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ACLU Protests Police Scanning License Plates
dustman81 writes "The ACLU is objecting to the practice of police in Springdale, Ohio using an automated license-plate scanner on patrol cars to locate stolen vehicles or those whose owners are wanted on felony warrants. The scanner can read 900 license plates an hour traveling at highway speeds. So far, the scanner has located 95 stolen cars and helped locate 111 wanted felons. The locations of the license plates scanned are tagged with GPS data. All matches are stored (with no expiration date given) and can be brought up later and cross-referenced on a map. If the plate is wanted, the times and locations of where it was scanned can be referenced. The Springdale police department hopes to begin using the system soon to locate misdemeanor suspects. This system is also in use in British Columbia."
It's a state-issued plate, and it's designed to be publicly viewable and even photographable in many areas (where photo blocking equipment is illegal). This is really not much different than officers looking at plats normally, just more efficient. Next up? GPS tagging plates.
I'm sorry, but this is one of the instances where I disagree with the ACLU.
You're out on the open road. You have no reasonable expectation of privacy. No civil right is being violated, IMO.
Is this another example of us basically having less and less privacy when we leave our homes? Yes? Are our movements being recorded more and more and is it getting annoying? Yes? But claim that the police recording license plates on the open highway is unconstitutional? Can't side with you.
Start a happiness pandemic
Because the police have no right to track me when I have committed no crime and am not wanted in connection with a criminal investigation.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
It does not say if _all_ or just the ones that one on the "hit" list plates are "tagged" and recorded. I would object to this system IF it recored _all_ plates and locations. Recording just the ones that came back with warrants or stolen I have no problem with. And would disagree with the ACLU on this one.
Last year my car was stolen. It happened a few days after some scumbag killed a cop and went on the lam, so the police had zero time for me (and I can't really blame them). If we'd had these gizmos then, they might have caught the piece of shit cunt that boosted my wheels.
If I was a cop on the hot auto squad, I'd cross-correlate owners reporting stolen vehicles with ACLU members - and I'd shitcan their cases.
I say let the police do all the automated tracking they want, but encrypt the data and set the system up so that it can only be decrypted by court order. Then the police can use the data when they have reason to, but they can't go on fishing expeditions or use the data for personal vendettas.
Apparently you didn't Read The Fucking Article.
*Every* license plate that is scanned gets saved and downloaded onto PCs at Police HQ. Then when a warrant is issued on you later on, they can go back into the database and pull up *everywhere your car has been* before you did anything wrong. The article clearly states this.
This is not just storing the location and plates of criminals, because the cross-checking isn't done in real time, it is done when the data is downloaded later. The article clearly states this.
This is not targeted surveillance of criminals with the 'innocent plates' discarded in real time (which I would agree would be perfectly fine). This is creating a massive database of where every car in that part of Ohio is, with no time limit on when the data expires, and no limit on who can access the data.
Papers, please, comrade citizen!
At least in my state, driving an automobile is not a RIGHT, but a privilege granted by the department of revenue
You actually believe that? That getting from point A to point B in the way society has designed it (i.e. by driving) is a PRIVILEGE? Welcome to the police state, I guess, where doing anything except breathing requires governmental permission.
Mod down people who tell people how to mod in their sigs
Mod parent up: "+1 unintentionally insightful" for accidentally proving the ACLU's point...
The issue isn't the reading of license plates. If they were to do that, scan for the tags of interest (stolen, wanted, etc.) and then immediateley and automatically discard all of the non-matches, then I would have no problem with it. Assuming all of those steps could be independently verified at any time of course.
The issue is the systematic reading and databasing of *all* license plates with a timestamp and geotag and storing that data indefinitely. It may not be illegal. But it should be - as part of the often claimed, but non-existent right to privacy. The state has no business tracking the whereabouts of law abiding citizens - it's rife for abuse at many levels.
