Five Important Questions About DEA’s Vehicle Surveillance Program

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been collecting hundreds of millions of records about cars traveling on US roads. (Photo: via Shutterstock)

With each week, we seem to learn about a new government location tracking program. This time, it’s the expanded use of license plate readers. According to The Wall Street Journal, relying on interviews with officials and documents obtained by the ACLU through a FOIA request, the Drug Enforcement Administration has been collecting hundreds of millions of records about cars traveling on U.S. roads. The uses for the data sound compelling: combating drug and weapons trafficking and finding suspects in serious crimes. But as usual, the devil is in the details, and plenty of important questions remain about those details.

First, who approved the program, and under what circumstances? We don’t know. The DEA is an arm of the Department of Justice, so presumably the Attorney General’s office has been involved, but details aren’t yet available. Also unknown is whether there has been any judicial oversight.

Second, are there any limitations on how the data can be used? This is also unknown. The emails obtained by the ACLU indicate that the main purpose of the program was to assist in seizures of cars, money, and other assets, often from people not charged with any crime, a program that has come under withering criticism. But the history of data collection programs is that information collected for one purpose quickly becomes attractive for other purposes. And the more information available (even for proper purposes), the more is available for misuse as well. Indeed, license plate information has been abused in the past, with peaceful protestors’ data shared with the FBI.

Third, how long can it be kept? The article reports that the DEA holds the data for three months, a significant drop from its previous two-year retention period. Much of this data is coming from readers set up by state and local law enforcement, though, and the retention periods for those jurisdictions are an inconsistent patchwork, with deletion times ranging from immediate (Ohio state patrol) to 90 days (Boston) to two years (Los Angeles County) to five years (New York City) to never (New York State Police). This is especially alarming given that a vanishingly small percentage of the millions of license plates scanned are actually connected to any crime or wrongdoing. At the same time, data collected by DEA reportedly goes back to state and local jurisdictions as well, setting up an endless loop of information with inadequate oversight.

Fourth, where else does the data go? Some of it is sent to fusion centers, which are state- or regional-based hubs that centralize information for sharing among the federal government, states, and private partners. Originally established in the wake of 9/11, fusion centers have largely abandoned their focus on terrorism for want of credible threats; they have instead transformed into an “all threats” model. In the process, they have been roundly criticized for wasting money, contributing little to counterterrorism efforts, and endangering both civil liberties and Privacy Act protections. Maryland and Vermont are known to feed their plate data to fusion centers, and the numbers are likely higher, given fusion centers’ voracity for data.

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