Leaked Plans Show School Buses Could Become Roaming Surveillance Vehicles

School buses may soon become roaming surveillance vehicles, 404media reported on Tuesday after reviewing leaked documents detailing plans to equip buses with automatic license plate readers (ALPR). The data would then be turned over to law enforcement, adding to the worrying and unconstitutional trend of warrantless mass government surveillance of law-abiding citizens across the country.  

BusPatrol, a company that claims to be the nation’s leading provider of school bus stop-arm cameras, currently has over 40,000 AI-powered stop-arm cameras across 24 states. These cameras, which are permitted in at least 30 states, are mounted on school buses and are designed to capture images of vehicles illegally passing when the bus is stopped. Incidents captured by the cameras are “recorded, reviewed, and submitted to local law enforcement for review and final approval,” according to BusPatrol. 

Although intended to improve student safety and driver behavior near school buses, stop-arm cameras have been criticized for failing on both fronts, while generating tens of millions of dollars for companies like BusPatrol. 

Now the company has plans to expand its revenue, data collection, and partnership with local law enforcement by turning its stop-arm cameras into ALPR cameras, according to the leaked BusPatrol documents. 

ALPR systems, such as those run by companies like Flock Safety, capture the license plate numbers of passing vehicles, along with the location, time, and date. But unlike red-light or stop-arm cameras that only capture data if the technology perceives a specific violation, ALPR “cameras photograph every vehicle that drives by and can use artificial intelligence to create a profile with identifying information that then gets stored into a massive data base,” according to the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public interest law firm. That database can then be shared and searched, including by law enforcement, to track and find a vehicle—and by extension the driver—all without a warrant.  

BusPatrol’s ALPR cameras would operate in much the same way, reports 404media, but rather than be fixed in one location like other systems, cameras on mobile school buses would capture data on every vehicle they drive past, regardless of whether any law was violated. 

Without proper oversight, “these cameras are ripe for abuse,” senior I.J. attorney Joshua Windham said in a statement announcing a nationwide campaign to challenge the unregulated and unconstitutional use of ALPR systems. Indeed, traditional ALPR systems’ data security has already come under fire after reports of sharing data with immigration agencies despite company policies forbidding it. In Texas, law enforcement officers used the technology to go after a woman who received an abortion, while in Kansas, another officer was caught using it to track an ex-girlfriend. 

News of such abuses has led some communities to end their contracts and remove ALPR cameras altogether. And some federal lawmakers plan to introduce a bipartisan amendment to the federal highway bill that would prohibit funding recipients from using ALPR systems for anything other than tolling, reports Wired. 

BusPatrol’s leaked documents suggest that the company is aware of the controversy around ALPR cameras and anticipates resistance from communities, according to 404media. However, the company is being pushed by a new investor to find alternate revenue streams, a source familiar with BusPatrol’s plans told 404media, and it is already conducting a trial run on one school bus with plans to have 100 ALPR cameras on buses by the end of next month. 

In theory, such technology could be narrowly tailored to only collect data when a violation occurs, Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told 404media, but “there’s a real risk that AI will be used to create a hellscape of over-enforcement.” 

While there is little doubt that school districts and local governments would be tempted by BusPatrol’s ALPR cameras in the name of protecting children, communities would be wise to pass on the intrusive, unregulated technology. “Leveraging something everybody supports—in this case protecting children—in order to expand mass surveillance is a typical way of trying to get people to accept surveillance,” Stanley continued, “one we’ve seen since 9/11 and before.”