Bloomberg News
“Especially with the IRS, I don’t know why these agencies are getting access to this kind of information,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy-rights group. “These systems treat every single person in an area as if they’re under investigation for a crime — that is not the way our criminal justice system was set up or the way things work in a democratic society.” ..(snip)
…The ACLU, which also has pushed for state measures limiting use of the technology, criticized the Homeland Security Department for a February solicitation seeking to buy access to the data. The department’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency had planned to use the records to help locate and arrest “absconders and criminal aliens,” according to a federal document seeking companies’ proposals.
The agency halted the solicitation, saying immigration officials weren’t aware it had been posted. …(snip)
…Even so, concerns about the government’s use of the data remain, said Kade Crockford, a project director with the ACLU of Massachusetts.
“The American public deserves to know the degree to which the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies are already tapping into these databases,” Crockford said in a phone interview. “The cancellation of the solicitation itself has no measurable impact on the existing reality, which is that we are all being tracked right now.”
Other federal offices, including the Justice Department’s Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Marshals Service, have awarded contracts to Vigilant for access to its records or tracking tools.
Maybe the States should change their plate designs to use that Captcha tech that the web sites use.
😉