Put Limits on Plate-Reading Technology - Lynchburg News and Advance

Americans’ civil liberties and technology have always been in tension with one another, but no more so than in the 15 years or so as Silicon Valley’s influence in society has exploded.

One little-known but widely used bit of technology has found its way into the news in the last couple of weeks, thanks to a state court decision in a Fairfax lawsuit: license plate readers.

With special cameras, police officers are able to record images of vehicle license plates, along with location and other specific data, on any number of vehicles. They can then run crosschecks of that data with lists, say, of stolen vehicles to assist in solving crimes.

The technology behind the readers has been around for decades, and their use in other countries is widespread. In the United States, however, the use of the technology has been slower to catch on because of privacy concerns.

The Virginia chapter of the ACLU has filed suit against the Fairfax County Police Department, one of the largest departments in the state using the technology, in an effort to have the courts set limits on how long police can retain the information gathered — or whether they can retain it all. Last month, a Fairfax circuit judge tossed the suit, ruling the data collection was not related to personal tracking of private citizens.

The ACLU begs to differ and announced last week it would be appealing to the Virginia Supreme Court. Their lawyers contend the collection and unlimited retention of the license plate data are violations of Virginia’s Government Data Collection and Dissemination Practices Act. That was the act then-Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a Republican, based a non-binding 2013 advisory opinion on that limited use of the technology. Cuccinelli advised that collection of the data for an ongoing case was permitted but passive collection, with no basis “clearly established in advance,” was illegal. The Virginia State Police immediately began purging its databases every 24 hours, but few other law enforcement agencies in the state followed suit.

The ACLU contends such data collection amounts to little more than “mass surveillance” of citizens who, under the U.S. Constitution, have the presumption of innocence. And when there is no restriction on how long police can retain the data, what is created amounts to a massive database of the whereabouts of individuals based on the GPS information collected at the time of the reading.

Twelve states have imposed limits on how long data can be retained before purging. North Carolina’s limit is 90 days; Vermont’s is 18 months. Virginia law, however, is silent. In 2015, the General Assembly passed a bill limiting retention to seven days, but Gov. Terry McAuliffe, acting at the urging of police groups, vetoed it.

No one disputes the technology has legitimate law enforcement uses: Cases of stolen vehicles have risen in departments that use the readers, as have instances of police locating drivers suffering from dementia getting lost.

But without fair and reasonable limits on how long such massive amounts of data on individuals can be retained, there is the very real risk of the creation, by inaction, of a database of hundreds of thousands of individuals. That’s just not acceptable.

We urge the General Assembly, when it convenes next month, to tackle the question anew and devise a common-sense time limit both civil libertarians and police can live with.

http://ift.tt/2iwOwm4