Meet the Company That Can Track Everywhere You've Been and Tell Police About It

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/meet-company-can-track-everywhere-youve-been-and-tell-police-about-it



***SNIP

AlterNet spoke with Kade Crockford, director of the Technology for Liberty program at the Massachusetts ACLU, about Vigilant Solutions, law enforcement abuses of privacy and the dangers posed by license plate reader databases.

Tana Ganeva: Why do you think there was so much confusion around this story and what should people know?

Kade Crockford: I'm not sure why there was so much confusion about the story. The first references to it I saw were from the right-wing blogosphere and basically the headlines were things like, "DHS plans to build massive license plate reader database!" Naturally I was interested in that because it is a pet obsession of mine. And so I clicked on the solicitation for bids and I actually read it—unlike that many people who wrote about it. And it was pretty clear to me that in fact no, DHS did not intend to build its own nationwide license plate reader database. The solicitation read almost exactly like it was written by the company Vigilant Solutions, a description of a database the company already offers law enforcement nationwide.

So my assumption is that in fact what DHS was doing was going through a relatively mundane bureaucratic procedure that they have to go through in order to apportion funds for the purchase of more subscriptions to this database.

As a document we posted to the ACLU website shows, ICE has been tapping into this database for years. Law enforcement all over the country has been tapping into it. The FBI more than likely does as well. It holds about 2 billion individual license plate records in it, and according to the company it grows almost 100 million plate reads per month and those numbers are just going to keep going up. So ultimately what we're looking at is a database that contains billions of records and law enforcement has access both for free on a tier one subscription plan, which allows a limited number of searches per week or month and then a tier two subscription service that they have to pay for, which I believe gives unlimited search of the database.

[Agony]

1. Great to see you still posting! I was afraid you were just hot dogging it to 100k.

[xchrom]

2. i read and post with my morning coffee

and in between yelling at the dogs as they GO IN AND OUT OF THE HOUSE IN THE MORNING!11