Marylanders: Request your data from the Fusion Center

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland joined with ACLU affiliates in 38 states to send requests to local police departments and state agencies to seek information on how they use automatic license plate readers to track and record Americans' movements. Here in Maryland, the state has reported that there are more than 320 ALPRs being used and many are linked to the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, Maryland's "fusion center," where the data is potentially stored indefinitely, creating an ever-growing database of our location and travel through the state.

ALPRs are cameras mounted on patrol cars -- or on stationary objects along roads - such as telephone poles or the underside of bridges -- that snap a photograph of every license plate that enters their field of view. Typically, each photo is time, date, and GPS-stamped, stored, and sent to a database, which provides an alert to a patrol officer whenever a match or "hit" appears when the plate is checked against external databases, such as lists of stolen vehicles.

Maryland Public Information Requests were sent to 27 local police agencies, 4 state police agencies, and 6 other state agencies.