2015 Legislative Preview
We had great success with Oregon legislators in 2013 on key privacy measures – one to guard against privacy invasion by law enforcement use of drones and the other to protect employees’ and university students’ digital privacy from unwarranted online snooping. We will continue to advance this agenda this session with a package of bills to curb mass surveillance.
Regulate Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) surveillance technology
Law enforcement agencies deploy license plate reader surveillance technology in Oregon without adequate or consistent privacy restrictions. Many agencies retain the location information and photograph of every vehicle that crosses the camera’s path, not simply those that are associated with a criminal nexus.
In the aggregate, this stored private location data can reveal the travel histories of thousands of Oregonians who have committed no crime. Longer retention periods and the absence of restrictions on sharing allow the government to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.
We are urging the legislature to impose consistent statewide guidelines for government’s use of ALPR surveillance technology, including benchmarks for use of the technology, safeguards limiting how long the data can be retained, and protections against unnecessary sharing of individuals’ data between government and private companies.
Prohibit unwarranted access to electronic communications and location information
Electronic communication – through email, cell phones and social media – has increasingly eclipsed postal mail and other hard-copy methods as our primary means of communication. Unfortunately, some government agencies interpret our outdated privacy laws to allow them to intercept and access a treasure trove of information about who you are, where you go, and what you do – the information being collected by search engines, social networking sites, and other websites every day.
Similarly, location tracking information – GPS records, cell phone location records, etc. – can reveal very sensitive information about your life. Location tracking records reveal a tremendous amount of detailed personal information about people ranging from which friends they are seeing to where they go to the doctor to how often they go to church.
We believe that the constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures should protect your information held by third parties – such as internet service providers and phone companies – unless the government has probable cause of wrongdoing and gets a court order.
Waiting for the courts to enforce the constitution relating to newer technologies could take many years and may not be successful. Our proposed legislation will reboot our privacy laws to ensure that online and digital activity, including sensitive location tracking records, receive the same protection as is guaranteed to offline activity.
Cell phone search? Get a warrant!
The type of data stored on a smartphone can paint a near-complete picture of even the most private details of your personal life. Before the age of smartphones, it was impossible for police to gather this much private information about your communications, historical movements, and private life during an arrest.
Today, many police officers routinely search the contents of a cell phone during an arrest encounter. Sometimes officers do so with the aid of
companies like Cellebrite that produce tools that strip a cell phone of all of its data on the scene. Such searches are a highly concerning invasion of privacy and are, in our opinion, unconstitutional.
Last term, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with this position and directed law enforcement to get a warrant before searching a cell phone. By codifying and narrowing this ruling, our legislative proposal affirms that you are entitled to smartphone privacy and that government agents may not search a cell phone unless they have a search warrant based on probable cause.
Privacy policies for police body cameras
Even before, but certainly in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last year, many Oregon law enforcement agencies are poised to equip officers with body cameras to record their encounters with members of the public.
While the ACLU generally takes a dim view of the proliferation of surveillance in our society, we hope that body cameras can be different. Guided by the right privacy policies, body cameras have the potential to serve as a much-needed check on police misconduct and hold officers accountable for abuse of power.
We are working this session with legislators to reconcile the many important questions about body cameras. Who decides when they are on or off? How long should the footage be retained and how should it be used? Is all footage subject to public records disclosure, or only that which serves a police accountability function?
Our proposed bill would require law enforcement to have policies on these and other issues in place before body cameras are widely deployed. In addition, our bill would also clarify that members of the public may make video and audio recordings of police officers in the course of their duties. We believe this activity is protected by the First Amendment, but Oregon law currently requires individuals who are recording conversations to give “specific notice” to any individuals whose audio is being recorded.
Reproductive health care for all Oregon women
We believe that every woman should have equal access to the full range of reproductive health care, starting before conception through childbirth. We know that these basic rights are the foundation of freedom, equity, and economic opportunity for women and their families. With our partners in the Pro-Choice Coalition of Oregon, we created the Comprehensive Women’s Health Bill to fill gaps in existing Oregon law and to clarify elements of federal law to ensure access to a full range of reproductive health care – including safe, legal abortion – for all women in Oregon.
