ACLU Releases Toolkit to Force Police Disclosure of Surveillance Tech

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts has released an online toolkit designed to help criminal defense attorneys uncover whether police used surveillance technologies—often in secret—to build cases against their clients.

The toolkit, described by the organization as the first of its kind, centers on legal motions that compel prosecutors to disclose whether surveillance tools were deployed against defendants. Technologies covered include facial recognition systems, automatic license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, cell-site simulators known as "stingrays," location data purchased from commercial brokers, AI-drafted police reports, and forensic tools that extract data from phones and vehicle infotainment systems.

The motions rest on a foundational 1963 rule of American criminal law requiring prosecutors to turn over all evidence that could aid the defense. According to WIRED, which first reported the details, the toolkit will be distributed through a password-protected library accessible only to verified defense attorneys.

Why it matters

Police departments routinely adopt surveillance technologies years before courts establish legal boundaries for their use. The U.S. Supreme Court didn't require warrants for cell phone location records until 2018, despite widespread mobile phone adoption in the late 1990s. This toolkit addresses a structural problem: defendants cannot challenge tools they never knew were used against them, allowing questionable surveillance practices to persist unchecked.

The disclosure problem

Jennifer Herrmann, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Massachusetts and one of the toolkit's authors, told WIRED the organization is fighting on two fronts—pressuring cities to abandon problematic tools outright and arming defense lawyers to expose surveillance in court.

The disclosure gap is well-documented. FBI records show the bureau required local police to sign secrecy agreements before using cell-site simulators, with one Baltimore agreement instructing prosecutors to drop cases entirely rather than reveal the device in court. Baltimore police used the technology more than 4,300 times between 2007 and 2015. These agreements continued until at least 2020, according to FBI records obtained by the ACLU.

In a 2017 Missouri murder investigation, authorities used Fog Reveal, a commercial tool mapping movements through app-harvested location data, but the Associated Press found no trace of it in trial exhibits. When Louisiana authorities arrested Randal Quran Reid in 2022—a Georgia man misidentified by facial recognition and jailed for nearly a week—the arrest warrant attributed his identification to "a credible source" rather than software, according to The Washington Post.

Vanishing evidence

The toolkit also includes preservation motions targeting surveillance data that automatically deletes itself. Axon's Draft One, an AI tool that writes police reports from body camera audio, discards machine-written first drafts by design. An Axon product manager told the Electronic Frontier Foundation in July 2025 that this choice avoids creating "disclosure headaches" for police and prosecutors. California responded by enacting a law requiring agencies to retain original drafts.

Flock Safety's license plate reader network deletes footage after 30 days by default, and Chicago's ShotSpotter contract declared gunfire data the vendor's property, not the city's. In each case, evidence a defendant needs can vanish before a defense attorney is appointed.

Gideon Epstein, a Technology for Liberty policy counsel at the ACLU and the toolkit's co-author, noted the organization still advocates for quick data deletion in general but recognizes that once charges are filed, the same data can exonerate defendants.

Legal precedent in Massachusetts

Massachusetts courts have established favorable precedent for these challenges. In 2024, the state's Supreme Judicial Court permanently dismissed drug and firearm charges against a Boston man after police defied a court order to turn over records of fake social media profiles used for surveillance. Last year, the same court ruled defendants can demand hearings forcing prosecutors to prove ShotSpotter's reliability before its evidence reaches a jury.

The toolkit arrives three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that geofence warrants—orders forcing Google to identify all phones near a crime scene—constitute a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, triggering constitutional privacy protections. The ACLU's toolkit includes a geofencing motion ready for use as lower courts work out implementation details.

The details were first reported by WIRED.