Subject: FYI - License-plate readers let police collect millions of records on
drivers
Link: http://cironline.org/reports/
License-plate readers let police collect millions of records on drivers
Crime and Justice National Security - Ali Winston, Contributor - Jun 28, 2013
A
license-plate reader mounted on a San Leandro Police Department car can
log thousands of plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. “It works 100
times better than driving around looking for license plates with our
eyes,” says police Lt. Randall Brandt.
Credit: Michael
Katz-Lacabe
When
the city of San Leandro, Calif., purchased a license-plate reader for
its police department in 2008, computer security consultant Michael
Katz-Lacabe asked the city for a record of every time the scanners had
photographed his car.
The results shocked him.
The
paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log
thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe
said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one
image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out
of his Toyota Prius in their driveway.
That
photograph, Katz-Lacabe said, made him “frightened and concerned about
the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.” The single
patrol car in San Leandro equipped with a plate reader had logged his
car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and
documenting the time and location.
At
a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies
throughout California have been collecting millions of records on
drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by
local, state and federal law enforcement.
An
image captured by a license-plate reader in 2009 shows Katz-Lacabe and
his daughters stepping out of a car in their driveway. The photograph
made Katz-Lacabe “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police
surveillance and data collection,” he says.
Credit: San Leandro Police Department photo courtesy of Michael Katz-Lacabe
With
heightened concern over secret intelligence operations at the National
Security Agency, the localized effort to track drivers highlights the
extent to which the government has committed to collecting large amounts
of data on people who have done nothing wrong.
A
year ago, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center – one of
dozens of law enforcement
intelligence-sharing centers set up after the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001 – signed a $340,000 agreement with the Silicon Valley firm
Palantir to construct a database of license-plate records flowing in
from police using the devices across 14 counties, documents and
interviews show.
The
extent of the center’s data collection has never been revealed. Neither
has the involvement of Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm with extensive
ties to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. The CIA’s venture
capital fund, In-Q-Tel, has invested $2 million in the firm.
The
jurisdictions supplying license-plate data to the intelligence
center stretch from Monterey County to
the Oregon border. According to contract documents, the database will be
capable of handling at least 100 million records and be accessible to
local and state law enforcement across the region.
Law enforcement agencies throughout Northern California will be able to access the data, as will state and federal authorities.
In
the Bay Area, at least 32 government agencies use license-plate
readers. The city of Piedmont decided to install them along the border
with Oakland, and the Marin County enclave of Tiburon placed plate
scanners and cameras on two roads leading into and out of town.
Law
enforcement agencies throughout the region also have adopted the
technology. Police in Daly City, Milpitas and San Francisco have signed
agreements to provide data from plate readers to the Northern California
Regional Intelligence Center. A Piedmont document indicates that city
is also participating, along with Oakland, Walnut Creek, Alameda and the
California Highway Patrol.
Katz-Lacabe, who was featured in
a
Wall Street Journal story last year, said he believes the records of his
movements are too revealing for someone who has done nothing wrong.
With the technology, he said, “you can tell who your friends are, who
you hang out with, where you go to church, whether you’ve been to a
political meeting.”
Lt.
Randall Brandt of the San Leandro police said, “It’s new technology,
we’re learning as we go, but it works 100 times better than driving
around looking for license plates with our eyes.”
The
intelligence center database will store license-plate records for up to
two years, regardless of data retention limits set by local police
departments.
Many
cities use license-plate readers to enforce parking restrictions or
identify motorists who run red lights. Police in New York City have used
the readers to catch car thieves and scan parking lots to identify
motorists with open warrants.
In
California, Long Beach police detectives used scanner data to arrest
five people in a 2010 homicide. Plate readers in Tiburon identified
celebrity chef Guy Fieri’s yellow Lamborghini in March 2011, which
allegedly had been stolen from a San Francisco dealership by a teenager
who embarked on a crime spree two years ago and now faces attempted
murder charges.
Sid
Heal, a retired commander with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s
Department, oversaw the adoption of plate readers in his agency in the
mid-2000s. Heal recalled the dramatic uptick the plate readers made in
the auto theft unit’s productivity.
“We found 10 stolen vehicles on the first weekend in 2005 with our antitheft teams,” Heal said. “I had a hit within 45 minutes.”
Before,
Heal said, police had to call license plates in to a dispatcher and
wait to have the car verified as stolen. Plate readers, Heal said, “are
lightning fast in comparison” and allow officers to run up to 1,200
plates an hour, as opposed to 20 to 50 plates per day previously.
But
Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
said the Northern California database raises significant privacy
concerns. “Because so many people in the Bay Area are mobile, it makes
it that much more possible to track people from county to county,” Lynch
said.
In May, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, along
with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, sued
the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and Los Angeles Police departments for a
week of data gathered and retained in a multiagency network. For now,
it’s unknown which agency administers the Los Angeles
database, how many agencies contribute or have access to the database,
how many records the system retains or how long they are kept.
In
San Diego, 13 federal and local law enforcement agencies have compiled
more than 36 million license-plate scans in a regional database since
2010 with the help of federal homeland security grants. The San Diego
Association of Governments maintains the database. Unlike the Northern
California database, which retains the data for between one and two
years, the San Diego system retains license-plate information
indefinitely.
“License-plate
data is clearly identifiable to specific individuals,” said Lee Tien, a
senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. “This is like having your barcode tracked.”
Few limits on license-plate data
License-plate
readers are not subject to the same legal restrictions as GPS devices
that can be used to track an individual's movements. The U.S. Supreme
Court ruled unanimously last year that lengthy GPS tracking constitutes a
Fourth Amendment search and may require a warrant.
But
plate readers might not fall under such rulings if police successfully
argue that motorists have no “reasonable expectation of privacy” while
driving on public roads.
Then-California
state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, introduced a bill last year that
would have required California police to purge license-plate data after
60 days and applied that rule to companies that collect such data. Law
enforcement and private businesses involved in the technology resisted, and the bill died.
“Do
we really want to maintain a database that tracks personal movements of
law-abiding citizens
in perpetuity? That’s the fundamental question here,” said Simitian, now
a Santa Clara County supervisor. “Larger and larger amounts of data
collected over longer periods of time provide a very detailed look at
the personal movements of private citizens.”
While
some law enforcement agencies, like the California Highway Patrol, have
their own data retention guidelines for license-plate scanners,
Simitian said there still is no larger policy that protects the privacy
of Californians on the road.
“Public
safety and privacy protection are not mutually exclusive,” he said.
“There's a balance to be struck, and most people understand that.”
Heal,
the retired sheriff’s commander, said that absent clear legal limits on
license-plate readers, law enforcement agencies will continue to expand
their ability to gather such information.
“A
lot of the guidance on this technology – the court doctrine – is
nonexistent,” Heal said. “Until that guidance comes, law enforcement is
in an exploratory mode.”
