his attorneys filed a claim against numerous government agencies seeking $50 million in monetary damages for “extreme suffering” caused by the shooting. According to the claim, Forest Service officers, in conjunction with the Bureau of Land Management, shot Brooks “needlessly and recklessly” on May 19: through his arm and back shoulder, in his armpit and the bottom of his spine, through the middle of his back, and several times in his legs. The officers opened fire when they saw Brooks was carrying a gun — but they were wearing civilian clothing and had not identified themselves as police, according to the complaint.

“Because this incident involved federal law enforcement officers, the investigation was handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It would be inappropriate for us to provide any additional comments at this time,” the Forest Service said in a statement provided to The Intercept. The FBI declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing investigation, and the Department of Justice and BLM did not respond to requests for comment.

The obscene multiagency operation began with a devious trick, designed solely to arrest the Roberts family for low-level misdemeanors related to their overstay on national forest land outside of Boise, Idaho.

Police body camera footage shows two undercover Forest Service officers approached the small trailers in which Brooks, his mother Judy, and his brother Timber had lived since they were evicted from their rental home in 2020. The officers said they needed help starting their car, so Timber promptly went out to get his truck and retrieve jumper cables. They then grabbed Timber and forced him to the ground as he screamed for help.

“They shot him in the back when he was defenseless and immobile.”

According to the claim, “Mr. Roberts, hearing his brother’s cries for help, wheeled out in his wheelchair to find what appeared to be his brother being carjacked or robbed. As he approached his brother to save him, officers saw the .22 revolver Mr. Roberts carried and opened fire on him.”

The complaint adds that Brooks did not fire his gun, and he swiftly threw it on the ground, several feet away, when he realized the men were police. “They shot him in the back when he was defenseless and immobile,” the claim states.

Another body camera video of the shooting’s aftermath shows Brooks writhing on the ground covered in blood and mud, crying that he cannot feel his legs, as police continue to pull his arms behind his back to force him into handcuffs.

“I’m sorry,” Brooks can be heard apologizing, “I didn’t know you were cops.”

Brooks Roberts recovers at Vibra Hospital in Boise, Idaho, on Aug. 7, 2023.

Photo: Courtesy of Brooks Roberts

The shooting is as frenzied and chaotic as it is gruesome, and drenched in what seems to be a disregard for human life. The circumstances that brought dozens of law enforcement officers to ambush an unhoused family over minor misdemeanor charges are emblematic of a social order that turns financial hardship into terminal poverty, and poverty into a crime managed by deadly state violence . “Organized abandonment and organized violence,” as abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has long put it.

“Federal police officers planned in secret to arrest this homeless family on minor misdemeanor offenses by preying on their good graces. Officers knew that the family would help two people that they thought were stranded motorists,” Craig Durham, one of Brooks’s attorneys, wrote me via email. “It’s a shame that in the wealthiest nation on earth, our federal government will expend so many resources to hassle a homeless family, botch an arrest so badly, and permanently injure someone, rather than just help them find a place to live.”

The Robertses were not staying in trailers — which lacked running water, heat in frigid winters, and air conditioning in brutal desert summers — out of choice. They had been trying to find housing since their eviction in 2020, when Judy lost her job of 13 years at a manufacturing plant after being T-boned in a serious car accident.

According to the wrongful shooting claim, the Roberts family tried to find emergency shelter as the Covid pandemic raged but were told all options were full. “For months they moved from place to place across southwest Idaho, encountering law enforcement who told them, again and again, to move on.” A criminal complaint against the three family members for violations relating to their overstay, and against Timber for a further count of disorderly conduct, notes that law enforcement officials had been informing the family of the need to move off forest land since late 2020.

In this country, the poor do not fall through the cracks, because these are not cracks but traps — from which there is no release.

In this country, the poor do not fall through the cracks, because these are not cracks but traps — from which there is no release. In the winter of 2021 to 2022, Judy suffered severe frostbite as the family stayed on BLM high desert land. “Her feet eventually froze to the floor of an old school bus. Hallucinating, she was rushed to the hospital, but doctors could not save her feet,” the claim filing noted. “After a double amputation, she spent several months in physical therapy learning how to walk with prosthetics.”

The following summer, Brooks was injured during an overnight Walmart shift, which left him requiring a wheelchair for mobility. The family was again forced to move by the BLM and set up their trailers further north on Forest Service land. That winter, 26 inches of snow left Judy, Brooks, and Timber snowed in and stuck. Nonetheless, the government continued to charge all three of them with multiple misdemeanor counts related to staying on federal lands.

In February 2023, the family appeared in court, were arraigned on “multiple misdemeanor violations” and granted pretrial release. A warrant was issued for the family’s arrests in May, however, after they “continued to violate numerous federal laws,” and after Timber allegedly shouted obscenities at federal officers and threatened members of the public, according to the government’s complaint. Forest Service and BLM agents then planned their undercover arrest operation, even though the matter was already in the courts. According to Brooks’s wrongful shooting claim, “No agent contacted the Robertses’ appointed attorneys. No agent reached out to see if they would surrender on these charges, as they had before.”

“I got social security disability, which they garnished for nonpayment of tickets for staying too long on forest land. We needed that money to get into an RV place. They should be using their resources to help people find a place to live instead of persecuting them,” said Judy, in a statement shared by Brooks’s attorneys.

“How can we get on our feet when you keep ticketing us to take away our money that we could have used for housing?” Brooks added. “It just makes the problems amplified. If the person is struggling to find a place and then they get arrested, then they really have trouble, because they don’t have the ability to find a place when they’re in jail.”

Body camera footage shows officers arriving to Payette National Forest where Brooks Roberts was living in a camper with his family following an eviction.

Still: U.S. Forest Service body camera

Like every state, Idaho lacks thousands of much-needed affordable rental homes. Last December, Boise-based organization Charitable Assistance to Community’s Homeless, or CATCH, reported the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city had doubled since 2020. Like the Robertses, a growing number of people who cannot find housing turn to staying on public lands in trailers and encampments. In a Boise State Public Radio report last year, a BLM supervisory field staff ranger said the number of people living on BLM land in Idaho had increased “tenfold, at least” in recent years.

Most national parks have a camping stay limit of two to three weeks. A crucial 2018 federal court decision, however, ruled that unhoused people cannot be punished for sleeping on public land if no shelter beds are available. “The government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit decided in Martin v. Boise, a ruling that covers the jurisdiction in which the Roberts family were continuously harassed and punished for their homelessness.

Durham, the attorney, told me he and his team believe Martin v. Boise applies in this instance and will be using it to defend the Roberts family in the criminal case brought against them by the government.

Local, state, and federal authorities have keenly sought ambiguities and loopholes in Martin, like banning daytime camping and sanctioning certain encampment sites, so that all others can be cleared without providing the sustainable permanent housing that should be a right.

In the summer of 2022, the National Park Service cleared two unhoused encampments from federal land in Washington, D.C., citing “threats to public health and safety.” The action clarified, in no uncertain terms, who does and does not get to count as “the public” in the eyes of our federal government. Similar rhetoric was deployed to defend the brutal killing of Jordan Neely , an unhoused Black man in crisis, on a New York City subway in May; officials invoked a selective view of a “public” deserving safety, from which Neely was violently excluded.

