Back in the fall of 2010, I was perusing the
Massachusetts state public safety website when I came upon an interesting
notice. The state had received nearly a half a million dollars from the federal
Department of Transportation for the purchase and distribution of automatic
license plate recognition (ALPR) systems for state and local police. And there
was one detail there that really surprised me.
It was the first I’d heard of the technology, so I
had to do a little digging. A cursory internet search revealed that police and
the organizations that represent them, like the International Association of
Chiefs of Police, were thrilled about the new technology. Evangelizing news
reports and briefing papers abounded; ALPR was a miracle tool, enabling police
to “catch bad guys” like never before. Gone were the days when police officers
radioed license plate numbers of “suspicious” looking cars back to the office,
looking for information about stolen cars or outstanding warrants. The
technology completely automated that process, and operated with thrilling
efficiency and ease.
Most police agencies use ALPR technology to look for
stolen cars, outstanding warrants, and parking scofflaws. But many also run
plates against federal watch lists, which are notoriously secretive and problematic. Some police departments are even
checking plate numbers against IRS databases, looking for tax evaders. The
system also allows for manual entry of license plate numbers. (It doesn’t take
a very advanced imagination to think of the innumerable ways in which that
feature can be misused.)
The biggest problem with ALPR systems is the creation
of databases with location information on every motorist who encounters the
system, not just those against whom some penalty or crime is alleged. Police
departments nationwide are using ALPR to quietly accumulate millions of plate
records, storing them in backend databases. While we don’t know the full extent
of this problem, we know that responsible deletion of data is the exception,
not the norm. Only two states have passed legislation barring the retention of
“non-hit” plate data for extended periods: Maine and New Hampshire. On the
other hand, we know for certain that some departments are eagerly engaging in
this surreptitious data collection.
Police in Metro Washington
DC and Connecticut,
for example, are pooling their captured plate data within their respective
geographic regions to create huge databases containing millions of records.
As license plate location data accumulates, the
system ceases to be simply a mechanism enabling efficient police work and
becomes a warrantless tracking tool, enabling retroactive surveillance of
millions of people.
Looking at that Massachusetts public safety web site,
it became clear that Massachusetts officials had something similar in mind.
What surprised me most was that the state’s grant advertisement to cities and
towns contained a provision requiring that recipients of the funds
submit allof their captured plate data to the state, where it would be stored
in the state’s criminal justice database.
That set off a number of alarms. Why would the state
require that cities and towns dump all of this location information into a criminal
justice database? After all, it’s not criminal justice data but rather location
information on millions of people suspected of no crime whatsoever. Once the
data is aggregated into this mega-database, the federal government, fusion
centers and other state law enforcement agencies will have access to our
data—all without warrants or any judicial oversight. Why does the state of
Massachusetts want to hoard the location and travel information of millions of
motorists in the state?
The likely answers is that, as one ALPR manufacturer notes,
“a repository of collected plates…forms the basis of an ‘after-the-fact’
intelligence database.”
Needless to say, upon learning this we at the ACLU of
Massachusetts took action immediately. We fired off a public records request to
the state asking for guidelines or data policies governing this database, and
for all of the successful grant applications. Over one hundred cities and towns
had applied for the money; about sixty ultimately received funds. Among them
was Brookline, a verdant, affluent city just outside Boston’s city limits.
When we made them aware of the issue, Brookline
residents didn’t like the idea of their captured license plate data getting
automatically shipped off to a state database, where federal agencies and even
the military would likely have ready access to it. They didn’t like that this
captured plate information could be combined with plate data from other states,
painting an eerily complete picture of our movements in public, potentially
nationwide.
So we organized.
The ACLU and a number of Brookline residents appeared
before the Brookline Board of Selectmen to argue that losing control over this
personal, revealing information was a bad idea.
The Board agreed with us, and ultimately the Chief of
Police did, too, and the city government voted to reject the grant.
The city officials and the police chief still wanted
to be able to use the technology, however, so officials urged the police to
work with the ACLU to craft an ALPR data policy that would enable the police
department to make good use of the technology, while limiting the dangers it
poses to our privacy in public.
We are approaching the end of that process in
Brookline. The police accepted many of our comments on its proposed data
policy. While we still have some disagreements about exactly how long plate
data should be retained, and over inclusion of DHS terror watch lists, the
policy will put Brookline on a far better footing, privacy-wise, than most
departments using ALPR.
It was an important victory. As a researcher and
advocate, I also learned something important through this process—not just
about ALPR and location tracking, but about our public process itself.
If the ACLU hadn’t stepped in to file the public
records request, agitate in Brookline and provide expert testimony to the city
government, and commentary to the police department, it’s likely that the
expansion of ALPR technology throughout the state would have progressed without
so much as a blip of public debate about the very real threats it poses to our
privacy and liberty. When we forced the conversation into the public square,
the press, residents and public officials throughout the state took notice.
The Brookline example shows that public processes can
work. The police there will get their cool new tool, and city residents will be
more secure knowing that their voices were heard—and that their location
information won’t so easily end up in a nondescript federal warehouse in the Utah desert.
The proper policy prescription for ALPR is pretty
simple: it’s all about the data policy. Police don’t need to retain captured
plate data in order to find stolen cars or people with outstanding warrants. In
the interest of liberty and freedom on the open road, they shouldn’t.
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