When Big Tech Becomes Your Local Police Department

ACLU details the many ways the mixing of the profit incentive with prosecution can go wrong

​Imagine if one private company didn't just sell equipment or software to your local police department, but became the operating system for policing itself – managing body camera footage, dispatch records, 911 calls, jail bookings, license plate reader databases, AI analytics, and more, all through a single cloud platform.
 
This dystopian vision, taken to an extreme in the classic film RoboCop – in which a predatory corporation acquires an entire police department – is arriving faster than most Americans realize. The integration of business and policing raises new concerns about privacy, accountability, and the concentration of surveillance power.
 
Vendors are pressing this “operating system” model on police departments, seeking to collect, manage, control, analyze, and optimize the flow of data that contains sensitive information on millions of Americans – including not just suspects, but also their families, neighbors, co-workers, friends, and crime victims.
 
A new white paper released by the American Civil Liberties Union and authored by Jay Stanley with Lauren Yu details all the reasons why the integration of corporate and police priorities can degrade the traditional constitutional protections built into policing.
 
Weak protections for AI-derived data
Stanley and Yu note that with so much collected data, “vendors are pushing AI hard on their law enforcement customers as a shortcut to squeezing value out of data. Examples include video analytics, AI-assisted police reports, and algorithmic inspection of license plate reader data for ‘suspicious’ movement patterns.”
 
What uses might this valuable data serve beyond law enforcement? Many companies pledge not to share, sell, or access data except in tightly controlled, audited circumstances for support and maintenance. 
 
Stanley and Yu write: “The problem is the lack of barriers to violating these promises and the near impossibility of discovering if those clauses are violated because of how easy it is to copy, transfer, and share data without leaving any fingerprints, especially within an opaque private company.”
 
Lack of checks and balances
 
Law enforcement answers to democratically elected officials. Transparency and accountability are enforced by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, email and other data retention requirements, and the budgetary and policy oversight of city councils, oversight boards, internal affairs bureaus, and other officials.
 
Companies lack these checks and balances. Local governments are learning to offload responsibilities to the private sector to shield themselves from public scrutiny. In New Orleans, for example, the police avoid local regulations on facial recognition by using a private organization to apply that technology on their behalf.
 
And when something goes wrong, the authors note, “you can’t use voter pressure to make a bad company ‘resign’ the way a sheriff might do if they do something bad.”
 
Bias toward prosecution
 
The mixture of profit and prosecution could degrade traditional safeguards in police work. Stanley and Yu write:
 
“Vendors in the law enforcement space have an incentive to demonstrate that their products are great at helping police catch criminals. This means that they have a financial incentive in being able to say that their products led to a high number of arrests and convictions – they gain no marketing advantage when crime is low and people go free.”
 
Vulnerable honeypots
 
For decades, police records tended to remain scattered among thousands of local departments. But cloud computing changes that equation. Information that once sat on local servers is increasingly stored in centralized corporate systems, creating nationwide repositories of highly sensitive data.
 
With so many companies centralizing and storing police data in the cloud, vendors are creating “honeypots” of sensitive data attractive to hackers. “Worsening the situation is the fact that good cybersecurity costs money, and yet most costs of breaches often fall not on the company but on ordinary people.”
 
As surveillance technologies become more powerful and more interconnected, policymakers should ensure that constitutional protections evolve just as quickly. Otherwise, the greatest expansion of police surveillance may come from corporations quietly becoming policing’s digital backbone, if not its brain.

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