The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you

The shocking police crackdown
on protestors in Ferguson, 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 information
about each and every one of us

in a way 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,

attend an Alcoholics 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 interact.

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 of 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 picture of Mike and
his two daughters

getting out of their car
in their own driveway.

The government has
hundreds of photos like this

about Mike going about
his daily life.

And if you drive a car
in the United States,

I would 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 departments
simply hang 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,

and pooling them together
into one vast database

with hundreds of
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 department

put 80-year-old John Kat
on a Plate Reader watch list

after he had attended dozens 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 cell towers
at a particular time,

a technique which
has known to reveal

the 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
around through whole 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 you 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,

or maybe for
simple voyeurism.

Fortunately, there are
steps we can take.

Local police departments can
be governed by the city councils,

which can pass laws
requiring the police

to dispose of the data
about innocent people

while allowing the legitimate
uses of the technology to go forward.

Thank you.

(Applause).