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.