Jordan Steffen reports:
…. U.S. Customs and Border Protection awarded a contract in October worth as much as $350 million to increase its use along the border, where thousands of license plates are processed by the system every day.
But the technique, which, unlike speed cameras, snaps pictures of all vehicles passing by, worries privacy advocates. Wary of its ability to pinpoint and store the location of vehicles, they worry that innocent people may become easy targets for tracking.
“It’s like being forced to walk around with a bar code that a scanner can pick up — except that it’s your car,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which advocates for consumer and privacy rights. “This is one of those privacy places where the rubber really meets the road.”
Read more in the L. A. Times.