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 quantities

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 wrongdoing,

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-Lacabe 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 information
in isolation,

or even that multiple police
departments are doing it.

At the same time,
the federal government

is collecting 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

tracking the movements of innocent people

it gets abused

maybe for blackmail

maybe for political advantage

maybe for simple voyerism

fortunately, there are steps we can take

local police departments

can be governerned by the city councils

which can pass laws requiring the police

to dispose of the data of innocent

people while allowing the legitiamte

uses of the technology to go forward

Thank you.

(Applause).