Profs & Pints Richmond: The Road to Mass Surveillance
Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “The Road to Mass Surveillance,” on the proliferation of automated license plate readers and the threats that they pose to our freedoms, with Steven Keener, a leading researcher on such devices as an assistant professor of criminology and director of the Center for Crime, Equity, and Justice Research and Policy at Christopher Newport University.
Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras have popped up throughout the country, with Flock Safety emerging as the predominant producer. They capture images of every passing vehicle and feed that data into centralized databases, giving tremendous power to track our movements on the road to both the government agencies that use them and the private companies contracted to operate them.
Proponents of the technology praise it for helping to track stolen cars, felony suspects, and missing persons. But it also has been used by law enforcement officers to stalk ex-partners, and its misreads of license plates have led to false accusations of crimes. Data from the cameras have been shared with entities that are not supposed to be allowed access, and attempts have been made to use such data to track individuals attending protests or crossing state lines to access health care that their own state banned. People have hacked into the cameras and the data they gather and broadcast that information on YouTube.
Learn in depth about ALPR cameras and the debate over their use and regulation with Steven Keener, the lead author of the first geospatial analysis of this emerging technology, “Surveillance Inequality: Race, Poverty and the Geography of Automated License Plate Reader Cameras.”
Dr. Keener will provide an overview of how ALPR cameras operate, describing what images are captured of each passing vehicle, what happens to those images in the short term, the lifecycle of the data that the cameras collect, and how the cameras are operated jointly by local police and private surveillance companies.
He’ll offer insights on the comprehensive, expansive database that has been built using the images captured by ALPR cameras, describing where that information is stored, who has access to it, how long it can be accessed and for what reasons, and what happens when the dataset is tapped into for investigations and criminal cases. You’ll learn about where cameras are placed and about trends in their use.
Dr. Keener will look at the risks of such a comprehensive dataset of individuals' daily movement patterns and bring you up to speed on court cases challenging ALPR surveillance systems on grounds such as the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure. We’ll look at rigorous debates at the local level over whether to maintain or cancel contracts with the private surveillance companies and at efforts by state lawmakers in Virginia and elsewhere to put guardrails on such technology.
Dr. Keener, a critic of ALPR systems who actively works with community organizations evaluating the cancellation of ALPR contracts, will equip talk attendees with the knowledge to engage in local advocacy. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Traffic in downtown Los Angeles (Photo by Prayitno / Creative Commons).
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3641237-0
