Catherine Crump - The Dangerous details Police Track About Us

Little do we know how much the Police know about us...

In her TED talk, Catherine Crump explains the small and surprisngly dangerous detail the Police track about us.

This TED talk opened my eyes in many ways regarding how much our Police and federal government can learn about us. People always joke about how the FBI is watching us, or there is someone inside our camera, but this TED talk brings out a true reality. 

If you drive your car around in the United States, the Police can track how you go about your daily life using the Automatic License Plate Reader that is mounted on roads or police cars. This technology is able to capture the license plates of moving cars and rendering it into readable texts so they can be checked for a lists of cars can could potentially be wanted for wrongdoing. These machines are able to track where the cars have been, when, and possibly who the people in the vehicles are.

Photo above displays an Automated License Plate Reader located on Police Car.

BUT, why is that fair if you are not suspect of anything? Police simply keep this information in case it is needed one day. At the same time, the federal government is collecting all of this information and creating one big data base to see where Americans are going/ traveling too.

Another device I learned about in this TED talk is a 'cell tower dump'. With this device “law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time, a technique which has been known to reveal the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people. Also, using a device known as a StingRay, 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." … 

Initially, the amount of information that the police and federal government have on us combined, is absurd to me. Many can call this an invasion of privacy. One real-life example that comes to my head that this information could be useful is when in search of a crime scene suspect.

Where was their car? What do their phone receipts look like? Who have they been in contact with? If unsure, the law can look into whether or not their alibi matches up with the information we have. This would be a great time for this evidence to be used.

Others may feel uncomfortable knowing that their everyday life is on file somewhere for people to see. Some information can be harmless, but it is still uneasy to feel like you are never really free to be on your own without someone collecting data on you.

This is something that could cause a great case for arguements whether this information gathered on U.S citizens (even people out of the country) is necessary or unecessary.