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Blog by Ana Blinder, Communications Strategist, ACLU

I started my professional career in the communications department of the National Football League. It was a dream job right out of college. I grew up a passionate New York Giants fan, but more importantly, I recognized the invaluable experience I’d gain working for an organization that managed to draw more than 100 million viewers to the Super Bowl each year. 

This is not a novel observation, but the NFL is more than a sports organization. Football is — sorry baseball — America’s pastime, and the league’s steps and missteps on player discipline, health and safety, and executive compensation have become part of the national conversation. Knowing this, leadership has clear instructions: Focus on the game; deflect from a scandal; protect the shield.

At the end of the day, it’s a business. Pontificate all you want about the selective outrage of the fanbase — denounce signing a domestic violence abuser unless he boosts that defensive line — but that fanbase buys tickets, merchandise, and expensive cable packages to justify multi-year broadcast deals.

Long ago, the NFL made a decision to capitalize on its ostensible patriotism. It helped solidify the association between pregame pageantry — and in turn the national anthem — and military appreciation. It partners with military nonprofit organizations that honorably support active-duty service members, veterans, and their families.

So on the fateful day Colin Kaepernick decided to sit — and later kneel at the advice of former Green Beret Nate Boyer — during the anthem to protest police brutality, it served as a referendum on the league’s “patriotism” and helped divide those united by fandom according to racial, economic, and generational lines.

I knew compartmentalizing protecting the shield and my personal beliefs was going to be challenging. The players were never protesting the military, but rather racial injustice — police brutality, mass incarceration, and systemic racism. I’ve heard this from them directly. They were pointed and thoughtful about their motives.

One player who demonstrated had friends and family who served in the military. He had honest discussions with them about using his platform to bring attention to issues bigger than the game and had nothing but respect for the troops. Another player did not protest, but he expressed solidarity with players who did because he knew racism was real, and he supported making people think about it, not avoid it. The league knew as much. But they had a bottom line to deal with.

I listened to our military nonprofit partners’ concerns about the message the protests send to service members with care. Brave men and women fight and die to protect the ideals of this country. I also listened to the players, who are indefatigably ready to help each “Community Tuesday,” their in-season off-day dedicated to community service. They run foundations. They fund literacy programs. They do what they can to help this country live up to its ideals.

I watched as fans, owners, and Twitter-users misidentified the purpose of the protests, and even worse, vacillated on the merits of such protests against racial injustice. These dog-whistles, selective patriotism, and tired tropes of the ungrateful Black man are just another reminder of what happens when Black men step out of line.

The president has called on NFL incomes as an explanation for players’ misplaced concerns regarding systemic racism. But a Black player who signs an NFL contract isn’t suddenly not Black.

Black people, as we’ve witnessed in horrific detail this year, are reported to the police for barbequing, swimming, napping, and moving into an apartment. Black students are suspended and expelled from school three times more often than white students are. Nearly 1,000 people were shot and killed by police in 2017, a disproportionate amount of whom were Black.

The list goes on.

My time at the NFL was marked by a stark reminder that many Americans refuse to confront the history and ubiquity of racism in this country. Yet despite all the dog whistles and outright racism, particularly from the White House, the players carry on. They know they’re protesting for justice and have the platform to get the message out.

They don’t deserve condemnation. They deserve praise.

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• Read more about An insider's account of the NFL players' take-a-knee movement

By Kade Crockford, director of the ACLU of Massachusetts' Technology for Liberty Project. This was originally published by Rolling Stone.

As FBI director J. Edgar Hoover became increasingly disturbed by the growing political power of the Civil Rights Movement — and paranoid about its possible connections to communists — he directed his agents to step up their surveillance of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Hoover’s obsession with King bordered on the fanatical. In his bid to destroy King, the now-disgraced patriarch of the modern FBI went so far as to send information about King’s private sex life to journalists. It didn’t work. Journalists refused to go along with the bureau’s smear campaign, and King went on to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act and win a Nobel Peace Prize.

But Hoover didn’t give up: He sent a now infamous letter to King, describing King’s private sexual activity and encouraging the reverend to kill himself in order to avoid the public embarrassment of the publication of the FBI’s surveillance records.

The FBI’s surveillance of black Americans isn’t just history. Last year, we learned the FBI has been spying on black activists, labeling them “Black Identity Extremists.” The feds also use powers obtained through national security laws like the Patriot Act to target people in the racially biased drug war.

More disturbing: The FBI that spied on King and today classifies Black civil rights activists as “extremists” is now partnering with Big Tech to amass unprecedented surveillance powers that history has taught us will be used to target communities of color, religious minorities, dissidents and immigrants.

In the 1960s, the FBI relied on rudimentary wiretapping systems and photos taken by informants. Now, it’s piloting Rekognition, Amazon’s facial recognition product that the company is aggressively marketing to police and ICE.

This marriage of Amazon’s face-surveillance technology to the FBI’s troves of Big Data about tens of millions of people threatens to supercharge the government’s ability to track and monitor all of us. This is the dystopian future sci-fi novelists warned us about. Imagine a world in which secretive government agencies can track millions of faces — both in real time and through historical video footage — enabling them to identify political protesters, whistleblowers and journalists’ confidential sources.