Like the wiretapping, the real issue is the lose of privacy and damage to our rights. In particular, the storage of plates numbers with locations is bothersome. I do not like the idea that the police can recall where any car was at. But if the system tries to locate a positive and then discards all else, well, it sounds useful to me.
As to the fast scan of all cars that the vehicle passes, personally, I am trying to figure out why the ACLU is fighting that. For the life of me, I would think that it makes things safer since it allows police to drive and observe other issues rather than pay heavy attention to cars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/conductunbecoming/
Yes, a cop on the street can follow you around and record where you go and when. But you would be able to see him doing that. You would know.
More importantly, the cop would have to skip other crimes to pursue you.
And the Gatling gun wasn't anything new compared to the musket. Yet it certainly changed land warfare.
Sometimes increasing the speed of an action does change the situation. And automating data collection on people NOT accused of a crime does change the situation.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
A system like this sounds really useful for locating stolen cars and finding wanted criminals. It's a great idea in theory, and apparently it's effective. And if stealing a car becomes synonymous with getting caught, so much the better. But the lawsuit is also a good idea. There's no reason to build a database of "innocent" license plates. The government shouldn't be snooping on its citizens, and it's easy to imagine this information being abused. Maybe you trust this administration, but can you trust the next one, and the one after that?
Well what's the big deal? So what if a government goon knows who my friends are, how often we hang out, which political meetings I attend, whether I attend narcotics anonymous meetings or see a psichiatrist, how often I buy liquor or go to sex shops, etc. I'm nobody important, just a working stiff like everyone else. And this is all small-potatoes stuff anyhow.
But it's precisely because I'm nobody important that it isn't a big deal to me. I don't have to worry about retribution after I leak an important story about wrongdoing at my company or government agency to the media. I'm not a journalist trying to protect the confidentiality of my sources. I'm not a candidate running for office and having all my movements for the past thirty years scrutinized by the establishment party. I'm not an undercover officer or overzealous district attorney worried about being outed or targetted by the mob. These people do important work, and it's important to protect them.
The best way to prevent the database from being abused is not to build it. You can still find criminals and stolen cars, and use the system to fight crime. But citizens who haven't done anything wrong shouldn't be tracked everywhere they go, since it might be used against them for political reasons.
I'm surprised by the way this system works.
I implemented a system that does basically this, as custom development for a police department in a small American city. It's worked fantastically well, but they had a lot of specific restrictions.
Examples:
They didn't want fully automated scanning, because apparently it causes all sorts of legal troubles if you run some plates (undercovers, celebrities, people who are later stalked/attacked).
Also, they didn't want to geotag the searches (even though all of the data was available) because they specifically didn't want to build a database of people's locations outside their duties.
And lastly, they didn't want permanent data storage of *anything*. They wanted two years, to comply with various regulations and to allow time for investigation into abuses, but no more. After that, they wanted it gone forever.
As such, I find it very surprising that a police department would even have interest in building a tool that is so incredibly ripe for abuse, when it is likely to open them to all sorts of litigation, as evidenced by the ACLU lawsuit.
And as to the tools who claim the ACLU is just interested in freeing criminals, I'd remind you that the ACLU simply cares about rights, even though sometimes that's unpopular. They're willing to fight to let you quote the Bible in your yearbook, to prevent 13 year olds from being arrested for writing on their desks and as this article notes, they are also against recorded surveillance of innocent drivers.
It's telling that nearly all of the right-wingers in this thread have distorted the ACLU's actual complaint (that surveillance databases are being built against innocent drivers) and have replaced it with a claim that somehow the ACLU is against running plates altogether or direct claims that the ACLU is pro-criminal.
According to this announcement, license plate data in BC is purged every three months. Yes, in Canada we do have privacy laws. It may not be perfect privacy, but at least it's a consideration when they roll out these programs. The Springdale cops should at the very least do the same.
Exactly. That's why we should have checkpoints at major crossings into and out of cities or across state lines. You want the privelege of driving? Well give us a cheek swab for DNA and a rapid drug/alcohol test while were at it. We'll catch a lot more felons that way.
