ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US
Exclusive: ICE is about to start tracking license plates
across the US
By Russell Brandom Jan 26, 2018, 8:04am EST
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has
officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition
database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system
gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of
real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil
libertarians.
The source of the data is not named in the contract, but
an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading
network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement
agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool
in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a
statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will
not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database
through this contract.”
Reached by The Verge, Vigilant declined to confirm any
contract with ICE. “As policy, Vigilant Solutions is not at liberty to share
any contractual details,” the company said in a statement. “This is a standard
agreement between our company, our partners, and our clients.”
While it collects few photos itself, Vigilant Solutions
has amassed a database of more than 2 billion license plate photos by ingesting
data from partners like vehicle repossession agencies and other private groups.
Vigilant also partners with local law enforcement agencies, often collecting
even more data from camera-equipped police cars. The result is a massive
vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month,
each tagged with a date, time, and GPS coordinates of the sighting.
“ARE WE AS A SOCIETY ... WILLING TO LET OUR GOVERNMENT
CREATE AN INFRASTRUCTURE THAT WILL TRACK ALL OF US?”
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.
“Knowing the previous locations of a vehicle can help
determine the whereabouts of subjects of criminal investigations or priority
aliens to facilitate their interdiction and removal,” an official privacy
assessment explains. “In some cases, when other leads have gone cold, the
availability of commercial LPR data may be the only viable way to find a
subject.”
ICE agents can also receive instantaneous email alerts
whenever a new record of a particular plate is found — a system known
internally as a “hot list.” (The same alerts can also be funneled to the
Vigilant’s iOS app.) According to the privacy assessment, as many as 2,500
license plates could be uploaded to the hot list in a single batch, although
the assessment does not detail how often new batches can be added. With
sightings flooding in from police dashcams and stationary readers on bridges
and toll booths, it would be hard for anyone on the list to stay unnoticed for
long.
Those powers are particularly troubling given ICE’s
recent move to expand deportations beyond criminal offenders, fueling concerns
of politically motivated enforcement. In California, state officials have
braced for rumored deportation sweeps targeted at sanctuary cities. In New
York, community leaders say they’ve been specifically targeted for deportation
as a result of their activism. With automated license plate recognition, that
targeting would only grow more powerful.
For civil liberties groups, the implications go far
beyond immigration. “There are people circulating in our society who are
undocumented,” says senior policy analyst Jay Stanley, who studies license
plate readers with the ACLU. “Are we as a society, out of our desire to find
those people, willing to let our government create an infrastructure that will
track all of us?”
The new license plate reader contract comes after years
of internal lobbying by the agency. ICE first tested Vigilant’s system in 2012,
gauging how effective it was at locating undocumented immigrants. Two years
later, the agency issued an open solicitation for the technology, sparking an
outcry from civil liberties group. Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson
canceled the solicitation shortly afterward, citing privacy concerns, although
two field offices subsequently formed rogue contracts with Vigilant in apparent
violation of Johnson’s policy. In 2015, Homeland Security issued another call
for bids, although an ICE representative said no contract resulted from that
solicitation.
As a result, this new contract is the first agency-wide
contract ICE has completed with the company, a fact that is reflected in
accompanying documents. On December 27th, 2017, Homeland Security issued an
updated privacy assessment of license plate reader technology, a move it
explained was necessary because “ICE has now entered into a contract with a
vendor.”
The new system places some limits on ICE surveillance,
but not enough to quiet privacy concerns. Unlike many agencies, ICE won’t
upload new data to Vigilant’s system but simply scan through the data that’s
already there. In practical terms, that means driving past a Vigilant-linked
camera might flag a car to ICE, but driving past an ICE camera won’t flag a car
to everyone else using the system. License plates on the hot list will also
expire after one year, and the system retains extensive audit logs to help
supervisors trace back any abuse of the system.
Still, the biggest concern for critics is the sheer scale
of Vigilant’s network, assembled almost entirely outside of public
accountability. “If ICE were to propose a system that would do what Vigilant
does, there would be a huge privacy uproar and I don’t think Congress would
approve it,” Stanley says. “But because it’s a private contract, they can
sidestep that process.”
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