A very unsexy-sounding piece of technology could mean that the police know where you go, with whom, and when: the automatic license plate reader. These cameras are innocuously placed all across small-town America to catch known criminals, but as lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump shows, the data they collect in aggregate could have disastrous consequences for everyone the world over.

Catherine Crump is an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. She litigates cases on many issues, from challenges to invasive government surveillance programs, to protecting the right to engage in political protest, to suing police officers for excessive force. Current cases include constitutional challenges to the government’s authority to engage in suspicionless searches of laptops at the international border and to its assertion that it can track the location of cell phones without a warrant.

A very unsexy-sounding piece of technology could mean that the police know where you go, with whom, and when: the automatic license plate reader. These cameras are innocuously placed all across small-town America to catch known criminals, but as lawyer and TED Fellow Catherine Crump shows, the data they collect in aggregate could have disastrous consequences for everyone the world over.

Catherine Crump is an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union. She litigates cases on many issues, from challenges to invasive government surveillance programs, to protecting the right to engage in political protest, to suing police officers for excessive force. Current cases include constitutional challenges to the government’s authority to engage in suspicionless searches of laptops at the international border and to its assertion that it can track the location of cell phones without a warrant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt4o-R9wzrs