Tag: baltimore
Trump Jokes About Baltimore Murder Rate At Rally

Trump Jokes About Baltimore Murder Rate At Rally

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

Continuing his racist attacks on Baltimore, President Donald Trump tried to get some laughs out of his rally Thursday night by making a joke out of the city’s murder rate.

Trump said the city’s murder rate was higher than a series of countries, and then said with a smirk, “I believe it’s higher than … give me a place that you think is pretty bad, give me a place…”

Someone shouted out “Afghanistan,” a suggestion he gleefully took up.

“I believe, we’ll check the number, and if we’re wrong, they’ll tell us tomorrow. There’ll be headlines! ‘Trump exaggerated!” he said.

The crowd laughed.

“I do believe it’s higher than Afghanistan,” he said.

“The President of the United States is using people’s kids, mothers, fathers, who have died on the streets of Baltimore as a punchline at a campaign rally,” noted New York Times reporter Erica Green.

Watch the clip below:

The Baltimore That Raised Me Is America Too

The Baltimore That Raised Me Is America Too

Reprinted with permission from Roll Call.

It was one of those Baltimore row houses that have come to define the city, three stories high, with a set of white marble steps out front. I will never forget those steps, the ones I had to scrub weekly, brush in one hand, Bon Ami cleanser in the other. And when I was finished, I had to do the same for older neighbors who needed the help. But those folks did their part, my mother reminded me, watching over the neighborhood from their windows when the block’s men, women and children were away working, running errands or attending school.

That’s what neighbors do for neighbors, all over America. And yes, that includes West Baltimore, about which Donald Trump tweeted: “No human being would want to live there.”

To my fellow Americans, especially those amused by the “antics” of the president of the United States, who buy what he’s selling, imagine how you would feel if those people and places that are in your bones were judged subhuman by the person whose job it is be a leader, your leader.

Consider how the language of Trump’s presidential tweets — his talk of infestation and disrespect of the people who are as American as you, as complicated and human as you — is tearing the country apart.

Ask why it is that Donald Trump only relegates black and brown people to the category of not human, how those caught in the opioid crisis of West Virginia and Ohio or the cratering manufacturing landscape of the Midwest, well, those are the Americans who may have been left behind but are worthy nonetheless of his empathy and concern. Is it because they voted for him? Is it because they are white?

To me West Baltimore was home, where I grew up with two parents, two brothers, two sisters and an occasional boarder. The kitchen was the heart of the home; it was where we often gathered to talk — and eat — with family and friends and classmates, around that long table with red and white painted benches. Those from coast to coast, who grew up on farms and in high rises, know and smile at some version of that scene.

I returned to the city to work as an editor at The Baltimore Sun when Harborplace and the National Aquarium sparkled, efforts at revitalization as manufacturing jobs shifted or disappeared. Though I don’t live there anymore, I still visit, to see family and friends and enjoy great times with them — eating a seafood meal, listening to the angelic voices of the Maryland State Boychoir (so proud my great-nephew auditioned and got in), taking in the exhibits at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, named for the late businessman and philanthropist.

The exhibits tell the story of Baltimore and Maryland, and some of it is not pretty. But it explains the racism, the redlining and discrimination in housing, employment, education and more that built a stratified society that is not easy to dismantle, the seeds of many of the conditions that Trump uses as ammunition. It also tells the story of the African American men and women who worked hard and cared and achieved despite astounding obstacles.

What Trump said about the congressional district of Rep. Elijah Cummings is simplistic and ridiculously incomplete — notice he failed to mention Johns Hopkins Hospital, where his HUD secretary Ben Carson built a reputation as director of pediatric neurosurgery and where I was born. The district includes parts of Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Howard County, with a median income above the national average, one that puts the South Carolina district once represented in Congress by his acting chief of staff and defender Mick Mulvaney to shame if you use that metric.

But there are clearly challenges in Baltimore, generations in the making, that Cummings has tried to work with the president to solve. He even met with Trump early on, and the president seemed to actually listen. That won’t happen again, though. Besides his personal resentment of the man, a black man, who has the audacity to perform his duties as chair of the House Oversight Committee, which includes calling the president and his family to account, being president of all the people — his job description — is not something Trump is interested in.

