Germany strikes down indiscriminate use of Automated License Plate Recognition technology

[Peter Sommer]

Germany strikes down indiscriminate use of Automated License Plate 
Recognition technology

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,541025,00.html

Germany's high court has declared laws enabling British-style total 
surveillance of drivers illegal. Privacy advocates and commentators 
applaud the ruling, but they ask if the court is trying to stop the laws 
from snowballing into a police state -- or just water them down.

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court declared Tuesday that laws 
allowing police to indiscriminately scan license plates using electronic 
surveillance devices and match them against databases kept by law 
enforcement and state officials were unconstitutional -- at least if 
strict provisions weren't placed on the practice.

Specifically, the Karlsruhe-based court said that laws allowing the 
techniques in the states of Hesse and Schleswig-Holstein violated 
federal privacy protection laws because they were equivalent to 
"complete surveillance" of broad swaths of the population and did not 
provide enough restrictions on the use of license plate scanning. Under 
current regulations in the states, for example, it was argued that 
police could profile individuals' movements. The court did say, however, 
that random sampling of license plates or mass scanning near borders 
would be acceptable.


Peter Sommer