[liberationtech] Sweeping Facebook warrant targets student journalists in Puerto Rico

[Yosem Companys]

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/19/puerto-rico-university-protests-facebook-surveillance/


An agent from the cybercrimes unit of Puerto Rico’s Justice Department
sought a search warrant for the records of virtually every Facebook
interaction over a 72-hour period with the three publications that
livestreamed the protest. The agent obtained private messages with the
publications’ followers and detailed information about the student
journalists who managed the pages.

Under federal law, when a government entity applies for a warrant, it can
ask the court to order service providers not to notify users for 90
days. Neither Facebook nor the government ever alerted the individuals
whose information had been turned over. Instead, students only learned
about what happened after Denis Márquez Lebrón, an Independence Party
member of Puerto Rico’s House of Representatives, contacted Pulso
Estudiantil to let them know that he was requesting a congressional
investigation into whether the search violated the island’s constitution.

The department’s sweeping search warrant was part of a hunt for crimes
committed by members of the youth anti-austerity movement, and it has
raised fears among civil liberties advocates of a return to a period of
Puerto Rico’s history when police routinely targeted citizens for
surveillance on the basis of their political interests.

For decades, Puerto Rico’s police department operated an intelligence unit
dedicated to spying on dissidents. With the knowledge of the FBI, police
officers created a file, known as a carpeta, for anyone who could be
construed as a supporter of Puerto Rican independence or other
environmental or labor causes. Officers recruited neighbors, friends, and
relatives to collect information about those targeted, and planted rumors
that led to divorce, job loss, and irreparable discord within communities
and families.

The existence of the carpetas was revealed only after two University of
Puerto Rico students were lured by an informant into the mountains in 1978
and executed by police. Law enforcement attempted to cover up the incident,
which would later be referred to as Puerto Rico’s Watergate. In a radio
interview in 1987, a former intelligence officer who had pleaded guilty to
perjury and conspiracy for covering up the murders provided the first
detailed account of the existence of a list of alleged subversives
maintained by the police. The ensuing investigations revealed that law
enforcement held active files on 75,000 people.

In 1988, a judge declared that creating surveillance dossiers on people
simply because of their political beliefs was illegal, and in the years
that followed, the government granted thousands of Puerto Ricans access to
their files. It appeared that an oppressive period of the island’s history
had come to a close.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ghserv.net/pipermail/lt/attachments/20200120/77a2b691/attachment.html>