Throughout the United States—outside private houses, apartment complexes, shopping centers, and businesses with large employee parking lots—a private corporation, Vigilant Solutions, is taking photos of cars and trucks with its vast network of unobtrusive cameras. It retains location data on each of those pictures, and sells it.
It’s happening right now in nearly every major American city.
The company has taken roughly 2.2 billion license-plate photos to date. Each month, it captures and permanently stores about 80 million additional geotagged images. They may well have photographed your license plate. As a result, your whereabouts at given moments in the past are permanently stored. Vigilant Solutions profits by selling access to this data (and tries to safeguard it against hackers). Your diminished privacy is their product. And the police are their customers.
The company counts 3,000 law-enforcement agencies among its clients. Thirty thousand police officers have access to its database. Do your local cops participate?
If you’re not sure, that’s typical.
To install a GPS tracking device on your car, your local police department must present a judge with a rationale that meets a Fourth Amendment test and obtain a warrant. But if it wants to query a database to see years of data on where your car was photographed at specific times, it doesn’t need a warrant––just a willingness to send some of your tax dollars to Vigilant Solutions, which insists that license plate readers are “unlike GPS devices, RFID, or other technologies that may be used to track.” Its website states that “LPR is not ubiquitous, and only captures point in time information. And the point in time information is on a vehicle, not an individual.”
But thanks to Vigilant, its competitors, and license-plate readers used by police departments themselves, the technology is becoming increasingly ubiquitous over time. And Supreme Court jurisprudence on GPS tracking suggests that repeatedly collecting data “at a moment in time” until you’ve built a police database of 2.2 billion such moments is akin to building a mosaic of information so complete and intrusive that it may violate the Constitutional rights of those subject to it.
The company dismisses the notion that advancing technology changes the privacy calculus in kind, not just degree. An executive told The Washington Post that its approach “basically replaces an old analog function—your eyeballs,” adding, “It’s the same thing as a guy holding his head out the window, looking down the block, and writing license-plate numbers down and comparing them against a list. The technology just makes things better and more productive.” By this logic, Big Brother’s network of cameras and listening devices in 1984 was merely replacing the old analog technologies of eyes and ears in a more efficient manner, and was really no different from sending around a team of alert humans.
The vast scale of Vigilant’s operations is detailed in documents obtained through public-records laws by the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Last year, we learned that the NYPD was hoping to enter into a multi-year contract that would give it access to the nationwide database of license plate reader data,” the civil-liberties group announced Monday in a blog post linking to the document. “Now, through a Freedom of Information Law request, the NYCLU has obtained the final version of the $442,500 contract and the scope-of-work proposal that gives a peek into the ever-widening world of surveillance made possible by Vigilant.”
The NYPD has its own license plate tracking program. It nevertheless wanted access to the Vigilant Solutions database as well, “which means,” the NYCLU notes, “the NYPD can now monitor your car whether you live in New York or Miami or Chicago or Los Angeles.” The NYPD has a long history of spying on Muslim Americans far outside its jurisdiction. And both license-plate readers and the information derived from them have already been misused in other jurisdictions.
More abuses seem inevitable as additional communities adopt the technology (some with an attitude expressed with admirable frankness by an official in a small Florida city: “We want to make it impossible for you to enter Riviera Beach without being detected.”)
Washington is accelerating the spread of the technology.
“During the past five years, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has distributed more than $50 million in federal grants to law-enforcement agencies—ranging from sprawling Los Angeles to little Crisp County, Georgia, population 23,000—for automated license-plate recognition systems,” the Wall Street Journal reports. As one critic, California state Senator Joe Simitian, asked: “Should a cop who thinks you're cute have access to your daily movements for the past 10 years without your knowledge or consent? I think the answer to that question should be ‘no.’”
The technology forms part of a larger policing trend toward infringing on the privacy of ordinary citizens. “The rise of license-plate tracking is a case study in how storing and studying people's everyday activities, even the seemingly mundane, has become the default rather than the exception,” The Wall Street Journal explains. “Cellphone-location data, online searches, credit-card purchases, social-network comments and more are gathered, mixed-and-matched, and stored. Data about a typical American is collected in more than 20 different ways during everyday activities, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Fifteen years ago, more than half of these surveillance tools were unavailable or not in widespread use.”
Nor are police the only ones buying this data.
Vigilant Solutions is a subsidiary of a company called Digital Recognition Network.
Its website declares:
All roads lead to revenue with DRN’s license plate recognition technology. Fortune 1000 financial institutions rely on DRN solutions to drive decisions about loan origination, servicing, and collections. Insurance providers turn DRN’s solutions and data into insights to mitigate risk and investigate fraud. And, our vehicle location data transforms automotive recovery processes, substantially increasing portfolio returns.
