Last Week Tonight’s field guide to “Big Brother on steroids”

But thanks to systems like Shotspotter, microphones are also popping up all over cities, ostensibly to alert police to sounds that could be gunfire but have so far proven less than effective (though, you might argue that’s exactly the point). Automated license plate readers are also spreading, with businesses like Flock setting up these ALPRs throughout cities big and small and feeding the data to police departments, no warrant required. And speaking of jaw-dropping stats, Oliver cites a study by the Brennan Center For Justice about the use of ALPRs in Vallejo, California, that found that 37% of all ALPRs “hits” from fixed readers (such as those attached to street lights) and 35% of mobile ALPRs were misreads, which is “an astonishingly high error rate.” 

Cell site simulators like Stingray, which allows cops to snoop on any nearby phones, are also catching on. These “man-in-the-middle attacks” trick cell phones into thinking they’re connecting to the nearest cell tower, giving police access to personal info. Like the other surveillance tools in the segment, they don’t work in isolation—they feed that data to real-time crime centers.

Last but certainly not least invasive is predictive policing, which Oliver calls the “dumbest” of all of these methods. Predictive policing was developed in Santa Cruz, CA, with the aid of a researcher at the University Of Santa Clara, who used a lot of earthquake terminology to describe the approach. As Oliver notes, these systems or devices “are disproportionately found in communities of color,” and when used alongside things like facial recognition software, which has already been shown to misidentify people based on race, have a clear racial bias. Santa Cruz ultimately backed away from predictive policing for that reason, but as Oliver notes at the start of the segment: “Technology is amazing, but it does feel like turning on the panopticon should be a bit harder than that.”