Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using advanced photographic camera , called “ automated license plate reader ” or ALPR , to scan and record the license plates of meg of car across the country . These cameras , mounted on top of patrol car and on city streets , canscan up to 1,800 license collection plate per second , twenty-four hour period or nighttime , allowing one squad car to memorialise more than14,000 plate during the course of a single shift .
shoot a individual permit plate one time on a public city street may not seem debatable , but when that data is put into a database , combined with other scan of that same dental plate on other city streets , and stored eternally , it can become very revealing . data about your location over time can show not only where you survive and work , but your political and religious belief , your social and intimate habits , your visits to the doctor , and your associations with others . And , according to recent inquiry reported inNature , it ’s potential to identify 95 % of someone with as few as four every which way selected geospatial datapoints ( localization + metre ) , making position data theultimate biometric identifier .
To better gauge the literal threat to privacy perplex by ALPR , EFF and the ACLU of Southern California need LAPD and LASD for data on their systems , including their policies on retaining and share information and all the licence plate data each section collected over the course of a individual week in 2012 . After both agencies refused to resign most of the records we ask for , wesued . We hope to get access to this data , both to show just how much data point the agencies are collecting and how revealing it can be .
ALPRs are often tout as an easy way to obtain slip car — the organisation see to it a scanned home plate against a database of slip or need cars and can instantly identify a hit , allowing officers to determine up a sting to recover the car and get the stealer . But even when there ’s no match in the database and no reason to recollect a car is stolen or involved in a crime , police keep the data . According to the LA Weekly , LAPD and LASD together already have collect more than160 million “ data points”(license plates plus clock time , date , and accurate position ) in the bang-up LA area — that ’s more than 20 hits for each of the more than 7 million vehicles registered in L.A. County . That ’s a short ton of information , but it ’s not all — jurisprudence enforcement officers also have access toprivate databasescontaining hundreds of millions of plates and their co-ordinate accumulate by “ repo ” men .
Law enforcement agency lay claim that ALPR systems are no different from an officer memorialise permission plate , clock time and location information by bridge player . They also argue the data does n’t justify any privacy protections because we drive our cars around in public . However , as five justices of the Supreme Court recognized last yr inUS v. Jones , a case involving GPS trailing , the ease of data solicitation and the scurvy cost of data storage make technical surveillance solutions such as GPS or ALPR very dissimilar from techniques used in the past .
Police are open about their desire to memorialize the movements of every car in vitrine it might one day prove worthful . In 2008 , LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck ( then the authority ’s head of detectives ) toldGovTech Magazinethat ALPRs have “ unlimited electric potential ” as an investigative tool . “ It ’s always lead to be great for the black - and - ashen to be driving down the street and find slip motorcar undulate around . . . . But the veridical value comes from the farseeing - terminal figure investigative United States of America of being capable to track vehicles — where they ’ve been and what they ’ve been doing — and bind that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur . ” But amassing data on the movements of jurisprudence - put up residents poses a literal threat to privacy , while the benefit to public safety is questioning , at best .
In light source of secrecy concern , states including Maine , New Jersey , andVirginiahave limited the use of ALPRs , and New Hampshire has banned them outright . Even the InternationalAssociation of Chiefs of Policehas issued a report recognize that “ show drive habit ” could raise First Amendment concerns because cameras could record “ vehicles parked at addiction - direction meetings , doctors ’ part , wellness clinic , or even represent arena for political protests . ”
But even if ALPRs are permitted , there are still common - sentience demarcation line that can allow the public safe benefits of ALPRs while forbid the sweeping tracking of every resident ’s movements . law can and should treat locating information from ALPRs like other tender entropy — they should retain it no longer than necessary to determine if it might be relevant to a crime , and should get a stock warrant to keep it any longer . They should limit who can access it and who they can share it with . And they should put oversight in place to check these limit point are followed .
Unfortunately , endeavor to impose reasonable limit on ALPR tracking in California have failed so far . Last yr , legislationthat would have fix private and practice of law enforcement retention of ALPR data to 60 days — a terminus ad quem currently in effect for the California Highway Patrol — and restricted sharing between natural law enforcement and private companies failed after vigorous resistance from jurisprudence enforcement . In California , police enforcement delegacy stay free to set up their own insurance policy on the use and keeping of ALPR data , or to have no insurance at all .
Some have inquire why we would search public disclosure of the actual license home data pile up by the police force — emplacement - base information that we conceive is secret . But we asked specifically for a narrow slice of datum — just a workweek ’s deserving — to demonstrate how invasive the applied science is . Having the datum will permit us to see how frequently some plates have been scan ; where and when , specifically , the copper are scanning plates ; and just how many plates can be collected in a large metropolitan area over the course of a unmarried calendar week . literal data will bring out whether ALPRs are deployed primarily in particular areas of Los Angeles and whether some communities might therefore be much more to a great extent tracked than others . If this information is too private to give a week ’s worth to the public to help inform us how the applied science is being used , then is n’t it too private to permit the police force amass year ’ worth of data without a warrantee ?
After the Boston Marathon bombing , many have argued that the regime should take reward of surveillance engineering to accumulate more datum rather than less . But we should not so promptly give up the very freedom that terrorist seek to destroy . We should recognize just how let on ALPR data is and not be afraid to press our constabulary and legislator for sensible limits to protect our canonical right to privacy .
regurgitate under Creative Commons licensefrom the Electronic Frontier Foundation . Image byjerseygal2009under Creative Commons license .
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