He is in a reelection battle and needs to rev up his base, and that is all that matters to Trump and his Republican Party.

Trump has reneged on his campaign promises to African American voters — his message of “What do you have to lose?” But Trump has also broken promises to those out of work in Ohio and Michigan, the Iowa farmers suffering from a tariff war, and the West Virginians who put their trust in him.

The racism is indicative of and a distraction from policies that hurt the struggling of every color: the families who would lose food assistance and the children whose free and reduced school lunches would disappear, adding worry and subtracting nutrition needed for learning. All the while, the loosening of regulations hurts the environment and benefits pay-day lenders and those who run for-profit prisons and colleges. And doesn’t Jared Kushner’s family own Maryland apartments cited for rodent infestation?

That won’t stop Cummings from his work. He said: “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors. It is my constitutional duty to conduct oversight of the executive branch. But it is my moral duty to fight for my constituents.”

Though not of his generation, I still grew up in a Baltimore with racial divisions, neighborhoods and schools and most everything else separate and unequal. I could look up to an older sister and brothers who, unlike Trump, did something about the injustice, marching and putting their own lives on the line because of their love for America. Family members teach in the city’s schools, and my eldest brother still works on civil rights issues, now as an advocate and policymaker for access for the disabled on public transportation for the state of Maryland.

I learned every lesson I needed in my neighborhood, from the nuns at St. Pius V, Oblate Sisters of Providence, members of the first successful Roman Catholic sisterhood in the world established by women of African descent. I roamed the stacks of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, established in 1882, especially my home branch, which stayed open during unrest following the death of Freddie Gray, offering safety and solace.

As my world expanded, I remembered everything my parents taught me.

Now Americans are learning about how loyal and resilient Baltimoreans can be, differences vanishing when the city’s pride and personality are attacked. You will get sick of hearing the recipe for a perfect crab cake (easy on the filler).

And pay attention — the next target of Trump’s wrath might take some notes from “Charm City.”

Mary C. Curtis has worked at The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Charlotte Observer, and as national correspondent for Politics Daily. Currently sheis a senior facilitator with The OpEd Project. Follow her on Twitter @mcurtisnc3.

Trump Tax Law Meant To Help Poor Actually Made A Billionaire Richer

Trump Tax Law Meant To Help Poor Actually Made A Billionaire Richer

Under a six-lane span of freeway leading into downtown Baltimore sit what may be the most valuable parking spaces in America.

Lying near a development project controlled by Under Armour’s billionaire CEO Kevin Plank, one of Maryland’s richest men, and Goldman Sachs, the little sliver of land will allow Plank and the other investors to claim what could amount to millions in tax breaks for the project, known as Port Covington.

They have President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul law to thank. The new law has a provision meant to spur investment into underdeveloped areas, called “opportunity zones.” The idea is to grant lucrative tax breaks to encourage new investment in poor areas around the country, carefully selected by each state’s governor.

But Port Covington, an ambitious development geared to millennials to feature offices, a hotel, apartments, and shopping, is not in a census tract that is poor. It’s not a new investment. And the census tract only became eligible to be an opportunity zone thanks to a mapping error.

As the selection process was underway, a deputy chief of staff to Maryland’s governor wrote in an email that “Port Covington does not qualify” as an opportunity zone.

Maryland’s governor chose the area for the program anyway — after his aides met with the lobbyists for Plank, who owns about 40% of the zone.

“This is a classic example of a windfall benefit,” said Robert Stoker, a George Washington University professor who has studied economic development in Baltimore for decades. “A major investment was already planned and now is in a zone where they are going to qualify for all kinds of beneficial tax treatment.”

In selecting Port Covington, the governor had to exclude another Maryland community from the opportunity zone program. In Baltimore, for example, the governor dropped part of a neighborhood that city officials recommended for the program — Brooklyn — with a median family income one-fifth that of Port Covington. Brooklyn sits just across the Patapsco river from Port Covington, in an area that suffers from one of the highest drug and alcohol death rates in Baltimore, which in turn has one of the highest drug fatality rates nationwide.

