DHS Suffers Moment Of Clarity, Shuts Down Plans To Build A Nationwide License Plate Database
from the an-NSA-esque-program-would-be-perfect-for-today's-political-climate! dept
Well, that was fast. No sooner had word spread that the DHS (and ICE) were soliciting bids for a national ALPR (automatic license plate reader) database than the government has stepped forward to cancel those plans.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Wednesday ordered the cancellation of a plan by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to develop a national license-plate tracking system after privacy advocates raised concern about the initiative.The (stated) reasoning behind this wasn't the outrage the announcement generated. Instead, officials are portraying it as some sort of rogue bid solicitation, done with no one's permission that somehow magically appeared on an official government platform.
The order came just days after ICE solicited proposals from companies to compile a database of license-plate information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers. Officials said the database was intended to help apprehend fugitive illegal immigrants, but the plan raised concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.
“The solicitation, which was posted without the awareness of ICE leadership, has been cancelled,” ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said in a statement. “While we continue to support a range of technologies to help meet our law enforcement mission, this solicitation will be reviewed to ensure the path forward appropriately meets our operational needs.”This itself should be concerning. If ICE leadership can't even keep an eye on its all-too-helpful minions, one is forced to wonder how many other solicitations have "escaped" in this fashion… and how many of those turned into actual ICE/DHS programs.
But I wouldn't dwell on the ICE's internal failures for too long. The most plausible explanation is that someone up top at the DHS or ICE suddenly realized that publicly calling for bids on a nationwide surveillance system while nationwide surveillance systems are being hotly debated was probably a horrible idea.
This may have been put on the back burner by the agency but it's not simply going to go away. It will return, either via a super-secret bidding system that turns the job over to favored government contractors, or further down the road, when the heat surrounding surveillance of US citizens dies down.
As it stands right now, nothing much changes for ICE. There are several ALPR contractors already in service who have collected (and continue to collect) millions of license plate records. And these can all be accessed by government agencies just as easily as they're accessed by local law enforcement -- without warrants, subpoenas or anything else that might generate a paper trail.
But don't worry, citizens. When this inevitably returns, ICE will have your privacy in mind. After all, the bid solicitation specifies that the system must conform with the Privacy Act of 1974. Nothing says "privacy" in 2014 like a 40-year-old law, especially one loaded with convenient exceptions for law enforcement.
Filed Under: alpr, database, dhs, ice, license plate
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Why none, of course. We caught the only bad one. This is the system working. There is nothing of import to see here, Patriot. Please move along.
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Someone call Satan!
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Re: Someone call Satan!
This is either a clear occurrence of Schroedinger's quantum singularities or the apocalypse is coming. I'd expect sanity from virtually anywhere except for the DHS. Next will be Disney forfeiting their copyrights on everything older than 14 years. And fiery apocalypse upon us.
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James Clapper releases a statement, claiming that the leadership at the NSA didn't request that the telcos give the NSA all of those metadata records every day. The telcos just offered to give them up every day and it was a lower level employee that said "OK". He then claims that the leadership didn't know about these programs until after they were up and running.
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That is that you know of.
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Ofcourse it is naive to believe that, because now the data is used by the tax agency's. For instance to check if you don't drive too many for private km's in your lease car. (otherwise you should pay more)
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I feel so much safer now
...rename/relocate/recycle... Ever wonder why they tried to slip a national surveillance program into ICE... where it might get overlooked?
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"We've gotten enough bids and have selected a vendor. The solicitation is now closed."
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Whats really happening...
Plans now continued as a state secret...
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What's the difference?
Or a police officer walking a beat who is observing and making decisions about whether anyone -- innocent or guilty -- matches any APBs they recall?
You can think of a whole bunch of instances like this. No court order, nor is one even suggested or likely. What do you feel is the part that changes?
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Re: What's the difference?
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Three years later and all of a sudden a cop trolling for something to do may notice your tag was read at the same location as a murder. Now whoops... all of a sudden you are drug into a police station asking you what you did three years ago on this date at 4:39PM. Better have a good answer.
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With the cops you at least have context... with stored data... not so much.
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Re: What's the difference?
If the license plate scanner system were implemented like this--where law enforcement simply flags a plate they care about, so that it triggers an alarm if it passes the scanners--it might be equivalent.
But this is not how this would work. It would be much more useful to law enforcement if the plate readers simply recorded every plate and then filed it into a database somewhere, which could then be queried for the locations visited by a plate of interest for the last five years. This is radically different than a radar gun. It is "meta" data on the location every car driven by every person in the US, stored non-anonymously servers run by the government (or a private contractor!). I am not anonymous, and the data are not transient.
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DHS
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As it ever was...
"We've been watching you for awhile," he says. "We don't like the way you have been questioning our abuse of your liberties or how you're not conforming. So we constructed a watertight case against you."
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I think license plates are a bad idea
We should get rid of license plates. If you get pulled over for a traffic violation, THEN the cop can ask for your vehicle paperwork.
You should be able to drive anonymously. That's why license plates have random numbers instead of our names on them.
But with stuff like plate readers and databases and smartphones and Google Glass...we may as well just put our names on the plates.
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Re stolen cars - how do you uniquely describe the mugger so the cops don't stop everyone in a red t-shirt with a baseball cap? Same answer.
I can't think of any argument for license plates on cars that doesn't equally apply to pedestrians.
If you think you should be required to wear a big sign with your SSN whenever you walk in public, then you'll think license plates are a good idea too.
We accept them now only because we're used to them.
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I didn't realize illegals had license plates ,or is it a new bling thing.
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Shut down what?
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Responsibility
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Your excuse for doing something wrong shouldn't be worse than admitting you were doing the bad thing.
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