On that note, let’s say that you are having a Sunday afternoon picnic with your child. The weather’s good, you’ve been running around and playing – but now it’s time for lunch. You open up the cooler, only to discover that you’ve left a couple of the sandwiches in the car. The car’s just a few yards away, so you quickly run to grab the sandwiches.

And in a split second, you look back to see that your child is gone. You catch a black sedan speeding away and you are barely able to catch the license plate. Because you caught that license plate, police are able to search a giant database of plate captures and track the movements of the kidnapper.

A classic question: What is more important, public safety or personal freedom? What are you willing to sacrifice? Let us know in the comments.

Ok, I know this whole scenario seems a little bit Without A Trace or Lifetime movie-esque, but the point is that police were able to use an ever-expanding database of data culled from license plate snapshots in order to generate real-time location information. That’s a reality, and it’s happening in our nation’s capital, among other places.

The Washington Post is reporting that police in D.C. are beefing up the area covered by license plate cameras. More than 250 cameras in D.C. and its suburbs are constantly hard at work, grabbing license plate numbers and sticking them into databases. The police aren’t exactly doing this quietly, but it’s being done with “virtually no public debate.”

The highest concentration of these plate readers in the entire nation exists in D.C. (one reader per square mile), so that means that District police are building the biggest location database based on license plates in the whole country.

Let’s take a brief look at these license plate readers.

First, these are apparently different types of cameras than the cameras cities have been affixing near stoplights and other places to catch people running red lights or speeding – the “here’s a ticket 2 weeks later in the mail” cameras.

These plate readers cost about $20,000 each and can snatch images of numbers and letters on cars traveling nearly 150 mph and across four lanes of traffic. These plate readers in D.C. take 1,800 images per minute, every one of which is stored in a database.

Basically, these plate readers have made it possible for police to track everyone’s movements as they move across the city.

These plate readers and the subsequent database of image captures has tipped the privacy concerns of some – notably the American Civil Liberties Union. One of their main concerns is naturally the privacy implications.

In the District, laws are in place that limit the amount of time that surveillance camera footage can be kept. The images must be dumped after 10 days, unless there is an actual investigatory reason to keep them. But right now, there is nothing keeping data from the plate readers from being stored for years.

The ACLU says that this database is storing the location data of innocent people. And they are right. The plate readers are casting an all-inclusive net, grabbing license plate numbers indiscriminately.

Clearly this technology is rapidly approaching the point where it could be used to reconstruct the entire movements of any individual vehicle. As we have argued in the context of GPS tracking that level of intrusion on private life is something that the police should not be able to engage in without a warrant.

Let’s think back to the slightly-stylized child abduction scene from the beginning of this article. Maybe that seems a bit far-fetched, but the reality of the situation is that the plate reader database has helped police. According to the D.C. police department, they make an arrest a day with the help of the plate readers. In a four month period this year, they also found 51 stolen cars.

And although our child abduction story above might seem unrealistic, the possibilities are there for the plate readers to help in truly significant ways. Police could track cars to and from murder scenes or use it to identify players in organized crime circles like sex trafficking – by logging which cars travel between certain locations.

But the fact that the technology is beneficial or could be beneficial in terms of law enforcement does not assuage concerns of a “surveillance society” becoming the norm in the U.S. It’s a classic argument that pits personal liberties against security and safety. Just how much of your freedom are you able to give up to feel safer? This is a crucial debate that we’ve seen play out most recently after 9/11 with the Patriot Act.

The ACLU channels Minority Report to discuss preemptive law enforcement:

Of course, if the police track all of us all the time, there is no doubt that will help to solve some crimes — just as it would no doubt help solve some crimes if they could read everybody’s e-mail and install cameras in everybody’s homes. But in a free society, we don’t let the police watch over us just because we might do something wrong. That is not the balance struck by our Constitution and is not the balance we should strike in our policymaking.

Obviously, the plate readers are a valuable tool for the police, and there are an abundance of situations where one could imagine the searchable database of plate captures to be extremely useful. But are those plate readers building up a database that’s just a little too full of innocent people’s location information for your liking?

If this kind of thing is to proliferate (both in D.C. and across the country), it is argued that it needs to see the light of day. Basically, society should have time to debate its merits and discuss their concerns. “The police should not be able to run out and buy a new technology and put it in place before anybody realizes what’s going on,” says Jay Stanley of the ACLU’s Privacy and Technology Program.

