Planet Money
00:00:21 · Amanda Aronczyk
[00:00:21] S2: A couple of months ago, I got put on a grand jury. Now this is not the kind of jury where you have to find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This was the kind of jury where you sit and watch a bunch of cases. Prosecutors for each case come in, present evidence, and then ask us, is there enough evidence to proceed to trial? Grand jury might see dozens of cases. It's a kind of triage at the beginning of the jury system, and it's there to protect people from the state, you know, overreaching, trying to put people on trial without enough evidence. And for me, it was a really intense month. The prosecutors played videos for us of thefts in progress and assaults and attempted murders and a couple of murder murders. It was kinda brutal. Now look. We all know there are cameras everywhere. Everyone is talking about those flock automated license plate readers and what their local police departments are doing with that info, but I did not understand the extent of it, just how vast it is. I did not know. I was being watched on practically every street, every corner, and every store, on every subway. So as my time as a juror was wrapping up, I called up Michelle Dahl. She runs the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, also known as STOP because they are trying to stop surveillance. And I wanted to talk about how much video the New York City Police Department seemed to have access to. So I I feel like I'm an aware person in the city, but was shocked by grand jury duty. And so I called your organization, STOP, and discovered that you couldn't really answer my call because you were on grand jury duty. That's correct. How did that happen? Like, did nobody ask you what you do for a living?
00:02:09 · Michelle Dahl, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:02:09] S1: Oh, I volunteered the information. I said, I'm a civil rights lawyer. Is this going to be an issue? I also [00:02:15] S2: Weirdly, it wasn't. We were on grand jury duty at the same time on the same floor in adjoining courtrooms. [00:02:21] S1: We must have crust beds [00:02:22] S2: and some points. Cross bath. There was a farmer's fridge. Yeah. I ate that. Yeah. It was old a little. [00:02:27] S1: I never tried that, but I did get a couple Celsius drinks. [00:02:31] S2: We are not allowed to talk to each other or tell you about specific cases we saw or the witnesses we heard from. We have been sworn to secrecy, but we can talk very broadly about the experience. So for example, let's say a grand jury was shown video of a hit and run. There might be footage of the incident from a camera on the street. That's not all that surprising, but there might also be an edit, like dozens of videos of the vehicle driving for miles shot from all sorts of cameras, all sorts of angles in black and white, in color. Then the prosecutor might show a video still of the driver. And it was like, how did they do this? Do the police go visit all the bodegas? You know, ask the state police for videos of the highways and then go to each and every business on the route to edit all of these videos together. Michelle says they often don't have to. Work that used to take days now can take just minutes because police can pull it all from this massive system.
00:02:31 · Amanda Aronczyk, Michelle Dahl
[00:02:31] S2: We are not allowed to talk to each other or tell you about specific cases we saw or the witnesses we heard from. We have been sworn to secrecy, but we can talk very broadly about the experience. So for example, let's say a grand jury was shown video of a hit and run. There might be footage of the incident from a camera on the street. That's not all that surprising, but there might also be an edit, like dozens of videos of the vehicle driving for miles shot from all sorts of cameras, all sorts of angles in black and white, in color. Then the prosecutor might show a video still of the driver. And it was like, how did they do this? Do the police go visit all the bodegas? You know, ask the state police for videos of the highways and then go to each and every business on the route to edit all of these videos together. Michelle says they often don't have to. Work that used to take days now can take just minutes because police can pull it all from this massive system. [00:03:32] S1: And it acts essentially as a search engine. Police officers can type in a person's name, and it will pull up a profile of that person, pulling data from different databases that they have. [00:03:44] S2: They might also be able to type in an address and pull up video. [00:03:47] S1: So it draws data from 80,000 plus cameras across the city, footage from drones, automated license plate readers, facial recognition tech can be used alongside it, and it's done without a warrant.
00:03:47 · Michelle Dahl, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:03:47] S1: So it draws data from 80,000 plus cameras across the city, footage from drones, automated license plate readers, facial recognition tech can be used alongside it, and it's done without a warrant. [00:04:03] S2: A warrant. Like an official permission slip from a judge to invade your privacy and search you or your stuff if it seems like you might have broken a law. [00:04:11] S1: And so we're just mass monitoring everyone for the chance that something might happen.
00:04:11 · Michelle Dahl, Amanda Aronczyk
[00:04:11] S1: And so we're just mass monitoring everyone for the chance that something might happen. [00:04:18] S2: Michelle's not saying that the police just sit around all day watching videos to wait and see if one of us is criming, but they have so many details about us and our lives available to them within seconds. I mean, whether this is good or bad, I just don't remember agreeing to all this. And that's because when it comes to the details, almost no one did. When I started to look into how and why the city where I live set up a massive all watching system, like picture a digital version of one of those bulletin boards with all the red strings tying together faces to names to locations to today to a year ago. I ended up talking to the NYPD, to government officials, to researchers, and to lawyers to figure out what happened. Turns out that while decisions were being made about what tech to adopt and how much to pay for it, almost no one was consulted. For a long time, the only paper trail was offline, stored in filing cabinets, kept under lock and key. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Amanda Aronczyk. For years, police have argued for security over transparency and spent billions of tax dollars without our permission on watching us, tracking us, recording us. Today on the show, how this all went down with the largest police department in the country and the fight to get police everywhere to tell us how they're watching us.
00:05:56 · S0, S3
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