I am writing as a Baltimore City resident to oppose the Goods & Services Contract Sole Source Award with Thomson Reuters – CLEAR (SB-25-14465).

I am deeply concerned by the lack of transparency and public debate about the City allowing BPD to add an Automatic License Plate Reader surveillance tool that is such a clear violation of city residents’ right to privacy, at
the cost of our own tax dollars.

Public documentation shows that BPD has previously held a contract with Thomson Reuters to access certain other elements of its CLEAR database since approximately 2020, allowing BPD to “easily access billions of public records, publicly available information, and proprietary data,” including “web sources, social media, and news media … local, regional, and national news reports, international news sources, industry sources, web sources (surface and deep web), blogs, regulatory information, and law enforcement information.”

The procurement before the Board of Estimates now appears to add additional mass surveillance tools to this contract, including CLEAR’s License Plate Recognition system that “utilizes Motorola/Vigilant Solutions’ live gateway of commercial license plate data to plot vehicle locations within the CLEAR interface.”

Adding these additional mass surveillance tools appears to double the cost of this contract from $11,094 per month to $22,863 per month.

The Motorola/Vigilant Solutions database on the CLEAR platform gives BPD access to a level of surveillance of Baltimore residents similar to that provided by the spy plane.

“The LPR gateway delivers more than 7 billion commercial results from more than 10 years of license plate data collection”  – Thomson Reuters submission to the BPD

A submission to BPD from Thomson Reuters brags:

“Commercial data creates a force multiplier effect for agencies by complementing your own internal LPR data with access to a broader network of LPR data. Commercial vehicles, including tow trucks, asset recovery, and repossession, collect multiple records of vehicle license plate locations along main roadways as well as neighborhoods, high-volume parking lots, and thoroughfares. This generates stronger trends and location history — making your job easier while searching for a single vehicle.”

It further specifies:

“The LPR gateway delivers more than 7 billion commercial results from more than 10 years of license plate data collection, with new license plate scans added at a rate of more than 150 million per month. Multiple tools will give you clues to someone’s location history, activity history, and more. You can even set up alerts to be notified when a vehicle has been recognized.”

CLEAR’s LPR system allows users to search for full or partial license plate numbers and obtain the date and time of that vehicle’s location going back for more than a decade, or to search all license plates at a given location, including drawing connections between cars that happen to be within 1/4 mile of each other.

A density map appears to show intense coverage by this system throughout Baltimore streets, especially on major transportation corridors. My own neighborhood appears to be extremely heavily surveilled by this system.

ACLU: Oppose it, Full Stop

This mass surveillance, allowing tracking of Baltimore residents’ location history for the past decade and more, is a serious invasion of Baltimore residents’ privacy, and the Board should reject this procurement.

Leading civil society organizations recommend against giving police access to Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems in general, and Motorola/Vigilant Solutions’ database in particular, because of their invasion of privacy and their chilling effect on free speech and political dissent.

The American Civil Liberties Union unequivocally states, “If the police or government leaders are pushing for Flock or another centralized mass-surveillance ALPR system in your community, we urge you to oppose it, full stop,” specifically naming the Motorola/Vigilant Solutions database as well.

ACLU continues, “There’s no reason the technology should be used to create comprehensive records of everybody’s comings and goings — and that is precisely what ALPR databases like Flock’s are doing. In our country, the government should not be tracking us unless it has individualized suspicion that we’re engaged in wrongdoing.”

“In our country, the government should not be tracking us unless it has individualized suspicion that we’re engaged in wrongdoing”  – ACLU statement in opposition to ALPR systems.

A joint publication by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and ACLU states:

“A Virginia state court found that ALPR technology violated a state privacy law because the technology can identify a vehicle’s owner when the license plate location information was coupled with data from databases containing other information like criminal and DMV records. ALPR technology also raises concerns under the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution because long-term location tracking can violate individual privacy. This is because ALPR technology has the ability to map out our car’s movements over time by collecting numerous data at different locations throughout time.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation states plainly, “Let’s be clear: you can’t trust what ALPR company Vigilant Solutions and its clients say.”

