Maplewood Police Get Surveillance Licence Plate Scanners

Police in Maplewood are deploying new automatic license plate scanner technology to find scofflaws, stolen cars, and anyone else on the roads who might be sought by police. And in doing so, they are logging your location whenever you drive by a police vehicle with these systems on-board.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports that this system, which can scan and identify thousands of license plates per hour, matches any licence tagged scanned with a database provided by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.  Charges that could register a hit in this database include driving on a suspended license, an outstanding warrant for failure to appear in court, or even just unpaid fines.

And even if you are not considered a wanted person of interest by local, Minnesota or national law enforcement, your location has still been tagged and stored in a database. It is easy to imaging how massive amounts of data from thousands of these police license plate scanning systems can be combined, and data-mined for historical data. You can be passively tracked, and someone can search for exactly where you were, and at what time, when your car passed into view of one of these systems.

The potential for a massive police surveillance state fed by data from these scanners is ominously real.