Someone is watching you
Thanks to Julio Morales of this newspaper for an informative and unsettling article earlier this month. “Authorities eye regional automated license plate reader program,” informs us that the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office along with the cities of Brawley, Imperial, El Centro and Westmorland plan to implement a program of automated license plate readers (ALPR) in those jurisdictions. The readers are essentially special cameras mounted in police cars and on light poles at busier intersections to record license plates that pass through those areas. The purpose is to cross reference the recorded information with a data bank or “hotlist” of plates on vehicles the police have an interest in.
On one level this is all well and good. The ALPR technology assists law enforcement in finding bad guys wanted for drug dealing or stealing cars. Morales’ article is rich in information on police incentives for wanting the ALPR. Yet, what troubles me is the lack of discussion surrounding the technology’s power, potential errors and misuse, and the essential safeguards to protect the innocent. I respect the professionalism of police and county sheriff’s deputies with whom I have come into contact over the years. It makes sense to modernize their tools. It is also necessary to discuss publicly such powerful technology when it impacts our privacy.
First, is the use of the data and who controls it. The current plan would include sharing among the five local agencies as well as the private contractor operating the system. Plus, the collected information would be compatible with and possibly made available to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Thus, the information would not remain under local control. I largely trust local police since they are under the control of cities and the county over which local citizens and residents have some influence. I also have faith that California’s state government is benign although Sacramento often seems as distant from local needs as does Washington, D.C. But, indeed, federal power is far beyond local control or influence. We have no assurance that local ALPR data will be judiciously used by the DEA, the FBI, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The current political winds blowing in Washington, D.C. would make it risky to share local data with federal agencies.
Second, who is auditing the gathered data and what are the limits on how long the data can be kept by police agencies? Who are the local or state agencies that will check the collected data’s accuracy? Are the bad guys being caught and are innocent residents protected from being swept up in system errors? What happens when a vehicle changes hands and the same license plate is transferred? There would need to be constant input of current DMV information into the data base to avoid hassling innocent owners and drivers. Is this assured? An active oversight system needs to be put in place at the same time ALPR is employed. Yet, we read that some jurisdictions have already begun using such a system. Make no mistake about it. The technology raises privacy issues since it can plot your daily vehicle trips and pinpoint the time and date that you passed the ALPR.
These concerns are not hypothetical. In May 2016 we received an email citation from The Toll Roads, the company monitoring use of CA SR 73 near Newport Beach, Orange County. We were cited for a toll evasion. The monitoring error was obvious to us since our car was parked in the carport and had only been driven a few blocks that day. CA SR 73 is approximately 200 miles northwest, and neither my wife nor I had ever driven on that road. Our car has a vanity license plate, and my wife believes that the difference in her plate and the violator’s was a space in the lettering. We appealed, and the citation was dropped. The ALPR system is not fool proof, and numerous issues need to be addressed before it is locally implemented.
For more information about automated license plate reader technology in California see https://www.eff.org/pages/ california-automated-license-plate-reader-policies
Richard Ryan lives in El Centro and welcomes comments at rryan@mail.sdsu.edu