A Virginia state judge ruled earlier this month that automated license plate data collection by police qualified as protected “personal information," and was illegal, because it included the following elements all combined: The license plate number, images of the vehicle and license plate and immediate surroundings, plus GPS location and time and date. Read the rest

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Muckrock teamed up to use the Freedom of Information Act to extract the details of 200 US cities' Automated License Plate Recognition camera programs (ALPR), and today they've released a dataset containing all the heretofore secret data on how these programs are administered and what is done with the data they collect. Read the rest

Spot the Surveillance is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's first VR app: it's part of the organization's Street-Level Surveillance, which has tracked and resisted the spread of ubiquitous surveillance tools, from license-plate cameras to Stingrays and beyond. Read the rest

As of July 1, registering a car in China will involve registering an RFID radio-beacon that will be planted on the car in order to track its movements. Read the rest

EFF obtained and analyzed records from the Oakland Police Department's secretive automatic license plate readers, showing that the department has mounted a program of incredibly intrusive, highly racialized secret surveillance of an entire city. Read the rest