Let’s say a company makes cameras. Small ones. Black, solar-powered, mounted on a pole and aimed at a lane of traffic. They’re called ALPRs — automated license plate readers.
And let’s say that company has more than 100,000 of them out on American streets, and that systems like these scan tens of billions of plates a month.
Yours is probably in there.
Now the reassuring part. The data is on a 30-day delete. Automatic, enforced by the storage system itself, audited every year by an outside firm. After 30 days, it’s hard deleted. That’s real.
But, somewhere in that contract…during those 30 days, the agency can view, save, and transmit the footage before it disappears. So the deletion is real — it just applies to the company’s copy. Whatever got downloaded first lives on somewhere else, under somebody else’s rules.
And let’s say that same company said publicly that it had no contracts giving federal agencies access to any of it.
Then later had to admit that it did have contracts.
You never signed anything. You just drove down a street.
There are so many of those little things out there now that you might even think you’ve seen a flock of ravens.
A group of ravens, it turns out, is called a “conspiracy.”
And we all know how smart ravens are.