At 8: 22 am on December 4 last month, a car traveling along a small private road in Alabama used its license-plate-reading devices to get photos of automobiles it passed. One picture, which does not have a car or a certificate dish, shows a beautiful red” Trump” campaign sign placed in front of someone’s garage. In the background is a symbol referencing Israel, a holly wreath, and a colorful inflated snow.
A” Steelworkers for Harris-Walz” sign that was taken on a different time by a distinct vehicle is visible in another photograph taken in front of a person’s garden. A construction contractor, with his mouth uncensored, is pictured near another Harris mark. On other photos, Trump and Biden can be seen ( including” Fuck Biden” ) bumper stickers on American trucks and cars. One photograph, taken in November 2023, shows a half torn bumper sticker supporting the Obama-Biden portfolio.
These images were created by AI-powered cameras mounted on cars and trucks, which were originally intended to capture permit plates but are now used to document political yard signs outside private homes, text-protected vehicles, T-shirts with text, and pro-abortion bumper stickers on T-shirts, all while recording the exact locations of these observations. A tool initially intended for customers police has evolved into a system ready of monitoring conversation protected by the US Constitution, according to recently obtained data reviewed by WIRED.
The detailed photographs all surfaced in search results produced by the systems of DRN Data, a license-plate-recognition ( LPR ) company owned by Motorola Solutions. The LPR system can be used by private authorities, eviction providers, and insurance firms, a associated Motorola firm, called Vigilant, gives officers access to the same LPR data.
But, files shared with WIRED by designer Julia Weist, who is documenting restricted data as part of her work, demonstrate how those with access to the LPR method is search for frequent phrases or brands, such as those of officials, and be provided with images where the search term appears even if it is not displayed on license plates.
More than 150 images showing people’s homes and bumper stickers were found in a search result for Delaware vehicle license plates with the word” Trump.” The precise location, time, and location of the photo were included in each search result.
” I searched for the word ‘ believe,’ and that is all lawn signs. People wearing a sweatshirt who says” I believe” are then just painted on planters on the side of the road. Weist says. ” I did a search for the word “lost,” and it discovered the flyers that people put up for lost dogs and cats.
The study also demonstrates how people’s personal political views and homes can be recorded into vast databases that can be questioned, in addition to highlighting the far-reaching nature of LPR technology, which has collected billions of images of license plates.
According to Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, “it really reveals the extent to which surveillance is occurring on a mass scale in the quiet streets of America.” That surveillance includes” a lot of other potentially very revealing information about people,” not just license plates.
DRN, in a statement issued to WIRED, said it complies with” all applicable laws and regulations”.
Billions of Photos
License-plate-recognition systems, broadly, work by first capturing an image of a vehicle, then they use optical character recognition ( OCR ) technology to identify and extract the text from the vehicle’s license plate within the captured image. Motorola-owned DRN sells multiple license-plate-recognition cameras: a fixed camera that can be placed near roads, identify a vehicle’s make and model, and capture images of vehicles traveling up to 150 mph, a “quick deploy” camera that can be attached to buildings and monitor vehicles at properties, and mobile cameras that can be placed on dashboards or be mounted to vehicles and capture images when they are driven around.
Over more than a decade, DRN has amassed more than 15 billion “vehicle sightings” across the United States, and it claims in its marketing materials that it amasses more than 250 million sightings per month. Images captured by law enforcement are not returned to the wider database, but police can share them with them using DRN’s Vigilant system.
The system is partly fueled by DRN “affiliates” who install cameras in their vehicles, such as repossession trucks, and capture license plates as they drive around. Up to four cameras can be attached to a vehicle to capture images from all angles. These affiliates receive free cameras and search credits in addition to receiving monthly bonuses.
Weist obtained a private investigator license in New York State in 2022. She did this by enabling PIs to access the extensive range of surveillance software. Weist could access DRN’s analytics system, DRNsights, as part of a package through investigations company IRBsearch. IRBsearch conducted an audit of Weist’s account and ended it after she published an op-ed detailing her work. The company did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. )
” There is a difference between tools that are publicly accessible, like Google Street View, and things that are searchable”, Weist says. Weist conducted numerous searches for words and popular terms while conducting her work, which yielded results that went beyond license plates. In data she shared with WIRED, a search for” Planned Parenthood”, for instance, returned stickers on cars, on bumpers, and in windows, both for and against the reproductive health services organization. Concerns have already been raised by civil liberties organizations regarding the potential use of license-plate readers as a weapon against those seeking abortion.
