Someone at the Philly Post noticed how the high tech surveillance crimefighting techniques are actually a bit creepy, referencing a new report about how a Evesham police cruiser tagged a man’s car who had an open warrant for burglary.

We’ve been talking about this surveillance stuff for a while now, maybe the awareness is really catching on.

Yes, they are scanning all of us. And yes, it is quite creepy.

(Disclaimer: Burglary is bad, don’t do it.)

Another insightful story on automatic license plate scanners, this time in use in Nutley. Every story gives a little more insight into how broadly these systems are being used to track people.According to NorthJersey.com, after a year of use, Nutley has “recorded and stored the information for 675,000 license plates which led to 13,000 hits”.  The types of hits recorded include stolen vehicles, and expired registrations. The article also acknowledges that the system gets data hits for possible suspended licenses and outstanding warrants by the registered owner.

This particular system Nutley uses is the PAGIS, or Police ALPR Graphical Interface System. It was jointly developed by Pips Technology and Motorola.

The article also mentions the investigative uses of the passive data collected on non-hits, such as information on where a car has been, matching photographic evidence, location, and time data in conjunction with witness information. So for example, if a witness suggests that a suspicious vehicle is parked outside a building every night at 10pm, the police can review the data to see if that information was also captured by the license place scanner.

This is the kind of ominous data collection and analysis that the government is capable of. These abilities will only get stronger as more systems are used, and more data is collected, merged, and shared. We write often about these government surveillance capabilities often here.

The Pips Technology site also goes into some detail about the data mining capabilities of these systems. It is a strong selling point of the systems, and from the North Jersey.com story, you can tell that police naturally love the access to all this information. No doubt it extends the ability of them to do there jobs.

But the question is at what cost to citizen’s freedom, and civil liberties? This kind of governmental surveillance power used capriciously or menacingly is an obvious threat to a free nation.

We should be having this discussion as a people before the surveillance state gets further entrenched in our daily lives.

New police technology in New Jersey is being used to aggressively scan and track citizens, searching for criminal and civil violations.According to this article, the Deptford PD has acquired automatic license plate scanning systems installed in police vehicles. These systems can identify thousands of license plates, whether they are parked or moving at highway speeds. If a license plate is scanned and matches any tag identified in an on board database, the police officer is instantly notified while still in close proximity to the car in question.

In a recent run through the parking lot at the Deptford mall, the system identified and flagged three stolen vehicles.

The database can be set to match any criteria. Stolen vehicles and amber alerts are just the beginning. The system can be cross referenced with DMV owner records, so that the owner of a vehicle who might have a suspended drivers license in New Jersey or out of state, or an outstanding criminal warrant, either locally, or matched with federal law enforcement databases, can be instantly identified and arrested.

Other possible uses are for locating ticket scofflaws, or even people owning municipal back taxes. Anything that can be matched to a government database can make you and your vehicle a target.

And that’s not all. Even if you have done nothing wrong, or are not wanted or suspected of anything, you are still being tracked. All of those license plate “misses” stay in the database indefinitely. Your movements can easily be tracked by anyone able to search the historical location data. Every plate tagged is matched with a time, date, and GPS location.

If you happened to be parked somewhere near where a crime was committed a month ago, you can be identified and questioned. And the data can be used in all kinds of other frightening ways. The government can make associations with other people parked near you. If there was a political event or gathering, the police can track anyone who was parked nearby, and look for patterns in the data.

And there is no way to “opt out” of this monitoring, other than not owning  a car. As these systems are deployed nationwide, the amount of data and possible mining of that data will be tremendous.

Civil liberties law has not caught up to these possibilities, and it is something that everyone should be aware of. And it may be noteworthy that these plate scanners were paid for with a federal grant from the Department of Homeland Security. Is this a long term plan for a nationwide net of federal tracking?

But in the mean time, if your driver’s license is suspended, or you accidentally missed a court date, you simply can’t expect to be able to even drive to the supermarket or mall without the police identifying you, and very likely arresting you on the spot.

Update: Another story on the scanner purchase in the Courier Post.