The Trump administration is using an anti-drug trafficking aid program from the 1980s to power cities about the nation to chimney their ongoing gathering of automated licence dish audience data into ample national surveillance centers that autumn under the White House’s jurisdiction, according to community records and court documents reviewed by 404 Media.
The records display the workings of a complex scheme in which the national authorities is using the “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” (HIDTA) program to get data from local cops’ Flock, Axon, and another ALPR cameras and total it on national authorities servers, anywhere it is afterward accessible to another federal, state, and local law implementation agencies. In several cases, data that goes to HIDTA is afterward additionally shared to a larger program run by the Drug Enforcement Agency called the “National License Plate Reader Program” (NLPRP).
Through HIDTA systems, local licence dish data can be accessed by assorted national agencies, including those who may not have contracts themselves alongside the ALPR companies. The program raises important privacy and transparency concerns; as cities commencement to location restrictions on how their Flock data can be used, it represents an end-around for national law implementation to admission data that it power not normally be capable to, and to do so without any apparent oversight body. HIDTA falls under the jurisdiction of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), and it lately won an award from the Trump White House for “managing an automated licence dish audience phase that brings together all levels of law enforcement.”
Many of the documents used in this part were obtained using community records requests by Cris van Pelt, the creator of the website HaveIBeenFlocked.com and its connected investigative blog, Footnote4a. “When local constabulary and personal vendors commitment community authority complete surveillance, they obscure a broader agenda. The DEA and ONDCP are already aggregating local data rearward the scenes,” van Pelt said. “This bypasses delegate processes entirely. The community has made it apparent that bulk surveillance violates essential rights, equal whenever it is laundered through fragmented systems, personal companies, and local project forces.”
A complex setup and a quasi-government program
The ONDCP, which oversees the HIDTA program, is sometimes known as the “drug czar” and has funded a sequence of law implementation and overarching surveillance programs, including a call records repository called Hemisphere that collected phone records and location data on additional than a trillion AT&T calls.
HIDTA is a “multi-jurisdictional community safety program” that finances a sequence of distinct HIDTA intellect centers and another medication implementation efforts throughout the country. There are a total of 33 HIDTA programs, which shield all 50 states. HIDTA’s intellect centers are akin to — but distinct from — authorities fusion centers, in which surveillance data is shared between local, state, and national law enforcement. Individual HIDTA intellect centers are managed by “executive boards,” and are normally made up of law implementation officials and authorities lawyers, but this setup can additionally guide to disturbance concerning who is really in accusation of the data that any HIDTA collects.
“The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, which notoriously funded a centralized call document repository that exceeded a trillion records that was used by HIDTA participants, has apparently done a akin item for licence dish audience data,” Jeramie Scott, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Surveillance Oversight Center, told 404 Media. “The entire scheme adds another tier of obfuscation of how licence dish audience data is being used and who is using it. If you’re pissed concerning Flock afterward you have to be pissed concerning this. No doubt this repository contains licence dish audience data from Flock as fine as from another providers of licence dish audience technology. The authorities went to awesome lengths to keep the Hemisphere Project out of the public’s eye, and I wouldn’t be amazed if they have tried to keep this program from the community too.”
HIDTA’s setup is complicated, but important. Over the final multiple years, the White House and multiple states have taken steps to justify local ALPR systems are fed into HIDTA; for example, cities in Georgia are not allowed to run ALPR systems on province entitlements of way without signing a “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) in which they commitment to dispatch their data to a HIDTA, according to copies of the accord seen by 404 Media.
This MOU highlights how complicated this program is. Earlier this month, the city of Brunswick, Georgia, realized that it could not deploy Axon licence dish cameras without signing an accord alongside the Atlanta-area HIDTA to “facilitate the sharing of data contained inside their digital data systems, including but not constricted to: Automated License Plate Readers and Law Enforcement Data Sharing Systems—which may contain aggregated data collected from multiple idiosyncratic or local sources—into commercially accessible and tradition developed data integration systems.” The MOU basically states that ALPR data collected by the city must be funneled to HIDTA, anywhere it can be accessed by assorted another law implementation agencies through aggregation application that brings in data from multiple distinct companies.
