Police claim 'violent extremists' exploit coronavirus to defeat facial recognition, leaked files show

As the coronavirus continued to ravage the country into the late spring and early summer, the Department of Homeland Security realized it had a problem on its hands: Masks worn to limit the virus's spread had the unintentional side effect of impeding law enforcement's facial-recognition technology. 

The fear, that "violent extremists" would exploit public health recommendations in an effort to combat digital surveillance, was laid out in a leaked May 22, 2020, DHS "intelligence note" published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, an organization — co-founded by journalist Emma Best — specializing in the publication of leaked documents. The document, one of hundreds of thousands in the so-called BlueLeaks files (cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs confirmed the leak was authentic late last month), depicts law enforcement scrambling to warn police across the country that a common sense health measure was instead a sign of something potentially sinister: violence.  Read more...

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