In recent years, surveillance technology has improved and grown drastically. License place readers are designed to track movements of passing drivers on highly active streets. These automatic license plate readers are mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges, use small, high-speed cameras to photograph thousands of plates per minute.
The readers capture information including the license plate number, the date, time, and exact location. This collected information is often pooled into regional sharing systems. This information is collected in order to target highly populated areas to ensure the safety of civilians. The collection of this information is highly controversial because there are no privacy laws implemented. This is critical in dealing with people’s personal information. In 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union collected 26,000 pages of documents detailing the use of the license plate reader technology from around the country.
The information in the documents collected display that there is little to no regulation so the readers are becoming a tool for surveillance and mass location tracking. This leads to pulling the information of innocent people when they may potentially be doing nothing wrong. The lack of regulation means that policies governing how long location data is kept vary widely.
The software aspects of the system run on standard computer software and can be linked to other databases. It first uses a series of image manipulation techniques to detect, normalize and enhance the image of the number plate, and then optical character recognition (OCR) to extract the alphanumerics of the license plate. Once the photograph is taken it is uploaded to the central system where the data is collected and analyzed.
Police cars can be fit with cameras, allowing officers to capture plates as they drive along on their normal path. Mobile cameras are more effective at capturing plates of parked cars. This allows for officers to also patrol parking lots and heavily populated regions. The concern with this is that people feel violated and as if their rights are being taken advantage of. There are many disagreements as far as the boundaries of surveillance go. To date there are only fourteen states have statutes in place for license plate reader technology. In addition to the lack of regulation there is also concern that they are too expensive and the funding is not available. A good portion of the funding comes from a justice assistance grant program and the homeland security grant program.
A review of the purchase orders in the databases show that Vigilant and 3M are the largest vendors of license plate reader technology. Vigilant has been particularly involved in the lobbying for the adoption of the reader technology. Private companies are also using this modern technology. Particularly DRN and MVTrac are the two main companies. They hire outside contractors to collect license plate data for cars across the country. These companies share the data that they collected with banks, insurance companies, credit reporting agencies, and “auto recovery” companies in order to find fraud and identity theft. This also shares its data with police agencies.
Most law enforcement agencies store plate data in the databases for many years and pass it along to other law enforcement agencies throughout their region. For example, in the greater Los Angeles area, nearly 30 individual law enforcement agencies pool their license plate data. Agencies also share data across the state and even with federal agencies. Police can then search these massive amounts of accumulated data in future investigations. This is both beneficial and negative because that information is critical and allows for personal information to be revealed. The database in which this information is stored is easily accessible and alerts the officer in the car if there is a match. The officer can then search a DMV database to learn the name and identifying information of the owner of the vehicle.
Overall, license plate reader
technology is a highly advanced and modern concept. There is a valid argument
from both sides of the spectrum. The most critical aspect of this is the
civilians and their safety. It becomes political and in certain cases a
violation of rights. Unfortunately, there is no way to please all views, so
hopefully with the right regulations and policies created it could be extremely
beneficial and positive for all parties involved.