Heeding the demands of the Secret Service, state police in Virginia recorded and collected the whereabouts of potentially millions of people in an effort to monitor attendees at political rallies in 2008 and 2009.<\/p>\n
Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request
\nfiled by the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the Virginia state
\ncapital show that police agencies utilized license plate readers
\nin order to record information about people traveling to at least
\nthree politically-charged events during the 2008 presidential
\nelection season.<\/p>\n
According to the documents obtained by the paper, Virginia State
\nPolice logged license plate data for every vehicle leaving the
\nstate en route to neighboring Washington, DC during President
\nBarack Obama\u2019s first inauguration ceremony in January 2009. Three
\nmonths earlier, the police ran a similar operation to coincide
\nwith campaign rallies in Leesburg, Virginia being held by
\nthen-candidate Obama and Sarah Palin, the Republican Party\u2019s
\nnominee for vice president.<\/p>\n
Mark Bowes, a reporter with The Dispatch, wrote that the United
\nStates Secret Service directed state police to use a license
\nplate reader positioned at the Pentagon in Arlington, VA to
\n\u201cto capture and store the plate images as an extra level of
\nsecurity for the inauguration<\/i>.\u201d Similar requests were made
\nfor the preceding rallies outside of DC, he reported.<\/p>\n
The Dispatch has not published information about how many
\nvehicles had their location recorded and logged, but Bowes noted
\nthat an estimated 1.8 million people attended Pres. Obama\u2019s
\ninauguration in Jan. 2009.<\/p>\n
How much of that information still exists, if any, remains a
\nmystery, however. In February, Virginia Attorney General Ken
\nCuccinelli authorized legislation forcing the state police to
\nstop storing data in a \u201cpassive matter<\/i>,\u201d and intelligence
\nis now erased after 24 hours unless investigators believes it\u2019s
\nrelevant to an ongoing criminal case. When Cuccinelli made that
\ndirective in February, it impacted the information from roughly 8
\nmillion license plates scanned over the span of 2010 through
\nearly 2013. Bailey McCann wrote for CivSource online, though,
\nthat the data is likely still accessible since it was collected
\nper the orders of the Secret Service, the federal law enforcement
\nagency that provides security detail for US presidents and other
\npersons of high-importance and serves as a function of the
\nDepartment of Homeland Security.<\/p>\n
The Dispatch\u2019s revelation comes amid growing concerns of \u201cAt first the captured plate data was used just to check \u201cAs it becomes increasingly clear that ours is an era of mass Claire Gasta\u00c3\u00b1aga, the executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, \u201cIt\u2019s a situation where you\u2019re collecting a lot of information
\nfederal-ordered surveillance within the US, as well as a recent
\nreport from the American Civil Liberties Union detailing<\/a> how law enforcement agencies across
\nAmerica are increasingly relying on license plate scanners as a
\ncrime-fighting tool. But despite proponents of the technology
\ncalling the devices instrumental in finding criminal suspects and
\nstole vehicles, scanners like the ones used in Virginia have
\nraised a number of privacy questions from the likes of the ACLU
\nand others.<\/p>\n
\nagainst lists of cars law enforcement hoped to locate for various
\nreasons<\/i>,\u201d ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump wrote in July
\nwhen her non-partisan group published their profile on the
\nscanners. \u201cBut increasingly, all of this data is being fed
\ninto massive databases that contain the location information of
\nmany millions of innocent Americans stretching back for months or
\neven years<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nsurveillance facilitated by ever cheaper and more powerful
\ncomputing technology, it is critical we learn how this technology
\nis being used<\/i>,\u201d Crump wrote. \u201cLicense plate readers are
\njust one example of a disturbing phenomenon: the government is
\nincreasingly using new technology to collect information about
\nall of us, all the time and to store it forever \u2014 providing a
\ncomplete record of our lives for it to access at will<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n
\ntold The Dispatch that she found recording information pertaining
\nto attendees of political rallies \u201cpretty astounding<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n
\non a lot of people to potentially use if something bad happens at
\nsome unspecified future time and some unspecified situation<\/i>,\u201d
\nGasta\u00c3\u00b1aga said. According to her, that reasoning \u201cwould
\njustify a camera on every street corner recording all of our
\nmovements at all times, because it would be expedient to be able
\nto have that to refer back to if there\u2019s a bank robbery there two
\nyears from now<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n