They point particularly to training materials created by Vigilant Solutions that instruct users, “If the use of the LPR equipment can be left out of the report, that is what is recommended, but always inform the prosecuting attorney of this.”

A Brennan Center for Justice research report warns:

“Historically, it would have been virtually impossible for law enforcement to routinely surveil all drivers. However, with the growing use of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), police can now receive alerts about a car’s movements in real time and review past movements at the touch of a button.”

The Brennan Center names the chilling effect of such systems on free speech, noting that “police in Denver spied on anti-logging activists and shared license plate information with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force when the activists held a training on nonviolence” and that “the International Association of Chiefs of Police has noted that ALPRs can cause people to ‘become more cautious in the exercise of their protected rights of expression, protest, association, and political participation because they consider themselves under constant surveillance.’”

Use by ICE

ICE uses ALPR systems to track and target people for deportation, and Baltimore City must not support this system.

Documentation obtained by the ACLU via FOIA in 2017 shows ICE using Thomson Reuters’s system to access Motorola/Vigilant Solutions’ License Plate Recognition database through the same CLEAR platform that BPD proposes to use in this procurement. ACLU has found that many local governments using such systems “are helping — feeding their residents’ personal information to ICE, even when it violates local privacy laws or sanctuary policies.”

A joint report by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center and ACLU warns, “ALPR technology is disproportionately used on communities where persons of color, immigrants, and low-income persons reside. These populations have a higher chance of having their information stored in an ALPR database and ultimately tracked.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has extensive documentation of Vigilant Solutions’ system being used by ICE, including via local police using the system.

AP recently reported that “Border Patrol is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with ‘suspicious’ travel patterns” through the use of ALPR systems.

A recent article in the Baltimore Sun described how “Democratic-led cities in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Washington last year terminated their contracts with Flock Safety, the largest provider of license plate readers in the U.S.” in the midst of ICE surveillance of immigrant communities.

William Owen of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project warned that “intelligence sharing between various levels of government, he said, has ‘allowed ICE to sidestep sanctuary laws and co-opt local police databases and surveillance tools, including license plate readers, facial recognition and other technologies.’”

Thomson Reuters wrote in a submission to ICE in 2017:

“Thomson Reuters, with our partner, Vigilant Solutions, is uniquely positioned to help ICE meet your agency’s diverse challenges with our subscription services. Based on conversations with ICE personnel about the specific investigative needs of ICE, Thomson Reuters can provide access to license plate reader data …The Thomson Reuters CLEAR team has been success fully supporting DHS’s investigative research needs and initiatives since the agency’s inception. We are proud to support the DHS and look forward to continuing our long-standing partnership.”

Our budgets show our values. If Baltimore City government claims to support and protect residents who are immigrants, it cannot give financial support to mass surveillance systems that may be used to track, detain, and deport the same people with our tax dollars.

Aerial Surveillance Experiment

Baltimore City residents and the Board of Estimates already rejected spy plane surveillance; now, the Board of Estimates must not allow a similar level of surveillance through this procurement.

BPD has used such mass surveillance technology before. Almost exactly a decade ago in 2016, BPD secretly partnered with Persistent Surveillance Systems to begin continuous aerial surveillance of the city, hidden from both the public and elected officials. After public outcry, the secret mass surveillance program was halted, briefly relaunched as a pilot program, and then cancelled by the Board of Estimates.

ACLU successfully sued Baltimore City over this mass surveillance program. The 2020 complaint stated:

“The BPD’s mass surveillance system will persistently record the movements of virtually all of Baltimore’s 600,000 residents, including Plaintiffs. This surveillance system presents a novel and society-changing threat to individual privacy and to free association, and it violates the Constitution.”

It based these claims on the fact that:

“The warrantless AIR program subjects Plaintiffs and virtually all of Baltimore’s 600,000 residents to long-term, wide-area, and indiscriminate surveillance that will capture the whole of an individual’s movements and thereby reveal their privacies of life. This surveillance is inescapable, and revelation of private information to the AIR program is involuntary: short of never leaving home when the planes are in the air, there is no way to avoid Defendants’ surveillance system. … The data collected through the AIR program will amount to a comprehensive record of the movements of Plaintiffs and nearly everyone in Baltimore—facilitating an unprecedented police power to engage in retrospective location-tracking.”

