The Danger of License Plate Readers in Post-Roe America

Enlarge / A license plate reader in California. gado | Getty Images

Since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, America's extensive surveillance state could soon be turned against those who request abortions or provide abortion care.

Currently, nine states have almost completely banned abortion, and more are expected to follow suit. Many Republican lawmakers in those states are discussing the possibility of preventing people from crossing state lines to get abortions. If such plans pass and withstand legal scrutiny, one of the key technologies that could be deployed to track people trying to cross state borders is automated license plate readers (ALPRs). They are widely used by police forces across the United States, but they are also used by private actors.

LPRs are cameras mounted on street poles, overpasses and elsewhere that can identify and capture the license plate numbers of passing cars for the purpose of issuing speeding tickets and tolls, locating stolen cars, etc. State and local police maintain databases of captured license plates and frequently use these databases in criminal investigations.

The police have access not only to license plate data collected by their own LPRs, but also to data collected by private companies. Companies like Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions have their own LPR networks that are mounted on the vehicles of private companies and organizations they work with, such as car repossession teams. Flock, for example, claims that it collects license plate data from approximately 1,500 cities and can collect data from over a billion vehicles each month.

“They have fleets of cars with LPRs that just suck up data. They sell that to various customers, including repo companies and government agencies. They also sell that to police departments "Says Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst at the ACLU. "It's a giant nationwide mass surveillance system. This obviously has serious implications if interstate travel were to be part of forced birth law enforcement. »

In a statement to WIRED, a spokesperson for Flock Safety said the company does not provide customer data to third parties. "We will never share or sell our customers' data to third parties. Although we cannot speak on behalf of any other vendor, we have never sold and will never sell data to repossession companies or to third-party organizations, including anti-abortion groups," the company said.

However, anyone can become a customer by purchasing the company's cameras. (Its customers often include neighborhoods and homeowner associations.) Flock Safety says its cameras are installed in more than 1,500 cities in 42 states, which are connected to Flock's centralized camera network. A March 2021 Vice investigation based on Flock-related emails obtained from nearly 20 police departments allows anyone who administers a Flock camera to “make data captured by Flock available to, for example, police, from the board of directors of the homeowners' association or from individual members of an entire neighborhood. In addition to private customers, Flock also reported...