So they make this announcement:

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Wednesday ordered the cancellation of a plan by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to develop a national license-plate tracking system after privacy advocates raised concern about the initiative.

The order came just days after ICE solicited proposals from companies to compile a database of license-plate information from commercial and law enforcement tag readers. Officials said the database was intended to help apprehend fugitive illegal immigrants, but the plan raised concerns that the movements of ordinary citizens under no criminal suspicion could be scrutinized.

But here’s the thing: They’ve already been doing it for years!

Lots of news reports are misinterpreting DHS’ solicitation, implying that the agency wants to either build its own database or ask a contractor to build one. The department doesn’t intend to build its own license plate reader database, and it isn’t asking corporations to build one. Instead, it is seeking bids from private companies that already maintain national license plate reader databases. And because it’s the only company in the country that offers precisely the kind of services that DHS wants, there’s about a 99.9 percent chance that this contract will be awarded to Vigilant Solutions. (Mark my words.)

According to documents obtained by the ACLU, ICE agents and other branches of DHS have already been tapping into Vigilant’s data sets for years. So why did the agency decide to go public with this solicitation now? Your guess is as good as mine, but it may simply be a formality so that the agency can pretend as if there was actually robust competition in the bidding process. (As recent reporting about the FBI’s secretive surveillance acquisitions has shown, no-bid contracts for spy gear tend to raise eyebrows when they’re finally discovered.)

What’s the problem with a nationwide license plate tracking database, anyway? If you aren’t the subject of a criminal investigation, the government shouldn’t be keeping tabs on when you go to the grocery store, your friend’s house, the abortion clinic, the antiwar protest, or the mosque. In a democratic society, we should know almost everything about what the government’s doing, and it should know very little to nothing about us, unless it has a good reason to believe we’re up to no good and shows that evidence to a judge. Unfortunately, that basic framework for an open, democracy society has been turned on its head. Now the government routinely collects vast troves of data about hundreds of millions of innocent people, casting everyone as a potential suspect until proven innocent. That’s unacceptable.

Surveillance state apologists and profiteers tell us that license plates are only photographed when they are in public view, where they claim we have no right to privacy. But what these people (perhaps purposefully) fail to understand is that the constitution is a floor, not a ceiling. (Also, there are signs that courts may in fact find historical data-mining of license plate reader databases unconstitutional.) We can make whatever laws we want to restrict the ways in which law enforcement and intelligence organizations compile, access, and use data about us. If we the people want to pass a law that says police must get a warrant to track our physical locations using historical license plate reader data held by private corporations or other departments, we can do that.
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