Over the past two decades, Americans have been subject to one revelation after another of how little privacy we actually have, with both government and industry engaging in varying degrees of surveillance.
This week, the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a public-interest law firm, announced the Plate Privacy Project—"a nationwide campaign to push back against the arbitrary and unrestrained use of automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras in thousands of American communities," per an I.J. press release.
While they may sound like the stuff of science fiction, ALPRs are very real and increasingly common. "These systems are a combination of high-speed cameras and optical character recognition technology that can identify license plates and turn them into machine-readable text," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Cameras can be mounted on poles at traffic stops or just along the roadside, while mobile versions can be affixed to police cars. Once captured, all information is uploaded to a central database "along with the time, date, and GPS coordinates." I.J. notes that ALPRs "can scan up to 2,000 plates per minute, essentially guaranteeing every vehicle is captured."
