'You are being tracked': ACLU reveals docs of mass license plate reader surveillance [View all]
'You are being tracked': ACLU reveals docs of mass license plate reader surveillance
Published time: July 17, 2013 14:30
A "License Plate Reader" or LPR, one of two mounted on the trunk of a Metropolotian Police Department(MPD) is seen on a police car in Washington, DC (AFP Photo/Paul J. Richards)
The American Civil Liberties Union has released documents confirming that police license plate readers capture vast amounts of data on innocent people, and in many instances this intelligence is kept forever.
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Additionally, the ACLU has released “You Are Being Tracked,” a 37-page report that offers the background on a technology that’s being regularly used notwithstanding objections from civil libertarians and others. Those objections, noted Crump, come amid two other large issues: the government’s increasing use of significantly telling surveillance devices and the public’s mass ignorance about the issue.
“As it becomes increasingly clear that ours is an era of mass surveillance facilitated by ever cheaper and more powerful computing technology, it is critical we learn how this technology is being used,” Crump wrote. “License plate readers are just one example of a disturbing phenomenon: the government is increasingly using new technology to collect information about all of us, all the time and to store it forever – providing a complete record of our lives for it to access at will.”
And while telephony metadata, Internet inbox intelligence and IP records can reveal an awful lot, scanning city streets and logging the locations of cars can provide the police with more than just a lot of useless data. License plate readers do occasionally prove effect with regards to locating criminal suspects or cars involved in crimes, but they are also allowing police to slowly build profiles painting a picture of the daily, weekly or annual driving habits of anyone, anywhere.
“A person who knows all of another’s travels can deduce whether he is a weekly church goer, a heavy drinker, a regular at the gym, an unfaithful husband, an outpatient receiving medical treatment, an associate of particular individuals or political groups — and not just one such fact about a person, but all such facts,” the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled in 2010.
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“The implementation of automatic license plate readers poses serious privacy and other civil liberties threats,” the report read. “More and more cameras, longer retention periods and widespread sharing allow law enforcement agents to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives. The knowledge that one is subject to constant monitoring can chill the exercise of our cherished rights to free speech and association.”
“If not properly secured, license plate reader databases open the door to abusive tracking, enabling anyone with access to pry into the lives of his boss, his ex-wife or his romantic, political or workplace rivals.”
http://rt.com/usa/aclu-license-plate-surveillance-216/
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From the ACLU:
07/17/2013
License Plate Scanners
Police Documents on License Plate Scanners Reveal Mass Tracking
By Catherine Crump, Staff Attorney, ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at 10:01am
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Today, we are releasing all of the documents we have received (accessible through this interactive map and this issue page) and are publishing a report, “You Are Being Tracked,” which explains what these documents say about license plate readers: what they are capable of, how they are being used, and what privacy harms they can cause if protections aren’t put in place. We’re also offering more than a dozen recommendations we think local police departments and state legislatures should follow when they pass laws about this technology.
Check out this great explainer about the technology:
<Go to site>
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The government doesn’t have a great track record of using this kind of information responsibly. As our report details, the data can be abused for official purposes, like spying on protesters merely because they are exercising their constitutionally protected right to petition the government, or unofficial ones, like tracking an ex-spouse.
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There is a reasonable way to regulate this technology. The primary law enforcement use of these systems is to take pictures of plates to make it possible to check them against “hot lists” of cars of interest to law enforcement. This can be done virtually instantaneously. While plates that generate a “hit” may need to be stored for investigative purposes, there is no need to store plates for months or years to achieve this purpose.
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http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/police-documents-license-plate-scanners-reveal-mass
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