Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Police
Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department refused to
release data about what license plates police cameras had captured
on the grounds that
every single car seen is under investigation. All of
them. And a judge bought that argument.
Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Southern
California are
looking to the California Court of Appeal for a dose of sanity
(yes, that strikes me as a Hail Mary pass, too) and a ruling that
the public has a right to know how many people’s movements are
being monitored by the police, whether deliberately or through
incidental data gathering.
That information can hit the creepy level very quickly, as the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune discovered two years ago. After
press inquiries, the police revealed a list of dates
and places a reporter’s car had been, and even the routes
followed by the city’s mayor.
I’m guessing it was that second point that spurred
Minnesota legislation to limit access to license plate data, as
well as how long it can be held.
Boston police
stopped using license plate scanners entirely after they
inadvertently data-dumped tracking information on 68,000 vehicles
to the Boston Globe. The incident revealed that the cops
weren’t actually putting the data to good use (they kept recording
the same stolen vehicles without following up) and were perhaps
less than ideal stewards of sensitive material.
Who knows? Maybe LA cops are better than their colleagues
elsewhere at using and protecting the information they gather on
people’s movements.
Heh.
Patrick Hannaford
noted yesterday that some police departments are getting
squirrelly about revealing what license plate data they’ve
gathered.
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