A Minnesota state agency decreed on Monday that a vehicle’s location data as captured by license plate readers, which under existing state law had been completely public, should now be kept private. This comes more than four months after a Minneapolis public committee lobbied to change the state’s policy. The new temporary measure will expire in 2015.
According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “The Department of Administration ruled Monday that the following data generated by license plate readers would be private: plate numbers; times, dates, and locations of vehicle scans; and vehicle photos.”
As we reported earlier, Minnesota has a rather liberal open records state law known as the Data Practices Act, which makes all government data public by default. That means that anyone (up until now) could request the entire data set—including license plate data—from any law enforcement agency.
In December 2012, Minneapolis mayor R.T. Rybak requested to a state committee that the data be immediately re-classified as “non-public.” The new proposal resulted from increased scrutiny of the practice in Minneapolis after a local reporter managed to track the mayor’s movements in August 2012 by filing a request with the police.
Sgt. William Palmer, the department’s public information officer of the Minneapolis Police Department, told Ars in December that the agency had fulfilled nine requests for a 90-day LPR data set, sent by postal mail on a 4GB flash drive. The data covered August 30, 2012 through November 29, 2012. Palmer did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for an updated figure.
One of those requests was granted to Mark Pitts, who runs a local firm called Datalytics LLC. Pittsclaimed that he had determined the location of the city’s stationary license plate readers, which collected more than 2 million records in 90 days.
The Minnesota Commissioner of Administration this week made his ruling on a request from the city of Minneapolis for a temporary reclassification of data from its Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR). The ruling was only a partial victory for the city of Minneapolis.
The commissioner said that license plate numbers; the date, time and location of vehicles; and pictures taken with the cameras can now be temporarily classified as private, non-public data.
The Minnesota Legislature is currently considering bills that would make ALPR data non-public permanently. More information on those are here.
However, the commissioner also ruled that a whole list of other things the city wanted to cut off from the public must remain open because there is not currently a statute on the books that allows them to be made non-public. He also said the city ” did not provide any argument or documentation to fulfill the requirement that the applicant must clearly establish a compelling need exists for immediate temporary classification, which if not granted could adversely affect the health, safety, or welfare of the public, or the data subject’s well-being or reputation.”
The items that will remain public include:
• Date and time of any report run from ALPR data, the name of the person running the report, and the date span of the report.
• The locations of any ALPR camera, whether mobile or stationary.
• The device number for each ALPR camera.
• Number of times a vehicle was captured by the ALPR system for a period of time.
• Any hit information, including but not limited to, the following categories: stolen vehicle, Stolen license plate, wanted person, Canadian Police Information Center data, protection order, missing person, violent gang and terrorist organization, supervised release, convicted sexual offender registry, immigration violator files, Keep Our Police Safe (“KOPS”), Minnesota warrants, suspended driver’s license, revoked driver’s license, canceled driver’s license, disqualified driver’s license, Be On The Lookout (BOLO), Hotsheet (stolen vehicles in Minneapolis), and scofflaw (5 or more outstanding parking tickets).
PHILADELPHIA (AP) - A federal appeals court is being asked to decide if the government must obtain a warrant before placing a GPS tracker on a suspect's car.
The case before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia involves three brothers suspected of robbing pharmacies. A GPS device led to their arrests in 2010.
Lawyers representing the trio told a three-judge panel Tuesday that warrantless tracking violates the Constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches.
But a federal prosecutor contends that authorities followed relevant legal precedents in attaching the tracker without a warrant. He says authorities had probable cause to suspect illegal activity.
A lower court previously ruled in favor of the brothers. The Justice Department appealed based on a recent Supreme Court ruling. It's unclear when the appeals court will rule.
The Obama administration will argue before a federal appeals court on Tuesday that law enforcement must regain the ability to use GPS tracking devices without a warrant, which it says is necessary to continue the fight against terrorism.
The use of GPS devices in warrantless snooping has been illegal since January 2012, when the Supreme Court ruled that vehicles are private property protected by the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. If the Obama administration is successful on its appeal however, GPS devices will be fair game for police nationwide.
The administration’s brief (PDF) in U.S. v. Katzin, filed with the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, goes even further than just arguing for law enforcement’s access to the technology: the administration says vehicle tracking is necessary to keep the nation safe from terrorist attacks as well.
Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, the president’s attorneys contend the original arguments are invalid because the so-called “automobile exception” to search warrants also applies to data showing where that vehicle is and has been, not just what may be inside.
