Hi!
I'm John Faust. I'm on the Board of Supervisors and I'm terrified of the cops, I've never done anything to bring them under control and here's an example of something else I didn't do. I didn't stop them or even speak out against the cops collecting hundreds of thousands of license plates of innocent citizens for no reason the cops can explain.
So remember Vote Faust, if you dumb enough to elect me once I'll probably get away with it again!
ACLU Sues Fairfax County Police Over License-Plate Data
FAIRFAX, Va. — The American Civil
Liberties Union of Virginia is suing Fairfax County police over a policy in
which they store data collected on thousands of drivers through the use of
license-plate readers.
The civil-liberties group filed the
suit Tuesday in Fairfax County Circuit Court. The ACLU alleges that keeping a
database of information collected through license-plate readers amounts to an
illegal invasion of privacy.
In 2013, Virginia’s attorney general
advised state police that data collected by plate readers is personal
information under state law and can’t be kept unless it’s part of a specific
criminal investigation.
The ruling prompted state police to
stop collecting data, but local police agencies, including Fairfax, still
collect and share the data.
A county spokesman did not immediately
respond to an email seeking comment Tuesday evening.
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VIRGINIA MAN SUES POLICE OVER LICENSE PLATE DATABASE
In what appears to be a legal first, a
Virginia man has sued the Fairfax County Police Department for collecting
images of his license plate in a massive database.
Harrison Neal, a Fairfax resident,
filed the suit after learning that his license plate had been scanned by an
automatic license plate reader twice last year and stored in a police database,
even though he was not a suspect in a criminal investigation. The American
Civil Liberties Union of Virginia filed the lawsuit on Tuesday on behalf of Neal.
Although individuals have filed suits
to obtain records stored in such databases, this is the first case known to
target a law enforcement agency over an alleged illegal use of a database.
The database, the complaint (.pdf)
asserts, violates a Virginia statute—the Government Data Collection and
Dissemination Practices Act—which prohibits government agencies from
collecting, storing, or disseminating the personal information of individuals
unnecessarily.
Automatic license plate readers have
become a hot topic in recent years, akin to the government’s warrantless use of
GPS trackers on vehicles and stingrays or IMSI catchers that are used to track
the location of cell phones and other mobile devices.
The readers, often mounted on a vehicle
or in a fixed location, use cameras and optical character recognition
technology to take images of license plates and store them in searchable
databases. Insurance agencies and impounders use them to locate stolen vehicles
or vehicles belonging to people who are behind on their payments. But law
enforcement agencies also use them.
Civil liberties groups consider the
readers and databases a violation of privacy because it’s possible to discover
a lot about a person simply by recording the location of their car over a period
of time. The readers can also capture much more than license plates. In
California, a computer security consultant named Michael Katz-Lacabe discovered
that authorities in his San Francisco Bay Area town had collected images of his
two cars 112 times in a database, including one image taken in 2009 that showed
him and his two daughters exiting one of the cars while it was parked in their
driveway.
But proponents of the technology argue
that the data collected is innocuous compared to other data like cell-phone
location information.
“We’re not insensitive to people’s
right to privacy,” Terry Jungel, executive director of the Michigan Sheriffs’
Association said in 2013 over a battle in his state about license plate
databases. “If Big Brother is going to abuse information, there’s better
information to abuse than this.”
Neal discovered images of his car in
the database maintained by the Fairfax Police Department after filing a public
records request recently. In response, he received two sheets of paper containing
an image of his car, along with a chart indicating the times and dates the
images were taken and a map showing a street location, believed to be the
location of the reader when it snapped the images.
But Virginia’s state law should have
prevented his images from being stored. In February 2013, the state’s attorney
general issued an opinion advising the State Police that automatic license
plate readers do collect personal information, as defined by the Act, and
therefore agencies cannot legally collect and store that data unless it’s
related to a specific criminal investigation. The pronouncement came in part
after it was discovered that Virginia State Police had used license plate
readers in 2008 to collect information about people who had attended rallies
for Sarah Palin and Barack Obama during the presidential election that year.
Subsequent to the attorney general’s
pronouncement, the Virginia State Police stopped storing license plate records
and established a policy for purging such information within 24 hours after
being collected by a reader, unless the information is relevant to a criminal
investigation.
