The Illinois State Police announced plans in January to install even more automated license plate readers, known as ALPRs, adding to the hundreds that the agency and the Department of Transportation already have planted along state roadways.
ALPRs are cameras installed along roads that photograph cars and scan license plates, among other things. These cameras are always on, recording every car passing by. Last August, the Illinois State Police reported to Gov. J.B. Pritzker that the agency’s ALPR network scanned more than 1.5 billion license plates over the previous year. This number — 1.5 billion — is shocking and illustrates how ALPRs are a tool for mass dragnet surveillance that can gather enough data to reveal sensitive personal information, including where someone lives and works and their religious affiliation, among other information.
Anticipating this, in 2023, Illinois lawmakers added restrictions to a state law with the goal of preventing ALPR tracking of two specific communities: individuals who are undocumented and people traveling across state lines to seek abortion services. In their effort to place limits on ALPRs, the Illinois legislature attempted to do the impossible. When tools such as ALPRs are designed for mass surveillance and seamless data sharing across state lines, the only way to implement meaningful limitations is to never collect such data in the first place.
The Illinois State Police are not alone in deploying ALPR cameras in Illinois as law enforcement agencies, other public agencies, homeowners associations and other private entities have installed thousands of cameras over the last decade. Private companies such as Motorola Solutions, Flock Safety and Genetec have sold their cameras to police in Chicago, Champaign, Bloomington and Carbondale, among others.
ALPRs are everywhere. Flock Safety alone touts serving 2,000 cities in at least 42 states across the country. The widespread use of ALPRs likely means that these companies and police agencies are collecting, storing and sharing hundreds of billions of license plate scans annually.
Once collected, all of this data is shared widely with few restrictions. This is part of the marketing pitch from the companies and the appeal to police. The vast data-sharing infrastructure allows police to search plate numbers and identify where the car has been. Once a license plate is added to a national “hot list” registry of cars suspected of ties to illegal activities, an alert is sent to local police when an ALPR scans the plate. In addition to infrastructure such as the FBI’s National Crime Information Center or Illinois’ LEADS system, these companies also offer their own database systems for data sharing among their customers, which offers even more invasive surveillance potential. The existence of this data poses not only a privacy threat but also a security and safety threat to anyone who drives a car in the United States, not just Illinois.
A recent example in Schaumburg illustrates how this operates in practice. On Nov. 9, the village Public Safety Committee reviewed a proposal from Flock Safety to add ALPR cameras to Schaumburg’s existing network. Flock offered Schaumburg free access to the company’s more than 4,500[ cq comment=” law enforcement agencies” ] other cameras across the country if Schaumburg were to implement these cameras. Otherwise, access to search this database costs $45,000 annually.
Flock’s pitch to Schaumburg also implies that all of the data from Schaumburg’s cameras would be made available in this database to any other customer across the country. While police love this feature, it means that protections established in a state law are easily skirted in practice.
While Illinois attempts to protect abortion seekers and undocumented people from out-of-state police surveillance, it is nearly impossible to prevent ALPR data sharing once data is collected. The systems that facilitate the collection of license plate data are designed to also make sharing the data just as easy, even if this violates the law. California is a perfect example of this impossibility. The state passed a law in 2015 that prohibits the sharing of ALPR data with any out-of-state agency, yet the state law has been violated again, again and again.
Illinois legislators should take note as California’s law contains much stronger language prohibiting data sharing outside of the state than Illinois’ law, yet police still violate it. California’s failures should be a red flag for Illinois if the state is serious about protecting the rights of abortion seekers and undocumented people.
Once data is collected and enters the database of any of these companies or public agencies, it can find a way into the hands of any law enforcement agent because these systems are designed for not only maximal data collection but also maximal data sharing. Flock’s incentive outlined in Schaumburg makes this crystal clear. The company knows that its business model depends on delivering the largest dataset possible to its customers so that any car and its history can be identified in real time, at any time. Flock, Motorola Solutions, and other providers will ensure that their customers adhere to the Illinois state law but only to the extent that they cannot be held legally liable when the law is broken.
The only way to protect anyone from ALPR surveillance is never to collect the data in the first place. Real safety for everyone requires data minimization. The mere presence of ALPRs and their function of mass surveillance puts us all at risk and is in direct opposition to the earnest but incomplete effort by Illinois’ legislators to build substantive protections.
Illinois’ elected officials need to know that they cannot have it both ways. When mass surveillance is the goal, it cannot be limited.
Ed Vogel is the senior policy researcher at the think tank Surveillance Resistance Lab. He is a public voices fellow on technology in the public interest with The OpEd Project in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation.
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