Boston Police indefinitely suspends license plate reader program

[tsai3904]

Boston Police halt license scanning program

The Boston Police Department has indefinitely suspended its use of high-tech scanners that automatically check whether drivers have outstanding parking tickets, lapsed insurance or other violations after a Globe investigation raised serious privacy concerns.

The police inadvertently released to the Globe the license plate numbers of more than 68,000 vehicles that had tripped alarms on automated license plate readers over a six-month period. Many of the vehicles were scanned dozens of times in that period alone.

The accidental release triggered immediate doubts about whether the police could reliably protect the sensitive data. It also raised questions about whether police were following up on the scans, since numerous vehicles repeatedly triggered alarms for the same offenses. One motorcycle that had been reported stolen triggered scanner alerts 59 times over six months, while another plate with lapsed insurance was scanned a total of 97 times in the same span.

“We just took [the scanner program] off-line while the commissioner reviews it,” said Boston police spokeswoman Cheryl Fiandaca. Commissioner William Evans “wants to review it so he knows that it’s being used effectively and that it doesn’t invade anyone’s privacy.”

But privacy advocates said Boston’s problems with the scanners underscore how easily the technology can be misused. The Boston police are one of the few departments in the state with explicit policies to protect privacy, but the released data calls into question how closely they follow their own rules.

“It’s not realistic to think that law enforcement will police itself when it comes to technologies like license plate readers,” said state Representative Jonathan Hecht, a Watertown Democrat who has filed a bill to regulate use of scanners and the sensitive data they collect.

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More:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/12/14/boston-police-suspend-use-high-tech-licence-plate-readers-amid-privacy-concerns/B2hy9UIzC7KzebnGyQ0JNM/story.html

[angelatc]

One motorcycle that had been reported stolen triggered scanner alerts 59 times over six months,

Apparently there's no money in recovering stolen vehicles.

[DamianTV]

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/12/14/2155215/boston-police-stop-scanning-registration-plates-for-now


Ars Technica reports that after journalists gained access to a database readout showing a sample of the data gathered by the 14 registration plate scanners that had been in use by the Boston police and analyzed some of that data with embarrassing results, the police force has announced it will suspend use of the scanners indefinitely. Among other things, the data dump (which was not quite as thoroughly scrubbed as the police department had intended it to be) showed that a stolen motorcycle was detected by the cameras 59 times and red-flagged, but evidently no action was taken to recover it.

[tangent4ronpaul]

Boston Police indefinitely suspends license plate reader program
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/boston-police-indefinitely-suspends-license-plate-reader-program/

As Ars has reported for more than a year, LPRs are in use in cities big and small across America. Typically, the specialized cameras scan a given plate using optical character recognition technology, checking that plate against a “hot list” of stolen or wanted vehicles. The device then also typically will record the date, time, and GPS location of any plates—hot or not—that it sees.
The cameras typically scan at an extremely high rate, usually around 60 plates per second. Law enforcement policies vary widely as to how long that information can be retained. Different agencies keep that data from anywhere from a few weeks to indefinitely. Some cities have even mounted such cameras at their city borders, monitoring who comes in and out.

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Collect all the plates

Politicians and advocacy groups, chiefly the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, say that this new revelation is highly disturbing.

“The main thing here is that police were not following up about stolen cars,” Kade Crockford, the director of the Technology for Liberty Initiative at the ACLU Massachusetts, told Ars.

She noted that typically, police departments tout LPRs as a way to help vastly expand an agency’s ability to catch stolen vehicles. Crockford also underscored that her organization is not opposed to LPRs in principle, but called for tighter and more uniform regulations about how long LPR data is retained, and under what circumstances it can be used.
The national office of the ACLU also recently published an analysis showing that of the over 204 million plates that were scanned in Washington, DC during 2012, just 0.01 percent of them even registered as being on the “hot list,” which can range from a minor infraction to being wanted of a major crime.

“It’s clear that in fact the reason that police departments are using this technology might not actually be the reason that they say they’re using it for,” Crockford added. “We found that in this case that they’re not following up on the stolen car hits and to us that says: the only [reason] that it’s being used is to collect huge troves of people’s movements.”

https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/mass-location-tracking-its-not-just-nsa

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[tangent4ronpaul]

“It’s clear that in fact the reason that police departments are using this technology might not actually be the reason that they say they’re using it for,” Crockford added. “We found that in this case that they’re not following up on the stolen car hits and to us that says: the only [reason] that it’s being used is to collect huge troves of people’s movements.”

https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-security/mass-location-tracking-its-not-just-nsa

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[angelatc]

bump

[Keith and stuff]

Thanks for sharing. Currently, NH is the only state where this is banned, but the House Majority Leader, a former US Marshall, has a bill to legalize this in NH. This article should help us fight the bill.