Advocacy Group Alleges License Plate Readers Are Invasion of Privacy
A new lawsuit has been filed by a local civil rights advocacy group to end the San Diego Police Department’s use of automated license plate readers as an invasion of privacy. The group, Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, is represented by the region’s ACLU and their suit was filed Tuesday, Sept. 30, in San Diego Superior Court.
Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, which advocates for refugees and displaced people, also wants the city to stop using public money on a program it says violates constitutional rights. They allege that the cameras and the database they create amount to an invasion of privacy rights under the state constitution.
The California Constitution “provides strong and affirmative privacy protections,” said Frederick Carroll, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of San Diego & Imperial Counties, at a press conference Wednesday at a news conference in downtown San Diego.
Carroll added:
“If privacy as guaranteed in the California Constitution is to mean anything at all, it means that Californians should not be subject to mass surveillance, mass data accumulation of their travels, a mosaic compilation of their everyday activities.”
The San Diego U-T reports:
“The city of San Diego has 500 automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, posted around the city. The cameras record and store information on all vehicles in their view, creating a searchable database. The police department, which runs the local program, holds on to the data for 30 days unless it is used in an investigation.
The readers have become increasingly controversial, locally and nationwide, particularly as the Trump administration has ramped up immigration enforcement and surveillance of people protesting it.”
As the controversy rolls across the country, universally, police tout the technology as a crime-fighting tool and point to crimes it has helped solve, including homicides. However, critics argue it creates a mass surveillance network and tramples civil rights, including in marginalized communities. What’s more, there’s been tons of abuse by police officers.
Critics argue that the cameras can reveal a person’s travel patterns — where they work, go to school, shop, worship and more.
Again, Carroll to reporters: “This is the kind of technology that is dangerous in any hands.”
The new lawsuit alleges that some local license plate readers are in sensitive locations — including four cameras near a Muslim civil rights organization and another four by a reproductive health clinic.
In a press release prior to their conference, the ACLU stated:
The SDPD collects ALPR information on millions of San Diego residents and drivers and retains this deeply invasive location and identifying information for 30 days. This massive quantity of location and identifying data allows the SDPD to piece together, track, and surveil the private habits, movements, and associations of drivers. SDPD conducted nearly a quarter million retrospective searches of their ALPR database last year.
The city’s use of ALPR violates the California Constitution, which guarantees the people’s inalienable right to privacy. San Diego’s ALPR program expends taxpayer funds and violates constitutional rights.
“The City of San Diego and the San Diego Police Department’s ALPR system is an invasive, around-the-clock mass surveillance technology that can reveal intimate details of a person’s life,” said Samantha Itazawa, advancing justice staff attorney at the ACLUF-SDIC. “This information can demonstrate travel patterns of individuals as they go to work, drop their children off at school, or attend a house of worship, doctor’s office or protest. This widespread collection of ALPR information poses serious threats to communities’ privacy and freedom of movement.”
“Governments have long used surveillance—ranging from wiretaps to social media monitoring—to target individuals from marginalized groups and supposed opposition groups. ALPR systems are no exception to this history,” said Frederick Carroll, legal director at the ACLUF-SDIC. “We live in a country where families are being ripped apart by masked agents, immigrants and trans folks are being villainized by the federal government, and people are being prosecuted for simply seeking health care. The city’s ALPR system is a dangerous tool which can aid this harmful agenda, and we will not concede our constitutional right to privacy, now or ever.”
“As San Diego faces unprecedented kidnappings by ICE, and our ability to protest gets stifled day-by-day, we must recognize that flawed surveillance technologies like ALPRs put us all at risk. The communities we serve at PANA know all too well that mass surveillance can be used against us and often unfairly targets us,” said Homayra Yusufi, senior policy strategist at PANA. “When vulnerable communities are afraid to practice their religion, protest or move freely because their sensitive information is being recorded and shared, we have to question the constitutionality of such technologies.”
PANA in their suit against the city and SDPD is seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to end their unconstitutional mass surveillance of San Diego residents and drivers. This lawsuit demands that the city must cease its use of ALPR technologies, uninstall all Flock and other ALPR cameras, and delete all data collected by these cameras.
