ACLU Presents Its Findings On License Plate Scanners, Most Of Which Is Bad News
from the more-haystacks,-fewer-needles dept
The ACLU has just released a report on the widespread use of license plate scanners by law enforcement agencies across the US. Culled from nearly 600 FOIA requests (and 26,000 pages of documents), the report shows that not only are license plate scanners widely deployed, but few police departments place any substantial restrictions on how they can be used.
The approach in Pittsburg, Calif., is typical: a police policy document there says that license plate readers can be used for "any routine patrol operation or criminal investigation," adding, "reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required." While many police departments do prohibit police officers from using license plate readers for personal uses such as tracking friends, these are the only restrictions. As New York's Scarsdale Police Department put it in one document, the use of license plate readers "is only limited by the officer's imagination."This "deploy first, restrict later" approach seems to be the default when it comes to new law enforcement technology. As we've noted before, law enforcement agencies (both local and federal) have been utilizing drones for investigative and surveillance purposes, most without establishing ground rules or taking into consideration possible privacy issues.
The other issue is a lack of standardized rules controlling the collection, usage and retention of license plate data. The Minnesota State Patrol deletes all records after 48 hours, but it's the exception. Most other agencies hold onto all data for anywhere from 90 days to 5 years. Responses from three agencies in Texas specified no end date, so until otherwise indicated, it's presumed to be indefinite.
Why are these agencies holding on to this data for so long? And why so much of it? The information the ACLU received indicates that license plate "hits" make for a very small percentage of records retained.
For example, in Maryland, for every million plates read, only 47 (0.005 percent) were potentially associated with a stolen car or a person wanted for a serious crime. [Other examples: Burbank, IL - 0.3%, Rhinebeck, NY - 0.01%, High Point, NC - 0.08%.] Yet, the documents show that many police departments are storing – for long periods of time – huge numbers of records on scanned plates that do not return hits. For example, police in Jersey City, N.J., recorded 2.1 million plate reads last year. As of August 2012, Grapevine, Texas, had 2 million plate reads stored and Milpitas, Calif., had 4.7 million.This is a concern for many reasons. First, storing millions of records on plates unrelated to criminal activity opens the door for potential abuse, as would any database of its size. One snapshot isn't a problem, but multiple photos over an extended period of time turn plate scanners into tracking tools.
What can location data reveal about people? Trips to places of worship, political protests, or gun ranges can be powerful indicators of people’s beliefs. Is it really the government’s business how often you go to the drug store or liquor store, what doctors you visit, and the identities of your friends? I’m sure all of us can remember something from our past that could embarrass us. If the government comes to suspect you of something in 2020, should it have access to databases stretching back years that could dig up facts about you that previously went unnoticed?Not only does this give law enforcement a pretty good indication of your habits, it also opens the door to misinterpretation. Someone traveling back and forth frequently from high crime areas might be assumed to be somehow involved with the criminal activity there. That's just one example, but amassing non-specific data encourages investigators to begin "connecting dots" and inferring suspicious behavior where there is none. Finding patterns is something the brain does well, even if not encouraged. But not every pattern is truly a pattern, nor does every perceived pattern indicate something of significance. (See also: numerology.)
Of additional concern is the fact that some of this retained data isn't in law enforcement hands at all.
License plate readers are used not only by police but also by private companies, which themselves make their data available to police with little or no oversight or privacy protections. One of these private databases, run by a company called Vigilant Solutions, holds over 800 million license plate location records and is used by over 2,200 law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.The ACLU is calling for law enforcement agencies to adopt certain basic policies to ensure proper protection of license plate data, as well as recommending the retention period of non-suspect data be measured in days, rather than weeks or years.
License plate readers may be used by law enforcement agencies only to investigate hits and in other circumstances in which law enforcement agents reasonably believe that the plate data are relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation.What the ACLU is asking for isn't overly-restrictive. In fact, what's listed here seems to be a bare minimum, common sense approach to data collection and retention, one that law enforcement agencies should have had in place before deploying the plate scanners. There's nothing about this that unduly binds law enforcement's hands in utilizing these scanners for their intended purpose. All these policies would do is trim down the likelihood of abuse and prevent agencies from collecting data simply to be collecting data.
