Surveillance Tech Company Is Pitching An Unholy ALPR/Stingray Hybrid To Law Enforcement

from the free-to-go-but-not-free-of-surveillance dept

Here’s something no one but cops and the tech firms that love cops wanted: an ALPR that can scoop up pretty much any information being broadcasted by cars and the devices carried by the people inside them. As if ALPRs weren’t already controversial enough, here comes a tech company offering that makes most ALPRs (including those sold by Flock!) look absolutely innocuous.

Joseph Cox has the gory details for 404 Media:

A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers.

The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. 

That’s some wild stuff! And not in a good way!

The legal argument for license plate readers has always been this: A car traveling on a public road has no expectation of privacy. Sure, ALPRs can generate hundreds of millions of plate/location records every year, but the (clumsy) analogy given to courts is that it’s no different than something that could be accomplished by police officers who simply wrote down every license plate that passed by their patrol car.

Of course, to duplicate what ALPRs actually do, you’d have to actually exist in a hypothetical. If a million monkeys with a million typewriters can create Shakespeare, surely a million blue-clad monkeys could generate millions of plate/location data points with the sort of accuracy one would expect from high-speed, high-quality plate reader cameras.

But we don’t exist in the infinite monkey theorem. That’s a strike against ALPRs being nothing more than a “force multiplier.”

And there is currently no legal argument that justifies hoovering data from devices and vehicles, which is something the public certainly can’t do. But that’s what surveillance tech company Leonardo is offering, according to its own pitch document:

It bridges license plate recognition data with sensor-captured device identifiers—such as those from mobile phones, Bluetooth wearables, and vehicle systems—to create a unique, trackable ‘electronic fingerprint’ for investigative use.

When multiple devices consistently move together with a vehicle, SignalTrace’s algorithms link them to that vehicle’s license plate and time-stamped location data. This correlation provides investigators with another layer of actionable intelligence, even if a suspect changes or removes a plate.

First off, let’s address this part of Leonardo’s assertion:

When multiple devices consistently move together with a vehicle…

That seems deliberately misleading. While it’s not illogical to expect surveillance tech to seek correlations between data points, you’d have to be deliberately ignorant to believe that data (i.e., captures that don’t include “multiple devices consistently moving together”) won’t be searchable. While disparate data may be mostly useless in investigations, having the option to search by identifiers other than license plate numbers means cops can track people and devices, rather than limit themselves to the movement of vehicles. And if you don’t think this will be abused, you’re so deep in denial as to be unreachable.

And there’s so much more! The Leonardo document says its tech can capture RFID info from key cards, asset tags, and pet microchips. It also says it can pull info from vehicle infotainment systems. While this may be limited to unique identifiers that link the car to the device, these systems contain plenty of other data that may not be as well-protected as drivers assume — things like GPS data, phone info for every device that has been paired with the system, as well as any communications (and connecting phone numbers) stored during hands-free operation.

Leonardo is angling for federal law enforcement contracts. And it certainly would like to hook up with whatever local agencies it can talk into paying for its services. While it’s not clear that anyone is purchasing Signal trace yet, Leonardo is already filling its pockets with federal dollars, as 404 Media reports:

Its U.S. arm has contracts with U.S. Special Operations Command and the General Services Administration, according to procurement records maintained by the transparency website Widely Reported.

At this point, there is no widely recognized legal argument that supports this sort of intrusiveness. While ALPRs get a pass because anyone can see cars and license plates when they’re traveling public roads and the Third Party Doctrine says nearly anything “willingly” handed over to third parties doesn’t require a warrant to obtain, this is something else completely.

There’s no law on the books or court precedent that says the government can, in effect, force devices carried by people in cars to turn this info over to the government just because the vehicle happened to pass a SignalTrace-powered camera.

This is tech that has no analogue in the public sphere. In other words, the general public doesn’t have access to tech that can obtain this info from other people’s devices. That was the argument used to excuse cops who used an iPhone’s night photography option to “see” through the tinted windows of a parked car. There’s also no “just a cop with a notebook and a pen” equivalent for this tech, which is what has been argued to route ALPRs around the Fourth Amendment.

Leonardo is setting up shop in the unsettled areas of the law. That’s not a great business model. Even if there’s initial interest from the government’s early adopters, securing sustained revenue streams would require the Constitution itself to be upended. I’m not saying it won’t happen. I’m just saying I wouldn’t bet my career on it.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, alpr, collect it all, location tracking, plate readers, stingray, surveillance

Companies: leonardo, signaltrace