This summer ACLU affiliates all around the country filed open-records requests seeking information about how government agencies are using automated license plate readers. One , released this week to the ACLU of Massachusetts by the police department here in Boston, provides a snapshot of the data-collection practices that are taking place around the nation.
The records reveal that the Boston police collect an average of 3,630 license plate reads per day and store the information for 90 days, unless officers decide they want to hold onto it forever, “for investigatory or intelligence purposes and for discovery/exculpatory evidence.”
Collected license plate data is stored in a private database called “,” and is available to any police officer with CopLink access. The Boston Police Department’s surveillance center, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), stores the data locally. The police department allows its officers to use license plate recognition technology for “proactive” surveillance purposes. That raises significant privacy alarms.
While the BPD says it “safeguards the legitimate privacy concerns of law abiding citizens” through its license plate reader program, the policy details say otherwise. Police should not retain the location information of thousands of people against whom no crime has been alleged, and should impose a finite retention period on those pieces of data it stores for legitimate investigatory purposes. The data should not be held in a corporate database, where it may be accessible to hundreds of agencies nationwide. Most importantly, police should not be able to collect and indefinitely retain revealing personal and location information on people accused of no crime under the catch-all “intelligence” justification.
But those practices are allowed under BPD license plate reader policy.
Despite our open-records request, there is still much we don’t know:
Though we asked for them, the department did not provide us with records showing how many LPR units it owns, or any information showing how many “hits” the BPD currently stores in its system.
We don’t know what kinds of LPR systems the Boston police use, either, because the department couldn’t find any procurement records, such as contracts or manufacturer marketing documents.
We did not receive any training materials other than one special order that serves as the department’s LPR policy—even though the special order states that all department employees who use LPR data or systems “shall participate in a training program regarding implementation of and adherence to this LPR policy.”
We also don’t know specifically which hotlists BPD uses in concert with LPR, though a disclosed policy governing its use says the lists are “either developed by the Department, or provided to the Department from another law enforcement entity,” and may include registered sex offenders.
The limited information we received in response to our request comes mostly from a , which serves as the department’s license plate reader policy. That document says LPR hotlists are updated once a week, providing plenty of room for error. However, the department requires that officers double-check the accuracy of all hits before taking “any police action that restricts the freedom of any individual,” which should mitigate problems resulting from obsolete hotlist data.
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the policy is that the Boston Police Department authorizes license plate reader deployment for “proactive” data collection:
As directed by the Superintendent in Chief, a Superintendent or Deputy Superintendant, District or Unit Commander, Investigatory Supervisor or an Intelligence Supervisor, LPR may be deployed to a defined geographical area for purposes of an ongoing investigation or an intelligence gathering operation. [emphasis added]
In other words, if the Boston police wanted to know who attended an anti-war meeting or went to Friday services at the , they could park a cruiser with LPR technology in a strategic location and without lifting a finger collect a membership or attendance list of motoring activists or worshippers. The department does not require that police document any legitimate law enforcement purpose or in any other way justify the deployment of LPR for “an intelligence gathering operation,” opening the door for serious abuse. Yet more troubling, the police could store this information indefinitely.
Perhaps the most significant gap in our knowledge about how BPD uses license plate readers is how the technology’s significant powers are harnessed for surveillance purposes. Does the agency’s sharing of our location information with the private CopLink database mean that police nationwide can peer into our private lives on a whim, for no good reason? Is the data added to the CopLink system ever deleted?
We don’t know. But we do know that the department’s policy allows it to retain indefinitely and information about ordinary people accused of no crime.
This is all exactly backwards. We should know how more about the police are using this and other powerful surveillance tools—both in Boston and around the country—and the police shouldn’t know much at all about how we live our day-to-day lives unless they suspect we are engaged in criminal activity. After all, we are innocent until proven guilty. Or is that maxim of American jurisprudence now reversed?