A leaf on Flock’s website set up for Georgia law implementation agencies says, “if your agency installs or operates cameras in the Georgia Department of Transportation Right of Way, you must sign a memorandum of understanding alongside HIDTA to remain in compliance alongside the new Georgia State Police guideline […] LPR says from GDOT ROW cameras volition be accessible to Georgia users of the HIDTA National LPR scheme through the Flock interface.” Because there are dozens of HIDTAs throughout the country, it is not apparent how many jurisdictions throughout the nation are actively funneling data into HIDTA’s databases. A login portal for the national HIDTA scheme seen by 404 Media runs through the Houston HIDTA .
“As we study additional concerning ALPRs and the extended ALPR data-sharing infrastructure, it’s apparent that we've lone scratched the exterior concerning the danger of these tools,” Ed of Southerners Against Surveillance Systems and Infrastructure told 404 Media. “As we study more, it's apparent that the outrage against this surveillance is justified. We need all of these cameras removed.”
ONE PROGRAM INTO ANOTHER
A December 2024 privacy effect assessment by the DEA concerning its National License Plate Reader Program explained that the DEA operates its own licence dish readers but additionally gets admission to “non-DEA equipment” through HIDTA and another “contributing law implementation agencies.”
“These contributing agencies transmit their LPR data to servers maintained by local hubs pursuant to their idiosyncratic MOUs, which stipulate that this data may be shared alongside the NLPRP system,” the DEA wrote in the effect assessment, and added that the DEA has been seeking to merge itself alongside a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) licence dish camera system. It noted that the scheme “may merge specified ample numbers of another governmental LPR network cameras and/or may get business LPR cameras scheme data in a ample adequate amount in the forthcoming to efficiently authorize on-going tracking of individual’s travels posing a hazard to idiosyncratic privacy,” and that it “risks an over-collection of the personally identifiable data of all licence dish passing all LPR camera location, including a ample figure of images of journey of law-abiding drivers not applicable to offender investigations.”
Atlanta is not the lone HIDTA aggregating ALPR data. For example, Houston’s HIDTA paid $306,800 to a business called Recruitful LLC “for creating and maintaining an LPR database” that is a hunt tool for data collected by multiple ALPR companies.
A statement of work for that agreement explained that the scheme being built was designed to merge “third party” data into one database, definition they were creating a repository for ALPR data, and that this repository would “migrate” or copy data from local entities into the centralized database. This method that data from assorted ALPR cameras — including those made by Flock, Axon, ELSAG, and Vigilant — would all be searchable in this distinct database. One of the criteria for this project was “All APIs and third-party integrations (Unification Platform, FLOCK) function seamlessly in the new environment.”
Flock and Axon did not react to a petition for comment. The DEA stated that it did not have jurisdiction complete HIDTA and refused to comment, equal on how its own licence dish scheme interacts alongside HIDTA. CBP did not react to a petition for comment. The White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy did not react to a petition for comment.
This scheme raises all sorts of questions concerning anywhere local ALPR data is ultimately going and what it is being used for, how lengthy it is being retained, and how the community can audit the data. Much of the misuse and abuse that has fueled the backlash against Flock has been uncovered by journalists and local activists operating through community records obtained from Flock’s network audits and shared on websites akin Have I Been Flocked. Some local jurisdictions have additionally asserted that their data goes immediately to HIDTAs, which are not queryable by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA); the Randolph County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina said, for example, that “all data is kept on the Federal Houston-HIDTA database,” and could not be shared alongside the public.
The DEA has asserted in court that HIDTA records are not topic to community records laws since they are complex entities governed by an “executive board” made up of state, local, and national law enforcement. The Obama White House described HIDTA not as an being at all, but a “grant program” made up of “law implementation members” (this does not alter the fact that HIDTAs themselves are signing memoranda of understanding alongside local entities).
“At the local level, the HIDTAs are directed and guided by Executive Boards composed of an equal figure of local Federal and non-Federal (state, local, and tribal) law implementation leaders,” the DEA’s attorneys asserted in a latest court filing in a case in which a man was seeking HIDTA records held concerning him. “Accordingly, DEA does not create, possess, maintain, or authority HIDTA program records, nor does it shop specified records in any of its systems of records. Since DEA has no custody or authority of HIDTA records, no HIDTA records receptive to Plaintiff’s petition be inside DEA.”
In July, the Trump administration gave HIDTA $277 myriad in additional funding.
About the author
Jason is a cofounder of 404 Media. He was earlier the editor-in-chief of Motherboard. He loves the Freedom of Information Act and surfing.
