DHS continues and expands use of commercial vehicle tracking databases
Barely more than a year after publicly cancelling a request for bids on the construction of a national database of vehicle location data compiled from commercial and government-operated license-plate reader (LPR) cameras, the DHS has quietly revealed that it is once again seeking to buy access to commercially-aggregated LPR data, and that some DHS component field offices are already doing so.
Cameras combined with optical character recognition software allow for automated logging of the license-plate number (and of course the associated time, date, plate, and direction of travel) of every passing vehicle. “Some LPR systems also capture within the image the environment surrounding a vehicle, which may include drivers and passengers,” the DHS acknowledges in its latest Privacy Impact Assessment for DHS use of commercial LPR data.
The only apparent difference between the proposal supposedly nixed in February 2014 and the plans revealed in the March 2015 PIA is that the DHS’s own LPR vehicle, driver, and passenger tracking data won’t be completely merged with LPR data from commercial sources and aggregators — at least not by the DHS itself. The PIA describes a scheme in which the DHS will pay for query-based access to commercially-aggregated LPR data and the ability to set flags that will generate real-time alerts to the DHS whenever license-plate numbers of interest are observed.