The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets
The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets
美国公民自由联盟（ACLU）正为律师提供武器，以揭露政府监控的秘密
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. 马萨诸塞州美国公民自由联盟（ACLU）表示，本周将发布一套面向刑事辩护律师的在线工具包，旨在帮助他们查明警方是否在秘密使用监控技术（如人脸识别、自动车牌识别、枪声检测系统等）来针对其客户构建案件。
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. 该组织称这套工具包尚属首创，其核心是一系列精心设计的法律动议。一旦法官批准这些动议，检察官将被迫披露是否对被告使用了监控技术。该工具包涵盖了多种技术，从“黄貂鱼”（Stingray）手机追踪器和商业数据经纪人出售的位置数据，到人工智能撰写的警方报告，以及能够破解手机并从车载信息娱乐系统中提取数据的取证工具。
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. 它还包括针对政府机构和私人供应商的“证据保全动议”，要求在监控数据被自动删除前将其保存下来。这些法律文件基于1963年确立的美国刑法基石原则：检察官必须移交所有可能对辩方有利的证据。马萨诸塞州ACLU表示，这些动议将通过一个受密码保护的资料库进行分发，仅供经过验证的辩护律师使用。
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. 马萨诸塞州ACLU专职律师、该工具包的作者之一詹妮弗·赫尔曼（Jennifer Herrmann）表示，该组织正在两条战线上对抗不受监管的监控工具。一条战线是向城市施压，要求其彻底弃用Flock（车牌识别网络）和ShotSpotter（枪声检测系统）等工具；另一条战线则是武装辩护律师，让他们在法庭上揭露这些监控行为。
“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. “从最初使用技术进行调查，到最终进入法庭并提出宪法质疑，这中间往往需要很长的时间，”赫尔曼说。因此，这些动议为律师提供了一种“挑战过去已发生之事”的方法，并建立起一套记录，以便应对未来可能出现的任何新技术。
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. 该项目旨在解决作者所称的“长期滞后”问题，即警方采用新监控工具与法院最终裁定其是否合法之间存在的时间差。到20世纪90年代末，大多数美国人已随身携带手机，但美国最高法院直到2018年才要求警方在获取手机位置记录时必须申请搜查令。这种滞后不仅仅是因为法院审理缓慢。那些披露记录最差的技术反而面临的司法裁决最少，原因恰恰在于：如果被告根本不知道某种工具的存在，他们就无法对其提出质疑。
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. 在发布随附的材料中，马萨诸塞州ACLU指出，警方部署这些工具时，“有时甚至不会向负责案件的检察官披露其使用情况。”多年来，联邦调查局（FBI）要求地方警察局在通过“蜂窝基站模拟器”（即俗称的“黄貂鱼”，一种伪装成基站以秘密定位手机的手提箱大小设备）进行监控前，必须签署保密协议。在巴尔的摩，一份此类协议指示检察官宁可撤销刑事案件，也不要在法庭上披露该设备的存在，尽管该市警方在2007年至2015年间使用了该设备超过4300次。ACLU后来获得的FBI记录显示，此类协议至少持续到了2020年。
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. 当密苏里州调查人员在调查一起2017年的谋杀案时使用了Fog Reveal（一种利用应用程序采集的位置数据来绘制人员活动轨迹的商业工具）时，美联社发现，在帮助定罪受害者妻子的庭审证据中，完全没有提及该工具。据《华盛顿邮报》报道，2022年路易斯安那州当局对兰德尔·古兰·里德（Randal Quran Reid）发出逮捕令时——此人因人脸识别错误而被误认并入狱近一周——逮捕令并未将他的身份识别归功于软件，而是称其来自“可靠来源”。这份授权逮捕他的文件，实际上掩盖了警方怀疑他的真实过程。
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. 该工具包的作者对问题的定义略有不同：他们最担心的不仅是向检察官隐瞒证据，还有那些根本不知道监控工具介入了其案件的被告，以及那些不知道该如何询问的辩护律师。
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. 该民权组织的“技术自由”政策顾问、工具包的另一位作者吉迪恩·爱泼斯坦（Gideon Epstein）提到了马萨诸塞州著名的车牌识别案件“联邦诉麦卡锡案”（Commonwealth v. McCarthy）。在该案中，辩方仅要求调取少数几个摄像头的记录，而非全州范围的网络记录。“很多时候，他们并没有要求获取正在使用的全部监控技术范围，”爱泼斯坦说。他补充道，这些动议的目的不仅是强迫政府交出证据，更是为了促使律师主动要求获取所有相关信息。
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. “证据保全动议”针对的是另一个更隐蔽的问题：监控证据的“自我销毁”。Axon公司的Draft One是一款利用随身摄像机音频撰写警方报告的AI工具，它在设计上会丢弃机器生成的初稿。Axon的一位产品经理在2025年7月告诉电子前沿基金会（EFF），这一设计是为了避免给警方客户和检察官带来“披露方面的麻烦”。加州立法者对此有不同看法，并于去年颁布了一项法律，要求相关机构必须保留原始草稿。
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. 在其他地方，Flock Safety的车牌识别网络默认在30天后删除录像；而芝加哥与ShotSpotter枪声检测系统签订的合同则声明，枪声数据属于供应商的财产，而非市政府的财产。在这些案例中，被告反驳指控所需的数字材料，往往在辩护律师被指派介入案件之前，就已经消失或处于政府无法触及的范围之内。
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. Flock Safety发言人帕里斯·卢贝尔（Paris Lewbel）表示，该公司拥有确保系统内存储数据完整性和真实性的程序，并提供相关工具来确认自动车牌识别（ALPR）图像或调查报告在从平台提取后未被篡改。