The brief contends that passing on warrantless GPS tracking when it is a potential investigative tool has a “minimal” effect on safeguarding privacy, but a “great expense” to law enforcement and public safety. “Requiring a warrant and probably cause before officers may attach a GPS device to a vehicle, which is inherently mobile and may no longer be at the location observed when the warrant is obtained, would seriously impede the government’s ability to investigate drug trafficking, terrorism, and other crimes.”
The brief adds that the legal standard for “slap-on” GPS tracking devices should not be “probable cause” as the Constitution sets out for searches of private property, but “reasonable suspicion,” a lesser standard that allows an officer to begin a search for probable cause.
“Just because a technology wasn’t around when the Constitution was written doesn’t mean that it’s not covered,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Catherine Crump said in an advisory. “The fundamental privacy rights established by the Fourth Amendment require that police justify their actions and show probable cause to a judge before they can conduct invasive surveillance like constant location tracking. The ‘automobile exception’ was created so police could find contraband hidden in cars, not so they could monitor a person’s movements nonstop for days or even months on end.”
The Supreme Court may have approved the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens for just about forever, but the good old state of Texas isn't going to take that lying down. Texas lawmakers don't believe that cell phone location data is fair game for law enforcement, and a couple identical bills filed in Texas's House and Senate would provide sweeping protections for private cell users.
Currently, the DoJ and Supreme Court have said that cell users have no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to location data and other data gleaned from cell transmissions. So while warrantless GPS tracking is out of bounds, cell location data can provide a fairly comparable analog, and additionally allows lawmakers to track when and where calls were made, and even gain access to text messages.
The new bill, which was authored by a group called the Texas Electronic Privacy Coalition, which includes the Texas branches of the ACLU and EFF. The bill is designed to require law enforcement to get a standard warrant before gleaning any cell data. That means that law enforcement can only breach cell privacy "if there is probable cause to believe the records disclosing location information will provide evidence in a criminal investigation."
“Surveillance has become so easy, thanks to the data collected and stored by your cell phone company, that it’s now ripe for abuse,” ACLU of Texas's Matt Simpson said in a release. “In a free society, there have to be limits on the government’s ability to monitor people’s activities and associations – that’s just a basic premise of liberty. This bill simply requires a judge to take a look, and make sure a request for location data is reasonably likely to turn up evidence of crime in an investigation.”
One key aspect of the bill, as Cyrus Farivar at Ars noted, is that it also would require carriers to disclose when they release cell data to law enforcement. That's an important privacy provision, especially when the current laws have allowed for rampant data collection. Remember, a Congressional investigation found that in 2011 alone, carriers responded to 1.3 million subscriber information requests from law enforcement, which generally wouldn't require warrants. Carriers have actually begun complaining about the rising costs of complying with such requests, which would suggest that they've certainly not slowed in frequency.
In step with the Texas bill, a similar electronic privacy bill has been introduced in Congress by Rep. Zoe Lundgren of California. That bill isn't solely concerned with cell phones, and includes email and other forms of electronic communication under its warrant requirements. Of course, a similar bill from Lundgren failed last year amidst opposition from law enforcement officials.
Still, it's heartening to see lawmakers finally recognize that the Fourth Amendment has largely been gutted and ignored as our communication increasingly becomes wireless and in the cloud. It's taken a long time for legislators to grasp the fact that, even if your data is stored somewhere outside your home or is being beamed through the air, it's still yours, and you do have a reasonable expecation of privacy. It's important to remember that these bills are still only proposed, but the fact that they exist is a step in the right direction. @derektmead
PIEDMONT, CALIFORNIA—In the early 20th century, a group of wealthy Oaklanders separated from their city to found Piedmont. Large, stately homes and a handful of businesses defined the city. Today, the town-on-the-hill has only 11,000 residents. Piedmont is entirely surrounded by Oakland, and is one of the few towns in America to be entirely contained within another city. Despite the recent efforts of a small group to “Liberate Piedmont” and return it to Oakland, it’s likely going to stay this way.
But if the local police chief has her way, Piedmont will become even more unique. The chief is pushing for Piedmont to become one of the few cities in America to install automatic license plate readers (LPR) at its city borders—in this case, they would be mounted above each of the 30 roads leading into town. If successful, Piedmont would be the second wealthy Bay Area community with such a system. (Tiburon, in nearby Marin County, approved LPRs more than three years ago for the only two roads leading into and out of town. Sugar Land, Texas, approvedsimilar measures for its municipal borders in November 2012.)
“I think there's a good chance we will do it to some level,” Rikki Goede, the police chief, told Ars on Monday. “It's an investigative tool being used as a force-multiplier. That's what tech is all about, helping us be more efficient and at the end of the day, keeping our technologies safe. If technology can help with that, we should be for that.”
