By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 12:31pm
Today the ACLU is launching a nationwide effort to find out more about automatic license plate readers (ALPR). By snapping photographs of each license plate they encounter—up to three thousand per minute—and retaining records of who was where when, license plate readers are fundamentallythreatening our freedom on the open road.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 12:58pm
Automatic license plate readers don’t pose much of a threat to our privacy if there aren’t very many of them. Like surveillance cameras, they really only become a problem when the data they collect are situated in a broader context of pervasive monitoring. One data point showing that your car drove past a stationary license plate reader on one highway doesn’t tell the government very much. But the data points begin to pile up when the surveillance cameras and license plate readers are on every street corner and police cruiser. And absent commonsense limits, that means police and prosecutors (and anyone else who gets at the database) can map your movements with the click of a button.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 3:24pm
Imagine a searchable database that would enable police or federal agents to instantly track everywhere you’ve ever driven in your car, like a “Google search” of your location over a period of months or even years. According to a law enforcement data manager speaking at a 2010 National Institute of Justice conference, that’s where the government is headed.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 2:29pm
This summer ACLU affiliates all around the country filed open-records requests seeking information about how government agencies are using automated license plate readers. One set of records, released this week to the ACLU of Massachusetts by the police department here in Boston, provides a snapshot of the data-collection practices that are taking place around the nation.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 3:36pm
Yesterday Andy Greenberg of Forbes published some shocking information, courtesy of a FOIA project done by our friends over at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC): US Customs and Border Protection is sharing our license plate information with private insurance companies, without any public debate or even forthright public disclosure.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 12:58pm
Today we sued the federal government to enforce Freedom of Information Act requests we filed over the summer to learn about how it is using a technology that can track Americans’ location with increasing efficacy: automated license plate readers. (See today’s legal complaint, our original FOIA requests, and a blog we posted when we made those requests.)
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 1:46pm
Back in the fall of 2010, I was perusing the Massachusetts state public safety website when I came upon an interesting notice. The state had received nearly a half a million dollars from the federal Department of Transportation for the purchase and distribution of automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) systems for state and local police. And there was one detail there that really surprised me.
Former Bush administration attorney John Bellinger, ACLU Center for Democracy Director Jameel Jaffer and WSJ Pentagon correspondent Julian Barnes appeared on NPR's On Point program to discuss the legality of the Obama administration's seemingly ever-expanding drone war.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 11:48am
Back in December, I posted a blog recounting a truly bizarre experience: sitting in on what I thought would be an open court hearing, and instead witnessing the closing off of the judicial process to the public. We had gone to court to argue our motion to quash a Suffolk county district attorney subpoena to Twitter, seeking information about our client, John Doe, and information related to Occupy Boston.
By Kade Crockford, Director, ACLU of Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project at 6:26pm
Rosa Luxemburg famously said that those who do not move cannot feel their chains. This morning in Suffolk county court, the ACLU of Massachusetts and our client moved. And we felt our chains.
I had gone to court to listen to our legal team argue a case to protect the First Amendment rights of our client, Twitter user @p0isAn0n, aka Guido Fawkes. That user, who wishes to remain anonymous throughout the proceedings, was the target of a Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney’s administrative subpoena to Twitter, dated December 14, 2011. As we wrote last week, the subpoena asked Twitter to hand over @p0isAn0n’s subscriber information, including our client’s IP address, which can be used to help track down someone’s physical residence.