In a statement, Marc Weller, a developer who is Plank’s partner in the project, defended the opportunity zone designation. “Port Covington being part of an Opportunity Zone will attract more investors, foster more economic growth in a neglected area of the City, and directly benefit all of the surrounding communities for decades to come,” Weller said. Supporters say the Port Covington development could help several nearby struggling south Baltimore neighborhoods.

An official in the administration of Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, said, “The success of that project is really going to go a long way to providing benefits for the whole city of Baltimore.” The official added: “The governor is a huge supporter of the development.”

A spokesperson for the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development, which was involved in the selection process, said that “due to the time limits of the federal tax incentive, the state of Maryland did purposefully select census tracts where projects were beginning to increase the odds of attracting additional private sector investment to Maryland’s opportunity zones in the near term.”

In December 2017, Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, his signature legislative achievement. Much criticized as a giveaway to the rich, the law includes one headline provision that backers promised would help the poor: opportunity zones. (Listen to the “Trump, Inc.” episode where we travel to an opportunity zone where the Kushner Companies owns large tracts of property.)

Supporters of the program argued it would unleash economic development in otherwise overlooked communities. “Our goal is to rebuild homes, schools, businesses and communities that need it the most,“ Trump declared at a recent event, adding, “To revitalize these areas, we’ve lowered the capital gains tax for long-term investment in opportunity zones all the way down to a very big, fat, beautiful number of zero.”

The provision has bipartisan support. “These cities are gold mines,” New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, a 2020 presidential hopeful and main Democratic architect of the program, told real estate investors in October. “They’re domestic emerging markets that are more exciting than anything you’ll see overseas.”

Here’s how the program works. Say you’re a hedge fund manager, you purchased Google stock years ago, and are sitting on $1 billion in gains. If you sell, you’d send the IRS about $240 million, a lot less than ordinary income tax but still annoying. To avoid paying that much, you can sell the shares and put the $1 billion into an opportunity zone. That comes with three generous breaks. The first is that you defer that $240 million in capital gains tax, allowing you to invest more money up front. But if that’s not enough for you, you can hold the investment for several years and you’ll get a significant reduction in those taxes. What’s more, any additional gains from the new investment are tax-free after 10 years.

It’s impossible to predict how much the tax break will be worth to individual investors because it depends on several variables, not least whether the underlying project gains in value. But one investment pitch projected 10-year returns would jump to 91 percent from 29 percent on a hypothetical $1 million investment. That includes $284,000 in tax breaks — money the federal government would have collected from taxpayers with capital gains but for the program.

The tax code already favored real estate developers like Trump, and his overhaul made it even friendlier. Investors can put money into a range of projects in opportunity zones, but so far most of the publicly announced deals are in real estate. The tax break has led to a marketing boom, with Wall Street pitching investors to raise funds to invest in the zones. Critics argue that the program is flawed, pointing out that there’s no guarantee that the capital investment will help community residents, that the selection process was vulnerable to outside influence, and that it could be a giveaway for projects that were going to happen anyway. In a case in Chicago uncovered by the Real Deal, two tracts already slated for a major development project were selected by the governor as opportunity zones even though city officials hadn’t initially recommended them.

Under the new law, areas of the country deemed to be “low-income communities” would be eligible to be named opportunity zones. The Treasury Department determined which census tracts qualified. Then governors of each state could select one quarter of those tracts to get the tax benefit.

That governor prerogative turned out to be very useful to Kevin Plank.

In 2012, Plank-connected entities quietly began buying up waterfront property on a largely vacant and isolated peninsula south of downtown Baltimore. Often using shell companies to shield the identity of the true buyer, they ultimately spent more than $100 million acquiring much of the peninsula. Plank’s privately held Sagamore Development now controls roughly 40 percent of the area that would later be named an opportunity zone.

In early 2015, more than two and a half years before Trump’s tax law passed, Plank revealed himself as the money behind the purchases. He planned a new development and headquarters for Under Armour, the sports apparel company he started after coming up with the idea as a University of Maryland football player. Today, Under Armour employs 15,000 people. Plank has a net worth of around $2 billion.

