ACLU Questions Privacy of License Plate Scanners

coastal984 writes with news that the American Civil Liberties Union is launching a nation-wide effort to find out how police departments are using and retaining information gathered from license plate scanners. They've sent FOIA requests to departments in 38 states, as well as the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Transportation. "It’s not an exaggeration to say that in ten years there will be [automatic license plate readers] just about everywhere, making detailed records of every driver’s every movement, and storing it for who knows how long. In some cases, we know that the worst-case scenario—vast databases with records of movements of massive numbers of people—is already happening. To avoid this fate we need to convince the nation and our lawmakers to take action on this serious threat to our liberty. And to make a convincing case, we need to know a lot more about the problem as it stands. Last year, most people didn’t know why we should call our mobiles 'trackers' instead of phones; there was very little public information on how police departments were using our phones to track our location. The ACLU stepped in and spearheaded a massive public records project, bringing together affiliates from every part of the country, obtaining documents that showed how police nationwide were getting access to our intimate information without judicial oversight."

Comments

Where is the line?

[MyLongNickName]

Anyone can sit down and write down liscense plate numbers. Citizens have done this on their own when they have suspected a house on their block of drug trafficking. Very few would consider this to be an invasion of privacy.

Police officers routinely check license plates against a registry of stolen cars. Few would consider this to be an invasion of privacy.

If police placed a device on my car that told them where I was 24/7, I'd consider that an invasion of privacy.

Having traffic plate scanners all over the place seems like an extension of case #2 where the police are checking license plates on their own... but simply using technology to speed up the process. Where is the line? Is it the automation and efficiency? Would we be upset if automated systems were in place to catch stolen cars or those with outstanding warrants? Or is it storing of the data so that someone else can use the data later for a non-law enforcement type purpose? Would we have a problem with the system if it was incapable of storing the data?

Re:Where is the line?

[The Raven]

I would be fine with the trackers if they stored only the most recent location a particular car was detected, and retrieving that location required either the registered owner to report it stolen, or a warrant.

As long as locations can be stored forever, and retrieved at a whim, abuse will be significant.

Re:Where is the line?

[Jaqenn]

The issue here is that technology has progressed to a point that we're discovering that it's possible to have a situation that's never been a problem before.

If you look at the warrant process, it's attempting to keep the government from messing with you unless they have 'a good reason'. Having a detective follow a suspect around to see what they do has, up until now, been naturally limited by funding and manpower to cases where the police had 'a good reason', and so we've never had to make up external limits on the activity.

As police activity becomes less and less limited by funding and manpower, we have to check if we need to start imposing outside limitations instead.

Use a Frame

[hardburlyboogerman]

My van has a custom built (By me) License plate frame that unless you are DIRECTLY dead on line of sight,all you see is a 1 finger salute.The Van give the bird to any cameras or scanners out there.

Not the scanners but how they use them.

[jellomizer]

I had a friend who got a $300 fine for driving with expired registration in the mail, because a police car flagged his car (Flagged when he was driving to the DMV to renew it), then months later they mailed him the fine, because the city needed some extra revenue. The same thing with traffic camera. I am OK with them monitoring the road, but if you are going to fine someone it should be done in real time. A parking ticket, when you get back to your car, you know you made a mistake. You run a red light, then you see Blue (or Red in NY) blinking behind you, you know what you did. These Delayed fines, are not helpful in solving bad behaviors, because too much time has gone by. Chances are the person doesn't even remember the act.
We have all made mistakes, and not get caught.
I have Ran Red Lights, not out of malice or being in a rush, but my mind was focusing on the car in front of me, or the guy tailgating me from behind, or just a brain fart of thinking Red is Go and Green is stop. (Red and Green are opposite colors and if you see the lights out of your direct vision, they can seem the same color.)

I have missed the Do not turn on Red Signs (as they place them where you can't read the sign if you are stopped at a red light.)

It is part of a bigger problem of Government thinking it is OK, to make revenue off of Fines, Then working hard to try to catch people breaking them.

Lets put the Traffic Lights upside down, so we can flag all the color blind people (or sideways like in Rochester, NY). Or lets make all the stop signs Green Circles. The heck with safety, we just need to bring in revenue.

Re:Convince Lawmakers to NOT Spy on us?

[ThatsMyNick]

How else are you going to do this? The law in it's present state allows this sort of monitoring. We after all do vote for these politicians. Might as well ask them to do something for us.

Re:Convince Lawmakers to NOT Spy on us?

[dkleinsc]

That's not quite right, and does a disservice to politicians who actually do give a damn about civil liberties, e.g. Ron Paul and Russ Feingold.

For instance, back in 2002 the Bush administration created the Total Information Awareness project, where the NSA was going to basically intercept all Internet traffic in the US and build profiles of everybody based on what they saw. After years of agitating by the usual suspects (including the ACLU and EFF) Congress defunded the agency.

However, what the NSA appears to have done in response to Congress expressly saying that they shouldn't do this: (1) Rename the program. (2) Make the whole thing classified. (3) Move the budget lineitem to a different spending category. (4) Continue as if nothing had happened. So the problem isn't exactly all politicians being power-hungry bastards, it's that power-hungry presidents (and both Bush and Obama are involved in this, it isn't a partisan thing) can work with a power-hungry national security state to do whatever the heck they want without the approval of Congress.

China compiles massive dossier on every citizen

[C0L0PH0N]

The real threat, that the ACLU knows very clearly, is that the clearest path to government oppression of its citizens is to follow the path of China and other totalitarian regimes, and put together a massive dossier on every citizen. Then, anytime the government wants to crack down on a citizen, it has all the information it needs to put the citizen away. As any police officer will tell you, with over 5,000 federal laws, and countless local state and municipal laws, every citizen breaks laws without even knowing it, and if they follow you in a cruiser, then eventually can legally pull you over. What protects us is that most miniscule violations are not on the books. But if the government can collect 100% of all the information technology increasingly permits, they will begin to get 100% information. This will not harm you until the government decides to focus its laser power on YOU. There is little in this world as powerful as government, which can bring down the powerful, the wealthy, even the lawmakers. The ACLU has this one right - our government needs to be limited in the information it gathers on us.

Re:Swap vehicles

[jc42]

There's nothing requiring the owner of the car to be the one driving it.

And there was an instructive example of this that got a bit of publicity back in the 1970s, mostly in the scientific press. The reports described a researcher who had for some years had his grant applications turned down without explanation. After a lot of questioning, he finally learned that he was on a US government list of "subversives". Further questioning turned up the explanation: There was a listed "subversive" group that had regular meetings in his city, some distance from where he lived or worked. The security investigators drove down the street during the group's meetings, recording all the auto license numbers, and kept a list of the numbers that belonged to people who didn't live or work nearby. His license number was on the list of regular attendees.

The explanation was that, after his teenage son got his driver's license, he regularly borrowed his dad's car to visit his girl friend, who lived on the same block as the "subversive" meeting. The security folks didn't notice the car was often there on days of non-meetings, only that it was there on many of the meeting days. The car was registered to the kid's father, so they concluded that the car's owner was at the meeting. Why else would he be there on meeting nights?

Once you get on a "subversive" list, of course, it's next to impossible to get off it. This sort of thing is worth remembering when people are talking about such tracking efforts. You and I could easily be on assorted government lists for equally accurate reasons.

These days, the word is "terrorist" rather than "subversive" or "anti-American" or whatever, but the problems are no different. There will be many false positives. Witch hunts are a universal in human society.