Will you have a private home?

Davd Rosen, Alternet

State and Local Law Enforcement

On July 9th, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) released the first set of findings from the House’s Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus.  It found that over 1.3 million federal, state and local law enforcement data requests were made to cellphone companies for personal records in 2011.  Among the tracking information provided to law enforcement entities were: geo-locational or GPS data, 911 call responses, text message content, billing records, wiretaps, PING location data and what are known as cell tower “dumps” (i.e., a carrier provides all the phones numbers of cell users that connect with a discrete tower during a discrete period of time).

In a separate and equally revealing disclosure, the ACLU found that, based on records from over 200 local law enforcement agencies, most law enforcement groups that engaged in cell-phone tracking did not obtain a warrant, subpoena or other court order.

The Associated Press received a 2011 Pulitzer Prize for revealing the role played by the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) secret demographics unit.  It undertook a federally funded, multi-million-dollar, multi-state surveillance program of Muslims in the metro-NY area, involving citizens and noncitizens alike.   Most recently, the AP reported that, based on the testimony of one of the program’s senior executives, the NYPD failed to identify a single attack or threat.

Another NYPD anti-terrorist program is known as the Domain Awareness System (DAS).  It was developed as a commercial partnership between the NYPD and Microsoft at an estimated cost of $30 to $40 million.  With DAS, investigators can track individuals or incidents (e.g., a suspicious package) through live video feeds from some 3,000 CCTV cameras, 2,600 radiation substance detectors, check license plate numbers, pull up crime reports and cross-check all information against criminal and terrorist databases.  Big Brother has become America’s new normal.

One area in which local government and private interests come together involves automatic license plate recognition.  In New York and other cities through the country, LPR cameras are being mounted on lampposts, bridges and police patrol cars and capture images of license plates.  These photos are a being shared with the National Insurance Crime Bureau that represents hundreds of insurance companies.  Thus, private location data of U.S. citizens are being acquired and shared with commercial entities without their knowledge or consent.