As in Tiburon, Piedmont’s proposed system could create a de facto electronic border fence around the city. It would scan the license plate of every car going into or out of town and retain that information for a year. However, the LPR data would also be transferred “nearly instantaneously” to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which feeds law enforcement intelligence to the federal government.
The Piedmont Police Department is currently awaiting a proposal from PIPS, a leading LPR vendor, and hopes to present that plan to the city government in the coming months. The PPD already has one mobile LPR, positioned on a patrol car.
As we reported last year, Federal Signal Corporation (FSC), which sells LPRs under its PIPS brand name, says it has sold 20,000 mobile systems across North America and another 15,000 fixed devices across the United States and the United Kingdom.
"We work with the 25 largest cities in the United States, over 100 cities in the US and over 200 in North America, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and in Mexico," said Tim O'Leary, a company vice president, in an interview with Ars in 2012. "We think the market is growing at eight to 10 percent, adjusted growth rate, annually."
In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2012, FSC said its sales of LPRs were up by $2.1 million in 2010 alone.
Piedmont has budgeted $5.4 million for its police force this fiscal year (PDF). Assuming 60 cameras for 30 roads at an average of $14,000 per camera, that would work out to $840,000 in purchasing costs alone.
Burglaries on the rise
As we reported last year, the scanners can read 60 license plates per second, then match observed plates against a "hot list" of wanted vehicles, stolen cars, or criminal suspects. LPRs have increasingly become a mainstay of law enforcement nationwide. Many law enforcement agencies tout them as a highly effective "force multiplier" for catching bad guys, most notably burglars, car thieves, child molesters, kidnappers, terrorists, and—potentially—undocumented immigrants.
Today, tens of thousands of LPRs are being used by law enforcement agencies all over the country—practically every week, local media around the country report on some LPR expansion. But the system's unchecked and largely unmonitored use raises significant privacy concerns. License plates, dates, times, and locations of all cars seen are kept in law enforcement databases for months or even years at a time. In the worst case, the New York State Police keeps all of its LPR data indefinitely. No universal standard governs how long data can or should be retained.
So what worries Piedmont enough to call for LPRs? Burglaries.
Chief Goede said the number of burglaries jumped from 90 in 2011 up to 135 in 2012. While that may be peanuts compared to what she experienced in her last job as assistant police chief of the San Jose Police Department (and its population of nearly 1 million), it’s still important for a community like Piedmont.
“You have to keep in mind, what Tiburon can do and Piedmont can do—San Jose can't do [because of its size and financial constraints.]” Still, she didn’t think that LPRs would instantly solve Piedmont’s problems. She sees them as part of the “three prongs” of good policing.
“You've got to have a good well-staffed police department that does problem solving,” she said. “You’ve got to have community collaboration, and a community that's invested in the community and calls the police and reports suspicious activity. The third is technology. Those three are what creates a safe community. One's not going to get rid of the other, they have to be equally strong.”
Civil liberties lurk in the background
Not surprisingly, the expanded use of LPRs has drawn the ire of privacy watchdogs. In late July 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union and its affiliates sent requests to local police departments and state agencies across 38 states to request information on how LPRs are used.
Part of the fear is that a police officer could potentially have a substantial record of movement for specific cars moving in and out of the city.
Goede said that for now, her department had not consulted with any civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union or the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She acknowledged that it was a “challenge” to balance the two concerns.
“ALPR cameras can be used with minimal impact on individual liberties, but they can also be used to record each time a visitor or resident enters or exits a city, retain that information indefinitely, allow that information to be used without restrictions or oversight, and even share that information with other agencies in order to build a robust profile of an individual’s whereabouts, activities, and associations,” said Chris Conley, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We would be happy to talk with the Piedmont police department to discuss the costs as well as the benefits of an ALPR system, and to encourage the department to establish policies and safeguards that recognize the potential impact on individual privacy of ALPR prior to purchasing or using cameras.”
Still, Chief Goede feels confident that her department would impose adequate privacy restrictions to keep the LPR database from being abused. She said this includes limiting access to such data for criminal investigations only.
"[But] communities are not going to just want technology to make them safer, they're going to demand that we use technology to make them safer,” she added.
Power users, you'll get your hardware. But prepare to find alternative software.
Stay in the know with
Follow Ars on Facebook
Follow Ars on Twitter
Follow Ars on Google Plus
Sign Up for the Ars Newsletter
Sign up for the Ars Technica Dispatch, which delivers links to the most popular articles, journals, and multimedia features via e-mail to your inbox every week.
