WV license plate readers raise privacy concerns
Charleston Gazette
When the white Chevrolet Suburban crossed the West Virginia state line traveling west on Interstate 64, the camera mounted above the highway quickly captured images of the vehicle’s North Carolina license plate as it zipped by.
Moments later, Lt. Jeromy Dove and Patrolman Nicholas Sams, of the Lewisburg Police Department, who were working on New Year’s Day, were alerted that the SUV heading their way had been reported stolen, and they prepared to pull the vehicle over.
The stop ended with the two officers wounded in a shootout, the discovery of the bodies of a North Carolina couple hidden under a mattress in the vehicle and the arrest of Edward and Eric Campbell, a father and son from Texas, who were later charged with murder.
That dramatic police action is just one example of how law enforcement in West Virginia has used a network of dozens of automatic license plate readers — ALPRs — to catch suspected criminals, find missing persons, locate stolen vehicles and track down people with warrants.
The system consists of vehicle-mounted cameras and stationary readers mounted above roadways throughout the state that send every license plate number that passes by to a database maintained by the West Virginia State Police’s Intelligence Exchange Program.
That database records multiple images of the license plates, along with the date, time and location where they were recorded. The setup can immediately alert officers if a vehicle is on a law enforcement “hot list” or can be searched by police to see when and where a specific license plate number was recorded in the past.
However, while the advanced technology has enabled the State Police and at least 32 other agencies — according to the State Police’s 2014 Annual Report — to capture suspected criminals and find missing people or abducted children, it also has raised questions about the privacy rights of citizens whose movements can be recorded by the cameras and saved in the database history.
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Lawrence Messina, the spokesman for Military Affairs and Public Safety, said the program is nothing more than an extension of normal police practice. He suggested that the same thing could be accomplished by positioning a police officer alongside a roadway and instructing the officer to collect the license plate numbers of every vehicle that drives past.
Privacy advocates, though, argue that that type of explanation discounts the capabilities of the license plate readers, which can collect a large number of images in a short time, even as vehicles pass by at speeds and in numbers that would be a blur to the human eye and rendering the plates nearly impossible to record.
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"The majority of the citizens that are having this information collected about them are law-abiding citizens,” said Jennifer Meinig, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia. “I think citizens in West Virginia would be shocked to know that, when they go to a rally, to church or to the grocery store, they are being tracked.”
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“Use of the system is restricted to criminal justice purposes or for the safety and well-being of individuals only, and all other purposes are prohibited,” he wrote in an email response. “Specific criteria must be established that a license plate is associated with a criminal enterprise, or with someone whose safety or welfare is in jeopardy.”
Messina said there is no need for police to seek a warrant to search a license plate in the database or to place a license plate number on the “hot list.” He said the time it would take to get a warrant would limit the program’s effectiveness, especially in the case of child abductions or missing persons, and he likened the capturing of license plate data to using a radar gun.
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The ACLU, which has investigated the issue of automatic license plate readers nationally, maintains that the mass collection of license plate data, combined with timestamps and location information, needs to be studied further, to determine its lawfulness.
Meinig cited the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones, in which the court ruled that the warrantless use of a tracking device on a suspected drug dealer’s vehicle constituted an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.
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But unless more information is known about the license plate program and what safeguards are in place, Meinig said, it is difficult to determine if citizens’ First and Fourth amendment rights are being protected.
“Without more details about the program — including, for example, information about how long the data is kept, when and under what circumstances the information is shared with third parties and which police agencies across the state are utilizing license plate scanners — it is hard to fully know how intrusively citizens are unknowingly being surveilled,” Meinig wrote in an email explaining the ACLU’s position.
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From his understanding of the program, Messina said, there is no indication that the data was being shared with any private companies or federal agencies and that the license plate data is kept for about a year, in most cases, before it is deleted — a time frame the ACLU considers far too long.
“The government must not store data about innocent people for any lengthy period,” Meinig wrote. “Unless plate data has been flagged, retention periods should be measured in days or weeks, not months, and certainly not years.”
When asked for the names of the participating police agencies and the number of license plate readers operating in the state, Messina said that was not considered public information. He did list the 13 stationary and 49 car-mounted readers purchased through the West Virginia Intelligence Fusion Center, the state agency that cooperates with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
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It is that secretive nature of the license plate program, with the data controlled at the state level, that ended up turning citizens and city officials in Buckhannon against the technology, said Richard Edwards, the city’s mayor.
“There was no proof of what was happening with that data,” said Edwards, who took office as the issue was being debated in the City Council. “Even at the city government level, we couldn’t find out any information.”
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Napier emphasized that, when a license plate is recorded, it doesn’t provide any more personal information than the vehicle number and when and where it was detected. Still, her conceded that it could be feasible for an officer to enter, for example, a spouse’s or a significant other’s license plate number into the system — although he said that officer likely wouldn’t be around long.
“They could go search it, I guess, if they wanted to. I wouldn’t say it never happens. It’d be awful dumb, but I’ve seen dumber things,” he said. “It’s like anything else . . . you can take advantage of any powers, but in law enforcement, it would be pretty stupid to do, because you’re going to lose your job over it.”
http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20150523/GZ01/150529699/1453
= new reply since forum marked as read
By the way, I stopped using E-Z Pass many years ago.
Not that I was doing anything wrong 
except giving the middle finger salute to highway and bridge cameras on days when my lack of privacy pissed me off. 
Are we going to be prohibited from crossing toll bridges? Guess more and more permitted trucking loads will be traveling the small roads. 
I've always been aware of big brother watching. 
Do they think they are on Discussionist, or something?
It just can't help itself, when all that info is available. It just can't be expected to show self-control.