Though the Port Covington area was cut off from downtown by I-95, Plank said he likes the location because of the visibility. “When people drive through Baltimore [on I-95] I literally want them to drive through and go, ’There’s Baltimore on the right. There’s Under Armour on the left,’” he told The Baltimore Sun.

A year later, Plank’s firm took his vision to the general public, running TV and print ads touting the new project. One of the ads, reminiscent of the Democratic presidential primary spots airing at that time, was filled with a diverse cast sharing their dreams for a new city within a city.

“We will build it. Together,” the ad begins, before running through a glittering digital rendering of contemporary urban design features. Office towers, shops, transit, parks, jobs — all of it to be anchored by a new world headquarters of the city’s most visible brand name, Under Armour. Sagamore would spearhead the project and sell land to others who would build businesses and housing.

Even before qualifying for the opportunity zone break, taxpayers were going to subsidize the development. Days after the ads touting togetherness, Plank proposed that the city float $660 million in bonds to help build what the company has said would be a $5.5 billion development. Opponents contended Plank’s proposal amounted to corporate welfare that would exacerbate the city’s stark economic and racial divides. But the company agreed to provide millions of dollars to the city and a group of nearby low-income neighborhoods to gain support for the project, and the City Council passed the measure that fall.

As Under Armour’s stock plummeted in 2017 amid slowing sales growth, progress on the Port Covington project lagged. That September, Goldman Sachs stepped in to commit $233 million from its Urban Investment Group. Hogan, himself a real estate developer, personally spoke with the then-CEO of Goldman, Lloyd Blankfein, about the deal.

In the weeks after the 2017 federal tax overhaul passed, Plank’s team spotted an opportunity.

Nick Manis, a veteran Annapolis lobbyist who has also represented the Baltimore Ravens, reached out to Hogan’s chief of staff about Port Covington, according to emails obtained by ProPublica through a public records request. The developers and their lobbyists had given at least $24,000 to Hogan’s campaigns in recent years.

But the developers had a problem.

The Friday before the meeting, a deputy chief of staff to the governor wrote in an email that “Port Covington does not qualify” for the coveted tax breaks.

The Port Covington tract, which includes a gentrified corner of South Baltimore north of the largely empty peninsula, was too wealthy to be an opportunity zone. There is a second provision of the law for wealthier tracts: A tract can qualify if it is adjacent to a low-income area. But Port Covington failed that test, too. Its median family income — nearly 160 percent of Maryland’s — exceeded the income cap even for that provision.

Port Covington was out — unless the tract could somehow be considered low-income in its own right.

On Feb. 5, the Port Covington development team arrived at the second floor of the statehouse in the opulent governor’s reception room to meet with top Hogan aides. The agenda for the meeting included opportunity zones, as well as transit and infrastructure issues. The developer’s team requested that the Port Covington tract be made an opportunity zone. The state officials “acknowledged their interest in receiving that designation,” a Hogan administration official said.

Three days after that meeting, Plank and the Port Covington developers got bad news. The Treasury Department released a list of census tracts across the country that were sufficiently poor to be included in the program. Port Covington was not included in that list.

Three weeks later, however, things turned around. The Treasury Department issued a revised list. The agency said it had left out some tracts in error. The revised list included 168 new areas across the country defined by the agency as “low-income communities.”

This time, Port Covington made the cut.

It couldn’t have qualified because its residents were poor. It couldn’t qualify because it was next to some place that was poor. But the tract could qualify under yet another provision of the law. Some tracts could make the cut if they had fewer than 2,000 people and if they were “within” what’s known as an empowerment zone. That was a Clinton-era redevelopment initiative also aimed at low-income areas.

Port Covington wasn’t actually within an empowerment zone, but it is next to one. So how did it qualify? The area met the definition of “within” because the digital map files the Treasury Department used showed that Port Covington overlapped with a neighboring tract that was designated an empowerment zone, Treasury officials told ProPublica.

That overlap: the sliver of parking lot beneath I-395. That piece of the lot is about one one-thousandth of a square mile.

There are no regulations or guidance on how to interpret the tax law’s use of “within,” said a spokesman for the Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which compiled the maps. The agency made what it called a “technical decision” that any partial overlap with an Empowerment Zone would count as being “within” that zone — no matter how small the area, or if anyone lived there.

