How the Feds Use Our License Plates to Build Dossiers

Another in a long line of privacy-busting apps is making headlines. Anthony Kimery of Biometric Update reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has an app that allows an officer to photograph a license plate, run it through commercial platforms and “instantly retrieve a vehicle’s historical sightings.”

The data that can be called up includes a vehicle’s “travel history, ownership records, and associated personal data.” In other words, portfolio building. In the old days, the feds mostly kept extensive files on criminals, suspects, and witnesses. Now merely driving a vehicle is reason enough to assemble a dossier that includes almost everything there is to know about someone.

The tech is powered by Motorola and Thomson Reuters among others. Privacy advocates have previously called out Motorola for license-plate privacy breaches. A 2022 Georgetown University report identified this firm as a go-to seller for agencies in search of consumer data, including utility records and driver’s license information. In 2019, Vice reported that the company’s contracts with ICE were lucrative, which perhaps is why “The Answer Company” wouldn’t respond with details about those dealings when Privacy International pressed for details in 2018. 

With this latest reporting, Kimery makes clear that ICE has found the perfect partners in its quest to build a national surveillance infrastructure:

“The scale is enormous. With billions of detections stored in Motorola’s network and deep identity datasets flowing from Thomson Reuters, the mobile app gives ICE a level of situational awareness that previously required specialized investigative teams and large analytic centers.”

The newly invigorated shift toward a national scale is an ominous one. Whereas agencies like ICE previously focused on border regions, ABC News notes:

“Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years.”

Thomson Reuters previously got into trouble for selling personal data, a fact that the City of Denver recalled this summer when it put the brakes on an extension of its police contract with the company. Thoughtful objections by municipalities like Denver are admirable. But without robust constitutional guardrails installed by Congress and the states, there's no stopping invasive juggernauts like this one. As we concluded the last time we shared news about Motorola’s involvement in license plate surveillance:

“The need for lawmakers in Congress and the state capitals to set guardrails on these integrating technologies is growing more urgent by the day. Perhaps the best solution to many of these 21st century problems is to be found in a bit of 18th century software – the founders’ warrant requirement in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.”

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