Professor Joel Reidenberg was quoted in a TechNewsWorld article about how the FBI and ICE are using state’s motor vehicle departments to mine for facial recognition data.
ICE’s bulk searches of DMV databases assume that everyone in the database is guilty in order to find a particular individual, explained law professor Joel R. Reidenberg, founding academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at the Fordham University School of Law in New York City.
“That’s a significant civil liberties infringement for drivers across the country,” he told TechNewsWorld. “ICE doesn’t need warrants to do that type of search. I think we should impose, by statute, a warrant requirement.”
Driver license information is protected by a federal statute, the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994, but law enforcement agencies are exempt from the restrictions in that law, he said.
“The law is 25 years old now. It was enacted before the days of digital photography, so this kind of data mining wasn’t even on the horizon. The old law doesn’t satisfy our current concerns,” Reidenberg noted.