Or, if the overlap was even real.

Turns out, no part of Port Covington actually overlapped with the empowerment zone.

Treasury’s decision ignored a well-known problem in geographic analysis known as misalignment, mapping experts said.

Misalignment happens when the lines on digital maps made by two sources differ slightly about where things like roads and buildings lie, according to Henry Luan, a professor of geography at the University of Oregon.

For example, if a tract ends at a highway, one file might show the border on the near side of the highway while another — when zoomed all the way in — might show it a few feet away on the far side. When laid on top of each other, the two files end up with minuscule differences that don’t mean anything in the real world.

Except in this case, it had big real world consequences for Port Covington. The mapping error allowed the entire tract to qualify as an opportunity zone.

“That area of overlap is a complete artifact of” the map files Treasury used, said David Van Riper, director of spatial analysis at the Minnesota Population Center. “It’s not an actual overlap.”

Sometime in the mid-2000s, the Census Bureau used GPS devices to make its map files more accurately represent the country’s roads. One of the maps used by Treasury appeared to be based on the older, less accurate Census maps, Van Riper said.

Even accepting Treasury’s misaligned maps, the entire Port Covington tract receives tax benefits, even though less than 0.3% of it overlaps with the neighboring tract.

“Only a minimal overlap, but you make the whole Census tract benefit from the policy?” Luan said. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

Port Covington is one of just a handful of tracts in the country that ProPublica identified that qualified through similar flaws in Treasury’s process.

Nothing indicates the Port Covington developers had any influence on the Treasury’s decision.

But the lobbying of the governor before the Treasury change appears to have paid off.

As they were lobbying, Baltimore officials were working out which parts of the city would benefit most from being opportunity zones. They petitioned the governor to pick 41 low-income city neighborhoods to get the tax break, all of them well below the program’s maximum income requirements.

The city’s list remained largely intact when the governor made his selections in April. Hogan made just four changes, three of which qualified under the main criteria without the benefit of the mapping error. But the fourth didn’t: Port Covington.

Plank’s team cheered the revision. The very thing that made Port Covington a poor candidate to be an opportunity zone — that it wasn’t a low-income area — could make it exceptionally attractive to investors. In January, they convened an opportunity zone conference at their Port Covington incubator called City Garage featuring state officials and executives from Goldman, Deloitte, and other firms.

“Port Covington kind of fits all the needs,” said Marc Weller, Plank’s partner, at the conference. “It has all the entitlements, and it has a financial partner in place as well. It’s probably the most premier piece of land in the United States that’s in an opportunity zone.”

The opportunity zone program has restrictions intended to prevent already-planned developments from benefitting. But the Port Covington developers told Bloomberg that the firm will be able to reap the benefits of the tax break because it has found new investors. Among the potential new investors who might take advantage of the tax break are Plank’s own family, one of the developers told the Baltimore Business Journal. A Port Covington spokesman denied that Plank’s family members are potential investors.

To get the maximum benefit, investments need to be made in 2019, though investments made through 2026 can take advantage of growth tax-free. Only a portion of the Port Covington project is expected to be underway by then.

A Goldman spokesman said it is “likely” that the firm will take advantage of the opportunity zone benefits in Port Covington, adding that it has “made no firm decisions about how each component will be financed.”

Margaret Anadu, the head of Goldman’s Urban Investment Group and the lead on the Port Covington investment, recently said of the opportunity zone program: “These are the same neighborhoods that have been suffering since redline started decades and decades ago, pretty much eliminating private investment. … And so we simply have to reverse that. And the only way to reverse that is to start to bring that private capital back into these neighborhoods.”

The Port Covington tract is just 4% black. For it to be included in the program, another community somewhere in Maryland had to be excluded. The ones that the city suggested that were excluded by the governor, for example, are 68% black and have a poverty rate three times higher than Port Covington’s.

There is some evidence suggesting being named an opportunity zone has already been a boon for property owners. An analysis by Zillow found that sale price gains in opportunity zones significantly outpaced gains in eligible tracts that weren’t selected. Real Capital Analytics found that sales of developable sites in the zones rose 24 percent in the year after the law passed.

