‘You are being tracked’: ACLU reveals docs of mass license plate reader surveillance
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.
According to documents obtained through a number of Freedom of Information Act requests filed by ACLU offices across the United States, law enforcement agencies are tracking the whereabouts of innocent persons en masse by utilizing a still up-and-coming technology.
License place readers are among the latest items being regularly added to the arsenal of law enforcement gizmos and gadgets, but documents obtained through the FOIA requests have prompted the ACLU to acknowledge that safeguards that would properly protect the privacy of Americans are largely absent.
When a police department deploys license plate readers on top of patrol cars or at fixed locations, it lets officers see a snapshot of every vehicle that passes by a particular point. From there, that information can be matched against a database that contains automobiles involved in criminal investigations or cars whose owners may already be in trouble with the law. According to the ACLU, though, the data that’s collected and routinely stored reveal much more than the location of suspected scofflaws.
“At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons,” ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump wrote on the non-profit group’s website Wednesday morning. “But increasingly, all of this data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years,”she wrote.
Crump and company filed FOIA requests to agencies in 38 states and Washington, DC compelling police departments there to provide them with information detailing their use of license plate readers. In response, the ACLU received 26,000 pages of information that it has analyzed and now made public.
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 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.
According to documents obtained through a number of Freedom of Information Act requests filed by ACLU offices across the United States, law enforcement agencies are tracking the whereabouts of innocent persons en masse by utilizing a still up-and-coming technology.
License place readers are among the latest items being regularly added to the arsenal of law enforcement gizmos and gadgets, but documents obtained through the FOIA requests have prompted the ACLU to acknowledge that safeguards that would properly protect the privacy of Americans are largely absent.
When a police department deploys license plate readers on top of patrol cars or at fixed locations, it lets officers see a snapshot of every vehicle that passes by a particular point. From there, that information can be matched against a database that contains automobiles involved in criminal investigations or cars whose owners may already be in trouble with the law. According to the ACLU, though, the data that’s collected and routinely stored reveal much more than the location of suspected scofflaws.
“At first the captured plate data was used just to check against lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various reasons,” ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump wrote on the non-profit group’s website Wednesday morning. “But increasingly, all of this data is being fed into massive databases that contain the location information of many millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or even years,”she wrote.
Crump and company filed FOIA requests to agencies in 38 states and Washington, DC compelling police departments there to provide them with information detailing their use of license plate readers. In response, the ACLU received 26,000 pages of information that it has analyzed and now made public.
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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