There are more than 94,000 ALPR’s, or automatic license plate readers, across the U.S., and the number is growing daily. In some locales, several are positioned within just a mile of roadway.
They capture your car’s location, make, model, color, any dents, and even bumper stickers, and can turn them into searchable data points.
They’re also mounted on police squad cars.
One Denver Police officer demonstrated the technology, saying, “The license plate reader went off on it and said it was a driver’s license restraint. So, it looks like on here that she has a suspended driver’s license.”
Another officer using it explained, “I can be on any screen on the computer. And if it hits on a license plate, it’ll pop up. It’s pretty easy to use. It can just kind of run in the background while we’re doing other stuff.”
Police say license plate readers help them solve crimes. However, they can also be used to build a database about you, recording where you live, work, go to church, or even which political rallies you might attend.
Smile, because these cameras can even capture who’s driving. The photos are then uploaded into a giant shared database, which can be accessed by police and other government agencies.
It’s estimated that license plate scans now reach into the hundreds of billions each year. Dave Maass, chief of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says some police agencies now want to use the tech to solve so-called future crimes – crimes that haven’t happened yet.
“This is one of the most pernicious and offensive technologies in the United States. It is misrepresented to the public in such a way that people think it’s doing one thing, but it’s actually doing another,” Maass said.
Robert Frommer, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, calls license plate readers a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“This technology is not just about taking pictures of license plates,” Frommer said. “It’s about the back-end AI database being able to take all that data, make deep insights about our past movements, and even predict where we’re going to go next.”
If you care about civil liberties, this would all be bad enough, but it gets worse. The license plate readers can also be hacked pretty easily, as tech blogger Benn Jordan discovered.
In his video, Jordan says, “You can press a button a few times on the back of these cameras, and within a few minutes, turn them into your own personal spy device or malware host or honeypot that steals people’s login credentials or a cryptocurrency miner. Whatever you want.”
Jordan also found license plate reader data for sale on the dark web.
Some police officers have also been caught using stored license plate reader data to stalk romantic interests.
Maass said, “We’ve seen dozens of cases of law enforcement officers abusing the system to stalk their exes, to look up stuff on women they’re attracted to, to go after their, you know, neighbors or people they have it out for. It’s a particularly tempting system because with millions of searches coming through in a given month, it’s very hard for a law enforcement agency to verify that each one is legitimate.”
The largest maker of license plate readers by far is a company called Flock Safety. An Open Records Request by a Dunwoody, Georgia resident shows that Flock employees used local cameras to view fitness studios, a pool, a gymnastics area, and areas involving children.
In an email to CBN News, Flock stated it would ‘respectfully decline’ an interview but has stated publicly, “the employees… accessed a camera network with the city’s explicit permission, as part of their job.”
Anger over these plate readers – there is now about one camera for every 3,400 Americans – has led to a small wave of vandalism across the country.
Flock defends their constitutionality, saying, “Courts have long held that license plates observed in public are not private information.”
Attorney Frommer responds, “I would say that me looking at your license plate as you drive by one time is qualitatively different than what Flock does, which is capture your vehicle plate over and over again to create a pervasive, persistent record of your movements. If I did that to you, you’d call it stalking and you’d be right.”
Flock has also claimed its technology cannot be used to create a so-called heat map of a person’s activities, showing patterns in their movements. Yet, the city of Oshkosh, Wisconsin canceled its contract with Flock last month after a company employee admitted that the software does create a heat map.
Flock maintains that its technology helps solve 700,000 crimes per year.
However, it also makes mistakes. Badge cam footage shows North Carolina police arresting an innocent second-grade school teacher whom the system identified as a dangerous criminal.
Most of the opposition to license plate readers has come from the political Left. Maass says all Americans should care.
Maass says, “If you are somebody who has convictions, who has politics, who has beliefs, whether they’re religious or political, you should be worried about this technology because it can be weaponized against critics of the government. I don’t care what the issue is that you care about. It could be gun rights. It could be the rights of Palestinians. If you care about something, surveillance is going to harm your rights.”
Police say 70% of crimes involve a vehicle, and license plate readers are highly effective in tracking suspects and solving crimes.
Americans will need to decide if the benefit is worth the price.
