We have seen dramatic visible evidence of the advanced military equipment that has been deployed to local police departments. We have also seen evidence of how the NSA is spying on the lives and communications of Americans. It now appears that the technology and techniques of such surveillance are rapidly being deployed to a police department near you.
The Future of Getting Arrested What they're gonna do when they come for you
Devices designed to detect questionable activity are proliferating. Several cities have recently put in place networks of microphone-based gunshot sensors, and others are likely to adopt similar systems. When a sensor picks up a suspicious noise, a computer program analyzes the sound and, if it resembles gunfire, determines its point of origin to within a few yards. A human reviews the report and, if warranted, dispatches officers to the scene—all within about 40 seconds of the gunshot.
At the federal level, an initiative called Next Generation 911 will enable victims and witnesses to send texts and, eventually, photos and videos to emergency dispatchers—something that’s currently impossible because the 911 network runs on analog technology from the 1970s. People caught in situations—home invasions, for instance, or domestic-violence incidents—in which they can’t safely speak into a phone will be able to get help, and police will receive valuable real-time crime-scene footage.
Controversially, police departments are starting to monitor social media, which many gangs have embraced as a vehicle for branding and boasting. By searching for specific keywords and mapping interactions among individual users, law-enforcement agencies can keep track of suspected gang members, and identify bubbling gang rivalries. They can also infiltrate networks by posting under aliases and “friending” suspects. The Yale criminologist Andrew Papachristos, who works closely with police departments and gangs, says he hopes that the coming years will see a public debate about how aggressively law-enforcement agencies should use the Web to gather intelligence on people who are not already criminal suspects. Many states have set legal thresholds for classifying someone as a gang member, Papachristos says. “But if all the evidence you need is a Twitter post that says, ‘I hate the Disciples,’ the bar is changing.”
These are examples of initiatives that are actively in the works with varying degrees of support from the federal government. Certainly some of them such as making it easier to contact the 911 network sound like positive developments. However, the infiltration of internet social media is a good bit more chilling. The FBI has been in this business for sometime. Agents posing as under age girls entice pedophiles and have managed to get convictions as a result of their efforts.
The notion of predictive policing has usually meant things like collecting statistics about past crime and allocating law enforcement resources accordingly. However, the drones that have been used to track terrorists in the Middle East are now being deployed to track urban crime. Something along these lines has been implemented in Compton, CA. There is of course political push back against programs for wide area surveillance, but use of the T word can likely overcome that.
We have seen indications of how the Dept. of Homeland Security and its fusion centers are coordinating communication among local police and the federal government. The FBI has long had a role in national crime prevention. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that there is also information sharing with the NSA.