This summer, the city of Wilmington announced its decision to place "Automated License Plate Reader/Recognition" (ALPR) technology on the drawbridge connecting Wrightsville Beach to the mainland. Wilmington isn't alone; six other police departments in North Carolina also use ALPR.
ALPR is basically a surveillance system that captures the images of car license plates traveling below a certain speed. The plates are then scanned through a series of national databases to see if the car may be a "vehicle of interest" – a car involved in a crime, a reportedly stolen vehicle, as well as running through motor vehicle records to see if a car is associated with an uninsured or unlicensed driver.
The ALPR system is capable of scanning thousands of license plates in the period of an hour. This is what makes the system so worrisome to civil libertarians. In a Wilmington Star News report, one police chief was quoted as saying, "a lot of people might say its Big Brother at work," and indeed it is.
Law enforcement officers have always been able to scan license plates and process them through whatever government databases were available to them. License plates are not private and their owners have no expectation of privacy over the plates which are displayed for all the world to see. However, the ability to scan license plates was limited by the officer's speed in entering the numbers and running them through the databases manually. ALPR is automatic.
In fact, in one pilot jurisdiction in Canada, cameras are reportedly mounted inside unmarked and marked law enforcement vehicles. Three cameras are mounted to capture oncoming license plates, as well as plates of vehicles in parking lots. Law enforcement officers can then simply trawl parking lots looking for vehicles of interest to the police.
Reportedly, the program is focused on finding stolen vehicles and unlicensed or uninsured drivers, but of course, the report indicates that this barely scratches the surface of what can be done by a surveillance system that captures thousands of licenses every hour and runs them through multiple databases.
ALPR is a technology currently without any real regulation or policy statewide or locally governing how the information gathered through surveillance should be kept or destroyed. There also seem to be no restrictions on the purposes for which the surveillance technology may be used.
The real fear is that, while ALPR is scanning approximately three thousand license plates every hour and running them through various federal databases, it also has the ability to store the location and travel data of every scanned driver indefinitely, whether or not the system identified the vehicle as one of interest to the police. Pretty quickly, law enforcement officers using this system could have a database tracking the movement of every driver within its jurisdiction.
As with so many other marvels of modern science, the unfettered spread of ALPR seems to be a case in which advancing technology is outpacing democracy's ability to absorb, process and respond to it. Unless state law and policymakers act soon, new and important ground may be quickly lost in the battle to preserve individual freedom and privacy before anyone even has a chance to respond.
Unfortunately, North Carolinians can look forward to a further proliferation of ALPR since three of the four biggest retailers selling the technology have opened offices in North Carolina and police departments all over the state are investigating avenues to have the purchase the technology.
Let's hope state and local officials weigh in on this issue with a thorough study and thoughtful regulation. Everyone's for apprehending criminals but we shouldn't have to establish a "Big Brother" society in order to make it happen.
Sarah Preston is Legislative Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina.
