LOS ANGELES — The man suspected of taking potshots at vehicles on Kansas City highways from March 18 to April 6 may now be in custody largely because digital cameras mounted atop police cruisers had randomly taken pictures of an Illinois license plate at least four times.
After a witness saw the driver of a green Dodge Neon behaving suspiciously and called the license plate in to police, detectives quickly searched Kansas City’s database of 11 million images collected from digital “automated license plate readers,” tracing the plate to various locations, an address and, eventually, Mohammed Pedro Whitaker.
Without Illinois license plate G86-5203 — and the police department’s database — Whitaker might still be at large.
“It’s worthwhile every day,” Police Maj. Michael Corwin, commander of the department’s Law Enforcement Research Center, said of the technology, telling the Kansas City Star, “We find people with warrants, stolen autos. It’s helped us solve burglary cases. You name the type of case, we’ve had successes in almost every arena, stealing to homicides.”
While Whitaker’s capture may have been the biggest law enforcement coup yet for the technology, it has not eased the concerns of civil libertarians who fear that the use of ALPR technology could present another step toward a “Big Brother”-type surveillance society if it is not used correctly.
“The implementation of automatic license plate readers poses serious privacy and other civil liberties threats,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a July 2013 report titled “You Are Being Tracked,” warning that the technology could allow law enforcement agencies “to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.”
Such privacy concerns prompted the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to file a lawsuit last year seeking information on how the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department are using ALPR systems. According to LA Weekly, the agencies “are two of the biggest gatherers of automatic license plate recognition information. Local police agencies have logged more than 160 million data points — a massive database of the movements of millions of drivers in Southern California.”
States including Tennessee, Colorado, Missouri and Rhode Island have passed or introduced legislation that would regulate ALPR usage by, among other things, limiting the amount of time that law enforcement can retain license plate data. In Tennessee, the time limit is 90 days, while a bill pending in Massachusetts requires that captured plate data be destroyed within 48 hours.
“We don’t have a problem with LPRs when they’re used for narrowly tailored law enforcement purposes” such as the search for the Kansas City sniper, Allie Bohm, an advocacy and policy strategist for the ACLU, told MintPress News in an interview. “But there’s no reason to store records of plates that are not hits.”
Critics are also troubled by the use of ALPRs in the private sector — they have become a favored tool for car repo companies and banks in their efforts to track down those who default on auto loans.
Companies that sell ALPR systems and their allies in law enforcement have launched a public relations and lobbying offensive, accusing the ACLU of “fear tactics and misleading rhetoric.”
“Quite simply, LPR saves lives and improves the safety of our [police] officers, families and communities while preserving personal privacy,” Vigilant Solutions, a leading data company, said in a statement.
Unlimited potential
Most of Vigilant’s data comes from a subsidiary, Digital Recognition Network. According to the company, the subsidiary has increased its plate scans tenfold since September 2010, and adds 70 million scans a month. Its clients include financial industry heavy-hitters such as Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., HSBC Holdings and Citibank.
In the public sector, Vigilant announced last week that the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center had acquired seven mobile ALPR systems for statewide law enforcement efforts. Earlier this year, Utah lifted its ban on private, commercial use of the technology after Vigilant challenged the law in court on First Amendment grounds.
Other major players in the ALPR industry include 3M Co., ELSAG North America, MVTRAC and credit reporting giant TransUnion, which acquired the investigative technology company TLO for $154 million last year in a bankruptcy auction.
“Now they’re combining LPR data with credit reporting information,” Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told MintPress.
License plate readers, which were first developed in Great Britain and usually cost between $10,000 and $17,000, use high-speed cameras and optical character recognition technology to collect up 1,800 plates a minute, as well as the date, time and GPS location of each read.
ALPR systems were initially employed by law enforcement in the early 2000s to trace stolen vehicles and aid in the search for abducted children, but experts say their usage has expanded as data storage costs have declined. According to a 2012 report by the Police Executive Research Forum, 71 percent of police departments have reported using license plate scanners.
In the pre-ALPR days, police officers could always note the license plates of vehicles at a particular location in the course of an investigation without raising privacy concerns. But ALPR systems, coupled with long-term data storage, allow officers to build up a picture of where a particular vehicle has been over an extended period of time.
“As an investigative tool, it has unlimited potential,” LAPD Chief Charlie Beck told the website Govtech.com. “That will be its strongest use … But 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.”
In the Kansas City area, where Mohammed Whitaker allegedly went on his shooting spree, at least 13 law enforcement agencies have started operating a combined 38 readers in the past five years. New York City has several hundred and, according to Vigilant’s website, the company’s technology has helped police nab everyone from a drive-by shooting suspect in Texas to the “Pillowcase Bandit” in Fayette County, Georgia.
“We are seeing some great results from our seven mobile systems and the online tools they provide,” Vigilant quoted a Fayette County sheriff’s lieutenant as saying.
But looming over the technology as it becomes ever more ubiquitous, civil libertarians fear, is the specter of “Big Brother.” In August 2012, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a map showing the 41 locations where license plate readers had recorded the Minneapolis mayor’s car in the preceding year.
“With LPRs on every corner … that’s really what’s happening,” Bohm, the ACLU strategist, said.
Incredibly sensitive data
One of the major concerns of the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the lack of information about exactly how ALPR technology is being used. Without that information, they have argued in court papers, “the very people whose whereabouts are being recorded cannot know if their rights are being infringed nor challenge policies that inadequately protect their privacy.”
To shed some light on the issue, the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation made requests in 2012 under the California Public Records Act for a week’s worth of license plate data collected by the LAPD and L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. The LAPD stores plate records for five years, while its sister agency keeps them for two.
Both agencies declined the requests, saying the information was investigative material and was therefore exempt from disclosure. But in a suit filed a year ago, the privacy rights groups say the exemption does not apply, in part because “[l]icense plate cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing and thus take pictures indiscriminately of all plates around them.”
“[T]he overwhelming majority of plate scans are simply used to accumulate a database of location information for future use,” the groups, who are seeking a court order requiring disclosure of the records, noted.
The LAPD has countered their claims, stating, “The mere fact that ALPR data is routinely gathered and may not — initially or ever — be associated with a specific crime” does not mean it should not be protected from disclosure. And police agencies have suggested that their license plate databases are no different from others that warehouse information for the investigation of future crimes.
The U.S. Supreme Court has found databases of DNA samples constitutional. But the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Lynch said, “Holding on to [license plate] data for long periods of time … is very problematic because it’s incredibly sensitive data. It’s location-based information — where people go, at what time of day, whom they’re associating with.”
She pointed to a recent case involving a GPS device that was attached to a private vehicle. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that attaching a GPS tracking device to a car, then using it to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. In a concurring opinion in the case of United States v. Jones, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the “[a]wareness that the government may be watching chills associational and expressive freedoms. And the Government’s unrestrained power to assemble data that reveal private aspects of identity is susceptible to abuse.”
“If the cops are looking for a specific suspect … there’s not really an issue,” Lynch said. But if data is being retained indiscriminately, “That’s a very different scenario.”
Bohm, of the ACLU, emphasized that while there is no expectation of privacy in a public place, “Nobody expects that every one of their activities in public is going to be [recorded] by the government.”
“Giving police officers the keys to our houses would probably solve more crimes,” she said. “But is that really the kind of society we want to live in?”