One noteworthy arrest came from driving down a residential street. A car was parked at a home, where the owner of the vehicle was sought for a felony warrant for failure to pay child support, but her listed address was on the other side of town.

After some investigation, it was determined that the woman had moved two weeks earlier, likely in an effort to evade the police and the warrant.

Now, most people would applaud this efficient use of technology for police to locate people sought by the law.

But one should seriously consider if there are negative implications with the police locating and tracking everyone parked on a residential street, in their homes.

It is true that only cars that are wanted by police will display active alerts. But to get to this point, ever plate is scanned, stored, and matched. So the police now have a record of where you are, every time a police car drives by.

Who has access to this data, and for what purposes? Can the police now search backward to find out where you have been spotted by these systems?

What other data mining can they do on anyone who they might even suspect or want to investigate in a criminal case? Can this information be subpoenaed in civil cases? If you are being sued for divorce, can this information be used against you, to find if you were at a girlfriend’s house?

Finding stolen cars and locating fugitives is a legitimate and beneficial use of these systems, but as these systems evolve and spread, the civil liberties concerns with what amounts to massive government surveillance of all citizens has yet to be seriously addressed.

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As noted in the news article, these devices scan every license plate near the police vehicle scanner, whether stationary or moving. If it picks up a plate that is matched with a stolen vehicle, or identifies a car that is owned by someone with a suspended driver’s license or outstanding criminal warrant for bail jumping, the officer is instantly alerted.

These license plate scanning systems can be configured to match any law enforcement or government database. Some municipalities choose to use these systems to find and boot vehicles whose owners may owe money for parking tickets or back taxes.  But this flexibility and the amount of data collected can raise concerns about the civil liberties protections of this constant monitoring.

Certainly few would object to increased police efficiency in finding cars flagged for an amber altert, or stolen vehicles. But data is collected and stored on many thousands of cars who have done nothing wrong. Yet with the GPS location matching, the government knows exactly where your car was at what time. This data can be stored indefinitely, and shared with any government agency to be searched retroactively.

These systems will only become cheaper and more widespread. In the very near future, they will likely be standard equipment on all police and governent vehicles in Ohio and nationwide.

You simply can’t expect to go anywhere unnoticed anymore.

And this fact is critical to anyone who thinks they can get away with ignored a driver’s license suspension or failure to appear notification.

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The system works by snapping visible and infrared images of every car and plate, running each plates through an optical character recognition system, and instantly matching the number to a database of vehicles. When a flagged car is identified, the officer in the vehicle is instantly alerted to take action while still in proximity to the car.

You can easily see how this can be applied to monitor and scan cars for any number of purposes. Some states are already using this to identify drivers who are operating on a suspended driver’s license, driving without insurance, or if the owner has an outstanding criminal warrant.

And the broader use of this techology is obvious. All plates are identified, stored, and sorted by date, time, and GPS location. This is true even for cars for which there is no problem, or obvious need for the information, but the data is stored somewhere, and can be saved indefinitely.

The historical data can conceivably be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes. For example, if a dangerous fugitive or kidnapper is on the loose, police can comb through the data and find out where his car may have been located months or years past, before there was any issue. This could provide clues to a person’s current whereabouts, or places he is known to visit.

And of course, this information can also be easily used to track and monitor people for no legitimate purpose. But the data is collected and accesssble, without a warrant.

Clearly civil liberties law has not caught up with these new used of technology and monitoring in law enforcement.

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If you are charged with a criminal offense in Ohio, please contact our defense attorney for a free legal consultation and criminal case evaluation today!

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