Defending Rights & Dissent Appears in DHS’s ‘Minnesota 15’ Surveillance

Recently released discovery documents show that the Department of Homeland Security used Clearview AI facial recognition technology to search for ‘Minnesota 15’ defendant Isaac Sant, and that the search results included photos of a 2018 Defending Rights & Dissent protest featuring our Policy Director Chip Gibbons as well as former U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Gibbons issued the following statement in response to the news:

“Although the petition drop with Chelsea Manning was obviously a publicly promoted event, it is troubling to see it appear in a DHS file. We know that law enforcement and intelligence agencies like DHS treat speech as suspicious and love to deploy guilt by association. This photo has nothing to do with any criminal case or criminal investigation. It is pure speech. I already had concerns with the charges being an attempt by the Trump admin to criminalize dissent, and if this is the type of evidence they’re gathering, those concerns are certainly heightened. We at Defending Rights & Dissent have long expressed concerns about the impact of facial recognition on First Amendment rights and I think this incident really illustrates how well founded those concerns were.”

Read more about DHS spying on activists at the Minnesota Reformer, and read more about Defending Rights & Dissent appearing in the documents at All-Source Intelligence.

See the released documents below: