What the Flock?! Our Discussion with Chad Marlow and Michael B. Soyfer on the Privacy and Law Enforcement Implications of Automatic License Plate Reader Technology

Send us Fan MailYou may have noticed, while driving down a street or highway, the proliferation of cameras on traffic lights and other structures.  Some of these cameras are recording your vehicle license plates and other features.  And in some instances, this data is being stored and made available both to government agencies and private parties.  For law enforcement, the aggregation of this data can be an incredibly powerful investigative tool, helping investigators to catalog a vehicle’s—and therefore its driver’s—historical patterns of movements and locations, as well as its likely future patterns.  But that power is exactly what concerns privacy rights activists like Chad Marlow, Senior Policy Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York, and Michael B. Soyfer, an Attorney at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Virginia.  We caught up with them to discuss the implications of this powerful technology.