The government must not store data about innocent people for any lengthy period. Unless plate data has been flagged, retention periods should be measured in days or weeks, not months and certainly not years.
People should be able to find out if plate data of vehicles registered to them are contained in a law enforcement agency’s database.
Law enforcement agencies should not share license plate reader data with third parties that do not follow proper retention and access principles. They should also be transparent regarding with whom they share license plate reader data.
Any entity that uses license plate readers should be required to report its usage publicly on at least an annual basis.
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Filed Under: aclu, license plate scanners, license plates, privacy, surveillance
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Seriously, you hold up the UK as a symbol of freedom and privacy? FYI, it was NOT a coincidence that George Orwell based 1984 there.
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He based it in England for the same reason that American writers tend to base their stories in the USA: George Orwell was English.
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The UK is a shining example of a total lack of governmental abuse of it populace.
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Saying the percentage that end up finding stolen vehicles and important criminals is low is disingenuous, if you have a giant magnet that can pull needles out of a haystack for you, the percentage of needles to hay is not really important.
imho :)
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Having unique identifications on cars is a reasonable trade-off on privacy/being anonymous.
There is no compelling reason to track all cars 24-7. There are plenty of compelling reasons to require cars be identifiable.
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Response to: crade on Jul 18th, 2013 @ 9:16am
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Re: Response to: crade on Jul 18th, 2013 @ 9:16am
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No, the whole point of license plates is to identify your car. That's very different from tracking.
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You are not describing the tracking at issue here. First and foremost, in your example a crime was committed and a specific search is initiated using given identification. This is part of due process.
The act of searching for a specific perp in a specific situation like you describe is night and day compared with blanket, warrantless, daily scanning tracking of everyone everywhere.
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Can you see the difference? If the scanners got data on the supposed criminals and let all the rest go it would be just like what you described. But that's not the case.
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Can you not see the problem?
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Compiling a database of all publicly available information results in a loss of privacy that is even greater than if someone has been assigned to follow you around 24 hours a day.
Each individual data point may be innocuous and publicly available, but in aggregate the effect is exactly the same as an unconstitutional violation of privacy. Since the results are the same, both actions are equally problematic.
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Yes, law enforcement is supposed to be 'hard'. It's the basic point of the Constitution, that we have inalienable rights that make it 'inconvenient' for the authorities to prosecute people.
Otherwise we should all wear 24/7 GPS, because, hey we might catch more criminals that way.
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Lets see if you believe what you say.
Only to people with "big data" fettishes.
Tell ya what, as the identifying is done in public and is otherwise public data, you'd not mind if TechDirt took up a collection and tracked your car an then published it on the internet?
That would be no problem for you - right?
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Not at all. They are mostly independent things, which overlap in certain use cases. As an earlier commenter pointed out, there is a one-way dependency in that you can't track something without identifying it.
However, tracking something requires more than simple identification. it requires compiling a series of data points over time -- in other words, it requires a lot more than just identification.
As an example: Intel microprocessors contain a unique serial number, so each processor can be identified. However, that does not mean each processor is being tracked -- unless someone installs software to read the serial number and compile ongoing information about it.
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If they are searching for your car they do not know where it is and they most certainly are not tracking it. Further they can only identify it by the license plate as they will be many cars of the same make,model and color about.
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LPR what if's?
But you know later on(much later on) they would very quietly, if at, all admit they were wrong, but were doing the public bidding of following up on such a giant alleged criminal lead.
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Drones again?
I think you guys have watched the terminator series one time too many.
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Re: Drones again?
With technology, it is quite possible and fairly easy.
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The ACLU is just now figuring this out?
This is so not news, because this has been going on for ages, and not just by police.