Following Brooks’s shooting, the National Homelessness Law Center called on the Biden administration “to issue an executive order eliminating all federal police activities in their response to homelessness, and instead to mandate a housing- and services-only approach that is rooted in choice, healing, and racial justice.”

In May, the Biden administration announced an initiative to partner with the country’s major cities with the aim of a 25 percent reduction in national homelessness by 2025 — an already insufficient goal that will still be hard to obtain amid soaring housing prices, slashed social services budgets, and the billions more being poured into policing by Democrats and Republicans alike .

“Data clearly show that a police approach is expensive, diverts community resources that could be used for housing, disproportionately harms Black people and other people of color and is overall ineffective at solving homelessness,” the National Homelessness Law Center said in a statement.

The Roberts family’s story is yet another reminder of the consequences of criminalizing poverty and homelessness. Timber and Judy are currently living in a hotel, where they rely on donations and support from local mutual aid networks. Three months after the shooting, Brooks remains in the hospital.

The post Undercover Federal Police Shot and Paralyzed Unhoused Man in Wheelchair appeared first on The Intercept .

Three Trump-appointed federal judges ruled on Monday to allow one of the country’s harshest bans on gender-affirming care for minors to go into effect. In Alabama, a doctor who treats a trans person under 19 years old with puberty blockers or hormones could now face felony charges carrying up to 10 years in prison.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision reverses an injunction that temporarily blocked the health care ban and stands at odds with the majority of federal court decisions on the issue so far. The disturbing ruling gives the clearest outline yet of the reactionary judicial logic that could be used to decimate trans peoples’ right to necessary health care, should the issue be taken up by the far-right Supreme Court: the very same reasoning used to end the right to abortion.

Just as SCOTUS ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson that abortion was not constitutionally protected because it was not “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” the 11th Circuit stated that parents do not have a fundamental right to direct the transition-related medical care of their children.

“The use of these medications in general — let alone for children — almost certainly is not ‘deeply rooted’ in our nation’s history and tradition,” Judge Barbara Lagoa wrote, citing the Dobbs decision.

“Although there are records of transgender or otherwise gender nonconforming individuals from various points in history,” noted the ruling, “the earliest-recorded uses of puberty blocking medication and cross-sex hormone treatment for the purposes of treating the discordance between an individual’s biological sex and sense of gender identity did not occur until well into the twentieth century.”

That is, trans youths have no right to the medicine they need because that medicine is not hundreds of years old. The decision also implies that the same logic could also be used to find bans on adult trans health care unconstitutional.

To demand that unenumerated rights be “deeply rooted” in U.S. “history and tradition” is, after all, to insist that only the rights of propertied white men are recognized as fundamental.

The deployment of Dobbs to deny established civil rights comes as no surprise. When Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked , it was clear that the “history and tradition” standard would be invoked again to hack away at an array of rights and legal precedents hard won in the last century.

To demand that unenumerated rights be “deeply rooted” in U.S. “history and tradition” is, after all, to insist that only the rights of propertied white men are recognized as fundamental — as Alito and his Christo-nationalist allies well know. The AR-15 assault weapon was only invented “well into the twentieth century” too, but we can be sure that such an argument from history would do little to aid gun control advocates in court. Too much is at stake in our collective struggle for bodily autonomy to entertain the fantasy that pointing out right-wing hypocrisy undermines right-wing rule.

When the first trans youth health care bans were heard by federal courts this past year, it was heartening that judges in state after state saw the bans for what they are — at odds with scientific consensus, ideologically driven, discriminatory, and likely unconstitutional — and blocked them. Even in some notoriously conservative courts, federal judges from Florida to Kentucky to Arkansas agreed that arguments treating youth gender-affirming care as untested and dangerous are simply not based in fact. Only one other federal court, the 6th Circuit, has reversed an injunction and permitted a ban on trans youth health care to go through, in Tennessee.

With the circuits split on the issue, it is ever more likely that a case will soon go before the Supreme Court. The 11th Circuit ruling gives a chilling taste of what a SCOTUS decision could look like: poorly argued and drenched in the sort of authoritarian dogma that the nation’s highest court is known to embrace.

The post Alabama Trans Health Care Ruling is a Worrying Omen for a Future SCOTUS Decision appeared first on The Intercept .

An ugly strain of anti-press hatred is stalking the nation.

The latest victim of this poisonous, anti-democratic virus is a small-town newspaper in Kansas.

On Friday, local police, acting like the Gestapo, raided the office of the Marion County Record, as well as the home of its owner and publisher. They used a trumped-up search warrant approved by a compliant local judge to seize newsgathering equipment, including the computers and cellphones of reporters. The raid was so traumatic that the publisher’s 98-year-old mother, who was the newspaper’s co-owner, died on Saturday as a result.

The police were trying to suppress the truth that the newspaper had uncovered about a local restaurant owner who hosted an event for the region’s far-right member of Congress, Rep. Jake LaTurner.

The Marion County Record was doing basic accountability reporting, the lifeblood of small-town journalism.

It has always taken courage to run independent newspapers in small towns and mid-sized cities in America. For generations, politicians and business leaders have fought back against aggressive coverage by local newspapers and have frequently made life difficult for publishers and reporters. Almost every reporter who has ever worked for a small newspaper has experienced resistance from the local power structure. I experienced a bit of it myself during my first job in journalism.

As a young reporter in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the late 1970s, I wrote a story revealing that local banks were not making mortgage loans in the Black community. In response, the biggest bank in town took out full-page ads in the newspaper for two days straight attacking my story. Thankfully, the paper’s top editor backed me up; the day the bank’s first ad ran, he walked past my desk in the newsroom and said simply, “Thanks for the extra ad revenue.”

But things have gotten much worse over the past few years. Hatred of the press has deepened on the extreme right, stoked by Donald Trump and his paranoid acolytes. Trump labeled the press the “enemy of the people,” a fascist slogan that has now seeped into common usage on the right. Physical attacks on journalists in the United States are becoming more common and are now a signature of right-wing extremism; reporters who covered the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were assaulted and had their equipment damaged.

Eric Meyer, the owner and publisher of the Marion County Record, was stunned by Friday’s raid, which involved the town’s entire five-member police force and two sheriff’s deputies. He told the Kansas Reflector that the message from police and the local political establishment was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

It is probably not surprising that the local establishment that is attacking the Marion County Record is at the same time supporting an extreme right-winger like LaTurner, who has not commented on the raid on his Twitter account. Meyer told the Associated Press that “this is the type of stuff that, you know, that Vladimir Putin does, that Third World dictators do.”

(The Intercept and other news organizations signed a letter from Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press condemning the raid.)

The unjustified assault on the Marion County Record is another reminder that press freedom is one of the most important democratic traditions under threat from Trumpism.

The post Anti-Press Hatred Is Alive and Well in Kansas appeared first on The Intercept .

In their latest absurd and overreaching attempt to stomp out gender nonconformity, Florida Republicans have found a new tactic: nicknames. If a child in Florida’s Orange County Public Schools system wants to use a name that deviates in any way from their legal name, they must now submit a signed parental permission form.

According to a memo released Monday, the new rule, while transparently targeted at trans kids, applies to all students, including cis students using common nicknames.

