License Plate Cameras on Police Cars Track Millions of Americans
Police departments around the country are rapidly
expanding their use of automatic license plate readers to track the
location of American drivers, but few have meaningful rules in place to
protect drivers' privacy rights, according to documents released on Wednesday
by the American Civil Liberties Union. As a result, the new documents
reveal, many departments are keeping innocent people's location
information stored for years or even indefinitely, regardless of whether
there is any suspicion of a crime.
"The spread of these scanners is creating what are, in effect,
government location tracking systems recording the movements of many
millions of innocent Americans in huge databases," said ACLU Staff
Attorney Catherine Crump, the report's lead author. "We don't object to
the use of these systems to flag cars that are stolen or belong to
fugitives, but these documents show a dire need for rules to make sure
that this technology isn't used for unbridled government surveillance."
The systems use cameras mounted on patrol cars or on objects like
road signs and bridges, and the documents show that their deployment is
increasing rapidly, with significant funding coming from federal grants.
They photograph every license plate they encounter, use software to
read the number and add a time and location stamp, then record the
information in a database. Police are alerted when numbers match lists
containing license numbers of interest, such as stolen cars.
Last summer, ACLU affiliates in 38 states and Washington, D.C. filed nearly
600 freedom of information requests asking federal, state, and local
agencies how they use the readers. The 26,000 pages of documents
produced by the agencies that responded – about half – include training
materials, internal memos, and policy statements. The results and
analysis are detailed in an ACLU report released today called "You Are
Being Tracked," which includes charts and policy recommendations.
The study found that not only are license plate scanners widely
deployed, but few police departments place any substantial restrictions
on how they can be used. The ACLU says that 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."
A tiny fraction of the license plate scans are flagged as "hits." 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. 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.
The documents show that policies on how long police keep this data
vary widely. Some departments delete records within days or weeks, some
keep them for years, while others have no deletion policy at all,
meaning they can retain them forever. For example, Jersey City deletes
the records after five years, and Grapevine and Milpitas have no
deletion policy. In contrast, the Minnesota State Patrol deletes records
after 48 hours, and Brookline, Mass., keeps records for 14 days. Maine
and Arkansas have passed laws prohibiting the police from retaining the
license plate location records of innocent drivers for extended periods.
"The fact that some jurisdictions delete the records quickly shows
that it is a completely reasonable and workable policy. We need to see
more laws and policies in place that let police protect both public
safety and privacy," said Allie Bohm, ACLU advocacy and policy
strategist. "The police should not be storing data about people who are
not even suspected of doing anything wrong."
The ACLU report released today has over a dozen specific
recommendations for government use of license plate scanner systems,
including: police must have reasonable suspicion that a crime has
occurred before examining the data; unless there are legitimate reasons
to retain records, they should be deleted within days or weeks at most;
and, people should be able to find out if their cars' location history
is in a law enforcement database.
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.
"Police departments should not use databases that do not have
adequate private protections in place," said Kade Crockford, director of
the Technology for Liberty Project at the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Last December, Florida Governor Rick Scott and the the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles announced a re-design of the Florida license plate because it "needs
to upgrade the basic Florida plate to a design that increases
readability and features a seven-character configuration." In other
words, so that the license plate can be read better by automated means
such as automatic license plate readers, red light cameras, and toll booth cameras.
The report, an interactive map with links to the documents, and an interactive slide show are available here
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