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The shocking police crackdown
on protestors in Ferguson, Missouri,

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in the wake of the police 
shooting of Michael Brown,

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underscored the extent to which advanced
military weapons and equipment,

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designed for the battlefield,

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are making their way

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to small-town police departments
across the United States.

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Although much tougher to observe,

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this same thing is happening 
with surveillance equipment.

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NSA-style mass 
surveillance is enabling

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local police departments 
to gather vast quantities

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of sensitive information
about each and every one of us

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in a way that was
never previously possible.

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Location information can 
be very sensitive.

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If you drive your car around
the United States,

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it can reveal if you go 
to a therapist,

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attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,

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if you go to church 
or if you don't go to church.

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And when that 
information about you

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is combined with the same information
about everyone else,

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the government can gain 
a detailed portrait

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of how private citizens interact.

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This information used to be private.

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Thanks to modern technology,

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the government knows far too much
about what happens behind closed doors.

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And local police departments make
decisions about who they think you are

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based on this information.

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One of the key technologies 
driving mass location tracking

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is the innocuous-sounding
Automatic License Plate Reader.

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If you haven't seen one,

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it's probably because you didn't
know what to look for --

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they're everywhere.

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Mounted on roads or 
on police cars,

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Automatic License Plate Readers
capture images of every passing car

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and convert the license plate
into machine-readable text

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so that they can be checked
against hot lists

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of cars potentially wanted
for wrongdoing.

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But more than that, increasingly,

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local police departments 
are keeping records

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not just of people wanted for wrongdoing,

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but of every plate that 
passes them by,

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resulting in the collection
of mass quantities of data

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about where Americans have gone.

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Did you know this
was happening?

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When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked
his local police department

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for information about the plate
reader data they had on him,

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this is what they got:

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in addition to the date, 
time and location,

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the police department had 
photographs that captured

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where he was going and 
often who he was with.

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The second photo from the top
is a picture of Mike and his two daughters

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getting out of their car
in their own driveway.

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The government has 
hundreds of photos like this

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about Mike going about his daily life.

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And if you drive a car 
in the United States,

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I would bet money 
that they have photographs

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like this of you going
about your daily life.

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Mike hasn't done anything wrong.

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Why is it okay that the government
is keeping all of this information?

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The reason it's happening is because,

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as the cost of storing
this data has plummeted,

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the police departments
simply hang on to it,

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just in case it could be useful someday.

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The issue is not just that
one police department

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is gathering this information in isolation

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or even that multiple police 
departments are doing it.

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At the same time, the federal government

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is collecting all of these
individual pots of data,

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and pooling them together 
into one vast database

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with hundreds of millions of hits,

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showing where Americans have traveled.

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This document from the 
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration,

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which is one of the agencies
primarily interested in this,

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is one of several that reveal 
the existence of this database.

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Meanwhile, in New York City,

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the NYPD has driven police cars
equipped with license plate readers

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past mosques in order to
figure out who is attending.

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The uses and abuses of this technology
aren't limited to the United States.

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In the U.K., the police department

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put 80-year-old John Kat
on a plate reader watch list

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after he had attended dozens of
lawful political demonstrations

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where he liked to sit on a bench
and sketch the attendees.

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License plate readers aren't the
only mass location tracking technology

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available to law enforcement agents today.

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Through a technique known as
a cell tower dump,

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law enforcement agents can
uncover who was using

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one or more cell towers
at a particular time,

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a technique which has been known to reveal

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the location of tens of thousands
and even hundreds of thousands of people.

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Also, using a device known as a StingRay,

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law enforcement agents
can send tracking signals

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inside people's houses
to identify the cell phones located there.

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And if they don't know
which house to target,

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they've been known 
to drive this technology

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around through whole neighborhoods.

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Just as the police in Ferguson possess
high-tech military weapons and equipment,

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so too do police departments across
the United States

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possess high-tech surveillance gear.

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Just because you don't see it,

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doesn't mean it's not there.

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The question is, what should
we do about this?

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I think this poses a serious
civil liberties threat.

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History has shown that once the police 
have massive quantities of data,

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tracking the movements of innocent people,

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it gets abused, maybe for blackmail,
maybe for political advantage,

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or maybe for simple voyeurism.

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Fortunately, there are steps we can take.

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Local police departments can 
be governed by the city councils,

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which can pass laws requiring the police

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to dispose of the data 
about innocent people

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while allowing the legitimate
uses of the technology to go forward.

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Thank you.

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(Applause).