“As an example, if the student is named Robert, but likes to be called the nickname Rob, the form must be filled out authorizing teachers and other personnel to call Robert the nickname Rob,” the new guidelines state.

Such are the extremities to which far-right school boards are willing to go to oppress young trans people.

If a cis boy with the legal name Robert can’t be called Rob in school without parental permission, then neither could a trans girl called Roberta. Even if Roberta could obtain parental permission to use her chosen name, Florida law ensures that the school is still free to misgender her.

“Under the recently adopted House Bill 1069, the teacher or other personnel may elect not to utilize the pronoun ‘she/her’ when referring to Roberta,” notes the school board memo. If parents fail to serve Republicans as a disciplining force against gender nonconformity, the GOP passion for parental rights flies out the window.

Orange County is not the first public school system to introduce a guideline around students’ chosen names. In total, however, the school board’s new rules comprise some of the most extreme and comprehensive anti-trans policies of any public institution in the country — the fruits of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s radically reactionary takeover of education policy. Like most astroturfed assaults on trans existence in recent years, the Orange County rules combine a vile mixture of banned and coerced speech; fixations on bathrooms and genitalia ; threats of harsh penalties and vigilante enforcement; and profoundly selective invocations of parental rights .

As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern noted on Twitter, these anti-trans rules were introduced during a “SEVERE teacher shortage,” as the Orange County Public School system has been “chronically unable to retain teachers year-to-year.” Facing hundreds of vacancies, the school board nonetheless prioritized new guidelines that would either drive out or repel trans and trans-supportive teachers and staff.

These policies are grimly predictable for a school board infiltrated by the far-right extremist group Moms for Liberty, as Orange County and other Florida districts were last year . When it comes to names and pronouns, however, the new rules go particularly far: Teachers — adult workers — must use pronouns and titles that align with their assigned sex at birth, according to Monday’s memo. The guidance brings the school board’s policy into alignment with a vile Florida law , which was passed in May.

This detail bears repeating, as it crystallizes Republicans’ selective approach to free speech: Teachers are not required to use their trans students’ chosen pronouns, but trans teachers are expressly forbidden from using the pronouns that align with their gender. The policy appears to stand in direct violation of the First Amendment, as well as the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision, which protects LGBTQ+ workers from discrimination.

The fact that the rules for students’ chosen names apply to both cis and trans children may at first appear as merely a cynical ploy to avoid legal challenges, as anti-trans laws have consistently been blocked in federal courts in recent months. No one truly believes a teacher will face disciplinary consequences for calling a cis boy Rob without a form from his parents. Any such rules will be selectively enforced to attack gender nonconformity.

The blanket name change rule is no doubt a legal fig leaf, but it nonetheless reveals that gender conformity requires expansive authoritarian enforcement far beyond the policing of trans and queer communities and individuals.

An education policy committed to trans eliminationism must also insist that all children be held in disciplined stasis.

This is not to relativize the suffering inflicted on trans students through such rules. Enforcing the use of trans kids’ deadnames is a violence; enforcing the use of legal names for cis children doesn’t come close, but it remains a significant denial of autonomy.

To insist on gender conformity requires broad social control; an education policy committed to trans eliminationism must also insist that all children be held in disciplined stasis. That’s a feature of the far-right agenda, not a bug.

Thankfully, hundreds of thousands of students have protested and continue to protest school board meetings, staging walkouts against anti-trans laws and policies, including in Orange County. They will not be readily controlled — they will use each other’s names.

The post Targeting Trans Kids, Florida School Board Requires Parental Approval for Nicknames appeared first on The Intercept .

The most popular video on Vaught Victor Marx’s YouTube now has more than 15 million views. Standing solemnly in a dark blue karate gi while his son Shiloh Vaughn Marx smiles and points a gun at his face, Marx uses his expertise as a seventh-degree black belt in “Cajun Karate Keichu-Do” to perform what he claims was the world’s fastest gun disarm. Over a period of just 80 milliseconds — according to Marx’s measurement — he snatches the gun from his son and effortlessly ejects the magazine. It’s a striking display, one that unequivocally shouts: I am here to stop bad guys.

Marx is more than just a competitive gun-disarmer and martial artist. He is also a former Marine, a self-proclaimed exorcist, and an author and filmmaker. He also helped launch the Skull Games, a privatized intelligence outfit that purports to hunt pedophiles, sex traffickers, and other “demonic activity” using a blend of sock-puppet social media accounts and commercial surveillance tools — including face recognition software.

The Skull Games events have attracted notable corporate allies. Recent games have been “powered” by the internet surveillance firm Cobwebs, and an upcoming competition is partnered with cellphone-tracking data broker Anomaly Six .

The moral simplicity of Skull Games’s mission is emblazoned across its website in fierce, all-caps type: “We hunt predators.” And Marx has savvily ridden recent popular attention to the independent film “ Sound of Freedom ,” a dramatization of the life of fellow anti-trafficking crusader Tim Ballard. In the era of QAnon and conservative “groomer” panic, vowing to take down shadowy — and frequently exaggerated — networks of “traffickers” under the aegis of Christ is an exercise in shrewd branding.

Although its name is a reference to the mind games played by pimps and traffickers, Skull Games, which Marx’s church is no longer officially involved in, is itself a form of sport for its participants: a sort of hackathon for would-be Christian saviors, complete with competition. Those who play are awarded points based on their sleuthing. Finding a target’s high school diploma or sonogram imagery nets 15 points, while finding the same tattoo on multiple women would earn a whopping 300. On at least one occasion, according to materials reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, participants competed for a chance at prizes, including paid work for Marx’s California church and one of its surveillance firm partners.

While commercially purchased surveillance exists largely outside the purview of the law, Skull Games was founded to answer to a higher power. The event started under the auspices of All Things Possible Ministries, the Murrieta, California, evangelical church Marx founded in 2003.

Marx has attributed his conversion to Christianity to becoming reunited with his biological father — according to Marx, formerly a “practicing warlock” — toward the end of his three years in the Marine Corps. Marx’s tendency to blame demons and warlocks would become the central cause of controversy of his own ministry, largely as a result of his focus on exorcisms as the solutions to issues ranging from pornography to veteran suicides. As Marx recently told “The Spillover” podcast, “I hunt pedophiles, but I also hunt demons.”

Skull Games also ends up being a hunt for sex workers, conflating them with trafficking victims as they prepare intelligence dossiers on women before turning them over to police.

Groups seeking to rescue sex workers — whether through religion, prosecution , or both — are nothing new, said Kristen DiAngelo, executive director of the advocacy group Sex Workers Outreach Project Sacramento. What Skull Games represents — the technological outsourcing of police work to civilian volunteers — presents a new risk to sex workers, she argued.

“I think it’s dangerous because you set up people to have that vigilante mentality.”

“I think it’s dangerous because you set up people to have that vigilante mentality — that idea that, we’re going to go out and we’re going to catch somebody — and they probably really believe that they are going to ‘save someone,’” DiAngelo told The Intercept and Tech Inquiry. “And that’s that savior complex. We don’t need saving; we need support and resources.”