Weist says she is concerned about how the search tools might be abused in a society where political violence and division are becoming more prevalent. One law enforcement official in Ohio recently urged people to “write down” the addresses of those who display yard signs supporting Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, demonstrating how a searchable database of people’s political affiliations could be abused.
Police officers used of confidential law enforcement databases in large numbers throughout the country according to a report from the Associated Press in 2016. In 2022, WIRED reported that hundreds of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were questioned for using LPR systems and databases in opposition to the US. Both reports allege misconduct, ranging from harassing and stalking to disclosing information to criminals.
The ACLU’s Stanley claims that the ACLU’s Stanley’s placement of signs on lawns or bumper stickers on cars is intended for “human-scale visibility,” not that of machines. ” Perhaps they want to express themselves in their communities, to their neighbors, but they do n’t necessarily want to be logged into a nationwide database that’s accessible to police authorities”, Stanley says.
Weist claims that the system should at the very least be able to filter out images that do n’t make mistakes and do n’t contain license plate information. Any number of times is too many times, especially when it comes to finding things like lawn signs and what people wear, Weist says.
License plate recognition ( LPR ) technology supports public safety and community services, from detecting kidnapping and stolen cars to automating toll collection and lowering insurance premiums by preventing insurance fraud, according to Jeremiah Wheeler, president of DRN, in a statement.
Weist thinks Motorola Solutions might be trying to filter out images that contain bumper stickers or other text given the relatively small number of images showing bumper stickers compared to the large number of vehicles that feature them.
Wheeler did not respond to WIRED’s inquiries about whether there are restrictions on what can be searched for in license plate databases, why did images of homes with lawn signs but no vehicles in sight appear in search results, or if filters are employed to reduce such images.
” DRNsights complies with all applicable laws and regulations”, Wheeler says. The DRNsights tool enables “authorized parties to access license plate information and associated vehicle information that is gathered and accessible in public spaces.” Customers are only permitted to access certain lawful purposes, and those who violate the law have their access revoked.
AI Everywhere
License-plate-recognition systems have flourished in recent years as cameras have become smaller and machine-learning algorithms have improved. These systems, such as DRN and rival Flock, mark part of a change in the way people are surveilled as they move around cities and neighborhoods.
Increasingly, CCTV cameras are being equipped with AI to monitor people’s movements and even detect their emotions. The systems have the potential to alert officials, who may not be able to constantly monitor CCTV footage, to real-world events. However, whether license plate recognition can reduce crime has been questioned.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s director of investigations, Dave Maass, the director of investigations at the civil liberties organization, claims that when government or private companies promote license plate readers, it seems like the technology is only looking for lawbreakers or people suspected of stealing a car or participating in an amber alert.” That’s just not how the technology works,” says Maass. ” The technology gathers and stores the data that is shared by everyone frequently for significant periods of time.”
Over time, the technology may become more capable, too. Maass, who has long researched license-plate-recognition systems, says companies are now trying to do “vehicle fingerprinting”, where they determine the make, model, and year of the vehicle based on its shape and also determine if there’s damage to the vehicle. According to one upcoming update on DRN’s product pages, insurance companies can check if a car is being used for ride-sharing.
According to Nicole McConlogue, an associate professor of law at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, who has researched license-plate surveillance systems and their potential for discrimination,” the way that the country was set up was to protect citizens from government overreach, but there’s not much put in place to protect us from private actors who are engaged in business meant to make money.”
According to McConlogue,” the volume that they’re able to do this in is what really troubling” about vehicles moving around the streets and taking pictures. When you do that, you are supporting the data-collectors in their efforts. But also, in the United States, you’re carrying with it the legacy of segregation and redlining, because that left a mark on the composition of neighborhoods”.
