Police from Santa Barbara County and other state police and law enforcement agencies say they want access to a national database of driver’s license photos to aid in their investigations, according to documents found by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The objective was first discussed by the Standing Strategic Planning Subcommittee, a panel inside the California Department of Justice consisting of representatives from state law enforcement groups, in August 2014, according to a subcommittee meeting agenda.
In a trove of emails and government documents recently unearthed through a California public records request, Electronic Frontier Foundation investigative researcher Dave Maass discovered the goal to one day link Cal-Photo—a California driver’s license database containing personal information, including photos—with a little-known national database called the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, or NLETS, operated by an Arizona-based private nonprofit by the same name. Access to the database would give police the ability to quickly find information about out-of-state residents for facial recognition purposes, Maass said.
The database is similar to the National Criminal Information Center (NCIC), which is maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and used by virtually every law enforcement agency in the U.S. to check for criminal history, missing persons, etc.
One of the groups seeking access to out-of-state driver’s license photos is the California State Sheriff’s Association—Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown acts as its secretary.
The goal appears to be solely at the subcommittee level, and according to an email from justice department spokesperson Kristin Ford: “There is no plan to merge Cal-Photo with NLETS.” But Maass is sounding the alarm anyway and leading a massive email and social media campaign to shed light on the goal, raising concerns of privacy and oversight.
Maass sent a letter to the justice department expressing concern that the subcommittee is moving beyond its intended authority.
“The public records indicate that these bodies are moving beyond mere advisory roles by applying for grants and meeting with heads of law enforcement agencies to expand both the collection of personal information and the sharing of this sensitive information with outside entities,” Maass wrote in the letter.
Maass told the Sun that linking the two databases would give police access to millions of driver’s licenses and information in a database that’s not accessible to the public—which in Maass’ mind means there would be a lack of law enforcement accountability.
Currently, police outside the state can access California driver’s license photos through NLETS on a “one-in/one-out” basis, according to a DMV document. That essentially means out-of-state police departments have to file a request with California to access someone’s records.
The same DMV document also raised significant concerns over the “transmission and wholesale sharing” of all driver’s license photos without proper safeguards in place. Maass said a system like that has the potential to be abused by rogue law enforcement officers.
“This means police will have wholesale access to DMV photos and data without a whole lot of auditing built in,” Maass said, adding that a database such as NLETS would not be subject to public records requests because it’s maintained by a private company. “If you have rogue cops, there will be not a lot of ways to keep track of them.”
Although nothing official has materialized at the justice department, Maass accuses police groups of cutting the public out of the decision-making process.
“It shows you what their priorities are,” Maass said.
Rogue cops or not, Bonnie Locke, the director of business development for NLETS, said that sharing the databases creates a powerful investigative tool for police.
Locke told the Sun that the database is just as effective in helping police vindicate potential suspects as it would be identifying them. She said the system is secure, and there are safeguards in place. Its employees, she said, are highly trained and bound by a policy similar to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services.
Conducting around 1.8 billion transactions per day, NLETS is physically separated from the Internet and has not been hacked or misused in its 45 years of existence, Locke said, although she admitted that misuse is a cause for concern.
A document uncovered by Maass—a report from the justice department dated Aug. 12, 2014—showed 126 instances of possible misuse of California police databases between April and July of 2014.
“You’re going to have people in any industry doing things that they are not supposed to do,” Locke said, adding that employees undergo extensive training on sharing policies. “In theory, one would hope a bad apple would get caught.”
The goal is to get every state linked to the network, Locke said. The network includes dozens of state, federal, and international law enforcement agencies, including the Secret Service, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the U.S. Coast Guard, to name a few. Now California police agencies want access, including the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office.
The Sheriff’s Office is aware of the subcommittee’s objective to link up with NLETS, although Sheriff Brown didn’t comment on it directly. According to Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Kelly Hoover, the impacts of a future link-up are unknown, but she added that the Sheriff’s Office thinks there’s a need to enhance its investigative methods and share information across borders.
“We are interested in any tool that will help us share information and enhance our ability to locate, identify, and arrest those responsible for committing crimes,” Hoover told the Sun in an email.
According to Maass, the Orwellian idea that somehow driver’s license photos will be linked to other technologies such as automatic license plate readers, is the most disturbing part about a potential private party link-up between states’ databases.
Matthew Turk, a computer science professor who has researched facial recognition at UC Santa Barbara, said this technology is not very useful at the moment, but the scenario is entirely possible.
“We’re moving in that direction,” Turk said. “But what’s the difference between having that and having policemen all over the place? These issues can be debated publicly.”
Contact Staff Writer David Minsky at dminsky@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 2, 2015.