Article by Jason Koebler: “The Trump administration is using an anti-drug trafficking grant program from the 1980s to force cities around the country to funnel their ongoing collection of automated license plate reader data into large federal surveillance centers that fall under the White House’s jurisdiction, according to public records and court documents reviewed by 404 Media.
The records show the workings of a complex system in which the federal government is using the “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” (HIDTA) program to obtain data from local cops’ Flock, Axon, and other ALPR cameras and aggregate it on federal government servers, where it is then accessible to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. In some cases, data that goes to HIDTA is then also shared to a larger program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency called the “National License Plate Reader Program” (NLPRP).
Through HIDTA systems, local license plate data can be accessed by various federal agencies, including those who may not have contracts themselves with the ALPR companies. The program raises significant privacy and transparency concerns; as cities begin to place restrictions on how their Flock data can be used, it represents an end-around for federal law enforcement to access data that it might not normally be able to, and to do so without any obvious oversight body. HIDTA falls under the jurisdiction of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and it recently won an award from the Trump White House for “managing an automated license plate reader platform that brings together all levels of law enforcement.”
Many of the documents used in this article were obtained using public records requests by Cris van Pelt, the creator of the website HaveIBeenFlocked.com and its associated investigative blog, Footnote4a. “When local police and private vendors promise community control over surveillance, they obscure a broader agenda. The DEA and ONDCP are already aggregating local data behind the scenes,” van Pelt said. “This bypasses democratic processes entirely. The public has made it clear that mass surveillance violates fundamental rights, even when it is laundered through fragmented systems, private companies, and regional task forces.”..(More)”.