The eighth Skull Games, which took place over the weekend of July 21, operated out of a private investigation firm headquartered in a former church in Wanaque, New Jersey. A photo of the event shared by the director of intelligence of Skull Games showed 57 attendees — almost all wearing matching black T-shirts — standing in front of corporate due diligence firm Hetherington Group’s office with a Skull Games banner unfurled across its front doors. Hetherington Group’s address is simple to locate online, but their office signage doesn’t mention the firm’s name, only saying “593 Ringwood LLC” above the words “In God We Trust.” (Cynthia Hetherington, the CEO of Hetherington Group and a board member of Skull Games, distanced her firm from the surveillance programs normally used at the events. “Cobwebs brought the bagels, which I’m still trying to digest,” she said. “I didn’t see their software anywhere in the event.”)

The attempt to merge computerized counterinsurgency techniques with right-wing evangelism has left some Skull Games participants uncomfortable. One experienced attendee of the January 2023 Skull Games was taken aback by an abundance of prayer circles and paucity of formal training. “Within the first 10 minutes,” the participant recalled of a training webinar, “I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Delta Force OSINT

The numbers of nongovernmental surveillance practitioners has risen in tandem with the post-9/11 boom in commercial tools for social media surveillance, analyzing private chat rooms, and tracking cellphone pings.

Drawing on this abundance of civilian expertise, Skull Games brings together current and former military and law enforcement personnel, along with former sex workers and even employees of surveillance firms themselves. Both Skull Games and the high-profile, MAGA-beloved Operation Underground Railroad have worked with Cobwebs, but Skull Games roots its branding in counterinsurgency and special operations rather than homeland security.

“I fought the worst of the worst: ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban,” Skull Games president and former Delta Force soldier Jeff Tiegs has said . “But the adversary I despise the most are human traffickers.” Tiegs has told interviewers that he takes “counterterrorism / counterinsurgency principles” and applies them to these targets.

“I fought the worst of the worst: ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban. But the adversary I despise the most are human traffickers.”

The plan broadly mimicked a widely praised Pentagon effort to catch traffickers that was ultimately shut down this May due to a lack of funding. In a training session earlier this month, Tiegs noted that active-duty military service members take part in the hunts; veterans like Tiegs himself are everywhere. The attendee list for a recent training event shows participants with day jobs at the Department of Defense, Portland Police Bureau, and Air Force, as well as a lead contracting officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Skull Games employs U.S. Special Forces jargon, which dominates the pamphlets handed out to volunteers. Each volunteer is assigned the initial informal rank of private and works out of a “Special Operations Coordination Center.” Government acronyms abound: Participants are asked to keep in mind CCIRs — Commander’s Critical Information Requirements — while preventing EEFIs — Essential Elements of Friendly Information— from falling into the hands of the enemy.

Tiegs’s transition from counterinsurgency to counter-human-trafficking empresario came after he met Jeff Keith, the founder of the anti-trafficking nonprofit Guardian Group, where Tiegs was an executive for nearly five years. While Tiegs was developing Guardian Group’s tradecraft for identifying victims, he was also beginning to work more closely with Marx, whom he met on a trip to Iraq in 2017. By the end of 2018, Marx and Tiegs had joined each others’ boards.

Beyond the Special Forces acumen of its leadership, what sets Skull Games apart from other amateur predator-hunting efforts is its reliance on “open-source intelligence.” OSINT, as it’s known, is a military euphemism popular among its practitioners that refers to a broad amalgam of intelligence-gathering techniques , most relying on surveilling the public internet and purchasing sensitive information from commercial data brokers.

Sensitive personal information is today bought and sold so widely, including by law enforcement and spy agencies, that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently warned that data “that could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety” is available on “nearly everyone.”

Skull Games’s efforts to tap this unregulated sprawl of digital personal data function as sort of vice squad auxiliaries. Participants scour the U.S. for digital evidence of sex work before handing their findings over to police — officers the participants often describe as friends and collaborators.

After publicly promoting 2020 as the year Guardian Group would “scale” its tradecraft up to tackling many more cases, Tiegs abruptly jumped from his role as chief operating officer of the organization into the same title at All Things Possible — Marx’s church. By December 2021, Tiegs had launched the first Skull Games under the umbrella of All Things Possible. The event was put together in close partnership with Echo Analytics, which had been acquired earlier that year by Quiet Professionals, a surveillance contractor led by a former Delta Force sergeant major. The first Skull Games took place in the Tampa offices of Echo Analytics, just 13 miles from the headquarters of U.S. Special Operations Command.

As of May 2023, Tiegs has separated from All Things Possible and leads the Skull Games as a newly independent, tax-exempt nonprofit. “Skull Games is separate and distinct from ATP,” he said in an emailed statement. “There is no role for ATP or Marx in Skull Games.”

The Hunt

Reached by phone, Tiegs downplayed the role of powerful surveillance tools in Skull Games’s work while also conceding he wasn’t always aware of what technologies were being used in the hunt for predators — or how.

Despite its public emphasis on taking down traffickers, much of Skull Games’s efforts boil down to scrolling through sex worker ad listings and attempting to identify the women. Central to the sleuthing, according to Tiegs and training materials reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, is the search for visual indicators in escort ads and social media posts that would point to a woman being trafficked. An October 2022 report funded by the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, however, concluded that the appearance of many such indicators — mostly emojis and acronyms — was statistically insignificant.

Tiegs spoke candidly about the centrality of face recognition to Skull Games. “So here’s a girl, she’s being exploited, we don’t know who she is,” he said. “All we have is a picture and a fake name, but, using some of these tools, you’re able to identify her mugshot. Now you know everything about her, and you’re able to start really putting a case together.”

According to notes viewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the competition recommended that volunteers use FaceCheck.id and PimEyes , programs that allow users to conduct reverse image searches for an uploaded picture of face . In a July Skull Games webinar, one participant noted that they had been able to use PimEyes to find a sex worker’s driver’s license posted to the web.

In January, Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli firm, announced it would provide Skull Games with access to its Tangles surveillance platform. According to Tiegs, the company is “one of our biggest supporters.” Previous reporting from Motherboard detailed the IRS Criminal Investigation unit’s usage of Cobwebs for undercover investigations.

Skull Games training materials provided to The Intercept and Tech Inquiry provide detailed instructions on the creation of “sock puppet” social media accounts: fake identities for covert research and other uses. Tiegs denied recommending the creation of such pseudonymous accounts, but on the eve of the eighth Skull Games, team leader Joe Labrozzi told fellow volunteers, “We absolutely recommend sock puppets,” according to a training seminar transcript reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry. Other volunteers shared tips on creating fake social media accounts, including the use of ChatGPT and machine learning-based face-generation tools to build convincing social media personas.

Tiegs also denied a participant’s assertion that Clearview AI’s face recognition software was heavily used in the January 2023 Skull Games. Training materials obtained by Tech Inquiry and The Intercept, however, suggest otherwise. At one point in a July training webinar, a Virginia law enforcement volunteer who didn’t give their name asked what rules were in place for using their official access to face recognition and other law enforcement databases. “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” replied another participant, adding that some police Skull Games volunteers had permission to tap their departmental access to Clearview AI and Spotlight, an investigative tool that uses Amazon’s Rekognition technology to identify faces.

