Alarming use of license plate readers with plans to create a central repository should worry everyone.

Article first appeared in the Boston Globe:

MA - Automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology’s popularity is exploding - seven Boston-area police departments will add a combined 21 new license readers during the next month alone — and with that expanded use has come debate on whether the privacy of law-abiding citizens is being violated.

These high-tech license readers, now mounted on 87 police cruisers statewide, scan literally millions of license plates in Massachusetts each year, not only checking the car and owner’s legal history, but also creating a precise record of where each vehicle was at a given moment.

Massachusetts public safety officials are trying to create a central repository of license scans similar to a system in Maryland where all 262 scanner-equipped cruisers feed data to the state. In 2011, the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security handed out $750,000 in federal grants for 43 police departments to buy scanners with the understanding that all scan results would be shared.

The bill introduced on Beacon Hill by Senator Cynthia Creem and Representative Jonathan Hecht would allow police to share scan results for law enforcement purposes, but it would require every agency to develop formal policies that protect privacy. It would also set statewide standards for preserving camera scanner data and require regular reports to the state on how departments are using their scanners.

Currently, even the state Executive Office of Public Safety lacks a formal policy governing the use of its planned database, while 36 police departments out of the 53 using automated license readers have no written policies, the survey found. The Massachusetts State Police are currently developing a policy for the department’s 20 camera scanners.

Though police have concerns about provisions in the Creem-Hecht bill — particularly the proposed 48-hour limit on saving license scans — some law enforcement officials say they can see a role for the state in setting standards on the technology.

“Some departments are keeping the data forever, others seem to be dumping it every 20 minutes,” said Peabody Police Chief Robert Champagne, who said his department has yet to set a limit on retaining its license scans.

A survey of police departments that use automated license readers found that fewer than a third — just 17 out of 53 — have written policies, leaving the rest with no formal standards for who can see the records or how long they will be preserved.

“The worst-case scenario — vast databases with records of movements of massive numbers of people — is already happening,” warns Kade Crockford of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which is pushing for a state law to regulate use of license plate scanners and limit the time departments can routinely keep the electronic records to 48 hours.

But police fear that zeal to protect privacy could stifle the use of a promising law enforcement tool, especially if they are prevented from preserving and pooling license plate scans for use in detective work. Currently, all of the police departments keep their plate scans longer than two days, with data storage ranging from 14 days in Somerville and Brookline to 90 days in Boston and up to a year in Leicester, Malden, Pittsfield, and Worcester.

Boston’s four scanner-equipped cars do 3,500 scans a day and more than 1 million per year, according to police data. Even smaller departments such as Fitchburg scan 30,000 plates per month with just one license-reading system, easily 10 times more than an officer could manually check.
Most of the departments that deploy license plate readers use them primarily for traffic enforcement. But the scanners — sometimes called by the acronym ALPR — are also used for missing persons, AMBER alerts, active warrants, and open cases.

“Every once in a while our detectives will use the ALPR database for retrospective searches,” said Sergeant Griffin, adding that the technology has proved useful to scan vehicles in neighborhoods surrounding crime scenes.

A police officer interviewed for today's Globe story told the newspaper that we don’t need a law to protect the public from license plate reader-enabled, unwarranted government spying. 
 
Chelsea officer Sergeant Robert Griffin, whose department reportedly does not even maintain a license plate reader policy, told the paper that we should simply "trust law enforcement to do the right thing" with the powerful technology.
But that’s not how we do things in the United States. We are a nation of laws. In order to protect our privacy from the threats posed by new surveillance technologies like license plate readers, we need to impose clear, legally enforceable limits on the police.
After all, we live in a democracy, and the police are public servants. If the public in Massachusetts wants to prevent government officials from tracking our movements as we drive through the state, we should and we will.
The police would no doubt benefit from absolutely no restriction on their power. Officers would have a much easier time solving crimes if they didn’t need warrants to search our homes. But that would be unacceptable. We have historically required that police provide evidence to a judge before officers violate our personal privacy, and technological developments should not change that basic framework.
McNamara said that there is no formal process when another police department requests a license inquiry of this kind into his unit’s database.

ACLU attorney Fritz Mulhauser warned last summer that, within a few years, police will be able to use license scan records to determine whether a particular vehicle “has been spotted at a specific church, union hall, bar, political party headquarters, abortion clinic, strip club, or any number of other locations a driver might wish to keep private.”
http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/08/big-brother-better-police-work-new-technology-automatically-runs-license-plates-everyone/1qoAoFfgp31UnXZT2CsFSK/story.html
http://privacysos.org/node/1019

Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) Systems: Policy and operational guidance for law enforcement:

http://www.theiacp.org/portals/0/pdfs/IACP_ALPR_Policy_Operational_Guidance.pdf