FBI seeks US-wide access to license-plate cameras with near real-time data
According to federal budget documents reported by Ars Technica, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is asking for "near real-time" access to vehicle-movement data from the network of US-wide license plate reader cameras. The documents show the FBI is allocating funds to establish multi-year contracts with specific vendor companies; the contracts aim to provide centralised access to large data sets held by camera operators.
License plate reader cameras (ALPR) have been deployed intensively over the past decade by both municipal police departments and private companies. In the US, the great majority of these cameras are run by private firms such as Vigilant Solutions, Flock Safety and Rekor; these firms provide municipalities with camera networks on a yearly subscription basis and store the data on central servers.
The FBI's request includes not only searches of historical data archives but also real-time or near-real-time streaming. That means the FBI system can be alerted at the moment a vehicle passes a specific camera. According to Ars Technica's estimate based on the documents, the target latency is below 60 seconds.
The scope of the project is notable for its breadth. An estimated 2,000 to 3,000 municipal police departments with ALPR cameras, alongside other coverage, brings millions of vehicle-movement points across the country into scope. That creates a data density sufficient to easily track a vehicle's daily routine (home to work, child to school, evening social activity).
Civil liberties groups have flagged the privacy concerns the project raises. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) spokesperson Stephen Lavoie said in comments to Ars Technica: "License plate reader technology began as a simple tool designed for street security; but it is now becoming a tracking infrastructure on a national scale. There is no federal law in the US that would oversee this."
The technical rationale for the project rests on the value of vehicle-movement tracking over time as a tool in FBI work on missing-child cases, abductions and organised-crime investigations. The example documents emphasise that tracking a vehicle in Amber Alert cases could play out in minutes rather than hours; that is the security-policy argument for the agency's real-time access request.
But growth of technical capacity untethered from political oversight is the central concern of civil-society organisations. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney Michelle Tran commented: "The FBI requesting live data to track a single vehicle is very close to a malicious tracking exercise. We do not yet know what oversight mechanisms will come with the contract."
State-level legal frameworks differ greatly. States such as California, Maine and Vermont have established regulatory frameworks for ALPR data retention periods, sharing and access conditions; but the great majority of other states have a gap on this. Federal law has no specific ALPR regulation; Fourth Amendment (federal search warrant) jurisprudence has not yet been adapted to this new technology.
Among technology companies, the most active vendor — Flock Safety — has signed contracts with more than 5,000 US municipal police departments in the past three years. The company's platform gives officers, through a mobile app, the ability to search for a vehicle, generate a last-known-location estimate and set up alerts. The integration the FBI is seeking would turn platforms of this kind into a federal-level access point.
Going forward, three important points will shape the project's evolution: federal-level debates about developing an ALPR regulatory framework, court cases adapting Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to new technologies, and the announcement of the final version of the contract. According to Ars Technica's reporting, the FBI has not yet released the final version of the contract; but Congressional approval of the budget requests means the project will effectively begin in the coming fiscal year.