SurveillanceVirginia police built massive data base of political rallies participants

As with police departments in other states, the Virginia State Police (VSP) has, from 2010 until last spring, maintained a large database of license plates which allowed VSP to pinpoint the locations of millions of cars on particular dates and times.

Rebecca Glenberg, the legal director of the ACLU of Virginia, writes that what is particularly disturbing, about the VSP case is that the agency used automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to collect information about political activities of law-abiding people. As documents obtained in response to an ACLU of Virginia public records request show, the VSP recorded the license plates of vehicles attending President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, as well as campaign rallies for Obama and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

“These practices starkly illustrate the need for tight controls on government use of technology for surveillance purposes,” Glenberg writes.

ALPRs have a legitimate law-enforcement use, but Glenberg writes that by creating and maintaining a database of millions of license plates and targeting political activity, “the VSP crossed well over the line from legitimate law enforcement to oppressive surveillance.”

Thus, in the cases of the campaign rallies and the 2009 inauguration, the VSP collected personally identifying information on drivers merely because these drivers were heading to a political event. “These drivers were not suspected of or connected to any crime — their only offense was practicing their First Amendment rights to speak freely and assemble peacefully,” she writes.

That the technology-assisted monitoring by the police of protests and political rallies would have a chilling effect on the freedom of expression is a view which, perhaps surprisingly to dome, was expressed in 2009 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The organization explained that when it comes to license plate readers, “[t]he risk is that individuals will become more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation because they consider themselves under constant surveillance.”

This was also the view of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (who is now the Republican candidate for governor in the November elections). Glenberg writes that when the VSP asked him about the legality of its information-gathering practices, Cuccinelli, in a strong opinion, explained that the use of ALPRs for “passive” collection of information violates Virginia’s Government Data Collection and Dissemination Act. That Act stipulates that law enforcement may use ALPRs to search for specific vehicles suspected of involvement in criminal activity, but it may not collect and save data on thousands of vehicles for which there is no grounds for suspicion.

The VSP says that since the Attorney General issues his opinion, the agency has purged its license plate database and now disposes of such information within twenty-four hours of collection, unless it is relevant to a clearly defined criminal investigation.

Glenberg notes that passive data collection should not be just an Attorney General opinion away. Rather, the practice should be clearly prohibited by law.

Glenberg concludes:

The VSP’s former use of ALPR data is just one of the ways government uses technology to obtain detailed information about the everyday lives of Americans, along with the National Security Agency’s collection of data on every phone call to or from the United States, or the increasing warrantless tracking of cell phone locations by law enforcement agencies. It is essential that Americans remain alert to these encroachments on liberty and demand that their legislators rein in the use of surveillance technology by local, state, and national government.