Automated number plate reading (ANPR) technology is here. This is also known as Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR), Automatic Vehicle Identification (AVI), Car Plate Recognition (CPR), and License plate recognition (LPR). This uses a camera to record license plate numbers of vehicles. It can be installed in fixed positions or mobile, such as police patrol cars. The real power of the system is not so much in its photographic capabilities, although these are formidable, but rather in the almost instant translation of photographic data into digital data, and the capture of the same into a database. Using fixed installation of this system, it is possible to locate a vehicle within a city simply by searching the database for the license plate number.
While this has solved a few crimes, and is useful for enforcing vehicle insurance requirements and retrieving stolen vehicles, there are substantial issues remaining about how long, and for what purposes, the data can be stored.
Talking CCTV in UK
Development in Britain.
The technology was first developed in Air Strip One (formerly known as the United Kingdom). According to
Wikipedia:
Effectively, the police and security services track all car movements around the country and are able to track any car in close to real time. Vehicle movements are stored for 5 years in the National ANPR Data Center to be analyzed for intelligence and to be used as evidence.
Britain, the very model of a modern surveillance state, almost completely covered by CCTV surveillance. It is almost impossible to leave your home in Britain without being captured on video camera. 4,000 cameras track the movements of 10 million drivers every day.
When automated plate number recognition was first set up in London, it was intended to enforce rules limiting traffic in the central part of the city. But, according to a BBC article (7/17/2007), the Home Office "anti-terror" unit was allowed in 2007 to gain full access to the system, whereas previously access had only been allowed on a case by case basis. Ostensibly this was as a result of an alleged car bomb attack, but in reality the process of allowing full access to the data was already in the "discussion phase" before that.
As in the United States, the expansion of police authority on "anti-terror" grounds has been used in Air Strip One as an ordinary device of police control of everyday activity, such as photography. (In 2010, the particular legal justification for this, Section 44 of the UK Terrorism Act of 2000, was held to be in violation, at least in part, of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.)
As an example of overstretch, some of these horrid CCTV things even allow the monitor to talk via loudspeaker to persons observed to be engaged in "anti-social behavior". Here's what the Middleborough mayor, the former police chief, who became known as "Robocop" had to say back in 2006:
"For example, if an operative now sees someone dropping litter, they can tell them to pick it up, or if they see an incident starting to get out of hand, they can give advice that will hopefully nip it in the bud.
"I think that it will give people extra confidence as they go about their business and re-enforce the message that Middlesbrough is a place that is constantly thinking about community safety."
And here is a video showing this Middleborough system in operation. And all this is to catch littering!
Use in the United States.
The District of Columbia is where ANPR/ALPR is most heavily concentrated, per a recent Washington Post report (11/19/2011). DC and suburbs deploy 250 license plate cameras which they use in ordinary police cases. These license plate readers cost $20,000 each, and can capture plate numbers on four lanes of a freeway with traffic proceeding at up to 150 miles per hour. The key is that the captured images are translated by machine into digital data based on license plate number. Provided a car has passed by a camera, it is possible to determine the approximate location of the vehicle simply by entering the license plate number number.
Here for example is "Veriplate" from NDI Recognition Systems, a Florida/North Carolina company. This particular system comes in either mobile (vehicle or tripod) or fixed mountings, and is promoted for a broad set of uses, ranging from the mundane to the mysterious:
* Homeland Security special operations
* Narcotics and drug interdiction
* Border Patrol / enforcement
* Covert / overt intelligence gathering
* Red light enforcement
* Stolen vehicle detection
* Airport security
* AMBER alerts
* Surveillance
* Criminal warrants
* Counter-terrorism
* Ports of entry
* Theme park security
* Perimeter security
The key to this system is stated in NDI's sales literature (.PDF)
The strategic advantage of ALPR is the ability to derive intelligence from historical data. Investigators use data analysis to solve crimes simply and effectively. Mobile and static ALPR cameras are data collection points which are consolidated into the intelligence database repository, and can be stored for a matter of months to several years.
And here is the NDI Youtube demo:
The date storage which is essential to the system's effectiveness. NDI's user interface (.PDF) appears to be targeted at police use of the database for ordinary police work.
Use by federal agencies.
