Few people know Real Time Crime Centers (RTCCs) even exist, let alone the extent of the surveillance they entail, so they can receive little public scrutiny and often operate
without much oversight. There have long been concerns around how surveillance technologies could affect First and Fourth Amendment rights in the US, but Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher at the EFF, says RTCCs “hyper-charge” these worries by collating all this data in one place.
“It’s perpetuating this mass collection of people's private information from a whole bunch of different video streams,” Lipton says. “They're really lowering the bar on the ways police can access that information … When there are these types of large databases without proper audit and oversight mechanisms, law enforcement officials and individuals can use them for their own purposes, which can be very scary.”
Regulations around the storage and usage of this data are patchy at best. For example, RTCC-collected data may be shared across jurisdictions because third parties contracted for the hardware or software will also collect data and share it, Lipton says. “Some of these companies will, in good faith, delete data in accordance with retention schedules, but we've seen them not do that,” she says. “With large databases like license plate reader databases, that information is sometimes shared without police departments realizing it and in violation of jurisdictional rules.”
