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Public Records Analysis

Public Records Analysis. Some basic ideas for activists Who suspect police infiltration. Getting Public Records is Easy. The hard part is not the request The real work is the analysis. Read Everything You Get. When you get a lot of records, read them all .

brennan-saunders
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Public Records Analysis

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  1. Public Records Analysis Some basic ideas for activists Who suspect police infiltration

  2. Getting Public Records is Easy • The hard part is not the request • The real work is the analysis

  3. Read Everything You Get • When you get a lot of records, read them all. • If you have too many records to read, share. • Organize a party to read through them together, and discuss them. • Post them so that others can also read though them with you. (But - consider privacy first!)

  4. Considerations • Be careful who you invite to read through police emails. • Police reports are often wrong… • … but people believe what they read, especially after they forget where they read it. • If you are searching for a spy, don’t invite the spy to your records reading party.

  5. Categories of Records • Broadly, public records held by LE Agencies fall into three categories for our purposes: • Indexes, • Records, and • Communications are these broad categories.

  6. Index • Index Information: This category includes lists of who works for a Department, which cars they own, what weapons they deploy, which classes of records they hold, who uses which phone number. These lists are usually easy to obtain, simple to describe, and exist for every Agency or Department. They help identify specific employees or agents whose records would be of interest in a specific follow up request.

  7. Index (cont) • The single most important concept about Index Information is that it isn’t ONLY in the hands of LE Agencies. • Voter Registrations, Property Ownership Records, and Online person searches (even Google and Facebook) all supply useful clues to personalities and incidents which would be of interest to you as a public records researcher. See the end slides for details.

  8. Index (cont) • Index information should be updated each year and occasionally correlated with prior years to see which officers have left the departments you are studying. • Ex Officers can become sources of information about how the department “really works.” • Index information should usually be published to help other records researchers.

  9. Records • Records Information: This category includes incident reports, patrol logs, shift schedules, 9-1-1 transcripts, and similar items. It’s the information recorded by police to describe their contacts with the public. It’s the most common type of record requested from LE Agencies and it will describe most incidents you might study.

  10. Records (cont) • Records are also nearly useless without some context to the record which helps you decode things like “Lincoln Two Seven arrival 22:33.” • Law Enforcement Agencies use a lot of shorthand to describe what they do, so having Index information with which you can decode those shorthand notes is essential.

  11. Records (cont) • In general, you never want to publish the actual incident reports of an LE Agency due to their tendency to falsely portray the personalities involved, and their tendency to name individuals in ways which specifically identify them and accuse them of crimes. • When you write a story based on a police incident report, you always want to run that report past the witnesses or named persons in the report first, if you can contact them, to balance what the officers mistook or distorted when they wrote their report.

  12. Communications • Communications Information: This category encompasses memoranda, emails, radio logs, phone bills, and the routing information for evidence and seized items taken by LE Agencies. In general, it is information ABOUT what other reports or records might exist, and it helps describe these records by date and time information – which is essential for obtaining the specific incident reports you might need to read.

  13. Communications (cont) • Communications information alone might give you your answer, if all you want to know is whether your local police are coordinating with the Feds to control your protests. But to see the patterns in the communications information, you need to have Index information to use in analyzing who communicated with whom. To show harms, you will need the arrest Records.

  14. The email which caught Towery

  15. Isn’t much, is it? • By itself this email does not reveal his role. • The secret was running the name through voter records, and correlating the information. • His voter address was near someone we knew. • His name was similar to that same person. • We already suspected a military spy. • Once we had this, other data fit the picture.

  16. Use Correlation • Correlate the names in your emails with other databases: • Police Rosters • Voter Registrations • Property Ownership • Court Cases • Facebook / LinkedIn • Thousands more possible – collect them

  17. Clues are in the details.How many can you spot?

  18. Some emails explain themselves – almost.

  19. Learn the Lingo • Strat = Strategic / Strategy • Grant = Monies from outside agency • OT = Overtime • Demo = Demonstrations • DT = Domestic Terrorism • SDS = Students for a Democratic Society • YOUR AGENCY’S LINGO MAY VARY

  20. Diagram Email Series

  21. Diagramming Emails • Inspiration Software http://www.inspiration.com/ • Flow diagrams for who sent what to whom, when • Shows flow of intelligence from sources, to police recipients who then do bad things to activists • Demonstrates causality of torts / lawsuit targets

  22. Timeline Emails • Simpler than Diagramming / No special software. • Lay out each email (or just the header / subject) in date / time order. • Can be used to correlate multiple sources from different departments.