Under Armour has said it’s still committed to building its new headquarters on the peninsula, but it’s not clear when that will happen.

Still, other aspects of the once-stalled project finally started moving forward in recent months. After presenting plans for the first section inside the opportunity zone this winter, the project finally got underway on a rainy day in early May of this year.

“The project is real,” Weller said at the kickoff event, which included Anadu, the Goldman Sachs executive, and city and state officials. “The project is starting. We’re open for business.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

IMAGE: Artist rendering of proposed Port Covington development in Baltimore, MD.

Why Baltimore’s Covert Spy Plane Program Is A Major Battleground For Privacy And Free Speech

Why Baltimore’s Covert Spy Plane Program Is A Major Battleground For Privacy And Free Speech

Published with permission from AlterNet.

A hidden camera in the sky watches people’s movements on the ground; ex-military private contractors control the cameras and run the operation to avoid government oversight. In the background, billionaire funders salivate at the possibility of plush government contracts. In the city of Baltimore, this dystopian scenario is already real life.

A private security firm, Persistent Surveillance Systems, with funding from a billionaire former hedge fund manager, has been filming and recording the people of Baltimore from the skies, using a surveillance plane with an ultra-wide-angle camera that circles the city recording the imagery to massive hard drives. The range encompasses 30 square miles simultaneously, almost a third of the city.

“Imagine Google Earth with TiVo capability,” gushes Ross McNutt, the founder of PSS.

The technology was first developed by the military and deployed in the siege of Fallujah. In an all-too-familiar transition, this battlefield technology needs a new marketplace in order to maintain profitability. Wars come and go, but the domestic marketplace is persistent.

Such is the growth cycle of the surveillance industrial complex, the morphed offspring of the military industrial complex that has distorted values and driven policies for years on end. Capital interests profit from the people’s collective and individual loss of personal privacy.

McNutt founded Persistent Surveillance Systems to bring that battlefield technology home to monitor the people of the United States. He viewed Baltimore as an excellent proving ground in the aftermath of the Freddie Gray case. However, McNutt lacked necessary finances. In stepped Texas-based hedge fund manager and billionaires John and Laura Arnold. The Arnolds’ foundation donated $120,000 to a local foundation, the Baltimore Community Foundation, which funded the spy plane.

By securing private funding, the Baltimore Police Department was able to use the dragnet surveillance technology off-the-books. There was no government oversight or authorization from elected officials, no public disclosures to the community or hearings before the City Council. It was all surreptitious and undisclosed until described last week in a bombshell article in Bloomberg Businessweek.

The Baltimore City Council has, in the aftermath of the Bloomberg Businessweek disclosure, stated that it will hold hearings “as soon as possible” without yet setting a date. The Council should determine which top police officials, including Police Commissioner Kevin Davis, were aware of this covert surveillance program. Each should be terminated by the mayor.

Democratic society cannot tolerate secret police any more than it can tolerate secret police operations. It constituted a gross breach of official duties for police to have failed to bring this mass surveillance program to the attention of the public and elected officials. Termination is the bare minimum degree of individual professional accountability demanded by this breach.

The Supreme Court’s Behind-the-Times Analysis of Mass Surveillance

Not merely a violation of trust, the mass surveillance technology should be treated as a violation of law. The Supreme Court, however, has not charted a clear doctrine in the analysis of mass surveillance technologies’ impact on fundamental civil liberties. Some justices recognize the threat posed, but whether their views will gain a majority remains to be seen.

In United States v. Jones, presented with a challenge to the use of GPS technology to monitor a suspect’s movements on public roadways around-the-clock for 28 consecutive days, the Supreme Court’s nine justices bandied about no less than three distinct legal theories for finding such use of technology without a warrant to be unconstitutional.

The Jones majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, avoided the core issues of how the Fourth Amendment addresses persistent surveillance technologies. The majority, resurrecting an old doctrine, found Fourth Amendment interests were violated because police trespassed on the suspect’s property interests by affixing the technology to the suspect’s car without a warrant.

Justice Alito, joined by three other justices, disparaged Scalia’s approach as applying “18th century tort law” to a controversy centered on a “21st-century surveillance technique.”

