Americans are regularly being confronted with the growth and reach of the national security state. Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's global invasion of telecommunications created an international reaction of shock. However, more than a year later there is little reason to believe that anything of significance has been done to curtail those activities. Meanwhile we are getting more and more information about the systematic approach that the Dept. of Homeland Security has taken to pulling local and state police forces into an integrated national security network. The sight of SWAT teams using military equipment against protesters in Ferguson was visually dramatic, but there are less dramatic and more insidious ways that this trend is invading everyday life for ordinary people.
You Are Being Tracked
A little noticed surveillance technology, designed to track the movements of every passing driver, is fast proliferating on America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers, mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges, use small, high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.
The information captured by the readers – including the license plate number, and the date, time, and location of every scan – is being collected and sometimes pooled into regional sharing systems. As a result, enormous databases of innocent motorists’ location information are growing rapidly. This information is often retained for years or even indefinitely, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.
I don't know if the semi-rural low crime community where I live has yet installed such a network. If they haven't it is likely to come in time. That will make it possible for the forces of law and order to know that I have consistent patterns of driving behavior. I go to the same grocery store about twice a week. I ride my bicycle a lot and don't drive much. I wouldn't contribute a lot to the database. There is really nothing about the data that they would be collecting on me that would cause me immediate personal concern, and yet the whole thing gives me the creeps.
The ACLU has been actively following these developments.
In July 2012, ACLU affiliates in 38 states and Washington sent public records act requests to almost 600 local and state police departments, as well as other state and federal agencies, to obtain information on how these agencies use license plate readers. In response, we received 26,000 pages of documents detailing the use of the technology around the country. Click on the map icon on the right to learn how police in your state use license plate readers to track people's movements.
However, there is now a recent California court decision to treat the collected databases as off limits to public scrutiny.
California judge rules against privacy advocate and protects police secrecy
A California judge’s initial ruling against a tech entrepreneur, who seeks access to records kept secret in government databases detailing the comings and goings of millions of cars in the San Diego area, via license plate scans, was the second legal setback within a month for privacy advocates.
The tentative decision issued Thursday upheld the right of authorities to block the public from viewing information collected on their vehicles, by way of vast networks that rely on cameras mounted on stoplights and police cars.
The rapidly expanding systems and their growing databases have been the subject of a larger debate pitting privacy rights against public safety concerns in a new frontier over high-tech surveillance. A Los Angeles judge ruled in August that city police and sheriff’s departments don’t have to disclose records from the 3m plates they scan each week.
All databases are subject to various types of errors and malfunctions. Credit reports are notorious for having inaccurate data. There is no reason to think that the license plate data is fool proof. There could be other issues about granting public access. Tracking data that has no use in criminal investigations could be used in various forms of civil litigation.
The entire national security rationale from the NSA on down has become that because technology has now made it possible to collect, store and retrieve vast amounts of data, the very existence of the technology provides all the necessary justification for collecting it all.