Over the past decade, MDFT use has quickly proliferated across the country. Records obtained by OPB show the Portland Police Bureau adopted the technology as early as October 2014 and has invested at least $270,629.96, outspending significantly larger departments. By contrast, since 2015, the similarly-sized Seattle police department has spent at least $240,837 on MDFTs. The Houston police department, with five times more officers than PPB, has spent at least $210,255, and the Los Angeles police department spent around $358,426 despite being almost 10 times the size of the Portland police. Warrants reviewed by OPB going back to 2018 show PPB searching phones to investigate a wide array of crimes ranging from attempted murder, bank fraud and robbery to lower level crimes like bike theft. And for years, the bureau was conducting digital searches with no policies in place regulating the practice. […] “People, when faced with authority figures in particular, are very likely to agree to whatever they’re asked to do,” he said. “I don’t think people understand how extracting works ... but on the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced that they wouldn’t consent even if they did just because people consent to all sorts of police invasions of their privacy without a second thought in order to acquiesce to their authority.”

CIVIC Platform is a technology environment that makes institutional data more accessible, enabling creative applications and analysis. We connect resources and a nationwide network of collaborators with complex information challenges in the public interest to build projects on CIVIC’s open technology frameworks. Our vision is for public data to be available as a vital resource for collaboration and group problem solving -- accessible programatically, in common formats, with excellent documentation, using secure and reliable technology. The technology is only part of the challenge. Custodians of this data in government, nonprofit, and academia face barriers of limited funding, access to talent, and unique compliance. We’re building the teams and systems to make it happen.