  23. Timeline Example • June 18 2009 - Tim Smith sends Tacoma Police Homeland Security Meeting Minutes (public records act request) to Cryptome.org http://cryptome.org/tacoma-homesec.zip • June 20 2009 – Drew Hendricks finally gets a copy of Brendan Dunn’s RQ from the City of Olympia. These are emails and memoranda regarding SDS, Anarchists in Olympia. It is this collection of documents which unravels the mystery of how the US Military was spying on Olympia. • June 21 – 24 2009 – Preliminary catalog made of participants in City of Olympia emails revealed by Brendan Dunn’s RQ. It is this activity which results in the ID of John Towery, and Cathie Butler. • June 23 2009 – Drew Hendricks comes to the realization that the person named John J Towery in the emails he is analyzing is the same person as John Jacob (Agent_Orange@riseup) and begins to deal with that reality. John Towery is taken off of listserv admin status on OlyPMR list and set to “no delivery” while a small team of about 10 persons helps to photograph Towery’s cars, house, motorcycle, and person. • July 20 2009 – A team of persons in Olympia execute a “sting” of John Jacob Towery to get facial pictures and photograph him with his motorcycle (lic # 947530). The Sting works. This is our second confirmation that “John Jacob” is really John Jacob Towery. • July 21 2009 - Drew Hendricks announces at a City of Olympia Council meeting the identity of John Towery as an agent of the Joint Base Lewis McChord DES / FP Cell. Early the next morning he posts it on Seattle IMC and other local web based news sources.

  24. Correlate emails with observations • When you watch a protest, photograph the cops there. • Photograph the apparent undercover cars. • Photograph the Photographers – all of them. • Keep these photos for later use. • You will correlate these photos with emails later.

  25. Correlate the Observations

  26. Audio Records • http://www.olyblog.net/wsp-audio-conspiracy-police • The voices heard are being recorded by an automated system and were later released to Olympia Copwatch, which in turn informed the victim directly.  The WSP at that time was still trying to prosecute the victim, Philip Chinn, for DUI - despite his blood test coming back negative for intoxicants of any kind.  In the audio clip his car is referred to by its plate number: "One Four Six, Robert Queen Nora".  Mr Chinn is not named.

  27. Video Records • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqLdNUIEelo • Video from the Washington State Patrol, obtained through a public records request. • The camera and a microwave link to send its video through Washington State's Emergency Management Division was purchased in 2005 - 2006 by the US Navy, through a Homeland Security Emergency Grant program.

  28. Direct Observations • Photograph the Photographers • https://www.flickr.com/photos/29801588@N08/2780103955/in/set-72157626857277568/ • Dwight L Combs - WSP Photographer April 23 2004 • He took photos of Craig Rosebraugh in April 2004. Then in June 2006, we photographed him at GA headquarters in Olympia, in full WSP dress blues. • He attended the 2005 "Domestic Terrorism" conference in Spokane WA and retired from the WSP after 2007.

  29. Private Spies • https://www.flickr.com/photos/29801588@N08/11698648706/ • Bank of America has a “Social Media Trolling” “team of 20 people and that’s all they do all day.” • B of A alerts State Police to stare at planned protests against them.

  30. Satisfaction is not guaranteed • What do you get if you prove spying? • Probably just money, and headlines. • Policy is harder to change. • Police Self Insurance insulates them from their bad behavior’s consequences.

  31. Publish! • https://www.flickr.com/photos/29801588@N08/sets/ • It is important to lay the foundation of the work activists will do after you. • Keep privacy in mind, but tilt that toward activists and against police officers. • The presumption is for publication if the subject is a public employee and the fact is related to their conduct as a public employee.

  32. Publish! • http://www.scribd.com/andrew_hendricks_2 • Many indexes and communication record sets are perfectly appropriate to share online, intact. • Never publish anything unless you have read ALL OF IT first.

  33. References • Most of these are WA State specific • http://www.dol.wa.gov/business/checkstatus.html • http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/ • http://www.courts.wa.gov/ • http://www.sos.wa.gov/corps/corps_search.aspx • http://portal.cityoftacoma.org/irj/go/km/prteventname/HtmlbEvent/prtroot/pcd!3aportal_content!2fevery_user!2fgeneral!2feu_role!2fcom.sap.km.home_ws!2fcom.sap.km.hidden!2fcom.sap.km.urlaccess!2fcom.sap.km.Navigation/City_Documents/PublicDisclosure

  34. References Continued • http://tcproperty.co.thurston.wa.us/propsql/front.asp • http://epip.co.pierce.wa.us/cfapps/atr/epip/search.cfm • http://info.kingcounty.gov/Assessor/eRealProperty/default.aspx • http://assessor.snoco.org/propertysearch.aspx • http://web1.seattle.gov/courts/cpi/ • http://regex.info/exif.cgi • https://fortress.wa.gov/dol/dolprod/dsdDriverStatusDisplay/ • https://armsweb.co.pierce.wa.us/Marriage/SearchEntry.aspx?e=newSession • https://www.muckrock.com/foi/tacoma-72/cell-site-simulator-acquisition-and-use-tacoma-police-department-12243/

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