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Another problem is
I think I could be OK with it under a few conditions, none of which would make it any less useful for real police work:
a) No database queries without some type of warrant. You could extend this to be some type of location based warrant for crimes happening in an area without suspects (even this has the potential for abuse)
b) Logging of all database queries. This would hopefully prevent abuse and create a "paper trail" for law enforcement that are misusing the information
I'm sure this will never happen, and we'll end up living in more and more of a police state. It's honestly not the MOST disturbing news I've heard recently, which makes it all the more disturbing.
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Jul 18th, 2013 @ 9:56am
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Talk about misrepresenting the arguments!
Technology is neutral. Using technology to infringe on copyright is not "ok", but using the same technology for other purposes is. Using technology to fight crime is ok, but using it for other purposes (such as widespread surveillance and routine tracking) is not.
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One more reason to ride a bicycle
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Point is there are two facets of this. Besides the obvious privacy concerns of data retention and efforts to limit abuse in that arena, there's also a whole world of pre-emptive evasion on the other side of the coin. Even if plates are on bicycles, nobody really cares about them, bothers to track them, or profiles riders.
One difference between the two is that I have immediate control and ability to implement the latter, whereas I would have to rely on others, resources far greater than my own, and a questionable legal system, to implement the former (and in the meantime I'm still playing their game, and obviously losing).
Simply avoiding driving cars isn't exactly anarchy, but it effectively leans that way.
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I can think of a few reasons.
1. Drones are cheaper, both in building cost and operational costs. Drone operators probably get payed lower wages than 'real' pilots too.
2. Drones can stay in the air much longer. Simply switch out drone operators every few hours, all without having to land the drone.
3. Easier to train people to fly drones, because they're pretty much GPS auto-pilot aircraft.
Add all that up, and instead of having a few manned aircraft flying around, we now have a drone army flying around invading law-a-biding citizens privacy.
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It makes sense to store all the data for 2 or 3 days and it sure would help with crimes. And even then law enforcement should only be able to request further retention if proven they entered with a request for a warrant to actually LOOK at the data. However, given that the Government seems to be incapable of doing it in a Constitutional way the scanners should be banned.
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Yup pretty much. I'd go further to say no person, no government in power is immune to corruption and power should be granted grudgingly and with an eye to the consequences of abuse.
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https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/alpr
LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck (then the agency’s chief of detectives) told GovTech Magazine that ALPRs have “unlimited potential” as an investigative tool. “It’s always going to be great for the black-and-white to be driving down the street and find stolen cars rolling around . . . . But the real value comes from the long-term investigative uses of being able to track vehicles—where they’ve been and what they've been doing—and tie that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur.”
The ACLU isn't asking for scanners to be banned. What is really important is limiting the retention of such records in a database. This is all the more important because it is common for an individual law enforcement agencies database to be merged into the database for a regional fusion center.
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But it's not exactly what they have always done. Tracking the movements of every single person is something new, not something old.
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The ACLU and EFF have a current lawsuit to gain access to 1 weeks worth of records in the LAPD and LA county sheriff's database. This is being done under the California Public Records Act. There is a San Leandro, California man who successfully got records relating to his own cars via a California Public Records Act request.
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It's been happening, we just haven't realized
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Re: It's been happening, we just haven't realized
I once witnessed a severe accident involving a drunk driver, and my statement and contact information was taken by a cop on the scene. I was subpenaed to appear as a witness at his trial.
A month later (before the trial), I moved to a different town. The very first week I had my new place, I got a letter from the court system in my old town informing me the trial had been rescheduled.
For the life of me, I have no idea how they knew that I moved and what my new address was. I had a month overlap where I had both places at the same time, and had not yet forwarded my mail or moved any of my services. The utilities in the new place weren't in even my name. I asked how they found out where I was, but never got anything like an answer.
It still creeps me out to no end.
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I wonder how government would react
Would they suddenly decide that it is unconstitutional?
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Plate Scanners
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Here's my story
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