Next Friday, at 1pm, Maine's Transportation Committee will hear LD - 1561, Act To Regulate the Use of Traffic Surveillance Cameras.
The bill, sponsored by Senator Dennis Damon of Hancock (of LD 1020 fame) prohibits the police from using automatic license plate readers to collect, store, and datamine photographs of any and all vehicle plates within range regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing. The information created by these cameras includes a time, dated, and GPS coordinated photo, which creates, essentially, a searchable map of the movements of everyone in the community.
With this technology, police can also create their own "hot lists." So, instead of it being linked to a list of lost/stolen vehicles (or some other law enforcement database), a cruiser could drive through a parking lot at a political rally, gay bar, adult video shop, etc. and create, instantly, a "hot list" of that group - a new tool to efficiently identify and target disliked individuals or groups.
Finally, someone (again either inside or outside the department) could input an individual license plate of interest into the system to track their movements. This opens the potential for someone to stalk an ex-partner, or to track the movements of someone they dislike, and then reveal embarrassing facts or subject them to increased police attention.
This technology turns the presumption of innocence on its head. Innocent people should not be subjected to unwarranted surveillance and they certainly shouldn't be subjected to having their movements tracked and stored for a month in a searchable database.
One thing we know, is that information like this, once collected and compiled, becomes very appealing to those who want to misuse it (again, either inside or outside the system). Breaches at Bank of America, the VA administration and Hannafords are proof that the best technical and policy protections will not protect from leaks, misuse, and/or abuse - it's not a matter of if, but when and how bad.
The bottom line is that ALPR's undermine our Fourth Amendment right to privacy. When people are under surveillance, they behave differently. This has been a principle of prison architecture for centuries, but Maine is not a prison, and Maine's free citizens are not prisoners.
For more on the battle to protect our privacy, Check out:
- Some videos demonstrating the technology here and here ;
- This piece about how baseless searches of laptops and cell phones pose privacy threats to travelers
- Proof body scanners don't work
- This ACLU blog, about a recent Computerworld report that the hacking attack on Google exploited a system the company set up to help the government access its users' data: If accurate, it means that this incident is the fulfillment of warnings that we at the ACLU as well as security experts and our allies have been making since at least the 1990s: when you design information architectures around providing law enforcement with people's personal information, that can open up significant security gaps that become vulnerable to exploitation by hackers; and
- This blog about how the FBI Illegally Gathered Phone Records And Misused National Security Letters.
