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EFF, MuckRock Partner To See How Local Police Are Trading Your Car's Location (eff.org)
v3rgEz writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation and transparency non-profit MuckRock helped file over a thousand public records requests, looking into how local police departments were trading away sensitive data on where you drive and park, picked up by their use of automated license plate recognition devices. They've just published the results of those requests, including looking at how hundreds of departments freely share that data with hundreds of other organizations -- often with no public oversight. Explore the data yourself, or, if your town isn't yet in their database, requests its information free on MuckRock and they'll file a request for it. "[Automated license plate readers (ALPR)] are a combination of high-speed cameras and optical character recognition technology that can identify license plates and turn them into machine-readable text," reports the EFF. "What makes ALPR so powerful is that drivers are required by law to install license plates on their vehicles. In essence, our license plates have become tracking beacons. After the plate data is collected, the ALPR systems upload the information to a central a database along with the time, date, and GPS coordinates. Cops can search these databases to see where drivers have traveled or to identify vehicles that visited certain locations. Police can also add license plates under suspicion to 'hot lists,' allowing for real-time alerts when a vehicle is spotted by an ALPR network."
Isn't this the point of a license plate?
Nope. The purpose was never to enable full-time surveillance of people's vehicles. It was to permit identification of vehicles in realtime. When license plates were introduced, there were no automatic license plate scanners. Now there are, so things are different.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Its often not the police collecting the data, the police are often merely subscribers to the commercial private databases. These database are filled by other private sources, bail bondsmen, reposessors, etc. These private entities will literally cruise up and down the isles of parking lots at various public venues -- malls, stadiums, walmart, etc -- scanning/recording plates and waiting for statistics to find them a car/person of interest. As a bonus they also sell all their collected data to the commercial private databases.
To think that this is largely a law enforcement effort or a law enforcement database is to totally misunderstand what has been happening.
No warrant is needed for public information available from a private source. That's the "beauty" of the current system for law enforcement, why they like to merely be a subscriber.