his neck for nearly nine minutes, was caught on camera by not

one but several witnesses as they begged officers to let Floyd

up.

The footage following so many incidents of systemic racism and

police brutality filmed in recent years ignited protests around

the world. This for us to stand up in George's name and say,

'get your knee off our necks.'

To have our dear brother George Floyd's murder televised.

No one in their right mind, regardless of their ethnic identity

, could deny that.

So that's where surveillance works in our favor.

That our people new to survey.

They knew to bear witness.

They knew to record because no one ever believed them if they

told their story. As hundreds of thousands joined the protests,

cameras on both sides ignited debates over privacy and the right

to photograph. In the 1950s, news cameras expose the brutal

horror of legalized racism in the form of segregation.

Seventy years later, it is the cell phone camera that has

exposed the continuation of violence directed at

African-Americans by the police.

Law enforcement flew drones over protests in Minneapolis and New

York. Facial recognition software is being used with some police

body cameras. Law enforcement can use signals from your cell

phone or automatic license plate readers to follow your

movements. Images of unity or chaos spread across social media

in an instant. Every time they turn on social media, they get to

see in real time vivid HD pictures of Black pain.

In the age of surveillance, we wanted to find out how police are

tracking protests, how the data is used, and how cameras on

every officer and in every pocket have fundamentally changed the

way we protest.

Police surveillance of the Black community is not new.

From 18th century ordinances that required slaves in New York to

carry lanterns after dark to the FBI wiretapping of Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr., to stop and frisk policies that

disproportionately target people of color.

We have lived a certain level of surveillance since we lived on

these shores. And they're walking around waiting for you to do

something wrong, a reason to jump in.

What's different with the surveillance of recent protests is just

how powerful the technology has become.

The mentality is often, let's put the technology out there, let's

use the surveillance, and then we'll deal with the problems

after the fact. And so often the problems after the fact have

been substantial and they've been problems that have been borne

disproportionately by communities of color.

Surveillance of these protests has involved multiple federal

agencies using groundbreaking tech from private vendors.

You see vendors bragging that they can identify hundreds of

people from a single photograph.

Right? Or identify people as they walk by a camera.

There's also things like drone technology and the integration of

drone technology with face recognition.

Four days after George Lloyd was killed in Minneapolis, Customs

and Border Protection flew an unarmed Predator drone over

protesters there. DEA, CBP and ICE do not have a role in this,

and they should not be using their surveillance technologies and

militarized equipment to combat protesters.

This increased presence of these officers is something that, you

know, not only chills individuals right to protest and makes

them more afraid, but it's just not contravention overall feel

of safety in the community. In an e-mail, CBP told CNBC that it

has resources deployed in several states at the request of law

enforcement in order to protect our communities and ensure that

the rights of Americans to peacefully protest are protected.

The drone was deployed to feed live video to law enforcement on

the ground to aid in situational awareness.

You want to have pinpoint accuracy if somebody is throwing things

at the police. You don't want the police to have a broad based

response and then go after everyone in front of them.

So having cameras and having video footage is going to help the

police identify who the bad people are.

Protesters have also reported drone surveillance in New York,

where the NYPD's Technical Assistance Response Unit operates a

fleet of 14 surveillance drones with thermal sensors to detect a

person's heat energy.

I've literally been at a protest staring kind of eye level at a

drone. So I know that my face is on camera.

But a lack of transparency makes it hard to identify exactly what

tech each jurisdiction is using to identify and track

protesters. When you think about surveillance technologies, in

the vast majority of cases, they're required secretly.

They're not approved by publicly elected city councils or

legislative officials.

Often we find out about them, you know, decades after they've

been deployed. Street level surveillance tools are also rapidly

advancing and remain largely unregulated.

The government has made so many, so many partnerships with

private surveillance tech vendors.

Big platforms like Clearview A.I., which is this giant facial

recognition platform which scrubbed a bunch of images from the

internet and are currently using them to run against people's

faces in real time.

Another example is cell site simulators or Stingrays used by law

enforcement to track precise location.

So your phone rather than going to a cell phone tower will ping

off this piece of surveillance technology and it will be able to

identify maybe who is in the area, how many phones are in the

area. It'll be able to link your phone to a certain location at

a certain time.

There's currently no federal law protecting the privacy of adults

in public spaces. But one Supreme Court ruling did deal with

this issue. Carpenter v.

USA, which just came out in 2018, said that kind of aggregate

tracking of people's location through cell phone data

constitutes a violation of privacy.

Movement of protesters can also be tracked using a number of

other tools. Stingray data can be combined with the number of

other things like face recognition, which can identify you at a

protest or an automated license plate reader.