Also, why the hell don't they have x-ray scanners like they use to find drugs in trucks in Afghanistan. I mean, it's not really a search if they don't open your trunk, and besides driving is a privilege to begin with. I'm sure they'd find illegal weapons down south a lot of illegal aliens that way.
Face it, a police state is the only way for lawful people to be safe from the scumbags. So call your Congressmen and demand road checkpoints with DNA matching, instant drug/alcohol testing, and x-ray scanning. Because driving is a privilege and not a right.
Driving is a Right, not a privilege.
"Personal liberty, or the Right to enjoyment of life and liberty, is one of the fundamental or natural Rights, which has been protected by its inclusion as a guarantee in the various constitutions, which is not derived from, or dependent on, the U.S. Constitution, which may not be submitted to a vote and may not depend on the outcome of an election. It is one of the most sacred and valuable Rights, as sacred as the Right to private property...and is regarded as inalienable." 16 C.J.S., Constitutional Law, Sect.202, p.987.
"Personal liberty largely consists of the Right of locomotion -- to go where and when one pleases -- only so far restrained as the Rights of others may make it necessary for the welfare of all other citizens. The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, by horse drawn carriage, wagon, or automobile, is not a mere privilege which may be permitted or prohibited at will, but the common Right which he has under his Right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Under this Constitutional guarantee one may, therefore, under normal conditions, travel at his inclination along the public highways or in public places, and while conducting himself in an orderly and decent manner, neither interfering with nor disturbing another's Rights, he will be protected, not only in his person, but in his safe conduct." II Am.Jur. (1st) Constitutional Law, Sect.329, p.1135.
http://teamliberty.net/id18.html
People who claim that driving isn't a right are usually parents or Divers Ed teachers trying to control teenagers. Sorry, those of use who understand what freedom means don't buy your sorry argument.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
While PERHAPS this could be used to hinder said right, the REALITY is it does not. Until it does, you have no real reason to complain other than being overly paranoid.
That may be the fucking stupidest thing ever said.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
As for the scanning of license plates...
The Supreme Court is clear in that this kind of observation by law enforcement doesn't constitute a search under the 4th Amendment. So you can't debate whether it is a reasonable or an unreasonable search as it never was a search to begin with.
1) Is the person in a public place? Simple yes or no. 2) Does the person have an expectation of privacy? For instance, a closed telephone booth is in a public place, but grants a person an expectation of privacy and law enforcement thus needs a warrant to record a conversation therein.
If 1 is yes and 2 is no, then it falls under the plain sight (or plain view) doctrine. It is an exception to the warrant requirement, requires no probable cause or reasonable suspicion, and is not considered a search (of any kind) under the 4th Amendment.
As for tracking/storing this data for long periods of time...
If the police can legally obtain information, there is nothing stopping them from amassing it in a database under the 4th Amendment. Something that wasn't a search to begin with doesn't magically become a search because it is entered it in to a database. A ruling stating otherwise would be groundbreaking.
However, the Court has ruled that you have a "right to privacy" under the 9th Amendment and some other numbers they pulled out of the butt of their number-gnome (since the Constitution doesn't explicitly say anything about privacy). So perhaps the Court will rule that the privacy of citizens outweighs the benefit to law enforcement in rearguards to warehousing this information.
If I had to bet, I'd say the ACLU is going to lose. But nothing stops the people of Springdale, Ohio from expecting a higher level of privacy than the minimums set by the US Constitution. I've not been to Ohio, but I'm pretty sure they have local elections there too.
My sister owns a circa 75 Nova. The body is not in the best condition, but it runs. Every time I go to Utah to visit her and drive that car, the police pull me over and give me a ticket for something ridiculous. Here's a couple of cases in point:
Just after dark, going out for some food with my baby in my wife's lap. Illegal, I know. (A pox on insurance companies.) Dangerous? Maybe, but then cars are dangerous machines. If they're going to make laws against putting children in cars with restraints, they might as well start making up rules about how many minutes a day you can allow a child to be in a car. And when are they going to go after the repeat offender drunk driver without whom the risk of accident would drop like a rock?
