Federal Drug Program Used to Aggregate Local License Plate Reader Data Into Centralized Database
Documents reveal the White House's HIDTA drug program is collecting automatic license plate reader data from local police departments and making it accessible to federal agencies including ICE.
What happened
According to documents reported by 404Media and the creator of HaveIBeenFlocked, the federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program—under the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy—is obtaining license plate reader data from local police using systems made by Flock, Axon, Motorola, and others. This data is aggregated on federal servers and made accessible to multiple federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Several states have mandated data-sharing with HIDTA; Georgia requires cities to sign memoranda of understanding pledging to send ALPR data to regional HIDTA programs. The exact number of jurisdictions funneling data through HIDTA remains unclear due to the program's 33 regional operations across all 50 states.
Context
This data pathway circumvents recent state-level restrictions on direct federal access to ALPR systems. News that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could access local vehicle surveillance triggered community concern, particularly during mass deportation operations, leading some states to pass laws against federal data-sharing and prompting at least one company (Flock) to cancel its direct ICE contract. However, HIDTA represents an alternative channel through which immigration and other federal agencies gain access to local surveillance data with minimal public transparency. Attempts to obtain HIDTA records through Freedom of Information requests have been met with agency arguments that HIDTA data is exempt from open records laws or kept on federal servers outside public reach. The opacity and complexity of the system make it difficult to identify which communities are subject to this data aggregation.