404 Media 调查后，参议员 Ron Wyden 要求公开白宫车牌监控项目信息

In response to a 404 Media investigation, Sen. Ron Wyden is demanding more information about how a federal license plate reader camera program works.

Last month, we reported on the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program’s license plate reader database, which mirrors data from city license plate reader programs onto federal databases. The HIDTA program falls under the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, which infamously ran a secretive cell phone data surveillance project called Hemisphere. We reported that HIDTA has now created a complex system for the federal government to obtain license plate data from companies like Flock, Axon, and Motorola via a series of agreements with cities and towns across the country. 

In a letter to Sara Carter, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, Wyden said that the office needs to publish a report it commissioned into the privacy practices of several of its surveillance programs, including the license plate reader database. 

“404 Media has reported that the HIDTA program is being used to aggregate location data on Americans derived from Flock, Axon, and other vendors’ ALPRs,” Wyden wrote. “There is currently limited transparency into these HIDTA-funded surveillance programs, but ONDCP has commissioned an assessment into the privacy practices of these programs that should be released to the public.”

Wyden said that the nonprofit contractor MITRE conducted a privacy review of HIDTA’s surveillance programs, including its cell phone data collection project and its ALPR program, in 2024. That report has never been made public. Wyden demanded the release of that study, as well as a separate “analysis of automated license plate reader systems and practices.”

“There is currently limited transparency into these HIDTA-funded surveillance programs, but ONDCP has commissioned an assessment into the privacy practices of these programs that should be released to the public,” he wrote. “This review was conducted by MITRE and completed in 2024, but ONDCP refused to provide it to my office and has subsequently not made that report public. I urge you to make this review public.”