California Officials Admit To Using License Plate Readers To Monitor Welfare Recipients (gizmodo.com)

According to a report from the Sacramento Bee, officials in Sacramento County have been accessing license plate reader data to track welfare recipients suspected of fraud. The practice dates back to 2016. Gizmodo reports: Sacramento County Department of Human Assistance Director Ann Edwards confirmed to the paper that welfare fraud investigators working under the DHA have used the data for two years on a "case-by-case" basis. Edwards said the DHA pays about $5,000 annually for access to the database. Abbreviated LPR, license plate readers are essentially cameras that upload photographs to a searchable database of images of license plates. If a driver passed by an LPR four times throughout a city, an officer with access would know where and at what time of day. Anyone with access to that data could use it track where someone drove and when, provided they were scanned by the LPR.

It's not immediately clear how travel patterns might reveal welfare fraud. As noted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients. Following an inquiry from the EFF, the DHA has instituted a privacy policy (one that didn't exist before their initial inquiry) requiring investigators to justify each request for LPR data. The Sacramento Bee reports the DHA accessed the data over a thousand times in two years.

Comments

Whoda thunk it?

[Anonymous Coward]

California finally does something that makes sense! Somebody fucked up somewhere!

GP's point is even more valid then

[rsilvergun]

if you account for the deterrent factor from stopping perhaps trillions of dollars of white collar fraud, right? So where's the increased enforcement of that?

It's got nothing to do with deterrents. Cheating welfare is already hard. The point of constant means testing and the like is a) to discourage people from getting help so you don't have to pay for it and b) to create an anti-poor person narrative that divides the working class into the poor and middle class so they won't notice the rich stealing all the money under their noses.

Works too.