The Hill
By Julian Hattem
May 4, 2015
The
Department of Homeland Security is scaling back its request to hire an
outside company to keep track of people’s license plates, now saying it
only needs half the
country.
While
the department had originally announced that it wanted a company to
keep tabs on license plates throughout the nation, it now claims to only
want data from “at least
25 states” and 24 of the 30 most populated metropolitan areas.
Additionally,
instead of requiring that the service make at least 30 million license
plate records available each month, now the department says that it only
needs at
least 6 million.
U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — the division of DHS looking
for the contract — said that the changes were merely alterations to
attract more solicitations
from contractors. Still, they could amount to greater flexibility in
carrying out the controversial DHS initiative first unveiled a month
ago.
“ICE
modified the solicitation based on feedback from vendors requesting
that the minimum threshold for records be lowered in order to facilitate
greater competition,”
spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said in a statement.
“ICE
has not scaled back the scope or protections,” She added. “We have
lowered some of the minimum requirements to allow additional commercial
vendors to participate
in this acquisition.”
In
a contract solicitation posted online, the department has asked
companies to offer up access to a commercial license plate reader
database that it can search to track
the automobiles of immigrant targets and criminal suspects.
“The
results of the queries can assist in identifying the location of aliens
who are immigration enforcement priorities, to include aliens with
certain criminal convictions,
absconders, illegal re-entrants and those that pose a public safety or
national security risk,” it said in the solicitation.
“ICE
will also use [license plate reader] information obtained from the
commercial database to further its criminal law enforcement mission,” it
added, including fraud
and the trafficking of arms, narcotics and humans.
The changes to the proposal were revealed in an amendment to the solicitation posted on Friday.
In
its notice, the government agency has made clear that it has no
intention of building a license plate tracking database of its own.
Instead,
it merely wants access to an existing commercial database, which are
employed by various police departments as well as repossession companies
and others. The
systems are updated with information from those public and private
organizations as well as toll roads and parking lots, among other
sources.
The
new DHS effort comes a year after it abandoned a previous attempt to
build its own license plate reading system in the face of opposition
about its impact on Americans’
privacy.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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