A recent story about automatic license plate readers (ALPR) revealed that police departments in numerous states share your license plate data without a warrant.
Three days ago an article in the Orange Leader, revealed how police in Texas share motorists’ ALPR data with law enforcement in other states.
Law enforcement agencies equipped with license-plate readers share collected data, even across state lines in pursuit of drug traffickers, individuals with outstanding warrants, stolen vehicles, or other activities of interest.
What does law enforcement mean by “other activities of interest”?
Two years ago, I revealed that “other activities of interest” is just a euphemism for police hotlists.
These hotlists can include things like traffic scofflaws, “terrorist watch lists” and secret watch lists, like the Law Enforcement Agencies Data System.
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Police boast of sharing license plate data without a warrant…
“No longer does an officer have to take a stack of warrants and go door-to-door in the hopes of tracking someone down,” Police Chief Rod Carroll said.
As far as I can tell, only 14 states have statutes regulating ALPR usage.
Police are also using Pay-By-Plate toll road ALPRs to create a massive database.
But it doesn’t end there; law enforcement also has access to other ALPR databases.
Repo agents and tow truck drivers share ALPR data
Repo agents, rental trucks, tow truck drivers and even garbage trucks share you ALPR data with law enforcement.
Three years ago, an article in the Mercury News revealed that San Jose, California wanted to install ALPRs on garbage trucks.
The data would be fed directly to the Police Department from the privately operated trash trucks, prompting an officer to respond to stolen vehicles or cars involved with serious crime.
And in 2015, I wrote an article about how DHS and law enforcement use 200,000 garbage trucks to spy on everyone.
If you think the ALPR nightmare story stops there, you would be wrong.
For years now, law enforcement has also been using ALPRs in shopping malls and parking lots to spy on innocent Americans. They are even thinking of putting ALPRs in car washes. (Click here to find out more.)
In three short years, DHS went from cancelling plans to create a national license plate tracking system with the DEA, to using the US Border Patrol to do what it could not. (Click here to read about the DEA’s highway ALPRs.)
Four days ago, an article in The Verge revealed that DHS used the US Border Patrol to accomplish its goal of national license plate tracking system.
ICE agents would be able to query that database in two ways. A historical search would turn up every place a given license plate has been spotted in the last five years, a detailed record of the target’s movements. That data could be used to find a given subject’s residence or even identify associates if a given car is regularly spotted in a specific parking lot.
As you can see, police state Amerika is alive and well and is doing everything in its power to destroy our Bill of Rights in the name of public safety.
You can read more at the MassPrivateI blog, where this article first appeared.
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