Boston has spent millions on no-bid contracts for analysts they claim couldn’t track racist demonstrators
After more than 100 white supremacists gathered in Boston and marched through the city over Independence Day weekend, city and law enforcement officials said they “did not have intelligence” that the nationally-known Patriot Front group was coming to the Hub—despite paying a government contractor with CIA ties millions of dollars for exactly that kind of information.
Documents obtained through a Freedom Of Information Act request show how the Boston Police Department has used secretive contracts to pay more than $5 million to Centra Technology as it hires analysts for the controversial Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), which tried to create a massive surveillance network across the metro area last year.
The documents offer a closer look into how BPD spends millions on surveillance programs with little oversight. Civil liberties advocates said city officials need to crack down on a program that violates residents’ rights yet is not intended to actually protect residents, regardless of how much money is spent.
“It’s not surprising that BRIC, given its history of targeting Black, Muslim, and immigrant communities, would not pay attention to a group like Patriot Front,” Fatema Ahmad of the Muslim Justice League said. “It’s futile to expect them to tackle white supremacist violence.”
“I would ask the City Council and the mayor to take a very hard look at what these so-called intelligence operations are producing for the people of Boston,” added Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty Program at ACLU Massachusetts. “There’s simply no evidence that this provides any value to the people of Boston.”
Building BRIC
According to the BPD website, BRIC “works at the forefront of intelligence collection and analysis” and provides information that “pinpoints areas of crime, shootings and gang violence, as well as helping to identify major players and ex-offenders returning to our neighborhoods.” An older summary offers more detail, saying the center is the metro Boston area’s primary focal point for “the gathering, receipt, analysis, and sharing of threat related information among federal, state and local public safety partners,” which “utilizes the talents and experience of seasoned detectives coupled with the advanced training and education of civilian analysts with experience in both criminal and homeland security issues.”
Furthermore, the “combination of these two perspectives supports a vetting and analytic development process that creates an in-depth, high-quality intelligence production and assessment capability.”
In summary and practice: BRIC is all about conducting surveillance, and lots of it. The center spends thousands of dollars a year on cameras and software, according to an ACLU analysis, while an investigation by that organization found BPD officers working for BRIC spied on antiwar activists, including at an event organized by a former Boston city councilor. BRIC also retained the reports it compiled on those groups for years, in violation of federal regulations.
Last year, the Dig broke the story of the BRIC trying to link more than 1,000 surveillance cameras across the the Metro Boston Homeland Security Region—which covers Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Quincy, Revere, Somerville, and Winthrop, as well as Boston—creating a network that would let users watch live and recorded footage remotely and that could add “quick deploy cameras.” At the time, the City Council was pushing a new law that would require council approval for any new surveillance technology, and then-Mayor Kim Janey “paused” the surveillance camera link plan after outrage from civil liberties groups.
That law has since passed and will go into effect this summer, theoretically giving the public more oversight into BRIC activity.
But the…
Read More: New Documents Reveal Extent, Cost Of BPD’s Secret Surveillance Strategy