Microsoft funding allows police to acquire license plate scanners & spy gear from the National Fusion Center Association.
A recent post published on the PrivacySOS.org blog directs viewers to a YouTube video produced by PIPS Technology, the self-described world leader in automated license plate recognition, or ALPR, technology. PIPS’ devices are deployed in police cruisers across the US, and in Little Rock, AK, for example, cops say the equipment is well worth the $18,000-per-unit price tag. But while PIPS may be touting their product as something of a must-have for police agencies, the manufacturer is staying silent when it comes to discussing the blatant privacy violations it commits every second its in use.
"It can scan the mall parking lot in a matter of minutes," Sergeant Brian Dedrick, of the North Little Rock Police Department tells Arkansas Matters of his ALPR scanner. "We couldn't even do that three years go."
Sgt. Dedrick is right — ALPRs allow law enforcement to do something that was unheard of only a few years ago.
Lieutenant Christopher Morgon of the Long Beach Police Department in Southern California is one of a few cops interviewed by PIPS in their latest advertisement video picked up by the blog, and he agrees that license-plate scanners let his agency do something that was once unheard of. Before adding ALPR technology to cruisers, cops there could only manually dial-in around 150 license plates in a single shift. By equipping patrol cars with high-tech software and a slew of surveillance cameras, though, Lt. Morgon says today the department does a lot more than that.
“If you dedicated your day to driving around and putting your vehicle in a place where there’s lots of cars, you could read anywhere from 5 to 10,000 plates in that same shift,” Lt. Morgon says, adding that a single cop car can collect data from upwards of three surveillance cameras simultaneously.
Rita Sklar, the director of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter, tells Arkansas Matters, "I don't think I have a problem” with the scanner themselves. It’s the sharing of information and how easily it can be connected to individuals, not just automobiles that raise concerns.
"It's just one chink in the wall of privacy," she says.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) defends the scanners, though, and notes that while the technology practically commits clean-cut privacy violations, there’s one little step — that single mouse click — that keeps them in the clear:
“A license plate number identifies a specific vehicle, not a specific person,” the IACP notes in their official scanner guidelines. “Although a license plate number may be linked or otherwise associated with an identifiable person, this potential can only be realized through a distinct, separate step (e.g., an inquiry to a Secretary of State or Department of Motor Vehicles data system). Absent this extra step, the license plate number and the time and location data attached to it arenot personally identifying. Thus, even though LPR systems automate the collection of license plate numbers, it is the investigative process that identifies individuals.”
“That's a real stretch. But it is a powerful legal assertion,” PrivacySOS notes. “By arguing that license plate reader data isn't personally identifiable, IACP is implicitly saying that it mustn't be protected as seriously as does personal information about us that doesn't require clicking a mouse — the ‘distinct, separate step.’”
“That's relevant in the real world because it means officers can collect, retain and share this very sensitive information with virtually no restrictions.”
In Long Beach, CA - Lt. Morgon believes that the department has raked in around $3 million in traffic ticket fines after using ALPR scanners for only three years. The LAPD has so far invested $1.8 million on the cameras — and have used them to log more than 160 million data points.
http://rt.com/usa/news/license-plate-police-department-520/
Police acquire license plate scanners and spy gear from fusion centers.
Many of the fusion centers that do exist no longer even allude to “terrorism” in their mission statements. They are all about fighting crime, and their “success stories” are more likely to concern automobile theft and drug rings than anything to do with “national security.” As the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center put it, they need funds to fight gunplay on streets: “That’s terror right there in our community. And that kind of terror is one that’s experienced in big cities and small towns across the state.”
If police departments can invoke fusion centers when they apply to the DHS for grants that they actually spend on license plate recognition systems, electronic records management, cell phone tracking devices, data mining software and “handheld citation issuance units and accessories,” then why not do it? The DC Metro Police got equipment worth $725,000 that way.
At a time when the nation’s schools and infrastructure could have urgently used an infusion of taxpayers’ dollars, funds intended for the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center were spent by the Arizona Department of Public Safety on two Chevrolet Tahoe sports utility vehicles.
The San Diego fusion center, meanwhile, seemed to be staffed with wannabe spies with a voracious appetite for electronic equipment. It used its DHS funds on “shirt-button” and “pinhole” cameras, and got 116 computers and related gadgets for its 80 full-time employees. The 55 flat screen TV’s it purchased for “training purposes” for $75,000 were used instead for “open-source monitoring” (otherwise known as “watching the news.”)
In 2010 an assessment of fusion centers was carried out by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis and the Program Manager of the Information Sharing Environment (ISE). The DHS did not willingly share these findings with the Senate Subcommittee. Indeed, they originally said they did not exist.
How did the Members of Congress finally obtain the 2010 assessment? They did so after the DHS obtained the “consent” of a “private, non-governmental organization, the National Fusion Center Association (NFCA), which supposedly had the authority to represent the 68 centers subject to review.” This previously unknown, private agency wrote a letter to the Subcommittee saying it had “authorized” the DHS to share the assessment with Congress.
In the rush to stand-up the department’s intelligence arm, the short-staffed office relied heavily on contractors, such as Booz Allen Hamilton and General Dynamics, which reaped millions of federal dollars.
It is a universe marked by redundancy. Information currently flows from fusion centers into a national “information sharing environment” such as the Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN), Protected Critical Infrastructure Information (PCII) Program, and Homeland Secure Data Network (HSDN – for classified data), which all sit alongside the Department of Justice’s Regional Information Sharing System (RISS), the FBI’s Regional Data Exchange and eGuardian, the Naval Investigative Services’ Law Enforcement Information Exchange (LInX) and the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit’s (LEIU) LEO network (LEIU is a private organization of public law enforcement officials, including chiefs of police).
Led by a former DHS grants official who lobbies for increased federal funding for fusion centers, the NFCA receives funds from Microsoft, ESRI, Thomson-Reuters, Mutualink and other firms that want business with fusion centers.
Mike Sena, president of the National Fusion Center Association, appeared at the hearing in defense of the work being done by fusion centers. His group lobbies for federal funding in support of fusion center activities, but the Senate investigators uncovered that it is a private organization “funded by corporations who seek to do business with fusion centers,” like Microsoft.
"We look at terrorism as a criminal activity," Sena said. "Oftentimes when we do investigations, the activity that was involved was not somebody out there building the bomb. It was individuals who were involved in criminal activity to raise funds for terrorist organizations,” he added.
http://privacysos.org/node/838
http://www.charityandsecurity.org/news/Senate_Investigation_Fusion_Centers_Do_Not_Help_Counter_Terror_Threaten_Civil_Liberties
http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n4/intelligence-fusion-centers.html
download the report, "Federal Support For and Involvement In State And Local Fusion Centers" (.pdf)
download exhibits that accompany the fusion center report (.pdf)
read a statement from Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) on the report