Cobwebs — which became part of the American wiretapping company PenLink earlier this month — provides a broad array of surveillance capabilities, according to a government procurement document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Cobwebs provides investigators with the ability to continuously monitor the web for certain keyphrases. The Tangles platform can also provide face recognition; fuse OSINT with personal account data collected from search warrants; and pinpoint individuals through the locations of their phones — granting the ability to track a person’s movements going back as many as three years without judicial oversight.

When reached for comment, Cobwebs said, “Only through collaboration between all sectors of society — government, law enforcement, academia — and the proper tools, can we combat human trafficking.” The company did not respond to detailed questions about how its platform is used by Skull Games.

According to a source who previously attended a Skull Games event, and who asked for anonymity because of their ongoing role in counter-trafficking, only one member of the “task force” of participants had access to the Tangles platform: a representative from Cobwebs itself who could run queries from other task force analysts when requested. The rest of the group was equipped with whatever OSINT-gathering tools they already had access to outside of Skull Games, creating a lopsided exercise in which some participants were equipped with little more than their keyboards and Google searches, while others tapped tools like Clearview or Thomson Reuters CLEAR, an analytics tool used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement .

Tiegs acknowledged that most Skull Games participants likely have some professional OSINT expertise. By his account, they operate on a sort of BYO-intelligence-gathering-tool basis and, owing to Skull Games’s ad hoc use of technology, said he couldn’t confirm how exactly Cobwebs may have been used in the past. Despite Skull Games widely advertising its partnership with another source of cellphone location-tracking data — the commercial surveillance company Anomaly Six — Tiegs said, “We’re not pinpointing the location of somebody.” He claimed Skull Games uses less sophisticated techniques to generate leads for police who may later obtain a court order for, say, geolocational data. (Anomaly Six said that it is not providing its software or data to Skull Games.)

Tiegs also expressed frustration with the notion that deploying surveillance tools to crack down on sex work would be seen as impermissible. “We allow Big Data to monitor everything you’re doing to sell you iPods or sunglasses or new socks,” he said, “but if you need to leverage some of the same technology to protect women and children, all of the sudden everybody’s up in arms.”

Tiegs added, “I’m really conflicted how people rationalize that.”

“Pure Evil”

A potent strain of anti-sex work sentiment — not just opposition to trafficking — has pervaded Skull Games since its founding. Although the events are no longer affiliated with a church, Tiegs and his lieutenants’ devout Christianity suggests the digital hunt for pedophiles and pimps remains a form of spiritual warfare.

Michele Block, a Canadian military intelligence veteran who has worked as Skull Games’s director of intelligence since its founding at All Things Possible, is open about her belief that their surveillance efforts are part of a battle against Satan. In a December 2022 interview at America Fest, a four-day conference organized by the right-wing group Turning Point USA, Block described her work as a fight against “pure evil,” claiming that many traffickers are specifically targeting Christian households.

Tiegs argued that “100 percent” of sex work is human trafficking and that “to legalize the purchasing of women is a huge mistake.”

The combination of digital surveillance and Christian moralizing could have serious consequences not only for “predators,” but also their prey: The America Fest interview showed that Skull Games hopes to take down alleged traffickers by first going after the allegedly trafficked.

“So basically, 24/7, our intelligence department identifies victims of sex trafficking.”

“So basically, 24/7,” Block explained, “our intelligence department identifies victims of sex trafficking.” All of this information — both the alleged trafficker and alleged victim — is then handed over to police. Although Tiegs says Skull Games has provided police with “a couple hundred” such OSINT leads since its founding, he conceded the group has no information about how many have resulted in prosecutions or indictments of actual traffickers.

When asked about Skull Games’s position on arresting victims, Tiegs emphasized that “arresting is different from prosecuting” and argued, “Sometimes they do need to make the arrest, because of the health and welfare of that person. She needs to get clean, maybe she’s high. … Very rarely, in my opinion, is it right to charge and prosecute a girl.”

Sex worker advocates, however, say any punitive approach is not only ungrounded in the reality of the trade, but also hurts the very people it purports to help. Although exploitation and coercion are dire realities for many sex workers, most women choose to go into sex work either out of personal preference or financial necessity, according to DiAngelo, of Sex Workers Outreach Project Sacramento. (The Chicago branch of SWOP was a plaintiff in the American Civil Liberties Union’s successful 2020 lawsuit against Clearview AI in Illinois.)

Referring to research she had conducted with the University of California, Davis, DiAngelo explained that socioeconomic desperation is the most common cause of trafficking, a factor only worsened by a brush with the law. “The majority of the people we interview, even if we removed the person who was exploiting them from their life, they still wanted to be in the sex trade,” DiAngelo explained.

Both DiAngelo and Savannah Sly of the nonprofit New Moon Network, an advocacy group for sex workers, pointed to flaws in the techniques that police claim detect trafficking from coded language in escort ads. “You can’t tell just by looking at a picture whether someone’s trafficked or not,” Sly said. The “dragnet” surveillance of sex workers performed by groups like Skull Games, she claimed, imperils their human rights. “If I become aware I’m being surveilled, that’s not helping my situation,” Sly said, “Sex workers live with a high degree of paranoia.”

Rather than “rescuing” women from trafficking, DiAngelo argued Skull Games’s collaboration with police risks driving women into the company of people seeking to take advantage of them — particularly if they’ve been arrested and face diminished job prospects outside of sex work. DiAngelo said, “They’re going to lock them into sex work, because once you get the scarlet letter, nobody wants you anymore.”

The post The Online Christian Counterinsurgency Against Sex Workers appeared first on The Intercept .

Two years after the murder of George Floyd ignited worldwide protests against police brutality , President Joe Biden ordered federal law enforcement agencies to update their policies on use of force. A new report, however, finds that the nation’s largest law enforcement agency ignored the spirit — if not the letter — of that order.

The Department of Homeland Security has failed to accurately compile data on use-of-force incidents, according to a report issued Monday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, or GAO. “We found the data were not sufficiently reliable for the purposes of describing the number of times agency law enforcement officers used force,” the watchdog agency wrote.

DHS updated its use-of-force policy in February to limit the use of no-knock entries, require more frequent training, and ban chokeholds unless deadly force is authorized. The changes brought DHS into compliance with Biden’s May 2022 executive order, which required federal law enforcement agencies to align their use-of-force practices with new Department of Justice policy. The order also included guidelines for improved data collection and reporting on federal agencies’ use of force.

GAO’s report, authorized by Congress last year, determined that several agencies under DHS have been regularly undercounting use-of-force incidents. From April 2022 to July 2023, GAO audited four DHS agencies: Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Protective Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service. “If officers used force multiple times during one event, the agency counted only one instance of force,” said Gretta Goodwin, a GAO director for homeland security and justice.

Customs and Border Protection reported using force on a group of 62 subjects as a single use-of-force incident.

After an encounter at the U.S. border, for example, Customs and Border Protection reported using force on a group of 62 subjects as a single use-of-force incident. GAO’s analysis also found that Federal Protective Service officers described using force 146 times in data from 2021 and 2022, while Federal Protective Service reported only 36 use-of-force incidents. In one case, according to GAO, Federal Protective Service counted 27 separate uses of force across 15 reports as a single incident.