What do you think about the expansion of the plate reader technology? Do the benefits outweigh the privacy and personal freedom concerns? Or is this an example of big brother yielding too much power with the ability to catalog this data without warrants? Let us know in the comments.

So much so, in fact, the ACLU has decided to throw its hat into the ring, issuing a call for wireless providers to stop tracking their customers. The edict came to light via an ACLU blog post, one that details their position quite well. Now, it should be noted there a legal ramifications to be considered because of the location data stipulations in the Enhanced 911 statute, but that’s not the same thing as AT&T doing it for potential marketing reasons. The details concerning location data in regards to E-911 are, according to Wikipedia, as follows:

Location information is not only transmitted to the call center for the purpose of sending emergency services to the scene of the incident, it is used by the wireless network operator to determine to which PSAP [Public Safety Answering Point] to route the call.

Again, this is not what the ACLU is fighting against. It’s obviously important to know where to send emergency response units in relation to 911 calls, but why should the wireless providers be allowed to track and keep a customer’s location data?

The ACLU would like to know the same thing:

But the major carriers – AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint – don’t just know where we are from moment to moment. They also retain detailed data about our location for extended periods of time, as we learned recently when we received this document in response to our national public records request on how the authorities are using location data. The carriers also readily share the information they gather with government agencies and law enforcement.

Why should they be doing all this?

To strengthen their position, the ACLU’s post mentions Verizon and its intention to sell user data to various interested businesses. As a Verizon customer, how does that knowledge sit with you? Should Verizon be allowed to sell the data that shows where you’ve been for marketing purposes? Or, were you even aware these companies were allowed to do so?

Good thing the oft-maligned ACLU is paying attention, and if more consumers joined the fight, something might actually get changed — provided these consumers know and/or care about how their wireless provider treats the location data being it collects and stores. To further explain their position, the ACLU as posted an open letter asking for these wireless providers to cease their tracking habits.

To further explain their position, the letter issued the following requests:

At a minimum, you should be keeping your customers informed by:

• Providing your customers with a clear explanation of what information is being kept about their account.
• Informing your customers when and how their account information is being shared with third parties.
• Notifying your customers if their information is ever breached or lost.

You should also be giving your customers control over their personal information by:

• Providing them with an easy way to control how long their personal information is kept.
• In particular, not storing their location data without their explicit affirmative permission.
• Informing them about government demands for their information whenever legally possible.

The ACLU is also asking for consumers to get involved, via an online petition. If you care about your privacy and how the wireless providers track, store and use the location data your phone generates, you should probably pay attention to how the ACLU does in its attempts to disrupt these practices.

The alternative, at least at this point, is to continue on as if your wireless provider is looking out for your best interests and all that location data will be kept private. Of course, that would mean completing ignoring Verizon’s stated intentions, but then again, apathy is apparently easier than being concerned.

But what about sexually suggestive photos posted on social media sites? Can schools punish teens for things they post in their own time?

A U.S. District Judge says no, as it violates a teen’s first amendment rights.

Back in 2009, two female students at a Fort Wayne Indiana high school were disciplined after photos emerged that they had posted on MySpace. The girls, aged 15 and 16, took photos at a sleepover that displayed “sexually suggestive poses with various props.” For instance, one photo saw the girls dressed in lingerie, pretending to lick penis-shaped lollipops.

The girls put these photos on MySpace, and according to the AP, their privacy settings only allowed friends to see them. Somehow, a parent at the school came across the photos and brought them to the district superintendent. The parent said that the photos were causing “divisiveness” among the school volleyball team, of which the girls were members.

Apparently, the photos also made their way around the school.

Here is the punishment that followed: The principal suspended the two girls from the volleyball team, the choir and the cheerleading team. He also ordered the girls to complete three counseling sessions and made them apologize to an all-male coaching board.

With the help of the Indiana ACLU, the two teens filed a lawsuit against the school district in October of 2009.

And now, the District Judge has ruled that the school violated the girls’ first amendment rights by disciplining them for the racy photos. From the ACLU of Indiana –

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana represented the students in their case against the school corporation, arguing that the conduct of the students had no substantial disruptive effect on the school. The court concluded that the discipline violated the First Amendment rights of free speech. The court also enjoined application of the school policy under which the students could be punished because they brought “discredit or dishonor” upon themselves or the school. The court said the policy was vague and overbroad.

The Judge ruled that the photos could not be ruled “obscene.” He said they were “silly” but were intended to be humorous.

