Hitchcockian? Orwellian? Or...Just Dunwoody Dystopian?

Turns out those cameras popping up all over are not going to serve the community and certainly will not be used to keep trucks from blasting through school zones. Seems nothing with ever stop that. No, these are Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs). Flocks of them. Being small-b black perhaps even a murder of crows. 

These spies-on-poles are not the first deployment of ALPRs  by the increasingly Orwellian state. These first bedecked patrol cars giving black sedans and SUVs something of an Evil Empire vibe. Apropos. The major benefit to these deployments is court engagement: cases have already resulted in decisions suggesting a proclivity by the state to abuse historical data and establishing a clear need for judicial oversight--warrants before fishing expeditions. Police who play fast and loose with constitutional and civil rights are playing techno-legal arbitrage hoping to "ask forgiveness rather than permission." Like the Dunwoody PD run by our very own bungle brothers. And by now it should be obvious that this city actually relishes spending our money on hopeless courts cases. So expect there are more to come regarding this Orwellian murder of crows. Maybe they should float a "Police Bond."

Precedents established because of the use (and abuse) of Cell Service Location Information and increasingly ALPR databases suggest a legal trajectory towards oversight and protection of Constitutional and Civil rights. Fortunately experts have begun recommending some best practices to protect rights while supporting legitimate use that serves the public good. These are what might be called common sense, detailed in this article, summarized as:

• Adopt retention limits and require warrants to search historical data. This should be a no-brainer. We'll see.
• Institute a two-step scanning process. Initial lookups should not reveal protected personal information and this information must support sufficient probable cause to conduct a further search. Expect an argument suggesting there is no such thing as protected personal information when police are involved. Expect that argument to cost a lot in legal fees.
• Require verification of hot list data. Government (like credit bureaus) have a habit of making unfavorable data more persistent than favorable data meaning that independent verification is necessary to protect citizens' rights and limit exposure to legal risk. 
• Require transparency and invite community input. Very, very problematic. Governments abhor transparency and will do much to prevent automatic implementation. Consider this: automatic license plates readers are wonderful but a publicly searchable database of government that database is unacceptably difficult or expensive to implement. Ask them. This city's track record of "inviting public input" is superficial, bordering on dismissive. Look no further than the parks master plan and the back-door "trail."
• Maintain audit logs. Who did what and when seems like table stakes. The amount of pushback will be enormous. If there is capitulation on this point it will be insincere: they will say they will implement audit trails, but somehow they just won't get it done. 

This is a very serious matter. Our privacy is at very serious risk and while the courts will ultimately uphold our rights, police departments will use the technology-legal arbitrage in the interim hoping to establish an "acceptable existence" to keep the technology in place and then operate at the very edge of the line. The very fact that these departments are aggressively installing these devices rather than community policing exposes their desired trajectory. And this will be costly. The cost of the cameras and service will be dwarfed by legal costs we'll surely incur. 

Is this really worth it?