A state audit of license plate reader use by CA law enforcement agencies requested by State Senator Scott Weiner concluded that existing policies were largely not compliant with existing state law and that laws needed to be strengthened. The CA…
Category: License Plate Readers
Mission Creep – Berkeley’s License Plate Readers
Update: November 12th is the day Berkeley’s automated license plate reader policy hits the council. Berkeleyside: Berkeley Is Being Bamboozled Update: On September 4, 2019, Berkeley’s Police Review Commission, which is empowered by the surveillance ordinance to provide recommendations regarding…
Richmond Cancels Vigilant Solutions ALPR Contract
Update: On June 25, the Richmond City Council voted 5-2 not to renew their contract with Vigilant Solutions. Richmond Standard The decision by the Council represents the first Bay Area municipal contract cancelled as a result of the passage of…
San Pablo Cops Sending License Plates to Border Patrol
In March of 2018, the small East Bay city of San Pablo delayed a $2.4 million dollar expansion of their Vigilant Solutions license plate reader surveillance system after community distress about Vigilant’s contract with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A…
79 Million Bay Area License Plates to Homeland Security
Mike Katz-Lacabe reports that Homeland Security fusion center NCRIC, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, collected 79.2 million license plates from a variety of Northern California cities from June of 2018 to May of 2019. The City of Piedmont sent…
Reining in License Plate Readers
The use of automated license plate readers by law enforcement agencies has become ubiquitous over the last decade. It is probably the most extensive mass surveillance program in the United States. The terrabytes of car images, of whch 99.5% or…
BART Proposes License Plate Readers At All Parking Lots
License Plates To Border Patrol
Recent public records requests have confirmed that as of February 2018 at least three Bay Area Sheriff Departments were sharing license plate reader scans they collected with the San Diego sector of the Border Patrol via the Vigilant Solutions platform…
BART License Plate Scans Sent To DHS While Board Passed Sanctuary Transit Policy
At the same time the BART Board of Directors was creating a Sanctuary Transit policy, the mass transit system was sending 57,000 license plate scans from devices installed at the MacArthur BART station to the Department of Homeland Security’s…
Traveling License Plate Scans – Contra Costa Edition
Bay Area cities with license plate reader equipment from Vigilant Solutions, an ICE vendor, share the scans of the license plates and car fronts of the people who drive in their town with a lot, emphasize a lot, of…