Wednesday, March 26, 2014
LAPD says every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is trying to figure out what the LAPD is doing with the mountains (and mountains) of license-plate data that they’re harvesting in the city’s streets without a warrant or judicial oversight. As part of the process, they’ve asked the LAPD for a week’s worth of the data they’re collecting, and in their reply brief, the LAPD argues that it can’t turn over any license-plate data because all the license-plates they collect are part of an “ongoing investigation,” because every car in Los Angeles is part of an ongoing criminal investigation, because some day, someone driving that car may commit a crime.
As EFF’s Jennifer Lynch says, “This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity.”
This reminds me of the NSA’s argument that they’re collecting “pieces of a puzzle” and Will Potter’s rebuttal: “The reality is that the NSA isn’t working with a mosaic or a puzzle. What the NSA is really advocating is the collection of millions of pieces from different, undefined puzzles in the hopes that sometime, someday, the government will be working on a puzzle and one of those pieces will fit.” The same thing could be said of the LAPD.
Full article: http://boingboing.ne … -car-in-los-ang.html
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