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of a law that would effectively ban people in America from using TikTok as soon as January 19, 2025. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s challenge to the law. TikTok has asked the Supreme Court for a temporary injunction to prevent the app from being banned while the court considers whether to take the case, saying that unless the justices intervene, the law will “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.” “The Constitution imposes an extraordinarily high bar on this kind of mass censorship,”said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Supreme Court should take up this important case and protect the rights of millions of Americans to freely express themselves and engage with others around the world.” The brief argues that the D.C. Circuit failed to fully address the law’s profound implications for the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. While the lower court’s decision correctly recognized that the statute triggers First Amendment scrutiny, it barely addressed users’ First Amendment interests in speaking, sharing, and receiving information on the platform. The court also perplexingly attempted to cast the government’s ban on TikTok as a vindication of users’ First Amendment rights, which it is not. The rights groups also explain that the law was intended to suppress certain content and viewpoints that many legislators believe could be amplified on TikTok, including the risk of foreign “propaganda.” But under the First Amendment, the government must meet a very high bar to restrict speech based on concerns about its “motivating ideology” or “perspective,” and the government has not come close to meeting that bar here. “The government should not be able to restrict speech, especially to the extent here, based on guessing about the mere possibility of uncertain future harm,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF. “The Supreme Court should put the TikTok ban on hold while it considers the DC Circuit’s erroneous ruling.” Finally, the brief underscores that the government can’t impose this type of sweeping ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious and imminent harm to national security. But the government has not provided evidence of impending harm, or evidence that banning TikTok is the only available way to address its concerns. As the brief explains, the D.C. Circuit improperly treated the government’s invocation of “national security” as a trump card and failed to hold the government to its burden. “Restricting citizens’ access to foreign media is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, and we should be very wary of letting the practice take root here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It would do lasting damage to the First Amendment and our democracy if the Supreme Court let this ban go into effect even temporarily.” You can find the brief online here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A587/335380/20241217144322392_24A587%20TikTok%20v%20Garland%20Amicus%20Brief%20pdfa.pdf -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Religious Liberty
ACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter IslamophobiaACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration today released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. In advance of the strategy, American Civil Liberties Union and its partners had urged the administration to overhaul government programs that reflect anti-Muslim discrimination. In particular, we have called for urgent action to constrain governmental agencies from continuing to exercise their authorities and technology to wrongly surveil and investigate, watchlist, and question and detain Muslims at the border, as well as deny immigration benefits to people from Muslim-majority countries. While the White House raised expectations that many of these issues would be addressed, the final strategy ended up falling far short. The following is a statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity. For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim. A serious anti-discrimination strategy would concretely address multiple bias-infused government practices that deny our communities equal participation in civic life and our democracy, like federal watchlisting, surveillance, and investigation. We’re profoundly frustrated that the administration didn’t take even the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.” -
VirginiaDec 2024
National Security
Trabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted ManTrabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted Man
Our client, Nizar Trabelsi, is in the United States against his will. The federal government brought him here from Belgium more than a decade ago and charged him with terrorism-related crimes. At trial, the government’s case failed: a federal jury found Mr. Trabelsi not guilty. But instead of allowing Mr. Trabelsi to return to Belgium after his acquittal, the United States placed him in highly restrictive immigration detention and began an ongoing effort to force him to Tunisia, where he was born and where he will very likely be tortured. Mr. Trabelsi’s detention violates the Constitution, immigration law, and the extradition treaty between the United States and Belgium. Through this lawsuit, he seeks to return to Belgium, and he demands an immediate improvement of his detention conditions. -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Immigrants' Rights
Federal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is UnlawfulFederal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is Unlawful
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — This week, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the court does not have jurisdiction to decide whether the government can continue to detain Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national who was brought to the United States against his will for prosecution and was cleared of all charges last year. The ruling means the United States will be able to continue to detain Mr. Trabelsi while it attempts to deport him to Tunisia, where he was born and where, as an immigration judge ruled earlier this year, he will likely face torture. The court also concluded that even if it did have jurisdiction over Mr. Trabelsi’s case, his claims challenging the government’s detention of him would fail. “Reviewing claims that the government is holding someone unlawfully is at the core of the judicial function, and we’re heartbroken for our client that the court got this so wrong,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Center for Democracy. “The government’s arguments in defense of Mr. Trabelsi’s detention makes a hash of the Constitution, immigration laws, and its own extradition treaty.” In 2013, the United States forcibly extradited Mr. Trabelsi from Belgium to face criminal charges in the United States. In July 2023, after almost 10 years of highly restrictive pretrial detention, a federal jury cleared Mr. Trabelsi of all charges. But instead of releasing Mr. Trabelsi or returning him to Belgium, the U.S. transferred him to immigration detention, wrongly treating him as an applicant for admission and placing him in the deportation process. Over the years, the Belgian government has issued multiple formal diplomatic requests asking the U.S. to facilitate his return, but the U.S. has refused to send him back. Mr. Trabelsi filed a lawsuit challenging the government's authority to detain him. He also sought immediate improvements to his detention conditions. Those claims were not part of the court’s ruling today, and will continue to be litigated on a separate track. “Mr. Trabelsi only wants to return to Belgium after being illegally extradited to the United States, held for ten years, and then acquitted by a jury of any crimes,” said Nicole Hallett, clinical professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “He cannot be held indefinitely and we will continue to fight to make sure that justice ultimately prevails.” Mr. Trabelsi is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Chicago Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the ACLU of Virginia, and Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School. The complaint in Trabelsi v. Crawford was filed against Jeffrey Crawford, warden of the Farmville Detention Center where Mr. Trabelsi is being held; Liana Castano, ICE field office director for the Washington Field Office; Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and Merrick Garland, U.S. attorney general.