A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use—and conceal—to build criminal cases, from facial recognitio
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it’s releasing an online toolkit this week for criminal defense attorneys designed to uncover whether police used surveillance technologies—facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and more—to build the cases against their clients in secret.
The toolkit, which the group describes as the first of its kind, is built around handcrafted legal motions that, when granted by a judge, will force prosecutors to reveal whether surveillance technology was used against a defendant. It covers an array of technologies, from “stingray” phone trackers and location data sold by commercial brokers to AI-drafted police reports and forensic tools that crack phones and siphon data from car infotainment systems.
It also includes preservation motions—demands that surveillance data be saved before it is deleted automatically—aimed at government agencies and private vendors alike. The filings rest on a bedrock rule of American criminal law, established in 1963, that prosecutors are required to turn over all evidence that could help the defense. The motions will be distributed through a password-protected library, the ACLU of Massachusetts says, available only to verified defense attorneys.
The group is fighting a war against unregulated surveillance tools on two fronts, says Jennifer Herrmann, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and one of the toolkit’s authors. One front is pressuring cities to drop tools like Flock, the license plate reader network, and ShotSpotter, the gunshot detection system, outright. The other is arming defense lawyers to expose the surveillance in court.
“The amount of time that it can take for that initial use of technology and investigation to actually get to a court and constitutional challenge is long,” Herrmann says—so the motions give attorneys a way to “challenge what has already happened in the past,” building a record that carries over to whatever tool comes next.
The project responds to what its authors describe as a chronic lag between the moment police adopt a new surveillance tool and the moment courts finally decide whether using it is legal. Most Americans carried cell phones by the late 1990s, but the United States Supreme Court did not require police to get a warrant for cell phone location records until 2018. The lag isn’t just the result of slow-moving courts. The technologies with the worst disclosure records have faced the fewest court rulings precisely because a defendant cannot challenge a tool they were never told about.
In materials accompanying the launch, the ACLU of Massachusetts says police deploy these tools “sometimes without even disclosing their use to the prosecutors handling the case.” For years, the FBI required local police departments to sign secrecy agreements before using cell-site simulators—suitcase-sized devices, commonly called stingrays, that impersonate cell towers to secretly locate phones. In Baltimore, one such agreement instructed prosecutors to drop criminal cases entirely rather than reveal the device in court, even as the city’s police used it more than 4,300 times between 2007 and 2015. FBI records later obtained by the ACLU show the agreements persisted until at least 2020.
When Missouri investigators used Fog Reveal, a commercial tool that maps people’s movements using app-harvested location data, in the investigation of a 2017 murder, the Associated Press found no trace of it in the trial exhibits that helped convict the victim’s wife. And when Louisiana authorities obtained an arrest warrant in 2022 for Randal Quran Reid—a Georgia man misidentified by facial recognition and jailed for nearly a week—the warrant attributed his identification not to software but to “a credible source,” according to The Washington Post. The very document that authorized his arrest actively obscured how police came to suspect him.
The toolkit’s authors frame the problem slightly differently: Their central worry is not only evidence hidden from prosecutors but defendants who are never told a surveillance tool touched their case at all, and defense lawyers who don't know to ask.
Gideon Epstein, a Technology for Liberty policy counsel at the civil liberties group and the toolkit’s other author, points to Massachusetts's own leading license plate reader case, Commonwealth v. McCarthy, in which the defense sought records for only a handful of cameras rather than the statewide network. “A lot of the time they're not asking for the full scope of surveillance technologies in use,” Epstein says. The motions, he adds, are as much about prompting lawyers to demand everything as about forcing the government to cough it up.
The preservation motions target a separate and subtler problem: surveillance evidence that destroys itself. Axon's Draft One, an AI tool that writes police reports from body camera audio, discards the machine-written first draft by design. An Axon product manager told the Electronic Frontier Foundation in July 2025 that the choice avoids creating “disclosure headaches” for police customers and prosecutors. California legislators saw the matter differently and enacted a law last year that requires agencies to keep the original drafts.
Elsewhere, Flock Safety’s license plate reader network deletes its footage after 30 days by default, and Chicago’s contract for the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system declared the gunfire data the vendor's own property, not the city’s. In each case, the digital material a defendant would need to fight back against a claim can vanish—or sit beyond the government's reach—before a defense attorney is ever appointed to the case.
Flock Safety spokesperson Paris Lewbel says the company has procedures to preserve the integrity and authenticity of data stored in its system, and tools to confirm that an ALPR image or investigative report has not been altered since it was pulled from the platform.
Lewbel says Flock complies with legal demands for customer data. Requests that don't legally bind Flock it refers to the customer, whom it also notifies.
A spokesperson for SoundThinking, maker of ShotSpotter, says the company complies with subpoenas and court orders regardless of which side issues them, and cooperates with “reasonable requests” for data in criminal proceedings. When a subpoena covers material the company considers confidential, such as its own trade secrets, it asks courts to restrict that material's dissemination.
Epstein is careful to note the ACLU still generally wants this data to quickly disappear. It’s lobbying Massachusetts to cut license plate reader retention to as little as two days, from Flock's default of 30. But once someone is facing charges, he says, that same data can be the evidence that clears them, which is what the preservation motions are designed to protect.
If the approach sounds theoretical, Massachusetts's highest court has recently proven otherwise, twice. In 2024, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court permanently threw out drug and firearm charges against a Boston man—barring prosecutors from ever refiling them—after police defied a court order to turn over records of fake social media profiles that officers used to surveil him, built with predominantly Black and brown avatars. Last year, the same court ruled that defendants can demand a hearing forcing prosecutors to prove ShotSpotter actually works before its evidence reaches a jury. The rulings help explain why the toolkit is built on Massachusetts law, which the ACLU says can be adapted for other states: The state’s high court has run years ahead of the US Supreme Court on digital privacy, requiring warrants for cell phone location data back in 2014.
