This AI Watches Millions Of Cars Daily And Tells Cops If You’re Driving Like A Criminal$1:
The previously unreported case is a window into the evolution of AI-powered policing, and a harbinger of the constitutional issues that will inevitably accompany it. Typically, Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology is used to search for plates linked to specific crimes. But in this case it was used to examine the driving patterns of anyone passing one of Westchester County’s 480 cameras over a two-year period. Zayas’ lawyer Ben Gold contested the AI-gathered evidence against his client, decrying it as “dragnet surveillance.”
And he had the data to back it up. A FOIA he filed with the Westchester police revealed that the ALPR system was scanning over 16 million license plates a week, across 480 ALPR cameras. Of those systems, 434 were stationary, attached to poles and signs, while the remaining 46 were mobile, attached to police vehicles. The AI was not just looking at license plates either. It had also been taking notes on vehicles' make, model and color — useful when a plate number for a suspect vehicle isn’t visible or is unknown.
To Gold, the system’s analysis of every car caught by a camera amounted to an “unprecedented search.” “This is the specter of modern surveillance that the Fourth Amendment must guard against,” he wrote, in his motion to suppress the evidence. “This is the systematic development and deployment of a vast surveillance network that invades society’s reasonable expectation of privacy.
“With no judicial oversight this type of system operates at the caprice of every officer with access to it.”
Gold declined to comment further on the case. Westchester County Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.
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