If they know that they're going to be maybe followed home by

some of this technology so that police can learn where they

live, people are going to be afraid to participate in our

democracy, in politics, as is our First Amendment right to do

so. That EFF has a tip sheet for how to spot street level

surveillance talk like this and others, including tattoo and

iris recognition software and acoustic gunshot detection

systems, which record the sound and location of a shot and alert

law enforcement.

Surveillance very often, it doesn't leave a very visible paper

trail for us on the outside.

It takes a lot of investigative journalism.

It takes a lot of accountability.

It takes public records requests to figure out exactly the

extent of the surveillance that we're seeing now.

So we might not know what's being deployed right now for a

little while. While surveillance tech remains fairly unregulated

for now, legislation is showing up at the local level.

And 35 members of Congress signed a letter in early June asking

federal authorities from the FBI, CBP, DEA and National Guard to

stop spying on Americans who are peacefully protesting.

One of the best ones is CCOPS, Community Control Over Police

Surveillance, which would, among other things, give citizens of

a town more control over what surveillance measures police are

buying, what they're deploying.

At police departments in some cities, facial recognition software

is now integrated into the body worn cameras that have been in

widespread use for years.

A 2016 study found that half of American adults are in a law

enforcement facial recognition database.

So far, a handful of cities have banned the use of facial

recognition software, and statewide bans of its use with body

worn cameras are in place in Oregon, New Hampshire and most

recently, California.

Companies are also chiming in.

In June, both Amazon and Microsoft announced they won't sell

their facial recognition software to police until stronger

regulation is in place.

And IBM announced it's getting out of the facial recognition

business altogether. Axon who is a manufacturer body cameras

has said that they will not integrate face recognition into body

cameras given, you know, many issues, including the privacy and

civil rights concerns.

Body cameras are were intended to be tools of accountability.

To turn them into surveillance cameras now targeted at the very

communities they were intended to protect is certainly not how

they're supposed to be used, not how they should be used and how

they should be permitted to be used.

We want to make sure that all our troopers are equipped with body

worn cameras, and one of the primary reasons is to ensure the

safety of not only our troopers, but the community at large.

We want to ensure that there is accountability on our end and

what we are reporting is the most accurate information.

Connecticut state troopers wear body cameras, but they're not

equipped with facial recognition software.

In Connecticut and elsewhere, police have acted in ways to mend

trust, showing solidarity with protesters.

The police have a fiduciary responsibility to protect the

protesters as well.

Once they walk up onto the highway, you'll really have to stop

traffic because you need to keep the protesters safe.

And if you acknowledge the pain of the protesters, then that's

mostly what we want.

Stop ignoring our pain.

Stop ignoring the plight that we go through.

As a mother of Black kids, something has to change.

When you're interacting with the public, you're either doing one

or two things, either building the trust that they have in our

police agency, or diminishing that trust.

While cameras are nothing new.

The fact that they're on many police officers and in almost

every pocket has a profound impact on protesting and policing.

For many of us who've been living this life, we understand it's

reality have always been here.

There's enough video out there of seeing white face hurting

Black bodies. And there's enough video up there of seeing Black

faces, quote, looting.

So it's perpetuating stereotypes and fear.

Still, the ability to record from almost any cell phone has

shifted the power dynamics.

There is power because we had been disempowered in so many ways,

our ability to pick up and record for ourselves.

And it's being validated by others around the world of African

ancestry who are having the exact same similar experiences.

The videos of peaceful protesters being sprayed with teargas,

essentially, and having rubber bullets used on them before

curfew and at a time when people were just peacefully

protesting, I think has prompted a lot of public officials to

not just sort of ask what happened, but it has made it

impossible for them to pretend like nothing wrong happened.

In 1991, a witness recorded on his camcorder as four LAPD

officers beat Rodney King.

The line of demarcation with policing and video was the Rodney

King situation.

And people in Los Angeles said for the first time ever,

'finally, we've got video proof of what we've been complaining

about for generations.

So clearly now the system is going to do the right thing.' And

they didn't. Experts say that filming changes nothing

if those caught on camera aren't held accountable.

Citizens are now policing the police because we've seen that the

police cannot police themselves.

We want levels of accountability.

And if police officers aren't arrested, charged and convicted,

then there's not going to be a change in policing.

Even when we've had the camera and we've clearly seen what we

saw, somehow that law enforcement person was not held

accountable. And psychologists like Jackson point out the

instant gratification of sharing images to social media also

changes how we protest.

Why? Why am I under arrest, sir?

For those who carry cameras professionally and journalists like

CNN's Omar Jimenez documenting the protests, the heightened

tensions have led to an unprecedented number of arrests and even

violent clashes with law enforcement.