On the federal level, ANPR/ALPR is in wide use by the Customs and Border Patrol agency; in 2009 it was deployed at 411 entry lanes at 65 ports of entry. (.PDF) As of April, 2009, Homeland Security was not just tracking inbound vehicles using ANPR/ALPR, but also vehicles exiting the United States:
License plate readers are intended to automatically read vehicle license plates and automate law enforcement queries. Southbound LPR information provides valuable intelligence, enhances domestic and international partnerships and assists with current weapon and currency southbound operations. CBP currently operates 52 outbound LPR lanes at 16 Southwest border crossings. CBP has initiated and expanded outbound operations and is moving quickly to replace the 52 LPRs currently equipped in southbound lanes to improve accuracy rates and enhance capability.
But the CBP operations are not limited to the actual port of entry. They maintain internal checkpoints within the United States, where they claim the authority to stop and detain anyone. (Here's a flyer (.PDF) they hand out to you when you are afforded the opportunity to cooperate with CPB at such a checkpoint). See for example these CBP checkpoints, at Rochester NY, more 75 miles from the Canadian border, and another, near Bangor, Maine, almost 100 miles from the Canadian border:
Customs and Border Protection also maintains that it can set up roadblocks—it prefers the term "temporary permanent checkpoints" for legal reasons—and question people on trains and buses or at transportation stations anywhere within 100 air miles of a U.S. border or seacoast.
Once this claimed authority is wedded to technology as powerful as ANPR/ALPR, CBP will become powerful indeed.
New York's "Ring of Steel".
With huge moneys coming out of the Homeland Security budget, we can expect to see a great expansion of ANPR/ALPR at the local level, using of course the anti-terrorism excuse. Here is an excerpt from a press release from the Department of Homeland Security (10/22/2010):
While in New York City, Secretary Napolitano also met with Commissioner Kelly to discuss the Department’s ongoing partnership with the NYPD and tour the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative (LMSI). LMSI was launched by Commissioner Kelly in 2005 to help ensure public safety and includes additional uniformed officers on the streets as well as counterterrorism technologies deployed in public areas such as closed circuit televisions, license plate readers, and chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear detectors..
The New York City area is the place in the U.S. most likely to resemble surveillance Britain in the near future. The impact of this was discussed in in December 2007 at a conference in Washington DC sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, which wanted nothing tougher than "voluntary good practices" as a restriction on data use. (transcrpt).
Conference speaker Melissa Ngo, senior counsel and director
of the Identification and Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy and Information
Center, warned about the ever changing justifications for a proposed CCTV surveillance grid in New York City, which its proponents call the "Ring of Steel". When for example, doubts are raised about the system's ability to address violent crime, then magically its proponents tout it as a money-making parking ticket venture.
The Ring of Steel was supposed to cost $90 million and would be funded in part with federal grants via the Ministry of Homeland Security, and would use 3,000 CCTV cameras to inventory every vehicle and driver who enters the area. The system would also be partially funded by automatic assessments of the drivers entering the area. In 2007 the technology was not yet sufficiently advanced to permit this, but by now, I think it may well be so.
Impact of the system.
Unless some sort of limits are placed upon the storage of data generated by these devices (which can scan 3,000 plates an hour), the expansion into general information gathering on the population becomes inevitable.
One major concern about blanket CCTV coverage is that it would be used to target ethnic minorities. Here is a report from BBC Radio which states, according to the YouTube summary:
218 public and 72 hidden ANPR and CCTV cameras were installed in predominantly Muslim areas of Sparkbrook and Washwood Heath in Birmingham by the Home Office counter terrorism fund without consulting residents or local councillors.
West Midlands Police ACC Sharon Rowe apologised on behalf of the force and a campaign the have the cameras removed has gained momentum. Birmingham Sparkbrook councillor Salma Yaqoob, who has submitted an offical complaint to the IPCC, explains how they were misled and how the cameras demonise and alienate the community.
Final comments
ALPR per se does not bother me. What is of concern is the storage of the data and the use to which the stored data is placed. There currently are no restrictions of any kind on this. It is perfectly possible for a complete record of all automobile travel to be assembled for a major city for a period spanning multiple years. This of course represents an enormous leap forward in the power of the state.
I guess the question is not so much whether this is legal, but rather if it is desirable. I think it is not, at least not without significant and real restrictions on use of the data.