License plate readers are recording millions of vehicles across the U.S.
(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)
California - 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.
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 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.
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.
“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 former senator Joe 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.”
http://cironline.org/reports/license-plate-readers-let-police-collect-millions-records-drivers-4883
Palantir denies its 'Prism' software is the NSA's 'PRISM' surveillance system:
The data analysis firm Palantir wants to make one thing clear: There’s more than one piece of software in the world called “Prism,” and Palantir’s “Prism” product is definitely not the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance system known as “PRISM.”
The leaked NSA document published Thursday by the Guardian and the Washington Post, which outlined a system known as PRISM for collecting data in real time from tech giants including Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, quickly led to suspicions that the program was in fact built by the $5 billion, CIA-funded data analysis startup Palantir, which sells a product with the same name.
But in a phone call Friday, a Palantir staffer who asked not to be named told me that Palantir has nothing to do with the NSA’s PRISM program, and that its “Prism” product is actually financial analysis software not intended for government. “It’s a name collision,” she said. “We had no knowledge of this PRISM program before the story broke, and we don’t have anything to do with it.
The Prism product, posted on a public wiki, was built for our finance program, and it has nothing to do with government.”
A description of Palantir’s Prism software on a public portion of its website doesn’t reveal much about its applications:
Prism is a software component that lets you quickly integrate external databases into Palantir. Specifically, it lets you build high-performance Data Engine based providers without writing any code. Instead, you define simple configuration files and then Palantir automatically constructs the data provider and database code for you.
For more information go to Palantir's site map link found at the bottom of their website, where they spell out how they work with the government. http://www.palantir.com/site-map/
Palantir isn’t the first to deny its involvement in the NSA’s spying scheme, which according to the Post extracted files directly from nine Internet companies over six years. Within hours of the story breaking, practically every tech company named in the story had denied their involvement and in some cases even denied knowing what PRISM was.
The Palantir staffer I spoke with wouldn’t comment on the startup’s customers, but it’s no secret that the company does work with intelligence agencies. A Wall Street Journal profile of the firm in 2009 said that the NSA was “eyeing” the company. It’s received investment from the CIA venture capital arm known as In-Q-Tel, as well as billionaire Peter Thiel. The company’s software was initially developed from fraud detection techniques implemented by PayPal, which Thiel co-founded.
Palantir has found itself under scrutiny for civil liberties violations before. When intruders from the hacker group Anonymous gained access to thousands of emails stored on the servers of the security firm HB Gary Federal, the emails revealed that Palantir had worked with HB Gary Federal to develop proposals for attacking WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, blackmailing its supporters and identifying donors.
The company quickly apologized for its role in the plan and cut ties with HB Gary Federal.
“The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy,” Palantir chief executive Alex Karp wrote in a statement at the time. “From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/07/startup-palantir-denies-its-prism-software-is-the-nsas-prism-surveillance-system/