That nightmare scenario may already exist in skeletal form at the FBI. Since 2015, the bureau has operated a Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation Services Unit — a.k.a. FACE — that “provides investigative lead support to FBI field offices, operational divisions, and legal attachés” and “may offer face recognition support to federal partners.”

Photographs of half of American adults are likely in the “Interstate Photo System” accessible to the FBI for face recognition searches. And the FBI has also entered into agreements with more than a dozen states, enabling its agents to access driver’s license databases, massively expanding the number of people who are subject to the FBI’s face-recognition surveillance.

The full extent to which the FBI is using face recognition, or could use Amazon’s technology, to track political protesters, identify whistleblowers or engage in other invasive surveillance remains unknown. That’s why we at the ACLU are filing a Freedom of Information Act request demanding the Department of Justice disclose how federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, are using face-recognition technology, and what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect basic rights and liberties.

The FBI’s long-secret harassment of King offers us two lessons. 

The first: Inappropriate government surveillance flourishes behind closed doors. It’s important we fight back against that secrecy and uncover information about what the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are doing with these high tech tools.

The second lesson is for companies like Amazon, who are arming the government with new surveillance powers despite warnings from lawmakers, academics, consumers, employees and shareholders. As a coalition of nearly 90 civil rights, racial justice and religious organizations recently warned Amazon, Google and Microsoft, the choices these companies make now will determine whether the next generation will have to fear being tracked by the government for attending a protest, going to their place of worship or simply living their lives. 

For the future of our rights and freedoms, companies like Amazon must stop selling facial-recognition technology to the government, and the FBI must come clean about how it is partnering with Big Tech to implement face recognition across the country.

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• Read more about Martin Luther King Jr. offers a lesson on why we should be worried about Amazon and the FBI

By Nicole Ozer, Technology & Civil Liberties Director, ACLU of California. This was originally published by USA Today.

A top Google executive recently sent a shot across the bow of its competitors regarding face surveillance. Kent Walker, the company's general counsel and senior vice president of global affairs, made it clear that Google — unlike Amazon and Microsoft — will not sell a face recognition product until the technology's potential for abuse is addressed.

Face recognition, powered by artificial intelligence, could allow the government to supercharge surveillance by automating identification and tracking. Authorities could use it to track protesters, target vulnerable communities (such as immigrants), and create digital policing in communities of color that are already subject to pervasive police monitoring.

So how are the world's biggest technology companies responding to this serious threat to privacy, safety and civil rights? Google at least appears to be taking the risks seriously with its recent announcement. Microsoft, unfortunately, is just talking the talk. And Amazon is completely running amok.

All three companies need to take responsibility for uses of their technology. Now, a nationwide coalition of civil rights organizations have demanded that they not sellface surveillance to the government. 

Last spring, the ACLU exposed how Amazon is aggressively trying to sell its face surveillance product — Rekognition — to government agencies. The company's marketing materials read like a user manual for the type of authoritarian surveillance you can currently see in China.

Amazon encourages governments to use its technology to track "persons of interest" and monitor public spaces, comparing everyone to databases with tens of millions of faces. Amazon even suggested pairing face recognition with police body cameras, a move that would transform devices meant for police accountability into roving mass-surveillance devices.

The dangers couldn't be clearer. In an eye-opening test, Amazon’s Rekognition falsely matched 28 members of Congress against a mugshot database. Tellingly, congressional members of color were disproportionately misidentified, including civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. And that test wasn’t based on a hypothetical: Law enforcement has already been using Rekognition to match pictures against arrest-photo databases. 

Following these revelations, federal lawmakers spoke up about the risks of face surveillance, and civil rights groups, company shareholders, and hundreds of Amazon employees have called on Amazon to stop selling the technology to governments. But instead of heeding these concerns and taking their product off the table for governments, the company is trying to sell Rekognition to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI.

Amazon's statements and actions provide a stark contrast with Google's approach. While Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos acknowledged his company's products might be put to "bad uses," he said the solution was to wait for society's eventual "immune response" to take care of the problems. This is a shocking abdication of responsibility, not to mention a convenient blindness to the "response" that Rekognition has already engendered.

Google, on the other hand, has charted a distinctly different course with technologies based on artificial intelligence, with CEO Sundar Pichai urging his industry to realize that "it just can't build it and then fix it."

So where is Microsoft in all this? The company has explicitly recognized the dangers of face surveillance in its statements, but its proposed solutions doesn't add up.

In a blog post, Microsoft President Brad Smith correctly identifies the threats the technology poses to privacy, free speech and other human rights, observing that today's technology makes a surveillance state possible.

But then, after outlining those grave threats to democracy, Smith proposes relying on inadequate safeguards that have failed in the past with technologies far less dangerous than face surveillance. He expresses excessive faith in notifying people of face surveillance systems — but what good is that in a world where face recognition is so widespread that nobody can opt out?

History has taught us that given the opportunity, governments will exploit new surveillance technologies, especially to target communities of color, religious minorities and immigrants. With face surveillance, we are at a crossroads. The choices made now will determine whether the next generation will have to fear being tracked by the government for attending a protest or going to their place of worship — or simply living their lives.

That's why so many people have been sounding the alarm. Microsoft has heard it, but seems to be in denial. Amazon needs to get its fingers out of its ears and start really listening. Google has heard it and is on the right track — the rest of the industry should follow its lead.

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• Read more about Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are at odds on the dangers of face recognition. One of them is on the right path.