Community Technology and Telecommunications CommissionJuly 9, 2025

Item 2: Presentation from EFF-Austin — original pdf

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ALPRs – Automated License Plate Readers MASS SURVEILLANCE MASQUERADING AS PUBLIC SAFETY Privacy Is A Universal Human Right Freedom Of Movement Is A Universal Human Right ALPRs – What’s Behind This Acronym? ALPR stands for Automated License Plate Reader. Police departments use them to scan and look up the criminal status of a particular car’s license plate. Police have always done this manually, ALPRs massively increase the scale of these lookups. Can be fixed or mobile, but in both cases all vehicles in a particular location will be scanned. The scanning is indiscriminate, no warrant or formal accusation of a crime is needed. The quasi-public status of cars is used to subvert the 4th amendment and its expectation of privacy. Location Data Is Big Business ALPR vendors aggressively court police departments. Millions are spent by cities licensing this technology. Major vendors like Flock make dubious claims of the technology’s usefulness. Went as far as to claim 10% of crimes in the US are solved by Flock! A Data Privacy Disaster Waiting To Happen These location datasets are usually controlled by 3rd party vendors, not cities, leading to dubious security and oversight. In 2020, the UK’s entire national ALPR database was leaked onto the dark web. Immense Human Rights Risks Fixed ALPRs can be placed to overpolice poor communities and communities of color, or by HOAs to privatize public streets. Mobile ALPRs can be positioned outside of abortion providers, gender affirming care clinics, or immigration services facilities. The movements of politicians and prominent public figures can be tracked, increasing the possibility of blackmail. ALPRs can be inaccurate 10% of the time, and the databases aren’t kept up to date. Innocent people have been held at gunpoint for supposedly stealing cars that were inaccurately flagged. Possibly nothing reveals more about a person than the pattern of where they go and at what times they go there. The Human Toll Of Mass Surveillance You lose access to your unfiltered thoughts and ideas. You lose the freedom to be embarrassing, inconsistent or experimental without consequence. It erodes intimacy with other people. There is a never-ending performance anxiety. The Technological Panopticon is a Social Tragedy Privacy allows us the ability to flourish as complex, ever- changing beings. Surveillance deprives us of that. Surveillance chills free expression even in the kindest of hands. People modify their behavior when they know they are being watched. Within the technological Panopticon, people begin to internalize the notion that they are being watched and self-censor accordingly, even if there is no one actually watching. Legal Oversight Doesn’t Address The Risks Any surveillance system built for allegedly legitimate purposes can be repurposed as quickly as bad actors gain access to it. The more sophisticated a system, the harder it is to audit, understand, or effectively regulate it. This creates a fundamental tension between capability and accountability. Tech surveillance develops at such a rapid pace that no current legislative body can effectively capture it. Without intentionally decelerating its deployment to allow for meaningful discussion and legislation, it will always evade democratic oversight. Even with safeguards, the surveilled has limited ability or access to verify that protections are being respected or to seek recourse if they're violated. Austin’s ALPR Pilot Program Audit Revealed Systemic Failures  Despite scanning 75,000,000 license plates, the success rate of locating persons of interest was less than 0.02%  Despite the Council Resolution prohibiting data sharing in most situations, the actual contract with Flock that was signed allowed for “a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid license to use, reproduce, modify, and distribute the agency data.”  Multiple data sharing requests were made that APD wasn’t even aware had happened.  In violation of Counsel Resolution, 25% of ALPR searches were done without a legitimate documented purpose. The Risks Aren’t Hypothetical  Authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search on more than 83,000 ALPRs looking for a woman who had an abortion.  In Dallas, two bounties hunters used ALPRs to locate a target, resulting in a fatal shootout.  In Virginia, despite local rules and prohibitions against using ALPR data for immigration enforcement, Flock’s data sharing network was used in numerous ICE enforcement operations. • No ALPRs For Austin. Not Now. Not Ever.  Austinites resoundingly rejected ALPRs this June, but the City Manager and some members of council wish to bring them back before the end of the year after addressing community concerns.  This is not a problem where a different vendor, even stronger regulations and safeguards, or technical remediation could solve it.  ALPRs, with their risks to privacy, safety, and human rights, are inherently dangerous.  We hope the Technology Commission will join us in continuing to educate the city council about why ALPRs are a bad choice for Austin. “We believe ALPRs are a mass surveillance technology because they canvass an entire area indiscriminately by gathering information about where people were at certain times, without a warrant, probable cause, or evidence of criminal wrongdoing. They are an obvious violation of the Fourth Amendment.” Kevin Welch, EFF-Austin Board President