If the girls would’ve taken nude photos, it might have been an entirely dfferent situation. For one, the pics probably wouldn’t have stayed on the site for very long, as MySpace like other social sites ban nudity.

Would the nude pics have been considered free speech in the context of the school code? It’s possible that criminal charges could have stemmed from nudes, just like the sexting cases. But could the school take disciplinary action over actions done off school property on the students’ own time?

According to the AP,

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that students can be disciplined for activities that happen outside of school, so long as the school can prove the activities were disruptive or posed a danger and that it was foreseeable the activities would find their way to campus.

So I guess the answer is yes, they could be disciplined. It looks like the key part of the Indiana case was the term “disruptive.” Apparently, lingerie pics with candy penises aren’t thought of as disruptive, but nude pics probably would be.

The question remains, however, where is the line drawn? What constitutes “obscene” and “disruptive?” What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

DHS asserts the right to look though the contents of a traveler’s electronic devices – including laptops, cameras and cell phones – and to keep the devices or copy the contents in order to continue searching them once the traveler has been allowed to enter the U.S., regardless of whether the traveler is suspected of any wrongdoing.

“These days, almost everybody carries a cell phone or laptop when traveling, and almost everyone stores information they wouldn’t want to share with government officials – from financial records to love letters to family photos," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

"Innocent Americans should not be made to feel like the personal information they store on their laptops and cell phones is vulnerable to searches by government officials any time they travel out of the country."

Today’s lawsuit was filed on behalf of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), whose members include television and still photographers, editors, students and representatives of the photojournalism industry; NACDL, which is a plaintiff as well as counsel on the case; and Pascal Abidor, a 26-year-old dual French-American citizen who had his laptop searched and confiscated at the Canadian border.

“Unchecked government fishing expeditions into the constitutionally protected materials on an innocent traveler’s laptop or cell phone interfere with the ability of many Americans to do their jobs and do nothing to make us safer," said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "

Between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, over 6,500 people—nearly 3,000 of them U.S. citizens, were subjected to a search of their electronic devices as they crossed U.S. borders, according to a separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU.
 

The American Civil Liberties Union challenged the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) on behalf of a coalition of writers, artists and health educators who use the Internet to communicate constitutionally protected speech.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in its ruling that the COPA law "cannot withstand a strict scrutiny, vagueness, or overbreadth analysis and thus is unconstitutional."

Previously, a federal district court and a federal appeals court found the online censorship law violates the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution. The Supreme Court upheld that decision, banning enforcement of the law in 2004 and sending the case back to district court to determine if there had been any changes in technology that would affect the constitutionality of the statute.

"Our clients provide valuable and necessary health and news information. Preventing adults from accessing this information under the guise of protecting children is not permissible," said Aden Fine, Senior Staff Attorney with the ACLU First Amendment Working group.

"There are more effective, less intrusive tools available to limit what minors can access on the Internet."
 

It looks like the ACLU is branching out into new territory. The organization is broadening its horizons from the political arena, stepping into the digital realm with its latest commentary on the citywide Wi-Fi network in the words for San Francisco.

In a statement earlier this week, the ACLU openly criticized policies by both Google and Earthlink, citing that the companies are providing inadequate privacy and free speech protection to potential Wi-Fi users.

In his article, Stephen Lawson outlines some of the ACLU

"It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid."
-- Q chats with Picard about the Borg, Q Who?

Similar treasures fill the Internet, but like any physical place one might find, there are parts of it best avoided. How dangerous has been a contention between the Department of Justice and the ACLU, who have been fighting over the Child Online Protection Act for several years.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and lawyers from DOJ attempted to gain access to search engine indexes last summer. The effort would have gone unnoticed had Google not dug in its heels and forced DOJ to publicize their investigation by suing Google in January 2006.

Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo, along with a number of other parties subpoenaed for volumes of search data, readily handed over the requested information. Google managed to win its case and limit DOJ to 50,000 randomly chosen URLs from its index and no user queries.

Now it appears DOJ may have been a little too overarching in its requests. An AP report noted that out of a government-commissioned study of search indexes, only a small percent of the URLs in them lead to explicit content.

UC-Berkeley statistics professor Philip B. Stark discovered search engines don’t contain quite as much bad content as the DOJ appeared to believe. For Google and MSN Search, only 1.1 percent of indexed pages contained “sexually explicit material.”

But about six percent of queries to those two search engines plus Yahoo return at least one explicit site, according to Stark.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.