A license-plate reader mounted on a San Leandro Police Department car
can log thousands of plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. “It works 100
times better than driving around looking for license plates with our
eyes,” says police Lt. Randall Brandt.
Credit: Michael Katz-Lacabe
When the city of San Leandro, Calif., purchased a license-plate reader for its police department in 2008, computer security consultant Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city for a record of every time the scanners had photographed his car.
The results shocked him.
The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police cars, can log thousands of license plates in an eight-hour patrol shift. Katz-Lacabe said it had photographed his two cars on 112 occasions, including one image from 2009 that shows him and his daughters stepping out of his Toyota Prius in their driveway.
That photograph, Katz-Lacabe said, made him “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.” The single patrol car in San Leandro equipped with a plate reader had logged his car once a week on average, photographing his license plate and documenting the time and location.
At a rapid pace, and mostly hidden from the public, police agencies throughout California have been collecting millions of records on drivers and feeding them to intelligence fusion centers operated by local, state and federal law enforcement.
An image captured by a license-plate reader in 2009 shows Katz-Lacabe
and his daughters stepping out of a car in their driveway. The
photograph made Katz-Lacabe “frightened and concerned about the
magnitude of police surveillance and data collection,” he says.
Credit: San Leandro Police Department photo courtesy of Michael Katz-Lacabe
With heightened concern over secret intelligence operations at the National Security Agency, the localized effort to track drivers highlights the extent to which the government has committed to collecting large amounts of data on people who have done nothing wrong.-[Full Article]