“We brought this to their attention, like ‘You’re not being transparent, and this clearly is an undercount,’” Goodwin said. “We asked them to pay more attention to that and to do an actual count of the use of force.” DHS did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

The report’s findings are notable given how DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection have typically counted uses of force against officers, said Katherine Hawkins, a senior legal analyst at the Project on Government Oversight. Customs and Border Protection has historically inflated data on use of force against officers to justify violence against migrants, The Intercept has previously reported. “This sort of sounds like the exact opposite, which is striking,” Hawkins said.

GAO also noted that DHS does not have a plan or system to monitor or analyze the use-of-force data it does collect under the updated policy. “According to officials, they have not developed a plan because it is too early to look at trends in the use of force data,” GAO wrote.

While each agency has an internal board that reviews uses of force, GAO found that in 2021 and 2022, DHS review boards determined most use-of-force incidents complied with agency rules.

This is an unsurprising trend, according to Hawkins, who noted that review boards were set up years ago to decrease use of force within Customs and Border Protection but typically found that such incidents were justified. There is no system in place to track board determinations and little transparency on how they analyze cases. “I don’t have a lot of faith in the review boards,” Hawkins said. “It’s kind of a black box.”

The four audited DHS agencies have use-of-force guidelines that reflect the standard of officer “reasonableness” established by the 1989 Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor. The court held that claims of excessive police force should be judged from the perspective of a “reasonable” officer responding to circumstances in a particular incident. The ruling has since given immense leeway to police, who often invoke the standard to justify using excessive force against civilians .

“When something goes up to one of the review boards, how are they making the determination that this is within or outside of policy?” Goodwin said. She added that GAO is interested in how DHS uses the information gleaned from its review boards. “What are they learning from it? What information, what lessons learned are they taking? And is that affecting how they do the training? Is that affecting any edits or updates they make to their policy?”

The report made two recommendations to DHS. GAO called on the agency to issue clarifying guidance on how its component agencies submit data on incidents when force is used multiple times, and it recommended that the secretary of homeland security create and implement a plan and timeline to analyze use-of-force data.

In a July 7 letter responding to a GAO request for comments on the report, DHS concurred with the office’s recommendations. The agency said it would create a plan to analyze the data by the end of this year, issue guidance on its reporting by January 2024, and complete the use-of-force data analysis in 2025. GAO will receive an update on the status of the recommendations within six months.

The post Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Routinely Undercount Use-of-Force Incidents appeared first on The Intercept .

The Texas Department of Public Safety purchased access to powerful software capable of locating and following people through their phones as part of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s “border security disaster” efforts, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.

In 2021, Abbott proclaimed that the “surge of individuals unlawfully crossing the Texas-Mexico border posed an ongoing and imminent threat of disaster” to the state and its residents. Among other effects, the disaster declaration opened a spigot of government money to a variety of private firms ostensibly paid to help patrol and blockade the state’s border with Mexico.

One of the private companies that got in on the cash disbursements was Cobwebs Technologies, a little-known Israeli surveillance contractor. Cobwebs’s marquee product, the surveillance platform Tangles, offers its users a bounty of different tools for tracking people as they navigate both the internet and the real world, synthesizing social media posts, app activity, facial recognition, and phone tracking.

“As long as this broken consumer data industry exists as it exists today, shady actors will always exploit it.”

News of the purchase comes as Abbott’s border crackdown escalated to new heights, following a Department of Public Safety whistleblower’s report of severe mistreatment of migrants by state law enforcement and a Justice Department lawsuit over the governor’s deployment of razor wire on the Rio Grande. The Cobwebs documents show that Abbott’s efforts to usurp the federal government’s constitutional authority to conduct immigration enforcement have extended into the electronic realm as well. The implications could reach far beyond the geographic bounds of the border and into the private lives of citizens and noncitizens alike.

“Government agencies systematically buying data that has been originally collected to provide consumer services or digital advertising represents the worst possible kind of decontextualized misuse of personal information,” Wolfie Christl, a privacy researcher who tracks data brokerages, told The Intercept. “But as long as this broken consumer data industry exists as it exists today, shady actors will always exploit it.”

Like its competitors in the world of software tracking tools, Cobwebs — which sells its services to the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, and a variety of undisclosed corporate customers — lets its clients track the movements of private individuals without a court order. Instead of needing a judge’s sign-off, these tracking services rely on bulk-purchasing location pings pulled from smartphones, often through unscrupulous mobile apps or in-app advertisers, an unregulated and increasingly pervasive form of location tracking.

In August 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism division purchased a year of Tangles access for $198,000, according to contract documents, obtained through a public records request by Tech Inquiry, a watchdog and research organization, and shared with The Intercept. The state has renewed its Tangles subscription twice since then, though the discovery that Cobwebs failed to pay taxes owed in Texas briefly derailed the renewal last April, according to an email included in the records request. (Cobwebs declined to comment for this story.)

A second 2021 contract document shared with The Intercept shows DPS purchased “unlimited” access to Clearview AI, a controversial face recognition platform that matches individuals to tens of billions of photos scraped from the internet. The purchase, according to the document, was made “in accordance/governed by the Texas Governor’s Disaster Declaration for the Texas-Mexico border for ongoing and imminent threats.” (Clearview did not respond to a request for comment.)

Each of the three yearlong subscriptions notes Tangles was purchased “in accordance to the provisions outlined in the Texas Governor-Proclaimed Border Disaster Declaration signed May 22, 2022, per Section 418.011 of the Texas Government Code.”

The disaster declaration, which spans more than 50 counties, is part of an ongoing campaign by Abbott that has pushed the bounds of civil liberties in Texas, chiefly through the governor’s use of the Department of Public Safety.

Under Operation Lone Star, Abbott has spent $4.5 billion surging 10,000 Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard personnel to the border as part of a stated effort to beat back a migrant “ invasion ,” which he claims is aided and abetted by President Joe Biden. The resulting project has been riddled with scandal , including migrants languishing for months in state jails without charges and several suicides among personnel deployed on the mission. Just this week, the Houston Chronicle obtained an internal Department of Public Safety email revealing that troopers had been “ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande” and “told not to give water to asylum seekers even in extreme heat.”

On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department sued Texas over Abbott’s deployment of floating barricades on the Rio Grande. Abbott, having spent more than two years angling for a states’ rights border showdown with the Biden administration, responded last week to news of the impending lawsuit by tweeting : “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.”

Despite Abbott’s repeated claims that Operation Lone Star is a targeted effort focused specifically on crimes at the border, a joint investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and the Marshall Project last year found that the state was counting arrests and drug charges far from the U.S-Mexico divide and unrelated to the Operation Lone Star mandate. Records obtained by the news organizations last summer showed that the Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation into Abbott’s operation. The status of the investigation has not been made public.

Where the Department of Public Safety’s access to Tangles’s powerful cellphone tracking software will fit into Abbott’s controversial border enforcement regime remains uncertain. (The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.)

Although Tangles provides an array of options for keeping tabs on a given target, the most powerful feature obtained by the Department of Public Safety is Tangles’s “WebLoc” feature: “a cutting-edge location solution which automatically monitors and analyzes location-based data in any specified geographic location,” according to company marketing materials. While Cobwebs claims it sources device location data from multiple sources, the Texas Department of Public Safety contract specifically mentions “ad ID,” a reference to the unique strings of text used to identify and track a mobile phone in the online advertising ecosystem.

