Recent revelations about the massive surveillance apparatus piloted by the National Security Agency have made Americans increasingly concerned with privacy and surveillance issues. Now, new information regarding the Department of Justice (DOJ) has come to light.
Last week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reported that the DOJ had been tracking and building a real-time database of millions of American drivers by collecting their license plate information. But they aren’t the only department interested in your plate info.
Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the ACLU, we now know that the DEA and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had planned on tracking the license plates of gun show attendees using automatic license plate readers.
The email reportedly detailed plans to keep a record of all of those who would attend specific gun shows in Phoenix, Arizona:
The April 2009 email states that “DEA Phoenix Division Office is working closely with ATF on attacking the guns going to [redacted] and the gun shows, to include programs/operation with LPRs at the gun shows.” The government redacted the rest of the email, but when we received this document we concluded that these agencies used license plate readers to collect information about law-abiding citizens attending gun shows. An automatic license plate reader cannot distinguish between people transporting illegal guns and those transporting legal guns, or no guns at all; it only documents the presence of any car driving to the event. Mere attendance at a gun show, it appeared, would have been enough to have one’s presence noted in a DEA database.
It’s important to note this aspect of the ACLU’s findings:
Responding to inquiries about the document, the DEA said that the monitoring of gun shows was merely a proposal and was never implemented. We were certainly glad to hear them say this, as we had rationally, based on the scrap of information left unredacted in the document, concluded that gun show monitoring was underway. After all, this would not be the first time that the government has used automatic license plate readers to target the constitutionally protected right to assemble.
The ACLU, being long time opponents to license plate readers, has been following this issue along with other forms of government surveillance on otherwise peaceful actions. The organization has filed FOIA requests in 38 states, along with Washington, D.C., in regard to the use of automatic license plate readers.
The post Got Tickets to the Gun Show? The Government’s Interested and Here’s How They Might Track You appeared first on Independent Journal.