License-plate readers help police, alarm privacy advocates

him or her with an image of the car and its plate, plus details about why the driver deserves scrutiny.

Schulz writes that, legally speaking, license-plate readers are not unlike what law enforcers do every day, confirming automobile registration and other information the government already retains electronically. In other words, on their surface the readers do not seem to resemble a new Orwellian monster in which the most sensitive personal information about yourself is stockpiled in massive data systems.

A closer look, however, could set off alarm bells. The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington state argued 26 May that plate readers store the time, date, and GPS location of each passing car. Many of those cars do not match any list of known code violators or stolen vehicles. Big-city police departments especially, civil libertarians say, are in a position to record tens of millions of driver details every year.

 

Motorola’s own product literature emphasizes these unique capabilities pointing out that the readers can “quietly note the time and location” when a “vehicle of interest” passes an officer. The collected information is then loaded into a program called Back Office System Software, or BOSS, a Motorola sales pitch says:

[Plate readers] can generate vast amounts of data: database hits, GPS coordinates, time of day, photographs, plate numbers and more. Back at headquarters, BOSS turns this data into useful intelligence. … Users can query the data using multiple search parameters including time, date, full or partial plate, location and user. BOSS can also map all locations related to a single plate to track vehicle movements. The BOSS web interface allows data to be easily shared across multiple locations and agencies.

Eighteen police departments in Washington state are relying on them, but the ACLU says that only two states nationally have established restrictions for how data collected from the readers can be used. While license-plate readers have been in operation for some time now, the ACLU attributes a surge in their popularity to improvements in the technology and the availability of federal grants to finance them, including funds from President Obama’s Recovery Act.

 

As seen here, Recovery Act spending figures show that agencies across the country are seeking license-plate readers with stimulus cash

Charlie Beck, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, told Government Technology in 2008 that the difference is like fishing with a net instead of a line. Safeguards can be put in place that protect the privacy rights of citizens, he said, but plate readers aren’t going anywhere.

Beck, too, puts a premium on the fact that they can document automobile locations. “The real value comes from the long-term investigative uses of being able to track vehicles — where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing — and tie that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur … The hope is to take all the readings and put them into one database for when you’ve got another jurisdiction or state looking for a car that may have shown up here.”