Submission + - The Surveillance State Marches on, Police Drones Are Now Reading License Plates (eff.org) 1
Torodung writes: Police departments across the US are deploying, or planning to deploy, fleets of drones. The latest trend in the practice is to equip them with Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR). These are being sold as first response tools with the added bonus of being able to track anyone and everyone on the way to the scene. According to the EFF, at the head of the marketing effort is Flock Safety, in addition to Motorolla, who have once again raised questions about conflicts between safety and privacy. Given the recent buzz around efforts to develop crime prediction, concerned Americans are becoming more conscious of law enforcement data collection and there is a growing movement to define the policies and procedures regarding its use and retention. As EFF writes:
Communities must demand restrictions on how local police use drones and ALPRs, let alone a dangerous hybrid of the two. Otherwise, we can soon expect that a drone will fly to any call for service and capture sensitive location information about every car in its flight path, capturing more ALPR data to add to the already too large databases of our movements.
