Name: EFF Asks Virginia Supreme Court to Rein in Indiscriminate Collection and Storage of License Plate Information
Brand: eff.org
SKU: eff-org-150
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

EFF Asks Virginia Supreme Court to Rein in Indiscriminate Collection and Storage of License Plate Information

preview

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItLike law enforcement agencies across the country, the police in Fairfax, Virginia, use automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to indiscriminately scan and record every passing car. The ALPRs don’t simply check for speeding, or outstanding tickets—instead, they store detailed information about the time, date, and location of each scan in a database for a year, even when they have absolutely no connection to law enforcement investigations.The wholesale collection and storage of the public’s movements invades individuals’ privacy and free expression rights and violates a Virginia data privacy law.As EFF explained in a to the Virginia Supreme Court, ALPRs collect an enormous amount of data on innocent drivers. 99.5% of cars scanned are not associated with any crime. But ALPR cameras nonetheless capture images of every license plate that comes into view, up to 3,600 plates per minute. This allows law enforcement agencies to compile enormous databases of license plate scans. And because law enforcement agencies often share the license plate information they collect with other local, state, regional, and federal agencies—and even private companies—law enforcement agencies may be able to access billions of plate scans from all over the country.The data collected can reveal highly sensitive personal information. ALPRs record the precise time, date, and place that scans occurred, and can pinpoint where an individual’s car was at a given time in the past with even more precision than cell phone data or GPS trackers. This information opens the door to a universe of inferences about peoples’ private lives, including political, professional, religious, medical, and sexual associations.Collecting this kind of information can chill individuals from engaging in constitutionally protected activity. In Muslim communities in the U.S. that were subject to surveillance, for example, to attend mosques, express religious observance in public, or engage in political activism.And, collecting location information in a centralized database opens the door to abuse. Police can abuse ALPR information to stalk individuals or improperly keep track of vehicles at sensitive locations, such as political rallies or doctors’ offices. Sadly, the fear of abuse is far from theoretical. Among other examples we provided to the court, police have used license plate information to stalk women; to extort the owners of vehicles parked at a gay bar; and to track cars attending gun shows.This isn’t the first time that the Virginia Supreme Court has considered the lawfulness of the ALPR system. , the court recognized that this ALPR collection system constitutes “sweeping randomized surveillance and collection of personal information,” and that the license plate scans allowed police to infer drivers’ past locations, as well as “personal characteristics” about the drivers. The court held that the indiscriminate collection and storage of license plate information would violate the that regulates the government’s collection of data on private citizens if the ALPR system provides a means for police to link license plate information to the vehicles’ owners. The court then remanded the case for the lower court to decide that question.The lower court correctly concluded that the ALPR system allows police to link license plates with individuals with just “” Accordingly, the lower court held that the ALPR surveillance system does violate Virginia law. Indeed, not only do ALPR systems allow police to link license plates to specific individuals, but doing so is the core purpose of collecting and storing ALPR data. Keeping a database of individuals’ historical movements, after all, allows police to conduct expansive surveillance without needing to know in advance whether they want to follow a particular person, or when. But the Supreme Court has made clear that the police to keep track of individuals’ location histories through their cell phone records. They should not be able to do so through license plate data, either.We hope that the Virginia Supreme Court will again recognize the immense impact ALPR tracking has on individual privacy, and make clear once and for all that indiscriminate license plate collection violates state law.Share ItSAN FRANCISCO–Millions of Americans’ everyday movements can be traced by police with the click of a mouse and possibly without a warrant, thanks to to state and local law enforcement, has found. The investigation, conducted...An EFF investigation of public records acquired from dozens of state and local law enforcement agencies has uncovered a widely-used mass surveillance technology. Americans are accustomed to hearing about how the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and even the domestically-focused Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have...SAN FRANCISCO–San Francisco police violated the city’s surveillance technology law by tapping into a private surveillance camera network to spy on demonstrators protesting the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of Northern California (ACLU) told a state appeals court...How transparent are police about surveillance technology? It depends on where you look. When it comes to acceptable levels of secrecy around police tools, states have drawn their lines in very different places, resulting in some communities where it is much harder for the public to know what invasive tools...Amazon’s Ring devices are not just personal security cameras. They are also police cameras—whether you want them to be or not. The company now admits there are “emergency” instances when police can get warrantless access to Ring personal devices without the owner’s permission.A large coalition of community and civil rights organizations have sent a urging the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to oppose or significantly amend a San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) proposal that would drastically increase their surveillance powers— threatening the privacy and safety of San Franciscans. The SFPD’s...Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, a of Amazon’s surveillance doorbell camera, Ring, has released a of concern and inquiry concerning the device’s audio capabilities. This is partially in response to a conducted by Consumer Reports that found that once the device’s motion sensor...By unanimous vote, San Francisco's public records appeals body ruled last night that the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) violated state and local laws when it failed to respond adequately to EFF's requests for documents about face recognition and the department's relationship with the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC),...SAN FRANCISCO—Community activists in Northern California today announced a in their lawsuit against the County of Marin and Marin County Sheriff Robert Doyle, whose office illegally made the license plate and location information of local drivers, captured by a network of surveillance cameras, available to hundreds of federal...California residents finally have a law designed to dismantle some of the secrecy around domestic acquisitions of warzone surveillance equipment.The weapons of the United States military—drones, mobile command centers, sound cannons, and more—have been handed off to local law enforcement for years. The transfers have equipped police departments with the...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItLike law enforcement agencies across the country, the police in Fairfax, Virginia, use automated license plate readers (ALPRs) to indiscriminately scan and record every passing car. The ALPRs don’t simply check for speeding, or outstanding tickets—instead, they store detailed information about the time, date, and location of each scan in a database for a year, even when they have absolutely no connection to law enforcement investigations.The wholesale collection and storage of the public’s movements invades...

public

Naomi Gilens

We're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We defend your civil liberties in a digital world.

EFF Asks Virginia Supreme Court to Rein in Indiscriminate Collection and Storage of License Plate Information

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS