Virginia Supreme Court takes
written arguments from civil rights groups against the use of license plate
cameras.
Civil rights groups made their
case to the Virginia Supreme Court, urging the justices last week to find that
the police use of automated license plate readers (ALPR, also known as ANPR)
violates state privacy laws. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and Rutherford Institute each filed
petitions in their case against the Fairfax County Police Department that
claimed the use of cameras to gather intelligence on motorists not suspected of
any crime violated Virginia's Government Data Collection and Dissemination
Practices Act.
Last year, a Fairfax County judge
rejected the argument (view ruling), even though a 2013 state attorney general
opinion agreed with the ACLU and EFF (view opinion). The groups insist that the
law seeks to protect private information about drivers, and that the lower
court judge was construing the term 'personal information' too narrowly.
"ALPR data clearly fits
within the types of personal data of concern to the General Assembly because it
allows the government to monitor patterns of movements associated with
identified vehicles, and to easily link that data to 'personal activities' of
specific Virginia residents using data readily available through
intercommunicating databases," EFF attorney Matthew J. Erausquin wrote.
"In the past few years, as it has become clear how easy it is to aggregate
seemingly innocuous and isolated pieces of data from disparate sources to
create a full and revealing picture of an individual, agencies and
organizations that work on privacy issues have broadened their definition of
personally identifying information."
The group cited the Federal Trade
Commission's updated definition of personally identifiable information to
include cases where the information can be "reasonably linked" to a
particular person using various identifiers. For its part, the ACLU blasted the
lower-court judge for dismissing the attorney general's opinion in a footnote.
"Nothing in the [judge's]
letter opinion... explain or support a conclusion that the instant case
'differs from the situation reviewed by the attorney general,'" ACLU
attorney Edward S. Rosenthal wrote. "Since no trial was held and no
admissions of fact were made by [our client] to support such a conclusion, it
is difficult to ascertain what the trial court based this remark upon."
Virginia law requires courts to
give "due consideration" to the points made in a formal ruling of the
attorney general.
"We're on the losing end of
a technological revolution that has already taken hostage our computers, our
phones, our finances, our entertainment, our shopping, our appliances, and now,
it's focused its sights on our cars," Rutherford Institute president John
W. Whitehead said in a statement. "By subjecting Americans to surveillance
without their knowledge or compliance and then storing the data for later use,
the government has erected the ultimate suspect society. In such an
environment, there is no such thing as innocent until proven guilty."