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The Real Problem With Banning Masks at Protests
Privacy advocates worry banning masks at protests will encourage harassment, while cops' high-tech tools render the rules unnecessary.
While today’s activists have more reliable communication tools than did Revolutionary War-era agitators, the Boston Tea Party’s ringleaders didn’t have to contend with surveillance technology, like Stingrays that impersonate cell phone towers to track nearby cell phones en masse, geofence warrants that let law enforcement request location data from companies about all the devices in a certain area (often without a warrant), professional social media monitoring firms that maintain scores of clandestine accounts to surveil activists, networks of automated license plate reading cameras that can track protesters’ vehicles, and even gait analysis technologies that can identify someone based on how they walk. This year, CAIR filed one of the first doxxing lawsuits in Illinois against Canary Mission, a pro-Israel organization that operates an online database and trucks with large screens on college campuses like Yale and Columbia, featuring pictures of pro-Palestinian protesters and others they accuse of antisemitism and links to their social media accounts. A conservative student at Auburn University was doxxed after engaging in pro-life activities on campus, as were employees at voting machine companies following President-elect Donald Trump’s fraudulent attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as were the far-right attendees of the white nationalist Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville Virginia.
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