Further Reading Feds seek contractor to build new federal license plate reader database

Just over a year ago, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sought a contractor to build and operate a national license plate reader database. After some controversy, that plan was eventually pulled.

According to a new ad posted Thursday, the agency now wants to "obtain query-based access to a commercially available License Plate Reader (LPR) database."

The new effort specifically says the agency is not creating a new database but wants to access a private LPR database—almost certainly one belonging to Vigilant Solutions, a California company that claims to hold over 2.2 billion reads. Federal authorities already have access to local LPR data from local law enforcement through federally funded, regionally administered "fusion centers."

The new presolicitation ad (and related 60-page formal solicitation), which was first reported Thursday by the Washington Post, states:

[Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is neither seeking to build nor contribute to a national public or private LPR database. ICE will use LPR information obtained in response to queries of the commercial database to further its immigration enforcement missions. ICE law enforcement personnel will query the LPR database using known license plate numbers associated with the aliens who are immigration enforcement priorities, based on investigative leads, to determine where and when the vehicle has travelled within a specified period of time. The results of the queries can assist in identifying the location of aliens who are immigration enforcement priorities, to include aliens with certain criminal convictions, absconders, illegal re-entrants and those that pose a public safety or national security risk. ICE will also use LPR information obtained from the commercial database to further its criminal law enforcement mission, which includes investigations related to national security, illegal arms exports, financial crimes, commercial fraud, human trafficking, narcotics smuggling, child pornography, and immigration fraud.

The Post has previously reported that ICE, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the United States Marshals Service, and the FBI have had related contracts with Vigilant.

"The updated solicitation issued by ICE seeks to provide its law enforcement personnel with access to a previously established private sector run and managed license plate database that is already being used by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies across the United States," Danielle Bennett, a DHS spokeswoman, wrote Ars.

"By building this framework around a PIA and engagement with stakeholders and leaders in Congress, this solicitation represents a significant step forward in the protection of privacy and civil liberties interests in connection with important law enforcement activities. Under this solicitation, ICE will not be the holder of bulk license plate data—it will always be maintained and stored by the commercial vendor. The government will only maintain particular individual records in case files once they are determined to have a connection to the legitimate law enforcement activity for which they were queried. No other records will be stored."

As Ars has reported recently, LPR cameras mounted in fixed locations or on police cars typically scan passing license plates using optical character recognition technology, checking each plate against a "hot list" of stolen or wanted vehicles. The devices can read up to 60 plates per second and typically record the date, time, and GPS location of any plates—hot or not. (There have been incidents where LPR misreads have led to dangerous confrontations.) Some cities have even mounted such cameras at their city borders, monitoring who comes in and out, including the wealthy city of Piedmont, California, which is totally surrounded by Oakland.

Our recent feature that examined the entire 4.6 million records collected over four years in Oakland definitively showed how revelatory this information can be. Oakland, a city of 400,000 people, reports a hit rate of just 0.16 percent.

No “meaningful limits,” critics warn

Not surprisingly, civil libertarians and privacy lawyers have been agitating for stronger protections in the use of this technology and are unimpressed with the modicum of privacy protections outlined in the new proposal.

"Unfortunately, it appears that DHS is attempting to justify its access to a vast database of privately collected and highly sensitive location data by releasing a privacy impact assessment that doesn’t place any meaningful limits on data collection and use," Jennifer Lynch, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars. "I hope lawmakers and the public will see through this and demand more privacy protections for government access to license plate data."

"Law enforcement—local, state, and federal—should not be allowed to collect or access records identifying the movements of tens or hundreds of millions of innocent people, or access anyone’s location history without warrants," Kade Crockford, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, told Ars by e-mail.

"State legislatures and congress must act to limit the government’s ability to both access and retain the driving histories of people suspected of no crime," Crockford said. "The gold standard of American criminal justice, the probable cause warrant, must apply in the 21st century. Right now, it doesn’t. Police and agencies like DHS are going to continue to push the limits until Congress acts."