The IRS is using license plate readers to spy on motorists
The Internal Revenue Service and other U.S. agencies awarded about $415,000 in contracts to a license plate-tracking company before DHS leaders dropped a plan for similar work amid privacy complaints.
Federal offices such as the Forest Service and the U.S. Air Force’s Air Combat Command chose Livermore, California-based Vigilant Solutions to provide access to license plate databases or tools used to collect plate information, according to government procurement records compiled by Bloomberg.
Vigilant, a closely held company, has received such work since 2009. In February, Jeh Johnson, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, ordered the cancelation of an immigration agency plan to buy access to national license plate data. While the technology can help solve crimes, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have said the mass collection of data infringes the privacy of innocent people.
“Especially with the IRS, I don’t know why these agencies are getting access to this kind of information,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy-rights group. “These systems treat every single person in an area as if they’re under investigation for a crime -- that is not the way our criminal justice system was set up or the way things work in a democratic society.”
IRS officials awarded the company a $1,188 contract for “access to nationwide data” in June 2012, according to records available online. That contract ended in May 2013, according to federal procurement records.
“The IRS uses a variety of investigative tools similar to other law-enforcement agencies to assist with criminal cases,” Eric Smith, an agency spokesman, said in an e-mail. He declined to say how the IRS used the records in its investigations.
The Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture, awarded Vigilant a contract valued at as much as $47,019 for its “CarDetector” system in August 2009, records show. The product scans and captures license plate numbers, compares the data to law enforcement lists of wanted vehicles and sends alerts when such vehicles are detected, according to the company’s website.
Forestry officials also awarded the company a contract valued at about $7,500 in August for a subscription to its license plate database and other services, according to contracting records.
“License plate readers are helpful to our law enforcement officers with illegal activities on national forest system lands in California,” Tiffany Holloway, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in an e-mail. She declined to comment about what types of crimes the tools are used to investigate or provide examples of how the technology has helped law enforcement.
Concerns about the government’s use of the data remain, said Kade Crockford, a project director with the ACLU of Massachusetts.
“The American public deserves to know the degree to which the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies are already tapping into these databases,” Crockford said in a phone interview. “The cancellation of the solicitation itself has no measurable impact on the existing reality, which is that we are all being tracked right now.”
'The ACLU, which also has pushed for state measures limiting use of the technology, criticized the Homeland Security Department for a February solicitation seeking to buy access to the data. The department’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency had planned to use the records to help locate and arrest “absconders and criminal aliens,” according to a federal document seeking companies’ proposals.
The agency halted the solicitation, saying immigration officials weren’t aware it had been posted.
Federal procurement records show it has awarded contracts valued at as much as $175,000 to Vigilant since 2011. Most are now expired. The other contracts with Vigilant are separate from the February solicitation, Barbara Gonzalez, press secretary for the immigration agency, said in an e-mail.
They provide “limited access to an already-existing database for a defined amount of time and only in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations and to locate wanted individuals,” Gonzalez said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-17/irs-among-agencies-using-license-plate-tracking-vendor.html