Are Police in Your Community Laundering License Plate Data Through Federal Drug Programs Into a Secretive Central Database?

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If your community is using Flock, Axon, Motorola, or another automatic license plate reader (ALPR) provider, or considering doing so, there’s a new question you need to ask those pushing the tech: Will the data your police department collects on innocent people’s locations be funneled to ICE and other federal agencies through a war-on-drugs era program called the “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” (HIDTA)?

According to documents obtained and recently reported upon by the creator of HaveIBeenFlocked and the tech news outlet 404Media, the government is using the HIDTA program “to obtain data from local cops’ Flock, Axon, and other ALPR cameras and aggregate it on federal government servers, where it is then accessible to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.”

HIDTA is under the jurisdiction of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, a.k.a. the “Drug Czar,” and includes 33 regional programs that cover all 50 states. 404Media reports:

Over the last several years, the White House and several states have taken steps to ensure local ALPR systems are fed into HIDTA; for example, cities in Georgia are not allowed to operate ALPR systems on state rights of way without signing a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) in which they promise to send their data to a HIDTA….

Because there are dozens of HIDTAs across the country, it is not clear how many jurisdictions across the country are actively funneling data into HIDTA’s databases.

This story is a reminder of the difficulty of bottling up intimate and personal information about how people are living their lives once it is created by license plate reader system. Collect it and they will come for it. And they’ll have many paths to getting it.

It’s also a reminder of how slippery government law enforcement agencies can be when pursuing access to our personal data and in dodging oversight when doing so. The HIDTA data-aggregation program is, as 404Media puts it, “complex” and “convoluted” and subject to “confusion about who is actually in charge of the data that any HIDTA collects.” Attempts to access HIDTA data via open records requests have been met with evasion, with the DEA arguing in court that HIDTA records are not subject to open records laws, for example, and a North Carolina sheriff’s office arguing that HIDTA records are not shareable with the public via FOIA because “all data is kept on the Federal Houston-HIDTA database.”

News that ICE and other immigration agencies are able to access local vehicle surveillance systems was central in first sparking questions about Flock and other ALPR companies within many local communities, especially as the Trump administration supercharged its cruel mass deportation campaign. These reports contributed to a wave of state laws against the sharing of data with the federal government, and prompted Flock to cancel its direct contract with ICE. (Meanwhile other companies, such as Motorola/Vigilant, continue to share their data directly with the feds.) And yet now we have learned that there is a whole new channel by which such access is occurring, virtually automatically.

Along with questions for local government authorities like “how many ALPR cameras are in our city,” and “how long is the data retained,” this new question must be added: “Is our local police department funneling license data to this drug program?”

In the end, though, the lesson this program provides is just how slippery the government can be and how hard it can be to limit the sharing is a reminder that the real solution to protecting against privacy invasions and abuses in a community is to get rid of ALPR and other mass surveillance programs altogether.