AI Summary
5 min readHow surveillance crept up on us
A couple of months ago, Planet Money host Amanda Aronczyk got put on a grand jury. She watched prosecutors play videos of thefts, assaults, attempted murders, and "a couple of murder murders." What stunned her wasn't just the violence—it was how the police had assembled those videos. For a hit-and-run, prosecutors might show footage of the incident from a street camera, then dozens more videos of the vehicle driving for miles, shot from all sorts of cameras and angles. "How did they do this?" she wondered. "Do the police go visit all the bodegas?"
She called Michelle Dahl, who runs the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), and discovered Dahl had been on grand jury duty at the same time, on the same floor, in adjoining courtrooms. Dahl explained that police often don't have to visit bodegas anymore. Work that used to take days now takes minutes, because police can pull it all from a massive system that acts "essentially as a search engine." It draws data from 80,000-plus cameras across New York City, plus drones, automated license plate readers, and facial recognition—all without a warrant. "We're just mass monitoring everyone for the chance that something might happen," Dahl said.
From foot patrol to the Domain Awareness System
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:29) **Host Joins a Grand Jury and Sees the Surveillance State Firsthand** - The host describes her month on a grand jury, watching crime footage from cameras everywhere.
- 2 (01:41) **Fellow Juror Michelle Dahl Explains the NYPD’s Surveillance Search Engine** - The host discovers her fellow grand juror is a surveillance expert who can’t answer calls because she’s also on jury duty.
- 3 (05:22) **The Core Puzzle: How Did This Happen Without Public Consent?** - The host introduces the two-part investigation: how the surveillance web was built, and how it grew in secrecy.
- 4 (07:26) **Former NYPD Captain Joe Pascarella on Policing Before the Tech Boom** - Joe recalls walking a footpost in 1991 Times Square with no technology besides his radio and his voice.
- 5 (08:55) **The 9/11 Shift: From Local Policing to Counter-Terrorism Force** - After 9/11, the NYPD transformed from a local police department into a counter-terrorism force.
- 6 (13:56) **Building the System: Real-Time Crime Centers and Private Camera Sharing** - The NYPD built a 24/7 real-time crime center and a network of cameras, license plate readers, and radiation detectors.
- 7 (16:16) **The Domain Awareness System (DAS): The Central Platform Launches** - The NYPD partnered with Microsoft to create a massive centralized platform called the Domain Awareness System.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
In the wake of 9/11, the New York Police Department built one of the most sophisticated and omnipresent surveillance systems in the country.
And while decisions were being made about what tech to adopt and how much to pay for it, few outside the NYPD were consulted. Not the City Council nor the public. For over a decade, the only paper trail of these purchases were offline, stored in filing cabinets, inaccessible to the public.
Today on the show, how the country’s largest police department built its surveillance system, and the fight to get police everywhere to tell us how they’re watching us.
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This episode was produced by Vito Emanuel and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and engineered by Cena Loffredo. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Music: NPR Source Audio - "Funky Space Mama," "Sunday Lights," and "Blammo"
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