Police license plate scanners paint a disturbing picture of "Big Brother" tracking Americans movements.

 The L.A. Weekly has learned that more than two dozen law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County are using hundreds of these "automatic license plate recognition" devices (LPRs) — units about the size of a paperback book, usually mounted atop police cruisers — to devour data on every car that catches their electronic eye.

The L.A. County Sheriff's Department and the Los Angeles Police Department are two of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate recognition information. Local police agencies have logged more than 160 million data points — a massive database of the movements of millions of drivers in Southern California.

Each data point represents a car and its exact whereabouts at a given time. Police have already conducted, on average, some 22 scans for every one of the 7,014,131 vehicles registered in L.A. County. Because it's random, some cars are scanned numerous times, others never.

Police acknowledge to the Weekly that the data have become so integral to their work, they almost take them for granted.

"The big joke is it's kind of like the radio," says Lt. Chris Morgan of the Long Beach Police Department. "When we first got radios in the cars, it was a really big deal. Now it's routine."

Documents obtained by the Weekly through the California Public Records Act, and interviews with officials at LAPD, LBPD and the Sheriff's Department, describe one of the most densely concentrated license plate recognition systems in the United States — soon to be linked up to a similar system in San Diego.

But privacy-rights advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, are worried.

Peter Bibring, an attorney with the ACLU, says, "There's nothing wrong with LPR installed in cars, checking license plates against stolen vehicles or warrant issues."

Bibring says that by retaining a history of innocent people's travels — under Chief Charlie Beck, for example, LAPD hangs onto millions of pieces of data for five years — "law enforcement can create a clear picture of the movements of law-abiding citizens."

Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says the sheer scale of the data collected changes the principles involved.

"When you look at how this will change the way people relate to the police, it's a big shift," Tien says.

We know Customs and Border Protection and the DEA have deployed near the southern “border” (which the government asserts extends 100 miles inland), and the readers that the DEA would like to deploy along interstate highways (my latest post on that is here, and an examination of the possible consequences here). It’s not clear what agency within DHS would be responsible for these L.A. deployments—whether these are also CBP or DEA cameras, or some other agency's.

The Weekly report also highlights that:

•    A large number of different law enforcement agencies in the region are using the technology—more than two dozen in L.A. County alone according to the paper.•    The records are all being uploaded to a central database.•    The records of innocent people are being retained for two to five years.•    The average number of location snapshots for a car in L.A. County has now reached 22, the paper estimates.If we do not put some protections in place, that average of 22 location snapshots per car will inevitably climb, probably very rapidly. If that is allowed to happen, it will have very significant reverberations.

Speaking of computerized law enforcement, New York City drivers may come under the watchful eye of automated speed cameras under a new proposal. One thing is certain: the American love affair with the automobile is entering a whole new chapter.
 http://www.laweekly.com/2012-06-21/news/license-plate-recognition-tracks-los-angeles/

Raleigh police are using license plate scanners to find stolen vehicles and more.

Raleigh, NC -  Raleigh is the only police department in the Triangle with ALPR. The city has six of the devices, one in each police district. In recent weeks, the devices have helped police recover at least four stolen plates and two stolen vehicles that they otherwise probably would not have seen, said Raleigh police spokesman Jim Sughrue.

The device can scan up to 3,000 license plates in an hour. Along with alerting officers about stolen plates, the devices can assist with other crimes that may involve a suspect vehicle.

Civil libertarians worry about the scanners. The American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina does not oppose the technology, said spokesman Mike Meno, but says it raises “tremendous privacy issues.”

“This is an issue that the national ACLU is looking at because the technology is being used more and more by local police departments,” Meno said. “The thing that is most troublesome to us is that in most cases the police will retain the data, even if a person is not charged with a crime.”

Meno said the retained information can be used to link someone to a later criminal investigation or could lead to routine tracking of people who haven’t done anything wrong. He noted that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department policy states that the scanners can be used to confirm a criminal suspect’s alibi regarding his whereabouts at a particular time and date and that the scanners can be used for “predictive purposes,” particularly in “high risk-crime areas” with a focus on “unusual traffic patterns.”

“That’s profiling,” Meno said.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s police are supposed to purge all information retained by the devices 18 months from the date it was recorded. By comparison, Raleigh’s policy states that officers must delete all scanned license plate information not linked to a specific criminal investigation within six months.

“We question why police would need to retain that data for up to six months if the information isn’t being used in an investigation,” Meno said.

Sughrue, the Raleigh police spokesman, said in some instances police may not know the identity of person who is suspected of a crime.

Raleigh’s policy also instructs officers to not deploy the devices unless there is “a legitimate law enforcement need” or “a specific criminal investigation,” and forbids officers from using the devices to intimidate or harass anyone.

The devices cost $18,700 apiece. The department used money from the Governor’s Crime Commission to purchase three of the devices, and a grant from the N.C. Highway Safety program to purchase two more, with funding from police coffers purchasing the sixth, Sughrue said.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/18/2159800/new-device-helps-raleigh-police.html

Privacy is the problem: United States v. Maynard and a case for a new regulatory model for police surveillance by Matthew Radler.

Abstract:
Inescapably, the debate in the United States about law enforcement’s use of electronic surveillance is defined in terms of privacy. Whether discussed by courts, commentators, or legislators, the principal and often the only justification put forth for regulating the use of a given technology by the police is that it invades an interest somehow described as private. But as surveillance technology has extended to conduct that takes place on public property and in plain view of society at large, this rationale for regulation has become incapable of justifying the rules that result. This demand for privacy-based rules about public-conduct surveillance reached its apex (thus far) in 2010 in United States v. Maynard, the appellate decision affirmed on other grounds by the Supreme Court’s property-based ruling in United States v. Jones. Maynard’s theory of privacy rights in the context of police use of tracking devices—that they are violated by the mere aggregation of data—is so vulnerable to circumvention by police agencies that its efficacy as a basis for regulation is questionable at best. This Note proposes an alternative rationale for regulation of public-conduct surveillance, as well as a theory of institutional harm and an alternative rulemaking authority—an administrative agency—to address public-conduct surveillance issues.

In an era when police action is the primary determinant of who is convicted of crimes, without meaningful review via trial, unchecked surveillance renders the judiciary a rubber stamp for local executive power; the demand for an ex ante record restores the supervisory role of the courts over police conduct. Preserving that institutional role, instead of protecting an increasingly difficult-to-justify notion of individual privacy in public behavior, provides a durable rationale, and ensuring that it is given full effect will require administrative, rather than judicial or legislative, oversight.
http://groups.law.gwu.edu/LR/ArticlePDF/80_4_Radler.pdf