The Oxford Advanced Learning Dictionary defines it as, “A totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities. A totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens’ activities.”

If you don’t feel that definition applies here and you aren’t being controlled, just wait. All the vast resources that were spent in the Gulf Wars and GWOT developing technologies to track terrorist fighters through the cities of the Middle East is being brought back to the states and is being turned on law abiding citizens. While many well-meaning people will rightly point to the criminals that have been caught as a result of these technologies and claim that if you want to sort out the bad apples, you have to look at them all. Even if that is true, in practice you would put the good apples back and move on. This simply isn’t the case any longer. The police are insisting on keeping ALL the data they collect — on you as well as the bad guys — and they have are fighting to keep all the data that has been scooped irrespectively of who is in the net. All the while they won’t say exactly what they have or how much. As police forces are susceptible to political forces and, like all professions, have their own bad apples…this much coalesced data will have unintended consequences on ALL citizens.

Throwing more light on the controversial use of police license plate readers, a new report from the Center for Investigative Reporting reveals the ongoing development of a new California database. This database is being established in partnership with Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm whose data analysis technology is in wide use by U.S. intelligence and defense communities.

This CNN video provide more details:

According to their website, a popular Palantir application “Palantir Law Enforcement” features an intuitive, user-friendly interface that allows any agent, detective, or investigator to quickly access and integrate all available information in one place. Instead of logging into separate systems, users can conduct one search for a suspect, target, or location through a single portal and return data from all relevant systems. Palantir Law Enforcement supports existing case management systems, evidence management systems, arrest records, warrant data, subpoenaed data, RMS or other crime-reporting data, Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) data, federal repositories, gang intelligence, suspicious activity reports, Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) data, and unstructured data such as document repositories and emails.[1]

Palantir’s expertise is in finding and analyzing connections between people, places and events in large repositories of electronic data. Federal agents have a trove of reports on the drug cartels, their members, their funding mechanisms, and smuggling routes. They also have dossiers, informants’ reports, surveillance images, intercepted electronic communications, and footage from drones. But what agents lacked — until recently — was a mechanism to assemble and share all that intelligence in a single consolidated manner with one another, and to quickly cut through the mountains of information to find leads specific to their investigation.[2]

One leaked document reveals that Palantir is employed by multiple U.S. Government agencies. One of the company’s first contracts was with the Joint Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Defeat Organization in 2006. From 2007–2009 Palantir’s work in Washington expanded from eight pilots to more than 50 programs. As of 2013, multiple groups within the U.S. Government including the CIA, NSA, Special Operations Command, to name just a few, were using Palantir. However, interesting enough, as of 2013 the U.S. Army was utilizing an internally developed data analysis tool called the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS). DCGS was developed at a cost of $2.3 billion, but it is facing numerous challenges — one of which is that it is not very popular. The same leaked document cites a 2012 study where 96% of the surveyed war fighters in Afghanistan preferred Palantir to DCGS.

Whitney Richards-Calathes, a doctoral student at City University of New York studying predictive policing and other tech-centric law enforcement trends, warns, “We have to be really critical about the built-in assumptions made when … databases are created for ‘public safety,’ yet youths as young as 9 and 10 years old are put in these secret databases and are automatically labeled as gang members.”[3] Hamid Khan sees a situation developing in L.A. that might give some people pause: the spread of intelligence gathering by local police, using the lower standard of “reasonable indications” instead of “reasonable suspicion,” thus fueling “a culture of suspicion and fear” in many of L.A.’s ethnically diverse communities.

Our own rat race surveillance (Illustration by Evan Hughes)

In defense of these concerns, according to Palantir (the company), Palantir Law Enforcement provides robust, built-in privacy and civil liberties protections, including granular access controls and advanced data retention capabilities. These system controls respect both the letter and the spirit of privacy and civil liberties laws while providing law enforcement officials with the capabilities they need to keep the public safe.[4]

Records obtained by L.A. Weekly from the U.S. Army Research Office show that UCLA professors Jeff Brantingham and Andrea Bertozzi (anthropology and applied mathematics, respectively) in 2009 told the Army that their predictive techniques “will provide the Army with a plethora of new data-intensive predictive algorithms for dealing with insurgents and terrorists abroad.” In a later update to the Army, after they had begun working with LAPD, they wrote, “Terrorist and insurgent activities have a distinct parallel to urban crime.”[5]

What is the trade off for improved public safety? Does gathering, storing, and analyzing data on all citizens in order to create intelligence, erode the civil liberties of innocent civilians? Especially as the police keep reducing the parameters of a crime to such nebulous terms as “reasonable indicator”? Could this apply if you drove down a bad street while taking your kids to school? Attend a church where another member is under suspicion? And if you happen to end up in one of these systems — how long can you expect to remain in there? These technologies were not designed to forget.

Ultimately, we need to ask ourselves if our local police agencies should be using the same methods in our neighborhoods to conduct community policing as our military and intelligence agencies use against foreign combatants? By the time we get a definitive answer, it will too late.

[1] https://www.palantir.com/solutions/law-enforcement/

[2] http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/joining-the-dots

[3] Forget the NSA, the LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks, By Darwin Bond-Graham, Ali Winston , LA Weekly, February 27, 2014, http://www.laweekly.com/news/forget-the-nsa-the-lapd-spies-on-millions-of-innocent-folks-4473467

[4] https://www.palantir.com/solutions/law-enforcement/

[5] Forget the NSA, the LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks, By Darwin Bond-Graham, Ali Winston , LA Weekly, February 27, 2014, http://www.laweekly.com/news/forget-the-nsa-the-lapd-spies-on-millions-of-innocent-folks-4473467