Big brother watching you? No, it’s Binghamton’s and Broome County’s finest, dropping cameras and license plate readers all over the county. They will collect the place, day, time, and direction of your travel along with a picture of your car and often its inhabitants. Private companies like the one used by the City of Binghamton are used to store the data and make it accessible to police and intelligence agencies all over the country—and even private buyers. One vendor alone claims to have over 6 billion records while adding 120 more records a month.
Other cities from New Hampshire to Michigan to California have begun to ban the use of license plate readers and the facial recognition cameras as violations of constitutional rights. Meanwhile local elected official and public authorities, including university and college officials, are moving full speed ahead. Launched by Binghamton Mayor David in 2017, these efforts have accelerated recently. Attempts to discover the use of the data by local media have been stonewalled.
Main and Floral Ave
We should not be silent. The case against yet more unsupervised and unaccountable state surveillance has been made by many, from concerned technology experts, through the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, to conservatives who fear mass state surveillance. Whatever your persuasion, the facts are simple: this technology can track us, our loved ones, and every move across the city, minute by minute. They can paint an intimate portrait your life and protected First Amendment-protected activity. They will track and record your movements to health centers, immigration clinics, trade shows, LGBTQ bars, union halls, rallies, protests, or centers of religious worship. They watch and track our students, unknown to them and us. And the abuses are already happening: A Washington, D.C. police lieutenant pleaded guilty to extortion after blackmailing the owners of vehicles parked near a gay bar.[45] The Los Angeles Police Department proposed sending letters to the home addresses of all vehicles that enter areas of high prostitution. In New York City police officers drove down a street and electronically recorded the license plate numbers of everyone parked near a mosque.
They are most often deployed in low-income communities and communities of color, and are criminally unreliable in mis-identifying persons of color and women as men. The drive to create a national database of our every movement nevertheless advances: the Department of Homeland Security has proposed a federal database to combine all recorded data and images.
And don’t’ be fooled into thinking we give up our privacy rights and identities in order to advance “public safety” and catch “criminals”; they catch us by the millions instead. For the best estimate is that less than 0.2 percent of plate scans, the most accurate and deployed use by police, are linked to criminal activity or vehicle registration issues.
What can we do? We can do what residents of cities from New Hampshire to Indiana to California have done: stop our public authorities, from police to city and education authorities, from using these machines against us. Take two beginning steps:
One, participate in the crowdsourced map of license plate and surveillance cameras in our area. Go to this map to record new cameras and help us build a public record of what we face. https://www.arcgis.com/apps/CrowdsourceReporter/index.html?appid=e556da80848b402f9a70cf7d54a95e64
Two, sign the Stop Secret Surveillance in the Southern Tier petition at this site: https://campaigns.organizefor.org/petitions/stop-secret-surveillance-in-the-souther-tier
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