10 signatures reached
To: Broome County, City, and Public Officials of the Southern Tier
Stop Secret Surveillance in the SouthernTier
We the undersigned demand that the city governments, police agencies, and state college and university administrations in the Southern Tier immediately stop the use of license plate readers and facial recognition cameras, and delete all previously stored information.
Why is this important?
They follow you everywhere: when you drive around the Triple Cities your movements are now tracked, recorded, stored, reported, and available to police and intelligence agencies across the country. Promoted by police chiefs and elected officials alike, license plate reader cameras are now being installed on poles, streetlights, and roving cars across the Southern Tier—with dozens in Binghamton alone. This includes the cities and police forces of Binghamton, Endicott, Johnson City, Vestal and Binghamton University. And all these agencies have kept secret how they store, share, and distribute collected data.
These cameras can photograph thousands of plates a minute. And plate numbers aren’t just checked against “hot lists” of stolen cars and escaped felons—police agencies now store plates numbers and the date, time, and location of all vehicles. The result? Enormous databases of our daily movements are kept for years on end. And through secret software contracts they are easily shared with the FBI, ICE, and other government agencies operating through “fusion” intelligence centers.
Newer license plate reader cameras are also capable of recording and identifying individuals, even inside cars, by their biometric facial features. Facial recognition cameras, including some mounted on drones, are now able to scan, spot and identify us as we walk down a street or through a crowded mall, church, trade show, concert, protest rally, schoolyard, synagogue, and mosque. They are inevitably used at public hearings and protests, and target poor, Black and Latinx residents and their neighborhoods. And they are notoriously inaccurate, identifying women as men while continuously mis-identifying persons of color.
These are techniques of police states. These forms of mass surveillance have accordingly been denounced by left and right, from the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, through conservatives who fear the rise of a surveillance state, to technology experts.
The people of Broome County and the Southern Tier don’t have to accept this secret surveillance. We can--like people in Indiana, New Hampshire, and California among others--demand an end to state surveillance of our daily lives. It is simple: city and police agencies need to turn the cameras off, cut them off poles, and delete the millions of records of our faces and movements.
To load new locations and pictures of licence plater readers and surveillance cameras go to: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/CrowdsourceReporter/index.html?appid=e556da80848b402f9a70cf7d54a95e64