Westchester County built a 600-camera plate reader network that shared 1.6 billion scans with ICE, lawsuit says

A coalition of civil rights groups on Tuesday asked a state judge to order one of New York’s largest suburban counties to stop its deployment of nearly 600 license plate readers, calling it a warrantless and “indiscriminate surveillance system” that violates the state constitution. The class action lawsuit also alleged that Westchester County never got proper authorization to launch the program, which has amassed a database of 1.6 billion plate scans that has been shared with more than 50 outside law enforcement agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The complaint said the network “records the long-term travel patterns, daily habits, and intimate information of millions of law-abiding New Yorkers and other motorists who travel through Westchester.” “In a democracy, a police department cannot unilaterally decide — without legislative authorization — to surveil the daily movements of its own citizens without any real accountability, transparency, or oversight,” said Barry Friedman, founder and faculty director of the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, which brought the suit on behalf of four motorists. “This indiscriminate data surveillance must not be allowed to continue in the dark.” “Westchester County has not yet received or reviewed the lawsuit referenced,” a spokesperson for the county said. The widespread use of license plate reader systems, which utilize a system of cameras to scan and record motorists’ license plate information, has generated controversy. The Associated Press in November reported that the U.S. Border Patrol was running a secretive license plate reader program that singled drivers out over their travel patterns, prompting a complaint from congressional Democrats that the program may be unlawful. A license plate reader company, Flock Safety, said last year it was pausing work with the Department of Homeland Security after it was revealed that police departments across the country were sharing license plate reade