“Every second, hundreds of consumer data brokers most people never heard of collect and sell huge amounts of personal information on everyone,” explained Christl, the privacy researcher. “Most of these shady and opaque data practices are systematically enabled by today’s digital marketing and advertising industry, which has gotten completely out of control.”

While advertisers defend this practice on the grounds that the device ID itself doesn’t contain a person’s name, Christl added that “several data companies sell information that helps to link mobile device identifiers to email addresses, phone numbers, names and postal addresses.” Even without extra context, tying a real name to an “anonymized” advertising identifier’s location ping is often trivial, as a person’s daily movement patterns typically quickly reveal both where they live and work.

Cobwebs advertises that WebLoc draws on “huge sums of location-based data,” and it means huge: According to a WebLoc promotional brochure, it affords customers “worldwide coverage” of smartphone pings based on “billions of data points to ensure maximum location based data coverage.” WebLoc not only provides the exact locations of smartphones, but also personal information associated with their owners, including age, gender, languages spoken, and interests — “e.g., music, luxury goods, basketball” — according to a contract document from the Office of Naval Intelligence, another Cobwebs customer.

The ability to track a person wherever they go based on an indispensable object they keep on or near them every hour of every day is of obvious appeal to law enforcement officials, particularly given that no judicial oversight is required to use a tool like Tangles. Critics of the technology have argued that a legislative vacuum allows phone-tracking tools, fed by the unregulated global data broker market, to give law enforcement agencies a way around Fourth Amendment protections.

The power to track people through Tangles, however, is valuable even in countries without an ostensible legal prohibition against unreasonable searches. In 2021, Facebook announced it had removed 200 accounts used by Cobwebs to track its users in Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Poland, and several other countries.

“In addition to targeting related to law enforcement activities,” the company explained, “we also observed frequent targeting of activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico.”

Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that bolstering surveillance powers under the aegis of an emergency declaration adds further risk to an already fraught technology. “We need to be very skeptical of any expansion of surveillance that occurs under disaster declarations, particularly open-ended claims of emergency,” Lipton said. “They can undermine legislative checks on the executive branch and obviate bounds on state behavior that exist for good reason.”

The post Texas State Police Purchased Israeli Phone-Tracking Software for “Border Emergency” appeared first on The Intercept .

When Saeed Bakhouch was repatriated to Algeria in late April from the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay after 21 years of detention without charge , his lawyer was assured by the State Department that he would be treated humanely. Still, his longtime lawyer, H. Candace Gorman, worried about her client’s upcoming release. Bakhouch’s mental health had deteriorated in the last five years; he had stopped meeting with her and retreated into himself. She feared that her client might be arrested after being returned to Algeria unless given real help and resources.

That’s exactly what happened. Almost immediately after Bakhouch landed in Algiers, he passed through the usual interrogation process for former Guantánamo detainees in Algeria. After a two-week period of detention and interrogation, he appeared before a judge in early May. The judge told Bakhouch that his story did not match what the information the U.S. provided, Gorman explained to The Intercept.

“He was being stripped of all of his rights,” Gorman said. Bakhouch was sent into pretrial detention and, for nearly three months, he has been held under brutal conditions. His hair and beard were forcibly shaved; he has been physically assaulted; and he has been deprived of his Guantánamo-issued medications to treat his injured heel. Now, human rights groups are alleging that Bakhouch is facing severe abuses in detention.

“If anyone had ever given me any hint at the State Department that they have no authority once he steps off the plane, I would have put the brakes on.”

As the Biden administration works to end America’s “forever wars” abroad, the State Department ramped up efforts to release the remaining 16 Guantánamo prisoners who were never charged with any crime and have been cleared to leave the prison. (In total, 30 detainees are still at Guantánamo.) Since Joe Biden assumed office, a slow but steady stream of these prisoners have quietly left the prison’s infamous gates. Like Bakhouch, they are all followed by a vexing question with few answers: Who, ultimately, is responsible for deciding what their freedom means?

Re-imprisoned in Algeria, Bakhouch is only the latest in a string of former Guantánamo detainees facing rights abuses after repatriation or placement in third countries. The question of responsibility over his well-being has pitted the State Department against human rights advocates who contend that his condition meets no viable definition of freedom.

“If anyone had ever given me any hint at the State Department that they have no authority once he steps off the plane, I would have put the brakes on because I know Saeed trusted that I wouldn’t let him go unless I was assured that he would be treated right,” Gorman told The Intercept. “And so the fact that they are now claiming that there’s nothing they can do and that this is a different country and we have no control over that — then why the fuck are you telling me you have their assurances.” (The State Department did not provide comment on this story by publication time.)

In June, the United Nations special rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, published a detailed report on rights violations related to the U.S. detention at Guantánamo. Among other abuses, Ní Aoláin found that transfers of detainees to foreign countries had resulted in their own human rights violations. Among other complaints — torture, arbitrary detention, and disappearances, in some cases — she found in 30 percent of documented cases, the released detainees were not given proper legal status by the recipient countries.

“In these harmful transfers, facilitated and supported by the United States,” the U.N. report said, “there is a legal and moral obligation for the U.S. Government to use all of its diplomatic and legal resources to facilitate (re)transfer of these men, with meaningful assurance and support to other countries.”

As men continue to be released from the prison at Guantánamo, Ní Aoláin told The Intercept that she “continues to be deeply concerned about the robustness of the U.S. Government’s non-refoulement assessment and the protection of human rights for those who have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to countries of nationality or third countries.”

Human Rights Letter

In a desperate effort to draw attention to Bakhouch’s enduring incarceration, Gorman and the Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, published an open letter with signatories from the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and other nongovernmental groups, urgently pressuring the State Department to intervene. The letter , published Wednesday and shared exclusively in advance with The Intercept, alleges that the U.S. provided the Algerian government with harmful and unfounded allegations about Bakhouch’s past — information that led to his detention — and that Bakhouch is imprisoned under severe conditions which violate international law. (The Algerian embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.)

“Despite being transferred out of Guantánamo on the basis that he no longer posed a significant risk to the United States,” the letter says, “Mr. Bakhouch was told by the Algerian lawyer assigned to represent him in trial that the United States provided the information to the Algerian government that led to them charging him with having sworn allegiance to Osama Bin Laden.”

“This allegation is woefully unfounded,” the letter continues, “and we are deeply troubled by the fact that Mr. Bakhouch is being detained on this basis and enduring abuse in Algerian custody, purportedly in part because of false or incomplete intelligence information from the United States.”

The CCR-led letter is addressed to Ambassador Tina Kaidanow, who heads the State Department office responsible for transferring men out of Guantánamo Bay. Kaidanow was appointed in August 2022 and has been repeatedly criticized in the past for failure to respond to botched resettlement deals . Most of the deals were not of her own making; she inherited a mess of released detainees in crisis — some have been re-incarcerated and tortured, forcibly repatriated, or denied legal asylum status .

With only her office to appeal to for assistance, lawyers and human rights advocates are growing increasingly concerned that, irrespective of the deals’ authorship, the struggling former prisoners have no diplomatic support from the State Department.

Now, with Bakhouch’s immediate and brutal re-incarceration, Kaidanow appears to be helming her own botched deal.

State Department Assurances

Emails from Kaidanow and her staff at the State Department’s Bureau of Counterterrorism to Gorman, which were obtained by The Intercept, show a pattern of vague reassurances, incompetence, and general disregard.

