Massachusetts Town Rejects State Funding for License Plate Scanners

In a first for the state, and possibly the first nationwide, a town has rejected state funding for police to purchase automatic license plate scanners (ALPR) due to privacy concerns.

The Brookline Patch reports that the board of Selectmen chose to reject the funding and further evaluate how if it might use such a system in the future, and under what restrictions.  The ACLU counts this as a significant victory in the battle for the privacy of ordinary citizens about where they drive their cars.

Automatic license plate scanning systems are cameras mounted on police cruisers that take pictures of all license plates within visual range, translate the images into letters and numbers, and match that information with on-board computer data about cars or persons who may be wanted for crimes, questioning, or be in the police database for any reason.

This data is also stored by date, time, and GPS location, so it is very possible to mine the data collected to search for a license plate, and identify when and where that vehicle has been when it was previously identified by one of these systems. That data is collected on many thousands of cars per hour, the vast majority of which are not wanted for any reason or suspected of breaking any laws.

The concerns that the Selectmen of this town had were that, as a condition of accepting state funds to purchase the agreement, they had to agree to share all of their data with state law enforcement agencies. These conditions are common with both state and federal grants for these systems. The Department of Homeland Security also funds the purchase of these license plate tracking systems with the same condition.

It is easy to see how all this data could be collected and analyzed to create a passive surveillance map of ordinary people, after the fact. It’s a system that no one can opt out of. And there are serious questions as to how and why this data could be used by law enforcement during investigations.

Would warrants be necessary to access this information? What kind of information about a person’s habits could be data mined, and what kind of guilt by association conclusions could be drawn? What if you where parked next to someone who committed a crime? What if you were tagged in a parking lot where a meeting was taking place that the police didn’t approve of?

All of these concerns factored into the Brookline Selectmen’s bold decision to reject these conditions. They have still not ruled out purchasing the system with town funds, where they could control the data and limit it’s access.

While automatic license plate reader systems certainly have benefits for things like easily finding stolen cars, finding people in amber alert situations, the risks of state access to data on private citizens is still hugely unexplored, so it is great to see one town taking a stand.

About David Matson