And its general counsel insists that “everyone has a First Amendment right to take these photographs and disseminate this information.” But as the ACLU points out:
A 2011 report by the International Association of Chiefs of Police noted that individuals may become “more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation” due to license plate readers. It continues: “Recording driving habits could implicate First Amendment concerns. Specifically, LPR systems have the ability to record vehicles’ attendance at locations or events that, although lawful and public, may be considered private. For example, mobile LPR units could read and collect the license plate numbers of vehicles parked at addiction counseling meetings, doctors’ offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for political protests.”
Many powerful interests are aligned in wanting to know where the cars of individuals are parked. Unable to legally install tracking devices themselves, they pay for the next best alternative—and it’s gradually becoming a functional equivalent. More laws might be passed to stymie this trend if more Americans knew that private corporations and police agencies conspire to keep records of their whereabouts.
Numberplate Recognition Cameras
PLANS to store the details of billions of road journeys for up to 10 years are being opposed by the surveillance watchdog. Tony Porter, the surveillance camera commissioner, says there is insufficient evidence to back police proposals to extend storage for data from automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras from two years to between seven and ten.
The plans emerged in Home Office minutes released under freedom of information law and a document from the Information Commissioner’s Office. The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), however, said it was exploring the “legal and operational implications” of a change but had made no formal proposal.
ANPR is one of the biggest surveillance systems in the world. here are about 8,000 cameras recording 10bn numberplates a year. Porter, a former assistant chief constable and head of counterterrorism at the 2012 Olympics, said: “I recognise the potential value, but you have also got to recognise that society might not tolerate the state having that type of information for years on end on a just-in-case basis.”
William Perrin, a former civil servant who has highlighted the lack of public oversight of ANPR, said: “Any proposal to store more data should be subject to a full public consultation and parliamentary scrutiny.”
The police national user group for ANPR circulated proposals within government to retain journeys for longer.
The Information Commissioner’s Office, the privacy watchdog, stated in a letter to the group: “If you move into a retention period of 7-10 years this is a significant amount of data being retained recording the movements of individuals as they go about their lawful day-to-day activities.”
Paul Kennedy, of the NPCC, said: “There are no proposals at present for extending the ANPR data retention period. However, the ANPR user group is exploring the legal and operational implications.”
LT 30 Dec 2015
Britain’s surveillance camera watchdog has raised concerns over the scope of a police database holding details of billions of road journeys that was set up without parliamentary authority.
Millions of car numberplates are logged daily by a network of cameras on motorways, main roads and in town centres. They are stored by police on a database that now holds 22 billion “reads” of vehicles’ front and back numberplates. The automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) database is believed to be the biggest in the world.
Civil liberties groups warned that it was almost impossible for motorists to travel without having their details collected.
Police are considering extending the length of time that numberplate records can be stored from two years to seven, prompting alarm from Tony Porter, the surveillance camera commissioner.
Mr Porter has raised with the Home Office his concerns about the information collected. “There is no statutory authority for the creation of the national ANPR database, its creation was never agreed by parliament and no report on its operation has ever been laid before parliament,” he said.
The commissioner has also passed on concerns from civil liberties groups that the database breaches privacy and human rights laws. He said their worries fell into sharper focus given the desire in some quarters of the police to extend how long the data can be kept.
A network of 8,300 fixed and mobile cameras capture 30 million numberplates from cars travelling within England and Wales each day. The data is instantly checked against a database of vehicles of interest to the police, including stolen cars and those without insurance, and helps to track and intercept crime suspects. The database of front and rear numberplate “reads” means that police have access to 11 billion records of cars, along with the time and place that they were captured, which allows officers to track specific vehicles.
Bella Sankey, the director of policy at Liberty, the civil liberties pressure group, said: “The slow creep of ANPR use, without public or parliamentary consent, undermines the bedrock principle of policing by consent — how can we consent when we haven’t been consulted?”
Liberty believes that the system could be open to challenge on the ground that the mass recording and retention of information on the location of millions of innocent people every day breaches people’s right to privacy and is disproportionate.
Daniel Nesbitt, the research director of Big Brother Watch, said: “It’s now virtually impossible for motorists to travel without having their details captured and stored, regardless of whether or not they are doing anything wrong.
“A proper debate about how this technology is being used and to what extent it invades the privacy of ordinary motorists is long overdue.”
Mike Penning, the policing minister, said: “Automatic numberplate recognition systems are a valuable source of intelligence for the police to use in both the prevention and detection of crime. The government, with the surveillance camera commissioner, aims to ensure that the public can be confident that surveillance camera systems are there for their personal protection.”