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The shocking police
crackdown on protestors

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in Missouri, in the wake
of the police shooting


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of Michael Brown

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underscored the extent to which

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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

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with surveillance equipment.

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NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling

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local police departments 
to gather

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vast quantitates of sensitive informaiton

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about each and every one of us

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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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or an Alcoholic 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

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information about everyone else,

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the government can gain a detailed
portrait

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of how private citizens act

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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

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about what happens
behind closed doors.

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and local police departments
make decisions

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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

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capture images of every passing car


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and convert the license plate

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into machine-readable text

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so that they can be checked

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against hot lists

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of cars potentially wanted

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for wrongdoing.

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but more than that, increasingly,

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local police departments are 
keeping records not just

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of people wanted for wrong doing,

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but 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 Lakave
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

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is a photo of Mike and his two duaghters

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getting out of their car

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in their own driveway.

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the government has hundreds
of photos like this

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of Mike going about his
daily life.

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and if you drive a car 
in the United States,

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you can 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

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that the government 
is keeping all of this information?

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The reason it's happening

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is because as the cost of storing
this data has plummeted

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the police department simply hangs on


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to it, 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 informaiotn

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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 collection all of these

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individual pots of data

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pooling them together into
one vast database

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with hundreds and millions
of hits

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showing where Americans have traveled

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this document from the

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federal drug enforcement administration

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which is one of the agencies

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primarily interested in this,

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is one of several

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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

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equipped with license plate readers,

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past mosques in order

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to figure out who is attending

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the uses and abuses of this technology

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aren't limited to the United States.

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in the UK, the police deparmtnet

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put 80-year-old John Kat

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on a plate reader watch list

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after he had attended 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

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uncover who was using one or more cellphones

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at a particular time

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a technique that is known

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to reveal their location of tens of thousands

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and even hundreds

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of thousands of people

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Also, using a device known as a sting ray,

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law enforcement agents

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can send tracking signals inside 
people's houses

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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

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this technology through entire
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 possess

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high tech surveillance gear

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just because we don't see it

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doesn't mean it's not there

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The question is

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what should we do about this

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I think this poses a serious

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civil liberties threat

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history has shown that once

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the police have massive quantities of data