A License To Spy

Salient reporting from Citynewswatch.blogspot.com highlighting the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s (CMPD) escalation of a predictive data-mining and surveillance infrastructure in advance of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg PD is not unusual but rather instructive. Funding is derived from asset forfeiture dollars (routed through the DOJ’s Equitable Sharing program to avoid North Carolina’s constitutional requirement that forfeitures go to education), a partnership with Nationwide Insurance, and federal grants (in this case, DHS’s Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI)). In lieu of merely employing Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR) to identify and alert law enforcement to stolen or wanted vehicles, the expanded system facilitates predictive mosaics of individual citizenry by feeding time-stamped location scans into surveillance databases. An April 29th, 2011 copy of CMPD’s standing operating procedure revealed that exact time place vehicle data (for CMPD’s existing mounted ALPRs) is stored for 18 months on Charlotte-Mecklenburg servers (unless a CMPD officer chooses to have the system store particular data for longer). However, data scans cross-interface international surveillance databases and thus are, at least theoretically, without an expiration date. CMPD is contracting the expansion of their municipal spy program through British surveillance outfit NDI Recognition Systems.  Permitting direct external funding sources for police is a remarkably bad idea-particularly for new technologies that raise controversial privacy concerns. Not only do the citizenry find their power to control the police in their power to direct the funding of the police-a dynamic ensuring a direct check on the police by giving the citizens the ability to to choose how they want the police to behave-but the appropriation process itself forces scrutiny. Citizenry are invariably better briefed on issues where citizens choose whether, and to what extent, they want to foot the bill. It also gives leverage to compel public disclosure of police behavior. That is largely absent here.Instead, various agencies in the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security are shipping billions of dollars to nearly any department willing to receive ALPR and data-mining technology. This is done without meaningful debate about what limits-if any-that we want on the technology and data-mine usage...more