On May 15, 1923, angered by the LAPD's brutal treatment of striking longshoremen, journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair appeared at a rally in San Pedro. Because the police banned all public meetings by the unionized strikers, the rally was held, with the owner's written permission, on private property prophetically named "Liberty Hill." Sinclair began reading the First Amendment.

Upton Sinclair arrested on May 15, 1923 in San Pedro, CA

 

Warning Sinclair to "cut out that Constitution stuff," the police arrested him before he finished the first three lines. Held incommunicado for 18 hours, Sinclair published a letter to the police chief after being released: "All I can say, sir, is that I intend to do what little one man can do to awake the public conscience ... I am not a giant physically ... But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice."
At the invitation of the newly-formed American Civil Liberties Union in New York, Sinclair spoke at crowded meetings in Los Angeles. From those gatherings, the first local branch of the national organization was formed.
For 90 years, the ACLU of Southern California has remained true to Sinclair's courageous spirit.
Today, we are at the forefront of efforts to ensure basic equity to all public school students in California, reform our local jails and criminal justice system, provide basic fairness for immigrants, and oppose discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
We do so because of individuals who stand up for their rights and awaken the public conscience.
Greg Valentini fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. He served under near constant sniper and mortar fire, participated in the assault on Tora Bora and the resulting search for Osama bin Laden, and witnessed friends and civilians gruesomely killed and maimed. He received six decorations for his service. On coming home, he struggled with thoughts of suicide, developed a drug addiction, and became homeless.
Los Angeles is the homeless veterans capital of our nation -- recently as many as 8,000 homeless veterans, many suffering from PTSD and other mental disabilities, have fought to survive on our streets.
In June 2011, the ACLU filed suit on behalf of Valentini and other veterans with severe mental disabilities, many of whom could be housed at the VA campus in Brentwood, on land deeded in 1888 to create a home for disabled veterans. It housed veterans for decades, but none since the late 60s. Instead, the VA has leased parts of the campus to a car rental company for a parking lot, a hotel for a laundry, and schools for baseball fields, even as homeless veterans sleep on the street just outside its locked gates.
Claiming no responsibility to house disabled veterans, the government has unsuccessfully sought to dismiss the suit.
Jonathan Goodwin was savagely kicked and stomped by deputies after a disagreement over food while jailed awaiting trial. Although he didn't resist, Goodwin was accused of assault. When his attorney asked about prior complaints against the deputies involved, the department said there were none.
Goodwin's attorney called the ACLU and discovered complaints against the deputies. A jury acquitted him, thanks in part to this evidence.
The ACLU filed two suits on behalf of Goodwin and countless others. The first, filed in January 2012, challenged the sheriff's failure to address the longstanding pattern of deputy abuse and establish the basic parts of an accountability system -- sound use-of-force policies, adequate training, careful investigation of alleged abuse and a rigorous discipline system. Baca initially dismissed the allegations, but later admitted being "out of touch."
The second suit, filed in July 2012, challenged the sheriff's failure to maintain a searchable database of complaints against deputies, as required by law. This time, Baca implemented a system to track complaints by deputy name. The department reviewed inmate complaints going back five years, and notified local defense attorneys with pending cases so they could seek information that previously would have been undisclosed.
In October 2012, the Citizen's Commission on Jails Violence recommended rewriting the department's grossly inadequate policies on use of force, increasing the amount of deputy training to meet "industry best practices and... standards in other corrections systems," and revamping the investigation and discipline system. Baca has agreed to adopt the Commission's recommendations.
The suit remains pending to hold Baca to his promises.
Tarek Hamdi had lived in the United States for decades when he applied to become a citizen. Federal law provides that naturalization applications must be decided in six months, but Hamdi waited nine years for a decision. The federal government ultimately denied his application based on a single lawful donation he made to a charity the government later deemed a financier of terrorism.
In February 2012, the ACLU represented Hamdi in court. Not only did the judge decide that his application should have been granted, she also requested the honor of swearing him in as a citizen.
Our most precious rights only acquire meaning when individuals stand up for them. Today, when courageous people take on the Veterans Administration, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, or Citizenship and Immigration Services, the ACLU ensures they have the backing they need. That's necessary in a democracy like ours committed to liberty and justice for all.
Reposted from the Huffington Post, "ACLU of Southern California: It All Began With an Arrest in 1923"

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly using sophisticated cameras, called “automated license plate readers” or ALPR, to scan and record the license plates of millions of cars across the country. These cameras, mounted on top of patrol cars and on city streets, can scan up to 1,800 license plate per minute, day or night, allowing one squad car to record more than 14,000 plates during the course of a single shift.

