Street-Level Surveillance in Atlanta

This Labor Day weekend, EFF joins tens of thousands of sci-fi and fantasy fans at Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia. Our goal: educate and energize the fandoms about privacy, surveillance, and free speech. 

In addition to an epic cosplay activism campaign, our team is sitting on almost a dozen panels covering issues such as domestic surveillance and government transparency. At our table at the Hilton, we’ll be able to give you with practical tips for protecting your privacy using EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense Project, and help you understand what types of technology police are using in your community, with some help from the Street Level Surveillance Project .

Just as we discussed San Diego’s surveillance camera network boondoggle (Voice of San Diego referred to it as “Bumbling Big Brother”) during Comic-Con 2014, here’s a quick round-up of some of the ways law enforcement in the Atlanta area are keeping an eye on you.

Automated License Plate Readers

Law enforcement agencies around the country have embraced Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), surveillance systems made up of network of cameras that capture the license plates of any vehicle that passes within view. Sometimes these cameras are attached to police vehicles, sometimes they’re mounted on telephone poles and traffic lights. While ALPR technology is often used to find stolen or wanted vehicles, it can also be used to identify witnesses, create lists of cars that frequent certain neighborhoods or establishments, and track the patterns of suspected criminal groups. When ALPR data is captured indiscriminately and stored for long periods of time, it can reveal the travel patterns of everyday drivers who aren’t suspected of crimes at all.

According to documents obtained by the ACLU of Georgia [PDF], the Atlanta Police Department invested more than $130,000 in ALPR technology in 2012, including at least 11 mobile cameras and one fixed-location camera.  The cameras were purchased from Vigilant Solutions, a company known for its aggressive marketing of the cameras and its immense database of ALPR data to law enforcement agencies around the country. 

In nearby Gwinett County, police began using ALPRs in 2011 at a cost of $20,000 per camera. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution further reports that the Georgia State Patrol and the Sandy Springs Police Department also use ALPRs. In Sandy Springs’ case, police told the reporter in 2012 that the agency’s one car-mounted ALPR system captured 11-million “reads” in a single year.

Stingrays

IMSI catchers—which go by brand names like “Stingrays” or “DRTBoxes—are devices that mimic cell phone towers in order to determine a cell phone’s location. These are among the more elusive surveillance tools used by law enforcement, since many agencies have signed non-disclosure agreements with the “Stingray” manufacturer, Harris Corp., which has resulted in evidence being withheld from defense attorneys and in some instances, criminal cases have been dropped for fear that the technology would be revealed.

Writing for TheBlot.com, Matthew Keys found that the Gwinett County Police spent roughly $200,000 on Stingrays, which a police spokesperson said the department uses “in criminal investigations with no restrictions on the type of crime.” The Gwinett County District Attorney further admitted on camera to an NBC investigative reporter that, pursuant to a secrecy provision within the county’s contracts with Harris, prosecutors do not disclose specifically the use of Stingrays to defense attorneys, instead only referring to the devices vaguely as “cellphone location technology.”

As of last year, Fulton County did not own its own Stingrays,