So not one “illegal” can escape their grasp
by digby
The Department of Homeland Security wants a private company to provide a national license-plate tracking system that would give the agency access to vast amounts of information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers, according to a government proposal that does not specify what privacy safeguards would be put in place.
The national license-plate recognition database, which would draw data from readers that scan the tags of every vehicle crossing their paths, would help catch fugitive illegal immigrants, according to a DHS solicitation. But the database could easily contain more than 1 billion records and could be shared with other law enforcement agencies, raising concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens who are under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.
But there’s nothing to worry about citizens because they promise they won’t use this for anything but catching the bad guys. So, just relax already:
A spokeswoman for DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) stressed that the database “could only be accessed in conjunction with ongoing criminal investigations or to locate wanted individuals.”
And just so you feel better about it, they’re going to outsource it:
“It is important to note that this database would be run by a commercial enterprise, and the data would be collected and stored by the commercial enterprise, not the government,” she said.
It’s fairly obvious that the government has totally lost the thread. No, we aren’t assuaged that they are going to turn the collection of all of our information into a profit making enterprise to which the government has access. This is not a solution — it’s the creation of even more problems.
Read the whole article to get the full sense of where this is going. I especially like the part where they allow the “vendor” to decide how long to keep the information. And who they sell it to.
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