Photographing a single license plate one time on a public city street may not seem problematic, but when that data is put into a database, combined with other scans of that same plate on other city streets, and stored forever, it can become very revealing. Information about your location over time can show not only where you live and work, but your political and religious beliefs, your social and sexual habits, your visits to the doctor, and your associations with others. And, according to recent research reported in Nature, it’s possible to identify 95% of individuals with as few as four randomly selected geospatial datapoints (location + time), making location data the ultimate biometric identifier.

To better gauge the real threat to privacy posed by ALPR, EFF and the ACLU of Southern California asked LAPD and LASD for information on their systems, including their policies on retaining and sharing information and all the license plate data each department collected over the course of a single week in 2012. After both agencies refused to release most of the records we asked for, we sued. We hope to get access to this data, both to show just how much data the agencies are collecting and how revealing it can be.

ALPRs are often touted as an easy way to find stolen cars — the system checks a scanned plate against a database of stolen or wanted cars and can instantly identify a hit, allowing officers to set up a sting to recover the car and catch the thief.  But even when there’s no match in the database and no reason to think a car is stolen or involved in a crime, police keep the data. According to the LA Weekly, LAPD and LASD together already have collected more than 160 million “data points” (license plates plus time, date, and exact location) in the greater LA area—that’s more than 20 hits for each of the more than 7 million vehicles registered in L.A. County. That’s a ton of data, but it’s not all  — law enforcement officers also have access to private databases containing hundreds of millions of plates and their coordinates collected by “repo” men.

Law enforcement agencies claim that ALPR systems are no different from an officer recording license plate, time and location information by hand. They also argue the data doesn’t warrant any privacy protections because we drive our cars around in public. However, as five justices of the Supreme Court recognized last year in US v. Jones, a case involving GPS tracking, the ease of data collection and the low cost of data storage make technological surveillance solutions such as GPS or ALPR very different from techniques used in the past.

Police are open about their desire to record the movements of every car in case it might one day prove valuable.  In 2008, LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck (then the agency’s chief of detectives) told GovTech Magazine that ALPRs have “unlimited potential” as an investigative tool.  “It’s always going to be great for the black-and-white to be driving down the street and find stolen cars rolling around . . . . But the real value comes from the long-term investigative uses of being able to track vehicles—where they’ve been and what they've been doing—and tie that to crimes that have occurred or that will occur.”  But amassing data on the movements of law-abiding residents poses a real threat to privacy, while the benefit to public safety is speculative, at best.

In light of privacy concerns, states including Maine, New Jersey, and Virginia have limited the use of ALPRs, and New Hampshire has banned them outright.  Even the International Association of Chiefs of Police has issued a report recognizing that “recording driving habits” could raise First Amendment concerns because cameras could record “vehicles parked at addiction-counseling meetings, doctors' offices, health clinics, or even staging areas for political protests.”

But even if ALPRs are permitted, there are still common-sense limits that can allow the public safety benefits of ALPRs while preventing the wholesale tracking of every resident’s movements.  Police can and should treat location information from ALPRs like other sensitive information — they should retain it no longer than necessary to determine if it might be relevant to a crime, and should get a warrant to keep it any longer.  They should limit who can access it and who they can share it with.  And they should put oversight in place to ensure these limits are followed.

Unfortunately, efforts to impose reasonable limits on ALPR tracking in California have failed so far. Last year, legislation that would have limited private and law enforcement retention of ALPR data to 60 days—a limit currently in effect for the California Highway Patrol — and restricted sharing between law enforcement and private companies failed after vigorous opposition from law enforcement. In California, law enforcement agencies remain free to set their own policies on the use and retention of ALPR data, or to have no policy at all.

Some have asked why we would seek public disclosure of the actual license plate data collected by the police—location-based data that we think is private.  But we asked specifically for a narrow slice of data — just a week’s worth — to demonstrate how invasive the technology is.  Having the data will allow us to see how frequently some plates have been scanned; where and when, specifically, the cops are scanning plates; and just how many plates can be collected in a large metropolitan area over the course of a single week. Actual data will reveal whether ALPRs are deployed primarily in particular areas of Los Angeles and whether some communities might therefore be much more heavily tracked than others. If this data is too private to give a week’s worth to the public to help inform us how the technology is being used, then isn’t it too private to let the police amass years’ worth of data without a warrant?

After the Boston Marathon bombings, many have argued that the government should take advantage of surveillance technology to collect more data rather than less. But we should not so readily give up the very freedoms that terrorists seek to destroy. We should recognize just how revealing ALPR data is and not be afraid to push our police and legislators for sensible limits to protect our basic right to privacy.

Documents
EFF and ACLU-SC's legal Complaint
LA Sheriff's Department ALPR Powerpoint Presentation
LA Sheriff's Department - Automated License Plate Reader System Information
LAPD - Automated License Plate Reader User Guide
LA Sheriff's Department - Field Operations Directive
 

Written by Peter Bibring, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Southern California and Jennifer Lynch, Staff Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation