The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you

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.