According to 404 Media’s investigation, the teams analyze a person’s financial habits, movements and other data, then pass that information to local law enforcement, which finds another pretense to make a traffic stop. In one case, police in Montana stopped a man driving a black Chevy SUV on Interstate 90, telling him his license plate was obstructed, and ultimately charged him with a DUI. The man, Kyle William Olson, told 404 Media he was transporting marijuana products from a licensed cannabis farm in California to his home in Wisconsin. Police reports and bodycam footage show the officer cited the plate as “the reason for stopping you.”
The report builds on an Associated Press investigation from last year that found Border Patrol had used automatic license plate readers as part of the same wide-spanning predictive policing program. Predictive policing is a controversial practice in which law enforcement uses data analysis to identify people who may have committed crimes even before there is evidence against them.
“The bottom line is genuine probable cause cannot be synthetically generated,” said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology. He said the approach appears to use “parallel construction to cloak the reason behind its car stops in secrecy,” adding, “If we can’t meaningfully review and evaluate these systems, we can’t trust them.”