Vermont fusion center shares 8 million location records about residents with Big Brother

Police in the town of Rutland, VT (population ~18,000) collected 539,680 individual license plate reads during the 18 month period between July 1, 2012 and December 31, 2013, according to a report issued by law enforcement. Census figures from 2000 put the number of families in the city at about 4,200. If we assume that there are an average of two cars per family in Rutland, that means police collected an average of 64 plate reads per car over 18 months. This figure might not seem like a lot, but consider that law enforcement throughout the state of Vermont only have a total of 61 license plate readers.

The information comes in the first of what we be annual transparency reports to the Vermont state legislature, mandated after lawmakers passed a bill in June 2013 to regulate license plate readers in the state. Unfortunately, the law allows departments and the fusion center to retain non-derogatory information about people against whom no allegation of wrongdoing has been made for up to 18 months. On the bright side, it requires that police disclose certain information about how they collect, use, and share license plate reader data.

Overall, the report shows, police statewide collected nearly 8 million records over the 18 month period. About 626,000 people live in Vermont. If 300,000 of them are registered drivers, the state retains an average of about 26 data points on each person. But while they collected huge quantities of it, the information was not particularly useful to investigators, the data shows.

While officials queried the database 105 times during the reporting period, only 40 of those searches turned up hits. In other words, more than half the time, the information police sought was not in the database.

Officials searched the statewide license plate reader database, held at the so-called Vermont Intelligence Center, for clues in investigations of all kinds: 25 related to missing persons, 16 times for drug smuggling, 7 times for a category labeled “suicidal”, 5 times in relation to domestic violence, three times for “wanted” persons, once for “threats”, and once for “suspicious”.

The report confirms that the fusion center shares license plate reader data with the federal government, as civil libertarians suspect occurs nationwide. Federal agencies requested license plate reader data from the fusion center a total of 18 times. Customs and Border Patrol, which operates its own license plate readers at the US borders, requested data from the Vermont fusion center 9 times during the reporting period. The FBI and the US Marshall’s service both sought data once, while the DEA requested it twice.

So what does the report mean about the state of license plate readers in Vermont? In short, it shows that while heaps of data are retained about thousands of people, it's not particularly useful to the cops.

The statistics show that while the private driving habits of tens or hundreds of thousands of people are maintained in the state’s database, the information therein was only useful to police 40 times.

Given that there are nearly 8 million records in the database, does the fact that the data was only useful to investigators 40 times justify the serious privacy harms inherent to keeping track of the movements of tens or hundreds of thousands of law-abiding people? That doesn’t seem right.
Useful or not, allowing the government to collect mass quantities of sensitive information about us absent any evidence of wrongdoing strikes me as essentially totalitarian. Knowledge is power, after all, and this kind of dragnet goes too far.

Even if the data was useful one million times, would we want the government to keep tabs on everywhere we go, just in case we ever do something illegal.
http://privacysos.org/node/1324

Police in Virginia allowed to spy on citizens for another year using license plate readers:

Local police in Virginia will retain their ability to collect data from license plate reader cameras for at least another year, even though an attorney general’s opinion last year declared that doing so was illegal. On Monday, the second of two bills in the General Assembly to limit police collection of such data was tabled for the year, after both legislators agreed that their bills required more study and more specific wording.

This means the debate weighing the importance of personal privacy vs. solving crimes and finding missing persons will continue for another year. The conversation is happening across the country as politicians try to decide how long data collected from license plate reader cameras — which can snap hundreds of license plate photos per minute, with time, date and location information — can be maintained.

After then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II (R) wrote last year that, under Virginia law, keeping such data when it wasn’t specifically tied to an investigation was illegal, the Virginia State Police promptly began dumping their license data after 24 hours. But police departments in Northern Virginia and elsewhere in the state decided to ignore the attorney general’s opinion. Alexandria, for instance, keeps data for two years.

Following a Washington Post article about the practice, Del. Richard L. Anderson (R-Prince William) and Sen. J. Chapman “Chap” Petersen (D-Fairfax) introduced bills defining a license plate number as “personal information” and saying that data tracking tag locations may not be kept without a specific investigative purpose.

Police officials and the license technology’s supporters were gearing up for a fight, saying that the bills were too vague and could be interpreted to restrict all manner of uses, including homeland security around the nation’s capital. They also noted the many successful uses of the data to make arrests and locate people and said the data shouldn’t be erased because of the possibility that someone might access the information illegally.

“We actually share some of the intent of the bills,” said Dana Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, “that there ought to be clear language on the use of the data and its retention.” Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union warned that the data could be used to track the movement of private citizens over time and misused by those who might have access to that information.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/bills-to-regulate-virginia-police-use-of-license-plate-reader-data-are-shelved-for-a-year/2014/02/10/a5b8a5b0-91cf-11e3-b227-12a45d109e03_story.html