Merissa Kovach, Field Organizer A little noticed surveillance technology, designed to track the movements of passing drivers, is fast proliferating America’s streets. Automatic license plate readers (ALPR) mounted on police cars or on objects like road signs and bridges, use small, high-speed cameras to photograph every passing car.
This system photographs every license plate it encounters - capturing thousands of cars’ information per minute – and uses software to read the number, add a time and location stamp, and then record the information in a database. A computer checks the information in these pictures against police department databases. If a scanned plate matches information in the database, an officer is alerted.
License plate readers can be a useful tool for police officers, helping them recover stolen cars and arrest people with outstanding warrants. However, the spread of these scanners is creating what are, in effect, government location tracking systems recording the movements of many millions of innocent Americans in huge databases.
To protect the privacy of millions of Americans, there is a dire need for rules to make sure that this technology isn’t used for unbridled government surveillance.
So why should you care?