The NYPD has a history of police abuse, and civil rights and liberties advocates like Urban Justice Center’s Surveillance Technology Oversight Project have protested the system out of constitutional concerns, with little success to date.
While the DAS has received some attention from the press — and is fairly well-known among activists — there is more to the story of Microsoft policing services.
Over the years, Microsoft has grown its business through the expansion of its cloud services, in which storage capacity, servers, and software running on servers are rented out on a metered basis. One of its offerings, Azure Government, provides dedicated data hosting in exclusively domestic cloud centers so that the data never physically leaves the host country. In the U.S., Microsoft has built several Azure Government cloud centers for use by local, state, and federal organizations.
Unbeknownst to most people, Microsoft has a “Public Safety and Justice” division with staff who formerly worked in law enforcement. This is the true heart of the company’s policing services, though it has operated for years away from public view.
Microsoft’s police surveillance services are often opaque because the company sells little in the way of its own policing products. It instead offers an array of “general purpose” Azure cloud services, such as machine learning and predictive analytics tools like Power BI (business intelligence) and Cognitive Services, which can be used by law enforcement agencies and surveillance vendors to build their own software or solutions.
According to this concept, a multitude of surveillance and IoT sensor data is sent onto a “hot path” for fast use in command centers and onto a “cold path” to be used later by intelligence analysts looking for patterns. The data is streamed along through Microsoft’s Azure Stream Analytics product, stored on the Azure cloud, and enhanced by Microsoft analytics solutions like Power BI — providing a number of points at which Microsoft can make money.
While the “Connected Officer” was a conceptual exercise, the company’s real-world patrol solution is the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform, or MAPP. MAPP is an IoT platform for police patrol vehicles that integrates surveillance sensors and database records on the Azure cloud, including “dispatch information, driving directions, suspect history, a voice-activated license plate reader, a missing persons list, location-based crime bulletins, shift reports, and more.”
Microsoft says “the car is becoming the nerve center for law enforcement.”
Although it sports a Microsoft insignia on the hood and door, the physical vehicle the company uses to promote MAPP isn’t for sale by Microsoft, and you probably won’t see Microsoft-labeled cars driving around. Rather, Microsoft provides MAPP as a platform through which to transform existing cop cars into IoT surveillance vehicles: “It’s really about being able to take all this data and put it up in the cloud, being able to source that data with their data, and start making relevant information out of it,” said Beckham. Indeed, Microsoft says “the car is becoming the nerve center for law enforcement.” According to Beckham, the information collected and stored in the Azure cloud will help officers “identify bad actors” and “let the officers be aware of the environment that is going on around them.” As an example, he said, “We’re hoping with machine learning and AI in the future, we can start pattern matching” with MAPP vehicles providing data to help find “bad actors.”
According to this concept, a multitude of surveillance and IoT sensor data is sent onto a “hot path” for fast use in command centers and onto a “cold path” to be used later by intelligence analysts looking for patterns. The data is streamed along through Microsoft’s Azure Stream Analytics product, stored on the Azure cloud, and enhanced by Microsoft analytics solutions like Power BI — providing a number of points at which Microsoft can make money.
While the “Connected Officer” was a conceptual exercise, the company’s real-world patrol solution is the Microsoft Advanced Patrol Platform, or MAPP. MAPP is an IoT platform for police patrol vehicles that integrates surveillance sensors and database records on the Azure cloud, including “dispatch information, driving directions, suspect history, a voice-activated license plate reader, a missing persons list, location-based crime bulletins, shift reports, and more.”
