Janine Jackson interviewed Tracy Rosenberg, executive director of Media Alliance and co-coordinator of the group Oakland Privacy, about media and tech companies’ collaboration with ICE and the surveillance state for the June 29, 2018, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited excerpt.
Tracy Rosenberg
When all of this Snowden revelations came out years ago, I, like many other people, and in my own work as a telecom advocate, I really saw online surveillance and spying as a huge problem; that’s sort of how I got into this venue.
It’s like, “What are we going to do? Is ‘Occupy the NSA’ a realistic strategy?” And the answer there is “No.” So the question became, “What can we really do in our own homes and our own communities?” So we started to investigate the links, like, “Where is the information traveling, how is it being collected, where is it being stored, and who has access to it?” And once you open that Pandora’s box, a lot of stuff comes falling out.
On license plate readers, these are sort of ubiquitous. In the past decade, they really have been set up in probably the majority of cities and counties in the US. And they take a photograph of the front of a car—they’re usually pole-mounted on traffic lights—as it goes by. And, essentially, if you are one of those people who happens to drive back and forth, every single day, past one of these, it can geolocate you in time and space, based on your license plate, on a fairly regular basis.
For people who live in cities that are inundated with these things, and the data is kept for one year, five years, ten years, it really can provide a pattern of your daily activities. And that can include things like parking lots of mosques, or cannabis clinics, or buildings with immigration lawyer offices, or political meetings of various kinds, Black Lives Matter meetings. There are all kinds of ways in which geolocating people can give you all kinds of information about what they are doing. And when we’re talking about actions of dissidents or political activities or immigration status, these can become ways to hunt, track and profile and capture people. When it comes to license plate readers, the ubiquity of them really opened up the question of, who has access to this data, where is it stored, is it secure, and what are the limitations in terms of how it’s used?
And the answer to that, unfortunately, as we sort of dug in, became, “Well, there’s not really a policy, and if there is one, it says you can use it for any legitimate law enforcement purpose. And really, any agency can ask us for the data, and we’ll send it to them, because that would only be the civil thing with any other law enforcement agency.”
And, basically, there were no rules. Work that we did basically involved, well, let’s pluck this stuff out. Let’s find out how many license plates, where are they, who are they shared with? And secondly, let’s start talking about what the policy is—or what it should be—because obviously the machines are there. We can’t take them off the traffic poles. Well, we can and we hope to, but that’s a long-term process.
The thing about mass bulk surveillance is, it’s collected on everybody, and it’s basically being held there on the off-chance that it might help with some criminal occurrence.
What we found, for example, in California, in Los Angeles, there was a lawsuit to get license plate-reader data from the LAPD, and what the LAPD said in court—this went all the way to the California Supreme Court—was, “We don’t have to release that data to you, because it’s evidence in a criminal proceeding.” And we said, “A criminal proceeding on every single person who has driven through the city of Los Angeles for the past five years?” And they said, “Well, you know, it might be in some future case.”
And essentially what that means is, it is a premise that data collection goes on in order to convict us of a crime that has not yet happened, that we haven’t committed. And we need to turn that whole structure on its head, which is to say that data needs to serve a public safety purpose, or there is no reason to collect it. We can’t preemptively create a police state based on future crime. Can’t do it. That’s George Orwell.
