Police provide proof that license plate readers are creating a database of Americans driving habits

Since May 2013, EFF and the ACLU have been engaged in a legal battle with two Los Angeles law enforcement agencies who are refusing to hand over a week’s worth of ALPR data. San Diego County, another jurisdiction, has fought efforts by citizens to obtain access to data that law enforcement has collected on them using ALPRs. Both claim that the records are exempted under the California Public Records Act because they are records of law enforcement investigations. The agencies also argue the public interest in maintaining secrecy in ALPR data outweighs the public interest in learning how and where ALPR systems are being used.

Law enforcement agencies like those in LA, San Diego, and Oakland aren’t using ALPR for targeted investigations, they're running a dragnet on all drivers in their jurisdictions. As states across the country become more and more concerned about ALPRs and take steps to limit their use, we believe the disclosure of a limited amount of license plate records will help to inform public debate on this mass surveillance tool.
 Muckrock and the Boston Globe obtained Boston Police ALPR data, the city suspended the program in the wake of the privacy concerns raised by the data. However the Mass. state police still use them as well as just about every police dept. in MA. Lets not forget the thousands of traffic cameras on roads & highways that are being used to spy on you & your family When the Minneapolis Star-Tribune obtained ALPR data that it used to track the whereabouts of the mayor, it kicked off debate in the legislature about how to balance the privacy of innocent drivers against the ability of police to fight crime. As a Minneapolis city official noted at a public hearing on ALPRs after the data release, “now that we see someone’s patterns in a graphic on a map in a newspaper, you realize that person really does have a right to be secure from people who might be trying to stalk them or follow them or interfere with them.” A state legislator and former police chief noted at that same hearing, “even though technology is great and it helps catch the bad guys, I don’t want the good guys being kept in a database.” DHS run police departments ignore the 4th. Amendment by using license plate readers to spy on innocent Americans. “One problem is it bypasses the Fourth Amendment,” said John Whitehead, president of the Charlottesville-based, civil-liberties-focused Rutherford Institute.

Automatic license plate readers can capture the date, time and exact location of a vehicle — for up to 1,800 vehicles per minute. That data goes to a central database that can match DMV records and other locations where that license plate was also captured on camera.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable” search and seizure, requiring a warrant. It’s the same argument used against the National Security Agency spy program.

“The Fourth Amendment is really clear that you’re supposed to have probable cause before you do that,” Whitehead said.

Click here to read how police bypass the 4th. Amend. with license plate readers.
 Not all California law enforcement agencies have followed Los Angeles and San Diego’s lead in ALPR secrecy. Whereas Los Angeles cops have stalled for more than a year and a half, Oakland provided raw ALPR data in just under two months. EFF released the data to the public, with the individual license plate numbers removed to protect the privacy of drivers captured by these cameras. (While LAPD and LASD also claim the public’s right to privacy as a reason for withholding the records, the data can be anonymized easily with a few clicks, either by deleting a column for the spreadsheet or replacing the plates with random numbers.) We've also done some preliminary analysis of the data, which we present below. (If you just want the raw data, the links are at the end of the post.)

The Numbers

63,272

Total number of data points collected by Oakland Police ALPR cameras 

48,718

Number of unique individual plates captured by Oakland Police ALPR cameras

39,275

Number of vehicles that were captured only once 

4,571

Number of ALPR reads within one mile of Oakland Police headquarters

589

Number of captured plates that were likely assigned to government vehicles (i.e. police cars, buses, county vehicles, etc., which generally receive plates that are seven numeric digits)

134

Number of entries that were obvious bad reads (e.g. the cameras picked up road signs, such as “CAUTION”)

24

Number of times the single most-captured plate was hit (a government vehicle, likely a police vehicle, captured multiple times at the same locations over a short period of time) 

1.31

Average number of times an individual plate was captured.

Want to take a look at the data yourself? Do you have a better analysis method? Want to draw your own conclusions? Please do! You can find the ALPR data here and the crime data here, both in CSV format, or here in a Google Fusion Table.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/what-we-learned-oakland-raw-alpr-data