The Patriots

by Jennifer Lynch and Peter Bibring

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using sophisticated cameras, called "automated license plate readers," or ALPRs, to scan and record the license plates of millions of cars across the country. These cameras, mounted on top of patrol cars and on city streets, can scan up to 1,800 license plate per minute, day or night, allowing one squad car to record more than 14,000 plates during the course of a single shift.

Automated License Plate Recording System

Photographing a single license plate one time on a public city street may not seem problematic, but when the data are put into a database, combined with other scans of that same plate on other city streets, and stored forever, it can become very revealing. Information about your location over time can show not only where you live and work, but your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor, and your associations with others. And according to recent research reported in Nature, it's possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial data points (location plus time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifiers.

To better gauge the real threat to privacy posed by ALPRs, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Southern California asked the LAPD and LA Sheriff's Department for information on their systems, including their policies on retaining and sharing information and all the license plate data each department collected over the course of a single week in 2012.

After both agencies refused to release most of the records we asked for, we sued. We hope to get access to these data, both to show just how many data the agencies are collecting and to show how revealing they can be.

Automated license plate readers are often touted as an easy way to find stolen cars -- the system checks a scanned plate against a database of stolen or wanted cars and can instantly identify a hit, allowing officers to set up a sting to recover the car and catch the thief. But even when there's no match in the database and no reason to think a car is stolen or involved in a crime, police keep the data.

According to the LA Weekly, the LAPD and LASD together already have collected more than 160 million "data points" (license plates plus time, date, and exact location) in the greater LA area -- that's more than 20 hits for each of the more than 7 million vehicles registered in LA County. That's a ton of data, but it's not all -- law enforcement officers also have access to private databases containing hundreds of millions of plates and their coordinates collected by "repo" men.

Law enforcement agencies claim that ALPR systems are no different from an officer recording license plate, time and location information by hand. They also argue the data don't warrant any privacy protections because we drive our cars around in public. However, as five justices of the Supreme Court recognized last year in U.S. v. Jones, a case involving GPS tracking, the ease of data collection and the low cost of data storage make technological surveillance solutions such as GPS or ALPR very different from techniques used in the past.

Police are open about their desire to record the movements of every car in case it might one day prove valuable. In 2008, LAPD police Chief Charlie Beck (then the agency's chief of detectives) told GovTech magazine that ALPRs have "unlimited potential" as an investigative tool. "It's always going to be great for the black-and-white to be driving down the street and find stolen cars rolling around... But the real value comes from the long-term investigative uses of being able to track vehicles -- where they've been and what they've been doing -- and tie that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur." But amassing data on the movements of law-abiding residents poses a real threat to privacy, while the benefit to public safety is speculative, at best.

In light of privacy concerns, states including Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia have limited the use of ALPRs, and New Hampshire has banned them outright. Even the International Association of Chiefs of Police has issued a report recognizing that "recording driving habits" could raise First Amendment concerns because cameras could record "vehicles parked at addiction-counseling meetings, doctors' offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for political protests."

But even if ALPRs are permitted, there are still common-sense limits that can allow the public safety benefits of ALPRs while preventing the wholesale tracking of every resident's movements. Police can, and should, treat location information from ALPRs like other sensitive information -- they should retain it no longer than necessary to determine if it might be relevant to a crime, and should get a warrant to keep it any longer. They should limit who can access it and who they can share it with. And they should put oversight in place to ensure these limits are followed.

Unfortunately, efforts to impose reasonable limits on ALPR tracking in California have failed so far. Last year, legislation that would have limited private and law enforcement retention of ALPR data to 60 days -- a limit currently in effect for the California Highway Patrol -- and restricted sharing between law enforcement and private companies failed after vigorous opposition from law enforcement. In California, law enforcement agencies remain free to set their own policies on the use and retention of ALPR data, or to have no policy at all.

Some have asked why we would seek public disclosure of the actual license plate data collected by the police -- location-based data that we think is private. But we asked specifically for a narrow slice of data -- just a week's worth -- to demonstrate how invasive the technology is. Having the data will allow us to see how frequently some plates have been scanned; where and when, specifically, the cops are scanning plates; and just how many plates can be collected in a large metropolitan area over the course of a single week. Actual data will reveal whether ALPRs are deployed primarily in particular areas of Los Angeles and whether some communities might, therefore, be much more heavily tracked than others. If these data are too private to give a week's worth to the public to help inform us how the technology is being used, then isn't it too private to let the police amass years' worth of data without a warrant?

After the Boston Marathon bombings, many have argued that the government should take advantage of surveillance technology to collect more data, rather than less. But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. We should recognize just how revealing ALPR data are and not be afraid to push our police and legislators for sensible limits to protect our basic right to privacy.

{Editor Note: Automated License Plate Recorders are merely the precursor ro CCTV which is already in use in many U.S. cities. However, a recent Australian court decision casts doubt as to their real purpose which doesn't appear to be crime.  "A local resident opposed to the introduction of CCTV cameras succesfully proved that public surveillance carried out by his city council not only broke Australia’s privacy laws, but also did nothing to prevent crime – the supposed reason for its installation."}

---

Daniel Solove, author of Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security, believes these arguments, and many like them, are flawed. They are based on mistaken views about what it means to protect privacy and the costs and benefits of doing so.