The ACLU’s timing is not incidental: Three weeks ago, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that when police use a so-called geofence warrant—an order forcing Google to identify virtually all phones near a crime scene—they are conducting a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, triggering the Constitution's privacy protections. The justices sent the case back down for lower courts to work out what a valid geofence warrant looks like. The ACLU’s toolkit will ship a geofencing motion directly into those unsettled waters.
The motions are meant to be adapted and filed in real criminal cases, and the group is asking attorneys who use them to report back. The point, Herrmann says, is to take good lawyering that already exists and put it “at the fingertips of every attorney for every defendant,” while continuing to flag the gaps where new strategies are needed.
was at a bar and a 50+ year old drunk white woman complimented me and my friend's outfits, told us there was a campsite up in northern maryland where a lot of gay bears go to have sex in the woods. we asked her how she knew about this and she very aggressively said "because i'm a FAG HAG!!! but i'm not allowed to say that anymore I GUESS!!!"
Interviewer: There is something stereotypically masculine about the kind of chest-pumping, overly stylish translations of your predecessors.
Wilson: I’m really skeptical about any gender essentialism on that. Other women have published translations of Homer into Italian and into other languages I can’t read. I’ve read some of the French translation by Anne Dacier from the 17th century, and it’s fairly loquacious. Could you pick the translations of The Odyssey by a woman out of a lineup? Absolutely not. But journalists wanted it to be about that. I get that you’re trying to create a story, but I just don’t believe it.
Interviewer: Have you followed the online discourse about the film so far?
Wilson: It’s made-up controversy. Nobody’s seen this movie. It’s just the usual triggers about race and gender, and I just find it very tedious.
Interviewer: curious about what it would look like to make a feminist version of The Odyssey. It seems that could be a helpful framework to have ahead of Nolan’s movie.
Wilson: I’ve been watching a lot of Nolan movies in preparation for all of this, and it seems to me that we don’t know what the script’s going to be like. If it’s the usual Nolan plot of “A guy is on a quest far from home and struggling to get back to an objectified female character,” then I’m not sure I see that plot as inherently particularly feminist.
Interviewer: Looking at those two changes, it seems to me that your translation has a feminist function, whether it’s intentional or not.
Wilson: I think the bar should be higher for feminist translation. There are people whose project that is.
*sits up in bed, stretches, yawns* it’s another beautiful, glorious day full of opportunity a- *ominous bell toll and i am instantly replaced with a 10,000-year-old mummy sitting in the exact same pose*
This is what I meant by how a lot of white supremacy is projection.
"I feel like my penis/my Manhood as a symbol is smaller than Black man's" becomes "Black men have oversized penises and are sexually insatiable beasts."
"I am sexually attracted to, fetishizing, and feel entitled to Black women's bodies" becomes "well she's asking for it, look at how she looks, Black women are always more openly sexual."
"I am afraid of approaching Black men" becomes "Black men are a threat."
"I am afraid of approaching Black women" becomes "Black women are always angry."
"I am not smart enough/not qualifed enough/can't beat my white counterparts professionally" becomes "DEI and affirmative action are letting those Blacks steal my position in school/jobs!"
Your own fears and insecurities about yourself somehow become a reflection of my humanity, when it had nothing to do with anything. And somehow enough people think that and now it's systemic instead of the made up nonsense it always was. Ijeoma Oluo called it mediocrity, James Baldwin called racism the white man's problem, and they remain correct.
"incurious" still GOAT insult. You could be better but you're not. You could learn but you won't, and for no good reason, just a base dispositional apathy. Get fucked
some people read an awful lot, but don't read very well. deep reading is itself a skill. being able to untangle the threads of theme, subtext, characterization, narrative style, and more are all things that it takes time and intentional engagement to learn.
if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars
literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that.
Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?
there are other more involved ways of finding criticism. Learning to use academic databases, going to your local library to do interlibrary loans, finding critical voices you appreciate; these are all useful subskills. Literacy isn't just being able to read words, it's being able to read words in context and think about what they tell you about the text, the author, or the time and culture in which the text was produced. Literacy is the skill of being able to look at the world with open eyes and think clearly about how its parts are connected. It'll change your life
this keeps getting shared around and ive seen some different tags responding differently so i just want to make some important clarifications and distillations
you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)
if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too
learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life
writers tend to put a lot of work into their stories. if you learn to read that work you'll (probably) appreciate the stories you love even more. And if not, then you'll have developed your taste. This too is worth doing
A 75 yo man proudly came into the cafe wearing an Ultra Maga hat. I excused my barista from the register to handle the transaction.
"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."
"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"
"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"
"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."
"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"
I laughed. "I've heard that before."
"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."
I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"
Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.
There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.
Anyone wearing that type of shit and preying on workers for their own spank bank material is a brainless fucking sheep.
something i want to mention because i’ve seen it growing as a trend online is that not only do people do this just for their own gratification, but watch for glasses. smart glasses are a growing segment of the consumer market, and creeps like this are harassing people in public in order to gather content without the victims being aware they’re being filmed
Is it acceptable that I do shave my legs only because it’s easier to put lotion on my legs when they aren’t too hairy and I do like the feeling of smooth skin when I finish up with it.
I also only really do it once or twice a month so sometimes I do go out in public with hairy legs.
come on man i'm on my lunch break can't you wait???