A second theory identified by concurring justices would have held the search unconstitutional under modern constitutional standards first articulated in the 1967 landmark case of Katz v. United States, that a Fourth Amendment search occurs when the government violates a subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable.

The reasonable expectation of privacy standard was historic because it detached the analysis from property or trespass law. In Katz, the Supreme Court held that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places,” finding a constitutional violation where police attached an eavesdropping device to monitor conversations that took place in a public telephone booth.

How the Government Creates an Intimate Picture of Your Private Life

“Mosaic theory,” the third legal theory referenced by concurring justices, is the most precise of all three and may ultimately have great significance for application to mass surveillance technologies, especially those that capture and catalogue public activities and movements.

The courts have held that there is not a privacy interest in publicly revealed activity, such as roadway movement. Mosaic theory recognizes that the aggregation of data or the persistent surveillance of public activities can create an intimate picture of a person’s life so revealing that government collection without a warrant violates Fourth Amendment privacy interests.

Even though a single snapshot of a person’s public movement does not trigger a privacy interest, the aggregation of many such snapshots or data points creates a mosaic that is so revealing that it unconstitutionally invades privacy.

While going on a single public trip, for example, a person understands her movements are observable to others, i.e., is not private. The whole of a person’s movements, over time, is not actually exposed to the public because it is impossible that any stranger or random person would observe all those movements. As one court described mosaic theory, “the whole is something different than the sum of its parts.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Jones described how movement tracking “generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” As she pointed out, this could include trips of an “indisputably private nature” including “to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on.”

Justice Sotomayor observed that, “Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future.” This is such a dramatic power, Sotomayor warned, that it “may alter the relationship between citizen and government in a way that is inimical to democratic society.”

Dragnet Surveillance Technology as a Tool of Social Control

History is filled with examples of how such information becomes tools, weapons, used by government for political control. One need look no further than J. Edgar Hoover’s dossiers on activists and dissenters, including Dr. Martin Luther King, and how abusive and repressive U.S. government institutions used such information to target and even destroy the lives of people whose social justice organizing threatened the status quo.

No longer does an official need to order breaking and entering to pilfer psychiatric records, as John Ehrlichman sought to do to discredit Daniel Ellsberg. In order to find details of a person’s activities, associations and intentions, the government can engage in dragnet surveillance, aggregation of information and data mining.

With each resurgence of the social justice movement filling the streets, we have seen a renewed devotion of government surveillance and abuse of anti-terrorism authority to target political organizing in the United States. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has uncovered and exposed thousands of pages from just the recent years alone documenting the FBI, DHS, fusion centers and other agencies targeting of dissent.

How People Can Reverse the Tide

While the law hesitatingly lurches forward, society need not wait for the justices of the Supreme Court to assert leadership and protect our rights, should a majority of the Court ever do so. As reflected in the Katz expectation of privacy standard, it is society that sets expectations of privacy.

There are some who misguidedly suggest that, given technology’s advances, we should expect an end to privacy because there are no limits to technology’s advances. Just because our privacy can be violated does not mean we should expect or tolerate such violations.

How would this look in action? The Baltimore City Council, when it conducts its hearings, should go beyond mere inquiry. It should take action to prevent recurrence and to establish the expectation of the people of Baltimore to not be subject to mass surveillance without their consent.

The Baltimore council should enact legislation banning deployment of mass surveillance technologies by police or any city agency without prior disclosure, debate and legislative approval. It should establish protocol whereby any such technology must be submitted to the council for an independently conducted Privacy Impact Evaluation that will disclose all nature of data collected, retention policies, access restrictions, and all other information needed to make an assessment of the impact on individual’s privacy including when aggregated with information from other data collection systems.

The decision whether to permit such surveillance rests with the people of the United States. Technology is a societal asset. The use of technology is controlled by us, society’s expectations of privacy, and not by the outer limits of technological capabilities, which as Edward Snowden has revealed, have virtually no limits at all.

Carl Messineo is Legal Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

Photo: A model of a military drone is seen in front of an U.S. flag as protesters rally against climate change, ahead of the Democratic National Convention, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., July 24, 2016. REUTERS/Dominick Reuter