Intellectual Property Law

City Wants Surveillance Cameras to Record Every License Plate

By Kim Zetter

Police in North Carolina want to build surveillance cameras that would record every car license that passes by and run it through the FBI’s criminal database, alerting authorities in real time if it finds a match.

The system would store license plate numbers for up to a year to provide authorities with historic data should they want to review the data later.

?There is no expectation of privacy to a license plate number,? said John Carey, the police chief in Wilmington, North Carolina, since a license plate is a displayed public record.

Wilmington police have applied for a Department of Homeland Security grant to place the cameras along a local highway as well as at a memorial and bridge.

The system would run every plate number through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center to look for anyone with an outstanding warrant or criminal record or simply someone who’s “a person of interest in a local investigation.”

Carey told the local paper that the system could be used to establish time lines for when a suspect entered or left a certain area or could be used to analyze patterns of movement or personal associations.

?A lot of people might say it?s Big Brother at work,? Carey said, but added that it would only affect those whose information was already in the NCIC database, and information gets into the database only for a reason.

So who’s in the NCIC database? The database is supposed to list missing persons, terrorist suspects, suspects wanted on outstanding warrants or those convicted of serious felonies, but peace activists have found themselves in the database after being arrested in non-violent anti-war rallies.

The executive director of the local branch of American Civil Liberties Union said there should be controls in place to make sure the system doesn’t retain data on the movements of ordinary citizens.

?It?s not a legitimate use of this technology to be storing information on innocent citizens on the off chance that someday law enforcement might want to track this person down for some reason,? she said.

Photo: teamaskins/Flickr

Full post as published by Threat Level on June 01, 2009 (boomark / email).