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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
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tracking the movements of innocent people
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it gets abused
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maybe for blackmail
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maybe for political advantage
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maybe for simple voyerism
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fortunately, there are steps we can take
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local police departments
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can be governerned by the city councils
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which can pass laws requiring the police
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to dispose of the data of innocent
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people while allowing the legitiamte
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uses of the technology to go forward
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Thank you.
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(Applause).