But, according to the ACLU of Virginia,
other government agencies in the state have failed to follow suit. The Fairfax
Police Department, for example, stores license plate images for up to a year,
regardless of their relevance to an investigation.
The department also has an agreement
with law enforcement agencies in Maryland and the District of Columbia to share
information collected in its database.
“Like many other technologies, ALPRs
have legitimate law enforcement uses,” Rebecca Glenberg, legal director of the
ACLU of Virginia said in a statement. “We do not object to the real-time use of
ALPRs to compare license plate numbers to a current ‘hot list’ of vehicles
involved in current investigations. The danger to privacy comes when the
government collects tens of thousands of license plate records so it can later
find out where people were and when. The intrusion is magnified in the
Washington, D.C. area, where multiple law enforcement agencies may access each
other’s information.”
ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION
May 6, 2015 | By Dave Maass
Virginia Governor Signs Warrant
Requirement for Drones, Rejects License Plate Reader Limits
With broad and near-unanimous
bipartisan support, the Virginia General Assembly passed a series of bills this
year to defend the public’s right to privacy from new mass surveillance
technologies.
To his credit, Gov. Terry McAuliffe
almost immediately signed a bill to require law enforcement to obtain a warrant
before tracking people’s mobile phones with cell tower emulators, often called
“stingrays.” But he initially balked at two other bills: one that would have
also required police to get a warrant before using drones and another that
would’ve placed strict limitations on other mass surveillance technologies,
including a seven-day limit on the retention of locational data collected
through automatic license plate readers (ALPR).
McAuliffe sent these two measures back
to the legislature with suggested amendments, who sent them right back to his
desk with only the slightest changes. The message was clear: these protections
are what Virginians want and what they deserve.
The second time around, McAuliffe
signed the drone bill, but he vetoed the ALPR bill, parroting the flawed
talking points of the device manufacturers and law enforcement lobby groups:
Many localities in Virginia retain this
data for 60 days to two years. Seven days is a substantial reduction.
Additionally, law enforcement agencies demonstrate that crimes are often not
reported until several weeks later. Under this bill, essential data would not
be available at the time of those reports. This is particularly concerning when
considering implications for the National Capitol Region, where cross-state
collaboration and information-sharing are essential to responding to potential
criminal or terrorist activity occurring near Virginia’s borders.
What McAuliffe fails to mention is
those law enforcement agencies are already breaking Virginia’s Data Act by
storing ALPR data, as the Virginia Attorney General determined in a 2013 legal
opinion [PDF]. He also pays little attention to the threat to personal privacy
that ALPRs represent: by collecting information on every driver, police are
treating the entire population as if they’re suspects in a criminal
investigation. Even more worrisome is how these cameras, which are capable of
collecting thousands of locational data points a day, can potentially reveal
the intimate details of a person’s life, including religious preferences,
political affiliations, medical conditions, and romantic relationships. Indeed, as the ACLU of Virginia notes:
In 2013, public records revealed that
during the 2008 election, Virginia State Police used ALPRs to collect
information about people attending rallies for candidates Sarah Palin and
Barack Obama, and later targeted vehicles crossing from Virginia to Washington
for Obama’s inauguration.
McAuliffe also failed to address some
of the more questionable techniques used by ALPR companies to shield their
products from public scrutiny, such as contracts that forbid agencies from
talking candidly publicly about the technology. In Lansing, Michigan, police
have given up on ALPRs because they were unreliable and drained the batteries
of their cars. In San Francisco, police have been sued after a false positive
resulted in a confrontation between officers and an innocent government
employee.
The ACLU of Virginia isn’t giving up.
Five days after McAuliffe signed the bills, the organization filed a lawsuit
[PDF] against the Fairfax County Police Department, which, despite the Attorney
General’s guidance, has been storing ALPR data for up to a year and sharing
that data with other law enforcement agencies in the region. If successful, the
lawsuit could potentially have an even stronger impact on ALPR limits than what
the bill would have provided.
We're very proud of the hundreds of EFF
supporters in Virginia who sent letters to their lawmakers and tweeted at the
governor about these measures. And, again, we commend McAuliffe for signing
bills to limit the use of stingrays and drones, but we’ll be rooting for the
ACLU as they pursue other means to challenge invasive technologies such as
ALPRs.
