In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a massive federal operation to wiretap the digital lives of American citizens and beyond. A decade later, the federal government has realized it can outsource the work. Social media platforms, apps, and websites gather mountains of data on its users daily for the sake of advertising. This data has traditionally been used to enable advertisers to target consumers with eerie accuracy. You could be advertised to based on data concerning your geolocation, your hobbies and interests, or even your political beliefs. In recent years, the federal government has awarded contracts to companies that repurpose this data for the sake of surveillance. This development is just one of many across the security industry to profit off the federal government's increasing interest in using surveillance for extralegal and political purposes.

Another of these developments has been in Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR). The once-mundane, decades-old technology has been recently swept up in an accountability vortex as companies like Flock Safety have attached the cameras to massive data sharing networks that allow any law enforcement officer to search 80,000 cameras across the country without probable cause. The federal government's surveillance-hungry law enforcement agencies have had a field day with Flock in particular, using their relationships with local police to use their Flock access, sidestepping warrants to perform their increasingly draconian duties.

I, [state your name], swear to...

Lakewood Police Department employs 50 of Flock's "Falcon" ALPR cameras, and participates in Flock's nationwide, statewide, and "direct access" data sharing networks. But despite the very real concerns surrounding the exploitation of ALPRs for political ends, Lakewood PD has a disappointingly generic policy for ALPR use. In fact, it is literally generic; it's a template from Lexipol, a police knowledge management system. A web search of the first sentence returns dozens of policies for other police departments that use the same template, filling in the blanks with their names. We retrieved this policy document thanks to a records request made under the Ohio Open Records Law by a Lakewood resident.

Lakewood's ALPR Policy

This template policy contains a few eyebrow-raising passages. For example, 428.3(b) states "Reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not necessary before using ALPR." As more and more courts decide that searches of ALPR data should operate under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constituion, continuing to use them without probable cause could prove a legal hazard for the Lakewood Police Department. 428.1 also states ALPRs "may also be used to gather information related to ... homeland security," which would certainly include the Department of Homeland Security, whose surveillance and actions have increasingly leaned into the extralegal in the past year.

The most customized portions of the policy, 428.2 and 428.4, state that Lakewood Police Department participates in the Cuyahoga County Regional Enterprise Data Sharing System (REDSS), which aggregates the ALPR data of its participants in a system known as LEADS. While we previously discovered Lakewood's ALPR data is retained on Flock for just 30 days, LEADS retains the data for a full year. This means that Lakewood's ALPR data can be searched on LEADS for months after it has already expired on Flock. Additionally, 428.4 explicitly states that LEADS is not open to public review, making it potentially less transparent than even Flock's own system. Much of the public information that is available on REDSS and LEADS, mainly agendas and minutes for REDSS board meetings, is woefully opaque, using jargon, acronyms, and shorthand to describe its management of the county's amassed ALPR data.