This is very similar to the level of persistent mass surveillance and location-tracking that Motorola/Vigilant Solutions’ ALPR database allows, by cars instead of by moving pixels.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that this aerial surveillance program was unconstitutional, finding that “allowing the police to wield this power unchecked is anathema to the values enshrined in our Fourth Amendment.”

The Court of Appeals stated that “the AIR program’s surveillance is not “short-term” and transcends mere augmentation of ordinary police capabilities. People understand that they may be filmed by security cameras on city streets, or a police officer could stake out their house and tail them for a time… But capturing everyone’s movements outside during the daytime for 45 days goes beyond that ordinary capacity.”

The 2020 contract with Persistent Surveillance Systems only allowed data from the spy planes to be retained for 45 days unless needed for an investigation, and promised that defendants charged based on information from the spy planes’ footage would have access to that data.

The Motorola/Vigilant Solutions database is in many ways less transparent, less accountable, and more permanent than the 2020 Persistent Surveillance Systems contract, which the Board correctly canceled in 2021.

In 2024, the Institute for Justice sued the town of Norfolk, VA, over its use of the Flock Safety ALPR system, a competitor to Motorola/Vigilant Solutions. The suit cites the 2020 LBS vs BPD suit:

“In Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck down an aerial surveillance program precisely because it created record of where everyone in the city of Baltimore had gone over the past 45 days… Norfolk is trying to accomplish from the ground what the Fourth Circuit has already held a city could not do from the air. If anything, Norfolk’s dragnet is even worse than the aerial surveillance in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, which could only capture “blurred dots, or blobs.” … The Flock Cameras, by contrast, create a “Vehicle Fingerprint” that includes identifying information, like a license plate. Defendants can use that information to identify drivers and then dig even deeper into their travel, habits, and associations using Flock’s advanced software capabilities. That is far more intrusive than tracking “blurred dots, or blobs.”

The spy plane was unconstitutional, an invasion of privacy, and wrong. Use of ALPR databases to track individuals’ movements over the course of years is the same.

Please reject this procurement. Do not use our tax dollars to unconstitutionally surveil Baltimore City residents and provide funding to a technological tool that facilitates ICE detentions and the suppression of free speech and political dissent.
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BPD Responds

We asked the Baltimore Police Department to respond to the basic points raised by the op-ed and to explain why it needs the additional capabilities provided by this procurement.

“CLEAR provides BPD with information that aids us in investigations,” BPD spokeswoman Lindsey Eldridge wrote in an emailed response, providing these examples”

• Public Records and Proprietary Data

•Vehicle and License Plate Information

•License Plate Recognition Data

•Law Enforcement Records

•Tools to link individuals to potential addresses, vehicles, phone numbers, etc.

Eldridge was asked about the author’s contention that use of ALPR databases to track individuals’ movements over the course of years is unconstitutional, an invasion of privacy.

“All of the information contained in Clear is publicly available or proprietary information,” Eldridge said. “We believe that this is not in violation of free speech and/or privacy.”

What about the concern that this technology, used elsewhere by ICE and other federal agents to conduct immigration sweeps and detention, would be used that way here?

“In light of BPD Policy 1021, which clearly states that the Department shall not engage in, assist, or support immigration enforcement except under limited and specific circumstances, we do not believe this technology would place Baltimore residents at risk of profiling or victimization,” Eldridge wrote.

“The Department remains bound by its established policies, and any technology utilized by BPD would be deployed consistent with those guidelines and applicable laws,” she continued.

What about the author’s contention that the surveillance capabilities BPD would have with this are analogous – in their scope and intrusiveness, tracking all citizens whether they are suspected of a crime or not – to those it would have gained with the so-called spy plane, which was condemned and rejected by popular opinion, the ACLU and the courts?

“The technology in question does not provide live monitoring, broad-area surveillance, or the ability to track individuals in real time,” Eldridge replied.

“The technology is a database and investigative tool. It is used to analyze existing records and data during specific investigations. It does not allow officers to follow someone’s movements, monitor the public at large, or track individuals who are not connected to a legitimate investigative purpose.”