Catherine Crump: The small and surprisingly dangerous detail the police track about you

I recently watched a TED talk from Catherine Crump about how the United States police track you just from an automatic license plate tracker.  The automatic license plate scanner is mounted in several place across cities, and on police cars themselves.  The scanner takes a picture of license plates mounted on cars, converts them to text, and can then alert authorities to the license plates of known criminals.

The issue Catherine talks about, is how this seemingly innocuous tool is used to subvert the privacy of citizens. The tool doesn't just collect data about criminal plates, but every plate that it encounters.  This let's the government have access to a large amount of private data that it shouldn't have.  Catherine notes an example where a person asked the police what data they had on his own license plate number, and they were able to tell him where he went, what he did, and who he was with.

Catherine amounts this type of behavior as spying on private citizens, and I tend to agree.  Police have been seen to use this tool to note which people go into mosques, and who have attended protests.  This allows them to build profiles for people to watch, most of whom are just going about their day.  She posits that this allows for an unprecedented amount of power for the government, and is a civil liberties threat.

This is honestly a terrifying watch as a US citizen, and I would recommend people give it a listen just to stay informed.  The link to the talk is here: