Mass surveillance: Police files

Contents

Police files are physical or digital records maintained by law enforcement agencies. Police files contain vast amounts of data about many things, are kept indefinitely or for long periods of time, and can be efficiently analyzed and cross-referenced using digital tools.

Notable examples of police files include:

Used in tactics: Deterrence, Incrimination

Mitigations

NameDescription
Attack

You can destroy cabinets that store police files on paper and data centers that store them digitally.

Used in repressive operations

NameDescription
Case against Boris

Investigators found out that the DNA on the bottle cap belonged to Boris because his DNA was in France's national DNA database[1].

Investigators obtained and analyzed records of local police activity (ID checks and fines) shortly before and after the sabotages, in different perimeters around where the sabotages took place, presumably hoping to find the names of the saboteurs in those records.