An Oregon Department of Justice investigator used a search tool to racially profile Twitter users who used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, the state’s attorney general said in a letter to a civil rights organization Tuesday in which she said she was “appalled” by the practice and has suspended the investigator.
Attorney General Ellen F. Rosenblum, responding to complaints form the Portland chapter of the Urban League, wrote Tuesday that she has ordered her department to stop using the online search tool and launched an investigation, saying the practice “raises many troubling questions” about law enforcement profiling throughout the state.
One Twitter account targeted by the probe belonged to Erious Johnson, director of civil rights for the state justice department and husband to Nkenge Harmon Johnson, the Urban League’s president.
“On a personal note, I have now seen firsthand how devastating profiling can be — written on the face of a member of my team,” Rosenblum wrote in the letter. “It must not continue.”
Rosenblum said she learned about the incident shortly before she received a letter from the local chapter of the Urban League. That letter alerted her that it is “improper, and potentially unlawful, for the Oregon Department of Justice to conduct surveillance and investigations on an Oregonian merely for expressing a viewpoint, or for being a part of a social movement.”
“We are concerned that such unwarranted investigations are racially motivated, and create a chilling effect on social justice advocates, political activists and others who wish to engage in discourse about the issues of our time,” continued the letter, which was also signed by the local affiliates of the NAACP, American Civil Liberties Union, and the AFL-CIO.
Rosenblum is currently working on a report which will include the findings of a statewide task force on police profiling in the state. She wrote in her letter Tuesday that after the #BlackLivesMatter incident, she is “more committed than ever to eliminating law enforcement profiling” in Oregon.
Black Lives Matter activists and other protesters have previously been targeted by law enforcement surveillance, both online and during high-profile protests. In July, the Intercept published documents revealing that the Department of Homeland Security has been monitoring the Black Lives Matter movement since the anti-police protests in Ferguson last summer. The documents indicate that the department frequently collects information, including location data, on Black Lives Matter activities from public social media accounts, including on Facebook, Twitter, and Vine, even for events expected to be peaceful, according to the Intercept.
And during the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore this spring, the FBI and the Baltimore police used advanced technology on airplanes to monitor protesters, according to the Baltimore Sun.