How Police Fund Surveillance Technology is Part of the Problem

Law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level are spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on surveillance technology in order to track, locate, watch, and listen to people in the United States, often targeting dissidents, immigrants, and people of color. EFF has written tirelessly about the harm surveillance causes communities and its effect is well documented. What is less talked about, but no less disturbing, are the myriad ways agencies fund the hoarding of these technologies.

In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice reported on the irresponsible and unregulated use and deployment of police surveillance measures in the town of Calexico, California. One of the most notable examples of the frivolous spending culture includes spending roughly $100,000 in seized assets on surveillance equipment (such as James Bond-style spy glasses) to dig up dirt on city council members and complaint-filing citizens with the aim of blackmail and extortion. Another example: a report from the Government Accountability Office showed that U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers used money intended to buy food and medical equipment for detainees to instead buy tactical gear and equipment.

Drawing attention to how police fund surveillance technology is a necessary step, not just to exposing the harm it does, but also to recognize how untransparent and unregulated the industry is. Massive amounts of funding for surveillance have allowed police to pay for dozens of technologies that residents have no control over, or even knowledge about. When police pay for use of predictive policing software, do town residents get an inside look at how it works before it deploys police to arrest someone? No, often because that technology is “proprietary” and the company will claim that doing so would give away trade secrets. Some vendors even tell police not to talk to the press about it without the company's permission or instruct cops to leave use of the technology out of arrest reports. When law enforcement pays private companies to use automated license plate readers, what oversight do the surveilled have to make sure that data is safe? None—and it often isn’t safe. In 2019, an ALPR vendor that was hacked allowed 50,000 Customs and Border Patrol license plate scans to leak onto the web.

Law enforcement will often frame surveillance technology as being solely a solution to crime–but when viewed as a thriving industry made up of vendors and buyers, we can see that police surveillance has a whole lot more to do with dollars and cents. And often it's that money that's driving surveillance decisions, and not the community's interests.

Article continues at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/09/how-police-fund-surveillance-techn...