Planet Money
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
[00:05:56] S0: This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. If you've listened to enough podcasts, you know a confident answer isn't necessarily a correct one. Sources matter. The same goes for AI, tax, and compliance. Aviator is grounded in twenty plus years of Avalara tax intelligence and delivers source backed, audit defensible outcomes with human oversight built in because the AI said so won't pass an audit. Visit avalara.com/aviator. [00:06:26] S3: This message comes from LinkedIn. Owning a small business comes with a lot of challenges and means juggling multiple things at once. It's even harder to do it efficiently. But with LinkedIn, you get all the tools you need to grow in one place. With LinkedIn, simplify your sales, marketing, and hiring so that you can actually run your small business. Learn more at linkedin.com/planetmoneyshow. This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com/bankguy for details. Capital One NA, member FDIC.
00:06:26 · S3, Amanda Aronczyk, Joe Pascarella
[00:06:26] S3: This message comes from LinkedIn. Owning a small business comes with a lot of challenges and means juggling multiple things at once. It's even harder to do it efficiently. But with LinkedIn, you get all the tools you need to grow in one place. With LinkedIn, simplify your sales, marketing, and hiring so that you can actually run your small business. Learn more at linkedin.com/planetmoneyshow. This message comes from Capital One. Capital One offers checking accounts with no fees or minimums. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com/bankguy for details. Capital One NA, member FDIC. [00:07:05] S2: I'm going to tell you this story in two parts. The first is about how this web of surveillance ended up on every NYPD issued cell phone. The second part is about how that web grew so big without any of us agreeing to it. So it's a story about the rise of the surveillance system and the secrecy that built it. To start off, I wanted to talk with someone who remembers what policing was like back in the day without all the fancy tech and video cameras. So I got in touch with former NYPD captain Joe Pascarella, who remembers thinking back in the early two thousands, more video might be helpful for police. [00:07:42] S4: You know, at the time, I didn't think we were doing a good job in the NYPD. [00:07:46] S2: The NYPD was being heavily criticized for what was known as stop and frisk, where police officers were stopping mostly young people of color and searching them based on some vague notion of suspicion.
00:07:46 · Amanda Aronczyk, Joe Pascarella
[00:07:46] S2: The NYPD was being heavily criticized for what was known as stop and frisk, where police officers were stopping mostly young people of color and searching them based on some vague notion of suspicion. [00:07:58] S4: So I thought, you know, a good way to cut down stops, just film everybody instead. [00:08:03] S2: That that is what you thought? Or [00:08:05] S4: That that was my thought, you know, nonphysical policing. [00:08:08] S2: So, right, in the early days of more camera surveillance, it was seen as a fix for something. [00:08:13] S4: Yes. Yes. I think it was a fix for, you know, less physical policing. You know, in a camera, there's a lot. You get a field of view. You get a direction. You could get someone's gait. You can get their biometrics. You could get a lot more off a camera than a physical observation. [00:08:28] S2: And is this... I can't tell what your what your take is on that. Like, is that positive? Is that negative? [00:08:33] S4: I... You know, I don't know. It's hard to say. It's in that public safety versus individual rights. Depends on, you know, the old adage where you sit is where you stand. [00:08:41] S2: Joe now sits at a desk at Saint Joseph's University in Brooklyn. There, he's a professor of criminal justice and cybersecurity, and he's got more time to think about the ways technology might step on people's rights. But when he was first starting out all the way back in 1991, he was mostly thinking about how to stay safe. [00:09:01] S4: My first role is actually... I'm I'm walking a foot post in Times Square.