(Don't tell me the one about the poor woman in south Florida rush hour traffic crying when she finally gets to the checkpoint because a sudden brake at low speeds put her baby's head against the windshield, and the cop's sob story about having to charge her with negligent homicide. I've heard it before, I draw a different lesson from it.)
Well, the cop pulls us over, uses language along the lines of calling me and my wife wetbacks, asks for me driver's license. I hand him an international permit. It's from Japan. He's never seen an international permit before, apparently. What is a white guy doing with an international permit from Japan? (Now that he's up close he can see that I'm noticeably white. He hasn't yet noticed that my wife is Japanese, which might not be surprising. She looks rather hispanic.)
I explain that I've been in Japan with my wife and kid for several years and my Utah permit has expired. He asks for it anyway, and why didn't I get it renewed? I apologize for not carrying it with me or getting it renewed when I'm only expecting to be in the States for a bit over a week.
Things go downhill from there, because, like many officers, this guy can't admit he's wrong.
He goes back to his car, radios in and we wait at least a half an hour while he discusses things with whomever. (No exaggeration. My kid is really getting hungry, and my parents and my sister are wondering where we are by the time we get back.)
In the end, the only thing he can get me on is the child carrier.
So I'm out $65, which is a week's worth of food back in Japan for my family at the wages I'm earning.
Several years later, my brother and I are in the same car making a late night run to Home Depot, first, to trade a fitting for a pipe so my sister has plumbing that works now that she is out of the hospital, and second, to pick up some medicine she needs within a few hours. We are calculating that Home Depot closes before the place with the pharmacy. It's Saturday night just after Christmas, snowing, the streets are not yet slick but will be a bit slippery in an hour or so.
Coming out of Home Depot, I stop at a traffic light. Full stop, like the law says.
Right turn on red is legal in Utah, but, of course, you must come to a full stop and signal.
Full stop. I signal. I turn. I need to get over to the left as soon as possible for a left turn, so I signal and change lanes. I get pulled over.
The ticket? Not waiting long enough between lane changes. $65 that I could not afford.
We missed the pharmacy.
Fortunately, there was another store that could do the pharmacy thing until midnight, but we had to call from her home to find it. Also, we were really lucky that she didn't end up needing the medicine before I could get back with it.
Can you charge a cop with (negligent?) homicide because he's busy profiling you when you are trying to get necessary medicine back to your sister?
No extenuating circumstances, no arguing the ticket. I'm sure my black, knee length fur coat and bright aquamarine silk trousers didn't help settle that poor cop's nerves when I got out of the car to explain that my sister's life really was in danger.
I can understand some of the ambiguities here. You have to understand, my
Of course this resolves down to a case of the public being monitored vs. an agency serving the public being monitored, so they're not directly comparable. But you made the comparison, I didn't. I think a pretty good argument could be made that the police should be monitored in this way while the general public shouldn't.
It has already been used abused in Arlington, Virginia and in several Connecticut cities. Sure finding stolen cars sounds great, and that's just what it takes to get the lemmings to give the thumbs up to this technology. But let's be real about the true purpose: to make money. Arlington will tow away your car for overdue library books. In Connecticut, the off-duty marshals -- who get paid a bounty for each car towed away -- trawled the WalMart parking lots to find people with a few overdue parking tickets. A woman in Bridgeport had her car towed out of her driveway while she was home over $85 in parking tickets. Is that the kind of world you want to live in? References: Connecticut Arlington
The biggest problem here is that cops are quite often worse than the criminals they hunt. That and the crime ring the have going with the lower court judges and prosecutors. I am FAR less concerned with my car being stolen than I am about being targeted by the police AGAIN. They will make your life hell and if you stand up to them they will stomp on you.
