Hey, there! Log in / Register
Every day, Boston Police record 3,630 license plates
By adamg on Fri, 09/28/2012 - 10:11am
The ACLU reports the results of a public-records request to Boston Police on its use of automated license-plate readers:
While the BPD says it "safeguards the legitimate privacy concerns of law abiding citizens" through its license plate reader program, the policy details say otherwise. Police should not retain the location information of thousands of people against whom no crime has been alleged, and should impose a finite retention period on those pieces of data it stores for legitimate investigatory purposes. The data should not be held in a corporate database, where it may be accessible to hundreds of agencies nationwide. Most importantly, police should not be able to collect and indefinitely retain revealing personal and location information on people accused of no crime under the catch-all "intelligence" justification.
But those practices are allowed under BPD license plate reader policy.
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Free tagging:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Traffic and Parking does it too
We received a ticket for meter feeding the other day.
Well, guilty as charged ... but I know damn well that our license plate was scanned at 11:29 am along with the meter number, and that info was held in the data base until it was again scanned at 4:09 pm.
If we had moved our car, would our car's presence at that meter been recorded in a data base somewhere? I bet so.
It was free I believe.
from a federal and state grant. And this type of reader stores this information for all the goverment agencies (State and Feds) to access if they wanted to.
I believe Cambridge, Brookline and Newton decided to turn down this grant/equipment for that very reason.
Federal and state grants
Federal and state grants count as free money. The money just falls out of the sky.
Excuse me while I pay the sky, every time I earn any money.
You would have paid for it anyway.
If Boston didn't accept it, another US city would have gotten it at some point.
Biking FTW
Biking FTW
Taking the T
....on a rainy day...FTW
Sob story guys and MBTA facial recognition notwithstanding.
When they record your tag,
When they record your tag, you can always say it wasn't you driving. Facial recognition software? Not so much. And then there's the cooties.
You are next
Eventually government will work out a justification to tattoo a number on your forearm or inject a RFID chip, say to protect children from abduction. Won't just be motorists subjected to constant abuse and torture.
USE THE DATA TO GENERATE TICKETS FOR PARKING IN BUS STOPS
If the GPS data is accurate enough to tell when people are meter-feeding or exceeding hourly limits, it sure as hell can tell when cars are parked in bus stops.
All these federal grants
To local police agencies, gives the federal government and federal intelligence agencies effective control over local policing. And most of these intrusive procedures are not laws, they're department regulations.
From the local angle, the cops get all kinds of toys and $ for O.T. and what-not. It's insidious.
This is no surprise. The
This is no surprise. The Boston Police Department is right up there with the NYPD in terms of not caring about court orders or individual rights.
3000 Were checked for the following
single babes in nice cars wanted for followup investigations. 500 turned out to be single hot guys wanted for followup investigations
What privacy interest?
I don't see what the privacy interest is. Where one drives on public roads isn't private. Where one parks on the street isn't private. What's the problem?
While your presence in a
While your presence in a public place is not private, your movement through the days and months is another matter. Just because I step outside my door, that doesn't mean the state has a right to track my location. Do you want people followed to political meetings? Teenage girls tracked to reproductive health clinics? There is a privacy of the crowd - we leave our house and move about in public to gain privacy from our friends, family and co-workers. If there is no assumption that we can move about in public without being tracked, then there is no real freedom of movement. Do you want the police tracking you when you leave a political protest and go home?
I generally understand and agree with this
but I mean, bank and credit card companies track purchases (and in fact, people seem to be happy about the idea that if someone steals a cc, the company calls you to ask because they "know" you didn't make those unusual purchases), web browsers give you personal ads, email programs read your emails, companies sell your address, phone number email address and other personal data, and cell phone actively tracks your movements.
The most striking thing about this is that law enforcement would bother. I mean, almost every person voluntarily carries a GPS device on their person, and law enforcement is bothering to write down when and where they see a license plate number on a car?!
All that stuff you think is
All that stuff you think is analogous is for the most part optional. (Yeah, I know you need a credit card for some things, but you can basically get by paying cash, etc.) But leaving my house is not optional, and there are plenty of places you need a car to get to.
When you apply for a credit
When you apply for a credit card, you sign off on their rules. The company doesn't really give a damn about you personally - they may use your data, but they don't particularly care about you, the individual. You are, effectively, safe in the crowd. Your ISP doesn't care about the porn sites you go to and tell your mother either.
LE is not bothering to write down anything. Cameras and recognition software does all the work. Because of improvements in technology, including data storage so inexpensive its' essentially free, there is a qualitative change that has occurred in surveillance.
In the past, police needed a damn good reason to invest in following you around. Now, one person can sit at a laptop and play 'what if.' I have the tag of a known villain. What other tags show up when said villain does? A few keystrokes and you have a dragnet. And once you're flagged - without knowing it - they decide there's reasonable cause to keep you in the files. You see this kind of mission creep constantly in security reporting. When you can do it, you inevitably find a justification for doing it.
Definition of Privacy
It's the distinction between the character of information (as private or not) and the use of that information. I don't want my likeness being used to sell cigarettes. Doesn't mean my likeness is private - people don't have to avert their gaze when I tread by.
Likewise, while we may not want the police tracking someone going to a political rally, that doesn't make that person's attendance "private." Who attends a political protest could be newsworthy, eg, if a presidential candidate attended an Occupy protest. Limitations on use are not the same as "privacy." Privacy is an absolute.
So do you have evidence that
So do you have evidence that the state has ever tracked someone going/coming from a reproductive clinic. If not why are you using that as an example.
Is the MBTA tracking you as you via your Charlie card; Is the DOT tracking you via Ezpass? And is everyone reporting this RIGHT NOW to the FBI (or maybe the CIA or maybe the UN). I haven't any evidence of any of those things (it makes a good case for going back to the days of tokens and toll booths).But who knows for sure that those things aren't they happening.
Even worse, with the Charlie Card and the new train arriving time boards, the MBTA (and the UN) not only know which train you are on, but when you will arrive at South Station. WOW!
It's not my job to prove that
It's not my job to prove that the state hasn't ever done anything wrong with the data. (And won't ever do it in the future, if it's archived.)
It's the state's job to protect our rights.
Either something is legal or
Either something is legal or it isn't. You don't get prior approval of where law enforcement is going to go. When Congress passed the first new security laws after 9/11, they insisted that the new tools would only apply to national security. The first enforcement action? A garden variety fraud case in Las Vegas. Once the law - or legal practice - is on the books, it can be used any way LE sees fit.
Maybe not pleasant, but probably not unlawful.
I don't think that I would like for any of these things to happen, but I am also not sure that any one of them is unlawful without more (e.g., some kind of unlawful harassment).
LPR policy...
A couple of points of clarification on the license plate recognition system.
The Boston Police does use an LPR system.
The data it produces is held for 90 days. It is not, in aggregate form, shared with other agencies, including other local, state or federal law enforcement agencies.
After 90 days LPR data is purged, except for specific vehicle information that has been requested to be held for investigative purposes. Again, this is for individual records, not aggregate data and these requests must be supported by a documented legitimate investigative purpose.
We are acutely aware of the potential abuse of this data and we believe that we have put sufficient safeguards in place.
If you have any questions on this you can reach me at [email protected] .