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.
but more than that, increasingly,
local police departments are keeping records not just
of people wanted for wrong doing,
but every plate that passes them by,
resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data
about where Americans have gone.
Did you know this was happening?
When Mike Katz Lakave asked his local police department
for information about the plate reader data they had on him,
this is what they got:
in addition to the date, time and location
the police department had photographs that captured
where he was going and often, who he was with
the second photo from the top
is a photo of Mike and his two duaghters
getting out of their car
in their own driveway.
the government has hundreds of photos like this
of Mike going about his daily life.
and if you drive a car in the United States,
you can bet money that they have photographs
like this of you going about your daily life.
Mike hasn't done anything wrong,
why is it okay
that the government is keeping all of this information?
The reason it's happening
is because as the cost of storing this data has plummeted
the police department simply hangs on
to it, just in case it could be useful someday.
the issue is not just that one police department
is gathering this informaiotn
in isolation
or even that multiple police departments are doing it,
at the same time, the federal government
is collection all of these
individual pots of data
pooling them together into one vast database
with hundreds and millions of hits
showing where Americans have traveled
this document from the
federal drug enforcement administration
which is one of the agencies
primarily interested in this,
is one of several
that reveal the existence of this database
meanwhile, in New York City,
the NYPD has driven police cars
equipped with license plate readers,
past mosques in order
to figure out who is attending
the uses and abuses of this technology
aren't limited to the United States.
in the UK, the police deparmtnet
put 80-year-old John Kat
on a plate reader watch list
after he had attended of lawful political demonstrations
where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees
license plate readers aren't the only mass location tracking technology
available to law enforcement agents today,
through a technique known as a cell tower dump,
law enforcement agents can
uncover who was using one or more cellphones
at a particular time
a technique that is known
to reveal their location of tens of thousands
and even hundreds
of thousands of people
Also, using a device known as a sting ray,
law enforcement agents
can send tracking signals inside people's houses
to identify the cell phones located there.
and if they don't know which house to target,
they've been known to drive
this technology through entire neighborhoods
just as the police in ferguson possess high tech military weapons and equipment,
so too do police departments across the united states possess
high tech surveillance gear
just because we don't see it
doesn't mean it's not there
The question is
what should we do about this
I think this poses a serious
civil liberties threat
history has shown that once
the police have massive quantities of data