The Electronic Frontier Foundation published an analysis describing how state and local public records laws have been one of the only reliable tools for the public to learn the true scale of automated license plate reader deployment — and warning that some states are now considering measures that would narrow what ALPR-related records the public can request.
EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance project has used open records requests for years to document ALPR use, following a research approach pioneered by the ACLU’s 2013 nationwide survey (see our summary in Your rights when it comes to license plate tracking). The organization argues that as ALPR data-sharing agreements and cross-agency networks have grown more complex, the ability to request and review agency policies and usage logs has become even more important — and more contested.
This kind of reporting is also why crowdsourced efforts like OpenStreetMap’s ALPR camera tagging have grown: where official disclosure is incomplete or actively resisted, volunteer documentation has become a parallel source of transparency. Read more in How OpenStreetMap volunteers are mapping ALPR cameras.
It’s a dynamic worth watching closely: if state legislatures do move to narrow what ALPR-related records are subject to public disclosure, independent documentation efforts like OSM’s tagging project become correspondingly more important as a check on what’s otherwise knowable about where this technology is deployed.
Read the original piece at EFF Deeplinks.