Senate Bill 1516 will now head to the governor’s desk.
The bill explicitly bars police from using information collected from scanning millions of cars, trucks and other vehicles on the state’s roads each year for immigration enforcement. Instead, the bill states that license plate readers can only be used for a short list of reasons — primarily law enforcement purposes such as tracking down stolen cars, nabbing suspects or identifying missing persons like children and vulnerable, elderly adults.
The bill also would prohibit police from using the readers to issue traffic citations or for surveilling law-abiding people in their everyday activities. The companies that provide the cameras would not be able to access the data, share it or sell it to others.
“As viable as this tool is, there also needs to be checks and balances,” a chief backer of the bill, Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, told the Senate last month.
Prozanski said the bill will lay the ground rules for the use of license plate readers across the state.
The subject has been a contentious one since the Trump administration last year began expelling immigrants, law-abiding or not, in a massive deportation campaign. Despite Oregon’s sanctuary laws, federal agencies including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement gained access to the license plate reader data collected by police in Eugene, Bend, Roseburg and Klamath Falls last June thousands of times, according to The Oregon Law Center.
That access led cities such as Eugene, Springfield, Woodburn and Bend to turn off license-plate-reading cameras mounted to poles and run by the company Flock Safety.
Rep. Jason Kropf, D-Bend, told colleagues on the House floor Thursday that in addition to a ban on immigrant enforcement uses, other restrictions will establish important guardrails. That includes a data-sharing restriction that requires that police in Oregon remain the owner of the data, end-to-end encryption that’s meant to prevent others from accessing the information and a requirement that license plate data be deleted after 30 days if it’s not part of an active police investigation.
“There’s examples of incredible things that this technology has done to promote public safety, and I also will say there are examples of when this data has eroded privacy concerns,” Kropf said.
Protecting the privacy of everyday Oregonians is still a big concern among many opponents of the bill, who argued it doesn’t go far enough in defining “end-to-end encryption.”
Ky Fireside, the founder of Eyes Off Eugene who is running for the state House seat being vacated by Springfield Democrat John Lively, said that the companies that operate license plate readers want to continue to have access to license plate data for their own commercial purposes. Despite pushback from the companies, Fireside said, it’s possible for them to sever their access to the data, just like the message app Signal has done with its users.
Fireside, the ACLU of Oregon and others are disappointed that the bill doesn’t include a definition of end-to-end encryption that they think would leave no wiggle room for the license reading companies to gain access to the data.
“I anticipate that this will end up in court with us petitioning or someone petitioning what counts as end-to-end encryption and what doesn’t,” Fireside said.
Kevin Campbell, executive director of the Oregon Association Chiefs of Police, said requiring companies to do what Fireside and others want would require “not just a software change, but an architecture change … that would be at significant cost.” Campbell said he doubts companies that operate license plate readers would be willing to comply.
“That’s a major change that we believe vendors are not going to make,” Campbell said. “This is too important a tool to put that at risk.”
A spokesperson for Flock Safety told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Thursday that license plate data is secure.
“Flock does not have independent access to customer data, we never sell customer data, and all data is protected with end-to-end encryption and industry-leading security standards,” said spokesperson Paris Lewbel in an email.
Lewbel expressed support for the bill, saying “Oregon is helping lead the nation by showing how technology policy can strike the right balance between privacy and public safety.”
Rep. Dacia Grayber, D-Portland, told colleagues on the House Rules Committee earlier this week that she was voting for the bill because in “the whole entirety of it, it is worth moving forward,” though privacy advocates have “some legitimate concerns.”
Grayber said legislators would be closely watching to ensure that Oregonians’ license plate data isn’t shared and abused.
“We need to pay close attention to this,” Grayber said. “We need to follow through on our word. And we need to make sure that our folks are being protected.”
The bill passed the Senate last month 27-0 and the House on Thursday 54-3.
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