The massive storage of license plate and vehicle data by law enforcement agencies across Southern California is sparking a debate over the privacy rights of citizens in their cars.
Through interagency agreements among the Los Angeles and San Bernardino county sheriff’s departments and more than 30 police departments, cameras called Automated License Plate Readers — mounted to police cruisers or in fixed locations — capture the data on millions of cars across the region. License plate numbers and a vehicle location history are then automatically fed into and permanently stored on one of three databases.
On average, a cruiser equipped with an ALPR camera can collect data on 10,000 cars in a single shift, according to industry reports. A lawsuit filed by two privacy rights groups says each of the 7 million registered cars in greater Los Angeles has had its license plate scanned an average of 22 times since the program launched.
The curation of so much information on personal vehicles has raised the ire of privacy groups, which are beginning to push back against the data mining efforts of Los Angeles County’s two largest law enforcement agencies.
“Law enforcement will tell you that these cameras are helpful in finding stolen vehicles and people with outstanding warrants connected to a vehicle,” said Jennifer Lynch, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group. “But that does not justify recording the movements of millions of people; it’s like assuming everyone in L.A. is a criminal or will be one in the future.”
In 2012, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and Electronic Frontier Foundation requested a week’s worth of data collected by the Sheriff’s Department and the Los Angeles Police Department, which maintains its own database.
The law enforcement agencies declined to release much of the information requested.
In May, both groups filed a lawsuit to compel the Sheriff’s Department and the LAPD to release the data collected during a one-week period in 2012.
The groups wanted to get their hands on the data in hopes it “would shine some light on what is being collected,” said Peter Bibring, staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation. “The information will also relay how license plate readers were deployed based on race and class.”
The parties will appear in civil court in August for a pretrial proceeding.
Sheriff’s Department spokesman Steve Whitmore said the agency first denied the ACLU and EFF’s joint request to release the data due to privacy concerns.
“We are more than willing to let a judge decide what should and should not be released after hearing both sides of the issue. We believe we will prevail,” Whitmore said in a statement.
The ACLU and EFF also contend that law enforcement has failed to develop hard and fast rules for how long the data is stored.
“The concern is raised when they keep information on cars that have not been involved in a crime at the time the car’s plate is captured,” Bibring said. “The Sheriff’s Department has said it would like to keep the data forever.”
The department’s Automated License Plate Readers server retains data for only two years, but some of the data captured through the car-mounted cameras finds its way to other databases, where it is stored permanently.
“Generally, most investigators only have access to about two years of data on our ALPR server, but we have to use the broader standard of ‘indefinitely,’ as the data is and can be exported to the department’s searchable databases such as Palantir and COPLINK, which retain the data indefinitely,” Whitmore said via email.
The Redondo Beach Police Department, which has used the technology since 2008 and recently entered into an interagency agreement with the Sheriff’s Department to share vehicle data collected on the readers, supports permanent storage of data.
“How long is data valuable if it’s used to solve a crime?” Redondo Beach Police Chief Joseph Leonardi said.
Redondo Beach operates seven police cruisers and two mobile trailers equipped with the license plate readers. Leonardi said his department alone has likely collected data on millions of cars.
When a license plate is captured by an ALPR camera, the information is run through a computer system to check whether it has been reported stolen or connected to a crime. Those slivers of information aren’t enough to solve crimes, but can generate important leads.
“It’s just an investigative lead,” Leonardi said. “It’s up to each investigator to determine what happens — you either do search warrants or you just talk to the person. It would not only be unwise but it would be wrong if people acted on this data without any further investigation.”
Leonardi declined to offer specific details on the effectiveness of the program.
Privacy groups point to two nightmare scenarios where license plate readers and the massive databases have been abused by police officers.
“There was an example in the Wall Street Journal about an officer who would sit outside gay bars and collect data, contact people and try to blackmail them,” said Lynch, referring to a 1998 criminal case in which Washington, D.C., police officers pleaded guilty to extortion for doing just that.
In 2011, the New York City Police Department used license plate readers in the controversial tracking of Muslims traveling to and from religious gatherings.
Law enforcement has placed some limitations on its system in an effort to avoid its misuse.
ALRP data doesn’t give officers in the field any information on who owns the car, and officers are only allowed to search the databases as part of a criminal investigation, officials said.
“Our ALPR data resides separately and does not integrate or tie registration data or any personally identifiable information to the registered owner,” Whitmore said. “All we glean from the information is that a particular license plate — not necessarily the registered owner or vehicle for that matter — was seen at a particular time and place prohibited from searching the database.”
The tug-of-war between privacy rights groups and law enforcement over the limits on surveillance has raged since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States prompted the call for increased monitoring, Bibring said.
Surveillance cameras have become commonplace, and the recent NSA cellphone surveillance scandal has exposed the breadth of law enforcement’s data mining efforts.
However, privacy groups don’t believe terrorism or advancements in technology give the government wide latitude to cull data on citizens.
“When you are driving in public, you don’t expect not to be seen, but being seen is not the same as having your location known everywhere you go in your car,” Bibring said.
What critics of license plate readers and massive data storage want is a public discussion on the matter.
“Law enforcement adopts these technologies without public discussion and without conversation about what policies should be put in place for privacy,” Bibring said. “If police were able to monitor all of our emails and conversations, there would probably be very little crime, but that’s not the society we want to live in or one our Constitution envisions.”