They say a conservative is a liberal that hasn't been mugged yet and that a liberal is a conservative that hasn't been beaten up by the police yet. However, the sad reality is that most of us harmless people are constantly juggling which criminal is more dangerous. Well, check your pain and suffering count sometime and I think you'll find that government criminals have your average thief and mugger beat by a long shot.
If the police were generally a bunch of guys who really lived to protect and serve and defend the rights of the community, it'd be great. They're not though. A few are, but they're the exception to the bullies or even the average types that have felt the taint of authority and let it go to their heads.
I don't think the ACLU is some bastion of greatness--their stand on gun rights is asinine--but just because something makes it easier to "catch criminals" doesn't mean it's a "good thing" and it doesn't even mean it's going to protect anyone.
Oh yeah, one more thing:
"Let's roll back though. These are license plates. Plates that are government issue, on highways that are government funded (yes by the taxes of the people, but government funded) and a device that is government controlled. So where's the problem?"
I'd say the government issued plates are the first problem. And yeah, the roads are government funded, but who owns the government? They're PUBLIC roads, NOT government roads. They're MY roads as a tenant in common. Why in the hell do I have to ask my SERVANT pretty please to use MY roads and get a plate from them? And roads get paid for if you use them. For the time being gas taxes do a good job of being a fair user fee. The more you use, the more you pay.
I might not have the same expectation of privacy on road as I do in my house, just as there's a big difference between a PUBLIC room like a living room and my bedroom. However, I don't want a camera on every street corner and all my movements tracked just because it might catch a few car thieves. It's just not worth it. Especially given the direction it WILL go and HAS historically gone. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It will ALWAYS be used by whoever is in power to suppress opposition.
There's a reason that many crimes in the US elicit such a harsh punishment, and that everything from bouncing a check to picking your nose in public is now a felony (ignoring the corporate-prison industry and other such arguments for the moment); the long prison sentences and exorbitant fines are thought to be a deterrent to other nare-do-wells who would now think twice before committing the same crime and getting the same sentence.
But part of the deterrence theory of punishment is premised on the fact that law enforcement can't catch all the criminals. To make up for the fact that there will always be Joe Robber or Tina Car-Thief who gets away with something, the hope is that they will be deterred from breaking the law in fear of receiving the harsh punishment.
The whole punishment-as-deterrent system will become quite warped however, when cops across the nation can cruise around scanning hundreds of license plates and arrest X number more felons than before. As law enforcement is armed with new technology, do the punishments ever decrease despite law enforcement being more effective in catching the bad guys?
To take this thought to the extreme: if police suddenly developed new drug-detecting technology that could scan people's surrounding air-mass as they walked out in public and determine with certainty whether they were carrying illegal drugs, should we still retain the harsh sentences that many states do for simple drug possession?
The ACLU will protect criminals at all costs, they don't care that the cars are on public roads, and that police calling them in is no different. For quite some time the ACLU has moved away from protecting the rights of people to being a liberal shill.
Are you saying it is only liberals that care about the U.S. Constitution with its "thing" against warrantless search and seizures? The ACLU will try to make the government follow the constitution at all costs!
Would you rather some of those rights be amended?
So what they are doing is creating a database of where all cars have been, whether they belong to the guilty or the innocent. When I read the summary I thought, "Wow, the ACLU has crossed the line here"; which made me suspicious, usually when folks want to vilify the ACLU they leave out key facts like this one. Read the article, this tidbit is buried in the second to last paragraph and is likely key to the ACLU's concerns.
While technically its not doing anything that crosses a line, noting plates and locations of cars in the public, technology is enabling some very concerning capabilities that need to be addressed. Distrust of the government isn't just a liberal thing, its an American thing.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Hardly. The ACLU is in fact protecting the law abiding, hard working, common citizen and their civil liberties. The very same civil liberties that the founding fathers fought so hard to establish. There's no excuse for the government to keep a list of law abiding citizens whereabouts indefinitely.
Totalitarian states often have less crime and are "safer" for those who follow the rules. Perhaps you would be more interested in that sort of government.