New ALPR Vulnerabilities Prove Mass Surveillance Is a Public Safety Threat

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Government officials across the U.S. frequently promote the supposed, and often anecdotal, public safety benefits of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), but rarely do they examine how this very same technology poses risks to public safety that may outweigh the crimes they are attempting to address in the first place. When law enforcement uses ALPRs to document the comings and goings of every driver on the road, regardless of a nexus to a crime, it results in gargantuan databases of sensitive information, and few agencies are equipped, staffed, or trained to harden their systems against quickly evolving cybersecurity threats.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), a component of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, released an advisory last week that should be a wake up call to the thousands of local government agencies around the country that use ALPRs to surveil the travel patterns of their residents by scanning their license plates and “fingerprinting” their vehicles. The bulletin outlines seven vulnerabilities in Motorola Solutions’ Vigilant ALPRs, including missing encryption and insufficiently protected credentials.

To give a sense of the scale of the data collected with ALPRs, EFF found that just 80 agencies in California using primarily Vigilant technology, collected more than 1.6 billion license plate scans (CSV) in 2022. This data can be used to track people in real time, identify their “pattern of life,” and even identify their relations and associates. An EFF analysis from 2021 found that 99.9% of this data is unrelated to any public safety interest when it’s collected. If accessed by malicious parties, the information could be used to harass, stalk, or even extort innocent people.

Unlike location data a person shares with, say,

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