Hypocritical Boston Police don't want GPS devices in police cars as they spy on every motorist

The pending use of GPS tracking devices, slated to be installed in Boston police cruisers, has many officers worried that commanders will monitor their every move.

Almost 70% of police departments install GPS tracking devices in their vehicles, according to a recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum.

Try not to laugh: The Boston police have been spying on every motorist, recording their license plates and movements for years. This July three bills went before the MA. state legislature to prevent the Boston Police from spying on residents without a warrant. http://www.privacysos.org/alpr/docs

The three bills concern prosecutors’ ability to demand records from phone and Internet providers, law enforcement’s monitoring of political speech, and the ability of employers to demand access to an employee or job applicant’s social networking accounts.

“We had to sue to get information from the Boston Police Department about what they were doing to peaceful protesters in the Boston area,” Ott said. He said, “Police were actually spending resources on monitoring these peaceful groups.”

A 2012 ruling stated Boston police can't pull over a motorist just because they're nervous.

Boston police fought and lost $170,000 in Court Glik v. Cunniffe because they didn't want citizens recording them.

Cry me a river Boston police, you don't want to be spied on! Where were you when you've been trampling our rights like the Stasi, KGB or the People's Armed Police?

“No one likes it. Who wants to be followed all over the place?” said one officer who spoke anonymously because department rules forbid police from speaking to the media without authorization. “If I take my cruiser and I meet [reluctant witnesses] to talk, eventually they can follow me and say why were you in a back dark street for 45 minutes? It’s going to open up a can of worms that can’t be closed.” (No one wants to be followed? YEAH, that includes EVERYONE in Boston and MA.)

Davis said that officers will not be disciplined if they can reasonably explain their whereabouts.
 

The department cannot discipline officers based on any information collected by the GPS devices in the first six months following their installation.

And the department must alert an officer if anyone from the public requests his or her GPS records. (What a double standard, why won't you notify every MA. resident when the police record & track our license plates.)

“Our interest was the scrutiny,” said Joseph Sandulli, a lawyer for the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association. “This thing keeps a permanent record of where an officer is all day. If he stops to go to the bathroom, that stop appears on the screen. If he goes a mile over the speed limit, someone can question that. It’s quite an intrusion on people’s lives.” (It's ok for police to speed, but no one else, that's your argument?)

Concerned officers also raised the specter of advanced hackers breaking into the systems and tracking police officers as they move about the city, potentially enabling them to evade police.

“How long is it going to be before some criminal mastermind . . . gets some kids at MIT to figure out how to break into the GPS system?” one unnamed police officer wondered in an interview with the Globe. “Then they know where the cops are and can go rob banks.” (What about hackers accessing your ALPR's database and robbing or stalking MA. residents?)

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/11/18/gps-now-monitor-bpd/Vc6qOHTlvehT2YzYWIQkiP/story.html
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2013/11/19/gps-devices-would-boost-efficiency-boston-police/NWzDwtpG3ItzBHG3RW2GZK/story.html
http://privacysos.org/node/1238

It's not the Stasi, but the NSA is bad enough:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/in-germany-legacy-of-stasi-puts-different-perspective-on-nsa-spying/2013/11/18/a0b1b37c-4940-11e3-b87a-e66bd9ff3537_story.html

Over 1 billion records in private license plate tracking database:

Vigilant Solutions maintains a database containing over one and a half billion records showing the driving patterns of people throughout the United States. The data, harvested by law enforcement agencies and the corporation's own fleet, is automatically uploaded to the company's server, called the National Vehicle Location Service. But NVLS is just one product among many that Vigilant Solutions offers to law enforcement nationwide. The company also provides robust analytical capabilities to officers, as the their video illustrates.

The scenario described in the video pertains to a fictional homicide investigation, but there's no reason the same kind of investigative technique couldn't be used to look into antiwar protesters, journalists who are asking difficult questions of a police chief, or nosy city council members. As you can see, the fictional officer wasn't required to enter a reason, provide any legal justification, nor even make reference to an investigation file before he was able to query the database and use analytic tools to decipher it. When it comes to license plate tracking in the United States today, just about anything goes. As the narrator in the video says, the plate database combined with the company's robust analytic tools make it easy for investigators to find out where someone lives or works, simply by looking at their driving history. Where we go says a lot about who we are. It also says a lot about who we know.

Another of Vigilant's products offers 'Associate Analysis', enabling investigators to find out who you hang out with. Journalists who think leaving their cell phones at home to meet a source keeps them safe from the government's watchful eye, take note: you shouldn't drive to meet that whistleblower, either. Unfortunately, license plate readers and the vast databases that contain billions of records of our movements -- run by corporations and the government -- are almost entirely unregulated nationwide. A handful of states have laws addressing the powerful technology, but only a few of those laws meaningfully forbid the mass storage and data mining of our location histories.  Police don't want the Massachusetts state legislature to act on a bill currently before the Transportation Committee, the License Plate Privacy Act, because it would ban them from keeping detailed records of our movements.

 MA. residents need to Sign the petition Stop license plate tracking!
http://vigilantsolutions.com/press/vigilant_solutions_unveils_facial_recognition_iacphttp://privacysos.org/node/1239

Cops love license plate readers:

If a police officer passes you by without incident, it could be luck, or it may be that the cop is using an automated license plate reader to see if there’s a more serious infraction to stop us for.

The technology isn't new, but has spread like wildfire across the U.S. in recent years. All across the country, law enforcement agencies are mounting the devices on cruisers and roadsides, analyzing license plates and letting police spy on motorists.
The ACLU of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department last month over records collected by license plate readers over the last several years.

According to The Huffington Post, both law enforcement agencies denied requests for the data collected by the devices, citing various sections of California law that allow police to keep records of ongoing investigations private and free of public scrutiny.
These started out as tools for stolen cars, but the police have built up an infrastructure for intelligence where they’re monitoring the movements of law-abiding residents Peter Bibring of ACLU Southern California said. http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Cops-Like-What-They-See-with-License-Plate-Readers.html

How are innovations in technology transforming policing?http://policeforum.org/library/critical-issues-in-policing-series/Technology_web2.pdf