USA: Police officers have misused license plate scanners

License plate scanners, which record and store all passing vehicles without suspicion or cause, are particularly popular with US police officers. There are only modest restrictions on the evaluation of the data. And even these are not adhered to by some police authorities. Flock, one of several scanner operators in the USA, is now taking cautious measures against misuse: data from California, Illinois and Virginia can only be queried in the state itself. Soon, an AI will also report possible misuse.

Flock has installed license plate scanners in more than 5,000 US cities and municipalities. The declared aim is to roll out the surveillance devices in all US municipalities. In addition to license plates, the cameras also recognize the model, color and special features of all vehicles recorded and store this information in a database for later queries. No court approval is required.

The local police authority can release the database for queries by other police authorities, either for certain partners, for everyone within a certain radius, in the same state, or even US-wide (national lookup). If a police authority wishes to use the nationwide search itself, it must also make its own data available for National Lookup. And so the network for National Lookup has grown considerably.

Individual US states have laws that restrict searches. Under Californian law, data may only be shared within the state. Illinois restricts data sharing with out-of-state authorities: they may not use Illinois' data to track women who may have sought abortions or to track people whose residency permits may have expired. And as of July, Virginia is limiting searches to certain purposes: suspected violations of city ordinances, Illinois state criminal law, theft of a vehicle, and missing person reports and wanted persons. This is unlikely to cover violations of US residency laws. In addition, Virginia limits the retention period to 21 days.

Abuse exposed

404media has uncovered that some police authorities are disregarding the rules already in force. They are accessing Californian data from outside the state or searching Illinois' database for evidence of people with expired visas. This finding is based solely on the reasons given by the police officers in the electronic query form. They had to confirm compliance with Illinois' regulations immediately beforehand with a mouse click.

The police officers making the query are not responsible for residence law. They are apparently trying to cooperate with the responsible federal authority out of their own urge. 47 police authorities were busted for such prohibited queries in Illinois when Flock conducted its own audit as a result of the 404media report.

Reaction of the operator

In response, Flock first installed a filter to prevent the query if an illegal query reason (such as "immigration" or "abortion") is specified. However, this only works in Illinois. Flock is now going one step further and blocking queries from other US states in California, Illinois and Virginia.

A case has come to light in Texas in which a police officer searched Flock's license plate database nationwide for a woman who had allegedly had an abortion on her own. In Texas, abortions are practically completely banned. The police officer and Flock deny that the search was about criminal prosecution. Rather, the woman's family was worried and reported her missing, which the police officer then followed up.

Flock wants to send artificial intelligence on patrol this year. It should recognize suspicious queries and then inform an employee of the police authority in whose area the queried camera is located. Automatic blocking is not planned. In addition, Flock would like to enable the individual police authorities to improve the query form: they can then demand that queries must specify a file number so that it is theoretically possible to check for which case the query is being carried out. Flock has no plans to make this mandatory throughout the country.

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