Researchers and technical and legal experts released a report Wednesday on automated license plate readers, or ALPRs. They said contracts made across the state between communities and the companies that provide the tools have created a “patchwork” network across the state where people’s data is tracked and saved for potential use by unknown parties.
Members of the ACLU of Iowa and University of Iowa Technology Law Clinic said Wednesday during a media conference they recommend that municipalities, counties and other community governing groups get out of their contracts for the cameras if possible and stand up to companies trying to gather data on residents’ travel habits. The ACLU of Iowa retained the technology law clinic to conduct the study, according to the report.
Pete McRoberts, policy director at the ACLU of Iowa, said the research team received varying responses from the 48 communities it contacted. Many provided information but others refused to state how many cameras they operate and where. Some claimed information that is disproven by their own contracts, he said.
“The patchwork of responses to this is really a good eye-opener as far as how problematic these contracts are,” McRoberts said.
Surveillance Before a Crime is Committed
These pictures can provide a snapshot of where someone is at a given time, she said, with the devices recording date, time and location alongside license plate numbers.
Austen said the ACLU of Iowa “has been engaged in education and policy advocacy” related to ALPRs for just over a decade, but adoption of the technology, and its capabilities, has grown exponentially over the past couple of years. This has caused significant privacy and civil rights concerns for the organization, she said, as well as among Iowans.
“ALPRs are being placed along roadways throughout Iowa, and they’re taking thousands of snapshots of all of the license plates that are going by of all of the vehicles, and then that information can be fed into a network of nationally shared databases that are being maintained by these private vendors who contract with local governments to put these cameras up and access the data,” Austen said.
One in 10 of those captures will be incorrect in some way, Austen said, as the camera systems have been found to have a 10% error rate. The report provided examples from between 2009 and this year of drivers, some with family members in the car, being detained by police after an ALPR flagged their vehicle as stolen after misreading the license plate.
Examples of misuse of the camera systems and the databases where information is stored were also listed in the report. In one incident, according to the report, Sioux City police officers were using racist phrases to search ALPR databases. According to the report, the phrase used to search was “Traveling Romanian Theft Group.”
Austen acknowledged “non-objectionable potential uses of ALPRs,” such as checking license plates against lists of stolen cars, tracking license plates associated with AMBER alerts and collecting tolls, but said the lack of state regulation as to how this technology can be utilized is leaving the privacy of Iowans vulnerable.
ALPRs Create Network of Surveillance
Flock Safety is the largest provider of ALPRs in the state, Austen said, and the report stated that the company’s systems hold more than 20 billion readings — an ever-growing number. She added the company’s business model “encourages” communities it works with to let their data go into a national database system in order for those communities to be able to “access the data that’s coming from other communities.”
UI Technology Law Clinic Director Megan Graham said during the media conference that ALPRs are “widely used in Iowa, and there is a substantial network of surveillance of this kind across the state.”
The team found 19 “transparency portals” with ALPR information from Iowa agencies contracted with Flock, Graham said, and between Nov. 8 and Dec. 7 of this year, the cameras in those agencies completed more than 4.2 million vehicle detections, with more than 90,000 detections per camera. There were 13 “hot lists” per 1,000 vehicles, she said.
Each group that uses the technology has control over how widely their data is shared and who has access to it internally, and their policies as to what is public information can be different from place to place.
“Iowans’ privacy is affected by these policies, and because of the policy differences, the policy shifts and changes as Iowans drive from place to place around the state,” Graham said.
Report Encourages Education
Graham pointed out that while law enforcement and government agencies are using this technology, so are homeowners’ associations and private businesses. Flock Safety states on its website that private customers are unable to access law enforcement data but can share their data with police if they choose, and the company does not sell data — the customers are the ones who decide with whom to share data, and generally information in the company’s system is deleted after 30 days.
In Iowa, Austen said there is no state code requiring residents to be notified about ALPRs, and no state or local rules the team could find required a warrant to use the ALPR databases.
Of the nearly 50 communities the team reached out to about ALPR usage, Austen said the police departments in Des Moines and Clinton and the sheriff’s offices in Fayette, Fremont and Mills counties did not respond to inquiries by the report’s publication.
Des Moines police have “identified responsive records but have not shared them yet,” Graham said, and the Mills County Sheriff’s Office stated they couldn’t complete the team’s request due to staffing issues, but the sheriff’s offices of Fayette and Fremont counties have not responded at all.
Nearly every agency contacted by the team didn’t provide everything they requested, Graham said, mostly because they said they didn’t have the sought-after information, but there were some cases where agencies would refuse to provide information on where cameras are located or how many incorrect flags they get from the system.
“I do think that it’s ironic that our interest in trying to get access to these public records is to ensure the privacy of Iowans, and in comparison, the police that are withholding these record records are saying that they want to do so to ensure the privacy of surveillance technology,” Austen said. “So they want to watch us. They want to be able to do so in secrecy, and this is fundamentally at odds with our democracy and the way that most Americans want to live our lives.”
McRoberts said this variance in responses to records requests is a “good example” of how local governments are either unequipped or unwilling to deal with the consequences of their contracts relating to the violation of residents’ privacy. He cited a situation in which a “high ranking city official” denied that they were feeding data to their ALPR’s larger system when “it’s explicit that the contract gives a worldwide nonexclusive license for any of that data that’s collected.”
Calling the contracts “largely one-sided,” McRoberts said municipalities need to have their attorneys analyze them and recognize that they can try and protect their citizens’ privacy. If agencies are already contracted with a vendor, he added, they should try “to return to protecting individual privacy by using any legal means to get out of those contracts.”
Iowa lawmakers “have been very interested in finding out facts” about ALPRs and how cities are using them, McRoberts said, and the ACLU of Iowa is recommending to them that the state should “press pause on” the camera systems until the Iowa Legislature can figure out a potential “comprehensive fix on privacy.”
With laws already in place directing law enforcement to have a warrant for GPS tracking devices and other areas of technology surveillance, Austen said questions need to be asked whether law enforcement is using ALPRs in a way that “safeguards” against risks, if it’s appropriate for these agencies to have regulatory power over the technology and data and whether “broader, uniform minimum protections” should be in place for Iowans.
“That’s why the value of this report is an educational tool for the general public, for policymakers, to include city council members and state legislators,” McRoberts said. “This is a good day for openness and for transparency.”
This story first appeared in Iowa Capital Dispatch. Read the original here.
