I'm not well-versed enough in US law to say whether they're doing it fully legally, found a legal loophole, or they just don't care (and most news sources can't seem to decide on this either yet), but I simply see this as fairly just and effective means of countering anonymous instigators within a crowd that's essentially helping them escape justice (i.e. doing the exact same thing they accuse police of doing).
It really is absolutely ridiculous to say that because some citizen broke the law, then the police are justified to
also break the law to stop them. That logic just doesn't work.
Right now you have people in basically a military role randomly kidnapping people off the streets, illegally interrogating them without any due process, then dumping them again when they can't get anything on them, and it's easy to see from the accounts that they're either destroying records related to this, suppressing the information, or just not keeping any records about what's going on. So right now in the USA you have illegal detainment going on, but they're also keeping it out of the records, so they're testing the waters with random abductions without record keeping. If they get away with this, they'll go further in the future, that's how it works.
That's a very dangerous game to play. It's the type of things fascistic latin American governments routinely do, and the type of thing that easily leads to abuses. Like, if they accidentally kill one of these people they can and probably would just dump their body in a dumpster somewhere and agree to never mention it again.
Oh right, but this is justified I guess because sometimes protestors hide their identities, wear masks etc, so it's ok to be kidnapped by commandoes with balaclavas on in unmarked vehicles. Because, fundamentally ... that's the same thing the protestors are doing right? Sorry but that logic doesn't work.