After Bakhouch’s release was approved but before he was transferred out of Guantánamo, he languished simply because the staffer who needed to sign his papers was unaware that was a part of their job responsibilities, Gorman learned from a phone call with Anand Prakash, a policy adviser to the Office of the Special Representative for Guantánamo Affairs. Prakash, she said, apparently found the mishap funny, leading Gorman to become more concerned that the State Department staff wasn’t taking her concerns for Bakhouch’s well-being seriously.

“With no family to help Mr. Bakhouch this will be a very difficult transition and I fear my client might become homeless — or worse — locked up.”

“With no family to help Mr. Bakhouch this will be a very difficult transition and I fear my client might become homeless — or worse — locked up,” Gorman wrote to Prakash. “Please let me know what you can about assistance that will be offered to Mr. Bakhouch.”

Prakash, who was unable to provide details of the diplomatic agreement with Algeria, replied, “I can assure you we will work to ensure that he is given appropriate and humane treatment upon return.”

On May 7, Gorman informed the State Department’s Guantánamo desk that her client had not been released as she had expected; instead, he had been re-imprisoned. “This is very distressing for us to hear – it’s not the outcome we expected when we repatriated Saeed to Algeria, and we are taking steps to find out exactly what happened,” Jessica Heinz, a staffer in the Guantánamo Affairs office, replied a day later. “I assure you we are looking into this and will take the steps necessary to ensure Saeed is in a good place post-release.”

As the month of May unfolded and Bakhouch sat in prison, Gorman repeatedly emailed asking for updates and more information — missives that went largely unanswered. By the end of the month, the veteran lawyer had received no updates or new information on the circumstances of her client’s imprisonment from Prakash or Heinz.

Fed up with the apparent inattention to the issue, Gorman eventually escalated and fired off a heated email to Kaidanow herself. Gorman pleaded for immediate help, pointing to Bakhouch’s severe mental health struggles with PTSD and depression. “I recognize your concern,” Kaidanow wrote back. “We and our colleagues in Algeria are doing everything we can to ascertain what the status of Mr. Bakhouch currently is and what his ultimate disposition will be. We take every precaution possible to ensure that detainees will be effectively rehabilitated once they are returned, but we cannot prevent the receiving country from acting according to their own laws and procedures.”

Bakhouch’s Mental Health

The letter from CCR to Kadainow raised the State Department failure to fully reckon with Bakhouch’s mental health issues. It was a point Gorman repeatedly emphasized prior to her client’s release from Guantánamo. The State Department staff writing the emails obtained by The Intercept at no point specifically acknowledge Gorman’s repeated concerns over Bakhouch’s mental well-being.

“Before his transfer, the State Department was made aware of a medical opinion about Mr. Bakhouch’s mental trauma and diagnosis of PTSD and depression related to his torture and detention, and that his U.S. attorney communicated concerns about his reintegration in Algeria to your office several times,” the letter says. “Unfortunately and alarmingly, these concerns seemed to have been disregarded at best and weaponized at worst now that Mr. Bakhouch is in constructive custody in Algeria.”

Concerned that Bakhouch had no family support in Algeria, Gorman continually asked about adequate resources to make sure he did not become homeless after repatriation. In one email, Prakash suggested Gorman reach out to Reprieve and the International Committee of the Red Cross — two nongovernmental groups that work with former detainees and human rights issues — to help Bakhouch readjust to life in Algeria.

At one point before Bakhouch’s release to Algeria, Gorman requests information on what assistance the State Department planned to give her client. “Could you please tell me if our government has made any arrangements with the Algerian government to help settle Mr. Bakhouch when he arrives back in Algiers?” she asked.

“There’s not a whole lot I can share re the specifics of our bilateral arrangements,” Prakash wrote in an email, “but I can say we are working to ascertain what the host gov can provide after transfer, and I can assure you we will work to ensure that he is given appropriate and humane treatment upon return. As you likely know, our standard agreements include reference to humane treatment.”

In the emails reviewed by The Intercept, Kaidanow invokes her commitments to personally ensure that each transfer goes smoothly with a focus on “reintegration and rehabilitation.”

Sufyian Barhoumi, another former Guantánamo detainee who was repatriated to Algeria in early April 2022, said those words mean “nothing at all.” Barhoumi and his lawyer, CCR’s Shayana Kadidal, said they have not been contacted by either the U.S. or Algerian governments. Barhoumi said nongovernmental organizations too, including the ICRC and Reprieve, had been unable to offer him assistance.

“In the course of Reprieve’s Life After Guantánamo work,” Reprieve’s U.S. joint executive director Maya Foa wrote to The Intercept, “we have consistently seen how hard it is for men subjected to this appalling mistreatment over many years to escape further persecution — whether repatriated or transferred to host countries. For many men, the abuse follows them forever; the stain of Guantánamo does not disappear once they are transferred.” (The ICRC did not meet the deadline to comment prior to publication.)

“Arbitrarily detaining so many men without trial has indelibly stained the USA’s reputation as a country founded on the rule of law,” Foa said. “Rehabilitation, reintegration, and reparation for all the men is the direct responsibility of the U.S. Government.” (Reprieve U.S. is a signatory on the letter sent Wednesday to Kaidanow.)

With no income or resources, Barhoumi said he feels stuck and alone: “I just need to start my life.”

State Shirking Responsibility

Gorman has continued to try to spur the State Department into action on Bakhouch’s behalf. Nearly two full months after Bakhouch was imprisoned in Algeria, Kadainow finally replied with specifics, saying she had “a chance” to speak with relevant diplomatic colleagues.

“Our Ambassador in Algiers was informed that Mr. Bakhouch is being charged under Algerian law for membership/affiliation with a foreign terrorist organization, which is a serious crime under Algerian law,” Kaidanow wrote. “He is currently under pre-trial detention while his case is under review by the Court d’Instruction, which will ultimately decide whether to bring him to trial or dismiss the charges and release him. The information regarding his case is still sealed.”

“Closing Guantanamo is not just about policy, it’s about people — the people who’ve been detained and tortured by the United States.”

Kaidanow added, “We continue to assert our interest in his humane treatment and legal rights in a variety of high-level settings.”

The U.S. — and Kaidanow’s — position seems clear: Algeria is responsible for what they now intend to do with their citizen. The U.S. has no further responsibility beyond asking them to honor their commitment to human rights.

For CCR, the lack of direct intervention is unacceptable, but there is little to do but continue to advocate for more care.

“Closing Guantanamo is not just about policy, it’s about people — the people who’ve been detained and tortured by the United States, and the obligations that the U.S. government has to them because of this,” said Aliya Hussain, CCR’s advocacy program manager. “These international law obligations continue even after the men are transferred to other countries, and they are unequivocal, which the Special Rapporteur makes clear in her recent report .”

If the State Department doesn’t follow up and enforce diplomatic assurances, the assurances are worthless, Hussain explained. “How they respond to Mr. Bakhouch’s situation in Algeria will signal how much oversight and advocacy they are willing and committed to undertaking to ensure the success of future transfers.”

The post Despite U.S. Guarantee, Guantánamo Prisoner Released to Algeria Immediately Imprisoned and Abused appeared first on The Intercept .