At Protests, Smartphones Are Tools for Sharing and Targets for Surveillance

Americans' relationships with smartphones can best be described as attached to the hip. As protests for racial justice continue across the U.S., demonstrators are using smartphone cameras and social media to rapidly share their experiences across the internet. They've also downloaded encrypted messaging and police scanner apps at record levels.

But your phone is a non-private two-way street in which your location can be tracked at a block-by-block level. As CNBC writes, we don't know whether cities and police departments are tracking protestors' phones.

We do know authorities have surveillance tools at their disposal. One example is stingrays, devices that mimic cell phone towers and trick phones in the area into transmitting locations and other de-anonymizing information. Another is geofence warrants, which allows the government to subpoena companies like Google for location data from all phones in the vicinity of a crime.

Bottom line: Smartphones aren't just a tool for one-to-many sharing. They're also rich targets for state surveillance.