Here’s how cops are using high-tech tools to monitor protesters

There are a plethora of surveillance methods that law enforcement can use to gain insight into peoples’ identities, communications, and purchases.

Stingrays impersonate cell phone towers to collect the unique ID of a cell phone’s SIM card.

Geofence warrants are being increasingly used on protesters, with evidence of the technique being deployed to identify people demonstrating against the police shooting of Jacob Blake .

Google revealed more than 25% of the warrants it received in 2020 were geofence warrants, constituting more than 10,000 requests.

Data brokers are companies that assemble information about people from a variety of usually public sources.

If a phone connects to a nearby Wi-Fi signal, its location can still be recorded.

Police use gait recognition technology to identify a person by their footprints, even if their face is obscured, or they are facing away from the camera.

In the U.S. , this process has, thus far, been exclusively manual — with forensic podiatry experts assisting law enforcement by analyzing people’s gaits from CCTV camera footage.

In recent years , Chinese law enforcement authorities have employed software to automate the process.