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The shocking police
crackdown
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on protestors in Missouri,
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in the wake of the police
shooting of Michael Brown,
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underscored the extent to which 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
with surveillance equipment.
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NSA-style mass
surveillance is enabling
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local police departments
to gather vast quantities
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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
information
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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
against hot lists
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of cars potentially wanted
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 wrongdoing,
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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-Lacabe 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
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 that
the government
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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 to it,
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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 information
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 collecting all of these
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
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration,
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which is one of the agencies
primarily interested in this,
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is one of several 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 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).