Terrorist attacks, while horrific, claim far fewer lives each year than suicide in the U.S. Nearly 30,000 Americans take their own lives each year. According to The Guardian, 3,467 American lives have been lost in terrorist attacks since 1970; 3,003 of those were in 2001.  A version of this article was originally posted here.

by Carl F. Worden

There are two Supreme Court rulings that directly relate to the current anti-Assault Weapon issue everyone needs to be reminded of.

The first is United States v. Miller 1939. Miller possessed a sawed-off shotgun banned under the National Firearms Act. He argued that he had a right to bear the weapon under the Second Amendment, but the Supreme Court ruled against him. Why? At the time, sawed-off shotguns were not being used in a military application, and the Supremes ruled that since it didn't, it was not protected. Even though Miller lost that argument, the Miller case set the precedent that protected firearms have a military, and thus a legitimate and protected Militia use. The military now uses shotguns regularly, but not very short, sawed-off shotguns, but an AR-15/AK-47 type weapon is currently in use by the military, therefore it is a protected weapon for the Unorganized Militia, which includes just about every American citizen now that both age and sex discrimination are illegal. (The original Militia included men of age 17-45). Therefore any firearm that is applicable to military use is clearly protected under Article II, and that includes all those nasty-looking semi-automatic black rifles, including full 30 round magazines.

The second important case is that of John Bad Elk v. United States from 1900. In that case, an attempt was made to arrest Mr. Bad Elk without probable cause, and Mr. Bad Elk killed a policeman who was attempting the false arrest. Bad Elk had been found guilty and sentenced to death. However, the Supreme Court ruled that Bad Elk had the right to use any force, including lethal force, to prevent his false arrest, even if the policeman was only trying to arrest him and not kill him. Basically, the Supremes of the day ruled that as a citizen, you have the right to defend against your civil rights being violated using ANY force necessary to prevent the violation, even if the offending party isn't trying to kill you.

Both of these cases are standing law to this day.

The Miller decision clearly includes AR-15/AK-47 type weapons as having a military application. The Bad Elk decision means that if the government tries to confiscate your AR-15/AK-47, or arrest you for having one, you can kill the offenders on the spot, even if they are not trying to kill you.

I didn't make these decisions; the United States Supreme Court did.

by Mary Kay Culp, KFL Executive Director

Today's KFL blog (read it HERE) examines how the states' legal ethics head, Stan Hazlett, went after one attorney's license, allegedly breaking the rules and repeatedly lying! He now faces his own set of ethics charges. Interestingly, that attorney also had a connection to abortion. Because of his actions it was revealed in a story in the Topeka Capitol Journal that sexual abuse was going on at the women's correction center in Topeka, with abortion being used to hide it!

This strongly echoes the ongoing saga of former attorney General, Phill Kline who Hazlett is also going after. 

Three weeks ago, anti- Kline "tweets" were going on the internet against Phill Kline, at his ethics hearing in the Supreme Court. After complaining about the source of the derisive comments--an appellate court law clerk (who helps the justices write their rulings)--Kline's attorney issued a letter to Hazlett. The letter is HERE. Many substantive charges are made, and Hazlett is asked to release more materials.

Note: Donate to Kline's defense at https://www.lifeissues.org/amistad/donate/index.html

The question remains why Hazlett steadfastly dogged Kline after two investigative bodies and a Wichita judge supported his actions.

Is it because of the fact that Hazlett works for the Kansas Supreme Court, whose member, Justice Carol Beier, has a recognized dislike of Mr. Kline? That assertion is not wholly ours. A December 2008 Supreme Court ruling regarding Kline found he did nothing wrong and yet Beier, who wrote the opinion, devoted 18 pages to denigrate him. The entire ruling written by Beier was so out of the ordinary, that the chief justice at the time, Kay McFarland said this, as part of her separate comments:

" …It appears to me that the majority invokes our extraordinary inherent power to sanction simply to provide a platform from which it can denigrate Kline for actions that it cannot find to have been in violation of any law and to heap scorn upon him for his attitude and behavior that does not rise to the level of contempt. This is the very antithesis of "restraint and discretion" and is not an appropriate exercise of our inherent power.”

Adding:

“I believe it is inappropriate to set forth, as if to threaten [Kline] with, the various penalties that could be imposed if some past or future hypothetical misconduct should "come to light" at a later date….This vague statement seems to anticipate and encompass the discovery of additional past or future misconduct.”

It is difficult not to wonder if there was some tipoff to Beier or her staff (especially as more "bad tweets"have been uncovered) about a CD with work product from then-former KS AG Kline's staff that supposedly appeared "mysteriously" on the desks of abortion attorneys just weeks earlier and that it supposedly contained damning information.  It didn't although they have tried during Kline's ethics allegations journey to make something of it. The origin of the CD, and its transfer to abortion attorneys has never been determined, but certainly needs to be. 

There are other issues related to Kansas corruption that we are working on because they too demand further exploration and action, and we will be reporting on them soon--especially the destruction of evidence related to the Planned Parenthood charges that have all now been dropped by Johnson County DA Steve Howe. 

Again, read the KFL blog article (here) about another Kansas attorney who Hazlett pursued who is fighting back allegedly with facts that proved Hazlett is not above lying, and note the similarities to how Hazlett has treated and continues to treat Phill Kline! Also, again, please read the great letter Kline's attorney Condit has written to Hazlett HERE.