What to do when cop cameras track your every move

In the past few years, police around the country have built up vast networks of cameras mounted on squad cars and posts that continuously take pictures of license plates, instantaneously enter the numbers in big computer data bases and, as result, quietly track the moves of millions of law-abiding Americans.

You OK with that?

We’re not. We’re of the general view that there should be limits on the freedom of government to follow us around, breathing down our necks, even in this brave new world of all-seeing high tech surveillance. We urge the Illinois General Assembly to do as other states have done and place strict limits on how these privacy-invading cameras — and the enormous amount of data they collect — can be used.

The cameras, called automatic license plate readers, photograph license plates and employ GPS systems to pinpoint their locations and the time the photos were taken. Using the same technology the U.S. Postal Service uses to read addresses, the cameras record not only the images but also the plate numbers and add them to huge data bases.

In a recent demonstration for a TV news crew, a Rock Island County, Calif., sheriff’s deputy recorded more than 1,000 license plates from his squad car in three hours. In a one-week sample last July, the Electronic Freedom Foundation said, Oakland, Calif., police snapped 63,272 photos, capturing 48,717 unique license plates.

The biggest network is run by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. The Wall Street Journal reported last month the DEA has secretly been tracking cars for nearly eight years and has stored hundreds of millions of records about motorists.

The cameras are excellent tools for law enforcement, as you can imagine. They help police locate stolen vehicles, find missing people, collect tolls, track cars used in crimes and ensure vehicles are properly registered. They are a steroid-pumped version of the traditional cop running license plate numbers while out on the beat.

But unlike that cop, the cameras feed their information into huge data bases that could easily be exploited and abused. In one test, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune used ALPR data it obtained to track the movements of the local mayor. When a Wisconsin TV station asked authorities to check for photos of a law-abiding Beloit teacher, authorities pinpointed three photos of her car on local highways. A San Leandro, Calif., found police had 112 photos of his two cars.

In Illinois there is no limit on how long such information can be kept on file. This is alarming. In a remake of the movie “American Graffiti,” the cameras would record every move those teens made that night, and still have the data 10 years later when the kids were grown adults applying for jobs. If you don’t want the cameras to know you went to an addiction counseling session or a political protest, you’d better leave your car at home.

Similar police tools, such as the Law Enforcement Agencies Data System, which records all arrests, are carefully monitored because years of experience show there is always someone who wants to misuse the data for personal reasons or to sell it. We need to the same careful rules for data amassed by ALPRs.

A bill introduced in the state Senate, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, would limit the use of ALPR data to such activities as criminal investigations, traffic enforcement and searches for missing people. It would also require data be kept only for 30 days unless there is a specific law-enforcement reason to preserve it. It‘s similar to laws that have passed or are under consideration in Florida, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.

We need a law that meets both the needs of law officers and innocent citizens. We want to catch criminals, but in a free society we can’t forget law-abiding citizens have a right to live their lives without cameras making permanent records of their every move.