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.

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