New technology makes licence plates a snap to read

Automatic plate scanners being tried out by Quebec Police provide more information quickly.

The stolen car that led Gatineau police on a wild chase Aug. 14 wasn't spotted by a flesh-and-blood police officer but an all-seeing electronic eye that can scan dozens of licence plates in an instant.

The new technology could be a threat to individual privacy, says lawyer and privacy expert Jonathan Dawe.

"On the one hand, your licence plate is something you display in public, it's a public record," he said. "But there is a real privacy concern that emerges when there's technology that can collect people's data in public in a way that would be difficult for individual officers to do."

The licence plate detection systems have been in place for almost two years, a Gatineau police spokesman said.

Cameras affixed to four Gatineau police vehicles, both marked and unmarked, scan plates of passing cars and feed the data to a com-puter connected to the main police database that cross-references all known information about the car and feeds it back to the officer.

The Ontario Provincial Police rolled out a similar system in 2009. Through an information-sharing agreement with the province, the OPP obtain a list of what they call licence plates in poor standing - plates with expired tags, cancelled licences, or from stolen vehicles.

For both police departments, if the scan turns up any kind of violation the officer is immediately notified.

"As soon as we read a plate, you can see the result in the car," said Gatineau police Const. Pierre Lanthier.

Police say the systems are a boon for traffic enforcement and an important tool for keeping streets safe from unsafe drivers.

"For us, it's just another investigative tool," said OPP Sgt. Kristine Rae. "We still have to do the legwork, we still have to verify what the computer spits out. It's just an indicator."

Only four cruisers are equipped with the systems in Ontario, Rae said, and they rotate through different districts. The systems' database was originally planned to link up to the police information on outstanding warrants and criminal charges, but Rae was unsure if that connection had been completed.

Tom Stamatakis, president of the Canadian Police Association, said the automated licence plate scanners are not an exercise of any new police powers.

"It's just a more efficient way to do what the police have always done," he said. "The only difference is the volume of information. There's no difference in terms of what information police officers are accessing. From a policing perspective, it's a really efficient way to identify people who might be dangerous to others on the road."

It is unclear what happens to the data collected by police, including location and time of day, about vehicles that aren't flagged by the system.

Lanthier admitted that data about every car scanned by the Gatineau system, including offenders and nonoffenders, is kept in a police database for a time, but any further information about the system would have to be obtained through a provincial access to information request.

But Stamatakis said keeping the information around makes little sense for policing, and the reams of data would quickly fill whatever storage police had chosen.

"I can't think of what we'd use that for," he said. "From a policing perspective, there's no utility to retaining data where there's no issue."

Dawe said licence plate recognition systems are one part of the evolving conversation and legal framework surrounding privacy in the digital age. "They definitely should be a part of the conversation about the limits of privacy," he said. "Technology has made it far easier to collect this information. The cost of electronic storage is plummeting and it's made it easier to keep giant databases that make this kind of information easily accessible."

Nader Hasan, a criminal defence and constitutional lawyer, said he believes the public should be aware of the creeping expansion of police surveillance powers. The legal definition of privacy is based on when people feel they should have privacy. Hasan said that as technology advances, people's reasonable expectations - and by extension their legal right to privacy - can change.

"Technology has the potential to eviscerate privacy," he said. "The longer a technology is in place, the narrower the scope of your privacy rights. Even something that seems like an incremental diminution of privacy rights is something that must be approached with the utmost concern."

An Ottawa police spokesman said the department does not use licence plate recognition systems, but it is under consideration.