You will be challenged.
Be ready.
People who object to mass ALPR surveillance routinely hear many of the same arguments. You may already have responses of your own. Here are some solid, polite, Fourth Amendment-based ways to explain why suspicionless tracking of everyone is not a prerequisite for effective law enforcement.
“If you haven't done anything wrong, why should you care?”
Privacy is not something reserved for people who have done something wrong. The Fourth Amendment exists precisely because Americans decided that government power to search, observe and investigate should have limits.
Most people close their curtains, use passwords, seal envelopes and expect private conversations to remain private. None of those things implies criminal activity. They simply reflect the ordinary expectation that people should not have to surrender their privacy merely to prove that they are innocent.
The question is not whether you personally have something to hide. The question is how much information government should routinely collect about people who are not suspected of any crime.
“But you're driving on a public road. Your license plate is already visible.”
Seeing a license plate on a public street is not the same thing as automatically recording it, attaching a time and location to it, storing that observation, and making thousands or millions of observations searchable later.
A police officer seeing your car drive past is an observation. A network that can reconstruct where vehicles have been over time is a surveillance system. Scale, automation, retention and searchability matter.
“They're only taking pictures of license plates.”
An ALPR observation is useful precisely because it contains more than a picture of a license plate. The plate is associated with a particular vehicle, place, date and time. Those observations and their metadata can be stored for long periods of time and made searchable.
A single photograph may reveal little. But thousands of stored observations can become something very different: a searchable history of where a vehicle has been seen and when it was there. Anyone with authorized access to that data may be able to reconstruct portions of a person's travel history—even when that person is suspected of no crime.
And the surveillance may not stop at the boundaries of the agency that collected the image. Where agencies have access to one another's ALPR data, searches can potentially reveal vehicle observations collected across multiple jurisdictions.
“The data is deleted after X days.”
How do we know?
A written retention policy tells the public how long an agency says data should be retained. It does not, by itself, demonstrate that every copy of the data is actually and irretrievably destroyed when that period expires.
That raises basic accountability questions: Who verifies the deletion? Is deletion independently audited? Is there an objective third party overseeing compliance, or are we simply relying on the agency and its vendor to tell us that the data is gone? If there is independent oversight, who performs it—and what does that oversight cost taxpayers?
There is also an important difference between deleting a record from a searchable production system and ensuring that the underlying information no longer exists anywhere. Data may have been replicated, backed up, exported, cached, logged, shared with another agency, or retained in another system. Depending on the storage technology and deletion method, some deleted information may also remain technically recoverable.
When an agency says, “We delete the data after X days,” the public should be able to ask:
- What exactly is deleted?
- From which systems?
- Are backups and replicas included?
- What happens to data previously exported or shared with another agency?
- Does the vendor retain any copies?
- What technical deletion method is used?
- Is deletion logged and auditable?
- Who independently verifies compliance?
- What happens when data is subject to a litigation hold, investigation, evidentiary exception, subpoena, or other lawful preservation requirement?
- What does verification and compliance cost taxpayers?
“But ALPRs catch criminals.”
An ALPR can certainly be useful in an investigation. That fact alone does not answer the civil-liberties question.
The important question is what surveillance of everybody else was required to produce those successes. If an agency reports arrests, alerts, recovered vehicles or other favorable outcomes, the public should also be told the denominator:
- How many total vehicle observations were collected?
- How many searches were performed?
- How many alerts were generated?
- How many alerts actually resulted in enforcement action?
- How many observations involved people suspected of no crime?
Without those numbers, the public is being shown the benefits without being given enough information to evaluate the scale of the surveillance used to obtain them.
“If you don't want police using ALPRs this way, what should they do instead?”
Police officers and law-enforcement agencies are the professionals. They have the training, experience, investigative resources, legal authority, technology, staffing, and access to information that ordinary citizens do not.
We recognize that finding people who commit crimes can be difficult. We also recognize that automated license plate readers can make some investigations easier. But making police work easier does not automatically justify collecting information about everybody else.
If a surveillance tool helps locate a relatively small number of people suspected of crimes by first photographing and recording the movements of enormous numbers of people who are suspected of nothing, then the impact on those innocent people is not merely an inconvenience to be dismissed as a “side effect.” That mass collection is, in fact, the civil-liberties issue under contention.
Law enforcement should pursue criminals. Absolutely. Track people when there is an appropriate legal and factual basis to track them. Use warrants, investigations, witnesses, targeted surveillance, forensic evidence, and other lawful investigative methods. But don't build a searchable history of everyone simply because doing so might make it easier to find someone later. Don't ensnare innocent people in your surveillance dragnet.
And when someone responds, “Okay, then tell us how we're supposed to catch the bad guys,” the answer is straightforward:
That's a problem for law-enforcement professionals to solve.
Citizens aren't expected to design investigative procedures for their police departments any more than patients are expected to devise surgical techniques for their doctors. Police agencies employ trained investigators, supervisors, analysts, attorneys, technology specialists, and other professionals precisely because policing presents difficult challenges.
The public's responsibility is not to invent an alternative surveillance system. The public has every right to establish the boundaries within which its government operates.
Don't track anybody else.
How you accomplish both is a professional law-enforcement challenge—not a burden that citizens must solve before they're entitled to object to mass surveillance.
“Police need every tool available to fight crime.”
Useful does not mean unlimited. Government agencies routinely operate under rules that restrict otherwise useful investigative techniques. That is a feature of constitutional government, not an obstacle to it.
The question should never be merely, “Does this technology help?” We should also ask what information it collects, whose information it collects, how long that information is retained, who can search it, who can receive it, how it can be misused, and whether a less intrusive method can accomplish the legitimate law-enforcement purpose.
“There are policies preventing misuse.”
Policies matter, but a policy is not the same thing as preventing the collection in the first place.
Once information has been collected and stored, questions necessarily follow: Who can access it? Who can search it? Can another agency obtain it? Can an employee misuse it? Can policies change? Can the system be compromised?
Good rules can reduce risk. They do not make unnecessary collection risk-free.
“The data is only kept for a limited time.”
“Limited” is relative. A searchable record does not become insignificant merely because it will eventually be deleted.
Ask what can be learned during the retention period, how many observations can accumulate during that time, who can search them, and why information about people suspected of no crime needs to be retained for that long in the first place.
“If it saves one life, isn't it worth it?”
Protecting life is one of government's most important responsibilities, but “if it saves one life” cannot by itself establish the limits of government power. Almost any expansion of surveillance could potentially be defended using that standard.
A free society has always had to balance effective law enforcement with constitutional limits, privacy and civil liberties. Public safety matters. So do the limits we place on government in pursuing it.