The shocking police
crackdown on protestors
in Missouri, in the wake
of the police shooting
of Michael Brown
underscored the extent to which
advanced military weapons
and equipment,
designed for the battlefield,
are making their way
to small town police departments
across the United States.
Although much tougher to observe,
this same thing is happening
with surveillance equipment.
NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling
local police departments
to gather
vast quantitates of sensitive informaiton
about each and every one of us
that was never previously possible.
Location information can
be very sensitive.
If you drive your car around
the United States,
it can reveal if you go
to a therapist,
or an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting,
if you go to church
or if you don't go to church,
and when that information
about you
is combined with the same
information about everyone else,
the government can gain a detailed
portrait
of how private citizens act
this information used to be private
thanks to modern technology,
the government knows far too much
about what happens
behind closed doors.
and local police departments
make decisions
about who they
think you are
based on this information.
One of the key technologies
driving mass location tracking
is the innocuous sounding
automatic license plate reader.
if you haven't seen one,
it's probably because you didn't
know what to look for
they're everywhere.
mounted on roads or
on police cars,
automatic license plate readers
capture images of every passing car
and convert the license plate
into machine-readable text
so that they can be checked
against hot lists
of cars potentially wanted
for wrongdoing.