Surveillance, Profits, and the Police

WASHINGTON – The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a new report today about the increasingly central role that surveillance and tech companies are playing in US police departments and how that threatens to give private companies unfettered access to Americans’ sensitive data. The report examines the major companies involved, the potential ways this information could be abused or exploited, and the history of close ties between corporations and police. Every day, police across the country use body cameras, drones, dash cams, and fixed surveillance cameras gathering hours upon hours of footage of people going about their daily lives. And now, some of the biggest surveillance tech companies, including Axon, Flock, and Motorola, want to gather, analyze, and control this data by providing “operating systems” for police departments that, like operating systems on computers and phones, can see and control all the data in the system. This will threaten the civil rights and civil liberties of everyone who interacts with one of these cameras — knowingly or not. Part of this trend is the movement towards police cloud services, which facilitates the consolidation of data from thousands of U.S. police departments within corporate servers and gives these private actors live remote control over the surveillance tech even after it’s deployed in communities. Or as Axon puts it on their website, “integrating hardware devices and cloud software solutions” in “the Axon ecosystem” and connecting “every officer, responder and agency.” “Putting private, for-profit companies at the heart of modern police departments — what could go wrong? The answer is: plenty, and that’s what this paper outlines” said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.“Policymakers, the public, and the policing profession need to grapple with the implications of this corporatization of police departments — especially for people’s civil rights and liberties — and address it before this becomes normalized and leads to new forms of abuse we’ve never seen before.” These new corporate efforts to expand their work with police are especially worrying given how quickly surveillance technology is proliferating across the country — and how few places have strong guardrails or oversight in place. As the report details, there are many ways providers could exploit their insider access to this data, including using it to go after critics, journalists, labor unions, regulators, and competitors, or to try and fend off investigations into their products. The lack of safeguards also means that company employees could use this data to target exes, manipulate prediction markets, or even alter evidence. Unfortunately, it’s not just the companies selling these products that the public needs to be worried about. According to the report, there is another set of players that raise many of the same concerns about private companies’ access to police data and the corporate role in policing: cloud computing platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, which currently also have access to the growing mountain of data generated by surveillance-based policing. The report lays out six recommendations that policymakers could implement to protect their constituents. Recommendations include contract requirements restricting private vendors’ access to law enforcement data, mandating the use of local rather than cloud services, and passing both the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act and Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) laws.