The National Security Agency is not the only ‘Big Brother’ government entity collecting mass amounts of information from American citizens. State police agencies are also using new technologies — including drones and license plate scanners — to track people in the name of better crime prevention.
Police agencies throughout California are using license plate readers to collect data on drivers and sending that data to intelligence centers operated by local, state and federal government, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
According to Michael Katz-Lacabe, a computer security consultant in San Leandro, Calif., the police have photographed his two cars 112 times – an average of once a week since local police began using scanners.
One image from 2009 showed Katz-Lacabe and his daughters getting out of their car in the driveway of their home. At that point, Katz-Lacabe told the CIS, he became “frightened and concerned about the magnitude of police surveillance and data collection.”
The Northern California Regional Intelligence Center — one of many organized after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — set up the database of records last year, per an agreement with a Silicon Valley firm with connections to the Pentagon and the CIA. Police in Daly City, Milpitas and San Francisco have agreed to provide data from plate readers to the intelligence center as well.
The license plate readers do have some benefits, however, as they are very effective at tracking down stolen cars. Sid Heal, a retired commander with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, saw the difference in operations before and after the plate readers came into use. He told the Center for Investigative Reporting that the readers “are lightning fast in comparison” and allow officers to run up to 1,200 plates an hour, as opposed to the 20 to 50 plates per day the agency was able to run before.
They are also not subject to the same restrictions as GPS tracking, which the Supreme Court determined to be beyond the Fourth Amendment’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” and therefore require a search warrant.
In a similar crime prevention effort, the St. Louis, Mo. Police Department has asked the Federal Aviation Administration to use unmanned surveillance drones to patrol the city’s high crime areas, prompting concern that the Department of Homeland Security is funding police departments across the country to buy high-tech surveillance drones.
As Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) pointed out while questioning Timothy Manning of the Federal Emergency Management Agency on the use of smaller drones to surveil cities, “It sounds like a drone to me, just a cheaper one.”
