A California judge has shut down a decade-long surveillance program in which Sacramento's utility provider shared granular smart-meter data on 650,000 residents with police to hunt for cannabis grows. The EFF reports: The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents' electrical usage data with narrow exceptions. For more than a decade, SMUD coordinated with the Sacramento Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to sift through the granular smart meter data of residents without suspicion to find evidence of cannabis growing. EFF and its co-counsel represent three petitioners in the case: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen. They argued that the program created a host of privacy harms -- including criminalizing innocent people, creating menacing encounters with law enforcement, and disproportionately harming the Asian community. The court ruled that the challenged surveillance program was not part of any traditional law enforcement investigation. Investigations happen when police try to solve particular crimes and identify particular suspects. The dragnet that turned all 650,000 SMUD customers into suspects was not an investigation. "[T]he process of making regular requests for all customer information in numerous city zip codes, in the hopes of identifying evidence that could possibly be evidence of illegal activity, without any report or other evidence to suggest that such a crime may have occurred, is not an ongoing investigation," the court ruled, finding that SMUD violated its "obligations of confidentiality" under a data privacy statute. [...] In creating and running the dragnet surveillance program, according to the court, SMUD and police "developed a relationship beyond that of utility provider and law enforcement." Multiple times a year, the police asked SMUD to search its entire database of 650,000 customers to identify people who used a large amount of monthly electricity and to analyze granular 1-hour electrical usage data to identify residents with certain electricity "consumption patterns." SMUD passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly "high" usage households to police. [...] Going forward, public utilities throughout California should understand that they cannot disclose customers' electricity data to law enforcement without any "evidence to support a suspicion" that a particular crime occurred.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the city of San Jose, California over its deployment of Flock's license plate-reading surveillance cameras, claiming that the city's nearly 500 cameras create a pervasive database of residents movements in a surveillance network that is essentially impossible to avoid. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Services, Immigrant Rights & Education Network and Council on American-Islamic Relations, California, and claims that the surveillance is a violation of California's constitution and its privacy laws. The lawsuit seeks to require police to get a warrant in order to search Flock's license plate system. The lawsuit is one of the highest profile cases challenging Flock; a similar lawsuit in Norfolk, Virginia seeks to get Flock's network shut down in that city altogether. "San Jose's ALPR [automatic license plate reader] program stands apart in its invasiveness," ACLU of Northern California and EFF lawyers wrote in the lawsuit. "While many California agencies run ALPR systems, few retain the locations of drivers for an entire year like San Jose. Further, it is difficult for most residents of San Jose to get to work, pick up their kids, or obtain medical care without driving, and the City has blanketed its roads with nearly 500 ALPRs."

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Police are using drones as flying automated license plate readers (ALPRs), according to a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

And where there is a market, a provider will jump in. Or was it the other way around this time? Flock Safety, for example, recently told a group of potential law enforcement customers interested in Drone as First Responder (DFR) programs that its drone can be used as a flying license plate reader camera as well.

An ALPR system is an intelligent surveillance system that automatically identifies and documents license plates of vehicles by using optical character recognition. This is not necessary for the drones’ main task—it’s an extra feature.

We can definitely see the benefits of the DFR program, which tell police officers what to expect before they arrive at the scene. Increasing situational awareness by using drones makes it safer for both law enforcement officers and the public.

The problem is that drones equipped with ALPR technology can systematically record vehicle location and movement, indifferent to whether it’s in public or private spaces. Unlike fixed cameras, drones can reach places and angles otherwise inaccessible, so they can look in backyards, private driveways, and even through windows.

Depending on the local circumstances, police DFR programs involve a fleet of drones, which can range in number from a few to a few hundred. Low operational costs enable police and their drones to collect and store enormous amounts of data. These practices increase the risk of breaches or leaks. Agencies often keep ALPR and drone-captured data well beyond its useful period, store it on centralized or external servers, and regularly share it with other agencies or federal authorities, according to the EFF.

According to EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance there are approximately 1,500 police departments known to have a drone program. A recent Wired investigation raised concerns about one police department’s program, finding that roughly one in 10 drone flights lacked a stated purpose and for hundreds of deployment the reason was listed as “unknown.”

There is a thin line between unwarranted surveillance and accidental recordings. The EFF states:

“While some states do require a warrant to use a drone to violate the privacy of a person’s airspace, Alaska, California, Hawaii, and Vermont are currently the only states where courts have held that warrantless aerial surveillance violates residents’ constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure absent specific exceptions.”

Combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI)—and these are already operational—drones can become a force to be reckoned with. But we need to start thinking about regulations to limit the privacy implications, so we don’t end up in a surveillance-state society.

Flock has previously described its desire to connect ALPR scans to additional information on the person who owns the car, meaning that we don’t live far from a time when police may see your vehicle drive by and quickly learn that it’s your car and a host of other details about you.

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