Police Surveillance Technology

On July 13, 2018 the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote: "Employees at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have raised public concerns about those companies assisting U.S. military, law enforcement, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in deploying various kinds of surveillance technologies. These public calls from employees raise important questions: what steps should a company take to ensure that government entities who purchase or license their technologies don’t misuse them? When should they refuse to sell to a governmental entity?"
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The question being asked by employees of these major companies, and no doubt by many others, is should the military and the police have technology that allows them to spy on American citizens. We may argue that the job of the military is to fight our nation's wars, and thus the military has neither the charter nor the intent to target American citizens. But military agencies have and do target political activists in the United States.

Heidi Boghosian, the former director of the National Lawyers’ Guild, wrote in her book "Spying on Democracy"  

"For at least two years, [a government informant working for the U.S. Army at JBLM] posed as an activist with Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), a group in Washington opposing the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. He gave information about planned protests to his supervisor, who wrote threat assessments that local law enforcement officials used in harassment campaigns that included “preemptive arrests and physical attacks on peaceful demonstrations, as well as other harassment”. One individual was arrested so many times that his landlord evicted him… In the words of the government agencies involved, they aimed to neutralize PMR through a pattern of false arrests and detentions, attacks on homes and friendships, and attempting to impede members from peacefully assembling and demonstrating anywhere, at any time. Harassment was systematic and pervasive." (pp. 107)

We ask our law enforcement officers to protect our communities, and they need to have the tools necessary to investigate crimes and to detect and apprehend criminals. But at the same time, law enforcement's ability to conduct surveillance must be limited, so that it does not expand into mass surveillance - where we go from surveillance of a person suspected of a crime, to surveillance of everyone in the hope of finding a crime.